Stonney Ray Lane
Former Warden of Brushy Mountain State Prison in Tennessee, Stonney Ray Lane, shares his experiences while serving as warden of Tennessee's toughest prison in the 1970's. Take an exclusive look into the lives of hardened criminals and those courageous men and women who have the job of keeping them locked behind bars. Warden Lane tells his side of the story of the 1977 escape of James Earl Ray, convicted of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and one of the nations largest manhunts that brings him back behind the walls of Brushy.
Foreword – Biographical sketch of Stonney Lane
I was born in Williamsburg, Kentucky, October 13, 1937, the second son of Dorothy Schultz and Claude Lane. My brother Harold was five years older than I, and my sister, Claudia, was born when I was 11. My mother adopted a daughter, Kitty, who was a few years older than Harold. My father owned a garage in Williamsburg, and was widely known for his mechanical ability. He was also, unfortunately, an alcoholic. My parents divorced when I was 13, and I went with my mother and sister to live in Knoxville, Tennessee.
I was enrolled at Christenberry Junior High, where as the new boy in town, life was pretty tough for me. My mother had married Paul Ross, and they had a coal mining business. I was involved in the usual teenage pranks and scrapes, had a few near brushes with the law, a few automobile accidents. It was the 1950’s when drag racing, duck tail hairdos, rock and roll music were the most exciting things around.
Late in my freshman year at Fulton High School, a physical education teacher noticed a curve in my spine. My mother took me to Bagwell Clinic where I was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that can cause crippling or hunch-back. I entered St. Mary’s Hospital and had spinal-fusion surgery (a sheep’s bone was placed beside my spine to stop any further curvature, which was cutting-edge medical procedure for the time). Several months in the hospital and half a year out of school (homebound teachers) changed my life radically.
My experience as an invalid and trying to deal with my parents’ divorced gave me my first hand lessons in surviving. The divorce was traumatic enough, but the spinal problem really presented me with a challenge.
Home from the hospital, I was flat on my back, in traction with weights on my head and on my feet for over three months. I had to depend on someone for everything. I had to be fed, dressed, bathed, and tended for 24 hours a day. My bodily wastes had to be dealt with in a most non-private way. My family was severely taxed by my condition, and after three-months of constant care giving, I guess they had enough.
One morning I awoke with a pressing need to use the urinal. The container by my bed was full. I had not seen anyone since the evening before. I lay there in total misery for what seemed forever. I finally unhooked the weights from the traction and crawled, half scooted, dragging my body down the hallway. Sweating and in quite a bit of pain from the effort, it was with great satisfaction that I relieved myself. That day I decided it was time for me to learn to walk again, to take care of myself again, and never to be dependent on others for anything.
The doctors fitted me with a body brace, and it wasn’t long until I was moving about pretty good. That experience taught me to be an independent young man. I developed the "attitude" of a rebellious teenager.
My mother eventually became totally frustrated with me. I think she needed to get on with her new life, and I was not helping matters at all for her. I had little in common with my new stepfather.
My mother was convinced that I would wind up inside some Juvenile Delinquent Institution or worse. She felt that I was completely out of her control, so she found a boarding school for me in the remote mountains of Kentucky.
Oneida Institute is a Baptist school, grades K-12, especially for troubled kids from broken homes. I really felt as if I had been dumped at the ends of the earth, abandoned by all those I loved. But the experiences I had there again made some lasting changes in my life.
I made some worth-while friendships there, threw away by back brace, played varsity basketball, was voted Mr. Popularity my senior year, and achieved successes that would not have been possible had I stayed in Knoxville. I have often said that if it were not for the influence of Oneida I probably would have ended up building time in a penitentiary instead of working in one. My mother had made the right decision for me.
