Back in the States, Ray found work at the Dryden Rubber Company in Chicago. It was another factory job, honest work, but he was let go after three months. With little money and at loose ends, he jumped freight trains, riding the rails all the way to Los Angeles.
Alone in a city that must have seemed like another world to him, he was soon in trouble. On the night of October 7, 1949, he attempted to rob the upstairs office of a cafeteria, the Forum. The manager spotted him crouched behind a safe. Ray fled, outrunning a parking attendant. Recklessly, he returned to the same area four days later. The parking attendant called the police. Ray denied everything, but he was convicted of second-degree burglary and served ninety days in the county jail.14
He retreated to Chicago, seemingly determined to stay on the right side of the law. He took an assembly-line job in one factory, then two more in succession. He enrolled in a course for a high school equivalency degree. He kept at it for two years before his tolerance for tedious, low-wage jobs reached a limit. He went AWOL, this time not from the army but from his job in the envelope-manufacturing department at Avery Corporation.
With no means of support, on May 6, 1952, he attempted to hold up a taxi driver with a pistol. He meant to hijack the taxi. The driver foiled him by grabbing the keys. Ray fled. A bystander raced after him and alerted police, who gave chase. In the melee that followed, Ray was shot in the arm and arrested.15
He was twenty-four, a high school dropout, a flop as a soldier, a jobless loner encumbered by a criminal record and unmoored from family. It seemed to mark a moment of final surrender. He slumped into the life of a drifter and habitual outlaw. As Percy Foreman, one of Ray’s eventual lawyers, would put it: “He called his pistol his credit card and committed a robbery every time he came into a new city.”16
For years Ray pulled off a string of petty robberies, many with impunity. At other times he bungled them. A bonehead attempt to burglarize a laundry in East Alton in 1954 ended in a comical snafu.17 As Ray hoisted himself to a window at the laundry, his shoes stuck in deep mud. In 1959, he and an accomplice robbed an IGA food market in Alton, making off with nearly $1,000. At the wheel of the getaway car, Ray failed to shut the door on the driver’s side. It swung open, and he almost fell out. With the police in hot pursuit he crashed the car into a tree.18
As his rap sheet lengthened, so did his prison terms. He served a year or more at two state prisons in Illinois and three years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. The stickup at gunpoint of a Kroger supermarket in St. Louis in July 1959 landed him in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City facing a twenty-year sentence.
The arc of his life story seemed complete. He was a common criminal, a habitual offender in and out of prison. He had defined a criminal life for himself, but he was not good at it. In his many ill-conceived, botched attempts at crime, he showed he was “markedly inept,” as Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the US House Select Committee on Assassinations, would observe years later.19
Doing hard time at Jeff City, as the maximum-security penitentiary was known, seemed to reshape his personality. He acquired a savvy and shrewdness that had not been evident before. That newfound capacity, combined with grit, enabled him to escape, Houdini-like, on April 23, 1967.
It was a Sunday. Ray was working his regular shift in the prison bakery, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. A truck was to arrive that day to pick up bread for regular delivery to the honor farm beyond the prison gates. Ray contorted his five-ten frame under a false bottom of a metal breadbox that measured four feet long, three feet wide, and three feet deep. The box was meant for sixty loaves. A fellow inmate covered the false bottom with enough bread to camouflage his curled body below. When the truck arrived, two inmates rolled the breadbox into its cargo bay.
Once the truck cleared the gates, Ray unfolded himself from the box. He had planned carefully. He wore a dyed pair of black pants and white shirt under his orange prison uniform, which he quickly stripped off. When the truck stopped at an intersection, he leaped to the ground. He did not run but instead ambled off so as not to alert the driver.20 He carried a stash of twenty candy bars, a comb, a razor and blades, a piece of mirror, soap, and a transistor radio.
According to his own eventual testimony, Ray laid low till dark, ducked through fields to avoid houses with lights, and trekked for seven nights, covering forty-five to sixty miles, and then jumped a railroad boxcar to St. Louis.21 He had served seven years and thirty-seven days of his twenty-year sentence.
By July he managed to reach Canada, where the border with the United States was not then hard to cross for an American. In Montreal he tried and failed in his attempt to obtain a Canadian passport under the assumed name of Eric Starvo Galt, and he returned to Birmingham. There he answered an ad in the Birmingham News for a 1966 V-8 Mustang with whitewall tires. On August 30, posing as Galt, he bought the car for $1,966 cash.22 Again using the Galt alias, he obtained an Alabama driver’s license.
How Ray acquired the money to buy the Mustang and pay the thousands more that he spent while he was a fugitive would mystify investigators. One likely source was his hustling of drugs and other illicit goods at Jeff City, money he may have parked with his brothers while he was in prison. Another possibility was the armed $27,230
