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Untitled Document
The lone robber entered the Farmers Bank of Liberty
at 9:10 a.m. on Friday May 30, 1980. He didn’t bark any demands, and
he didn’t hand the teller a note.
The gun in his left hand spoke for itself.
He placed a crumpled plastic bag on the counter. As
the teller stuffed cash from four tills into the bag, the bandit walked
directly to the office of the executive vice president, as if he had cased
the bank in advance. He motioned for the bank officer to go to the vault.
“Two minutes,” he said, aiming the pistol
at the officer and another bank employee. Informed that the vault had a
time-delayed lock, the bandit grabbed the loot from behind the counter and
fled.
The robbery took three minutes and netted $15,122.
Eyewitnesses pegged the stickup man as about 50 years
old, 5 feet 8 inches tall, 180 pounds, gray-haired and potbellied. He was
dressed in baggy slacks, a tan jacket, and a floppy fisherman’s hat.
Though a nylon-stocking mask concealed the robber’s facial features,
the traumatized teller noted his “farmer’s tan.”
Three weeks later, John Larry Ray, the brother of the
late James Earl Ray, was arrested for the heist.
In the town of Liberty, Ill., Ray’s name still
strikes terror in the former bank teller, though a jury ultimately
acquitted Ray of that crime in a federal trial in Springfield more than a
quarter-century ago.
These days, the notorious bank robber lives quietly
on College Avenue in Quincy in a small brick house with a rickety front
porch. Vacant lots dot the neighborhood. Around the corner, on Martin
Luther King Memorial Drive, African-American children play on the sidewalk
in the autumn dusk.
John Larry Ray moved here from St. Louis three years
ago to care for his sister, Melba, who died last November. The 74-year-old
brother of the convicted assassin of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has
survived a heart attack and a stroke in recent years. He is also hobbled by
diabetes. Complications from the disease forced the partial amputation of
both of his feet more than a decade ago. In the spring, he hopes to erect
tombstones at a local cemetery for himself and his kin.
He is counting on royalties from a book due out in
March to help pay the bills. The forthcoming biography chronicles his
criminal career and life in prison. It also purportedly reveals his late
brother’s alleged ties to the CIA [see “His last score,”
page 15]. Because of contractual obligations, he is currently not speaking
to the press.
John Larry Ray’s own story, however, has little
to do with international intrigue or espionage. His is a cops-and-robbers
tale rooted in western Illinois.
click to enlarge PHOTO CREDIT
Illinois law-enforcement authorities charged John Larry Ray with the May 30, 1980 robbery of the Farmers Bank of Liberty in Liberty, Ill.
He was born in Alton on
St. Valentine’s Day 1933, the second son of Lucille and George
“Speedy” Ray, a small-time hoodlum. During his youth, the
family hightailed it from town to town, his father adopting aliases to stay
one step ahead of the law. By 1944, the “Rayns” family had
moved north to Knox County, where, Ray says, he applied for his first
Social Security number to earn money delivering the Galesburg Register-Mail. James Earl
Ray borrowed that number in 1967 to get a job as a dishwasher in Chicago
after John Larry Ray helped him escape from the Missouri State
Penitentiary.
Those acts would bind the two brothers’ fates.
But John Larry Ray had already made more than one wrong turn by then.
His first serious scrape with the law came in 1953,
when a joyride through the streets of Quincy in a stolen Hudson earned him
five to 10. After his release in 1960 from the Menard State Penitentiary,
in Chester, Ill, he worked as a bartender and Greyhound bus-depot employee.
He dreamed of being a seaman but ended up tending greens at a golf course
near Chicago. In 1964 and 1965, he knocked around Florida and the Catskill
Mountains, in upstate New York, and collected unemployment benefits in New
York City. By October 1966 he had landed in St. Louis, where, he says, he
worked as a painter. In January 1968 he opened the Grapevine tavern on
Arsenal Street in South St. Louis with one of his sisters.
