Orders to Kill Page 5

  Shortly afterward I called Ben Spock. We arranged to travel together to Memphis for the memorial march the following Monday and then go to Atlanta for the funeral.

  FEAR AND UNCERTAINTY PREVAILED in Memphis that evening. Telephone communications broke down in the central city. Though a curfew had been imposed and the meeting at Mason Temple, at which Dr. King was to speak, had been called off, masses of blacks, some unknowing, some in defiance, converged on the temple. By 8:15 p.m. window-breaking and rock-throwing incidents were increasing. By 9:00 sniper fire was reported in northern Memphis, and by 10:00 a building supplies company, just north of downtown, was the scene of a major fire. Rioting and looting became rampant, with liquor stores the main target. The first contingent of a four-thousand-strong National Guard force moved into the streets, joining the police, sheriff’s deputies, state highway patrol, and fifty Arkansas highway patrolmen.

  Eventually, Ralph Abernathy, Andy Young, Hosea Williams, and the other SCLC staff members regrouped at the motel and met into the early hours of Friday, April 5. All pledged loyalty to Ralph Abernathy as Dr. King’s appointed successor.

  By Friday morning the autopsy by Shelby County’s medical examiner, Dr. Jerry Francisco, had been completed at John Gaston Hospital. Dr. King’s body was then taken to R. S. Lewis and Sons Funeral Home, where people came to pay their respects.

  Coretta King was on her way from Atlanta to escort the body home, and the SCLC staff gathered at the funeral home to take the body to the airport when she arrived. She and her children never left the private jet Sen. Robert Kennedy had chartered for her. Attorney General Ramsey Clark visited her on board and publicly announced, “All of our evidence at this time indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal act.”

  6

  Aftermath: April 5–18, 1968

  ON THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, April 5, President Johnson met with twenty-one civil rights leaders called to Washington from across the country. He then went to the National Cathedral and attended a memorial service for Dr. King in the midst of the ongoing insurrection and civil disorder in the capital.

  Compared with the spontaneous violence of the night before, Friday in Memphis was relatively calm, as though the city had spent its anger in one short burst. The situation across the country was very different. By evening at least forty cities were in trouble; states of emergency were declared in Washington D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Wilmington, Delaware, and Newark.

  Within twenty-four hours of the killing, the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle found in the bundle near the scene was traced, by its serial number, to the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham, Alabama. The manager, Donald Wood, told investigators that a person named Harvey Lowmeyer had first bought a .243 Winchester on March 29 and then, strangely enough, exchanged it for the Remington the next day. On the rifle was a Redfield 2 × 7 telescopic sight which had been mounted at Lowmeyer’s request.

  A pair of binoculars also found in the bundle in front of Canipe’s shop was traced by Memphis police to the York Arms Company, located a few blocks north of the rooming house on Main Street.

  The rifle was packed in a Browning rifle box, along with a Remington Peters cartridge box containing nine 30.06 cartridges—four military type and five Remington Peters soft points. The rifle box had been wrapped in a bedspread, along with a zippered plastic overnight bag containing toiletries, a pair of pliers, a tack hammer, a portable radio, two cans of beer, and a section of the April 4 Memphis Commercial Appeal. In the rifle was an unejected cartridge case.

  The Memphis City Council passed a resolution expressing condolences to Dr. King’s family and issued a reward of $50,000 for information leading to the capture and conviction of the assassin. Since the Commercial Appeal and the Press Scimitar had also each pledged $25,000, the reward offer came to $100,000.

  The march scheduled for Monday, April 8, was to go ahead as a memorial to Dr. King, with a rally in front of city hall, subject to the restrictions previously agreed upon and handed down by Judge Bailey Brown. On that cloudy Monday, Dr. Spock and I joined some forty thousand people, mostly local blacks, and slowly marched between the ranks of the five thousand National Guardsmen who lined the route from Hernando Street to City Hall.

