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

"How important is it?" he asked.

"Very ," Dr. Francisco assured him--in fact, it was required by law. He explained that for forensic purposes he needed to determine with greater specificity the angle of the bullet's path. Any future prosecution of King's assailant would legally require an autopsy to determine with absolute certainty that King had died as a direct result of the gunshot wound. A host of secondary questions might be answered, too: Could there have been a second bullet? Could the wound have been caused by a pistol, fired at close range? Could the doctors at St. Joseph's have done anything to save King's life? "It might tell us something 472we didn't know before," Dr. Francisco added, according to Abernathy. "Something that could save another person's life."

Reluctantly, Abernathy made the call to Mrs. King and then handed the phone to Dr. Francisco. She readily gave her consent, speaking in a voice that seemed to Dr. Francisco remarkably calm and composed.

After Abernathy left the autopsy suite, Dr. Francisco's first task was to remove the bullet from King's body. About 9:30 p.m., with three Memphis police officers serving as official witnesses, Dr. Francisco excavated the main fragment from an area just beneath the skin of King's left shoulder blade. He attached a tag to the lump of metal, labeling it "252." The police witnesses described the badly marred and distorted bullet as "giving the appearance 473of being a 30-06," but it had mushroomed almost beyond recognition. It had a copper jacket and a nose composed of soft lead, the police officers surmised, "as it was very flattened."

Dr. Francisco wrapped the deformed bullet in cotton and gave it to the police witnesses, who tagged it with a receipt and dropped it into a brown manila envelope. The three police witnesses then left the examining room to deliver the package to Inspector Zachary of the MPD's Homicide Bureau--who, in turn, would hand it over to Special Agent Jensen of the FBI.

Dr. Francisco prepared to go about his macabre work, feeling the weight of history upon him. He recalled that, after the assassination of President Kennedy, alleged irregularities associated with the autopsy became the subject of much speculation--and ultimately helped to hatch any number of conspiracy theories. "More than any case 474I'd ever been assigned to, I knew the work had to be without flaw," he later said. "I said to myself, 'Not a single mistake, Francisco.'" In a literal sense, history was watching him: photographers, working in both color and black and white, diligently captured every stage of the procedure on film.

The autopsy was unusual in another respect--the high level of security under which it was conducted. The Memphis authorities feared that plotters in a conspiracy, or a hostile mob, might try to sabotage Dr. Francisco's examination or even steal King's body. So while he worked, Memphis policemen, armed with shotguns, were stationed on both sides of the examining room door. Dr. Francisco later recalled, with characteristic understatement: "I felt very safe." 475

Now Dr. Francisco examined his subject, noting the various scars and bruises on King's body, the blood spatters, the needle marks from the emergency room. "This," he later wrote, "is a well developed, 476well nourished Negro male measuring 691/2 inches in length. The hair is black, the eyes are brown. There is a line mustache present."

Following the usual protocol, Dr. Francisco systematically removed, examined, and weighed the various organs--including the spleen, pancreas, liver, gallbladder, and brain--all of which he judged to be healthy and normal. Then he made a close inspection of King's injury, with the aid of X-ray images that had been taken at St. Joseph's Hospital. Around the wound's entrance, he found and collected on slides trace amounts of a black substance that, upon microscopic examination, was later determined to be a residue of lead left by the soft nose of the bullet. Dr. Francisco described the path of the bullet through King's body as "from front to back, above downward, and from right to left"--an important orientation, for it went far in confirming the suspected location of the fired rifle.

He regarded King's wounds as almost immediately catastrophic and felt certain that no amount of medical intervention could have saved him. "Death," Dr. Francisco summarized in his autopsy narrative, "was the result of a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transection of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of the neck. The severing of the spinal cord at this level and to this extent was a wound that was fatal very shortly after its occurrence."

"This," he succinctly concluded, "was not a survivable gunshot wound."

King's body was wheeled out of the autopsy suite and given over to the custody of the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home--the same black-owned mortuary that had provided King with a Cadillac and chauffeur during his stay at the Lorraine. The Lewis morticians had been hired to conduct the embalming, makeup, and other tasks necessary to prepare the body for public viewing.

Around 11:00 p.m., as the shotgun-wielding policemen stood guard outside the Tennessee Institute of Pathology, King's body was loaded into the rear of a hearse and driven across the desolate city on curfew-flushed streets prowled only by the occasional tank. The downtown was ghostly quiet but blindingly bright. "Every light in every store 477was on (the better to silhouette looters)," observed Garry Wills, who'd just arrived on assignment for Esquire . "Jittery neon arrows, meant to beckon people in, now tried to scare them off. Nothing stirred in the crumbling blocks. Even the Muzak in an arcade between stores reassured itself, at the top of its voice, with jaunty rhythms played to no audience."

At 11:15, King's body arrived at R. S. Lewis and the morticians began their work.

PRESIDENT JOHNSON, a bit of an insomniac even on peaceful nights, padded down to the Oval Office sometime in the early morning hours, dressed in his bathrobe. All through the night, the news stories and telegrams had been flooding into the White House. World reaction to King's death was immediate and far-reaching. Johnson was not quite prepared for the magnitude of the shock King's death was causing around the globe. In this nerve center of the world, the Situation Room memorandums and State Department telexes kept piling up, and the news-ticker machines steadily hammered away.

On one of the wire services, the Reverend Billy Graham, traveling in Australia, was quoted as saying that "tens of thousands of Americans 478are mentally deranged. [King's slaying] indicates the sickness of the American society and will further inflame passions and hates." In New Delhi, the Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, said Martin Luther King's slaying "is a setback to mankind's search for light. Violence has removed one of the great men of the world."

The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, said the whole nation "died a little" with King's murder. The retired baseball legend Jackie Robinson, reached in New York, was practically speechless: "I'm shocked. Oh my God, I'm very frightened, very disturbed. I pray God this doesn't end up in the streets."

A telegram from an analyst at the American embassy in Paris summarized the French reaction to King's slaying that morning: "Press and radio, which in recent months had almost lost sight of King in the glare of the more flamboyant [Stokely] Carmichael, now proclaim King as the only truly great leader among American negroes and agree he cannot be replaced."

The London papers quoted the British pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell as saying that the murder of Dr. King is only "a foretaste of the violence that will erupt in America because the U.S. government cannot finance a full-scale war in Vietnam and alleviate the misery of its most oppressed citizens."