Months later, the FBI showed up at the Grapevine to
question John Larry Ray on the whereabouts of his brother, who was by then
wanted for the murder of King. He lied, telling the agents that he
hadn’t had any contact with his brother for years. The FBI
couldn’t prove his participation in the prison break the previous
year, but the bureau had John Larry Ray in its crosshairs, and he would
remain a target.
In 1970, federal agents nabbed him for serving as the
getaway driver in a bank robbery in St. Peters, Mo. That charge resulted in
his only bank-robbery conviction and an 18-year sentence.
John Ray, in a videotaped interview, taken in 2001.
In 1978, however, a congressional panel investigating
King’s murder — the House Select Committee on Assassinations
— accused Ray of four other bank heists, including an October 1969
stickup in rural Illinois.
In an odd twist, Ray would be busted for robbing the
same financial institution — the Farmers Bank of Liberty — in
1980, a year-and-a-half after the conclusion of the congressional hearings.
The crime stunned the
town of Liberty, population 524. Rumors that the robber was camped in a
pasture at the edge of town hiked fears. Police-band chatter crackled with
mounting reports of suspicious characters in the vicinity. The robbery
garnered banner headlines in the Quincy
Herald-Whig, and the Liberty Bee-Times, the town’s
weekly newspaper, devoted its entire front page to the story.
Less than a week later, Liberty would be jolted
again.
At 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 4, 1980, a farmer
reported a suspicious vehicle west of town, according to the Bee-Times. When Liberty Police
Chief Albert “Ab” Viar responded to the call, he found a blue
1969 Pontiac Tempest abandoned beside a gravel road, its engine compartment
still warm. The car didn’t have license plates, but a registration
application in the lower right-hand corner of the windshield bore the
signature of James R. LaRue.
Viar drove back to the house of the farmer. As she
and her husband talked to the chief, the farmer’s wife saw a light
come on inside the Tempest, which was parked about a quarter-mile away. By
the time the police chief got back to that location, the car was heading in
his direction. Viar flipped on his squad car’s emergency lights to
signal the driver to stop. Instead the driver sped away, and Viar pursued
him. The chase ended a half-mile later, when the Tempest spun out on a
curve and crashed into a ditch. The driver jumped from the car and escaped
on foot into a cornfield.
As darkness fell, the police chief radioed for
backup. After his deputy arrived, they conducted a search. About 300 feet
from where the Tempest had first been spotted, Viar found a yellow satchel
containing $10,803 from the bank robbery.
At 8 o’clock the next morning, a county deputy
and state police officer reported being fired upon near the bank, prompting
another manhunt. Heavily armed local and state cops swarmed the fields and
woodlands surrounding the town. That afternoon, authorities discovered an
abandoned encampment about a mile from the scene of the car chase. At the
site, police found a hole under a tree, leading them to believe that the
robber had unearthed the loot, only to have his plans thwarted by the
vigilant police chief.
Meanwhile, the Adams County Sheriff’s
Department issued a warrant for James R. LaRue, and the Illinois State
Police arrested a man with that name in Cicero, Ill., on June 9, 1980. They
released the suspect within hours, however, after he informed officers that
a wallet containing his identification had been stolen a month earlier.
The investigation appeared to have reached a dead
end.
But a week later the sheriff’s department
charged Ray with the bank robbery on the basis of a left thumbprint found
on one of the Tempest’s side-view mirrors. Ray, who matched the
general description of the suspect, had vanished months earlier after being
released on parole. Within days the FBI entered the case and, weirdly
enough, so did an investigator for the defunct congressional committee.
At 5:45 p.m. on June 23, 1980, Sgt. Conrad
“Pete” Baetz of the Madison County (Ill.) Sheriff’s
Department spotted Ray walking along Illinois Route 140 near Alton.
“As I remember it, he was wearing a dark-blue
leisure suit,” says Baetz, who now lives in Two Rivers, Wis.
“It was also hotter than hell that day.” Baetz, on a shopping
trip with his wife, turned his car around and passed the sweaty pedestrian
again to confirm his identity.
