The Nation: RAY’S BREAKOUT

“They wouldn’t have me in a maximum-security prison if I wasn’t interested in getting out.”

—James Earl Ray,

in an interview, May 27

The plot was classic in its simplicity—and its initial success. It began while some 200 prisoners were idling away their recreation time after dinner in the yard of the Brushy Mountain state prison. The beige-painted stone fortress, 40 years old and showing its age, is half hidden in the rugged Cumberland Mountains, 40 miles north of Knoxville, Tenn. No one had ever escaped for long from Brushy Mountain, a “maximum-security” penitentiary filled with hard cases—convicted murderers and other violent criminals.

As the men played horseshoes or volleyball or strolled the grassy area, they were studied by guards armed with shotguns and rifles who observed the familiar scene from seven of the eight watchtowers. In addition, about ten guards were down among the men, circulating, waiting, watching for trouble. It was 7:30 p.m., pleasant and cool. A gentle breeze was blowing, and the soft Tennessee twilight was just drawing on. Darkness would not fall for two hours or so—plenty of time for anyone to get away, if he could make it over the 14-to 18-ft. stonewalls.

Then it began, but in a way that would not immediately arouse suspicion. Shouts erupted, bodies swirled together in the yard: two inmates were fighting. Instantly, the other convicts began to shove and jostle each other to get to the scene of the action. They seemed to be reacting simply like bored men who were eager to enjoy any diversion in their numbing routine. The guards moved quickly to break up the melee, forcing their way through the crowd to get to the fighters. As the guards gained control of the situation, one of the prisoners attracted further notice by claiming he had a broken ankle. During the confusion, a man began running toward a nearby wall. For a brief interlude—perhaps only a moment or two—the guards in Brushy Mountain focused their attention on the group near the southwest end of the prison.

That was time enough. While the diversions went on, seven prisoners were making a dash for another section of the wall at the northern corner of the yard (see diagram). As usual during routine operations, the tower nearest to it was unmanned. The men erected a makeshift ladder crudely fashioned out of iron water pipes stolen from the prison’s plumbing. Frantically, the men scrambled up the ladder and wiggled under the 2,300-volt electrified barbed wire that ran 18 in. above the top. At about that moment, all of the phones inexplicably went dead in the prison and for six to seven miles around. One after another, the men began making the long drop to freedom.

The guards saw the last man as he tried to follow the others over the wall. There was a fusillade of shots from Tower 3, 175 long yds. away, and Tower 4, 75 yds. distant. Jerry Ward, serving 20 to 40 years for bank robbery, fell on the other side of the wall with superficial bullet wounds in his head and arm. He was easy to catch, but by that time the other six convicted murderers and armed robbers had disappeared into the densely forested mountains that nestle against the prison walls. Oddly, Ward was not downcast when he was taken into a local hospital. ”James Earl Ray got away!” he cried out jubilantly. “Ray got away!”

The dramatic breakout of James Earl Ray, 49, immediately rekindled the debate over whether or not he alone had killed Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4,1968. Initially, Ray—the scruffy, born loser from the shallows of the underworld—had insisted that only he committed the crime. After he pleaded guilty at a hearing in a Memphis court on March 10, 1969, Judge W. Preston Battle sentenced him to 99 years in prison. A month later, Ray recanted, demanded a formal trial and later talked vaguely, even wildly, of being part of a conspiracy with a mysterious Latin whom he called Raoul. Indeed, Ray has insisted that he did not fire the high-powered .30-06 Remington Gamesmaster rifle that killed King with a single bullet.

Extensive Justice Department investigations, including one that was completed last February, have all concluded that Ray acted alone, but the conspiracy theories persist despite the lack of solid, supporting evidence (see following story). How could a man of Ray’s limited background and bumbling history engineer such a plot by himself and escape to London? In particular, millions of the nation’s blacks have always doubted that Ray had acted without accomplices. Some suspect that the case in some fashion involved a right-wing cabal or even the FBI itself, driven on by the late J. Edgar Hoover, whose hatred of King has been well documented. Unless Ray is captured—alive—there may be no way to convince millions of blacks, and not a few whites, that his escape was carried out in order to protect the true killers of King.

Right after the escape, black leaders voiced their suspicions that the break had been organized by people who hoped that it would end with Ray’s death. The Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, who succeeded King as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, speculated that Ray could implicate “a lot of people in very high places in this country.” Added Abernathy: “Poor people and black people and good-thinking Americans are not going to be misled in believing that James Earl Ray could have escaped from a maximum-security institution.”