  Eventually Dr. Spock and I mounted the specially erected platform and joined the family, Ralph Abernathy, and others who would address the large outpouring of mourners. We went to Atlanta the next day for the funeral. There were about 100,000 mourners, including Vice Pres. Hubert Humphrey, walking slowly behind a mule-drawn caisson to the campus of Morehouse College for a service and then on to the burial in South View Cemetery. Prominent individuals who had increasingly turned their backs on Dr. King when during his last year he most needed them turned up at his funeral. The hypocrisy sickened me.

  That evening, Robert Kennedy invited a number of us to a gathering in his hotel suite. I did not go—I regarded the senator’s politically motivated actions as distasteful. I had long ago come to expect that from the Kennedys as a result of my previous experience as Robert Kennedy’s Westchester County, New York, citizens chairman during his senatorial campaign in 1964. (We would learn years later that a less mature Attorney General Kennedy had given in to Hoover’s pressure to permit the wiretapping of Dr. King.)

  Negotiations aimed at settling the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike would soon resume under intense presidential pressure for a settlement. An agreement was reached on April 16: the union was recognized and a pay raise was agreed to, as were the procedures for a dues checkoff through the Public Workers Federal Credit Union. The strike had lasted sixty-five days.

  ON APRIL 10, Mrs. John Riley, in apartment 492 of the Capitol Homes Housing Project in Atlanta, telephoned the local FBI field office to report a Mustang that had been left in a small parking space near her building. She described it as white with a 1968 Alabama plate in the back and two Mexican tourist stickers on the windshield. She had heard that the police were looking for a man driving a white Mustang in connection with the killing of Dr. King. The Mustang, she reported, had been parked in that space since April 5.

  A quick check showed that the car was registered in the name of Eric S. Galt, 2608 South Highland Avenue, Birmingham. The ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes.

  On April 12, the Miami FBI office issued and then immediately withdrew a statewide police bulletin calling for the location—though not the apprehension—of one Eric Starvo Galt.

  A handwriting comparison indicated that Galt was also the man calling himself Harvey Lowmeyer who bought the rifle at the Aeromarine store in Birmingham. An analysis of fibers found in the trunk of the Mustang matched those on the pillow and sheets in room 5B of the rooming house rented by John Willard on April 4.

  From interviews with acquaintances of Galt, the FBI learned that he had attended the International School of Bartending on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Tomas Reyes Lau, its director, provided a photograph of the man. Money orders cashed in the Los Angeles area, found to have been bought at the Bank of America by Eric S. Galt, were made out to the Locksmithing Institute of Bloomfield, New Jersey. The records of that institute showed that Galt had been receiving lessons by mail beginning in Montreal on July 17, 1967, with the latest lesson having been sent to 113 14th Street, Atlanta.

  Local FBI agents descended on those premises on April 16. Learning that Galt still had ground-floor room number 2, they established physical surveillance for twenty-four hours. Author Gerold Frank maintained that when no one appeared, two agents acting under instruction from Cartha DeLoach, the FBI’s assistant director in Washington, disguised themselves as hippies and rented a room adjoining No. 2 from James Garner, the landlord.5 The connecting door was padlocked from the other side, so, according to Frank, DeLoach gave instructions to take the door off the hinges to get in (DeLoach has denied this). Thus, they obtained—possibly illegally because no warrant had been issued—a variety of items from the room, including a map o
f Atlanta with a clear left thumb print. Someone—apparently J. Edgar Hoover himself—suggested that the available fingerprints be compared against the prints of white men, under fifty, wanted by the police—the fugitive file. There were reportedly fifty-three thousand sets of prints in this category.

  On April 17, the Birmingham FBI office sought a federal fugitive warrant for Eric Starvo Galt pursuant to an indictment charging a conspiracy to violate Dr. King’s civil rights.

  Beginning on the morning of April 18, the FBI specialists undertook the task of fingerprint comparison; by the next morning, the seven hundredth card matched. It belonged to a fugitive from a Missouri penitentiary. His name was James Earl Ray. It was clear: Galt and Ray were the same man.

  7

  Hunt, Extradition, and Plea: May 1968–March 10, 1969

  WITH THE DEATH OF DR. KING, the media quite naturally turned their attention to the FBI-led search for the killer. The manhunt officially started on April 17 with the Birmingham indictment. From that time, the FBI (“the bureau”) purported to mount an all-out campaign to search for Dr. King’s murderer.

