Scotland Yard detectives at Heathrow had succeeded in retrieving Sneyd's bag from the returning Brussels flight, and around 3:00 p.m. Chief Inspector Kenneth Thompson brought the suitcase to Sneyd's cell. "Is this your luggage?" he asked.
Yes, Sneyd said, it was.
The contents of the suitcase were quickly inventoried--and, in the words of one Scotland Yard official, "proved most enlightening." Among other items, investigators found a map of Portugal, a guidebook to Rhodesia, two books on hypnotism, and a well-marked paperback titled Psycho-Cybernetics. There was also a jacket with a label bearing the name Mr. Eric Galt. Wedged inside the battery housing of his transistor radio was a folded sheet of paper scribbled with the names of several mercenary groups in Angola.
A policeman appeared and told Sneyd to remove his clothes; he was to put on prison garb and turn in his present attire to Scotland Yard. Sneyd balked at this indignity--"I don't know what you're doing this for. It's no good for the lab boys, if that's what you think"--but then he did as he was told. The clothes were placed in a cellophane bag and entered into evidence.
A few minutes later Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Butler entered Sneyd's cell and sat across from the prisoner, now in his jailbird uniform. Butler wasted no time in picking up where he'd left off at Heathrow. "As a result of inquiries714 made since you were detained," he said, "we have very good reason to believe that you are not a Canadian citizen, but an American."
Sneyd averted his eyes and seemed to be struggling with the implications of what he'd just heard. Then he nodded and mumbled, "Oh well, yes I am."
Sensing vulnerability, Butler aggressively pressed his case. "I believe your name is not Sneyd," he said, "but James Earl Ray, also known as Eric Starvo Galt and other names." Butler let that sink in, and then continued. "And that you are wanted at present in the United States for serious criminal offenses, including murder in which a firearm was used."
Sneyd was devastated. He collapsed onto a nearby bench and cradled his head in his hands. "Oh God," he said. "I feel so trapped."
Despite all the dire things Butler had just said about the detainee, the two charges Scotland Yard was now filing against Sneyd alias Galt alias Ray seemed puny indeed: traveling on a forged passport and carrying a firearm without a permit. But that was enough to stop the world's most wanted man and end his sixty-five-day flight from Memphis. He would soon be sent off to London's storied Brixton prison, to await extradition hearings.
"I should caution you again," Butler said, "that anything you say may be held against you."
Sneyd stared at the floor, his blanched face a mask of worry. "Yes, I shouldn't say715 anything more now. I can't think right."
47 THREE WIDOWS
IN THE SUBURBS of Washington, D.C., Cartha DeLoach was making late Saturday morning pancakes716 for his kids when the phone rang. It was an operator at FBI headquarters, patching through an international call from London.
"Deke--they've got your man." DeLoach heard a delayed and echoey voice from across the ocean. It was John Minnich, an FBI agent serving as the legal attache at the American embassy in London.
"They what?"
"Scotland Yard," Minnich said. "They've got Sneyd. He was caught at Heathrow a few hours ago."
DeLoach couldn't contain his joy. "Really? Where was he going?"
"On his way to Brussels, apparently," Minnich replied. "He told them he was heading to Rhodesia after that."
DeLoach breathed a sigh of relief that was audible over the international phone lines. "Every muscle in my body relaxed,"717 DeLoach recalled in his memoirs. "I hadn't realized how tense I'd been over the past two months. Light flooded into every corner of the room."
"But, Deke," Minnich said, snatching DeLoach from his reverie. "There's a small problem. We don't have a positive ID on him."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean we're not absolutely sure it's Ray."
"Well, that's easy," DeLoach barked. "Just get his fingerprints."
"Can't," Minnich replied. "It's not allowed here in Great Britain. Not unless the subject voluntarily agrees."
DeLoach almost hurled the phone at the wall in disgust--he had no patience for the Brits and their misplaced courtesies. The bureau had too much riding on this case, too many agents still slaving in the field, following too many costly leads; he had to get a positive identification--immediately.
"Dammit, man,718 give this guy Sneyd a glass of water. Then take the glass and lift the latents."
"But ..."