He then called the sheriff’s department from a
nearby roadhouse. An on-duty officer arrived promptly to assist Baetz in
the arrest. The two deputies frisked Ray and found nothing. Later, a
Madison County jailer discovered a .38-caliber revolver among the personal
items that Ray was toting in a shopping bag when he was arrested. The bag
reportedly also contained women’s nylon hosiery and coin-roll
wrappers from the Farmers Bank of Liberty.
Baetz recognized the suspect so readily because they
had crossed paths before. He had interviewed Ray in his capacity as a
congressional investigator for the HSCA two years earlier.
The Madison County officer had taken a leave of
absence from his local law-enforcement duties in 1978 to work for the
committee, but the career move turned bad when Baetz came under
investigation himself.
Former FBI informant Oliver Patterson alleged that
the then-congressional investigator had directed him to spy on Jerry Ray,
the youngest of the three Ray brothers. The informant also said that he
gave false testimony, provided to him by Baetz, to the committee. Patterson
revealed his illegal activities at a St. Louis press conference organized
by attorney Mark Lane, who then represented James Earl Ray. Though the
committee denied any wrongdoing, the press coverage tarnished the
reputations of both the HSCA and Baetz.
If Baetz feared that his latest brush with fame would
stir up questions about his checkered Capitol Hill tenure, he needn’t
have worried. The arrest of John Larry Ray grabbed front-page headlines in
newspapers in St. Louis, Alton, and Quincy, but none of the accompanying
stories mentioned Baetz’s central role in the HSCA scandal two years
earlier.
The Adams County sheriff arrived in Alton the next
morning by chartered plane and flew Ray back to Quincy, where FBI agents
dispatched from Indianapolis waited to interrogate him about the shooting
of National Urban League president Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, Ind., on
May 29, 1980 — the day before the Farmers Bank of Liberty robbery.
Though the agents publicly discounted Ray as a
suspect in the civil-rights leader’s shooting, their boss took a
different tack. In a front-page story that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, FBI
director William H. Webster emphasized the similarities between the Jordan
shooting and the murder of King — including the possibility that
money from bank robberies financed the plots.
The FBI chief’s accusations may have been
sparked by memories of his early days on the bench. Like Baetz, the
nation’s top cop had encountered John Larry Ray previously. As a
fledgling federal district judge in St. Louis, Webster had sentenced John
Larry Ray to prison for being the wheelman in the 1970 robbery of the Bank
of St. Peters (Mo.).
In 1978, the HSCA used that single federal conviction
as the linchpin for its theory that the Ray brothers were an organized gang
of bank robbers. The committee further alleged that James Earl Ray and John
Larry Ray robbed the Bank of Alton on July 13, 1967, and used proceeds from
that heist to finance James Earl Ray’s travels in the year preceding
the King assassination.
To buttress its theory, the committee cited other
bank robberies that were carried out in a similar fashion, including the
1970 Bank of St. Peters robbery, for which John Larry Ray was convicted,
and the 1969 holdup of the Farmers Bank of Liberty, for which he
wasn’t even charged.
“They all went down in essentially the same
way,” Baetz says. “We put James Earl Ray in the area on the day
the Alton robbery occurred.”
By the time HSCA called him to testify, John Larry
Ray was slotted for parole for his 1971 bank-robbery conviction. After he
refused to admit involvement in any of the bank robberies, the committee
charged him with perjury and federal marshals pulled him out of a halfway
house in St. Louis. He spent the next two months in solitary confinement at
the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., while Justice Department
officials tried to decide whether to pursue the charge. In comments to the
press, Ray accused the federal prison system, the FBI, and congressional
investigators of conspiring to deny his release.
Attorney James Lesar, who represented John Larry Ray
before the HSCA hearings, objected vehemently to the relevancy of bringing
up bank robberies that took place after King was assassinated. The
committee repeatedly overruled the objections.
“They pretended they were a judicial proceeding
despite the fact that it was a totally one-sided presentation of
evidence,” says Lesar, a Washington, D.C., lawyer. “They were
the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury, all in one ball.”
Internal Justice Department memos obtained later by
Lesar through the Freedom of Information Act confirmed the HSCA had
overreached its authority. Justice Department officials ruled that the
committee had improperly slapped the perjury charge on John Larry Ray to
force James Earl Ray to testify. The department refused to prosecute the
case.
