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

If King did survive, he would be paralyzed from the neck down and would probably live in a vegetative state. There was very little Dr. Gioia could do, very little anyone could do at this point. By most medical definitions, King was already brain-dead. The organs were alive, and the lungs drew breath thanks to the respirator, but King's vital systems had ceased to function as an organic whole.

Yet his heart kept beating.

EVER SINCE THE first dispatcher alerts around 6:10 p.m., the Memphis police had been on the lookout for a late-model Mustang driven by a well-dressed white man possibly answering to the name John Willard. Cruisers were placed at nearly every major thoroughfare leading from the city, and all across Memphis policemen pulled over every Mustang they saw. This was no mean task, as the wildly popular Mustang was one of the most common cars on the road. A quick check with area Ford dealers would reveal that some four hundred light-colored Mustangs had been sold over the past three years in Memphis and Shelby County.

Still, several promising leads soon developed. At 6:26, a sheriff's department dispatcher broadcast an alert, based on information of uncertain origin, that put the assailant's Mustang heading north and east out of the city: "Subject now believed north of Thomas from Parkway, dark hair, dark suit."

Ten minutes later, a police lieutenant named Rufus Bradshaw, 389driving car 160, was flagged down by an agitated young man named Bill Austein at the corner of Jackson and Hollywood in north Memphis. The twenty-two-year-old Austein, who drove a white and red Chevrolet Chevelle and worked for a heating and air-conditioning company, was a licensed citizens-band radio enthusiast (FCC call letters KOM-8637). Lieutenant Bradshaw described him as "looking like the deacon of a church." Austein said he was just now receiving an extraordinary transmission over the CB radio in his Chevelle--a transmission on Channel 17, one of the lesser-used frequencies, that urgently concerned the shooting of Martin Luther King.

His curiosity piqued, Bradshaw pulled his cruiser alongside Austein's car in the parking lot of a Loeb's Laundry and listened with fascination to the chatter on his radio. For the next twelve minutes Bradshaw heard a live narration purportedly being transmitted from a blue 1966 Pontiac hardtop barreling toward the northeastern precincts of the city--a Pontiac that was in hot pursuit of a fast-fleeing white Mustang. The broadcaster claimed the man he was following was "the man who had shot King."

As he attempted to decipher this unfolding story, Bradshaw got on his own radio and excitedly relayed to the central police dispatcher what he was hearing. The headquarters dispatcher, who could not directly raise the CB signal himself, listened to Bradshaw and, in spurts and fragments, broadcast an often garbled version of his narration. "White male, east on Summer from Highland, in white Mustang, responsible for shooting," the dispatcher began. The minutes slipped by, and the chase escalated from seventy-five miles per hour, to eighty, ninety, ninety-five, as the Mustang and pursuing Pontiac hurtled east through rush-hour traffic and ran red lights by the dozen. The CB operator in the Pontiac, who spoke with brisk officiousness in a cracking adolescent voice, said he had two companions in the car.

Several times the transmission faltered due to atmospheric conditions, distorting the voice to the point of incoherence, but then the signal would regain its clarity. The chase progressed to the city's far eastern outskirts, then into the suburbs of Raleigh and on toward the naval air base at Millington. As night fell over Memphis, Martin Luther King's assailant appeared to be making for the honeysuckled hill country of rural Tennessee.

Austein kept breaking in and requesting the name or call number of the CB operator in the Pontiac, but the man refused to answer. All he would volunteer was the make and year of his vehicle. On the strength of the gripping transmissions relayed by Bradshaw, police dispatchers diverted cruisers to northeast Memphis in the hope of intercepting the speeding vehicles. Roadblocks were erected, highway patrolmen alerted. As Fire and Police Director Frank Holloman and his staff listened to this white-knuckled narrative, a palpable excitement began to run through headquarters, a gathering hunch that they might be zeroing in on the mysterious John Willard. Other people listening in over the airwaves got caught up in the chase. At one point some other CB operator, obviously not a fan of the civil rights movement, broke in over the static and stated, "Let him go, as this may be the subject that shot Martin Luther King."

At 6:47, as the cars headed out Austin Peay Highway, the chase seemed to turn from dangerous to potentially lethal: the witness in the blue Pontiac suddenly screamed over his CB, "He's shooting at me! He's hit my windshield!"

Squawked Bradshaw: "The white Mustang is firing at the blue Pontiac! The white Mustang is firing at the blue Pontiac!"

Austein broke in and asked the CB operator in the Pontiac if he could make out the license plate number on the Mustang, but the driver said he was leery of getting that close--he feared the shooter in the Mustang might open fire again.

Then, at 6:48, Austein's CB receiver fell silent, the staticky reports mysteriously terminated, and Holloman's hottest lead went ice-cold.

THE SCENE OUTSIDE St. Joseph's Hospital was one of deepening chaos and confusion. People shouted and cursed, they cried and prayed, they stood quietly at the edge of the parking lot and held vigil by candlelight. Helmeted policemen stood at attention, wearing riot gear, loaded shotguns at the ready. Weird rumors hatched, intensified, and rippled through the milling crowds. The assassin had been caught and killed on the Mississippi River bridge, it was said. President Johnson was on his way to Memphis on Air Force One. Ralph Abernathy had been shot, too, and was dying alongside King. One of the more far-fetched and optimistic pieces of gossip had it that King had walked into the ER under his own power while holding a towel over his face, that the bullet had only grazed his jaw, and that he would be meeting with the press momentarily to assure the world he was safe.

By 6:30 the crowds outside grew so unruly that hospital officials, fearing a riot, requested more police to set up barricades. Only the closest of King's staff--Young, Bevel, Chauncey Eskridge--were able to enter the facility. A resourceful reporter for the Commercial Appeal , realizing he was following one of the biggest stories of his career, suddenly complained of chest pains--"I think I'm having a heart attack!" he moaned--and gained admittance to the ER.

In the waiting room, Andy Young sat 390with his head in his hands, and an FBI agent paced the corridors. Eskridge leaned on the wall in the waiting room and said, "Why, why would anybody want to do this? I just don't understand it." Young found a phone booth down the hall and called Coretta, not knowing that Jackson had just reached her from the Lorraine. She was hurriedly packing, planning to hop on the next flight to Memphis. A television newscast droned somewhere in the background of the King home.

Young disabused her of the hopeful idea that King was merely shot in the shoulder. "The neck," 391Young corrected her. "It's very serious. But he's not dead, Coretta. He's not dead."

"I understand," Coretta said again--Young thought she sounded "almost serene." She was scheduled to depart Atlanta on the 8:25 flight, she told him.

"All right," Young replied. "We'll be looking for you at the airport. But, Coretta, bring someone with you."