Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  "About a month ago," he replied, "I received a telephone call from a stranger who asked me, 'Is this Mr. Sneyd?' He wanted to know if I'd lost my passport--he said he was with the passport division and was making a routine check. I said, 'You've got the wrong Mr. Sneyd.' But then he asked me again, wasn't I Ramon George Sneyd, born in Toronto on October 8, 1932? I said, 'Yes, but there must be some mistake. I've never had a passport. I've never applied for a passport in my whole life.' The man apologized for the mistake, and hung up."

  Sneyd's story was convincing enough that Marsh soon let this very confused policeman go. The passport that had been issued to "Sneya" was obviously phony.

  Meanwhile, other RCMP detectives began to investigate the various addresses noted in the passport application. They visited Mrs. Loo's place on Dundas Street, Mrs. Szpakowski's place on Ossington Avenue, and the Arcade Photo Studio, where they confiscated the original negative of the passport photo. They discovered that "Sneyd" had also been using the alias "Paul Bridgman"--and that the real Bridgman, like the real Sneyd, had recently been telephoned by a stranger claiming to be from the passport office in Ottawa.

  Their curiosity more than piqued, RCMP detectives then visited the Kennedy Travel Bureau, the Toronto travel agency from which the notarized passport application had originated. There they interviewed Lillian Spencer, the travel agent who had worked with Sneyd. Consulting her files, Spencer told the detectives that Sneyd had presumably traveled to London Heathrow on May 6 aboard British Overseas Flight 600. She hadn't heard from him since.

  Airline records at the Toronto International Airport indicated that "Sneya" had indeed kept to his itinerary: on the flight list to London was the name detectives were looking for--Ramon G. Sneyd.

  Copies of the passport application were forwarded posthaste to the FBI Crime Lab, where handwriting experts soon ascertained that Sneyd's handwriting matched that of Eric S. Galt and James Earl Ray. The train of evidence was thus indisputable: the fugitive, after acquiring a new identity in Canada, had escaped to England. It was time to notify Scotland Yard.

  THE DAY AFTER his bank robbery in Fulham, Ramon Sneyd decided he needed to move again, and quickly cleared out of the New Earls Court Hotel. He wended his way through the rainy streets to Pimlico and inquired at a YMCA. It was full, but the YMCA receptionist referred him to a little place a few doors down called the Pax, where a VACANCY sign winked through the fog. Dressed in a beige raincoat with a bundle of papers under his arm, Sneyd asked the hotel's Swedish-born owner, Anna Thomas, for aspirin to soothe his throbbing headache--then went up to his room, which was small but clean, its walls decorated in a cheerful pattern of blue peacocks. "He seemed ill704 and very, very nervous," Thomas said. "He stayed in bed all day. I asked him several times to sign the register, but he refused."

  In truth, Sneyd was in a state of growing panic. He was running out of ideas. He'd heard nothing from Ian Colvin or Major Alastair Wicks, and he still had no notion how he was going to get to southern Africa. His robbery had fetched the paltry equivalent of only $240--not enough to purchase an airline ticket to Salisbury. He'd already spent some of his takings on the street, buying a syringe and drugs--possibly speed or heroin--to shoot up. Mrs. Thomas soon picked up on his narcotized state. "He never smelled of liquor," she said, "but he kept acting sort of dazed."

  Something else was on Sneyd's mind: News reports on June 5 carried the sensational story that Senator Robert Kennedy had been shot in the head at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, not far from where Sneyd, as Eric Galt, had been living a few months earlier. Senator Kennedy was still clinging to life in a hospital, his prognosis grim. Sneyd was no admirer of Senator Kennedy, but he feared that the outrage over another major U.S. assassination would only spur the FBI to redouble its efforts at finding King's murderer. He didn't know how, but he was convinced that the fallout from the Kennedy shooting would pursue him across the ocean.

  "That's terrible news--about Senator Kennedy," a hotel staff member later recalled saying to Sneyd.

  He replied with what the employee took to be sarcasm dripping from his voice: "It's terrible all right."

  THE SAME DAY, Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King, along with several other SCLC staff members, were numbly watching the television news in a suite at Washington's Willard Hotel. They had withdrawn from the noise and mud and confusion of Resurrection City, only a few blocks away, to join the national vigil for Robert Kennedy. As the depressing news reports flickered over the screen, both Young and Mrs. King felt a horrible deja vu. "I was in a daze,705 functioning on autopilot," Young said. "I had never been so despondent."

