RAY'S ODD ODYSSEY

AS a thief, James Earl Ray's specialty was botching his getaway. After heisting $190 from a St. Louis supermarket in 1959, Ray left tracks that the most flat-footed cop could follow: he even parked a car used in the stickup outside his lodgings. That was characteristic of Ray, whose most profitable known caper, grossing only $2,200, was bungled when the escape car crashed. The cruelest of his convictions was for the $11 stickup of a Chicago cab driver in 1952.

After he escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967, Ray's style changed; he seemed to have become a cum-laude graduate in criminality. Flush with unaccustomed cash and astute at espying loopholes in the law's vigilance, he rambled across the country using a collection of aliases. Then, after a .30-'06 bullet killed Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, spurious radio messages sent Memphis police chasing the wrong way after Ray's 1966 white Mustang.

From that day, until a British detective politely questioned a Brussels-bound passenger at London's Heathrow Airport on June 8, Ray eluded a worldwide professional manhunt fortified by a $100,000 reward for his capture. Last week, with the accused assassin immured in a maximum-security cell in Southwest London's Wandsworth prison, policemen unraveled the nexus of plastic faces, borrowed identities and bogus papers that he had woven for two months across two continents.

Canadian Pattern. Four days after King's murder, Ray had hightailed across the Canadian border, and was renting a $10-a-week room from Mrs. Fela Szpakowsky on Toronto's polyglot Ossington Avenue. Just why Ray chose Canada is not entirely clear, but, almost surely, one reason was the knowledge--widely circulated among convicts in the U.S.--that it is ridiculously easy to get a Canadian passport. All that is needed is the gall to ask for one and a birth certificate--and the certificate is not strictly necessary.

In a consistent if bizarre pattern over several months Ray had appropriated four aliases from Torontonians, all from men who live around the suburb of Scarborough and bear varying degrees of likeness to Ray. In July 1967, Ray took the name of Warehouse Supervisor Eric St. Vincent Gait, 54, whose signature he had apparently misread as Eric Starvo Gait. As does Ray, Gait has scars on his forehead and right palm and could pass for 40, Ray's age. John Willard, 42, the name used by the man who rented the room in Memphis 13 paces away from the bathroom where King's assassin hid, is an insurance adjuster who is shorter and slighter than Ray's 5-ft. 9-in., 175-lb. frame, but looks not unlike him. Paul Bridgman, an educator, and Ramon George Sneyd, a policeman, whose names Ray used after he arrived in Toronto, are both 35 and have Ray's build. Police are still puzzling over how they were chosen.

In the Library. On April 16, Ray paid $8 for a Canadian passport in the name of Sneyd. "He blended into the wallpaper," recalls Lillian Spencer, manager of the Kennedy Travel Bureau, who handled the simple declaration that Ray signed, affirming that he was a Canadian citizen. Next day, on Miss Spencer's say-so, Travel Agent Henry Moos notarized the form and forwarded it to Ottawa.

Ray was also aware of Ontario's lackadaisical procedure for issuance of birth certificates and mailed off $2 money orders for certificates for both Bridgman and Sneyd. For these, he needed the maiden names of their mothers. Announcements of their births in library copies of old newspapers supplied the information Ray required.

Ray never collected the birth certificate mailed back for Bridgman--who, as Ray apparently learned, already had a valid passport. On April 18, the fugitive got a phone call and next day moved three blocks away to a Chinese-run boardinghouse on Dundas Street West, where he had rented a room in advance for $9 a week from Mrs. Yee Sun Loo. On May 2, Ray picked up his new passport and paid $345 in cash for a return excursion flight to London. Four days later, he left Canada.

"Nice Guy." On May 8, Ray flew from London to Lisbon, perhaps in the hope of a payoff, perhaps in an attempt to contact recruiters for white mercenary fighters in Africa, or else to try to reach the white-supremacist breakaway state of Rhodesia, which maintains a mission in the Portuguese capital. Indulgent officials, spotting a discrepancy between the spelling of his name "Sneya" on his passport and his adopted signature, nevertheless allowed him to pass "like any tourist."

Husbanding his funds, Ray checked into the third-rate Hotel Portugal, hung out at cheap bars, and even wheedled a $7.02 discount on a prostitute's routine $17.55 fee for half an hour's dalliance. "He was a nice guy," declared Maria, a comely adjunct to the Texas Bar. Ray-Sneyd also obtained a new passport from the Canadian embassy by pointing out that his surname was misspelled on his original document.

On May 17, Ray flew back to London, finding anonymity in one of the city's 5,500 hotels and back-street rooming houses. His tracks become visible again on May 28, when he checked into the $5-a-night New Earl's Court Hotel. On June 5, after telephoning the London Daily Telegraph to inquire about mercenary forces in Africa, Ray was again on the move, holing up in the unlisted Pax Hotel, run by Swedish-born Mrs. Anna Thomas, 54. For the next three days, Ray never left his room for more than 20 minutes, and refused to emerge for four telephone calls, two of them from an airline. On June 6, Ray again telephoned the Telegraph's Ian Colvin, asking about mercenaries. Colvin offered to send him an address in Brussels.

The search that caught up with Ray started when the FBI--taking into account the easy passport procedure in Canada--asked the Canadian police to go through their passport applications. They combed 300,000 of them and tipped off Scotland Yard to Sneyd's true identity. Held on charges of possessing false passports and a loaded .38 revolver, Ray's first appearance in London's famed Bow Street Magistrate's Court lasted 82 seconds before he was hustled back to a cell. Meanwhile, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Fred Vinson Jr. began the slow, tortuous procedure of extraditing Ray to face a possible death sentence for murder or finish the last 13 years of his 20-year Missouri sentence for robbery. Fighting all the way, Ray's lawyers could delay his return to the U.S. for months.

Help & Conspiracy. Ray's elusive odyssey could not fail to suggest that he had had help. Where did the money come from (at times he flashed a roll of $20 bills)? This, of course, galvanized the artisans of conspiracy theories.

To Crime Buff Truman Capote (In Cold Blood), it seemed conceivable that Ray, as well as Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas and Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, might all be cogs in a single, stupendous murder machine. The killers, Capote suggested on NBC's Tonight show, might all have been intensively trained, brainwashed triggermen of a type envisaged by Novelist Richard Condon in The Manchurian Candidate; their purpose could be to drive the U.S. to its knees by assassinating public persons--a theory, Capote claimed, that was once expounded by 19th century Theosophist Helena Blavatsky. (Sirhan, Capote noted, asked for a copy of Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine soon after his arrest.)

More plausibly, Capote argued that a cheap crook with Ray's dismal record of bargain-basement villainy could not have traveled so far without extensive help from experts. In Capote's view, Ray was the low man in an elaborate and many-tiered plot--the pigeon paid to leave his fingerprints on a rifle and then decoy pursuers away from King's real assassin. The plotters allowed Ray to live, Capote hypothesized, because he had no knowledge of the conspiracy's inner core.

Botched Again. Law-enforcement men working on the case tend to discount such theories. A senior Justice Department lawyer is conducting an undercover search for leads to a plot among Memphis underworldlings, but local police and FBI agents--who first hunted the suspect as a member of a conspiracy--are working on the assumption that Ray, a known racist and always a loner in prison, killed alone.

Ironically, after skillfully eluding capture for so many weeks, Ray can be said to have botched his last getaway. He apparently left Lisbon in a hurry because he sensed that the police were on his trail. But under a 60-year-old treaty with the U.S., Portugal--which abolished the death penalty in 1867--will not extradite any criminal sought on a capital charge. Senhor Ray could have stayed there indefinitely.

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