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

DeLoach was so confident, in fact, that he was willing to make a wager with Attorney General Clark: the bureau would catch King's killer within twenty-four hours--that is, by five o'clock Saturday night--or he would present Clark with a bottle of the finest sherry 537he could find. Clark shook on the deal, even though it was a bet he sincerely hoped to lose.

Though he was more skeptical, Clark had to admit that the case was shaping up well. "We had considerably more evidence, 538considerably earlier, than we ever expected," he recalled. "But we didn't realize the suspect was one of these unique types of people who tends to do just the opposite of what you'd expect. You'd think he'd go right, and he goes left. He was intent on giving us a merry chase--to put it mildly."

As Clark sped toward Washington, he thought about America's historical penchant for gun violence. Like many liberals across the nation, he hoped that the King assassination might quicken the gun-control debate on Capitol Hill, and he vowed to push for a policy requiring a permit to own a gun--especially high-powered rifles like a .30-06. "We are virtually unique 539among nations in our failure to control guns," he would write. "Destroyers of life, causers of crime, guns had once again scarred our national character, marking another terrible moment in our history."

DeLoach rode in silence most of the flight to Washington, absorbed in very different thoughts. The day in Memphis had been long and stressful, and his head was throbbing from lack of sleep and the pressure of the investigation. J. Edgar Hoover's long-standing "feud" with King, as DeLoach called it, would inevitably stir deeper doubts within already suspicious segments of the American public, who wondered if the FBI had been involved in the assassination--or if Hoover had directly ordered it. DeLoach realized that even if he won his bet and the FBI did catch King's killer by tomorrow, it still wouldn't be enough "to dam the flood 540of criticism and abuse that was coming our way."

It was past ten o'clock when the Jetstar began its approach into Washington. The plane was twelve miles out, over the horse country of Virginia, when Clark and DeLoach first spotted the smoke--a long, doomed finger extending all the way from the District. Since all commercial flights into National Airport had been banned, Clark asked the pilot to drop down and fly low along the Potomac. What they saw stunned them.

"I looked down at a city in flames," Clark recalled. Smoke engulfed all of downtown and the Mall. Only the great illuminated dome of the Capitol and the sharp white obelisk of the Washington Monument punctured the seething blankets. Clark could see infernos blazing up around U and Fourteenth streets, and also within a few blocks of his own office at the Justice Department building, the same building where FBI Crime Lab analysts were burning midnight oil, poring over the King assassination evidence.

The spreading conflagrations made the previous night's scattered rioting seem tame--the pilot of the Jetstar thought it looked like Dresden. All told, more than five hundred fires had been set throughout the city. At President Johnson's behest, much of the District was now occupied by federal troops, 541spearheaded by the Third Infantry Regiment, the so-called Old Guard, a corps of elite troops out of Fort Myer specifically trained, like the loyal Praetorians of ancient Rome, to protect the seat of government in the event of crisis--a Russian invasion, presumably, or the landing of Martians.

The White House was reinforced with sandbags and ringed with troops, its great lawns bathed in blinding floodlights. Machine-gun nests were erected all around the Mall and the Capitol building, where soldiers, some fresh from Vietnam, stood in nervous vigil, their rifles fixed with bayonets. One reporter thought the scene on Capitol Hill had "the air of a parliament 542of a new African republic."

The Jetstar made several low passes over the District. Looking down at the city where he grew up, the city he loved, Clark recalled accounts he'd read of the British sacking and torching Washington during the War of 1812. "In all my life," 543he said, "I never thought we'd see Washington burning."

34 HOME SWEET HOME IN TORONTO

THROUGH THE EARLY morning hours of April 6, Eric Galt's Greyhound continued to grind north through flat Ohio farm country, creeping toward Detroit. According to his memoirs, the coach reached the Motor City 544around eight that morning, a bright warm Saturday. Galt bought a fresh copy of the Detroit News , whose pages were dominated by reports of the assassination and the riots it had ignited. Detroit itself had been particularly hard-hit: though nothing like the riots in Washington, or the massive riots that hit Detroit in the summer of 1967, looting and arson had been widespread since Friday. The previous night, police had fired on several crowds of rioters, killing one man. Now three thousand National Guardsmen patrolled the streets, and Detroit's mayor, Jerome Cavanaugh, repeated for the media what had effectively become a national mantra: "It is better to overreact 545than underreact."

As he scanned the paper, Galt must have been relieved by the vagueness of the reports on the manhunt. It seemed that no new leads had developed. The articles made no mention of an Eric Galt or a Harvey Lowmeyer, no mention of a Mustang found in Atlanta. The authorities seemed to be concentrating on a nonexistent man named John Willard. Now that he was poised on the border, only miles away from Windsor, Canada, Galt could breathe a little easier.

He knew that crossing between the United States and Canada was a lax affair requiring no documentation, and that travelers were seldom stopped and questioned. But in the wake of the King assassination, he worried that the border guards might be taking special precautions. Galt checked himself in the bathroom mirror and decided he looked too much like a fugitive to cross the border into Windsor. His dark beard had come in strong over the past two days, and he feared that unless he got cleaned up, he might arouse suspicions should a customs agent stop him. Unfortunately, he had dumped all his shaving toiletries with the bundle back in Memphis.

Galt later claimed that he stashed his suitcase 546in a locker at the Greyhound terminal, took off across a grassy park, and found an old-fashioned barbershop where he requested a shave. The barber hesitated--he'd stopped shaving customers years ago--but Galt prevailed upon the man and climbed into his chair. Soon the barber was working up the lather with a mug brush and sharpening the blade on his leather strop. If the subject of Martin Luther King's assassination came up, what might have been said between the two men is not known. But for the next ten minutes or so, without realizing his customer's identity, the barber gingerly dragged his straight razor over the face and neck of Martin Luther King's assassin.

Clean shaven, Galt returned to the terminal for his suitcase and hailed a taxi. His worries about the border proved unwarranted--his cab crossed under the Detroit River through the fumy Windsor Tunnel without so much as a glance from the authorities. (It was a point of local interest that the Detroit-Windsor crossing was the only major border crossing where one had to go south to pass from the United States into Canada.) The cabbie drove to the Windsor train station. For a one-way fare of $8.20, Galt took the noon train on Canadian National Railways. The four-hour trip was an easy one, making a northeastern stitch across the farm country of Ontario, roughly paralleling Lake Erie, passing through the city of London. At around four o'clock the train pulled in to his destination, Canada's largest city--Toronto.