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

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

JANUARY 15, 1929-APRIL 4, 1968

"FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, THANK GOD ALMIGHTY I'M FREE AT LAST"

As the last of the crowds fell away, Martin Luther King Sr. laid his head on the cool stone of his son's mausoleum and openly wept.

37 THE MURKIN FILES

BY APRIL 10, the day after King's funeral, the hunt for the man in 5B had begun to take on a momentum of its own. Working around the clock, Ramsey Clark had set up a situation room on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. Cots were placed in various corners of the office, and food was brought in to sustain the teams of bureaucrats working on the legal aspects of the case. "It was a huge operation," 587Clark later recalled. "I didn't go home, I just stayed there all the time, I had a little place in my office where I'd sleep. It was the biggest investigation ever conducted, for a single crime, in U.S. history."

Several times a day, Clark met with Deke DeLoach over at the FBI nerve center and demanded to hear the latest from the bureau. DeLoach hated these briefings, of course, but he knew he had no choice but to work with the attorney general--while doing his best to keep Clark and Hoover at arm's length. Sadly, on April 10, there wasn't much to report. After an initial flurry of activity, the manhunt had seemingly ground to a halt. Now the case was fraying into multiple slender strands. Over the past few days, the FBI offices had been flooded with crazy leads, sensational rumors, and tantalizing tips that the bureau agents dutifully followed but that never seemed to pan out.

The case now had an official name at least. On all memos and enciphered Teletype messages, in all FBI and Justice Department correspondence, the investigation was to be called MURKIN, a bit of bureaucratic shorthand that simply stood for "Murder, King." Some three thousand agents were now working the case, which was now termed a "special investigation." Although the main activity was still to be found in Robert Jensen's office in Memphis, and in Birmingham, already the investigation had spread out to every field office in the country. In hopes of hunting down biographical traces of Eric Galt, or Harvey Lowmeyer, or John Willard, FBI investigators were now combing through every known repository of names--voter registration lists, parole board lists, telephone directories, utility company records. They were checking with rental car agencies, airlines, credit card companies, motor vehicle divisions, the IRS, and the Selective Service. So far, nothing very promising had turned up.

J. Edgar Hoover, meanwhile, had been frantically sending out Teletype messages to all the FBI "territories," underscoring the urgency of the investigation. "We are continuing 588with all possible diligence and dispatch," Hoover wrote to all special agents in charge on April 9. "The investigation is nationwide in scope as countless suspects are being processed and physical evidence is being traced. You may be completely assured that this investigation will continue on an expedited basis until the matter has been finally resolved. Leads are to be afforded immediate, thorough, imaginative attention. You must exhaust all possibilities from such leads as any one lead could result in the solution of this most important investigation. SAC will be held personally responsible for any failure to promptly and thoroughly handle investigations in this matter."

Attorney General Clark was satisfied that the FBI, despite its history of dirty tricks with respect to King and his organization, was turning over every stone and working in all haste to find the assassin. But he had no shortage of questions for DeLoach. At this juncture, Clark asked, what is your view of the killer?

"A racist," 589DeLoach replied. "Maybe a member of a hate group. Well groomed, but somebody who would feel at home in a flophouse. And not too bright. Obviously he hadn't planned the crime very well."

"What are the possibilities of a conspiracy?" Clark wanted to know.

"So far, there's no real evidence he had help, either in planning or execution. If he had, his escape would have been better and he would have left fewer witnesses."

The bureau, DeLoach informed Clark, was now exhausting an inordinate amount of time and energy tracking down what seemed to be wild leads. A combination of two factors--the posting of a reward for finding the killer, and the release of an artist's composite sketch to the media--had rapidly accelerated the inflow of these sorts of calls. While the portrait of the assassin published in newspapers and magazines from coast to coast did catch the aquiline sharpness of Galt's nose, it was otherwise so bland and generic-looking it could have been anyone. Still, people swore they saw the assassin in Rock Hill, South Carolina; in Mountain View, California; in Joplin, Missouri; at LaGuardia Airport.

"Tips" arrived from all points of the compass. 590From the Denver area came a rumor that the killer was an Italian-American associated with a racist outfit called the Minutemen. From North Carolina came a lead that Bobby Ray Graves, the Exalted Cyclops of the Klan in Boiling Springs, was behind the assassination. Out of Baltimore, a local tavern owner reported to police that he overheard "a Cuban" saying that he'd recently been in Memphis and that he knew King was going to be killed five days before it happened. A respected black grocer and civil rights activist from west Tennessee came forward with a chilling story that, only a few hours before the assassination, he'd overheard a Memphis meat market owner, an Italian with possible Mafia ties in New Orleans, yelling into the telephone, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch 591on the balcony and then you'll get paid."

Most of the tips were clearly from well-meaning people, but others bore a rascally quality. The Miami field office received an anonymous note scribbled on a scrap of paper that said, cryptically, "Go to LaGrange, Georgia, and you will have King's killer." The writer claimed he'd met the assassin, whom he described as "weird and funny talking," at a recent gun show in Memphis and that the man had bought a .30-06 "much like the gun that killed King."

FOR A TIME, it seemed that every psychotic street person, every muttering hobo and colorful transient, was picked up for questioning. A surprising number of tips came from people seeking to implicate their own family members. A Louisiana caller said her ne'er-do-well son drove a 1967 white Mustang and hadn't been heard from since the day of the assassination. A woman from Chicago said the killer looked "an awful lot like my ex-husband."

God help anyone whose last name was Galt, Willard, or Lowmeyer--or any spelling variation thereof. John Willards were found in Los Angeles, Des Moines, and Spokane. Another John Willard, located in Oxford, Mississippi, was interrogated long enough to establish that he had been mowing his own lawn at the time of the assassination. A Reverend Ralph Galt in Birmingham was questioned repeatedly. "We don't know a thing about this person," his wife told the press. "We've checked all the relatives we can think of--and we wonder if it's not a fictitious name."

For a short time, the FBI entertained the possibility that the killer may have been the jealous husband of one of King's lovers--or, more likely, that a jealous husband may have paid someone else to carry off a hit. In Los Angeles, agents interviewed a prominent black dentist who was the husband of King's longtime mistress there, but the questioning went nowhere. In Memphis, meanwhile, Jensen's agents briefly investigated the possibility that the Invaders--having fallen into a bitter argument with King's staff the very day of the assassination--may have been behind King's death, but again, this line of inquiry proved barren.