Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (23 page)

AFTER BUYING THE rifle and scope in Birmingham, Eric Galt returned to his Atlanta rooming house, taking care to keep his new acquisition hidden from other tenants and his landlord. He spent much of his time reading the
Atlanta Constitution
, which gave extensive coverage to King's troubles in Memphis and reported, on April 1, his vow to return in a few days for a peaceful demonstration down Beale Street.

Suddenly Galt knew where he needed to be. King's frenetic pace, combined with the constant, improvisational changes to his schedule, had made him nearly impossible to track; the peripatetic minister had scarcely been home in Atlanta during the time Galt had been living at the rooming house. But on this occasion the papers had neatly forecast the precise location of King's next appearance--on historic Beale in downtown Memphis--and conveniently gave Galt several days to plan ahead.

"You must have a goal
²⁸³
to shoot for, and a straight course to follow," Dr. Maltz had urged in
Psycho-Cybernetics
. "Do the thing and you will have the power."

A straight course was exactly what Galt had now; one could detect in his patterns a sudden sense of focus. He began to accelerate his movements, to concentrate his formerly fevered and desultory thoughts, to make clear and cogent preparations. He paid another week's rent at his Atlanta rooming house. He bought a map designated "Georgia-Alabama," another of the entire United States, from which he planned his route to Tennessee. On April 1, at about 10:00 a.m., he dropped off a bundle of dirty clothes
²⁸⁴
at the Piedmont Laundry around the corner at 1168 Peachtree Street--giving fastidious instructions to the counter clerk about items he wanted dry-cleaned, including a black-checked suit coat. As always, he said he wanted his regular laundry folded, with no starch. The laundry's desk clerk, Mrs. Annie Estelle Peters, wrote his name on the ticket in perfect Palmer penmanship cursive--"Galt, Eric."

On April 2, Galt threw a few belongings together and placed his Gamemaster rifle, still awkwardly nestled inside its Browning box, in the trunk of his car. He tossed some toiletries and clothes in a cheap, Japanese-made leatherette zippered bag, as well as his Remington-Peters ammo, his camera equipment, and, the better to monitor King's movements, his Channel Master transistor radio. Galt left most of his other belongings--including his Zenith television--in his room. Fearing a break-in, he decided to hide his snub-nosed .38 revolver
²⁸⁵
in the flophouse's basement.

It was a warm spring morning, and the sun shone at his back as Galt drove the Mustang west out of Atlanta, toward Memphis. As the road spooled into the Georgia piney woods, he was alone with his thoughts and the hypnotic thrum of the V-8 engine. He hurtled over country roads, past Indian mounds and termite-chewed barns and rutted ditches of rust-red soil. Spring had arrived in earnest. Buds appeared on the deciduous trees, and the warming earth swelled with bright new blooms--jasmine, wild cherry, forsythia. It was the time of year when newly hatched bugs snapped from the greening thickets and splattered on windshields, and the skies swarmed with great black clouds of starlings.

Galt cut a jagged crease across the kudzu-strangled Southland, across countryside that Nathan Bedford Forrest and his marauders had prowled during the Civil War. Keeping to the Lee Highway--Highway 72--he shot past Huntsville and Madison and Muscle Shoals, past Tuscumbia and Cherokee and Iuka. Galt angled ever closer to the Tennessee state line, at one point passing not far from Pulaski, birthplace of the KKK. Along the way, he discovered that one of his tires had a slow leak, and he pulled over to change it.

As he drew nearer to Memphis, he must have regretted that he hadn't had an opportunity to test-fire his new rifle. Outside the old Confederate rail crossroads of Corinth, Mississippi, just a few crow miles from the Tennessee border and not far from the battlefield of Shiloh, Galt pulled off the road and found a secluded place.
²⁸⁶

The bloodbath at Shiloh had begun 106 years earlier to the week, on an early April day much like this one. Lasting a mere two days, the engagement ended with twenty-four thousand dead and wounded--more than all the American casualties of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War
combined
. This battle, fought in the vicinity of a small country church, affirmed everyone's worst fears, North and South--that madness would prevail, that the War Between the States would descend into a protracted horror of staggering loss.

The writer Ambrose Bierce, who fought here as a young man, described the woods around Shiloh as a "smoking jungle"
²⁸⁷
so deep and dark that "I should not have been surprised to see sleek leopards." Now, behind a scrim of similar woods just south of the battlefield, Galt cut the engine and opened the trunk. Studying the Gamemaster in the filtered light, he familiarized himself with its components, with the contour of its walnut stock, with the heft of its butt and the feel of its pump-action mechanism. The moving parts of the gun worked seemingly without friction, thanks to a proprietary burnishing process the Remington company called "vibra-honing."

Galt was loath to draw attention to himself--a farmer, a Civil War buff, or even a Mississippi state trooper could be within earshot--but he knew he had to test the Gamemaster's accuracy. He needed to make sure the Redfield scope was properly aligned and showing no idiosyncrasies. He wanted to acquaint himself with the rifle's powerful kick, and examine the trajectory to see for himself how much the bullet dropped over long distances.

Galt leveled the Remington and trained his scope on a target off in the hazy woods. Then he curled his finger around the trigger.