My mother and step-father went into the strip mining business in Scott, Morgan, and Campbell counties during my high school years. Strip mining was a method of extracting coal by removing the surface of the earth covering the seam, auguring into the mountainside to bring out the black gold that was hidden there. Stripping employed fewer men than the traditional deep mining, and could also recover coal that deep mining had to leave behind. It required expensive heavy equipment, earth moving machines, augers, conveyors, etc. The coal was not as high in quality as the deep mined variety had been, but TVA’s demand for coal for its steam fired electric generating plants made it very profitable for those lucky enough to get the contracts.
There was an incident the second summer of my strip mining experience that emphasized my distaste for the job. I lost a set of keys that belonged to my stepfather. They unlocked everything on the job, including the gate that had to be opened before the employees arrived each morning to go to work. Paul’s verbal assault on me concerning this matter was all the excuse I needed to tell him where to go. I left home.
I had a great Aunt living in Carthage, Indiana. I knew she would take me in. I hitchhiked to Carthage where Aunt Roxey welcomed me. I stayed there a couple of months. I really loved the people there, but I knew that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life doing yard work and waiting for my turn to get hired at the local paper mill. Fall was fast approaching, and it was decision time for me.
I had saved money enough to buy a bus ticket to Williamsburg, Kentucky. I planned to hitchhike on into Tennessee from there. On the trip into Williamsburg I had time to make a few tentative plans. Williamsburg boasted a small junior college and I intended to check into the possibility of enrolling.
Dr. James Boswell was President of Cumberland College at that time. I went to his home, which was located on the campus of the small school. He was most cordial, and invited me into his den to discuss the chances of my attending classes at Cumberland. I told him, truthfully, that I had no money. I had only a desire to further my education. Dr. Boswell was a wonderful man. He told me to be there the next week to enroll. He would see that the finances were taken care of. If I was willing to work, he was willing to help me. With Dr. Boswell’s help I completed two years of college at Cumberland.
Working for my mother in the summers also helped me secure funding for my college classes. It also provided me with an opportunity to make several friends in Scott and Morgan County. I worked alongside the local men, doing whatever jobs were required, and I had earned their respect. I tasted and breathed the coal dust they had endured for years. I also drank with them, out of the same fruit jar, the gut-wrenching, throat-burning "white lightning" that these Tennessee hills were famous for.
During the second summer in the mines, I began to look around for something else to do. I had two years of college and a deep desire to do something better than coal mining. A lot of my buddies had joined the military, and I had decided that the Air Force would be an exciting and challenging opportunity for me. Besides, I wanted to upstage my brother, who had been in the Army. I thought flying would beat the hell out of foot soldiering any day of the week. Of course, I could not begin to pass the physical, even though I was working at a much more demanding job than flying a plane would be. But, with typical Government logic, the Air Force turned me down. (They did tell me that if we had an extreme national emergency they would probably take me.) "Yeah, sure," I thought.
That fall bad weather set in and strip mining came to a complete halt. I was not enrolled in college anymore, and suddenly I was among the unemployed. What should I do next, I wondered?
I had become acquainted with Reuben Phillips who owned and operated a grocery store on New River. He was also a relative of a member of Anderson County Board of Education. Reuben told me they needed a teacher for the fifth grade at Rosedale Elementary School.
I could obtain a temporary teaching certificate, based on my two years at Cumberland College. I had never thought about teaching, but the idea appealed to me. It had to be easier than driving a coal truck or mining. Reuben recommended me for the job, and I was hired.
I guess I could write a whole book on the experiences I had during that year – I know I learned a whole lot more than my students. I also found that I loved the challenge that the classroom presented. I was privileged to coach the girl’s basketball team. The school had no gym so we practiced on an outdoor asphalt court. All our games were played "on the road," at our competitor schools. I boarded with a local family and really became a part of the community. I had found my calling in life.
At the end of the school year, again I was unemployed. Teachers were not paid during summer vacations, so I went back to work for my mother in order to have an income.
That summer I really made up my mind that teaching would be my career. So, in September 1958, I went to Knoxville to enroll in the University of Tennessee to finish my degree. My brother was a junior there, attending on the GI bill. I had to scrape together the money from teaching and truck driving to pay my tuition.