  During this time, the bureau selectively leaked information to the media. One such leak was noted very early on by Martin Waldron of the New York Times. In his article entitled “The Search” published on April 20, 1968, he stated:

  “Earlier there had been information leaks from the FBI that the fingerprints found on the rifle dropped on the Memphis street had been tested and had been found to be those of Ray.”

  On May 1, the San Francisco Chronicle, quoting certain “unimpeachable sources” of the Los Angeles Times, said that the FBI had found or obtained a map of Atlanta with “the area of Dr. Martin Luther King’s residence and church circled and … linked to accused assassin James Earl Ray.” The article went on to state that “the map tends to support a theory by some investigators that Ray stalked Dr. King for some time before fatally shooting him on April 4.” (On May 22, the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain carried the same story across the nation.) So, shortly after being identified, a leak, clearly from the bureau, portrayed Ray in the national media as a killer who consciously stalked his prey and left behind tangible evidence of his stalking.

  Praise for the bureau manhunt also appeared in print. It was widespread and appears to have first been declared by nationally syndicated columnist and Hoover friend Drew Pearson in a column written with Jack Anderson that appeared on May 6, 1968:

  We have checked into the operations of the FBI in this respect and are convinced that it is conducting perhaps the most painstaking, exhaustive manhunt ever before undertaken in the United States.

  Its G-men have checked every bar ever patronized by James Earl Ray, every flop-house he ever stopped at, every cantina in Mexico he ever visited. It has collected an amazing array of evidence, all linking Ray with the murder.

  In early May, as a matter of routine, the FBI asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to examine its files to assess whether anyone resembling the fugitive James Earl Ray might have applied for a passport recently. (A similar exercise under way in the United States had been unproductive.)

  A task force of constables compared Ray’s photograph with nearly a quarter of a million photographs submitted with passport applications from April 23, 1967 (the day of Ray’s escape from prison).

  On May 20, a young constable saw a photograph that looked like Ray. It was attached to the application of one Ramon George Sneyd, a thirty-five-year-old native of Toronto. The passport had been issued on April 24, 1968, and sent on that date to Sneyd care of the Kennedy Travel Bureau in Toronto.

  Mr. Sneyd turned out to be a Toronto policeman who was clearly not the man in the photograph accompanying the passport application. Sneyd said that around the first of May he had a call from someone who claimed to be with the passport division inquiring whether he had lost his passport. When he said he had never had a passport the caller apologized, saying that it must have been a mistake, and then hung up.

  The RCMP forwarded the passport application to the FBI laboratory in Washington for a handwriting comparison with the Galt signature. They matched.

  Backtracking Ray’s movements, the RCMP discovered he had apparently arrived in Toronto on April 8 and explored using not one but two new identities: Sneyd and Paul Edward Bridgeman, a thirty-five-year-old man who had some resemblance to Ray. Bridgeman had also received a telephone call asking if he had lost his passport. (He had had one eight years earlier.)

  The RCMP also discovered that there was a Toronto citizen named Eric St. Vincent Galt who was the only Eric Galt listed in the Canadian telephone directories in 1968. He worked for Union Carbide, the U.S. defense manufacturer.

  The RCMP quickly learned from the Kennedy Travel Bureau that Ray, as Sneyd, had left for London on a BOAC flight on May 6. Scotland Yard was contacted and every port of entry into the United Kingdom was alerted. The official reason was that Ramon George Sneyd, traveling on a Canadian passport, had violated the Alien Immigration Act. If apprehended he was to be held for questioning.

  On the same day he flew to London, Ray flew to Portugal, where he obtained a new passport from the Canadian embassy that corrected a misspelling in the last name from “Sneya” to “Sneyd.” He flew back to London on the 17th of May.

  MEANWHILE, the U.S. media continued their coverage of the case. In a May 20 Time article, “acquaintances” reportedly referred to Ray as “… an obsessive racial bigot, an abrasive patron, who belted screwdrivers, dozed on the bar stool and bickered with anyone around.”

  Time carried the FBI line on the death slug, stating that “the unjacketed slug had been too badly marked for a definite comparison to be made.”

