Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (68 page)

A FEW HOURS before dawn, at the Millington naval air base seventeen miles north of Memphis, Shelby County's sheriff, William Morris, Fire and Police Director Frank Holloman, and the FBI special agent in charge Robert Jensen anxiously waited for the prisoner's arrival. An armored personnel carrier sat squatly on the tarmac, surrounded by a convoy of police cars. Outside stood federal marshals, FBI agents, and guards carrying submachine guns. The night was moonless, and the runway was puddled with water from thunderstorms that had just passed through western Tennessee.

At 3:48 a.m.,
⁷³⁸
the sound of a plane bored through the humid darkness, and the C-135 touched down. Sheriff Morris trundled up the steps, where he greeted the FBI agents and made his way toward the prisoner. With a sheriff's deputy recording everything on a video camera, Morris looked into Ray's face and said, in his deepest baritone: "James Earl Ray, alias Harvey Lowmeyer, alias John Willard, alias Eric Starvo Galt, alias Paul Bridgman, alias Ramon George Sneyd, will you please step forward three paces?"

Ray did so.

A Memphis physician, Dr. McCarthy DeMere, approached Ray and asked him to remove his clothes. A few minutes later, Ray stood stark naked and shivering in the aisle, his fish-belly skin shining brightly in the video camera lights. Dr. DeMere took Ray's blood pressure and other vital signs, then nodded to Morris: "He's all yours."

One of the FBI agents handed a receipt to Sheriff Morris and said: "I now give the person and property of James Earl Ray into the custody of Shelby County, State of Tennessee."

While the sheriff read the prisoner his Miranda rights, a deputy opened up a suitcase and produced a plaid flannel shirt, a pair of dark green pants, a pair of sandals, and a bulletproof vest. The deputy helped Ray put on the whole ensemble, and then Ray's hands were manacled to a leather harness.

Morris and his deputy practically lifted the prisoner off his feet and shepherded him down the steps into the open air. For the first time since April 4, the prisoner's feet touched Tennessee soil. Robert Jensen and his agents stood impassively in the shadows, watching. One of Jensen's men was on a mobile phone, narrating the proceedings to Cartha DeLoach in Washington: "They're getting out of the plane
⁷³⁹
... Now they're taking the prisoner." DeLoach wanted to hear the blow-by-blow, so that he would know the exact moment James Earl Ray ceased to be
his
problem.

DeLoach had made sure that the federal security around the plane amounted to a "ring of steel."
⁷⁴⁰
Two lines of armed guards formed a long corridor extending from the plane to the waiting armored vehicle. As he awkwardly walked the gauntlet, Ray kept his head down, his eyes fixed on his sandaled feet.

Sheriff Morris ushered the prisoner into the rear of the personnel carrier, whose multiple armored plates were said to be strong enough to withstand a rocket attack and whose windshield was made of inch-thick bulletproof glass. Within a minute, the motorcade took off. The armored car, with its spinning dome light, made a heavy rumbling sound as it lumbered down the tarmac. The convoy turned onto the main road and aimed for downtown Memphis, the city lights glowing through the haze to the south.

Working with the FBI, Morris had arranged
⁷⁴¹
every detail of this choreographed show. The transfer of James Earl Ray was to be carried out in complete secrecy, under cover of night. To throw off the media, Morris had arranged a "decoy convoy" to head simultaneously for the Memphis airport, where most journalists expected Ray's plane would touch down. Sheriff Morris, who was ultimately responsible for keeping Ray safe, feared a reprise of Dallas; Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was still fresh in the national memory. No one would be permitted a second's access to Morris's prisoner; no one would even get close.

Morris didn't have to be paranoid to believe that any number of people might want to ambush these proceedings. It was possible, he feared, that black militants might try to kill Ray, or that Klansmen might try to stage a commando-style rescue raid. And if there
was
a larger plot behind the assassination, then the conspirators themselves might try to assassinate Ray--or kidnap him--before he could spill any secrets.

At about 4:30 a.m., the convoy roared up to the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Memphis. Armed guards stood on roofs, while riot-control cops, wielding sawed-off shotguns, lined the street. A city bus pulled up to serve as a screen in case any long-distance snipers were out there. The rear door of the armored car swung open and Ray stepped out. Morris hustled him into the building and into an elevator that whisked them to the third floor. The elevator door opened, and as the prisoner emerged, a sheriff's department photographer snapped a few pictures. Averting his eyes, Ray tried to kick him in the head, screaming, "
You son of a bitch!
"

Morris led Ray down the hall toward his cell, which was really a fortified cell
within
a cell, specially prepared for him at a cost of more than a hundred thousand dollars. All the windows were covered with quarter-inch steel plates, reportedly strong enough to resist small-arms artillery. Bright fluorescent lights were set to burn twenty-four hours a day. Multidirectional microphones dangled from the ceiling, and closed-circuit television cameras trolled the cell block. At least two sets of eyes would be on him at all times--until the day he stood trial.

It was all Ray's tailor-made hoosegow, the entire third floor of what had become a citadel within the county courts complex. He would be the most heavily guarded, and most vigilantly watched, man in the United States.

