Hampton Sides - Hellhound on His Trail - The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

For all his preening, Galt lacked confidence about his looks; he seemed an oddly skittish man, awkward around people and hard to pin in a conversation. He gave off the appearance of a hustler preoccupied with sub-rosa enterprises he did not wish to divulge. Most people took the cue and left him alone.

Those who did speak with him found him hard to understand, for he blurted out words in unrhythmic spates and monosyllables, mumbling softly, his lips cramped in an uncomfortable-looking construction, as though his mouth were full of sharp rocks. He spoke in a drawl that was hard to place; it was the drawl of rural Illinois, along the Mississippi River valley, where he had grown up during the Depression in a succession of impoverished towns. It was the drawl of St. Louis, the city he and his family had lived in and out of--the city that, in his drifter's way, Galt considered home.

Galt was willing to spend good money on certain prescribed things--like dance lessons and bartending school or his portable Zenith television--but at heart he was a cheapskate. He darned his own clothes, sewed buttons on his fraying shirts, drank horse-piss beer, lived in prideful squalor, rarely tipped in restaurants, and prowled drugstores for bargain-basement sales on toiletry items. If he dined out, he usually ordered greasy hamburgers at drive-ins, but more often he ate in his room, subsisting on crackers, canned food, and powdered soups that he warmed in a mug with an electric immersion heater. "He was tight as a tick," said one acquaintance; his expenses amounted to scarcely more than five dollars a day.

Galt was equally stingy with his words and thoughts. His emotional life was a mystery. He rarely gestured and almost never laughed. He liked to leave people guessing and once described his personal motto as "Never let the left hand know what the right is doing." He once said, in the manner of a boast, that he had not cried since he was twelve years old.

His sexual relationships were fleeting and superficial. Women, he had said, were to use and forget. He'd never married, and he'd never been in love--indeed, he hated the word "love." "I don't think that a man 109sits around talking about love and so on. It sounds sort of odd to me. Women--they'll break down and cry and all that stuff." As he had in Puerto Vallarta, Galt frequented hookers, and according to one acquaintance his preferred mode of pleasure was "to get his knob polished." 110His life seemed devoid of romance. "You can't trust anyone too far, especially the women type," Galt later wrote. "No woman has ever thought much of me--and anyways, marrying would have interfered with my travels."

Those who conversed with Galt often came away with the unsettling realization that he had revealed nothing of pinpointable substance--and that he rarely returned a gaze. An introduction to Eric Galt was an unsatisfying affair--his handshake was limp and unresponsive. Blinking rapidly, Galt would turn his head and look downward or sideways, so that even close up it was hard to appraise the man. Like a squid, he seemed to throw up clouds of obscuring ink, hoping to screen himself from scrutiny and keep others guessing who he was and where he stood.

Students at the National Dance Studio, where Galt took rumba and cha-cha lessons for several months, quickly noticed his mysterious reticence. The school, on Pacific Avenue in Long Beach, was a melancholy place where lonely hearts came to meet under the net of easy intimacy that close dancing threw over strangers. Galt, however, would not interact with the other students, and refused to join in the fun. He was grimly determined to learn his moves; he said he might soon relocate to a Hispanic country. "I find myself attracted 111to the Latins," he said. "They're easygoing. They're not too bothered by rules and regulations." But, he said, "it helps socially if you know a little something about the Latin dances." He did in fact memorize the steps, but he was stiff and ungraceful. He got the mechanics of the rumba, but none of its soul.

Galt was especially self-conscious around his female partners and would not allow himself to succumb to their harmless flirtations. He would just shiver bashfully in their arms and look down.

"He was shy," one instructor said. "One time I talked with him for an hour and tried to break him down. When the conversation got personal, he became quiet." Rod Arvidson, the manager of the National Dance Studio, concurred: "He was the withdrawn type, 112the type that often needs to learn to dance."

Nearly everything about Eric Galt seemed bland and retiring, the details of his appearance falling somewhere in the statistical middle: average height, average weight, average build, average age. The cumulative effect of all these milquetoast qualities made him strangely forgettable.

If one lingered and studied him awhile, though, certain attributes began to reveal themselves, like previously unnoticed images rising in the chemicals of a darkroom sink. There was the crooked grin on his face, which, though subtle, was a nearly permanent feature--a smirk that curled with irony and seemed to suggest he knew something he would never tell. There was the tiny dimple on his chin, the touch of gray in his sideburns, the thick cross-hatching of dark hair on his forearms, and a small scar in the center of his forehead. There was his lumbering, slough-footed gait, the stride of a much older man, punctuated by a faint limp. There, too, were the rabbity little tics: the way he constantly tugged on his left ear, the weak nervous giggle, the compulsive habit he had of shuttling his glass of vodka--back and forth, back and forth--on the lacquered wood of the bar.

And so most people who met Eric Starvo Galt, if they noticed him at all, came to regard him as an oddity: a null set of stewing ambition, wiry and watchful, seemingly paranoid--and emphatically alone.

FOR SOME TIME since his arrival in Los Angeles, Eric Galt had been paying visits to a clinical psychologist named Dr. Mark O. Freeman. Their first appointment was on the late afternoon of Monday, November 27, 1967, and Galt, sharply dressed as usual, walked into Freeman's Beverly Hills office at around five o'clock. Dr. Freeman wrote in his daybook that his new patient hoped to "overcome his shyness, 113gain social confidence, and learn self-hypnosis so he could relax, sleep and remember things better."

They began to talk, and Dr. Freeman got a sense of the man. Galt naively seemed to believe that hypnosis was a form of communication expressed directly eye to eye, through some mysterious medium of thought rays. "He had the old power idea 114of hypnotism," Freeman said. "He actually thought you could go around looking people in the eye and hypnotize them and make them do whatever you wanted them to do."

Galt placed great value on the touted health benefits of hypnosis--and especially hoped to learn how to put himself under. All told, he met with Dr. Freeman on six occasions, throughout the months of November and December 1967. Dr. Freeman later said that Galt "made a favorable impression" on him. The sessions were productive, he thought, and the two men got along well.

"He was a good pupil," 115Freeman said. "This fellow really wanted to improve his mind. He had a bent for reading. He didn't fight hypnosis. I'd show him how to go under, and pretty soon he'd be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him a lot of positive feelings of competence." While Freeman said that Galt confessed to no "deep dark secrets," he did note that in at least one of their sessions together, Galt disclosed a "deep antipathy to negroes."

Then, for reasons not known, Galt severed his relationship with Freeman, saying only that the psychologist "didn't know nothing about hypnosis." He canceled his last appointment with Freeman, telling him that his brother had found a job for him as a merchant seaman in New Orleans. Freeman never heard from Eric S. Galt again.