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

That settled it in Galt's mind: while he might develop the Bridgman alias for sideline purposes, he would become Ramon George Sneyd.

THE SAME MORNING of the King funeral, the FBI agents Neil Shanahan and Robert Barrett were 150 miles away in Birmingham, trying to learn what they could about a man named Eric S. Galt.

Galt was in no way a suspect yet--his only crime was having checked in to the New Rebel Motel in Memphis the night before King's murder and having driven a car similar to the getaway car (which just so happened to be one of the most popular cars on the American road). The address he'd listed on the New Rebel registration card was correct (if lapsed), and the interview that Agents Saucier and Shanahan had conducted the previous night with Galt's former landlord, Peter Cherpes, hadn't particularly set off any alarm bells. The man that Cherpes had described was a drifter--an itinerant seaman and shipyard laborer with ties to the Gulf Coast--but that was surely no crime. In fact, state police failed to turn up anyone named Eric Galt with an arrest record in Alabama.

Yet the FBI was duty-bound to follow every lead--and the Galt name was just one of innumerable leads to be followed. Inquiries around Mobile and the Gulf Coast turned up no Eric Galt, as did phone calls to Seafarers International and other maritime unions. A quick check with the motor vehicle division in Montgomery did reveal that Eric S. Galt had applied for an Alabama driver's license in September 1967, noting on his application that he was a "merchant seaman, unemployed." Further checks with vehicle registration records showed that an Eric Galt did indeed have a currently titled, licensed, and registered white two-door 1966 Mustang, bearing the same license plate number he provided on the New Rebel registration form--1-38993.

Working off the VIN, the FBI quickly traced the car back to its previous owner, a Birmingham man named William D. Paisley who was a sales manager for a Birmingham lumber company.

Shanahan and Barrett showed up at Paisley's place of work 584and asked him some questions--never mentioning that they were investigating the assassination of Martin Luther King. Paisley only vaguely recalled the man, but yes, he had sold a pale yellow 1966 Mustang to an Eric Galt some eight months earlier, back in August 1967. Paisley had offered the car for sale in the classified ads in the Birmingham News for $1,995. He recalled that Galt, after phoning the house and making arrangements to meet, then came to the Paisley residence by taxi on the early evening of August 28. The man carefully examined the Mustang and seemed to like it. It had whitewall tires, a push-button radio, and a remote-control outside mirror. The tires had had a bit too much wear--they were clearly bald in places--but the body was in near-perfect shape. "This is one of the cleanest ones I've seen," Galt enthused.

"You want to take her for a spin?" Paisley asked.

Galt said no, he didn't have a current driver's license. His previous license, he said, was issued back in Louisiana--and anyway, it had expired, and he didn't want to risk getting stopped by the police. So Paisley got behind the wheel and cranked up the V-8 engine, and Galt hopped in the passenger seat. They tooled around the neighborhood for a quarter hour, while Galt fiddled with the knobs and dials and played with the push-button radio.

Galt told Paisley he liked the red leather interior but wasn't so sure about the pale yellow paint color, which was so light it was almost white. (Galt didn't tell Paisley the real reason for his distaste, but as Galt later put it, "If you are going to do something illegal, 585I'd rather not have a white car to do it in.") When they got back to the house, Galt thought about the car a few more minutes and then, without even looking under the hood or attempting to negotiate the price, told Paisley, "I'll take it off your hands."

Shaking on the deal and agreeing to meet the next morning to complete the transaction, they talked a bit while standing outside Paisley's house. Galt said that he worked on a Mississippi River barge and that he had a lot of money saved up. He said he'd recently been through an ugly divorce--his ex-wife was an Alabama woman, he said, from the mountain country up around Homewood.

When Paisley offered his sympathies, Galt replied, "Yeah, that's the way it goes."

They met the next morning outside the Birmingham Trust National Bank--"that's where I keep my money," Galt had told Paisley. Galt, who was wearing a sport jacket and an open-collared shirt, said he had $1,995 in cash, fresh from the bank. From his shirt pocket, he removed a prodigious wad of bills--mostly twenties, but a few hundreds as well--and started counting the money out in the open. "Man , let's be careful with this kind of money," Paisley said, and they moved into the foyer of the bank to finish the transaction.

Paisley gave Galt the title and a bill of sale and then fished in his pocket for the keys. They shook hands and that was it--Paisley never saw the man again.

IN THE HISTORIC quadrangle at Morehouse College, the mule-drawn wagon wound its way to the steps of Harkness Hall, and the large public requiem began. Some 150,000 people crammed onto the campus green and stood for hours in the oppressive heat beneath jumbled canopies of parasols. Mahalia Jackson sang "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," the spiritual King had asked Ben Branch to play "real pretty" moments before he was shot on the Lorraine balcony. So many old ladies fainted in the crowd that the lengthy schedule of eulogies had to be radically truncated. The final speaker, and the marquee attraction, was Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, the president emeritus of Morehouse, a distinguished lion of an orator and King's most beloved mentor. The grizzled theologian, whose parents had been former slaves, spoke plainly, with a measured indignation in his voice.

"I make bold to assert," 586Mays said, "that it took more courage for King to practice nonviolence than it took his assassin to fire the fatal shot. The assassin is a coward; he committed his foul act, and fled. But make no mistake, the American people are in part responsible. The assassin heard enough condemnation of King and of Negroes to feel that he had public support. He knew that millions hated King."

Mays went on to deliver a majestic eulogy in the black Baptist tradition, leaving bitterness behind and building toward a triumphant crescendo. "He believed especially that he was sent to champion the cause of the man furthest down. He would probably say that if death had to come, there was no greater cause to die for than fighting to get a just wage for garbage collectors. He was supra-race, supra-nation, supra-class, supra-culture. He belonged to the world and to mankind. Now he belongs to posterity."

The great funeral broke up, and a smaller crowd of family and friends followed the hearse in a slow motorcade to South View Cemetery, a grand old place that had been created in the 1860s when Atlanta's blacks grew weary of burying their dead through the rear entrance of the city graveyard. This would not be King's final resting place--he was to be only temporarily buried here with his maternal grandparents until a permanent memorial could be built beside Ebenezer Church. Beneath flowering dogwoods, Ralph Abernathy rose to address the winnowed crowd. Drawn and weak, Abernathy had not eaten since the assassination. Like the old days when he and King went to jail together, he was fasting, to purify himself for the trials ahead.

"The grave is too narrow for his soul," Abernathy said, tears streaming down his face. "But we commit his body to the ground. We thank God for giving us a leader who was willing to die, but not willing to kill." Then a retinue of attendants rolled the mahogany casket into a crypt of white Georgia marble that was inscribed: