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

The plane landed in Atlanta, where the rain had turned to a gentle, all-suffusing mist. Coretta's four children, all dressed up, had been brought to the airport tarmac, and now they climbed the portable stairs and boarded the plane. Bernice, who was five, practically skipped down the aisle, seemingly without a care. Andy Young gathered her up in his arms. Bunny--as everyone called her--looked around the cabin, and then a puzzled expression formed on her little face. "Where's Daddy?" she said. "Mommy, where is Daddy?"

Coretta's heart ached. "Bunny," she said, taking her daughter in her arms. "Daddy is lying down in the back 528of the plane. When you see him, he won't be able to speak to you. Daddy has gone to live with God, and he won't be coming back."

Little Dexter, who was seven, understood the meaning of the big box in the rear of the plane but was leery of confronting the full truth. "I'd look around 529at the plane's interior, anywhere but at the coffin," he later wrote. "I didn't want to think about my father in there, unable to get out." He kept asking Coretta random questions--"What's this? What's that ?"--while fidgeting and pointing to different features of the aircraft. "Mother knew I was avoiding 530the fact of our father's corpse. I was curious about him being in the casket, but I didn't want to face it."

The casket was removed from the rear of the plane and loaded into a hearse. Everyone disembarked, formed a motorcade, and followed the King family to the Hanley Bell Street Funeral Home, where crowds were already forming outside.

Coretta asked the funeral director to open the coffin. She fretted that the morticians in Memphis had botched their work, that they'd failed to "fix his face," as she put it. But when the lid swung open, she was pleased. His countenance "looked so young and smooth 531and unworried against the white-satin lining of the casket," she wrote. "There was hardly any visible damage."

The children were brought in to see their father. They stared and stared, in disbelief, in curiosity, in dread. Andy Young was standing nearby when Dexter said, "Uncle Andy, this man 532didn't know our Daddy, did he?" speaking of King's killer.

Why do you say that? Young asked.

"Because if he had, he wouldn't have shot him. He was just an ignorant man who didn't know any better."

AS THE HANLEY Bell Street Funeral Home was taking delivery of King's body in Atlanta, Eric Galt was only a few miles away, at the Greyhound bus terminal, buying a one-way ticket 533for points north. The waiting room was the usual sweaty swirl of humanity--soldiers on leave, itinerant workers, mothers comforting croupy babies. People sat smoking on the molded plastic benches, half listening to the shrill squawk of the loudspeaker announcing delays and cancellations, the buses now boarding for Charleston, New Orleans, and Tallahassee.

Galt had a few belongings in a single suitcase--some clothes, whatever toiletries he hadn't dumped in Memphis, a book on self-hypnosis, and his dog-eared copy of Psycho-Cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Probably he bought a copy of the Atlanta Constitution and, secreting himself behind the broad, inky sheets, read of all the destruction he had wrought from coast to coast. On the front page, the immense banner headline read: DR. KING SHOT, 534DIES IN MEMPHIS; RIFLE FOUND, HUNT FOR KILLER PRESSED.

The Constitution noted a number of details about King's suspected slayer--more details than Galt would have felt comfortable with, perhaps, but nothing that pointed directly to him. The physical description was vague and somewhat inaccurate. The suspect, the Constitution reported, was "a young, dark-haired white man who dashed out of a flophouse across the street from King's hotel, dropped a Browning rifle on the sidewalk and fled in a car." The paper also noted, in an eerie juxtaposition, that a group of "old-line Georgia segregationists" had succeeded in raising a considerable war chest for George Wallace's presidential campaign--"so there will be a man in the White House who recognizes the viewpoint of the southern white people."

The Constitution 's progressive editor and publisher, the legendary Ralph McGill, had an editorial on page one. Whether Eric Galt read it is doubtful, but it was aimed right at him: "The moment the triggerman fired, Martin Luther King was the free man. The white killer was the slave--a slave to fear, a slave to his own sense of inferiority, a slave to hatred, a slave to all the bloody instincts that surge in a brain when a human being decides to become a beast."

Around one o'clock, Galt boarded the coach that said "Cincinnati" on the destination marquee, with the familiar lean hound lunging across the length of the cargo compartments. Galt crept down the narrow aisle and took a seat. Like most cross-country Greyhound coaches, the bus had a tiny rear lavatory that was doubtless ripe with the smell of chemicals losing the fight against cidered urine.

That afternoon the bus churned north out of Georgia in clouds of diesel fumes, grinding up through the striated limestone foothills at the border with Tennessee. The bus stopped in Chattanooga, and Knoxville, and then pressed on toward Kentucky. With every mile he put behind him, Galt must have felt a deepening relief. He was out of the Deep South now, burrowing into regions of the country that carried no association with himself or his crime. He was likely starting to breathe easier, knowing that his jag from Memphis, to Birmingham, and then to Atlanta was growing colder as he vanished into the murky inseams of the country.

Yet no matter how far north the bus ventured, he found that no place was untouched by King's death, no stop along the dreary string of terminals was immune from uncertainty and anger and fear. Galt could escape from his crime but not from its powerful recoil.

By nightfall Galt was in the hills of Kentucky, gliding through bluegrass and bourbon country toward Lexington, then crossing the muddy Ohio into Cincinnati, where he got off at the Greyhound terminal.

In his memoirs, Galt said he had a layover of two hours, so he checked his suitcase in to a locker 535and went to a nearby tavern--not only for drinks to ease his nerves, but also to gather some news. Cooped up on the bus, and lacking his pocket radio, he was starved for information on the manhunt. He must have been relieved to learn from the evening papers that authorities had made no substantial new breaks in the case. The Mustang had not been found, and there was no mention of a rooming house in Atlanta. Late that night, he boarded a second bus, 536bound for Detroit.

WHILE GALT'S GREYHOUND motored north, Attorney General Ramsey Clark and his small entourage boarded the Jetstar in Memphis and took off for Washington. Clark had been getting disturbing reports of incipient rioting in D.C. throughout the day, so they cut short their time in Memphis. Around five o'clock, the jet rose into the Memphis sky and arrowed toward the capital.

On board, Cartha DeLoach continued to be a font of optimism. The search for the man in 5B was proceeding crisply, in his estimation. Thus far, it seemed nearly a textbook operation. DeLoach had been in repeated contact with FBI headquarters and had all the reports in hand--laundry tags, ballistics, fibers, hairs, fingerprints, gun receipts, physical descriptions--the case was coming together with rapid efficiency. The new Los Angeles twist presented some unexpected complications, he had to concede, but otherwise all evidence seemed to be pointing to one suspect, or possibly two, living and plotting the crime out of the Southland. DeLoach assumed of course that both "Lowmeyer" and "Willard" were fictitious, but to be sure, FBI agents were checking every permutation of those names throughout the South.