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

The morning paper in Nairobi said King's death "once again reminds the world of the sick society America is ... It may well be that the era of non-violence has died with its prophet."

Not all the incoming commentary praised the fallen King or his methods. The South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond told a wire service reporter: "I hesitate to say anything bad about the dead, but I do not share a high regard for Dr. King. He only pretended to be nonviolent." Texas's governor, John Connally, concurred. While acknowledging that King "did not deserve this fate," Connally insisted that the civil rights leader "contributed much to the chaos and turbulence in this country."

The presidential candidate George Wallace could not be reached for comment, but Bob Walters, California chairman of Wallace's campaign, had this to say about the deceased: "Although he claimed to be a nonviolent man, he spread seeds of violence which are now in the country. You shall reap what you sow."

The wires also reported that the racist J. B. Stoner of the National States Rights Party was giving a speech in Meridian, Mississippi, when he heard the news of King's death. Gloating, the bow-tie-wearing demagogue told a crowd of like-minded segregationists: "Martin Lucifer Coon is a good nigger now."

SOME TIME AFTER midnight, Memphis time, Special Agent Jensen finished reviewing and tagging all the physical evidence now in the FBI's possession: the bullet removed from King's body, the rifle and scope and ammunition, the binoculars, the transistor radio, the suitcase with all its miscellaneous contents, King's shorn necktie and bloodied shirt, photographs from the autopsy, the old windowsill with the tiny half-moon indentation that Homicide Bureau detectives had removed from the communal bathroom. There were also three twenty-dollar bills that FBI agents had obtained from Bessie Brewer--one of which she believed the man in 5B had given her when he signed in.

Jensen sealed the contents in clear plastic and boxed them up, writing on the outside of the package, "FBI Crime Laboratory, Washington, DC." He gave it to Special Agent Robert Fitzpatrick, who would serve as a personal courier for this important parcel. Fitzpatrick rushed to the airport, where a chartered jet was waiting. Shortly before 1:00 a.m., he boarded the plane and flew through the morning hours, the package at his side at all times. The jet landed at Washington's National Airport just before dawn. An armed escort met Fitzpatrick at the terminal and sped him to the city.

At 5:10 a.m. eastern time, Friday, April 5, Fitzpatrick personally delivered the evidence to Special Agent Robert A. Frazier of the FBI Crime Lab on Pennsylvania Avenue. Ballistics, fiber, and fingerprint experts were already waiting.

BOOK TWO

WHO IS ERIC GALT?

For murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak

With most miraculous organ

.

SHAKESPEARE,

Hamlet

30 A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS

JUST AFTER DAWN on Friday, April 5, a Lockheed Jetstar taxied 479from the immense hangar that housed presidential planes and then shot down the runway at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. On board the twelve-seat business jet were Ramsey Clark, Cartha DeLoach, and several other government officials, including the brilliant young black Justice Department lawyer Roger Wilkins. On this early morning, they were hastening to Memphis on a vital mission: to officially kick off the federal investigation into Martin Luther King's assassination--and to assure the city, and the nation, that the Justice Department would expend every resource to find and prosecute King's killer.

That morning Clark wore a crisp black suit with a thin tie of diagonal blue and white stripes. He already felt exhausted, and the day was only beginning, a day that promised to be as stressful as any he'd experienced as attorney general. Clark had hardly slept the night before--no one at the Justice Department had.

The jet banked over Prince Georges County and climbed west over Washington, where the fires from the previous night's rioting still smoldered. Clark looked out the window at the city where he had been largely raised and schooled.

DeLoach tried to brighten the mood. He was confident that the FBI would find the killer--or killers--within a matter of hours. While the plane was in the air, he was in constant communication with the bureau and would periodically share the latest bulletins with Clark. The probable murder weapon, he said, was safely ensconced in the crime lab, two floors above Clark's office in the Justice building, and was now undergoing analysis. Working off the serial number on the rifle--461476--FBI officials had already called the Remington Arms Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and traced the weapon to a gun wholesaler in Alabama and finally to a gun shop in Birmingham called Aeromarine Supply Company; FBI agents in Birmingham would soon be dispatched to question the employees who sold the gun.

Then DeLoach learned of a tantalizing new lead: in 1958 the Memphis Police Department had arrested a white male fugitive named John Willard 480who had committed arson and whose last known whereabouts were in Mississippi. MPD sleuths, as well as FBI agents from Memphis and Jackson, were already combing the region in hopes of tracking the man down.

DeLoach had been in such a hurry this morning that he hadn't had time to eat. Now he opened his briefcase 481and found a sandwich next to his large revolver. As he tucked into his breakfast, he looked out the window at the Shenandoah Valley, which was now sharpening with the vivid greens of spring. The jet hurtled past the mountains of Virginia at four hundred miles per hour and headed over Tennessee.

Two hours later, at 7:20 a.m. central time, the Jetstar landed in Memphis. Stepping off the plane, Clark and DeLoach saw that the place had a decidedly martial cast. National Guardsmen and riot police ringed the perimeter of the runway, and military planes were parked along the tarmac. Flags flew at half-staff.

Special Agent Robert Jensen met Clark and DeLoach on the tarmac and drove them into the troubled city, which was just now stirring from the curfews.

AT THAT SAME moment, Eric Galt eased his Mustang into the parking lot of a forlorn housing project in Atlanta called Capitol Homes. It was about 8:20 eastern time on a drizzly Friday morning, and the city was waking up to the banner headlines in the Constitution proclaiming that Atlanta's most famous citizen had been slain. Galt had been driving through the night, worried all the while that some state trooper might notice the make and color of his car and end his escape before he even got out of the South. From Birmingham to Atlanta, he had avoided main highways and driven strictly on back roads. "At daybreak I stopped for gas 482on the outskirts of Atlanta," he later said; he then went to the Capitol Homes project--a location he had scoped out 483two weeks earlier.

Galt hated giving up his loyal Mustang--over the past seven months he had driven it some nineteen thousand miles. Ditching it like this violated his sense of frugality. "I sure hated that I didn't have time to sell it for at least $1,000," he wrote. But he knew there was no time to put an ad in the paper and fool around negotiating with customers and all the usual rigmarole; the whole world, it seemed, was searching for this car.