Back at the St. Louis halfway house from which he had
been yanked, John Larry Ray told the Associated Press on Aug. 24, 1978,
that “he would testify about a ‘link’ in the
assassination if authorities would permit a nationwide television report
about improper judicial action that resulted in his conviction of aiding
the robbery of a St. Peters, Mo., bank.”
His only co-defendant in the 1971 St. Peters
bank-robbery trial had his conviction overturned on a technicality as Ray
remained locked up. Now the judge who sentenced him had risen to FBI
director. Guilt or innocence mattered little under these circumstances.
Nothing would ever shake his belief that he had been set up to take a fall
because he was James Earl Ray’s brother.
The pawn had made his move, but it was as if he
wasn’t even on the chessboard. Nobody paid attention to his offer.
This must have convinced him that the game was rigged.
But that doesn’t explain why John Larry Ray
chose to lie to the HSCA. Despite the expiration on the statute of
limitation and a congressional grant of immunity, Ray denied involvement in
James Earl Ray’s escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967.
He has since admitted picking up his brother after the escape near
Jefferson City, Mo.
In its final report, the HSCA concluded “that
the resistance of the Ray brothers to admitting a criminal association
among themselves in these minor crimes is based on a frank realization that
such an admission might well lead to their implication in the higher crime
of assassination.”
When asked to make a closing statement before the
HSCA on Dec. 1, 1978, John Larry Ray cast the blame for King’s
assassination on his accusers, appealing to Congress to unlock evidence the
government had decided to seal until 2027.
“The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI and
a federal judge locked up thousands of pages of evidence concerning . . .
Martin Luther King, and the Rays and maybe a person who conspired to
assassinate him.
“It is my belief that since I have been locked
in solitary confinement for 67 days, in three different federal asylums,
and [endured] many physical tortures by this government, that they should
release this information, and the person who do [sic] not release the
information, it seems to me they would be covering up a murder. They would
be covering up the murder of Martin Luther King. . . .”
At his arraignment in Adams County on June 25, 1980,
Ray displayed no belated signs of contrition. He argued press coverage of
“FBI propaganda” made it impossible for him to receive fair
treatment in the United States and requested a trial before the United
Nations. Six months later, after more contentious court appearances, the
state of Illinois washed its hands of John Larry Ray and turned the case
over to federal prosecutors.
The rest of the courtroom drama would play out in
federal district court in Springfield. It would pit an inexperienced public
defender against a phalanx of assistant U.S. attorneys.
Ronald Spears,
Ray’s court-appointed lawyer, had been in private practice for less
than two years when he went to trial in April 1981. He confesses a degree
of youthful naïveté then about outside events surrounding the
case, but that doesn’t explain his surprise over the unusual
developments inside the courtroom.
“There were some critical mysteries in the case
that I’ve never figured out,” says Spears, who is now a
Christian County Circuit Court judge.
The most mysterious element of the case, says Spears,
involved a flashlight that the prosecution admitted as evidence. Twenty-six
years later it remains a subject of debate.
Baetz, the arresting officer who testified at the
trial, says that FBI agents belatedly discovered a roll of bills inside the
flashlight, money that the former congressional investigator contends came
from the bank robbery.
Spears remembers it differently. With FBI agents
present, he and Ray examined the physical evidence, including the
flashlight that had been found in the shopping bag at the time of his
arrest. Ray opened the flashlight and peered into the battery chamber and
then put the cap back on, according to Spears. Later Ray took Spears aside
and asked him to call for an investigation. Ray claimed that he had stashed
money he had earned working in Chicago before his arrest in the flashlight
and that it had disappeared.
Spears informed the court of his client’s
allegation and demanded an explanation. “So the prosecutor brings the
thing into open court and takes it out of the box,” says Spears.
“He opens up the end of it, [and] pulls out several thousand dollars
in cash. All of this evidence was in the custody of the FBI. They had
already examined it. They obviously would have identified if they found the
money in there. Either there was some not very good work done by the crime
lab, or somebody took it [the money] and was going to keep it and got
caught.”
