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

The sheer oddness of the name Eric Starvo Galt already had people guessing. Journalists and commentators began to ransack the bins of pop culture for clues, and a kind of spirited scavenger hunt of the zeitgeist got under way.

It was widely noted that John Galt was the elusive protagonist of Ayn Rand's controversial 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged . Rand's thousand-page anvil of prose begins with the question "Who is John Galt?"--and as her libertarian saga unfolds, Galt emerges as a savior-like figure who exposes the evils of the welfare state and then brings American civilization to its knees with a top-down strike of the nation's leading innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, and captains of industry, who decamp to a secret city lofted high in the Rocky Mountains. Atlas Shrugged laid out, in fictional form, Ayn Rand's personal philosophy of objectivism, which held that altruism toward society's unfortunates was not only misguided and ineffectual but also evil; that rational self-interest was the only moral principle that could guide a person to happiness; and that government should keep out of the great clashings of human affairs. "I swear by my life and my love of it," Galt declares in the novel's most famous line, "that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

Could there be a connection here? Could Eric Galt be a literary allusion, a planted clue, that harked back to the granite-hard philosophies embedded in Atlas Shrugged? Could the killer be a radical Ayn Randian? Or some hit man hired by a wacko libertarian industrialist? A reporter for the Atlanta Constitution noted that in the novel, John Galt "destroyed the production plants 637of civilization because he hated the 'welfare state' that took from the producers and gave to the weak"--and then went on to observe that Martin Luther King, with his cries for the redistribution of wealth that lay at the heart of his coming Poor People's Campaign, was "perhaps the world's most outspoken proponent of those things the fictional John Galt hated."

Other commentator-sleuths went in a different direction. Could the name Eric Starvo Galt be a glancing reference to the most famous super-villain then populating the pages of international spy fiction? In several Ian Fleming novels, including On Her Majesty's Secret Service , James Bond's arch nemesis is Ernst Stavro Blofeld, an evil genius who leads a criminal organization called SPECTRE that's bent on "a most diabolical plot for murder on a mass scale." In the 007 films, Ernst Stavro Blofeld--a.k.a. Number 1--was depicted as a bald man in a Nehru getup; he had a hideous facial scar and was usually seen stroking a white Persian cat.

True crime growing from the pages of fiction? It didn't make much sense, but its pull was irresistible. All over the country, people began to comb through Bond thrillers and Ayn Rand books, underlining key phrases, hunting for esoteric clues. FBI agents even got in on the research. If nothing else, the allusions to James Bond and John Galt cemented early on the notion that the killer was part of a shadowy and well-oiled international conspiracy--a SPECTRE-like syndicate--that made him seem all the more exotic and mysterious.

IN TORONTO, Eric Galt's photograph was plastered on page one of the morning Star . The large headline read: FBI SAYS THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY--MYSTERIOUS SEAMAN SOUGHT IN KING DEATH. When Mrs. Szpakowski saw the picture that morning, April 18, she instantly thought of her roomer. She stared and stared at the photograph with the weird eyes, studying it from all angles. She thought about the man who called himself Paul Bridgman, his odd habits, his nervousness, his seeming addiction to newspapers. All morning she fretted over what to do. She showed a copy of the Star to her husband, Adam. Pointing toward the ceiling, she said, "He is the man who killed 638Martin Luther King."

Who is the man? What are you talking about?

"Paul Bridgman," she said. "The man upstairs. He's the killer they've been looking for."

"You're crazy in the head," Adam told his wife.

"But he looks just like him. We should call the police," she insisted.

"Fela, you're crazy. You'll only make a fool of yourself."

Mrs. Szpakowski relented. She never picked up the phone. Burying her suspicions, she went about her chores for the day. Then, while making the rounds the following morning, she learned that Paul Bridgman, without any notice, had vacated his room. He'd left his key on the table in the foyer. When she cleaned his room, Mrs. Szpakowski found an edition of the Toronto Star sitting on the bed, with the same picture of King's accused assassin. The image gave her a chill.

THE FBI REMAINED confident that the warrant they'd issued the previous day was correct, that Eric S. Galt was indeed their man. What they weren't sure about was whether Eric Galt was really Eric Galt. The suspect clearly had a penchant for using multiple aliases, and Galt could very well be just another one. As Cartha DeLoach well knew, isolating a suspect was one thing; positively identifying him was something else again.

To that end, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake and his men at the crime lab had been methodically poring over the fingerprints found on various objects in the bundle, in the Mustang, and in the Atlanta rooming house and comparing them with select batches of prints on file at FBI headquarters. Bonebrake had considerably narrowed the search by concentrating on men under fifty and over twenty-one, but that still left some three million sets of prints to examine--an aneurysm-inducing chore that could take many months and still turn up nothing.

Hoover and DeLoach realized they had to figure out some other way to narrow the search. DeLoach hunkered down with other high-ranking officials and sifted through all the evidence gathered thus far. As they did, a clear pattern began to emerge: Galt, even before the assassination, seemed to be acting like a man on the run. "All the signs were there," 639DeLoach said. "The aliases, the movement from one place to another, the reluctance to make friends, the caution, the restraint. Galt was behaving like an escaped convict trying to avoid detection."

Thus an idea was born. DeLoach picked up the phone and called Bonebrake's boss, Les Trotter, director of the FBI's Identification Division for fingerprints. DeLoach later recalled the conversation in his memoirs. "Les, we have pretty good evidence 640that Galt is an escapee," DeLoach said. "How many 'Wanted' notices do we currently have in our files?"

"About 53,000," Trotter said.

DeLoach grimaced. "Well," he said, "at least that's better than three million."

The task before them was clear: DeLoach wanted Bonebrake's men to compare the "Galt" prints with the prints of all fifty-three thousand wanted fugitives. "You've got to put all your people on this," DeLoach said.

"When do you want us to begin?" Trotter asked.

"How about today?"

The examiners began working in the late afternoon of April 18, exactly two weeks after the assassination. Additional experts from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Richmond hastened to Washington to assist in the round-the-clock effort. DeLoach said he didn't need to remind them that "we're under tremendous pressure, 641and that our cities are powder kegs."

Bonebrake zeroed in on Galt's left thumbprint found on both the rifle and the binoculars. It was their highest-quality print, the one that manifested a clear loop pattern with twelve ridge counts. To his pleasant surprise, Bonebrake learned that the FBI files of known fugitives held only nineteen hundred thumbprints with loops of between ten and fourteen ridge counts. This was encouraging: suddenly the monumentality of Bonebrake's project had shrunk by several orders of magnitude. The teams of experts ranged around a table, facing a blowup poster of Galt's thumbprint. They got out their magnifying glasses and went to work.