James Earl Ray: The Heathrow Capture

On the morning of June 8, 1968, a slight, bespectacled traveler handed a Canadian passport to an immigration officer at London's Heathrow Airport. He was booked on a flight to Brussels under the name Ramon George Sneyd. The officer asked him to step into an office "for some routine questions." The man's composure collapsed almost at once. "Oh God," he said, "I feel so trapped." In his pocket was a loaded .38-caliber revolver — and a second passport in yet another name. The traveler was James Earl Ray, and his arrest that morning closed the largest manhunt the FBI had ever conducted.

Two months earlier, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot dead on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The single shot was fired from the bathroom window of a rooming house across the street, where a man calling himself John Willard had taken a room hours before. Near the scene investigators recovered a bundle — a Remington rifle, binoculars, and a transistor radio — carrying a set of fingerprints. Within days the FBI matched those prints to James Earl Ray, a career criminal and escaped convict who had broken out of the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967 while serving twenty years for armed robbery.

Ray was already gone. Born in Alton, Illinois, in 1928, he had spent much of his adult life in and out of prison, and he proved an unusually capable fugitive. After the assassination he drove to Atlanta, then to Toronto, where he acquired a Canadian passport under the name Ramon George Sneyd. On May 6 he flew to London. From there he traveled to Lisbon — reportedly seeking passage to white-ruled Rhodesia or South Africa, or work as a mercenary — before returning to London on May 17. For two months his trail crossed an ocean and several countries while the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police tried to close the net.