Registration day I was completely lost. I wandered around on that huge campus, stood in endless lines (no such thing as computerized enrollment in those days), and accomplished nothing. By late afternoon I was thoroughly disgusted and discouraged. I had been shifted from one end of the place to the other trying to find my assigned student advisor, without whose signature I could not be enrolled in any classes. "The hell with his place," I muttered as I stalked down the hill from the Administration Building. "They can have it. I’m going home!"
As luck would have it, I ran into my brother Harold about half way down the hill. He was an old hand at the registration game, knew all the ropes, and had the patience to calm me down and walk me through the process. He located a student advisor in the physical education department who was willing to take me on. (My assigned advisor was evidently a non-person). By the end of the day, I was fully enrolled at the great old school where my blood has been turned to Orange forever after.
I can’t say I really enjoyed classes at UT, though I loved the excitement of Neyland Stadium on Saturdays when the football team went into action. Unfortunately, UT did not have a championship team that year, like they did in 1998. As a matter of fact, I was one of those who witnessed the humiliating defeat of the Volunteers by their small sister school, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga! The riot that ensued was great fun.
I made some good friends at the Quarterback, a bar and pizza place on Cumberland Avenue. Faculty and students hung out there every evening. My brother became very concerned that I spent too much time there. But I did manage to keep at least a 2-point (C) grade average.
I still worked for my mother and Paul during time between quarters at school. The summer of 1959 was a troubled time for them as well as for a lot of other coal operators in the mountains of East Tennessee. The Unions representing coal miners had begun efforts to organize the men who were now working in the strip pits. Their tactics were violent; several mines were victims of dynamite explosions of equipment, physical assaults of operators, sniper attacks.
One day the car which my mother was driving was struck by 4 or 5 rifle rounds in an effort to scare her and Paul off the job or to force them to hire United Mine Workers labor. We belonged to the Southern Labor Union, but the UMW did not accept the validity of that organization.
Driving a coal truck that summer was very similar to being in combat situations in a war. We drove with a partner literally riding shotgun when possible, spent nights sleeping on or near the mining equipment to guard against attack, growing ever more suspicious of any stranger who might appear on the roads in or around the strip pits. We set booby-traps at the entrances to the job and kept lookouts posted 24 hours a day. Fortunately, the dispute was finally settled. I had survived my combat training and was ready to return to the more civilized world of the UT campus.
I struggled with my classes. English grammar was never one of my strong points. One requirement for graduation was passing a Junior English Exam. Each professor I had praised the content of my written work, but would strongly recommend that I attend a remedial writing lab to prepare me for this exam. The test consisted of writing three coherent 500-word themes with almost no grammatical errors, especially on that was called "the comma-splice." One comma splice caused an otherwise well-written paper to be marked "F." The theme topics were assigned and were written in a professor-monitored classroom.
Well, to make a long story short, I discovered that I could not even copy over a theme written by some one else without making a comma splice. Those little buggers just managed to escape my notice every time. Graduation was looming closer and closer, but that English Exam threatened to prevent me from getting a diploma.
Finally, I met a girl named Billie Shipwash who was a whiz at English. Feeling only a little dishonest, we would amble casually by the writing lab classroom to not the topic of the day’s theme. Billie would then carefully do the assignment. I finally was able to copy three of her themes carefully enough to pass that hated Egnlish exam and meet the requirements to get my degree.
Billie and I were married in the summer of 1960. She has served as teacher and editor for me countless times in my life, and is now helping with this manuscript, even though our marriage ended in 1990.
In the fall of 1960, with a college degree in education and new wife, I was ready to go to work in the real world, fully qualified for a career in teaching. Jobs were really hard to find. Billie’s family had roots going back six generations in Morgan County, Tennessee. Billie’s aunt was a teacher there, and she knew of an opening in Coalfield School. Late that summer I was hired on, and reported for duty as a civics and history teacher. I also coached the basketball team, due to my successful experience at Rosedale.
