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

Bernice and the other King children--Martin III, Dexter, and Yolanda--had been smothered with goodwill these past few days. True to his word, Bill Cosby had flown to Atlanta and personally entertained them at the house. The King children had received untold thousands of letters and telegrams from all around the world. "Dear Yolanda," one twelve-year-old girl wrote, "I believed in your father 577down to the bottom of my soul." Said a grade-schooler named Robert Barocas from Great Neck, New York: "Dear Dexter--if they catch the guy 578who shot your father, give him a sock in the mouth for me."

Now the four King children slipped out of Ebenezer with their mother, just ahead of the mourners. On Auburn Avenue, most of the flags flew at half-staff, but some flew upside down , sending a message not of sorrow but of bitterness and defiance. Along the funeral route, angry mutterings could be heard: Johnson had done it. Hoover had done it. Wallace had done it. The Klan, the White Citizens Council, the Memphis Police Department. The Mafia, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the generals who ran the war King had condemned. In a society already marinated in conspiracy, it was only natural that every form of collusion would be bruited about. Now, with each step the mourners took toward Morehouse, King's death seemed to gather further layers of mystique.

Throughout his civil rights career, King had drawn symbolic meaning and practical power from an Old Testament analogy: he was a black Moses, parting the waters, leading his people on their great exodus out of Egypt. It was an image he consciously and repeatedly invoked, even in his last speech in Memphis --I may not get there with you but we as a people will get to the Promised Land . With his assassination, however, the analogy suddenly shifted to the New Testament: King had become a black Jesus, crucified (during the Easter season, no less) for telling society radical truths. If this new analogy was to carry any biblical resonance, then the entire apparatus of the state and culture must be complicit in the Messiah's death--King Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Levites and the Pharisees, the long arm of the Roman Empire.

So as the two mules kept up their doleful clip-clop through Atlanta, the questions multiplied through the ranks of the marchers. The whole power structure, the whole zeitgeist, seemed implicated. As Coretta herself said, "There were many fingers 579on the rifle."

Even the most alert and conspiracy-tuned observer could not have guessed one irony along the funeral route: late that morning, the cortege passed within a few blocks of the Capitol Homes housing project, where, still sitting locked and abandoned in the parking lot, a white hardtop Mustang with Alabama plates shimmered in the eighty-degree heat.

NEARLY A THOUSAND miles due north, Eric Galt was in his room on Ossington Avenue 580with a growing collection of Toronto newspapers. He was half watching the coverage of the King funeral on the console television while working on a letter to the registrar of births--a letter that he would mail later that day.

The networks sprinkled the funeral coverage with periodic bulletins about the manhunt and also updates on the rioting, which--in most places at least--had finally ended. The statistical tally emerging from the smoldering ruins was staggering: Fires had erupted in nearly 150 American cities, resulting in forty deaths, thousands of injuries, and some twenty-one thousand arrests. In Washington alone, property damages were estimated at more than fifty million dollars. Across the nation, close to five thousand people had become "riot refugees."

The feckless author of all this chaos was sitting quietly in Toronto, Ontario, writing a letter. Mrs. Szpakowski was curious about her new tenant, who was now calling himself Paul Bridgman. There was a sadness about him, a loneliness. Once, when he was away, she went in to clean the room and noticed newsprint crumpled everywhere. Residual piles of frozen-food cartons and pastry crumbs and cellophane wrappers spoke of bad food eaten alone at odd, small hours. Bridgman never brought a visitor into the room. Not once did she hear laughter in there--just the garbled tones of the television.

Galt was starting to get out more at night, making his usual sorts of rounds. He apparently visited a brothel on Condor Avenue and made several appearances at a go-go nightclub called the Silver Dollar, 581where he watched the dancers and drank Molson Canadian.

Mrs. Szpakowski thought her guest was immersed in a big project of some sort. He seemed serious, rushed, preoccupied to the point of being flustered when interrupted. Sometimes he'd go out to use a pay phone in a booth down the street, always moving at a brisk, businesslike clip. Other times he would walk down to the corner of Dundas Street and hop on a streetcar.

In fact, her new tenant was immersed in a project, and a rather complicated one at that, one that would take several weeks to complete. Galt had been working on the ten or so names he'd retrieved the day before from the reading room of the Telegram . He looked up their listings in the Toronto phone book and found that two of them, Paul Bridgman and Ramon Sneyd, were both still living in Toronto--and that both resided in a suburb east of the city, not far away, known as Scarborough.

Before going the next step, Galt felt he needed to make sure these unsuspecting candidates of identity theft bore at least a vague resemblance to his own likeness. So it was "time to play detective," 582as Galt later put it. He went to Scarborough and loitered in the shadows by these two men's houses until he caught glimpses of them. Although on close inspection neither Bridgman (a teacher) nor Sneyd (a cop) especially looked like him, Galt was encouraged to learn that they met his general description--dark hair, fair skin, receding hairline, slender-to-medium build, Caucasian.

That was all he needed: if either one had been obese, or bald, or marked by a pronounced scar, or of another ethnicity altogether, Galt would have to start his search anew. They weren't perfect, but Bridgman and Sneyd passed.

Then Galt did something truly brazen, something that illustrated the extent of his desperation: he called Bridgman and Sneyd on the telephone, probably from the same phone booth Mrs. Szpakowski saw him talking on. One night, Paul Bridgman, who worked as the director of the Toronto Board of Education's Language Study Centre, picked up his home telephone, shortly after finishing his supper.

"Yes, hello," 583Bridgman later recalled hearing the caller say. "I'm a registrar with the Passport Office in Ottawa. We're checking on some irregularities in our files here and we need to know if you've recently applied for a passport."

Bridgman was naturally a little suspicious. He didn't understand why some bureaucrat in Ottawa would call on official business during the evening. "Are you sure you have the right person?"

"Bridgman," Galt assured him, spelling out the surname. "Paul Edward Bridgman. Born 10 November, 1932. Mother's maiden name--Evelyn Godden."

"Well yes, that's correct," Bridgman replied, deciding the caller must be on the level after all. Soon Bridgman freely told Galt the information he needed to know: Yes, he once had a passport, about ten years ago, but it had expired, and he had not bothered renewing it.

"Thank you very much," Galt said, and hung up.

Galt was concerned that Bridgman might pose a problem--his old passport might still be on file in Ottawa and might set off alarm bells if Galt applied for a new one. So he got back on the phone and reached Ramon Sneyd. Going through the same routine, Galt was relieved to learn from Sneyd that the man had never applied for a passport in his life.