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

The longer the investigation crept along without resolution, the more it looked to a doubting public as though the agents of Hoover's famously King-hating bureau either were deliberately dragging their feet or were themselves involved in the assassination. DeLoach felt that arousing public suspicion was a risk the bureau would simply have to take. A case like this could only be solved behind the scenes--through methodical detective work, careful lab analysis, and a relentless pursuit of every plausible lead.

The media were emphatically shut out. For nearly two weeks, even the most enterprising crime reporters, journalists who previously enjoyed an "in" with the FBI, now found themselves rebuffed and stonewalled. The special agent in charge in Atlanta told one such reporter: "All I can say 628is 'No comment.' We could talk all night and still all I could say is, 'No comment.'"

Wednesday, April 17, would be a very different day for the MURKIN case. It was the day the FBI would finally, briefly go public.

At the Justice Department that morning, the FBI announced that it was issuing a warrant 629for a thirty-six-year-old fugitive named Eric Starvo Galt. The warrant stated that Galt--alias Harvey Lowmeyer, alias John Willard--along with a person "whom he alleged to be his brother," had entered into a conspiracy "to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate Martin Luther King, Junior." The Justice Department had to invoke this slightly garbled legalese because murder is a state and local, not a federal, crime; the FBI could arrest Galt for conspiring to violate King's civil rights, but not for murdering him.

The warrant went on to describe Galt's personal idiosyncrasies in some detail: "He probably does not have a high degree of education ... is said to drink alcoholic beverages with a preference for vodka and beer ... has a nervous habit of pulling at an earlobe with his hand ... an avid dancer ... left ear protrudes farther from his head than his right." Noting that Galt was a neat dresser and a devotee of country-and-western music, the warrant concluded: "He should be considered armed and dangerous."

The FBI also released to the media two photographs--the bartending school picture of Galt in his bow tie with his eyes closed, and then the same picture, with the eyes filled in by an FBI sketch artist. Perhaps it's true that the outward markers of human identity abide uniquely in the eyes, but neither one of the images looked much like the real fugitive-- especially the one doctored by the artist. In that image, Galt looked like a wax figure, a mannequin, a freakish fake. Though it was hard to pinpoint just what was "off" about them, the drawn-in eyes gave Galt a creepy cartoon quality that, in terms of helping the public find the killer, would probably do more harm than good. His ruse before the camera seemed to have accomplished what he'd hoped.

The Eric Galt warrant, with its accompanying photos, represented the full extent of the FBI's offerings for the day. Justice Department officials in the room announced that they would take no questions. When one reporter tested an official by asking a question anyway--what was the provenance of the photos?--he brusquely replied: "No comment."

WHILE WASHINGTON REPORTERS were scrambling for the phones, the fugitive was walking down a street in Toronto not far from his rooming house, where he very nearly blundered into a disaster. Ramon Sneyd was out of sorts that day, flustered, anxious about the passport application he had submitted, through the Kennedy travel agency, the day before. With some trepidation, he realized he had two weeks to do nothing, two weeks for something to go wrong. What if the paperwork didn't go through? What if the photo set off alarm bells? What if the passport officials contacted the real Ramon Sneyd?

Perhaps it was this nagging jumble of worries that caused him not to pay attention to what he was doing that afternoon, leading him to make a stupid mistake: he jaywalked across a busy street. 630

Immediately, a policeman approached him. Excuse me, sir, the cop said, do you realize you have broken the law?

Sneyd's heart sank. For a brief moment, he thought the jig was up. You must cross at the intersection, the cop said. "I'm afraid I must issue you a ticket. The fine is three dollars."

Sneyd was surprised, amused, relieved, and elated--all at the same time. But when the cop inquired, "Name and address, please," Sneyd realized he had a problem. He wasn't sure what to tell him. He knew that the real Ramon Sneyd was a Toronto policeman--who knew, maybe even a friend of this very traffic cop?--and so he recognized using that name was too risky. In his wallet, stupidly, he still had his Alabama driver's license, made out to Eric Galt--who, although Sneyd didn't know it yet, was the most wanted man in North America.

He had to think on his feet. He gave some other phony name that surfaced from his imagination, then provided an address, 6 Condor Avenue, which happened to be the real address of a brothel that he had apparently visited in Toronto.

He worried the cop might smell something fishy and feared that he might ask for an ID. But this was wholesome Canada, trusting Canada. The cop believed him. He wrote up the ticket, took Sneyd's three dollars, and went along his way.

Sneyd was disgusted with his obtuseness--not only for jaywalking, but also for still having his Galt ID on his person. As soon as he could, he shredded his driver's license 631and tossed it in his trash. For a brief time, while awaiting the arrival of his birth certificate and a passport, he was without identity, dwelling in a document-less purgatory, a man without a name.

40 THE PHANTOM FUGITIVE

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, newspapers all across North America and the world carried page-one photos of Eric Starvo Galt. He was the talk of the nation, the subject of party chatter, the name on the lips of every radio voice along the dial. But the queer-looking pictures, together with the bizarre train of facts that the FBI had assembled, seemed to raise more questions than they answered. What kind of name was Eric Starvo Galt? What kind of assassin was this--this avid dancer who listens to hillbilly music? What was the story behind those eyes?

Papers all over the country were full of inflamed speculation. Crime reporters out-purpled each other with nicknames for the wanted man. He was "the man without a past." 632He was "the man who never was." He was "the sharp-nosed stranger," "the will-o'-the-wisp," "the mystery man," "the phantom fugitive."

Those fake-looking ovoid eyes in the photographs raised doubts across the country. Though both Jimmie Garner and the gun salesman at Aeromarine claimed to recognize the man in the photo, other key witnesses along the trail began to voice their concerns that the FBI had the wrong man. Peter Cherpes, Galt's Greek-American landlord in Birmingham, said: "No, that's not him, 633I don't think so." Charlie Stephens, the tubercular alcoholic in Memphis who'd glimpsed John Willard in the rooming house hallway, said the FBI portrait "doesn't register." Bessie Brewer shared her roomer's doubts. "I just don't know," 634she told reporters. "I just don't know if it's him."

Some journalists injected notes of profound skepticism. Galt, said a Newsweek writer a few days later, "was a two-dimensional cutout, 635with a name that could have been pasted together out of paperback novels." Galt, like Willard and Lowmeyer, must be an alias, for the "deepest catacombs of a record-happy society--from the IRS to the Selective Service--yielded nothing under his name." A reporter for Memphis's Commercial Appeal thought the character the FBI had presented to the world bore all the hallmarks of bad crime noir. "Fiction wouldn't touch it," 636the reporter wrote. "The worst detective story writers in the world know how far they can stretch things before the reader throws down the magazine and says, 'Oh, let's not be ridiculous.'"