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

Over a police radio, an officer relayed this information to police headquarters: "We have information 371that the shot came from a brick building directly east--correction--directly west from the Lorraine." Now more policemen flooded into the courtyard, and so many radios were switched on that the police dispatcher at headquarters began to hear only a whining hum. "Cut off some of the radios at the Lorraine, cut them off!" the dispatcher demanded. "We're getting too much feedback."

The sheriff's deputy William DuFour, a vigorous man in his mid-thirties, trundled up the Lorraine balcony steps and tried to take control of the situation. "Where's he been hit?" 372he asked. People on the balcony were unsure how to take DuFour's arrival--at this moment, especially, they were deeply suspicious of any white man in a police uniform. In seeming response to DuFour's voice, the muscles of King's face faintly pulled and twitched, as though he were trying to rise from his shock to answer DuFour's question. "Dr. King, don't move!" shouted the deputy sheriff, cutting King off before he could further injure himself.

As DuFour tried to ascertain the severity of the wounds, James Bevel padded about the Lorraine courtyard, lost in a rambling soliloquy that veered from the senseless to the savant: "Murder! Murder! 373Doc said that wasn't the way. Yet you knew he'd never be old. You couldn't think of him as an old man. It ended as it had to end. It was written this way."

25 THE WEAPON IS NOT TO BE TOUCHED

GUY CANIPE, the owner of Canipe's Amusement Company, was sitting at his desk 374near the front of his shop, facing south, and listening to a selection of scratchy old 45s he'd punched into one of his jukeboxes for the two black customers in his store. An appraising man in his late fifties who wore a checked flannel shirt and spoke in a slow Texas drawl, Canipe liked any kind of music, his friends said, "so long as it made him money."

Surrounded by the carcasses of broken-down nickelodeons and pinball machines, he was sucking on a wad of tobacco and sifting through paperwork when he heard a thud in the enclave at the front of his store. Ordinarily, the noise wouldn't have registered with him. This was the sort of neighborhood where derelicts were always tossing trash--and where all manner of flotsam ended up on doorsteps; a year earlier, in fact, someone had left a perfectly good television on his doormat. But this time Canipe sensed something. He stood up, stepped over to the threshold, and beheld a curious bulge in his entryway, wrapped in a cloth that looked to him like a curtain.

Canipe looked up and spied a man heading south down Main Street. The stranger walked swiftly but did not break into a full run. Canipe could only see his back, but could tell he was a white man of medium build, neat in appearance, bareheaded, around thirty years old, and wearing a dark suit. He was, as Canipe put it, "not like the kind of people you see down here." By this time, the two black customers in Canipe's store, Julius Graham and Bernell Finley, had come forward, and they, too, got a look at the mysterious man.

He slipped behind the wheel of a white late-model Mustang about four or five spaces south of the shop, parked next to a large liquor billboard that said, VERY OLD BARTON, a popular brand of bourbon. The man cranked the motor and peeled off into the street heading north, passing right in front of the shop. Finley thought the Mustang made a "screeching" sound and then sped off, "like it was going to a fire--laying rubber down the street." As far as Canipe, Graham, and Finley could tell, the driver was the only person in the vehicle, but the Mustang was going too fast for any of them to take down a license plate number.

Now Canipe inspected the bundle at his doorstep. At one end, a black pasteboard box peeked from the fabric. Canipe, who was an avid hunter, could see the word "Browning" printed on the box and imagined for a second that someone had presented him with a generous lagniappe--a brand-new shotgun. The barrel glinted steel blue from the box. It was pointing at him.

Finley and Graham, curious, moved toward the door, but Canipe blocked their exit. He could see a policeman racing down South Main, his pistol drawn as he approached the bundle. "Get back," Canipe told his two customers. "There's some kind of trouble out here and I don't want no part of it."

The officer, Lieutenant Judson Ghormley of the Shelby County Sheriff's Department, had missed Galt and the squealing Mustang by no more than a minute. The forty-year-old Ghormley, who wore a khaki shirt and green uniform trousers, thought the little amusement shop was closed for the night and seemed surprised when Canipe cracked the door and poked his head out.

"You see who put this down?" Ghormley asked Canipe.

The shop owner told Ghormley he'd just missed the guy, and offered his description, with Finley and Graham chiming in. Finley could only say he was "medium height, medium weight, medium complexion" and that he wore a "dark suit--what color, I couldn't say." Graham was sure of one thing: the man had driven off in a Mustang, a white late-model Mustang.

Soon Ghormley got on his walkie-talkie and conveyed the information to police headquarters. "I have the weapon in front of 424 Main, and the subject ran south on Main Street!" he squawked excitedly.

The dispatcher shot back over the scratchy airwaves: "You are not to touch the weapon! 375 Repeat --the weapon is not to be touched! You are advised to seal the area off completely. Any physical description on the subject?"

Ghormley radioed back over his walkie-talkie: "All we know is, he's a young white male, well dressed, dark colored suit."

Within minutes, the police dispatcher broadcast the very first description of the shooter and the probable getaway car: "Suspect described as young white male, 376well dressed, believed in late-model white Mustang, going north on Main from scene of shooting."

It was 6:10.

INSIDE THE ROOMING house, Charlie Stephens dashed back to his room 377and peered out the window. Across the way, the courtyard of the Lorraine Motel was pure chaos. On Mulberry Street, policemen scurried this way and that, and a line of officers advanced on the rooming house and formed a cordon.

From down below, in the brambled rear lot of the rooming house, a helmeted policeman gave Stephens a start. "Hey!" the cop yelled. "Get back from that window!"

Although Stephens had heard the gun go off in the bathroom, he had no idea what was really going on--he didn't even know Martin Luther King had been staying at the Lorraine.

The policeman eyed Stephens suspiciously. "Stay in your room," he commanded. "No one is allowed to leave the building!"

"But what is it?" Stephens yelled back. "What's happening?"

The look of pure befuddlement on Stephens's booze-reddened face must have convinced the cop that this man could not be judged a serious suspect. "It's Martin Luther King," the policeman said. "He's been shot."

AT THAT MOMENT, the sound of an approaching siren punctured the night. Fire department ambulance 401--a long-finned modified red Cadillac that looked rather like a hearse--screeched around the corner and pulled into the Lorraine courtyard. Emergency technicians hopped out and removed a stretcher from the rear doors of the ambulance. They hauled it up to the balcony and, with Abernathy and the others helping, managed to slide King onto the soft white bedding. The gurney stays were cinched in place, and firemen administered oxygen to King from a portable tank. Then a group of about six men, including Andy Young and the sheriff's deputy William DuFour, guided King's stretcher down the steps, negotiating the sharp turn of the staircase.