  Coretta could never forget Senator Kennedy's kindnesses after her husband's death--providing a plane for her to fly to Memphis, delivering that calming off-the-cuff speech in Indianapolis, touring the riot-scarred cities, and offering a vision for how to rewire the inner cities of America. Kennedy was the only presidential candidate who had openly supported the Poor People's Campaign.

  Now the bulletins made it increasingly clear that Kennedy was not going to make it. The news was almost too much for Resurrection City to bear; it was the crushing blow to an already weather-beaten and hopelessly disorganized event at the frayed end of the civil rights movement. "We were all still trying706 to pretend that Martin's death had not devastated us," Young wrote. But with Kennedy's shooting, "I couldn't pretend anymore. I sank into a depression so deep it was impossible to go on."

  THE FOLLOWING DAY in London, Anna Thomas, the Pax Hotel's owner, went in to clean Sneyd's room and saw a newspaper on the bed opened to news about the RFK assassination. The senator had died overnight, a young Palestinian Arab firebrand named Sirhan Sirhan had been charged, and a stupefied nation was preparing to mourn another Kennedy. The senator's body was to be flown to New York, for a requiem mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, then taken by a slow train to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery beside his brother's grave.

  Thomas found that Sneyd's room was already tidy, the bed made, the blue spread pulled tight. He'd washed his own shirts, and now they were hung up to drip-dry over the small sink beside the window.

  Sneyd, it turned out, was at a telephone call box around the corner, ringing Ian Colvin at the Daily Telegraph. "I haven't heard from Major Wicks707 and now I've had to change hotels--did you call him?" Sneyd demanded to know. To Colvin, Sneyd sounded "overwrought and somewhat incoherent."

  Colvin told Sneyd that he had phoned Major Wicks (and, in fact, Colvin had), but Wicks had said the name Sneyd meant nothing to him. Wicks checked around and found no one who knew Sneyd's brother. "How long has he been missing down there?" Colvin asked.

  "Well," Sneyd admitted. "The truth is, he's not really missing. It's just that we haven't heard from him in a few months."

  "Are you worried for his safety?" Colvin asked.

  "It's not so much that," Sneyd said, hesitating. "You see, I'd really like to become a mercenary myself."

  All this dissembling was trying Colvin's patience. He told Sneyd that now was a bad time to try to enlist with the mercenaries--in most African countries, the fight was fading, the movement drying up, the soldiers of fortune gradually heading home.

  "In any case," he added, trying to make this importunate man go away, "London's not the best place to get information on the mercenaries."

  This seemed to catch Sneyd's attention. "Where would you suggest I go?" he asked.

  "Well," Colvin replied. "If I were you, I'd get myself over to Brussels." He explained that they had some sort of information center there that kept track of all the mercenaries.

  "Where's that again?"

  Brussels, Colvin said--Brussels, Belgium.

  ABOUT A MILE away, at Scotland Yard, one of Great Britain's leading sleuths had taken command of the Ray-Galt-Sneyd fugitive case. His name was Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Butler, the head of the famed Flying Squad that had recently solved one of England's most notorious heists--the so-called Great Train Robbery of 1963. Blu
nt, stolid, and balding, the fifty-five-year-old Tommy Butler was a bachelor who lived with his mother in Barnes, near the Thames. He didn't smoke, rarely drank, and was given to wearing natty houndstooth blazers.

  Detective Butler had a reputation for methodical relentlessness. Writing of Butler, a London Times reporter said that "many criminals seeking refuge708 abroad later confessed that they knew no peace, even at the other side of the world, when they heard Mr. Butler was actively engaged in their recapture."

  Butler's men quickly learned that Ramon "Sneya" had stayed only a few hours at Heathrow and then taken a plane straightaway to Lisbon. Portuguese police, working with the FBI and Interpol, traced Sneyd's movements in Lisbon. They found his hotel, his drinking haunts, his whores. They found that he'd obtained a corrected passport at the Canadian embassy in Lisbon. They found he'd returned to London on May 17.

