AS a thief, James Earl Ray's specialty was botching his getaway. After heisting $190 from a St. Louis supermarket in 1959, Ray left tracks that the most flat-footed cop could follow: he even parked a car used in the stickup outside his lodgings. That was characteristic of Ray, whose most profitable known caper, grossing only $2,200, was bungled when the escape car crashed. The cruelest of his convictions was for the $11 stickup of a Chicago cab driver in 1952.
After he escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967, Ray's style changed; he seemed to have become a cum-laude graduate in criminality. Flush with unaccustomed cash and astute at espying loopholes in the law's vigilance, he rambled across the country using a collection of aliases. Then, after a .30-'06 bullet killed Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, spurious radio messages sent Memphis police chasing the wrong way after Ray's 1966 white Mustang.
From that day, until a British detective politely questioned a Brussels-bound passenger at London's Heathrow Airport on June 8, Ray eluded a worldwide professional manhunt fortified by a $100,000 reward for his capture. Last week, with the accused assassin immured in a maximum-security cell in Southwest London's Wandsworth prison, policemen unraveled the nexus of plastic faces, borrowed identities and bogus papers that he had woven for two months across two continents.
Canadian Pattern. Four days after King's murder, Ray had hightailed across the Canadian border, and was renting a $10-a-week room from Mrs. Fela Szpakowsky on Toronto's polyglot Ossington Avenue. Just why Ray chose Canada is not entirely clear, but, almost surely, one reason was the knowledge—widely circulated among convicts in the U.S.—that it is ridiculously easy to get a Canadian passport. All that is needed is the gall to ask for one and a birth certificate—and the certificate is not strictly necessary.
In a consistent if bizarre pattern over several months Ray had appropriated four aliases from Torontonians, all from men who live around the suburb of Scarborough and bear varying degrees of likeness to Ray. In July 1967, Ray took the name of Warehouse Supervisor Eric St. Vincent Gait, 54, whose signature he had apparently misread as Eric Starvo Gait. As does Ray, Gait has scars on his forehead and right palm and could pass for 40, Ray's age. John Willard, 42, the name used by the man who rented the room in Memphis 13 paces away from the bathroom where King's assassin hid, is an insurance adjuster who is shorter and slighter than Ray's 5-ft. 9-in., 175-lb. frame, but looks not unlike him. Paul Bridgman, an educator, and Ramon George Sneyd, a policeman, whose names Ray used after he arrived in Toronto, are both 35 and have Ray's build. Police are still puzzling over how they were chosen.
In the Library. On April 16, Ray paid $8 for a Canadian passport in the name of Sneyd. "He blended into the wallpaper," recalls Lillian Spencer, manager of the Kennedy Travel Bureau, who handled the simple declaration that Ray signed, affirming that he was a Canadian citizen. Next day, on Miss Spencer's say-so, Travel Agent Henry Moos notarized the form and forwarded it to Ottawa.