Deer hunting season had ended months earlier, so any knowledgeable sportsman who happened to be passing through that drowsy stretch of the Magnolia State might have been surprised to hear, in the first week of April, the ragged concussions of a high-powered hunting rifle as a succession of .30-06 shells whined through the trees.

19
TORNADO WARNINGS

AT 7:00 ON the morning of Wednesday, April 3, Ralph Abernathy dropped by the house on Sunset to pick up King and drive to the Atlanta airport. Coretta offered breakfast, but the men were late for their plane to Memphis. King tossed some books into his briefcase, packed a few suits, and headed for the kitchen. "I'll call you tonight," he said, giving his wife a kiss.

King was nursing a slight cold, but other than that Coretta didn't sense that anything was amiss. "It was an ordinary goodbye,"
²⁸⁸
she later recalled, "like thousands of other times before."

The two men hopped into Abernathy's 1955 Ford and sped to the airport, arriving just in time for the flight. At the gate, they met a few other SCLC staff members--Dorothy Cotton, Bernard Lee, and Andy Young--and they all scurried aboard the Eastern Air Lines jet.

They needn't have rushed: for nearly an hour the plane remained idling at the gate. People began to grumble and crane their necks to learn the cause of the holdup. Eventually, the pilot's voice broke over the intercom to apologize. "We have a celebrity
²⁸⁹
on board this morning," he said, "and we're required to check every piece of luggage in the entire cargo hold for explosives." An anonymous caller had phoned Eastern Air Lines with a threat to blow up Martin Luther King's plane.

King cut a worried look at Abernathy. "Ralph," he said, "I've never had a pilot say that before."

Eastern Flight 381 finally pushed off from the gate and taxied down the runway. "Well," King said with a mordant grin, "looks like they won't kill me this flight."

"Nobody's going to kill you,
²⁹⁰
Martin," Abernathy replied. He could tell the episode had rattled his friend. King stared pensively out the window as the plane rose over Atlanta and circled west.

The jet landed at 10:30 Memphis time and pulled up to Gate 17. King stepped off the plane and was met by a small entourage that included the Reverend Jim Lawson and a chauffeur named Solomon Jones, who was driving a big white Cadillac provided for King's use by the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home. King moved briskly through the terminal, walking a gauntlet of television cameras, police officers, undercover detectives, and FBI agents. Lawson did not trust the cops, though they were ostensibly there for King's protection. When one of the Memphis Police Department officers stepped forward to ask Lawson where they were headed, the minister tried to shoo him away, saying, "We have not fully made up our minds."
²⁹¹

Among the plainclothes policemen posted in the terminal were two black officers, Detective Edward Redditt and Patrolman Willie Richmond. They had been assigned to work as an undercover team and follow King everywhere he went during his Memphis stay. But some of the Memphis strike organizers were onto Redditt (he had been conducting surveillance on strike activities for weeks), and they took him for a spy if not a traitor to his race. That morning, a prominent female activist named Tarlease Mathews approached Redditt in the airport and fairly hissed at him: "If I were a man
²⁹²
I would kill you."

KING AND HIS party stepped outside and approached a waiting convoy of cars. The weather was turning blustery--thunderstorms were in the forecast, and meteorologists announced that the mid-South was under a tornado watch. With plainclothesmen Redditt and Richmond following close behind, the motorcade drove downtown so King and Abernathy could check in to the Lorraine Motel.

Nearly all of King's staff members were lodging at the Lorraine--James Bevel, James Orange, Jesse Jackson, Hosea Williams, Chauncey Eskridge, Bernard Lee, and Dorothy Cotton, as well as Young and Abernathy. A South African filmmaker named Joseph Louw, working on a PBS documentary about the Poor People's Campaign, was also staying in the motel, as was a black
New York Times
reporter named Earl Caldwell. A few rooms had been reserved for the Invaders, with whom King's staff was intensely negotiating. Then, too, King was expecting the arrival of his younger brother, A. D. King, who was a minister in Louisville, Kentucky. AD had been on a road trip with his girlfriend, Lucretia Ward, in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. They were driving her baby blue Cadillac convertible, and were bringing along a young black state senator from Louisville named Georgia Davis, one of Martin Luther King's mistresses. They were supposed to arrive late that night.

Now a cameraman from Channel 5, the NBC affiliate in Memphis, took a shot of the SCLC entourage standing on the balcony, in front of 306, the brass numerals gleaming in the sun. King was set up in his familiar digs--if not in his favorite city, at least in his favorite room at his favorite hotel, with his staff and closest confidants around him. Whatever might happen in Memphis that week, his world was in place at the Lorraine.

SHORTLY AFTER LUNCH, King and much of the staff took off in a convoy for the Reverend James Lawson's Centenary United Methodist Church to discuss strategies for the coming march. There King learned that the City of Memphis had succeeded late that morning in obtaining a federal injunction effectively preventing him from staging
any
demonstration for the next ten days. Among the many arguments raised by the city attorney, Frank Gianotti, was the legitimate worry that King could be in mortal danger should he lead another march down Beale Street. "We are fearful,"
²⁹³
Gianotti said in U.S. District Court, "that in the turmoil of the moment someone may harm King's life, and with all the force of language we can use we want to emphasize that we don't want that to happen."