With the sporty Mustang as his calling card, Ray headed south and west. He clocked two thousand miles, eventually crossing the Rio Grande and going halfway down the Pacific coast of Mexico. He wound up in Puerto Vallarta, a derelict former mining town then emerging as an upscale beach resort.
Manuela Aguirre Medrano, a prostitute, would tell investigators that she and Ray became acquainted in Puerto Vallarta. She said that she slept with him several times while he was living high (beer during the day, gin at night). If anyone asked what he did for a living, he said he was a writer. He was calm, shy, yet prone to spew hatred against blacks, she would say of him.23
By mid-November, Ray was on the road again, back across the border and on to Los Angeles. He hung out in bars there, posturing as a businessman who had operated and sold a tavern in Mexico and who was mulling over his next venture. He embarked on a quirky quest for self-improvement. He hired a plastic surgeon to snub his pointy nose. He booked sessions with a psychologist and a hypnotist. He took courses in bartending and ballroom dancing. It was as though he was remaking himself for a more respectable calling. He devised a murderous plot instead.
Investigators who would inquire into Ray’s life would find abundant evidence that he hated black people, King in particular.24 Written on the back of his TV set they found the segregationist slur “Martin Luther Coon.” They reported many instances in which Ray had allegedly uttered anti-black insults.25 One of his lawyers, Percy Foreman, would say years later, “He is a racist, and has been one all his life. He could not think of anybody else not being a racist if they were white.”26
While he was in Los Angeles, Ray’s anti-black bigotry seemed to seize him with acute insistence. He circulated a petition to place third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, the segregationist former Alabama governor, on the California ballot. In one incident at a bar, the Rabbit Foot’s Club, he had an angry exchange with a white woman, presumably over race. According to the bartender, Ray dragged the woman toward the door, hollering that he aimed to drop the woman off in Watts, the city’s African American neighborhood.27
Just when Ray resolved to kill King remains an open question. In Los Angeles the idea stirred him into action. Perhaps not coincidentally, King was highly visible at the time, denouncing the Vietnam War and vowing massive demonstrations in Washington.
Over the weekend of March 16 to 17, King was in Los Angeles to preach at the Second Baptist Church. Ray, an avid newspaper reader, might well have seen articles in the Los Angeles press reporting King’s visit and his plan to blitz the South later that week on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign.28 Ray filled out a postal change-of-address form marked “General Delivery, Atlanta.” On March 17, he left Los Angeles in the Mustang.
If Ray intended to head straight to Atlanta, he changed his mind. News media were reporting that King would travel to Selma, Alabama. Hot on King’s trail, Ray drove to Selma. He spent the night of March 22, a Friday, at a motel in the Alabama city. But King was not in Selma that night. A last-minute change in his schedule had him sleeping in Camden, thirty-eight miles away.
Ray drove on to Atlanta. As was his habit on arriving in a new city, Ray looked for a cheap rooming house where he could stay. He found a room for $10.50 a week on Fourteenth Street near Piedmont Park, a Midtown area known as a hippie enclave.
He zeroed in on King’s likely whereabouts. In pencil he circled a map of Atlanta at three points linked to King. One circle marked the SCLC headquarters, a second the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the third a former house of King’s. A fourth circle, around the Capitol Hill Housing Project, is where Ray would abandon his Mustang on April 5.
Ray outfitted himself in sniper mode. He shopped for a high-powered rifle, not in Atlanta but 150 miles away in Birmingham. For Ray, a felon using a fake name, Alabama was a less risky state than Georgia in which to buy a gun. In Alabama, unlike Georgia, there was no requirement that he identify himself.29 He did not have to show his counterfeit driver’s license, which would have identified him as Eric S. Galt. Keeping the transaction separate from his alias avoided creating a paper trail that might link the driver’s license to the rifle that he intended to buy.
On Saturday, March 23, a week after his departure from Los Angeles, he drove to Birmingham to shop for the rifle. He parked the Mustang at the Aquamarine Supply Company, a sporting goods store opposite the Birmingham airport, and went inside.
He told the store manager, Donald Wood, that he wanted a rifle for deer hunting in Wisconsin. Ray selected a .30–06, pump-action Remington Gamemaster 760. The rifle could “drop a charging bull,” according to Remington’s marketing material.30 Ray bought a Redfield 7x2 scope to attach to the Gamemaster. The scope would magnify an image to look seven times closer. He also bought a box of soft-point, military-style bullets, a kind that would mushroom on impact.31 The total cost of the three purchases, plus tax, was $265.85. Ray signed the sales slip as Harvey Lowmeyer, thus distancing the alias of Eric S. Galt from the purchase of the rifle.
By Monday newspapers were reporting that King would return to Memphis that week to stage a nonviolent march. That same day, Ray left Atlanta for Tennessee. Where he stopped between Atlanta and Memphis is not known, although investigators would surmise that he paused