  So the brunt of the investigation, having been briefly tossed to Portugal, was back in Butler's court. The detective chief superintendent wasted no time. Detectives fanned out and began questioning the managers of every cheap hotel and bed-and-breakfast in London. Every airline, train line, bus line, and rental car agency was checked, as were luggage lockers, safe-deposit boxes, and nightclubs. A photo with a description of Sneyd was printed in the Police Gazette, a sheet circulated among every police and immigration officer in the British Isles. "Wanted in connection with a serious immigration matter," the caption under Sneyd's photo announced. "Do not interrogate but detain for questioning."

  Finally, on June 6, the name Ramon George Sneyd was placed on the "All Ports Warning," which meant that immigration officials at every harbor and air terminal in the British Isles were alerted to halt anyone traveling under that name.

  Butler reported back to the FBI in Washington--his men were on the case, he said, and he felt confident that something would turn up soon. Cartha DeLoach was cautiously optimistic: "We knew that the fugitive709 was hiding somewhere in England, Scotland, or Wales--an area smaller than the United States, but still a haystack in which a needle could disappear for weeks or months or years."

  46 I CAN'T THINK RIGHT

  ON THE MORNING of June 8, Anna Thomas knocked on Ramon Sneyd's room and found that her tenant had packed up and taken off. The room was clean, except for the newspapers sprawled everywhere. He'd left behind a Cold War spy thriller, Tangier Assignment, whose lurid yellow cover promised a story "seething with international intrigue, Mafia villainy, and freebooting contrabandists." In the sink, crammed down the drain, Thomas found a plastic syringe.

  She was quite glad to see her tenant go. "He was so neurotic,710 such a strange fellow," Thomas recalled. "I felt sorry for him, but he was so obviously a troubled man that he gave me the creeps."

  AS THOMAS CLEANED the room, Sneyd was sitting in a taxicab, making his way to Heathrow Airport, where he planned to take British European Airways Flight 466 to Brussels, Belgium. The plane was scheduled to leave at 11:50 a.m.

  On the strength of Ian Colvin's suggestion, Sneyd had bought a one-way economy ticket the day before. Now, at Heathrow's Terminal 2, he presented the voucher to a clerk at the departures desk and then checked in his one bag. He turned and walked toward customs and immigration. He wore a sport jacket, gray pants, and a long beige raincoat. Under his raincoat, in his right trouser pocket, he could feel the cool metal mass of his loaded pistol.

  "Passport please,"711 a young immigration officer named Kenneth Human said when Sneyd approached the window.

  Sneyd fished his wallet out of a coat pocket. From an inside fold, he retrieved a dark blue Canadian passport, which the officer opened and studied. Officer Human glanced at Sneyd, and then back at the passport photo. Nothing seemed untoward: the same man, the same glasses, everything matched.

  Then Human saw another passport, peeking from Sneyd's billfold. "May I see that other one?" he asked.

  Sneyd handed the officer the second passport, which was clearly stamped "Canceled."

  "Why are the names different?" Human asked, noting that one said "Sneyd" and the other said "Sneya."

  Sneyd explained that his original passport, issued in Ottawa, had contained the misspelling--simply a clerical error--but that he'd had it corrected as soon as possible while in Portugal.

  Officer Human appeared to be buying Sneyd's explanation. But at this point, a Scotland Yard detective materialized--a slender, fastidious man with blue eyes and a trim mustache named Philip Birch.712 While Sneyd and the customs officer continued talking about the passport, Birch studied the Canadian's face and movements. He had an "absentminded professorial air" about him, Birch thought, but something about the traveler looked familiar. He seemed to recall seeing the man's photograph in the pages of the Police Gazette.

  Birch ran his finger down a list of names typed on an official Scotland Yard document that was labeled "Watch For and Detain." Under the heading "All Ports Warning," the Canadian's name jumped off the page: Ramon George Sneyd.

  Detective Birch tapped Sneyd on the shoulder. "I say, old fellow," he later recalled telling the subject. "Would you mind stepping over here for a moment? I'd like to have a word with you."

  Seemingly more annoyed than alarmed, Sneyd glanced at his watch. "But my plane's leaving soon."

  "Oh, this will only take a moment," Birch assured him in a chipper tone. "May I see those passports, please?"

