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

Agent Darlington pressed her. What color? What model?

Mrs. Kelley frowned. The card only said, "Ford."

"Anyone else driving a Ford that night?" Darlington asked.

Kelley riffled through the other registration cards from April 3. "Well, yes," she said. "Here's one." A man from Alabama had checked in to the New Rebel at 7:15 p.m. that same evening. As she recalled, it was a rainy night, tornado warnings in the forecast. She never saw the man herself, and couldn't give any sort of physical description. But according to the card, he drove a Mustang with Alabama tags, license number 1-38993. The card didn't specify the car's color.

The guest--what was his name? Agent Bauer demanded.

She showed him the card. It said, in plain block lettering, "Eric S. Galt, 2608 Highland Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama."

AFTER HOLING UP in his room all weekend at the Szpakowski rooming house in Toronto, Eric Galt finally emerged that Monday morning and, according to his memoirs and other accounts, made his way down to the offices 563of Toronto's Evening Telegram . He told the front desk that he had come to look at back issues of the newspaper.

Soon he was led to the paper's reading room. How far back you interested in? the librarian asked.

Galt said he was interested in the 1930s, and the librarian indicated that would be on microfilm.

Galt was shown the microfilm machines, and soon a box arrived with reels dating back to the early 1930s. The librarian demonstrated how to work the machine, threading the brittle ribbon of plastic through the guides and sprockets. Galt flipped on the light and adjusted the focusing knob until a grainy world of black and white swelled into view.

For the next several hours, Galt advanced through the early 1930s, through the initial years of the Great Depression. He skipped over the headlines about Roosevelt, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the imprisonment of Al Capone, Amelia Earhart's transatlantic solo flight. Galt wasn't interested in news or sports, wasn't interested in history at all. With each day's paper, he always spun back to the same section: births and obituaries.

Galt was trolling for names--specifically, the names of baby boys born in the early 1930s in Toronto. As he scrolled through 1932, ten or more birth announcements caught his eye and he jotted down the particulars. One of them was named Ramon George Sneyd. "At the Women's Hospital," the paper said, "on Saturday, October 8th, to Mr. and Mrs. George Sneyd (nee Gladys Mae Kilner), a son, Ramon George." Communing with these faded names in the murky light of the microfilm screen, Eric Galt was frantically looking for a way to cease being Eric Galt: he was hunting for a new identity.

It's possible that he had gathered valuable tips from someone about how to obtain a new alias, but if so, Galt never revealed who it was. In any case, the methods Galt used were ludicrously simple. "I'd read somewhere," 564he later said, "that Soviet spies in Canada routinely assumed the names of actual Canadians [by] taking them from gravemarkers or from the birthing notices in old newspapers. I'd been trying for years to get out of the United States on some system like this." It was a clever technique, but not exactly an esoteric one. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police report noted at the time, "Teenagers are adopting 565this practice to obtain birth certificates for persons over twenty-one years in order that they can frequent beverage rooms."

Satisfied with the day's catch, Galt left the reading room around noon with his collection of names and headed back for the Szpakowski rooming house. On his way, though, he likely made a brief expeditionary detour 566--to roam through one of Toronto's graveyards.

THE GREAT SILENT march in Memphis came to rest at an echoey marble plaza beside city hall, where an aluminum stage and a powerful public address system had been erected beneath the city's official insignia--cotton boll and steamboat. Rosa Parks, the grandmotherly prime mover of modern civil rights, sat on the platform with Mrs. King, Teddy Kennedy, and other dignitaries as the rear of the march caught up and filled in the public square. It was still spitting rain, but occasionally sunshine would spear through the brooding clouds; as Southerners say, the devil was beating his wife.

Several hours of speeches commenced--labor speeches and political speeches, some dry and some fiery, but all exhorting the city to do the right thing and settle the strike so that King's death could be redeemed in some way and the fatigued nation could get back to its business.

The whole program was really directed at Henry Loeb, but the mayor wasn't showing his face to this hostile crowd. In fact, he probably wasn't even inside city hall. He had been up all night, negotiating with strike representatives, prodded along by Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds, whom President Johnson had personally dispatched from Washington to serve as an envoy. The talks had dragged on until 6:00 a.m., but the city still had not reached a resolution. The sour garbage would keep piling up on the curbsides, filling the streets with rank odors, growing happy rats.

King's death in defense of garbage workers made a certain kind of metaphorical sense, especially to the clergymen in the audience, several of whom pointed out a deep biblical irony: Jesus Christ was crucified between two thieves, upon a mound of trash .

Now labor leaders, one after another, came to the stage and fulminated. The Memphis strike had clearly become a cause celebre not just for municipal workers but indeed for all labor organizations around the country: the AFL-CIO, the UAW, the UFWA, the USWA, the IUE--all had representatives on the stage. The whole scene was a white Southern businessman's worst nightmare: Reds encamped at city hall!

AFSCME's Jerry Wurf, who'd been up all night with Loeb in the negotiations, vowed: "Until we have justice 567and decency and morality, we will not go back to work." But it was the legendary Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers who got lathered up into a fever pitch. "Mayor Loeb," he said, "will somehow be dragged 568into the 20th Century!"

All this feisty union talk resonated with many in the audience, but Memphis was not a labor town--neither by tradition nor by style--so much of it soon fell on deaf ears. Besides, the person the crowds had really come to see was Coretta Scott King. Finally, after several hours, she obliged them. Introduced by Belafonte, she rose and addressed the crowd in a calm and level voice, keeping her remarks personal. She spoke of her love for her husband, and of his love for their children. She spoke of the brevity of life. "It's not the quantity 569of time that's important, but the quality," she said. She sounded only one bitter note when she raised the question: "How many men must die before we can have a free and true and peaceful society? How long will it take?"

Her composure was almost otherworldly. Out in the audience, people were weeping uncontrollably, but her voice never cracked. "If Mrs. King had cried 570a single tear," said one woman in the crowd, "this whole city would have give way."

Her time in Memphis had inspired her, Coretta King declared. The movement would go on; she had not lost faith. "When Good Friday 571comes, these are the moments in life when we feel there's no hope." She looked over at her children and said with a faint smile: "But then, Easter comes."

THAT EVENING, WHILE Coretta King was returning to Atlanta, the FBI agents Neil Shanahan and William Saucier 572pulled up to 2608 Highland Avenue in Birmingham. "Economy Rooms," the little sign said out front. The two agents rapped on the door of the large pale gray two-story stucco rooming house located in the foothills of Birmingham, not far from the famed colossus of Vulcan, whose deformed physique lorded over the steel city of the South. Peter Cherpes, the Greek-American who ran Economy Rooms, came to the door. Shanahan and Saucier explained that they were with the FBI and that they were looking for a man named Eric Galt who was supposed to be living there. The Birmingham field office had gotten both the name and the Highland address from an urgent report that the Memphis agents Darlington and Bauer had filed earlier in the day.