One man who does think that Ray got help in fleeing is Warden Stonney Lane of Brushy Mountain prison, who told TIME that he thought the break had been assisted by some authority within the institution. Said he: “They would have had to be helped.” Whoever organized the plot shrewdly waited until Lane was far away in Corpus Christi, Texas, taking his first vacation in five years. Lane said Ray was the first man over the wall. “What I want to know is: Why wasn’t he shot at? They shot the last one.” And Lane was convinced that Ray and the others would never have tried to flee unless someone was going to pick them up, probably on Route 116, a farm road that runs just a quarter-mile from the prison. Lane planned to conduct a thorough investigation to determine if one or more guards or officials in his prison had aided the escape.

The possibility that Ray may have had outside help in getting out of Brushy Mountain certainly did not mean that he had had help in killing King. Even so, the escape and the questionable circumstances surrounding it will focus more attention on the feeble efforts of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which has been probing—with a notable lack of style, skill and success—the killings of King and John F. Kennedy. Staff investigators have interviewed Ray six times, and Chairman Louis Stokes of Ohio intended to call him to testify in public. Though Stokes will not reveal what Ray has told the committee, he insists that “We know there are people out there who would not want him to talk.” Says Stokes, who is black: “My real concern is whether James Earl Ray was lured into this escape and, if so, whether for the purpose of killing him.”

The prospect that Ray could be shot dead while at large deeply worried national leaders. According to a Justice Department source, Jimmy Carter and Attorney General Griffin Bell were “terrified” that a prison guard or a local deputy might spot Ray and kill him. If that happened, both the President and the Attorney General realize, there would be no way to convince the conspiracy theorists—whose ranks would certainly swell—that Ray had been anything other than a pawn manipulated by the real killers of Martin Luther King Jr.

The man on the run was interviewed at length two weeks before he made his break by Marsha Vanden Berg, a reporter for Nashville’s Tennessean. She gave TIME a glimpse of what James Earl Ray was like—and of the life he led —just before his escape. He was dressed in prison blues and a gold windbreaker, and he looked fine, she recalls, “much better than his old pictures, and with good color in his face.” His voice was high-pitched, and he spoke in short, broken sentences. His grammar was bad, but his mind was “clever and cunning.” Ray rarely gestured, showed absolutely no sense of humor and projected the air of being a loner. He started out sitting next to his latest attorney, Jack Kershaw of Nashville, but gradually inched away during the two-hour interview until he was all by himself at the end of the table.

Ray said he thought he was smarter than most of his fellow prisoners, while admitting that he was in prison because he was “stupid.” He told how he spent most of his free time totally absorbed in his case, studying law books and court transcripts. Despite his monomania about his case, Ray admitted at one point that he was wearying of fighting losing legal battles. Said he: “I don’t want to litigate this thing until I’m senile.”

Clearly, Ray enjoyed being interviewed. “He loves attention,” says Reporter Vanden Berg, “but doesn’t like to show it.” When the session was over, Ray underwent an immediate transformation. “You could see his shoulders droop when he started walking—no, shuffling—back to join the other convicts.”

By all accounts, Ray had been a model prisoner lately—playing volleyball and lifting weights during his free time when he tired of his law books, which he studied so thoroughly that he sprinkled his conversations about his case with legalisms such as “exculpatory.” He lately finished reading a book on cybernetics and two on hypnotism. In recent months, het was assigned to the laundry, showing no outward concern at having to work side by side with blacks.

Author George McMillan, who wrote The Making of an Assassin about Ray’s life, says that in the parlance of old cons he was a “concrete prisoner” —someone who “knows the prison world perfectly, its values, the adjustments one has to make, how to get around.” Largely for that reason, he was admired by many of the prisoners. However, he hung around with only a couple of friends, neither of whom made the big breakout with him.

Just before the escape, Ray was behaving like a man who had no plans to leave. His lawyer claims he was talking with some optimism about getting a new trial, and he had scheduled an interview with Brazilian television. But one certainty about Ray is that he is an escape artist and is constantly plotting flight (see box). Says McMillan: “He’s a guy who studies every brick, crack in the wall and weak bar. He’s a single-minded psychopath, and escape is always on his mind. He-might be thinking about the law and appeals, but at the bottom he’s always thinking escape.”

