personal interviews, memoirs, and official documents. Chief among these are the FBI's MURKIN files, including a wealth of largely unpublished FD-302 reports assembled by FBI agents in field offices across the nation. I also relied heavily on the thirteen-volume King assassination Appendix Reports compiled by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Three books, by three official participants in various aspects of the manhunt, were extremely useful to my research: Cartha DeLoach's revealing memoir, Hoover's FBI; the Justice Department official Roger Wilkins's searching autobiography, A Man's Life; and Ramsey Clark's Crime in America.
Anyone interested in knowing more about the George Wallace movement has three excellent biographies to choose from--authoritative works on which I relied in my several passages concerning the 1968 Wallace campaign. Foremost among these is Dan Carter's absorbing work, The Politics of Rage. Also of great interest are Stephan Lesher's George Wallace: American Populist and Marshall Frady's engagingly well-written Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace.
In describing the tragic swirl of events in Memphis that led up to the King assassination, I found two books especially helpful. Joan Turner Beifuss's engrossing and highly readable At the River I Stand was the first work to make use of a treasure trove of oral histories taken by the Memphis Search for Meaning Committee. Michael Honey's definitive Going Down Jericho Road elucidates the sanitation strike and shows how events in Memphis fit into larger movements of U.S. labor history. The best work on the riots that consumed the nation after King's assassination is undoubtedly A Nation on Fire by Clay Risen.
I drew from a wealth of memoirs written by the King family and the SCLC inner circle. Among the most helpful were works by King's widow (Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King Jr.); by his father (Martin Luther King Sr., Daddy King); by his son (Dexter Scott King, Growing Up King); by his second-in-command (Ralph Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down); by his legal adviser (Clarence Jones, What Would Martin Say?); and by his most loyal lieutenant (Andrew Young, An Easy Burden). I must also convey my admiration for the two preeminent, broad- canvas works on King and the movement--David Garrow's Pulitzer Prize-winning Bearing the Cross and Taylor Branch's remarkable three-volume achievement, America in the King Years.
My account of James Earl Ray's travels is drawn principally from his own words found in a rich and sometimes bewildering range of documents. These include Ray's '20,000 Words' (a handwritten account of his movements while on the lam); Ray's testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, including eight official interviews conducted while he was incarcerated at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary; lengthy interviews Ray gave to such media outlets as Playboy, CBS News, and the Nashville Tennessean; handwritten letters he sent to his brothers while serving at Brushy Mountain; and his own two books, Tennessee Waltz and Who Killed Martin Luther King? Ray's ever-changing accounts over the years, like his ever-changing aliases, make for a record that's sometimes maddening and sometimes mystifying but also, at times, quite revealing. As they say, a busted watch tells the truth twice a day.
PROLOGUE:
#416-J
1 'bloodiest forty-seven acres in America': This and other details relating to Jeff City prison are adapted from Patrick J. Buchanan, 'Jefferson City: The Pen That Just Grew,' Nation, Nov. 6, 1964.
2 'He was just a nothing here': McMillan, Making of an Assassin, p. 173, from his personal interview with Missouri corrections commissioner Fred Wilkinson.
3 'an interesting and rather complicated individual': Dr. Henry V. Guhleman (prison psychiatrist) to the Missouri Board of Promotion and Parole, Dec. 20, 1966, Hughes Collection.
4 Librium for his nerves: Ibid.
5 'in need of psychiatric help': Ibid.
6 applying a walnut dye: See the FBI's MURKIN Files, 4441, sec. 56, pp. 4 -6.
7 considerable quantities of mineral oil: McMillan, Making of an Assassin, p. 181.
8 'When he was using': George McMillan, interview with the inmate Raymond Curtis, box 1, interview notes, McMillan Papers.
9 visitor was his brother: Huie, He Slew the Dreamer, p. 40. See also Ray and Barsten, Truth at Last, p. 72, in which John Ray acknowledges he visited his brother at Jeff City the day before the escape and agreed to assist in his brother's flight (facts that he had denied for years, including while under oath before the House Select Committee on Assassinations).
10 rather astonishing quantity of eggs: This and other descriptions of the escape come from James Earl Ray's own account in Tennessee Waltz, p. 42.
11 two wads of cash: Ray, Who Killed Martin Luther King? , p. 57.
12 he could strut while sitting: James J. Kilpatrick, 'What Makes Wallace Run?' National Review, April 18, 1967.
13 'backlash against anybody of color': Wallace on Meet the Press, April 23, 1967, quoted in Lesher, George Wallace, p. 389.
14 'This is a movement of the people': Ibid., p. 390.
15 'If the politicians get in the way': Ibid.
16 gave it all to the chickens: FBI, MURKIN Files, 3503, sec. 39, p. 9.
17 'I looked at the stars a lot': This quotation and other first-person depictions of Ray's flight from prison are drawn from James Earl Ray's '20,000 Words,' House Select Committee on Assassinations, Appendix Reports, vol. 12.
18 called his brother: Ray and Barsten, Truth at Last, p. 73. John Ray admits that his brother called him and that he picked up the fugitive at a tavern in central Missouri and then drove him back to St. Louis.
19 hopped an eastbound freight train: Ray, Tennessee Waltz, p. 45.