Looking back from this perspective, almost 40 years later, it might seem that fate led me Morgan County, and that all my experiences up to that time prepared me for the career I had later in corrections.
I spent four years teaching at Coalfield. I had some great times and met some really good people who are still my friends.
I still had some growing up to do, though. My temper and sense of justice caused me to have a conflict with the school administration, and suddenly I found myself without a job, two small children to supports, and no prospects of any kind. This was in 1965.
Again, Billie’s aunt, Bernice Langley ("Miss Tiny," as she is known throughout the county) the same one who steered me toward the Coalfield job, had heard that Brushy Mountain Prison was looking for a teacher to begin a rehabilitation program for illiterate inmates. She urged me to apply.
The story of my career in corrections begins there.
Stonney Ray Lane
2000
On April 4, 1968 I was leaving Brushy Mountain Penitentiary after a full day of teaching and counseling at the medium security institution. I went through the main gate at 7:25 p.m. I remember the time well. Officer Jimmy Newberry, the regular gate officer on the second shift, commented on the fact that I had worked well past my usual quitting time of 4:30.
It was a normal work day for me except for the extra time I had put into planning for my classes the next day. After teaching adult education classes to about thirty inmates that day, I was tired. We were having visitors the next day, so I had put in a little extra planning for tomorrow’s classes.
"Good night," I said to Officer Newberry. "Have a good shift." I drove my car past the prison gate toward Highway 116. I was looking forward to getting home and stretching out. I tuned my car radio to WIVK, a country music station in Knoxville. Soon there was a news bulletin:
"Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, today. King was gunned down as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he was trying to mediate a garbage workers’ strike. He was shot from ambush by an unknown assassin. Witnesses saw a man running from a rooming house just moments after the shooting. An all points bulletin has been issued for a suspect driving a White Ford Mustang," the news bulletin went on.
What a horrible tragedy, I thought. I hurried home to catch whatever TV coverage the networks might have. Damn, I thought, President Kennedy and now this. Would this nightmare never end? All the networks were covering the event. I sat in stunned silence as I listened to all the rhetoric concerning the assassination.
I returned to my usual routine while the King assassination drama played for several weeks. I was the dominant conversation at most of our coffee breaks at the prison. I don’t remember at any time discussing the fact that the crime took place in Tennessee. We were geographically so far from Memphis (about 450 miles) that it just didn’t register that we could possibly someday house the assassin in our institution.
Two months went by before it was reported that a man by the name of James Earl Ray, an escaped convict from the Missouri Prison System, was arrested for the assassination of Dr. King. He was taken into custody at London’s Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968. It was reported that he put his head in his hands and wept when authorities confronted him.
James Earl Ray was identified by the FBI as the primary suspect in the assassination of Dr. King. His fingerprints were on the rifle, scope, and a pair of binoculars.
In March, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty and was given a ninety-nine year sentence. Ray admitted buying a rifle similar to the murder weapon and renting a room at the Memphis flophouse where the shot was fired. But soon after being sentenced, Ray recanted his confession, saying that he had been given the gun by a man called "Raoul."
Ray’s confession cancelled the need for any trial, and the government ceased any investigative activity concerning the case at that time. It seems they had what they wanted. A confession was closure to the case.
Ray began seeking the trial he never had because of his guilty plea.
I wondered then, as I do now, just how many people were involved in the assassination plot. It didn’t seem possible that one man could bring down such a giant of a man like Dr. King without help.
I also had no idea at the time that this crime would have any effect on my life. Dr. King and James Earl Ray were something like storybook figures to me. Not in my wildest dreams did I think I could ever be involved with James Earl Ray.
I was an adult education teacher in a remote medium security institution in Petros Tennessee. There was no way I would ever be involved in such a drama. Was I ever wrong.