From a distance, the prison that Ray escaped from looks like a child’s cardboard castle—all neatly placed turrets and towers. Brushy Mountain, which sits at the base of three mountains, has two security features that are not readily apparent. The residents just down the road are mainly third-and fourth-generation Americans of Swiss or German descent, law-abiding and slow-talking people who are quick to point out anything or anyone strange to the sheriff over in the county seat of Wartburg, six miles from the penitentiary. They are also proud of their prison; some of the residents train the bloodhounds used in tracking escaping convicts. Brushy Mountain’s second feature is more daunting: it is an Alcatraz besieged by rattlesnakes and copperheads instead of sharks. Says one guard: “I’ve lived here all my life, and you couldn’t throw me into those mountains. You’ve pretty much got to know what you are doing to survive back there.”

In 1972 the prison was closed because of a strike by the guards and was not reopened until 1976. Despite its well-known “escape-proof” reputation, Ray asked to be transferred there. At 4:30 p.m. on Friday, he and the other inmates of Block A filed into the dining hall to have a fish supper. They were then returned to their cells for a regular head count. At 6 p.m., the operations officer of the penitentiary picked up his microphone and yelled, “The yard!” The cell doors opened, and the prisoners moved out into the enclosed yard—about the size of two football fields. The men looked like sailors: they were wearing dark blue denim dungarees and light blue denim shirts.

The ladder had already been concealed on the western side of the yard. When the diversions began, Ray and the six others started moving toward the wall, and it was all over about as quickly as it began. At week’s end prison officials were still not sure what had caused the phones to godead at the critical moment.

Nearby residents learned about the escape in the time-honored way: the siren began to wail. But with the phones out, Assistant Warden Clayton Davis had to send a man those six miles by car to report the escape to the sheriff in Wartburg. Capturing the wounded prisoner Ward was no problem; he was right outside the wall. Local roads were swiftly blocked off. But prison officials needed 45 minutes before they could organize a full-scale search. With six bloodhounds in the lead, a posse started after the group, which had disappeared in the direction of Frozen Head Mountain.

One of the men who went over the wall with Ray was his cellmate, Earl Hill Jr., serving a life sentence for killing a policeman and raping his wife. But one of the mysteries of the break was that the other five apparently were little more than casual acquaintances of Ray’s. They were all criminals with records of violence, and Ray normally kept apart from such convicts. Although Ray was thought to have been the first man up the ladder, prison officials believed that the leader of the group might have been Larry Hacker, 32, a man with a spider tatooed on his arm who was serving a sentence of 28 years for robbery with a deadly weapon.

Within an hour of the break, a guard handling four bloodhounds got close enough to some of the fugitives to hear them crashing through the brush, but they got away. The dogs picked up two sets of tracks, and the men seemed to be moving in circles. Still, they stayed just out ofreach.

As the night wore on, the number of lawmen prowling the mountains rose to 150. Five vanloads arrived carrying teams of specially trained state trooper SWAT teams. At the direction of Attorney General Bell, who stayed in close contact with the President, the FBI took charge of the case, and 75 agents moved quickly into the area. The FBI ordered in a special helicopter armed with an infra-red sensing device; it began roaming the area, hunting for minute changes in temperature on the forest floor that might be caused by the presence of men. In all, five helicopters flew over the area, occasionally whirring down to land on the baseball field outside the prison that the convicts share amiably with the local Little League team. Officials claimed they had sealed off a 10-sq.-mi. area, but other agents began taking the precautionary step of checking highways and airports in Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Kentucky.

At daybreak Saturday, Ray and the five others were still at large. Meanwhile, Brushy Mountain officials could pick up no clues on the prison grapevine. Said C. Murray Henderson, Tennessee corrections commissioner: “We are dealing for the most part with hardcore prisoners who live by an inmate code. They aren’t going to tell anybody anything.”

Then, at 1:45 p.m., a helicopter spotted a man walking by himself eight miles northwest of Brushy Mountain. A police car swiftly picked up David Powell, 27, a convicted murderer and the only black in the group. He offered no resistance. It turned out that he was the only convict from another cell block—he came from B—and guards theorized that he had had nothing to do with planning the break, that he saw men going up a ladder and simply joined the crowd. After the break, the others told Powell to find his own way. Shortly after 2 on Sunday morning, searchers grabbed Hacker near a Baptist church, four miles east of the prison.

As this week began, helicopters were still buzzing angrily over the Tennessee mountains, and sweating officers and their bloodhounds were laboring slowly through the bush. Whatever happens, the clamor to find out how Ray managed to escape from a maximum-security prison is bound to go on. Even more disturbing, Americans will be wondering all over again, more seriously than ever, whether or not the wanted man had acted alone when he killed King. The case of James Earl Ray still has a long, long way to go.