'engineered to see that Ray749 is permanently lost and never heard from again. There are people out there who would not want him to talk.'
An even more horrifying conspiracy theory rose up from the depths of the newspapers. As it happened, Martin Luther King's father, Daddy King, was only forty miles away from Brushy Mountain on that particular weekend. He was scheduled to preach in a Baptist church in Knoxville on Sunday. People began to speculate that this was not a coincidence at all, that the escape was somehow tied to King's appearance in Knoxville: people literally feared that King's life was in danger.
It wasn't as crazy as it sounded, given the tragedies that had befallen Daddy King since his son's assassination. In 1969, his other son, A. D. King, was found dead at the age of thirty-eight, floating in his swimming pool in Atlanta. Then, in 1974, the matriarch of the family, Daddy King's beloved wife, Alberta, was gunned down by a deranged black man while she was playing the organ during a service at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
How much pain could one man bear? How much bad fortune could be directed at a single family? On Saturday, reporters reached Daddy King in Knoxville and asked him about the manhunt for his son's assassin that was going on in the mountains just to the west. 'I hope they don't kill him,'750 King said. 'Let's hope he doesn't get killed. You're looking at the face of a black man who hates nobody.' But King wasn't taking any chances, either, especially with a posse of known murderers on the loose. He had a bodyguard with him at all times, he said, and he'd 'stopped checking into hotels in my own name a long time ago. I go nowhere without someone traveling with me, without security at both ends. I've gotten used to it.'
The hysteria that Ray's escape had generated was understandable, as were the public suspicions that something much larger was afoot. Nonetheless, prison officials insisted that--so far, at least--they'd found absolutely no evidence that anyone had aided the runaways, and no evidence of a wider conspiracy either inside or outside the prison walls. Warden Stonney Lane, somewhat irritable from having to return prematurely from his vacation to deal with the crisis, promised a full investigation. For now, all he could report was that the phone lines had gone out because the prison had received too many calls all at once from people down in Petros who'd heard the steam whistle shrieking. The power lines had temporarily fizzled as a result of what he rather opaquely called a 'panic button overload on the penitentiary circuits.'
Mostly, though, Lane was focused on finding Ray and the others. He vowed that the search would venture into 'every hollow and back road where a man could hide.'
Governor Ray Blanton, meanwhile, tried to reassure the nation that, whatever else happened, his National Guardsmen and corrections department officers would not shoot James Earl Ray. They were, he said, 'under orders to use all possible restraint.' He conceded that the breakout might have been avoided, that there was possibly 'a failure and a laxity' on the part of the Brushy Mountain guards. But, he added, this James Earl Ray character was something else, a fish too big and slippery for any state pen to keep.
'It's not a matter of we can't handle him,' the governor said. 'It's a matter of we can't
BY SUNDAY MORNING, officials were fairly boiling with frustration. Although three of the prisoners had been caught, Ray remained at large. The full might of the state and the nation could not bring the prime fugitive to bay-- not the planes and helicopters with their heat-sensing machines, not the National Guardsmen with their night-vision goggles, not the FBI with its topo maps and roving surveillance cameras. So the search would have to come down to the man hunter's oldest technology, the surest technology of all. It would have to come down to the dogs.
Sammy Joe Chapman751 was the captain of the bloodhound team at Brushy Mountain. He was a big, pale guy with a miner's lamp blazing from his forehead and an impressive Civil War mustache that crimped and tweezed when he smiled. People around the prison called him a 'sniffer' and a 'dog boy.' He'd spent his life tracking coons and hunting for ginseng root in the Cumberland woods, learning what he called 'the tricks of the mountains.' He knew all the landmarks around the New River valley--Flag Pole, Chimney Top, Twin Forks, Frozen Head. He knew where the burned-out cabins were, and the abandoned mine shafts, and the naked faces of the mountains where the strip miners had done their crude scrapings.
