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Ray was also aware of Ontario's lackadaisical procedure for issuance of birth certificates and mailed off $2 money orders for certificates for both Bridgman and Sneyd. For these, he needed the maiden names of their mothers. Announcements of their births in library copies of old newspapers supplied the information Ray required.
Ray never collected the birth certificate mailed back for Bridgman—who, as Ray apparently learned, already had a valid passport. On April 18, the fugitive got a phone call and next day moved three blocks away to a Chinese-run boardinghouse on Dundas Street West, where he had rented a room in advance for $9 a week from Mrs. Yee Sun Loo. On May 2, Ray picked up his new passport and paid $345 in cash for a return excursion flight to London. Four days later, he left Canada.
"Nice Guy." On May 8, Ray flew from London to Lisbon, perhaps in the hope of a payoff, perhaps in an attempt to contact recruiters for white mercenary fighters in Africa, or else to try to reach the white-supremacist breakaway state of Rhodesia, which maintains a mission in the Portuguese capital. Indulgent officials, spotting a discrepancy between the spelling of his name "Sneya" on his passport and his adopted signature, nevertheless allowed him to pass "like any tourist."
Husbanding his funds, Ray checked into the third-rate Hotel Portugal, hung out at cheap bars, and even wheedled a $7.02 discount on a prostitute's routine $17.55 fee for half an hour's dalliance. "He was a nice guy," declared Maria, a comely adjunct to the Texas Bar. Ray-Sneyd also obtained a new passport from the Canadian embassy by pointing out that his surname was misspelled on his original document.
On May 17, Ray flew back to London, finding anonymity in one of the city's 5,500 hotels and back-street rooming houses. His tracks become visible again on May 28, when he checked into the $5-a-night New Earl's Court Hotel. On June 5, after telephoning the London Daily Telegraph to inquire about mercenary forces in Africa, Ray was again on the move, holing up in the unlisted Pax Hotel, run by Swedish-born Mrs. Anna Thomas, 54. For the next three days, Ray never left his room for more than 20 minutes, and refused to emerge for four telephone calls, two of them from an airline. On June 6, Ray again telephoned the Telegraph's Ian Colvin, asking about mercenaries. Colvin offered to send him an address in Brussels.
The search that caught up with Ray started when the FBI—taking into account the easy passport procedure in Canada—asked the Canadian police to go through their passport applications. They combed 300,000 of them and tipped off Scotland Yard to Sneyd's true identity. Held on charges of possessing false passports and a loaded .38 revolver, Ray's first appearance in London's famed Bow Street Magistrate's Court lasted 82 seconds before he was hustled back to a cell. Meanwhile, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Fred Vinson Jr. began the slow, tortuous procedure of extraditing Ray to face a possible death sentence for murder or finish the last 13 years of his 20-year Missouri sentence for robbery. Fighting all the way, Ray's lawyers could delay his return to the U.S. for months.