Breadcrumb Trail Links
NewsCanada
Canada unwittingly served as an accomplice to one of the most infamous murders of the 20th century
Get the latest from Tristin Hopper straight to your inbox Sign Up
Published Sep 24, 2024 • Last updated 43 minutes ago • 5 minute read
You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account.
Article content
It happened in Canada: This series on the revolutionaries, luminaries and criminals who have visited the Great White North, was originally published in 2014
In a 1967 Massey lecture — his only address to a Canadian audience — Martin Luther King had praised Canada as “not merely a neighbour to negroes.”
The civil rights leader explained that in 19th century negro spirituals, American slaves had often sung of journeying to “heaven.” But the slaves were not singing about the hereafter; they were relaying coded instructions for an escape to freedom.
Advertisement 2
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS
Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.
Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post and 15 news sites with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.
SUBSCRIBE FOR MORE ARTICLES
Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.
Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post and 15 news sites with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.
REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES
Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.
Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.
Don’t have an account? Create Account
or
Sign in without password New , a new way to login
Article content
“Heaven,” said King, “was the word for Canada.”
Less than a year later, King was dead, and the country he had praised so highly as a haven for escaped slaves was serving as an unwitting asylum for his killer.
“Young white male, well-dressed, believed in late-model white Mustang, going north on Main from scene of shooting,” read the first police dispatch issued nine minutes after King had been shot in the neck on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
Five years before, it had taken Dallas police only 70 minutes to round up Lee Harvey Oswald, the murderer of President John F. Kennedy.
But despite driving such a conspicuous vehicle, King’s assassin had easily slipped across three state lines before abandoning the car and catching a bus to Detroit. And on April 6, only 48 hours after firing the fatal shot, James Earl Ray was disembarking at Toronto’s Union Station. At the exact same time in Ottawa, meanwhile, the Liberal Party of Canada was selecting a 48-year-old Pierre Trudeau to be its next leader.
For the next month, as race riots tore apart U.S. cities and authorities launched the largest murder investigation in American history, Ray lived peacefully among 2.6 million Torontonians.
NP Posted
Thanks for signing up!
Article content
Advertisement 3
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Article content
Although his name and photo were soon being circulated on newspapers and television broadcasts around the world, Ray visited brothels, frequented a strip club and was even stopped for jaywalking.
But while Ray would be quietly suspected, he was never called out. As author Hampton Sides wrote in the 2010 book Hellhound on his Trail, “this was wholesome Canada, trusting Canada.”
By 1968, the world was well aware of the perils of airplane hijacking and international terrorism. Despite this, Canada retained a laughably careless approached to distributing passports.
“Canadian passports are in effect issued indiscriminately to any person who claims to have been born in Canada,” a royal commission would conclude in 1969.
After a visit with his American counterparts in 1937, RCMP Commissioner S.T. Wood wrote, “I learned that there was a general feeling that Canadian passports were both useful in facilitating international travel and strangely easy to obtain.”
“Instances were brought to my attention where most undesirable people, criminals and prostitutes, had been deported … later to return with Canadian passports.”
Advertisement 4
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Article content
In 1940, Spanish communist Ramon Mercader del Rio had procured a fake Canadian passport in order to murder Leon Trotsky in Mexico City.
The passports were also a favourite of the espionage community. Six years after the King assassination, when agents with the Israeli Mossad came to Norway to kill an innocent Moroccan waiter they had mistaken for a terrorist, they made sure to use passports borrowed from Canadian nationals.
Ray, a lifelong petty criminal, had already spent some time in Canada soon after his 1967 escape from a Missouri prison, and he knew Toronto reasonably well.
More importantly, he knew that with only a bare minimum of effort, the Dominion of Canada would allow him to escape North America under a false name, and evade the unprecedented police dragnet slowing closing in upon him.
The killer’s ultimate plan was to get to Rhodesia, where he figured the country’s white supremacist government would welcome him as a hero. Then, once he was set up in a Harare villa, he could spend his remaining years collecting five-figure bounties from American hate groups.
Advertisement 5
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Article content
But for now, he was in an $11/month room at 102 Ossington.
“He had on a black pair of, what I would call, Mr. Magoo glasses,” said Lidia Szpakowsky, daughter of the property’s owner, told the National Post in 2010. Ms. Szpakowsky was only 10 years old at the time, but translated between Ray and her Polish mother.
Ray went to the offices of the Toronto Telegram and trolled through their archived birth announcements to find two Torontonians with similar ages to his own; teaching consultant Paul Bridgman and Toronto police officer Ramon George Sneyd.
From there, Ray merely needed to scope out their addresses to see if they resembled him physically, and then call them under false pretenses to confirm that they had not already applied for a passport.
Until news emerged that their identities had been compromised, neither Torontonian suspected a thing.
“I got interviewed by the press and I couldn’t tell them anything because I didn’t know anything,” Mr. Sneyd told the National Post in 2003.
Working feverishly, U.S. investigators had tracked down Ray’s abandoned Mustang, his Los Angeles apartment, a bartending school he had attended, and via a careless thumbprint left on a roadmap, they had discovered his true identity.
Advertisement 6
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Article content
When the trail ran dry, they turned their attention north of the border.
The FBI had heard the “convict folklore” surrounding the easy availability of Canadian passports, and agents assumed that Ray was planning to game the Canadian system to make his escape.
The Mounties were alerted — and with the nightmare image of the world’s most wanted fugitive using the maple leaf to trot the globe — the RCMP immediately assigned 12 officers to work around the clock combing through the last 12 months of Canadian passport applications.
After 175,000 applications, on June 1 the officers discovered the Americans were right: A man matching Ray’s description had indeed taken out a false Canadian passport, and had already used it to fly to the U.K.
It would later emerge that even Ray had been surprised at how easy it was.
Most embarrassing, Canada had not even issued the ill-gotten passport correctly. Passport authorities had gotten Ray’s assumed name wrong, spelling it “Sneya.” At a stop in Portugal, Ray had only to complain about the spelling error and — without providing any supporting documentation — was issued a fresh one.
Advertisement 7
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
Article content
On Passport Canada’s website, James Earl Ray is still cited as the reason the agency was pushed into a late 1960s drive to “tighten requirements” for Canadian passport holders. Among other changes, applicants soon needed to provide some meager proof that they were Canadian citizens.
But try as they might, nearly 50 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Canadian passport has not lost its cachet with the world’s spies and evildoers.
As recently as last year, after an increasing number of terrorists for both Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah started showing up with Canadian documentation, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service issued a warning that terrorist organizations were actively looking to recruit fighters with access to Canadian passports.
In the words of Michael Peirce, CSIS Assistant Director of Intelligence, “it facilitates travel so easily and so smoothly.”
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.
Article content
Share this article in your social network
Get the latest from Tristin Hopper straight to your inbox Sign Up
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=66f280746ee54900b4d67f0207c0737f&url=https%3A%2F%2Fnationalpost.com%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fit-happened-in-canada-james-earl-ray&c=2273916072784416240&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-09-23 21:17:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.