Killing the Dream by Gerald Posner

Author:Gerald Posner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

27

On the Run

Within two minutes of the shooting, Ray had left the scene of the assassination and was on his way toward the Mississippi state line.1

Ray’s story was that he was on his way back to the rooming house from the gas station when he “ran into a police roadblock.”2 Since he was a fugitive, Ray immediately turned around and drove away. “When police are around,” he said, “I try to avoid the area.” Before the Select Committee, Congressman Louis Stokes asked Ray why he did not just drive to another part of town. “It was my intention,” he said, “to drive out into Mississippi on the highway and stop at a service station and make a telephone call and attempt to find out if anything had taken place illegally.”3 He was “apprehensive” that something had gone awry with the gun deal at the rooming house.4 That was despite the fact that Raoul had supposedly assured him there would be no gun deal until Ray returned to the rooming house later that night.5 “I was playing it safe on assumptions of what might have been,” recalled Ray.6

He was already in Mississippi, he recalled, when he heard a radio news bulletin that Dr. King had been shot in Memphis.7 A little while after the first news flash, Ray heard another report that the police were looking for a white Mustang.8 From the time of the first broadcast, Ray said, he was “really” in a hurry and he drove the 350 miles straight to Atlanta without stopping.9 Fearful that his car would be spotted, he stayed largely on dark side roads, and the journey took him nearly eleven hours.10 As he drove along, he threw out “everything I could get ahold of,” including “the camera equipment … I didn’t know what else I threw out … anything I could get my hands on I threw out the back seat of the car.… I just wanted to get rid of everything that would connect me with the Mustang. Or that would connect me with anything.”*11

When he reached Atlanta, it was shortly after dawn on April 5. He parked the Mustang in the rear of the Capitol Homes housing project, figuring that “if it’s in a parking lot it might sit there a few days” before the police found it, and he “wiped the fingerprints off the car.”12 He had already stopped twice, once at a gas station, and wiped down the interior.13 “I know I wiped everything off the Mustang after they started looking for me.”†14

Ray’s hurried departure from Memphis has the earmark of guilt. Ray later said he only “vaguely” knew who Dr. King was, and did not know he was in Memphis—much less that he was staying at a motel only two hundred feet away from the rooming house where Ray had his room. However, the initial bulletins did not say where King was shot, so if Ray had been telling the truth about his ignorance of King and his whereabouts, the news of the shooting would have caused no panic in him.

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