Other evidence may have been flushed down the
toilet. Feces collected near the getaway car contained anal hairs, which
prompted the state to order Ray to provide samples. He complied. But when
Spears later questioned the forensic specialist at the trial, the witness
testified that he had thrown away the evidence.
“Again, it points to either what could have
been a sloppy investigation or worse,” Spears says.
The prosecution relied on the testimony of Charles
Reeder, a cellmate of John Larry Ray’s while Ray was jailed in Adams
County. He told the jury that Ray had confessed to the crime. Under
cross-examination, however, Reeder said that he agreed to testify for the
government in exchange for a possible reduction in his 10-year sentence for
deviate sexual assault.
The defense countered by calling Oliver Patterson,
the former HSCA informant, to the stand, prompting the prosecution to
object, so Judge J. Waldo Ackerman cleared the jury from the courtroom to
ascertain the relevancy of his testimony. Under oath, Patterson said that
when he heard that Baetz had arrested John Larry Ray, he immediately
wondered whether the former congressional investigator had tampered with
the evidence. Moreover, Patterson told the court, his false testimony
before the HSCA — which Baetz allegedly condoned — led to the
delay in Ray’s 1978 parole. In short, Patterson maintained that Baetz
had a vendetta against Ray and his family.
Not surprisingly, Jerry Ray agreed. The youngest of
the Ray brothers testified that the FBI had first tried to pin the Liberty
bank heist on him. “When it was shown that I couldn’t have
robbed it because I was in Georgia, then they said ‘John Ray robbed
it,’ ” says Jerry Ray. “If they can’t get one, then
they get the other.”
Ackerman, however, ruled that Patterson’s
testimony was irrelevant to the bank-robbery charge.
“I’m sure at that point Patterson liked
the publicity he was getting,” Baetz says. “I didn’t even
know that he was going to testify, but my guess is he would testify to the
fact that there was this vast conspiracy against the Ray family.” The
former congressional investigator blames Mark Lane, James Earl Ray’s
attorney, for promulgating that idea. “His way of handling things was
to throw out as many allegations as you can, as loud as you can, and see if
they will stick,” Baetz says.
In this case, however, the job of making things stick
fell to federal prosecutors, who failed to place John Larry Ray inside the
bank that had been robbed. None of the fingerprints at the bank matched
Ray’s, plus none of the witnesses, including the teller, could
identify Ray.
Instead, prosecutors used circumstantial evidence
against Ray, including the thumbprint on the vehicle involved in the car
chase — a week after the robbery. In addition, a ballistic expert
testified that a .38-caliber bullet removed from a tree at the site where
the getaway car was found on the day of the robbery matched the gun
discovered in Ray’s shopping bag after his arrest.
After seven hours of deliberations, the jury found
Ray guilty.
But the judge threw out the conviction. His decision
hinged on a handwritten motion submitted by John Larry Ray when he faced
state charges in Adams County. Federal prosecutors introduced his motion as
evidence so that the jury could compare it with handwriting on the
license-plate-application form for the Pontiac Tempest involved in the car
chase. But Ray’s motion included detailed information on his prior
bank-robbery conviction, which was inadmissible evidence.
In the second trial, which took place in July 1981,
Ray was acquitted by the jury after more than 10 hours of deliberations.
John Larry Ray, however, returned to federal penitentiary because he had
been convicted in March 1981 for contempt of court for not providing
handwriting samples to federal prosecutors. Ray apparently balked at the
demand after having already given samples to the state after his arrest the
previous year. For his lack of cooperation, he received a three-year
sentence. He received additional time for the .38-caliber pistol found
among his possessions after his arrest.
Ray was paroled in 1987 and disappeared for the next
five years. U.S. marshals arrested him for parole violation in St. Louis in
1992. The Federal Bureau of Prisons released him for the last time on July
26, 1993. By that time, Ray had spent more than 25 years of his life in
prisons in 13 states from coast to coast.
By virtue of his
relationship to his late brother, John Larry Ray will always be associated
with one of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century. In many ways he
has been cast in a role not entirely of his own creation. His legend is
really a collaborative work, a crazy quilt of official sources whose pieces
don’t always fit.
