Redemption

establishment catered to hard-up transients. Ray, who was no stranger to derelict rooming houses, would belittle it later as a “wino place.”¹ Its residents were not far removed from homelessness, and Brewer had learned to exercise caution. When Ray knocked, she opened the door a crack, leaving its chain latch closed, and gazed at Ray.

“Do you have a room to rent?” he asked through the door, as Brewer would relate to author Gerold Frank.² In Frank’s account, she would remember Ray as a “trim white man who appeared to be in his early thirties,” having “dark hair, blue eyes, and a thin nose” and wearing “a dark suit that seemed much too nice for the neighborhood.” Reassured, she opened the door to admit him. “He was a clean, neat man,” she would tell a reporter for the Commercial Appeal a day later.

Brewer motioned to Ray to follow her across from the office to the first door on the left. It was Room 8, a kitchenette apartment that rented for $10.50 a week. It had a stove and refrigerator. Ray glanced around. The room was not on the side of the building facing Mulberry Street. “I only want a sleeping room,” he told Brewer.

She led him through a second-floor passageway to Room 5B in the adjoining building. To enter Room 5B, Brewer had to open a padlock on the door and turn a jury-rigged doorknob fashioned from a coat hanger. The rent was less, $8.50 a week, she told Ray. The room looked as humble as the door lock. A naked lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. A mattress on a metal bed frame sagged. There was a worn wooden dresser and a single window behind tattered, floral-patterned curtains. Ray glanced inside and said the room was fine. He would take it.

During its investigation a decade later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations would find no evidence that Ray had checked out the view from the window before taking Room 5B. Rather, the committee concluded, “the privacy and its location at the rear of the building apparently made the room more acceptable to Ray” than Room 8.³

Back in Brewer’s office, she asked him to pay for the room in advance. He dipped into his pocket for a crisp $20 bill and handed it to her. As she wrote a receipt, she asked his name. He said it was John Willard. To Brewer he seemed pleasant and calm. He even smiled reassuringly. Only after he left the office did something about him strike her as odd. He did not ask for the padlock to lock the door of Room 5B. Nor did he have any luggage.

A half hour later, Ray turned up at the York Arms Company, a sporting goods store on South Main four blocks north of the Lorraine. Ray asked a store clerk, Ralph Carpenter, to show him a pair of binoculars. Carpenter would comment later on his impression of Ray and how he was struck by the quaint neatness of the slender man. Ray’s dark hair was combed straight back, and he wore a narrow, old-fashioned knit tie.

The clerk offered two of the store’s pricier models, one pair of binoculars for $200 and another for $90. Ray asked for something cheaper. He was shown a pair of 7x35 Bushnell Banner binoculars. The price was $40, plus $1.55 tax. Ray nodded his approval. He dug into his pocket and slowly counted out two twenties, a one-dollar bill, two quarters, and, finally, five pennies.⁴

Equipped with the binoculars, Ray drove back to the rooming house. This time he parked a few doors south, at 424 South Main. He sat in the car for a few moments, scarcely moving, seemingly staring into space. Or so it appeared to Elizabeth Copeland and Frances Thompson, two employees at the Seabrook Wallpaper store across the street. They observed him frozen to the driver’s seat and wondered about this.⁵ He may have remained in the car until he believed nobody was around and he could exit the car unseen.

When he did exit the Mustang, he opened the trunk and removed a bulging bundle wrapped in a green and brown bedspread. The bedspread most likely cloaked the Remington Gamemaster rifle that Ray had bought in Birmingham, a portable transistor radio etched with his inmate number (00416) from the Missouri State Penitentiary, a pair of men’s undershorts, an undershirt, a hairbrush, various tools and toiletries, and at least two cans of Schlitz beer.⁶ He wrapped the bundle in his arms and managed at the same time to grip in one hand the York Arms bag containing his new field glasses. He hastened the few steps to the rooming house entrance and climbed the twenty stairs to Room 5B.

It was not long after 5:00 p.m. when he entered the room. Outside it was cool, and the sky was clear. The sun would not set till six twenty-five. As it would turn out, luck was again on his side. He could count on plenty of light for almost an hour and a half.

In his room, Ray hooked the curtain out of the way, raised the window, removed the screen, and canvassed the area. Room 5B was located near the rear of the building on the east side, which stood at a ninety-degree angle from Mulberry Street. By leaning out the window and craning his neck to the left, he could look diagonally across Mulberry. From that angle the Lorraine came into full view. His good luck was holding. Room 5B afforded him a view of the motel.

Yet as a lookout it was not ideal. To see the whole expanse of the Lorraine, Ray had to lean out the window. He would have to expose his head outside as he surveyed the area with binoculars. A vigilant passerby on South Main might have been struck by a man’s head jutting out the window, with binoculars trained toward the Lorraine. A police security detail protecting King at the Lorraine, if there had been one,