Chapman had grown impatient with the feds and all their instruments and all their worrying. He knew that his bloodhounds would find Ray in due course. All they needed was a good drenching rainstorm. That was the funny thing about bloodhounds: their extraordinary snouts didn't work well in dry weather. When the forest was in want of moisture, all the wild odors mingled into olfactory confusion, and the dogs couldn't pick out a man's clear scent.
Then, on Sunday afternoon, the weather turned. For hours and hours it rained strong and steady, flushing out the forest, driving the stale airborne smells to the ground. Chapman looked at the gray skies and smiled.
Around nightfall he put a harness to his two best hounds, a pair of fourteen-month-old bitches named Sandy and Little Red. He'd personally trained them, teaching them to hunt in perfect silence--none of the usual yelping and singing normally associated with hounds. Late that night, along the New River about eight miles north of the prison, the dogs picked up something strong. The wet ground quickened their senses, just as Chapman knew it would. Tugged by Sandy and Little Red, Chapman followed the river toward the Cumberland strip mine. After a few miles, they crossed over to the other side, then started up the steep flanks of Usher Top Mountain. An hour into the chase, the hounds remained keen.
Now Chapman radioed back to the prison: 'We've got a hot trail!' He crossed a set of railroad tracks and a logging road and a clearing strewn with coal. In his headlamp, Chapman could see a rusty conveyor belt and other industrial machinery of the West Coal Company. It was nearly midnight, but the dogs kept leading him uphill, toward Usher Top. For two hours, he strained and struggled up the face of the ridge, his dogs never letting up. At one point he halted them and heard thrashing in the blackberry bushes, not more than fifty yards up the mountain.
In another ten minutes, Chapman and the dogs had nearly reached the mountain's summit. Halting his dogs again, he heard silence--nothing but the crickets and a slight breeze whispering through the oaks and the rush of the river down in the moonlit valley, hundreds of feet below. It was ten minutes past two on Monday morning. Sandy and Little Red yanked Chapman a few feet farther. They snuffled and sniffed in the wet leaves. Their bodies went rigid, but still they didn't bark or bay--they only wagged their tails.
Chapman shined his lamp at a bulge in the forest floor. From his shoulder holster, he produced a Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special. 'Don't move or I'll shoot!'
Then, like a ghoul, a pale white man rose lurchingly from the leaves. He was wet and haggard and smeared in mud. His scratched arms were crusted with poison ivy. He wore a navy blue sweatshirt and dungarees and black track shoes. James Earl Ray's fifty-four hours of freedom had come to an end.
Chapman slapped some cuffs over the fugitive's wrists and frisked him. Ray had a map of East Tennessee and $290--a stash he'd apparently saved up from his $35-per-month job in the prison laundry. Aside from the map, he had nothing on his person that appeared to have come from outside the prison, nothing that indicated he'd had any help.
'Ray, how do you feel?'
'Good,' he mumbled, averting his eyes in the lamp glare.
'Had anything to eat?'
'Naw,' Ray said. 'Only a little wheat germ, is all.'
Chapman got on the radio to share the good news--and in the process learned that other bloodhounds had found another fugitive down on the New River several hours earlier (the sixth and final runaway wouldn't be caught until Tuesday). Chapman congratulated Sandy and Little Red, tugging at their slobbery dewlaps. But he had to hand it to Ray, too. 'For a 49-year-old man752 who didn't know the mountains,' he said later, 'Ray really didn't do bad.'
Inmate #65477 headed down the mountain, back to a prison term that would last, unbroken by any more escapes, until his death in 1998 from hepatitis C (probably contracted through a tainted blood transfusion he would receive after several black inmates repeatedly stabbed him). Now, tromping in manacles through the soggy Cumberland woods, Ray didn't say a word. He only thought about his mistakes and what he'd do differently next time, if he ever got another chance.
'It's disappointing being caught,'753 he told an interviewer back at the prison. 'I wasn't happy being run down. I'd rather be ...