His side of the story has been largely ignored or
discredited. Ray is, after all, a felon, an ex-con with a rap sheet that
spans five decades. He is known to have lied to the FBI and Congress. But
there is another reason that his version of events has often gone unheeded:
Ray has a lifelong speech impediment. Words have failed him. He has
literally been misunderstood.
An intent listener can discern his message clearly
enough, however, and it hasn’t changed for a very long time. Ray
still harbors an unyielding contempt for authority. The world is his
prison, and he has made a career of defying those who run the joint.
C.D. Stelzer is a frequent contributor. His profile of
singer/songwriter Wil Maring, “Keeper of the farm,” appeared in
the Aug. 9 issue. Contact him at [email protected].
John Larry Ray’s journey
Ray’s criminal history includes car theft,
bank robbery, aiding a prison escape, and perjury.
Feb. 14, 1933 —
Born Alton, Ill.
1944 —
Applies for and receives Social Security number 318-24-7098 in Galesburg,
Ill. under the name John L. Raynes.
1953 —
Convicted of car theft in Quincy, Ill., sentenced to five-to-ten years.
1960 —
Released from Menard State Penitentiary in Chester, Ill.
April 23, 1967 —
Helps his brother James Earl Ray escape from the Missouri Penitentiary in
Jefferson City, Mo.
April 1968 —
Interviewed at the Grapevine tavern in St. Louis about his brother’s
whereabouts by the FBI.
Oct. 28, 1970 —
Charged with driving the getaway car in the robbery of the Bank of St.
Peters (Mo.).
April 6, 1970 —
Convicted of the St. Peters bank robbery.
April 23, 1970 —
Sentenced to 18-years in federal penitentiary by U.S. District Judge
William H. Webster.
April-May 1978 —
Gives closed-door testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA).
June 15, 1978 —
Pulled out of a halfway house in St. Louis and charged with perjury by the
U.S. Congress; placed in solitary confinement at the federal maximum
security prison in Marion, Ill.
Aug. 24, 1978 — Returns to halfway house in St.
Louis.
Dec. 1, 1978 —
Gives public testimony before the HSCA.
July 26, 1979 —
Parole revoked for failing to appear in court for DWI charge in
Fredericktown, Mo.
Feb. 4, 1980 —
Fails to report to halfway house in St. Louis, after being released from
the federal medical facility for prisoners in Springfield, Mo.
June 16, 1980 —
Charged with the robbery of the Farmer’s Bank of Liberty (Ill.)
June 23,1980 —
Arrested by Madison County, Ill., deputy and former congressional
investigator Conrad “Pete” Baetz near Alton, Ill.
June 24, 1980 —
Questioned by FBI agents in Quincy about the shooting of National Urban
League President Vernon Jordan Jr.
June 25, 1980 —
Charged in Adams County, Ill. with the Farmers Bank of Liberty robbery;
asks for trial before the United Nations.
Dec. 23, 1980 —
Illinois authorities drop charges and remand John Larry Ray into federal
custody.
March 17, 1981 —
After seven hours of deliberations, the jury convicts John Larry Ray of
contempt in U.S. District Court in Springfield for not providing
handwriting samples to federal prosecutors.
April 6, 1981 —
Convicted of robbing the Farmers Bank of Liberty in U.S. District Court in
Springfield.
April 30, 1981 — U.S.
District Judge J. Waldo Ackerman throws out guilty verdict because the jury
received inadmissible evidence.
July 10, 1981 —
After more than 10 hours of deliberations, a jury finds John Larry Ray not
guilty in second Farmers Bank of Liberty robbery trial in U.S. District
Court in Springfield.
July 28, 1981 —
Sentenced to three years for contempt of court for not providing
handwriting samples to federal prosecutors.
July 26, 1982 —
7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds contempt of court conviction.
1987 —
Paroled from federal prison.
Feb. 8, 1992 —
Arrested for parole violation by federal marshals in St. Louis.
July 26, 1993 —
Federal Bureau of Prisons releases John Larry Ray for the last time.
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