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

TO THE CORE of his angry soul, Eric Galt identified with Wallace's rants against big government, his championing of the workingman, his jeremiads on the spread of Communism. He even identified with the governor's Alabama roots--Galt had lived for a brief time in Birmingham in 1967, and his Mustang still bore Alabama plates, which sported the state nickname, HEART OF DIXIE.

What Galt found most appealing about Wallace, though, was the governor's stance as an unapologetic segregationist. Wallace's rhetoric powerfully articulated Galt's own smoldering prejudices. Although Galt was not politically sophisticated, he was a newspaper reader and something of a radio and television news junkie. His politics were composed of many inchoate gripes and grievances. On most topics he might best be described as a reactionary--he was, for example, drawn to the positions of the John Birch Society, to which he wrote letters, though never formally joined.

By late 1967, Galt had begun to gravitate toward stark positions on racial politics. He became intrigued by Ian Smith's white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. In Puerto Vallarta he had bought a copy of U.S. News & World Report in which he found an advertisement soliciting immigrants for Rhodesia. The idea appealed to him so much that on December 28, 1967, he wrote to the American-Southern Africa Council 141in Washington, D.C., to inquire about relocating to Salisbury.

"My reason for writing is that I am considering immigrating to Rhodesia," Galt said in his letter, noting that representatives from the John Birch Society had referred him to the council. "I would appreciate any information you could give me." Not only did Galt hope to gain citizenship in Rhodesia; he was such an ardent believer in the cause of white rule and racial apartheid that he planned, as he later put it, to "serve two or three years in one of them mercenary armies" in southern Africa. While living in Los Angeles, he wrote to the president of the California chapter of the Friends of Rhodesia 142--an organization dedicated to improving relations with the United States--raising still more questions about immigration and inquiring about how he might subscribe to a pro-Ian Smith journal titled Rhodesian Commentary .

Galt was apparently also an occasional reader of the Thunderbolt , 143a hate rag published out of Birmingham by the virulently segregationist National States Rights Party. Galt was enamored of the party chairman, a flamboyant, outrageous race baiter named Jesse Benjamin Stoner. Born at the foot of Tennessee's Lookout Mountain, a Klansman since his teens, J. B. Stoner believed, literally, that Anglo-Saxons were God's chosen people. Among his more memorable statements, Stoner called Hitler "too moderate," referred to blacks as "an extension of the ape family," and said that "being a Jew should be a crime punishable by death." Lyndon Johnson, Stoner said, "was the biggest nigger lover in the United States."

All of this wasn't just talk: J. B. Stoner was a lawyer who had successfully defended Klansmen and was suspected by the FBI of direct involvement in at least a dozen bombings of synagogues and black churches throughout the South (in fact, he would be convicted years later of conspiracy in a Birmingham church-bombing case). The chief of the Atlanta police said about Stoner in 1964: "Invariably the bastard 144is in the general area when a bomb goes off."

A confirmed bachelor who had a speech impediment and walked with a limp from childhood polio, Stoner was given to wearing polka-dot bow ties and displaying the banner of the National States Rights Party--a Nazi thunderbolt, adapted from Hitler's Waffen-SS, emblazoned on the Confederate battle flag. According to the historian Dan Carter, a distinct strain of homoerotic camp ran through the NSRP membership. At least one party stalwart, an archly effeminate organizer 145known as Captain X, wore jodhpurs and jackboots with stiletto heels; on at least one occasion in 1964 an undercover Birmingham Police Department detective observed Captain X sashaying about the party's headquarters, heavily made up in mascara and rouge--and smacking a riding crop.

The Thunderbolt , the National States Rights Party's monthly newsletter with a circulation of about forty thousand die-hard readers, railed with predictable regularity against King and called Wallace's presidential campaign "the last chance 146for the white voter." Among other things, the Thunderbolt called for the execution of Supreme Court justices and advocated the mass expulsion of all American blacks to Africa. Galt apparently loved reading Stoner's screeds in the Thunderbolt and repeated his trademark zingers: like Stoner, Galt took to calling King "Martin Luther Coon," and even pasted the racist sobriquet 147on the back of a console television he kept in his room in Los Angeles.

HAVING LONG MARINATED in this genre of hate literature, Galt's prejudices sometimes took on an edge of violence in Los Angeles. One night in December, Galt was having a drink at a dive called the Rabbit's Foot Club at 5623 Hollywood Boulevard, where girls danced in nightly floor shows. It was, according to one journalist who went there, "a murky, jukebox-riven hole in the wall 148for lonely people with modest means." A regular at the Rabbit's Foot for weeks, Galt usually drank alone, but lately he had been "preaching Wallace for President" to anyone who'd listen, according to the bartender James Morison. Another regular at the Rabbit's Foot remembered Galt as "a moody fellow from Alabama" 149who drank vodka and preferred the stool closest to the door. He told people he was a businessman, and that he'd just come back from Mexico after spending a few years running a bar down there. For added credibility, he'd toss out a few expressions in Spanish.

On this particular night in December, a young woman named Pat Goodsell 150--reportedly one of the floor-show dancers--was sitting next to Galt at the Rabbit's Foot bar, engaged in harmless conversation with several other regulars about the state of the world, when the subject turned to the Deep South after someone noticed the Alabama tags on Galt's Mustang outside. "I don't understand the way you treat Negroes," Pat Goodsell said to Galt. She only ribbed him at first, but when he dug in and tried to defend Wallace's home state, she pressed the matter. "Why don't you give them their rights?" she asked.

At this, Galt grew incensed, and the others in the bar could feel the tension rising. It was a side of this seeming wallflower they'd never seen before. He said to Goodsell, "What do you know about it--you ever been to Alabama?"

Suddenly Galt sprang from his stool, clutched Goodsell by the hand, and yanked her off her stool. It almost seemed as though he were spoiling for a fistfight.

Then he started berating her, his voice rising to a queer, high register. "Well," he shouted, "since you love coloreds so much, I'll just take you right on over to Watts and drop you off down there. We'll see how much you like it!"

When he stormed out of the Rabbit's Foot, two men followed him from the bar, one black and one white. Outside, they picked a fight--"they jumped me," Galt later put it--and wrested his suit coat and watch from him. "To get away from them," Galt said, "I picked up a brick and hit the nigger in the head."

Galt sprinted to his car with the intention of grabbing his Liberty Chief .38 revolver under the seat, but only then did he realize the real trouble he was in: the Mustang was locked and his keys were in his stolen coat, as was his wallet, which contained his Alabama driver's license and about sixty bucks. Although his apartment wasn't far away, he didn't dare head home, for fear that his two attackers would return and steal his car. So he spent the whole night crouching in the shadows of the Rabbit's Foot, holding vigil over the Mustang.