  Two policemen joined Birch, and the three men escorted Sneyd across the busy terminal toward a police administrative office. Sneyd believed this was all just a routine passport mix-up, and so he remained grudgingly cooperative. Should things turn dicey, there was always the loaded revolver in his pocket. As far as he could see, this friendly trio of officers did not carry weapons.

  When they arrived at the office, Birch turned and faced Sneyd. "Would you mind if I searched you?" he asked. Sneyd raised his arms and offered no protest.

  Carefully patting him down, Birch quickly discovered the revolver: a Japanese-made .38-caliber Liberty Chief--its checkered walnut stock wrapped with black electrical tape. Birch spun the revolver and found five rounds of ammunition.

  "Why are you carrying this gun?" Birch asked in an even tone.

  "Well," Sneyd replied. "I'm going to Africa. I thought I might need it. You know how things are there." For the first time, a note of alarm had edged into his voice.

  Birch handed the revolver to one of the other policemen and continued frisking the suspect. In Sneyd's pockets, Birch found a little booklet on rifle silencers and a blank key, of the sort that a locksmith might carry. Sneyd had a small amount of money--less than sixty pounds--on his person.

  "I have reason to believe you have committed an arrestable offense," Birch said, and told Sneyd he was being detained. Now he would be missing his flight. Sneyd slumped in his chair.

  The officer got on the phone and tried to have Sneyd's bag pulled from the plane--but it was too late, the jet was already easing back from the gate. Then Birch called Scotland Yard headquarters and informed his superiors that just two days after being placed on the "All Ports Warning," Ramon George Sneyd was now in police custody.

  AN HOUR LATER, Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Butler arrived713 at Heathrow, accompanied by Chief Inspector Kenneth Thompson of the Interpol office. After briefly conferring with Philip Birch in an anteroom, Butler stepped into the office with the suspect and assumed command of the questioning. The poker-faced Butler was known throughout Scotland Yard as a master interrogator, adept at modulating his voice so that a suspect had no idea what he was thinking. Inspector Thompson sat in, but Butler did all the talking.

  "We are police officers," Butler began, in a formal, courteous tone. "I understand you had in your possession two passports."

  Sneyd seemed glad to see a fresh face to whom he could register his indignation. "I can't understand why I'm here," he said.

  Butler would not dignify Sneyd's concern with a reply. "What is your name, sir?"

  "Sneyd--my name is Sneyd!"

  Butler
produced the two passports and shuffled them in his hands like a deck of cards. He tapped them, opened them, and shuffled them again. He screwed up his face into a pained expression. "Both of these passports show that you are a Canadian citizen born in Toronto on October 8, 1932. Are these details correct?"

  "Of course they're correct." Sneyd's frustration was palpable.

  Then Butler produced the Liberty Chief pistol and held it in his palm. His pained expression returned. "This .38 revolver with five rounds of ammunition in its chambers was found in your hip pocket when you were first questioned. Is this your gun?"

  "Yes."

  "Would you like to tell us, Mr. Sneyd, why you are carrying a gun at all?"

  "I was going to Brussels."

  "Why should you want to take a gun to Brussels?"

  Sneyd stammered. "Uh, well. I'm really thinking of going on to Rhodesia and things aren't too good there just now."

  Butler traded glances with Inspector Thompson, then studied the revolver some more, knitting his eyebrows for effect. He was deliberately drawing things out, trying to make the suspect sweat. "In this country," he said, "one has to have a firearms certificate to own a gun--even to have ammunition in one's possession. Have you a firearms certificate issued by the competent authority?"

  Sneyd shook his head. "No," he said, "I haven't got a certificate."

  More pregnant pauses, more scowls and grimaces. "Then I must inform you, Mr. Sneyd, that you are under arrest for possession of a gun without a permit. I must also caution you that anything you say may be held against you."

  SHORTLY THEREAFTER, SNEYD was transported to Cannon Row jail, a redbrick and granite cell block inside Scotland Yard, less than a hundred yards from the Houses of Parliament. There he was placed inside a large empty cell and detained until Butler and his Yard men could scramble together more information. The iron gates of the compound were guarded by a pair of tall London bobbies. With each passing quarter hour, immured in this gray dungeon, Sneyd could hear, could almost feel, the resonant chime of Big Ben, reminding him that he had not made it to the empire's extremities--only to the empire's central police station. Nearby, an armed guard stood vigil.