I first went to work at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary when it was a Medium Security Institution in 1965. Warden Lake Russell needed someone with a background in teaching, and as he said it best, someone who was headstrong enough to initiate an educational program for illiterate inmates that were in his custody. Warden Russell wanted the inmates to work, but also saw a need for them to read and write as well. I had great respect for his ideas. His thoughts on the treatment of incarcerated inmates were considered quite radical by most penologists in Tennessee at the time.
Warden Russell was a former educator and coach. In that, we had a lot in common. I had quit my job as a teacher at Coalfield High School due to a misunderstanding with the Superintendent of Schools in Morgan County, Dr. Ross Wilson. Dr. Wilson had predicted that I wouldn’t work anywhere very long because of my stubbornness. The strange thing about the whole incident is that the one thing I admired about Dr. Wilson was his stubbornness. We just happened to see things from different perspectives.
Our final disagreement erupted when I was attending a conference at the University of Tennessee. Along with several other Morgan County teachers, I had been selected by Dr. Wilson to attend the workshop which was sponsored by the government as an experiment in Racial Understanding. It paid a stipend of $500 which I gladly accepted.
The University chose participants from that first class to attend a more intensive conference in the summer. The stipend for the summer was $1500. The University sponsors selected me to represent Morgan County. I was elated that I was getting this opportunity. I had spent most summer vacations from teaching (two months with a paycheck in those days) doing whatever jobs I could find. I painted houses, worked in hay fields, drove coal trucks – anything to support my family.
Dr. Wilson had a different idea about who should be selected to attend the summer session. He felt he should have the authority to choose the representative from Morgan County. In fact, he notified the University that he would make the appointment or Morgan County would not participate in the conference. The University allowed him to choose his representative. I was left out in the cold.
To say I didn’t appreciate this gesture by my boss was an understatement. I was sure I had been done in by local politics. I was never very good at playing games with politicians.
I turned in my resignation almost immediately and told Dr. Wilson what I thought of his decision. This incident proved to be the beginning of a long line of confrontations with politicians. "Stonney Lane is non-controllable," Dr. Wilson said about me. I always considered that statement a great compliment. I felt I was exercising my independence. In fact, this streak of stubborn independence had put me out of work.
Warden Lake F. Russell hired me as a teacher at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary. He felt he had found the right man for the job. When Russell called my former employer, Superintendent Wilson, to ask for a recommendation, he certainly got one. It was not good. The strongest point Wilson made was that I was not easily intimidated.
My reputation for being very independent and headstrong probably helped me land the job at Brushy. Warden Russell needed someone who could stick to the job and not be intimidated. I fit what he was looking for. He knew better than anyone what a job lay ahead for me. Turning a prison into some type of rehabilitation center was practically unheard of at that point in time.
Warden Russell harbored some reservations about hiring me. For the first and only time in my life I was asked to sign a loyalty oath before reporting to work. As Warden Russell explained it, he wanted to make sure I understood "who’s the boss." I thought it was amusing, but I signed the oath without any hesitation. When it came to being headstrong or being hungry, I didn’t have a problem making a decision. I needed a job.
After I signed the oath, I told Warden Russell that he had found someone who was not easily intimidated nor easily discouraged. I assured him I was the man for the job. He just smiled and said, "We’ll see."
This employment opportunity placed me in a unique position in the history of Brushy Mountain Penitentiary. I was the first person hired at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary to establish and operate any type of rehabilitation program in that prison.
Brushy Mountain Prison had been established in 1896. It had operated first as a convict lease prison. The state leased out the convicts to private coal mining operations in Anderson and Morgan Counties. This arrangement worked out well for the mine operators and helped the state defray the costs of feeding and housing the inmates. Digging coal with the aid of a pick and shovel was hard and dangerous work. Convict labor was cheaper than hiring free men for the job. Of course, this led to resentment and even violence of the part of the free miners who were displaced or not hired. Eventually, the local miners revolted. "The Coal Creek War" ended the convict lease program. (The history of the conflict is well documented in a book by Chris Cawood.)
