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

WHATEVER THE RADIO prankster intended, his hoax had only one beneficiary, and that was Eric S. Galt. The spectacular story of the car chase diverted attention to the wrong part of the city and in all likelihood helped buy Galt a precious fifteen minutes.

Having thrown down his bundle and peeled off in his Mustang--missing the first onrushing wave of police officers by as little as thirty seconds--he sped down Main Street past Huling Avenue, then headed off on one of the most far-flung and convoluted getaways in American history.

Galt's immediate goal was to exit the state as quickly as possible, which was an easy thing to do from downtown Memphis, since the city lay along the river at the alluvial convergence of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Galt could have sped west and taken the immense iron-truss bridge over the Mississippi River, which would have spilled him out into Arkansas in no more than three or four minutes. Instead, he headed southeast 408toward Mississippi on Highway 78--Lamar Avenue, the same route he'd come in on earlier that day from the New Rebel Motel.

By 6:10, when the first bulletin describing the make of his car squawked over police radios, Galt was on his way out of town. For a white-knuckled ten minutes, he found himself crawling in bumper-to-bumper traffic--a few slow miles of congestion caused by a road construction project. According to his memoirs, Galt turned on his car radio and scanned the AM stations for bulletins.

The traffic jam had cleared by 6:30, and he passed the New Rebel Motel, with its neon Confederate colonel flickering on the sign out front, lighting up the dusky highway. Minutes later, he crossed into rural Mississippi, aiming in the direction of Birmingham and Atlanta, his Mustang boring into the rust red hills under the mantle of darkness. Except on Summer Avenue, Memphis police did not erect roadblocks along the major thoroughfares leading out of the city. Galt had managed to keep just ahead of the ever-enlarging dragnet by the thin margin of a few minutes and a few miles.

As Galt cut across the Magnolia State, the bundle must have weighed on his mind, the nagging realization that he'd left a constellation of things behind at the crime scene that could lead to him. With growing alarm, he tried to recall just what, besides the weapon, was stuffed in that ungainly pile he'd dropped on the sidewalk.

But for now, Galt could savor his triumph. Through an exquisite confluence of timing, dumb luck, and the idiosyncrasies of geography, Eric Galt had slipped safely from the orbit of metropolitan Memphis and was now pushing with impunity deep into the Mississippi hill country.

There was something else, too. The broadcasters now broke in 409over the airwaves to announce a stunning piece of news: Martin Luther King Jr. was dead.

AT THE AIRPORT in Atlanta, Coretta King hurried down 410the long corridor, with Mayor Ivan Allen and Dora McDonald at her side. As they neared the gate for the Memphis flight, she heard her name called out over the airport's PA system.

Coretta was optimistic at first. "Someone is paging me," she said brightly. Then she was seized by a "strange, cold feeling," she later wrote, "for I knew it was the word from Memphis and that the word was bad."

When Mayor Allen took off to retrieve the page, Dora said, "Come on, we need a room where we can sit down," and led Coretta to the outer entrance of the ladies' room, where they waited a few awful minutes, holding hands. Then Mayor Allen returned, with a stricken expression on his face. Assuming a peculiar formality, he walked up to Coretta, looked her in the eyes, and said, "Mrs. King, I have been asked to tell you that Dr. King is dead."

The words hung in the air as passengers pressed toward their gates. Dora and the mayor tried to comfort Coretta. For a time they stood weeping together in a clutch. But the plane was about to leave. "Mrs. King," Mayor Allen said, taking her hand in his. "What do you want to do? Do you want to go on to Memphis?"

She shook her head. "I should get back home," she said, "and see about the children."

IN A FIFTH-FLOOR conference room at the U.S. Justice Department building in Washington, Attorney General Ramsey Clark received word of King's death just moments after it was announced in Memphis. Fearing that the nation was about to come apart at the seams, Clark viewed King's death as "a tragic setback 411and stunning on a personal level."

The attorney general instantly knew that the FBI would have to take over the case--although murder, even the murder of a nationally prominent citizen, was not a federal crime. But the assassination of Martin Luther King was too momentous to leave to the Memphis Police Department. Clark also realized there was a strong likelihood that King's assailant had already crossed state lines, thus making this a multi-jurisdictional case.

Clark assigned a phalanx of Justice Department lawyers the task of finding workable legal grounds for the FBI's immediately taking on the case. They hastily zeroed in on Title 18, section 241 of the U.S. Code, which "prohibits conspiracies to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of the United States."

Attorney General Clark next put in a call to Cartha DeLoach, the assistant director of the FBI, who had just arrived at home. "I think the bureau 412should investigate," he told DeLoach, briefly outlining the "conspiracies to injure" clause Justice planned to invoke. No expense should be spared, Clark insisted. "Get as many facts as you can. I'll call the White House."

Clark's unspoken implication was that DeLoach should call Hoover, since Clark's relationship with the FBI director was so bad that the two were hardly on speaking terms. DeLoach took the cue and got Hoover on his private line. He recalled the conversation years later in his memoir.

"Some idiot shot Martin Luther King," DeLoach said.

The director had heard all about the assassination, of course, and wouldn't let DeLoach get a word in edgewise. "Do not accept responsibility for this investigation," Hoover demanded in his machine-gun sputter. "This is a local matter. Offer Memphis whatever help they need--ballistics, fingerprints, criminal records. But this case falls under the jurisdiction of city and state police."

Eventually, DeLoach was able to interrupt the Old Man's tirade long enough to say that he'd already heard from the attorney general. "Clark says he wants us to take over the case."

After a long pause, Hoover heaved a sigh. "Well he would," he said in exasperation. Hoover must have shuddered at the thought that his bureau was now charged with the responsibility of solving the murder of a man he detested, a man he and his COINTELPRO agents had so determinedly tried to smear, sabotage, and "neutralize."

DeLoach explained that Justice had already ginned up some sort of legal rationale. DeLoach said he thought Clark's decision was sound. Even though King was a private citizen, how odd it would seem, to the country and to the world, for the FBI not to take charge of the most prominent national murder case since the JFK assassination. It was, he said, "a crime of immense importance 413to the nation" and one characterized by great "external pressures."

"OK, go ahead," Hoover curtly said, recognizing the futility of his argument. "But I want you to take charge. Don't let Clark turn this into a political circus. You make it clear this is the FBI's case."