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

Then, gently, Father Bergard closed King's eyes. 402

IN ATLANTA, KING'S parents listened to the radio 403at Ebenezer Baptist Church. They knew their son had been shot and seriously wounded, but they still held out hope. Martin Luther King Sr. had a little radio set up near his desk in his upstairs study. As he prayed aloud, Alberta King cried in silence. She had grown up in Ebenezer and had been the church's organist since 1932; Ebenezer was her home, and her sanctuary, the best possible place for her to be in such a crisis. "Lord, let him live, let him live! " King senior moaned as the minutes drained away.

Then the somber bulletin came over the airwaves. King turned to his wife, but neither said a word. For years they had feared the coming of news like this--its possibility had lurked behind every late-night phone call, behind every startling noise. Daddy King recognized that in the face of concerted evil, his son had nowhere to hide. "No matter how much protection 404a person has, it will not be enough if the enemy is hatred," he would write. His son's fate, he realized, had been sealed years earlier. "To avoid it was impossible, even as avoiding the coming of darkness in the evening."

The Kings held each other in the study and tried to absorb the blow. Mrs. King recalled her conversation with both her sons earlier in the day, how from the motel room in Memphis they had teased her by each pretending to be the other. It had meant so much to her to hear from them, to know they were together and safe.

Daddy King removed his glasses, and the tears coursed down his cheeks, toward his gray-flecked mustache. "I always felt I would go first," he said over and over. He could only think of his son as a child, growing up, like his mother before him, in this very church, his young life revolving around Ebenezer. "My first son, 405whose birth had brought me such joy that I jumped up in the hall outside the room where he was born and touched the ceiling--the child, the scholar, the boy singing and smiling--all of it was gone. And Ebenezer was so quiet; all through the church, the tears flowed, but almost completely in silence."

A FEW MILES away, at the FBI headquarters in Atlanta, the news of King's death came flooding in over the radio. Reaction in the office hallways was mixed. Over the past decade, agents in the Atlanta field office had probably exhausted more man-hours on King--following and wiretapping and bugging and attempting to smear him--than they'd spent working on any other single subject. Code-named "Zorro," King was the office bogeyman, the subject with the most voluminous file, and the quarry of a thousand investigatory trails.

Two agents, 406who happened to be standing next to each other when the news came in, succinctly captured the office's divergent opinions on King. The first, Arthur Murtagh, allowed as how he thought King's death was a tragedy. "He was a credible person," he said. "He was doing what he could to help his people."

The agent standing next to him, James Rose, chastised Murtagh for his naivete, and the two colleagues became embroiled in a heated argument. Rose said King was a Commie, a charlatan, and a threat to the nation's security; he was trying to take over the country and give it to the Russians.

According to Murtagh, Rose exclaimed, "They got Zorro!" and nearly jumped up and down with joy. "Thank God, they finally got the S.O.B.!"

27 A FEW MINUTES AND A FEW MILES

AT POLICE HEADQUARTERS, Director Frank Holloman received word of King's death within seconds and alerted his highest-ranking officers to brace the entire force for the storm he expected would soon rage in the streets--looting, arson, possibly a full-scale race riot. Right now, though, his attention was focused on the incredible high-speed pursuit that had just taken place out on Summer Avenue.

Holloman had some of his best men analyze a recording of the broadcast. Several things about the episode began to seem glaringly strange. Not a single bystander or motorist anywhere along Summer called to report a car chase or gunshots. This was an amazing fact, for Summer was one of Memphis's busiest thoroughfares and the chase had taken place at rush hour, just after the first news bulletin of King's shooting was broadcast--a time, that is, when the city was on edge and primed for trouble.

As officers analyzed the tape and plotted times and locations on a map, they realized that the chase would have had to keep up an average speed of eighty miles per hour, nearly impossible on that traffic-snarled artery. Surely such a high-speed pursuit would have produced accidents, or near accidents, while creating a spectacle no motorist driving along Summer could forget.

Furthermore, sheriff's department officers in cruisers parked at several key intersections farther out Summer insisted that they never saw or heard anything unusual--no blue Pontiac, no white Mustang, no squealing tires or revving engines, no windshields shot out. It seemed to them like a phantom car chase.

Bill Austein, the CB enthusiast who had originally flagged down Officer Rufus Bradshaw, nursed doubts of his own. After the transmission fizzled off the airwaves, he and Bradshaw sat in the parking lot of Loeb's Laundry and sifted the extraordinary narrative they'd just heard. Austein realized that the broadcaster's voice sounded oddly calm and steady for a young man purportedly speeding at eighty miles an hour, swerving from lane to lane, with gunfire shattering his windshield.

It was also strange that the transmitter never identified himself, despite repeated urgings by Austein and other Memphis CB operators to do so. If the guy was willing to risk so much to catch a speeding car, and even put his life in danger, why wouldn't he say who he was?

Austein had additional questions about the signal itself. Throughout the broadcasts, he had repeatedly checked the little floating needle on his radio--the S-meter, it was called--and noticed that the signal strength never diminished, even though the pursuit was supposedly taking the Pontiac many miles to the northeast, well beyond the city limits, where the signal should have faded to nothing.

This was extremely fishy, Austein realized, for it meant that the broadcaster, whoever he was, had to have been stationary for much or all of the transmission--either parked in his car or radioing from a home base. The more he thought about it, the more Austein became convinced that the chase was "entirely a hoax," 407most likely perpetrated by a teenage CB enthusiast, just for yuks. The prankster had doubtless been listening to the police radio, where he picked up the first report that the getaway car was a white Mustang--and then let his imagination run wild.

Holloman's men soon reached more or less the same conclusion. Of course, the possibility remained that the CB radio enthusiast was not some random practical joker, but rather some nefarious individual who, as part of an elaborate plot, had manufactured a bogus car chase to throw the Memphis police off the killer's scent. Holloman briefly considered this possibility--it was well known in law-enforcement circles that many members of the United Klans of America communicated through citizens-band radios--but he had no time to speculate about that now. As a precaution, he would later have his detectives check every auto body and glass repair shop in Memphis to learn whether any blue Pontiac owners came in with a shattered windshield. For now, all Holloman could say with certainty was that for a few vital minutes, his police department had been had.