"Do it!" DeLoach demanded, and hung up. He was too nervous to cook pancakes, too anxious to do anything but pace the floor.
An hour later, Minnich called back and began with a single word: "Positive!"
The ruse had evidently worked. Sneyd had gripped his glass of water and drunk his fill. Investigators whisked the glass away and submitted it to a Scotland Yard crime lab. The latent prints lifted from the glass were instantly familiar to the FBI--they included a left thumbprint with an ulnar loop of twelve ridge counts. The prints not only matched Ray's fingerprints; they were identical to the ones Scotland Yard experts had found on the scribbled-over paper bag left at Fulham's Trustee Savings Bank.
"Good man!" DeLoach told Minnich. He hung up and then tried to reach Hoover.
He found the director at his usual weekend haunt in New York, the Waldorf-Astoria. Hoover was taciturn and seemed on the verge of grumpiness for being troubled on an off day. When DeLoach broke the good news--that the largest manhunt in the FBI's history was over--all the Old Man said was, "Fine--prepare the press release."719
AT ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL720 in Manhattan, the requiem mass let out, and Robert Kennedy's body was shuttled to Penn Station to be placed on a memorial train for Washington. A stream of mourners began to flow from the dim Gothic cavern into the glare of the June day. Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird stepped into a limousine and took off for Central Park, where the presidential helicopter awaited. Along Fifth Avenue, the dignitaries were too numerous to count, but the energy of the crowds coalesced around a triad of women, the three national widows--Jackie, Coretta, and Ethel.
An FBI agent, waiting on the steps beneath the eaves, buttonholed Ramsey Clark as he emerged from the cathedral. The agent whispered in Clark's ear. The attorney general nodded his understanding. The long chase was over. A press release had already been offered to the media.
For a brief moment, the nation's highest law-enforcement official savored the news. He got on a mobile phone and had a word with DeLoach, then called Assistant Attorney General Fred Vinson and told him to get on a plane to London to oversee extradition proceedings.
But as Clark thought about the timing of the FBI's news flash, he began to suspect that Hoover was deliberately trying to upstage the senator's funeral. If there was one man the director loathed as much as King, it was Bobby Kennedy. How delicious it must have seemed to the Old Man, Clark thought, to trumpet the bureau's triumph here and now, just as the great bronze doors swung open and the chancel organist pulled out all the stops. It would have been in good taste to wait721--even just an hour or two--but Hoover couldn't help himself.
Within a few minutes, word had spread through the crowds milling beneath the cathedral's enormous rose window. A pack of journalists approached Coretta Scott King. "They've caught your husband's killer in London--what is your reaction?" one of them asked insistently.
This was news to Coretta. Without saying a word, she turned to the reporter, smiled the sad, wise smile she had perfected through two months of widowhood, and gave a barely perceptible bow. Then she turned and melted into the throngs along Fifth Avenue.
LATER IN THE day, as the Kennedy memorial train crept down the Eastern Seaboard past tearful crowds lined along the tracks--killing several spectators in the process--word of Ray's capture reached Resurrection City. An announcer's voice boomed the sensational news over a public address system, and the shantytown crowds spontaneously erupted in a prolonged cheer that was soon undercut w
ith grumbles of skepticism. Was Ray the right man? Was he the only man? How could he have gotten all the way to London without help?
Since Abernathy was in New York for the funeral, Hosea Williams, the "city manager," became the encampment's de facto spokesman. "We're happy he's been caught722--if he is the man," Williams told reporters. "But I'm not near as worried by that one man as about the system that produced him--the system that killed President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. We are concerned with a sick and evil society."
A few hours later, at dusk, the Kennedy train pulled in to Washington's Union Station, and the funeral motorcade eased through the city toward Arlington National Cemetery for a candlelight burial. The cortege passed by the Justice Department building on Constitution Avenue, where Kennedy had served as attorney general, and where the FBI was now contending with the world's response to the Ray capture while prosecutors began to assemble the case for his extradition hearings. As the motorcade rolled by the Lincoln Memorial, a choral group sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Along Constitution Avenue, thousands emerged from the hovels of the Poor People's Campaign and gave the senator a final mournful salute before his hearse passed onto the Memorial Bridge and crossed over the blue-black Potomac toward Arlington Cemetery.
