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

Sneyd wasn't going to explain any of this to her, of course, but Spencer graciously intervened before he had to conjure up a story. "I can get you a passport," she said. "Do you have a birth certificate?"

"Well, no," he said.

She told him that was okay, he didn't need a birth certificate.

What about the guarantor? he asked. "I don't know anyone who could serve as my guarantor."

"Not necessary, either," Spencer replied. There was a loophole in the passport rules, she said. From her files, she fished out a government form called "Statutory Declaration in Lieu of Guarantor." Sneyd was simply required to sign the form in the presence of a notary. "As it happens," she said sunnily, "we have a notary right here in the office."

Sneyd couldn't believe his good fortune. He'd had no idea how easy it was in wholesome, trusting Canada to acquire travel papers and inhabit another person's identity: no birth certificate required, no proof of residence, no character witnesses. He'd wasted his time fabricating a web of interlocking aliases, disguises, and residences, when all he had to do was swear before a notary that he was who he said he was. Welcome to Canada , the expression went, we believe you .

Sneyd made quick work of the application forms. Listing his occupation as "car salesman," he provided the real Ramon Sneyd's birth date with his new address at Mrs. Loo's place on Dundas Street West. The application asked, "Person to Notify in Canada in Case of Emergency," to which, predictably, he furnished the name of his doppelganger, "Paul Bridgman, 102 Ossington Avenue, Toronto." It was all terrifically easy, but in his haste he made one critical mistake--he scribbled the last name "Sneyd" in a way that was barely legible.

From his jacket, he retrieved an envelope containing the passport photos he'd sat for at the Arcade Studio a few days before. Sneyd paid Lillian Spencer five dollars for the application and another three dollars for her processing fee. She said the passport would be ready within two weeks--and should arrive in her office about the same time the British Overseas Airways ticket came in. She bade him farewell, and as he ambled out the door, she affixed to his application a note whose frantic truth she could not have guessed. "Please expedite," she wrote, "as our client wishes to leave the country as soon as possible."

39 ARMED AND DANGEROUS

AT THE FBI headquarters in Washington, the MURKIN investigation had been steadily building throughout the week, steadily swelling toward an evidentiary crescendo. Individually, the thousands of isolated puzzle pieces that agents had thus far accumulated meant little and proved nothing; taken as a whole, however, they were starting to paint a single portrait and point toward a single man. The mounting evidence kept landing on the same individual, over and over and over again--the same shadowy figure, nervous, fidgety, wearing a suit, living in flophouses, and driving a white Mustang.

In quite a literal sense, the puzzle pieces were coming together: they were now arrayed on a single large table in a harshly lit FBI examination room. Since April 4, the FBI had compiled a staggering amount of stuff--hundreds and hundreds of miscellaneous objects that seemed to bear no relation to one another, like the scattered debris at an airplane crash. A Schlitz beer can. A package of lima beans. A bullet housing. A strand of hair. A scrap of paper. A pocket radio. A receipt with handwriting on it. A shutter-release cable for a camera. A coffee cup immersion heater. A marked-up map. A pair of undershorts. A twenty-dollar bill. A portable television. A set of binoculars. A bottle of French salad dressing. A toothbrush. A rifle.

Cartha DeLoach had the bureau's best minds poring over this mass of evidence--not just fingerprint people, but handwriting people, fiber-analysis people, photographic specialists, ultraviolet light technicians, ballistics experts. The connections these professionals began to discern were dizzying, the links intriguing, the microscopic matches too numerous to count. What they saw was a thousand little arrows, each one seemingly pointing to some other arrow.

Fibers found in the trunk of the impounded Mustang matched fibers taken from the bundle's herringbone bedspread. Eric Galt's signature on the registration card at the New Rebel Motel in Memphis matched handwriting samples obtained all along the investigatory trail. Hairs in Galt's comb matched hairs found in the Mustang sweepings. The physical, the circumstantial, and the purely anecdotal seemed increasingly interwoven: The "Turista" stickers affixed to the car jibed with Stein's recollections that Galt said he'd once owned a bar in Mexico. When buying the gun in Birmingham, Lowmeyer had mentioned going hunting "with my brother," while people at both the bartending and the dancing schools also recalled that Galt mentioned a forthcoming trip to visit a brother. The story about Galt pressuring Charlie and Rita Stein, and their cousin Marie Tomaso, to lend their signatures to the George Wallace campaign seemed somehow connected to Galt's Alabama license plates, his former Alabama residence, and other emerging ties to George Wallace's home state.

Every imaginable detail--the Thermo-Seal laundry tags, the auto service sticker, the change-of-address form, the maps, the fingerprint-laden Afta aftershave lotion, the money orders, Marie Tomaso's Zenith television found abandoned two thousand miles away in Atlanta--seemed to link Galt's movements together. The car was connected to the bundle, was connected to the gun, was connected to the binoculars. Atlanta was connected to Memphis, was connected to Mexico, was connected to Los Angeles and Birmingham and back to Atlanta again. It was all a single web.

Two pieces of late-breaking evidence clinched the FBI's confidence that they were onto the right man. The first came on April 16, when agents in Atlanta found the laundry service 625Eric Galt had used on Peachtree Street. Annie Estelle Peters, the desk clerk at Piedmont Laundry, checked her records and noted that Galt had picked up his clothes on the morning of April 5, the day after the assassination--the same day he'd parked the Mustang at Capitol Homes and vacated his rooming house, leaving a note on his bed. Galt's inculpatory movements seemed now almost perfectly clear: staying in Memphis at the New Rebel Motel on the night of April 3, he had raced back to Atlanta after the assassination, whereupon he'd abandoned his car, picked up his laundry, cleared out of his room--and apparently left town for good.

Then, from George Bonebrake and his fingerprint experts, came the coup de grace: a fingerprint raised from a map 626of Mexico in Galt's Atlanta room matched a fingerprint found on the .30-06 Gamemaster rifle.

"Our net was beginning to close," 627said DeLoach. "It was all becoming obvious--Galt and Lowmeyer and Willard were one and the same man." What kind of man was the subject of ongoing speculation, but DeLoach boiled the suspect down this way: "Poorly educated, without scruples, and with a touch of animal cunning. But we knew he had one weakness--he liked to dance."

UNTIL THIS POINT in the investigation, the FBI had been working in almost total secrecy. Hoover and DeLoach had repeatedly admonished all the SACs in all the field offices across the country that the word was mum--nothing, apart from that one artist's composite sketch of the killer, was to be leaked to the media or to any local law-enforcement agencies. This nearly complete lockdown on information served a strategic purpose, of course--to keep the assassin and any accomplices forever guessing--but it also made fertile ground for the sprouting of conspiracy theories.