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

He was very regular in his habits, she said. He would bring in his dirty clothes every Saturday afternoon and, at the same time, pick up the previous week's clothes. Then, for some reason, he stopped coming in. She hadn't seen him for about a month.

WHILE THIS INTERVIEW was taking place, other FBI agents in Los Angeles learned that Eric Galt had briefly secured a telephone service in his room. Although the line had been disconnected in late January, the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company was able to supply the FBI with records of every outgoing and incoming call related to that number--469-8096. This led the agents on an interesting series of goose chases.

One of the numbers turned out to be that of a woman who had sold Galt a console Montgomery Ward TV set through a newspaper classified ad. Another number was listed in the name of Elizabeth Pitt, a woman who had placed a singles ad in a lonely hearts club broadsheet: "Tall skinny auburn haired divorcee, 41, seeks prospective husband with patience," the ad read. Galt had apparently called Pitt with the idea of getting her to appear in a pornographic film, but the phone conversation went nowhere, and they never even went out on a date. A third number turned out to be the Wallace campaign headquarters in Century City--which, for the time being, meant nothing to investigating agents. Probably the most productive find in the bank of numbers Galt had called was that of the National Dance Studio in Long Beach, California.

Special Agent George Aiken 605promptly drove down to the studio, which was located at 2026 Pacific Avenue in Long Beach, in a low-slung building with palm trees out front. There he met the owner, Mr. Rodney Arvidson, who had a vivid memory of his former student. In a large room with a record player and blocking-tape marks on the parquet floor, Galt had taken cha-cha, fox-trot, and swing lessons for several months. "He told me he'd been down in Mexico, sometime in 1967, and that he owned a restaurant," Arvidson said. "He said he was fluent in Spanish, but when I would speak to him in Spanish, he wouldn't say anything back, which led me to believe he wasn't actually conversant."

"How did Galt dress?" Agent Aiken asked.

"Always wore a shirt and tie. He had a pair of shiny black alligator loafers." Arvidson remembered thinking that Galt's appearance didn't jibe with his personality--that he dressed like a businessman, but talked and carried himself like an uneducated and socially awkward person from a decidedly rural, working-class background. "He couldn't seem to relax," Arvidson said. "He didn't smile easily. He was pleasant but evasive--he would never talk about himself and he wouldn't look you in the eye. He had a crooked smile. He said he was a merchant seaman and wanted to return to the sea."

Though Galt seemed to be unemployed, he had plenty of money. Every time Arvidson informed him that another payment was due, Galt would reach into his trousers and happily peel off some twenties from a large roll of bills. All told, he paid more than four hundred dollars for dance lessons and never seemed to balk at the fees.

Arvidson found a card in his office files showing that Galt had previously taken fox-trot and cha-cha dancing lessons while living in Alabama. "Leaving in a couple of months to work on a ship," the card said. "Wants to travel." A box marked S was checked--indicating that Galt was single.

Cathryn Norton, a dance instructor at the studio, told Agent Aiken she had frequently given Galt lessons. "He was a fair dancer," she allowed. "But he wasn't friendly with anyone. He always wore a suit, kept his fingernails clean and neatly trimmed." Norton recalled that he sometimes smoked filter cigarettes and that he had "a nervous habit of pulling on his earlobes with his fingers."

One night someone connected with the dance school hosted a private party at his house, and about twenty people showed up. "Galt came and left alone," Norton recalled. "He had some punch and stayed pretty much to himself. He was like a clam."

Galt's last lesson was on February 12. "When he quit," Arvidson recalled, "all he said was that he wanted to open his own bar and restaurant. He said he was going to enroll in some school to learn how to be a bartender."

"YES," TOMAS LAU said, "Eric Galt was a student here." 606A suave man with a trim mustache, Lau was director of the International School of Bartending at 2125 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The FBI agents Theodore A'Hearn and Richard Raysa, after canvassing all the bartending schools in Southern California, had quickly found Lau's establishment.

Lau believed Galt was "diligent and well-coordinated" and had the potential to become a fine bartender. Lau thought so much of Galt that he even went to the trouble of finding him a job. "But he declined," Lau recalled. "He said he was going to visit his brother somewhere and didn't want a job. He said he'd call me if he still needed a job when he got back."

Another pupil at the school, a man named Donald Jacobs, 607recalled that Galt said he'd been a cook in the merchant marine and worked on riverboats and barges on the Mississippi. Jacobs doubted this was true, because he noticed that Galt's hands "didn't appear calloused or used to hard work."

Beyond the fact that Galt had "thin lips and a slight Southern accent," Lau had trouble recalling what his former pupil looked like. Then he remembered graduation day. "I've got a picture of him somewhere," he volunteered.

"How's that?" Agent A'Hearn couldn't believe what he'd just heard.

"All our graduates get their picture taken with me and the diploma," Lau explained. "It's something we've always done around here."

Lau scoured his scrapbooks and soon found the photograph, which was snapped at the school on March 2. For the first time, an FBI agent was peering at the image of the man now being hunted by three thousand bureau colleagues across the country.

There stood Lau, proudly posing with his student--a slender, narrow-nosed, dark-haired, fair-skinned man wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie. The portrait looked pretty much like all the other graduation photos gracing Lau's scrapbooks, though Agent A'Hearn did notice one peculiarity: Galt's eyes were shut.

38 CANADA BELIEVES YOU

ARMED AT LAST with a photograph of the manhunt's prime suspect, the FBI began to assert its true institutional might--pressing with renewed focus and multi-tentacled determination all across the country. In Los Angeles, agents canvassed the banks in the vicinity of the St. Francis Hotel in search of any monetary trails left by Eric Galt. This proved a hugely successful tack: Although Galt had kept no savings or checking accounts and had failed to establish any credit history, at the Bank of America in Hollywood the agents found that an Eric Galt, in fact, had purchased a series of modest money orders in late 1967 and early 1968. Several of the orders were made out to an establishment in Little Falls, New Jersey, called the Locksmithing Institute.

Within an hour, agents in New Jersey visited the "institute" and learned that it offered correspondence courses in key cutting, lock picking, safecracking, alarm wiring, and other skills of the trade to students all over the world. Before enrolling in the course, Galt had signed an oath swearing that he'd never been convicted of burglary, adding: "I shall never use my knowledge to aid or commit a crime." According to the Locksmithing Institute's records, Galt's last lesson had been mailed to him, only a week earlier, at 113 Fourteenth Street Northeast in Atlanta.