  A May 20 Newsweek article cited the FBI’s comments on an ad placed by Ray and another ad that he answered by sending a Polaroid photograph in which he looked fatter than usual. Newsweek reported that “bureau insiders said he was taking amphetamines off and on and his weight might well have fluctuated sharply as a result.” The article noted that the bureau had released another photograph of Ray taken with a prostitute in Mexico, but she was “clipped out.” The article continued:

  Still, the fact of her presence—plus Galt/Ray’s pathetic try for mail-order romance—yielded telling insights, and thus helped fill out his emerging portrait as an ingrown, emotionally stunted loner. The more investigators find out about their man, in fact, the less they see him as the conspiratorial type. “You take five guys who don’t know each other and put them in a room,” said one. “Four of them would start talking small talk to each other. Ray would sit by himself.” He picked up the suspect’s mug shot. “This is our man,” he said. “He killed King.”

  Hence, in this one leak to Newsweek the bureau conveyed to the American public, some two weeks before Ray’s capture, that the man being sought for the killing of Dr. King was a vice-ridden loner and was certainly guilty.

  Jeremiah O’Leary, a frequent mouthpiece for the bureau, in an article in the Washington Star quoted unnamed convicts interviewed by unnamed investigators (who could only have been FBI agents tracking Ray) as saying that “Ray was a racist and a habitual user of amphetamines while in prison.” O’Leary also maintained that “some of his fellow prisoners described him as an anti-negro loner who spent much of his time in jail reading sex books and girlie magazines.”

  Other wire service syndicated pieces were equally damning. For example, one story under the leader “Ray Talked Of Bounty On King: Friend”6 put out by UPI quoted a convict named Raymond Curtis, allegedly a friend of Ray, as saying that Ray told him that if there was a bounty on Dr. King, he would collect it if he got out. Curtis also alleged that Ray used dope, bragged about picking up lots of women, and was a loner.

  It is difficult to imagine more damaging depictions of an accused person who hadn’t yet even been apprehended, much less given a chance to tell his story.

  ON SATURDAY, June 8, Ray, wearing a beige raincoat and shell-rimmed glasses, presented his Canadian passpo
rt at the desk at Heathrow Airport at approximately 11:15 a.m. He had been scheduled to fly on a British European Airways flight to Brussels at 11:50. Immigration officer Kenneth Human noticed a second passport when Ray pulled the first from his jacket and asked to see that one as well. It was identical except that it had been issued in Ottawa on April 4, and the last name was “Sneya.” Ray explained the misspelling and stated that he had had no time to get it corrected before leaving Canada, requiring him to take care of it in Lisbon.

  Ray was approached by Detective Sgt. Philip Birch of Scotland Yard, who asked to see the passports. He took Ray (as Sneyd) to a nearby room and telephoned Scotland Yard. Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Butler and Chief Inspector Kenneth Thompson were notified and headed toward Heathrow. Ray was searched by Sergeant Birch, and the officer extracted a .38 revolver from his back right pocket, the handle of which was wrapped in black electrical tape. The six-chamber gun was loaded with five rounds.

  Ray explained that he was going to Rhodesia and thought the gun might be needed because of the unrest there. Birch informed him that he was committing an offense for which he could be arrested. Shortly after 1:00 p.m., Butler and Thompson arrived, when Ray was placed under arrest for possession of a gun without a permit and was taken to Cannon Row police station, fingerprinted, and placed in a cell. Later Butler and Thompson told him that they had reason to believe he was not in fact a Canadian citizen but an American wanted in the United States for various offenses including murder with a firearm.

  Solicitor Michael Eugene was appointed to represent Ray. Extradition was routinely opposed. Ray wrote to U.S. attorneys F. Lee Bailey of Massachusetts and Arthur J. Hanes of Birmingham, indicating that he was interested in seeking legal services in the event of his return to Memphis to stand trial on a murder charge. Bailey, who had been friendly with Dr. King, wasn’t willing to act, but Arthur Hanes and his son Arthur, Jr., were interested and went to England in an effort to visit their new client. During their first trip, in June 1968, they were denied access, but soon afterward they were allowed to see him.