IN WASHINGTON the following day, agents in the hallways of the FBI allowed themselves to bask for a moment in the glory of the capture. Although some newspaper editorials injected notes of doubt--was there a conspiracy? was Ray a patsy?--most papers and television accounts were full of praise, and on Capitol Hill politicians offered fulsome kudos to Hoover and his men.
Perhaps the loudest praise came from Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a longtime Hoover stalwart. "Some felt this case723 was impossible," Byrd said. "Others have asserted their belief that Ray would never be captured, implying that the FBI did not really want to catch Ray. But in the end, Ray could not have run afoul of three finer law enforcement agencies in the world, even if he had tried--for his final capture resulted from the cooperation of the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and New Scotland Yard."
Hoover's critics saw the bureau in a new light; they found it refreshing to see the FBI not spying on citizens, not smearing reputations or pulling dirty tricks, but rather doing the close, hard work it was created for--solving major crimes important to the nation. The nine-week investigation was bold, relentless, methodical, creative, multidimensional. It had cost nearly two million dollars and had tied down more than half of Hoover's six thousand agents across the country. In many ways, it was one of the FBI's finest hours. All the advances the young Hoover had pushed for during the bureau's infancy--centralized fingerprint analysis, a state-of-the-art crime lab, a ballistics unit, a continental force of agents working in lockstep--had come fully into play in capturing Ray. For a single fugitive accused of a single crime, it was by far the most ambitious dragnet the FBI ever conducted. Ray had led them on a chase of more than twenty-five thousand miles.
In truth, the bureau had done a much better job of finding Ray than of ascertaining exactly why and how he had committed the crime. There were many unanswered questions--particularly having to do with Ray's motive, his sources of money, and his possible ties to the Sutherland bounty or to other floated plots on King's life. Ray's long flight was full of mysterious gaps, seeming contradictions, and stray facts that were difficult to reconcile. What were his connections to New Orleans, for example? What exactly did he do there and whom did he meet after he dropped off Charlie Stein? What possible role did his brothers play in the assassination, and in aiding Ray while he was on the lam? What help, if any, did he have in gathering his multiple aliases in Toronto? The trail that Ray had left was long, tortuous, and sketchy.
Ray's source of money was perhaps the biggest mystery. The FBI did not have it all sorted out, but it was clear that Ray must have pulled off several robberies while he was in flight. The bureau was intrigued to learn that on July 13, 1967, two men held up a bank724 in Ray's old hometown of Alton, Illinois. The robbery, which took place a little more than two months after Ray's escape from Jeff City, netted $27,234 in cash. The case was never solved, but the FBI strongly suspected that the Ray brothers were involved.
Hoover intuitively understood how unusual Ray was. He was cryptic, difficult to pigeonhole; he refused to fit the assassin profile. "We are dealing with a man725 who is not an ordinary criminal, but a man capable of doing any kind of sly act," Hoover told Ramsey Clark in a meeting on June 20. "Ray is not a fanatic [like] Sirhan Sirhan. But he is a racist and detests Negroes, and Martin Luther King. He had information about King speaking in other towns and then picked out Memphis. I think he acted entirely alone, but we are not closing our minds that others might be associated with him. We have to run down every lead."
Clark had no doubts that Ray had killed King, and that any conspiracy that existed was merely a crude and poorly funded one. The case against Ray was "one of the strongest726 you're likely to see," Clark said years later. "The evidence is vast. And you can see the ways in which his environment--his history of unhappiness, his tragically sad circumstances--had forged a character who would do it." Despite the profusion of evidence against Ray, Clark predicted the case would be forever awash in conspiracy theories. "Some Americans,"727 he said, "don't want to believe that one miserable person can bring such tragedy on our country and impact so powerfully on the destiny of us all."
None of the papers or newsmagazines mentioned just how close Ray had come to getting away with his crime--or that if he'd made it to Rhodesia, extraditing him would have been nearly impossible. And few accounts gave the Canadian, Mexican, Portuguese, and British authorities their due; catching Ray had been, in every sense, an international effort. Indeed, Hoover seemed a bit embarrassed that it was Scotland Yard, not the FBI, that finally caught his quarry.
