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

But when Galt examined his Polaroids of Manuela, he was cross with himself. The images didn't grab him; they were flat and uninteresting. Perhaps he was beginning to fear he had no talent behind the camera. Manuela could see the frustration on his face. Visibly upset, 42he took the Polaroids and tore them all up.

ERIC STARVO GALT had ridden into Puerto Vallarta on Highway 200 three weeks earlier. On that afternoon--Thursday, October 19--he checked in to the Hotel Rio at the end of the cobblestoned main drag and just a block from the beach. The Rio was a modest but respectable enough place 43with white stucco walls, iron-lace balustrades, and a roof of Spanish tiles. For about four bucks a night, he secured a second-floor room that overlooked the river Cuale, where fishermen would string nets across the brackish water and fry their catch in the shade of the rubber trees that lined the musky banks.

The hotel management didn't know what to make of this mysterious new guest. Galt was a fidgety gringo who wore shades and mumbled when he spoke. His two-door Mustang hardtop was a 1966 model with mud-splattered whitewall tires and Alabama license plates. Galt told the front desk he was a "publisher's assistant," 44but he told others around town that he was a writer on vacation. He kept a manual typewriter in his room, and he sometimes stayed up late at night pecking away at the keys while listening to a pocket transistor radio.

Galt found the scenery around Puerto Vallarta "idyllic" 45and soon grew so fond of the life there that he considered settling down permanently. Before coming to Puerto Vallarta, he had spent most of 1967 on the move--St. Louis, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, then Birmingham, Alabama. He wasted a few days in Acapulco but found that he hated the place--it was overdeveloped and touristy, he thought, and "everybody there wanted 46money, money, money." Puerto Vallarta, on the other hand, was still a ragged paradise--bathwater ocean, blood orange sunsets, wild lagoons prowled by crocodiles. Frigate birds and pelicans flapped in the skies. Humpback whales, having migrated here to breed in warm waters, could sometimes be seen spouting in the bay. The steep hillsides flickered with butterflies, and every morning a thousand roosters announced the day. The people around P.V. seemed poor but happy, living outside, eating outside, sleeping on rooftop pallets beneath the stars. Everything about the place was relaxed, especially the dress code, which succinctly boiled down to a popular local aphorism: "Men, wear pants. Women, look beautiful."

Not long after he arrived in Puerto Vallarta, Galt began a regular nocturnal routine of visiting the cathouses. There was one particularly cheap place where a customer could climb a ladder to a stack of cubicles, each occupied by a prostitute. He'd dive into one of these little matchboxes and have a quick-and-dirty for a few pesos, with the moans of the other lovemakers seeping through the paper-thin walls. It resulted in a kind of erotic feedback loop 47: each noisy couple going at it, while simultaneously hearing all the other noisy couples, created an exquisite cacophony that Galt found titillating.

Later Galt began frequenting 48the slightly classier Casa Susana. In the downstairs receiving room, which also served as a bar and cantina, the whores sat on metal chairs lined along the dingy walls. Small translucent lizards clung to the ceiling and cheeped in the shadows between their mosquitoey meals. A grinning bartender with atrocious teeth kept the booze flowing while customers sat around tables or danced to Broadway tunes playing on a decrepit jukebox. Rustic, easygoing, a bit down-at-the-heels, Casa Susana was a community gathering place of sorts; lots of locals went there just for the spectacle, and it was not uncommon for squealing children, or even squealing pigs, to scamper through the downstairs rooms.

Something about Manuela Aguirre Medrano caught Galt's eye. She was slightly plump, but she was young, with a broad smile and dreamer's eyes the color of rich chocolate. She introduced herself as Irma--her professional name, it turned out, lifted from the French stage show Irma la Douce , which Billy Wilder had recently turned into a Hollywood film starring a chartreuse-stockinged young Shirley MacLaine as a popular Paris prostitute.

Galt took Manuela upstairs and had his way with her for the equivalent of about eight dollars. He returned a few nights later and requested her again. Gradually they struck up a friendship. Galt would sit with her through the night at a table in the Casa Susana cantina, drinking screwdrivers. Manuela spoke almost no English, and he almost no Spanish, so they whiled away the hours with caveman gestures and awkward smiles.

Sometimes they would go out together during the day and drive around Puerto Vallarta in his Mustang, fishtailing on the muddy roads. Having grown up in a town with only a few relics and sputtering jalopies, a town where most men drove only burros, Manuela had never seen such a fancy car, let alone ridden in one, and she felt like a queen as he squired her about the ciudad .

On several occasions they drove the twelve miles down to the beach at the little village of Mismaloya, where four years earlier John Huston had filmed The Night of the Iguana . Eric and Manuela liked to sit and drink cervezas under a palm tree in a secluded cove not far from the Iguana set, which was still largely intact. The great bay was spread before them, and in the foreground dolphins could often be seen playing around a chain of three cave-riddled rock islands, known as Los Arcos.

Huston's movie--"One man ... three women ... one night," went the desperate poster tagline--starred Richard Burton as a defrocked priest and Ava Gardner as the randy owner of a cheap seaside hotel not unlike the one where Galt was staying. During the filming, dozens of paparazzi descended on Puerto Vallarta to cover the combustible mix of personalities, including the playwright Tennessee Williams (on whose play the film was based), yet the world media were primarily interested in the torrid affair that Burton was then pursuing with Elizabeth Taylor. Although both were married to other people at the time, Burton invited Taylor down to Puerto Vallarta to be with him during the filming. He ensconced her in a house across the street from his and then built a pink "love bridge" to connect the two residences.

Their romance was considered such an international scandale that even Vatican officials weighed in, accusing Taylor of "erotic vagrancy." Iguana's box-office success, combined with its accompaniment of behind-the-scenes press, cemented Puerto Vallarta's reputation as a place of louche living and sultry intrigue--and got the first wave of gringos coming.

In 1966, the writer Ken Kesey, on the lam from the FBI after faking his own suicide following a series of drug busts, had come to hide out in Puerto Vallarta and its shaggy environs. Now, a year later, Eric Galt was part of the exodus. He'd first read about Puerto Vallarta in one of the many magazine articles that covered the making of Huston's movie. During his nearly monthlong stay in Mexico, he lived an expatriate life of sloth and debauchery quite true to the spirit of Huston's film. In between his drinks and his whoring, he was (or was pretending to be) an author, a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker; he was developing a kind of recombinant personality, sifting and sampling the lifestyles he'd read and heard about.

Like the doomed iguana in the story, Galt appeared to be a creature who'd come to the end of his rope. Manuela found him strange. He complained of headaches, 49stomach problems, and other maladies. He was introverted, distracted, perpetually tired. He rarely tipped 50and never laughed. He was paranoid of the cops, always looking over his shoulder. Under the seat of his car, he carried a loaded Liberty Chief .38 snub-nosed revolver, which he called his "equalizer." 51He claimed to have served twenty years in the U.S. Army. He made trips into the hills 52from time to time, apparently to buy marijuana.