Arrested at Last

Among the 96 passengers debarking at Heathrow Airport from BEA's Lisbon-London Flight 75 was Ramon George Sneyd, who went to the Commonwealth immigration desk and presented his Canadian passport. The immigration official took one look at the document, then asked the bespectacled Sneyd to join him in a back room for some "routine" questions. The interrogation was far from routine. Sneyd was found to be packing a loaded pistol in his back pocket, plus another Canadian passport. And when Scotland Yard's crack detective Tommy Butler took over, the alert immigration official's original suspicions were confirmed: fingerprints proved that Sneyd was, in fact, Illinois-born James Earl Ray, 40, alias Eric Starve Gait, the escaped convict accused of assassinating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 in Memphis.

A New Identity. Since the time that Ray had left his fingerprints on the .30-'06 Remington rifle that killed Dr. King, he had made an elaborate odyssey from justice. He fled to Toronto on April 8, where he checked in and out of two $9-a-week flophouses. He adopted the name Ramon George Sneyd, that of a Toronto policeman, which he possibly picked at random from a city directory. Using his new identity, Ray submitted a passport application. Because of Canada's ludicrously simple passport procedures--which demand, in effect, that the applicant merely swear that he is Canadian--he was granted one. On May 6 he flew BOAC to London, and the next day on to Portugal.

The FBI, meanwhile, had launched the biggest manhunt in its history (cost: $1,000,000), warning officials in Mexico and Canada, favorite hideaways in Ray's tawdry past, to be on the alert. Scotland Yard and Interpol joined the manhunt, and FBI liaison men traveled to Europe and Australia in search of their man.

For all the manpower and expense, Ray's trail seemed to grow progressively colder. Then, on June 1, came the first big break. At the U.S.'s request, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been checking passport mug shots for the slippery suspect. After assiduously studying about 300,000, they spotted the face with the box-tipped nose.

Pistol & Cards. While all this was going on, Ray was in Lisbon calculating his next move. He apparently attempted to alter his fraudulent passport, but only got as far as changing the d in Sneyd to a. At the Canadian embassy in Lisbon he told the consul: "My name has been misspelled," and was issued a new passport on May 16. Thus, with the two cards and pistol in pocket, he flew off to London and incarceration at Cannon Row police station, a stone's throw from Big Ben.

Facing Ray after his extradition to the U.S. are a Shelby County, Tenn., murder indictment and a federal conspiracy charge. The big unanswered question is where he got the money for a two-month foray to Europe.

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