Morris handed the prisoner over to the guards, who escorted him into his cell and removed his bulletproof vest, his handcuffs, and his leather harness. Then he was given corrections department garb to put on. Though it was impossible to tell through the steel skin that covered the windows, the sun was just beginning to rise over Memphis when James Earl Ray's cell door clanked shut.

EPILOGUE
#65477

June 10, 1977
Petros, Tennessee

AN HOUR BEFORE dusk, as Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" crackled over the prison radio, two hundred inmates
⁷⁴²
streamed into the recreation yard. They took in the mountain air for a while and then fell into their usual games--horseshoes, basketball, volleyball. The prison walls were thirteen feet tall and strung along the top with high-tension razor ribbon wires humming with twenty-three hundred volts of electricity. Armed guards watched from the seven towers that were set at regular intervals along the wall. An eighth tower, near the yard's northeast corner, was unmanned.

It was a cool spring night, a Friday, the start of another weekend at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. "Brushy," as the inmates called their home, was one of Tennessee's tightest maximum-security prisons, a turreted fortress carved from a hillside deep in the Cumberland coal country, in the wrinkled eastern part of the state. It was a small prison, filled with criminals as hard as the surrounding terrain--murderers, rapists, armed robbers, and other violent offenders. The facility's multiple layers of security, combined with the rattlesnakey wilderness in which it was set, long ago prompted corrections experts to confidently declare Brushy Mountain "escape-proof."

As the surrounding thickets of oak and hickory darkened in the approaching twilight, the games played on across the nine-acre yard. The hillsides reverberated with lazy volleyball thwacks and gleeful shouts and the occasional metallic clang of a ringer. If the night's atmosphere seemed languorous, maybe even a bit lax, it was because everyone knew that the prison's no-nonsense warden, Stonney Lane, was on holiday down in Texas--his first vacation in five years. It seemed as though
everyone
was on vacation.

Then, down on the basketball court, an argument erupted. Some of the inmates got into a fistfight. More joined in. A prisoner clutched his ankle and screamed that he'd broken it. Guards stormed into the yard and tried to break up the melee.

It was almost certainly not a real fight but a well-planned ruse. For at this exact moment, near the yard's northeast corner, in the shadow of the unmanned tower, a smaller group of men took advantage of the chaos. Seven prisoners stooped over an assortment of half-inch water pipes that they'd smuggled out to the yard under their clothes. Working frantically with wrenches, they screwed the pipes together. In a few minutes, they constructed a strange, stalky-looking contraption, about nine feet long, that had little rungs and was curved at one end with something that looked like a grappling arm.

Then, just like that, they hooked their jerry-built ladder over the thick stone wall--and started climbing. Within a few seconds, the first man reached the top. He was a forty-nine-year-old man with a slight paunch, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt, dungarees, and black track shoes. He crawled under the high-voltage wire and jumped into a ravine. Then another prisoner went up and over, and another.

In all, six men bolted over the wall before a guard in one of the towers finally turned from the fake fight and spied the ladder. Someone tripped the alarm, and a shrill steam whistle sang down the hollow, all the way to the town of Petros. Corrections officers found that, inexplicably, the power had flickered out through much of the prison and the phone lines were down.

Now marksmen in the various towers replied with shotgun blasts and a fusillade of rifle fire. Inmates scattered from the base of the ladder. The seventh and last man clambering up the wall, a bank robber named Jerry Ward, was struck in the arm and face with buckshot. He jumped over the edge, smarting and bleeding, but not badly hurt.

The Brushy Mountain guards had no idea how many prisoners might have disappeared over the wall--nor did they know the identities of the escapees. Within a few minutes, lawmen easily caught Ward in the brambles just outside the prison. When they hauled him off to the infirmary to treat his wounds, the prisoner had a curious reaction to the failed escapade: he seemed almost beside himself with joy.

"Ray got out!" Ward cried in delicious disbelief. "Jimmy Ray got away!"

A LINEUP OUT in the yard quickly confirmed it: Brushy Mountain's most famous prisoner was indeed one of the six men who'd bolted over the wall. In fact, he'd masterminded the plot. James Earl Ray, #65477, had been planning his breakout for months. He'd been saving pipe, figuring sight lines, measuring distances, patiently waiting through the early spring for the greening forests to sprout sufficient camouflage. He'd conditioned his body by playing volleyball and lifting weights. He apparently designed the queer-looking pipe ladder himself, and he was the first one over the wall. Ray had even dropped hints to the media that an escape was imminent. "They wouldn't have me in a maximum security prison if I wasn't interested in getting out," he told a Nashville reporter only two weeks earlier.

Yet the Brushy Mountain guards didn't see it coming, even though everyone knew Ray had a penchant for disappearing from prisons. The deputy warden Herman Davis said it was "the most daring escape I ever heard of." Scrambling under that high-voltage wire, he said, was all but suicidal. "If you get yourself grounded, you're a cinder." Davis also wondered why the phone lines and power lines had gone out--were some of the prison guards colluding with Ray? "It sure makes you think, don't it?"