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

Downstairs, Georgia Davis went back to her room, 201, the room she and King had shared the night before. King's whispered words rang in her ears: "Our time together is so short." "I touched the pillow, 457searching for some lingering contact, some connection with him. But all I felt were the cold, clean sheets." Suddenly she felt a consuming dread. "The vision of his body flashed through my mind," she later wrote. "I remembered all the preachers I had ever heard, describing the fiery furnaces." And she thought: I am descending into hell .

At one point, Abernathy emerged from room 306 holding the cardboard backing from a laundered shirt and began scraping King's congealed blood into a jar. As he did so, he wept, and said to those assembled on the balcony, "This is Martin's precious blood. 458This blood was shed for us." The Memphis photographer Ernest Withers took several shots 459of the blood--to his eyes, the puddle's shape bore a curious resemblance to King's silhouette. Using a small vial, Withers scooped up some of the blood for himself; he would keep it in his refrigerator for many years.

Jesse Jackson went a step further. Young recalled seeing Jackson leaning over and pressing his palms down flat in the pool of drying blood. Then he stood up, raised his crimson hands to the sky, and wiped them down the front of his shirt. 460Minutes later, Jackson, not bothering to change his stained shirt, left for the airport to catch the last flight to Chicago. "There's nothing that unusual 461about it," Young later said. "We Baptists, you know, we believe there's power in the blood--power that's transferable."

CORETTA KING RETURNED home from the Atlanta airport and began to deal with the avalanche of phone calls and telegrams while greeting the tearful well-wishers who streamed into her house. Within hours, a greenhouse's worth of flowers had materialized, and phone company workmen came to install a bank of three telephones to handle the swelling volume of calls.

A newspaper reporter described the newly widowed Mrs. King as "composed but dazed" 462as she moved through the rooms at 234 Sunset, brushing past the portrait of Mahatma Gandhi on the wall and the bouquet of fake carnations King had recently given her. Financially, she had serious concerns about how she was going to carry on--King had not written a will, 463had only a minimum life insurance policy, and left scarcely any savings, other than this cozy little brick home on the southwest side of Atlanta, not far from the slums. The house, together with two joint checking accounts he shared with Coretta, would be judged too small in value to probate.

Yet already Coretta seemed profoundly resigned to her husband's death. "I do think it's the will of God," she said. "We always knew this could happen." It was something she had been preparing for, and even publicly speaking about, for years. Three years earlier, in Seattle, she had told a crowd, "If something happens 464to my husband, the cause will continue. It may even be helped."

All his campaigns had been dangerous, she said, "but there was something a little different 465about Memphis. Martin didn't say directly to me that it's going to happen in Memphis, but I think he felt that time was running out." Coretta said her husband had long felt "a mystical identity with the meaning of Christ's Passion" and that it seemed appropriate that his death should come during the Easter season.

After President Johnson's call, the newly installed phones began to ring ceaselessly. The governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, called, offering a chartered plane for her use. The comedian Bill Cosby called, offering to come and entertain her kids. Senator Robert Kennedy called, offering another plane. Attorney General Clark conveyed his condolences and assured her that the FBI was on the case. Harry Belafonte, the calypso singer, phoned to say he'd be there the next day, "just to do any little menial thing 466--I want to share this sorrow with you."

Among the offerings from Western Union, a telegram arrived from the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, in Addis Ababa. "It is with profound grief," the Lion of Judah said, "that we have learned the shocking news of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King whose valiant struggles for the cause of human dignity shall long be remembered by all peace loving peoples."

Coretta slipped away from the commotion and went back to the kids' rooms to put them to bed. As she later recalled in her memoir, it was clear that Dexter didn't fully comprehend what had happened. "Mommy," he said, "when is Daddy coming home?" 467

"He was hurt very badly," Coretta answered, realizing she was unable at this late and frantic hour to face a conversation about death. "You go to sleep, and I'll tell you about it in the morning."

Then she spoke with Yolanda, her eldest child, with whom she'd been shopping all afternoon for an Easter dress. "Mommy, I'm not going to cry," Yoki said resolutely. "I'll see him again in heaven."

But something was bothering her, something clearly nagged at her young conscience. "Should I hate the man who killed my father?" she asked.

Coretta shook her head. "No, darling, 468your daddy wouldn't want you to do that."

WITHIN AN HOUR of King's death, authorities transported his body across town to the office of the chief medical examiner at John Gaston Hospital on Madison Avenue, where it was promptly taken to a pathology suite in the basement. The corpse was placed on a stainless steel table in a room with a sloping tile floor equipped with a drain. A set of implements lay gleaming beneath the bright lamps--chisels, vibrating saws, an array of scalpels and forceps. The body was covered with a sheet of thick, crinkly medical paper. From beneath the sheet, a tag marked "A-68-252" dangled from the subject's big toe.

The Shelby County medical examiner, the pathologist Dr. Jerry Francisco, 469emerged in a white lab coat. He was a tall, punctilious, soft-spoken man whose voice was tinged with the gentle twang of the hill country of western Tennessee. Although he was only in his mid-thirties, Dr. Francisco had already conducted many hundreds of autopsies; later in his career he would investigate the deaths of numerous Memphis-area celebrities--including that of Jerry Lee Lewis's fifth wife, Shawn Michelle, and, most famously, Elvis Presley.

By temperament and training, Dr. Francisco was a stickler for detail and loved to recite the arcane lore of his profession from the time of its Norman origins in medieval England. Dr. Francisco took relish in pointing out that in addition to dissecting the cadavers of important people who'd died under mysterious circumstances, the coroners of ancient London were required by law to serve as "the Keeper of the Royal Aquarium."

At around 9:00 p.m., Abernathy was summoned from the Lorraine and ushered into the lab to identify the body, in accordance with legal protocol. An attendant removed the sheet of medical paper, producing a harsh crackling sound. Gazing at the body on the sterile metal table, Abernathy thought his friend "somehow looked more dead" 470than he had seemed when he'd left him in the hospital just two hours earlier. "I stared for a moment," Abernathy wrote in his memoirs, "a mute witness to the final dehumanization of Martin Luther King, Jr., his transformation from person to thing. I knew in that moment that I could leave this body now, leave it forever."

Abernathy nodded and curtly told Dr. Francisco what he needed to hear. "This," he said, "is the body 471of Martin Luther King, Jr.," and he signed the requisite form.

Then Francisco asked Abernathy to reach Coretta King by phone to secure her permission to conduct the autopsy. Abernathy hesitated. He failed to understand why an autopsy was necessary; no one doubted for a moment what had killed his friend. "It seemed incredible to me," Abernathy later wrote, "that such a procedure could make any difference now." He hated to trouble Coretta with such a gruesome request and wanted to spare her the shock of yet another indignity.