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

"I wish it was Henry Loeb 503lying there," one woman said.

"Why'd this happen to you, 504Dr. King?" said another, leaning into the coffin. "What are we going to do now?"

For several hours, people marched through the funeral home. They moaned and wailed and prayed and sang. Abernathy said, "The Lord is my light and my salvation." Billy Kyles said, "I am the resurrection and the life." The cameras kept flashing.

Finally the lid was lowered, and the coffin was placed in the back of the long limousine. When Abernathy shut the hearse doors, he placed his hand on the glass and said, "Long live the King."

A two-mile procession of cars followed the hearse as it crept through the city streets and then motored out to the Memphis Metropolitan Airport, escorted by National Guardsmen and police. The convoy turned toward the tarmac, where an Electra four-engine prop jet had just landed, a plane that had been provided to the King family by Senator Robert Kennedy. The aircraft's hatch door was open. Standing at the lip, hatless, wearing a black dress and black gloves and staring out over the approaching motorcade with a queenly rectitude, was Coretta Scott King.

32 ONE MAN ON THE RUN

RAMSEY CLARK AND Cartha DeLoach spent most of the morning making the rounds in Memphis. They dropped by the local FBI office to bolster the morale of Jensen's already beleaguered cadre of field agents. They paid a visit to the U.S. attorney's office, to reassure prosecutors that the FBI would work hand in glove with them to build a successful case against King's assailant, if and when he was caught. Then they met with some of the top National Guard officers. Clark told the commanders they were doing a fine job but urged them not to use excessive force. He was particularly troubled by the use of tanks. "I thought it was a provocation," 505Clark said, "and it was also a kind of sorry sign as to what kind of country we are. I mean, what's around here that calls for tanks?"

Clark's entourage quickly moved on to city hall for a meeting with Mayor Henry Loeb. Outside the building, some of the garbage strikers were marching with their I AM A MAN signs. Clark was clearly moved by the succinct clarity of the slogan. "What a message that was," 506he later said. "It was one of the most imaginative demonstrations and one of the most powerful symbols that came out of the civil rights movement." The Justice Department official Roger Wilkins was similarly touched by the sight of the garbage workers, solemnly parading on the morning after King's assassination: "To see these men 507walking in a very orderly fashion, asserting, 'I should be treated as a human being'--you couldn't not be moved by that. I stood there with tears rolling from my eyes."

Clark and Wilkins strode inside the white marble halls for their visit with Mayor Loeb, which went nowhere. Wilkins described Loeb as "gracious in a Southern kind of way, 508but staunch as a brick wall." Clark tried to persuade Loeb to do whatever it took to resolve the strike--it was not only in the city's best interests but in the nation's as well. Loeb dug in his heels even as he lavished his Washington visitors with hospitality. "We did not move him one inch," recalled Wilkins, "and he did not have one inch of sympathy for these men who were out there pacing around the building."

Finally, Clark and DeLoach met with Fire and Police Director Frank Holloman, in his smoke-filled office. Holloman had some bad news. The enticing "John Willard" lead his detectives were bird-dogging that morning had already dried up. This particular John Willard, it turned out, had an airtight alibi: he was still in jail.

Clark and DeLoach tried to brighten the mood by sharing some of the positive information they'd gleaned from FBI headquarters that morning: that the murder weapon had already been traced to Birmingham, where agents had obtained a good physical description of the buyer; that analysts in the fingerprint unit had lifted several high-quality latent prints they were now comparing with the prints of known fugitives; that right here in Memphis, Jensen's men had interviewed the York Arms clerk who had sold the binoculars to the man in 5B. Jensen, meanwhile, had hired an artist to interview witnesses at Bessie Brewer's and Canipe's to prepare a preliminary sketch of "John Willard." All in all, they were making brisk progress, DeLoach thought. It was only a matter of time before they'd catch the killer.

But Director Holloman remained surly. The stress King's assassination was putting on his already overstrained department showed on his pale and furrowed face. He'd been up all night and was now so wired on nicotine and coffee that he could scarcely complete a thought. He kept running his fingers through his strands of gray hair. "He was just about out on his feet," 509said an aide. "He was whipped and numb."

Holloman deeply resented the rumors circulating around the city, and the nation, that his department was somehow involved in King's murder--rumors intensified by the public knowledge that Holloman had once worked directly for Hoover at the FBI headquarters in Washington. Clark and DeLoach assured him the federal government had no such suspicions, but the accusation clearly stung--and would continue to trouble him the rest of his life. "I had not a scintilla 510or an iota of a desire to see any harm come to Dr. King," Holloman testified in Washington years later. "One of the greatest disappointments in my life has been that Dr. King was assassinated and that he was assassinated in Memphis."

Holloman apprised Clark and DeLoach of other developments around the city--that night's curfew plans, preparations for Abernathy's "silent march" down Beale, the various leads his own department was pursuing. He mentioned that Memphis's two daily Scripps Howard newspapers had offered a combined reward of fifty thousand dollars for information leading to the killer's arrest, and that the Memphis City Council had responded by putting up another fifty thousand dollars. Holloman was mildly optimistic that a hundred grand would produce a raft of new leads, but he also knew that posted rewards of this sort have a way of bringing out the nutcases and cranks.

CLARK BROKE UP his mid-morning meeting with Holloman to call a press conference. More than a hundred journalists and film crews from around the world--including Sweden, Australia, Yugoslavia, and Japan--gathered in a nondescript federal suite downtown to hear the attorney general's delicately worded remarks. "All of our evidence 511at this time," Clark said, "indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal act."

He was not free to divulge any details lest he jeopardize the ongoing investigations. But he wanted to assure the nation that investigators had already compiled a considerable amount of evidence, and that every effort was being made to catch the killer. The dragnet, he said, extended well beyond Memphis. "It has already spread several hundred miles from the boundaries of Tennessee now." Investigators were working on several names, some of which might be aliases, and they were hunting for a white Mustang. "We have a name we're working on. Whether it is the right name we'll have to see. We're very hopeful. We've got some good breaks." He said he hoped to have an early conclusion to the investigation, followed by an indictment, trial, and conviction.

"We are getting close--we've got one man on the run," Clark confidently announced. But as the nation's highest law-enforcement official, he was worried about violence erupting around the country. He advised the nation's mayors, governors, and police chiefs that "either overreaction or under-action can lead to rioting. You have to exercise a very careful control."