For Cartha DeLoach, the hunt for James Earl Ray was the most satisfying case he ever worked on, and he could not have been prouder of his field agents who'd labored in obscurity all across the country--in Memphis, in Atlanta, in Birmingham, in St. Louis, in Los Angeles, and all points in between. "Nothing Ray did728 threw us off the path," DeLoach boasted. "From the time we found that photograph at the bartender's school, his fate was sealed."
Like Clark, DeLoach entertained no doubts that the FBI had the right man. Ray, he said, "was a loner,729 an egotist, a bigot, a man who in prison had said he was going to kill Dr. King, a man who wanted to be known, a man who stalked Dr. King: The evidence was overwhelming." For years to come, however, DeLoach would have to grapple with the public's understandable suspicion that Hoover's deep hatred of King must have influenced the case in some substantial way.
Yet paradoxically, DeLoach thought Hoover's contempt for King only intensified the manhunt. "Truth be told,"730 DeLoach later wrote, "the old feud did have an impact--it drove us to prove, at every moment, that we were doing all we humanly could do to catch King's killer. That may have made our job harder--or at least more pressure-packed--but as I look back on the case, I still feel the same sense of satisfaction. The FBI had never pursued a fugitive with greater patience and imagination."
48 RING OF STEEL
ON JUNE IO, two days after his arrest, in a chamber deep inside London's Brixton prison, Ramon Sneyd met for the first time with his British solicitor, a diligent young man named Michael Eugene. Sneyd was mild mannered and pleasant at first, but he soon fell into a rant. "Look," he said, "they got me mixed up731 with some guy called James Earl Ray. My name is Sneyd--Ramon George Sneyd. Never met this Ray guy in my life. I don't know anything about this. They're just trying to pin something on me that I didn't do."
Eugene tried to calm his client and explain to him that he was not concerned with the crimes Sneyd had been accused of in the United States. His concern, properly speaking, was only with the coming extradition hearings. Eugene asked Sneyd whether, in the meantime, he could do anything to make him more comfortable. Eugene later recalled the conversatio
n.
"Yes," Sneyd replied. "I'd like you to call my brother."732
"Certainly," Eugene agreed. "How do I reach him? What is his name?"
"Oh, he lives in Chicago," Sneyd said. "His name is Jerry Ray."
Eugene blinked in disbelief. Was this man a blithering idiot? Did he realize what he'd just said? He took down Jerry Ray's contact information and didn't say a word. For days and weeks, the prisoner would continue to insist his name was Sneyd. Eugene happily went along with the fiction.
"And another thing," Sneyd said. "I'm going to need to hire a lawyer in the States--in case we lose the extradition trial. Could you make contact with a few lawyers for me?"
Again, Eugene cheerfully agreed. "Any ones in particular?"
Sneyd was aiming for the stars. First, he said he wanted F. Lee Bailey, the famous Boston trial attorney. If Bailey said no, then he wanted Melvin Belli, out of San Francisco.
What little Eugene knew about American lawyering told him that retaining either of these two celebrity attorneys would cost a king's ransom. "Oh," Sneyd said dismissively. "I'm not worried about their fees. Even if it takes a hundred thousand dollars, I can raise it. They'll be taken care of."
Although Eugene seriously doubted Sneyd's assertion, there was a good deal of truth to the notion that he could quickly build a war chest of funds. In fact, the United Klans of America was already in the process of raising ten thousand dollars to defend Sneyd. Another group, the Patriotic Legal Fund,733 out of Savannah, Georgia, had pledged to pay all of Sneyd's attorney fees, court expenses, the cost of any appeals--as well as his bond. The Patriotic Legal Fund was affiliated with the National States Rights Party, whose chairman and legal adviser, the bow-tie-wearing J. B. Stoner, had already written a letter offering to defend the accused free of charge. Sneyd, Stoner told the media, was a "national hero" who had done America a favor and "should be given a Congressional Medal of Honor."
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