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

TWO DAYS LATER, Eric Galt rolled into Atlanta, and though he knew nothing about the city, he soon found his kind of neighborhood--which is to say, slatternly, sour smelling, and cheap. No matter where he was in the world, his radar for sleaze remained remarkably acute. It was March 24, a Sunday. He located a rooming house 220at 113 Fourteenth Street Northeast, just off Peachtree Street near Piedmont Park in midtown. It was a somewhat disheveled part of Atlanta that had lately been turning into a hippie district--or at least what passed for one in this starched-collar, business-oriented, Baptist-conservative boomtown, which a few years earlier had adopted the boosterish slogan "The City Too Busy to Hate." Home of Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, among other large national companies, Atlanta had become the proud epitome of the New South; it was a city of unapologetic commercialism and an often ersatz sophistication, but also, in many quarters, a city of surprising racial tolerance--so much so that one prominent Southern essayist, John Shelton Reed, would remark: "Every time I look at Atlanta, 221I see what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent."

Galt's new neighborhood in midtown cut against the city's conventional grain, however; it was a shaggy precinct of head shops and pawnshops, street buskers and panhandlers, co-op houses and record stores, with the first strains of what would become known as Southern rock seeping from the late-night bars along Peachtree. Not that Galt was interested in any of this; he couldn't stand "longhairs," as he called hippies, or their music--and he especially detested their protest politics, one of the constant subjects of George Wallace's ridicule. Except for illicit drugs, which Galt both sold and used, the ways of the counterculture were foreign to him--and antithetical to everything Wallace preached.

Still, Galt felt at home in this part of town, with its familiar undertow of petty criminality. It was a neighborhood, Galt wrote, where he "wouldn't have to answer 222too many questions." He might have looked like a square with his alligator loafers and his nicely laundered dark suit, but he was a canny hustler who knew how to live on these streets. Here, he could beg, borrow, or steal what he needed, watch his pennies, and lie low as long as circumstances required.

He eased the Mustang into the gravel parking area and walked through the weedy lot to the rooming house, where vines of brown ivy clung lifelessly to the cheap asbestos siding. For a buck fifty a night, he rented a forlorn little room with a marshmallowy bed, a stained washbasin, and a tiny dresser marred with dents and scratches. The room, number 2, was on the first floor, its windows slatted with metal venetian blinds.

Galt coughed up enough money for a week's rent--a grand total of $10.50. He hauled in his portable Zenith, his transistor radio, and his clothes--as always, tidy and clean--and set up housekeeping among the filth.

The manager of the place, a wino from Mississippi named Jimmie Garner, was in the midst of a prolonged drunk. Because so many of his previous tenants had been scruffy squatters--"this place was just infested with hippies," 223Garner later admitted--the landlord was duly impressed by the clean-cut Galt. He thought the well-dressed new roomer looked "like a preacher" 224--adding that "there was nothing whatever about this man that was unusual." He was quiet and mannerly and didn't cause any trouble. Garner did notice that the guest was always alone, and not at all forthcoming about his circumstances.

"What do you do for a living?" Garner asked him one day.

"Jack of all trades--done some welding in the Carolinas," Galt replied with a curtness that conveyed an unwillingness to endure questioning. For the next four days, the guest came and went, sometimes on foot, sometimes in his Mustang. Mostly, though, he kept to his room, with the blinds drawn.

What was Galt doing in camera for those four days and nights? If he was following his usual routine, he was reading the newspaper, watching TV, listening to his transistor radio, and subsisting on saltine crackers, tinned meats, and powdered soups. He also bought a can of Carnation milk, a bottle of French salad dressing, and a bag of frozen lima beans. He had his self-help books, including his beloved Psycho-Cybernetics . He was settling in for a long haul, it seemed, and the figures he jotted on an envelope indicated that he was growing short on cash.

At some point he bought a detailed map of Atlanta and began studying it closely. He must have spent a considerable amount of time driving around town, checking specific locations that he circled on the map with a pencil. He was endeavoring to learn the lay of the land--or, as Galt later put it, "to bone up 225on Atlanta's street system."

One of his circles marked 226the location of his rooming house. Two others were more ominous. Pencil in hand, he circled addresses on Sunset Avenue and Auburn Avenue: the residence and the church, respectively, of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

15 "MARTIN LUTHER KING IS FINISHED"

ON THE MORNING of Thursday, March 28, King boarded a flight at Newark, bound for Memphis. He'd spent several exhausting days in the New York area, drumming up support for his Poor People's Campaign, still determined to wage his "War on Sleep." He tried to catnap on the plane, but he couldn't.

Perhaps he was worried about the Beale Street march, set to begin as soon as he touched down in Memphis. Or perhaps the unpleasantness of the previous night played in his head: After a fund-raiser at the apartment of Harry and Julie Belafonte, he'd ended up staying at the Manhattan home of Arthur and Marian Logan (she was a civil rights activist and a member of the SCLC board). There he'd fallen into an argument about the merits of the Poor People's Campaign that lasted for hours and turned sour. The Logans tried to convey their sincere doubts about his Washington project, but King would hear none of it. Downing glass after glass of sherry, he argued with his hosts until three in the morning. Marian Logan worried that he'd become unreasonable; he drank so much that he seemed to be "losing hold" of his faculties, 227she said. She'd never seen him so wound up before. She noticed that he gripped his glass with one hand and made a clenched fist with the other.

As his plane sped across the country, King was bleary-eyed, restive, and a bit hungover. He was traveling with an aide, Bernard Lee, a young bespectacled Howard University graduate who'd helped lead the sit-in movement in Alabama and was now a devoted SCLC staffer. Abernathy was already in Memphis and would meet King and Lee at the airport. The plan was for King to stay no more than a few hours in Memphis. He would fulfill his vow to march with the striking garbage workers--and then fly straightaway to Washington to continue raising funds and solidifying support for his Poor People's Army. The march would be a mere whistle-stop.

He worried about Memphis, but he knew that his old friend James Lawson was an ace at organizing these sorts of events, adept at training marshals and disciplining the marchers. A first-rate communicator and strategist, Lawson would take care of things. On King's visit to Memphis ten days earlier, the mood had seemed so right, so united and strong. The esprit de corps of the sanitation workers reminded King of the movement's early days, in Montgomery, Birmingham, and the March on Washington.

The plane touched down at around 10:30. King and Lee disembarked and met Abernathy at the gate. The flight was nearly an hour late, so Abernathy hurried them through the airport and out to the modern terminal to a waiting white Lincoln Continental that whisked them downtown. It was a humid spring day, and the sun was just beginning to burn through the morning haze. More than ten thousand people had been gathering in the hot side streets, waiting for King to arrive.