Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (36 page)

IN A FIFTH-FLOOR conference room at the U.S. Justice Department building in Washington, Attorney General Ramsey Clark received word of King's death just moments after it was announced in Memphis. Fearing that the nation was about to come apart at the seams, Clark viewed King's death as "a tragic setback
⁴¹¹
and stunning on a personal level."

The attorney general instantly knew that the FBI would have to take over the case--although murder, even the murder of a nationally prominent citizen, was not a federal crime. But the assassination of Martin Luther King was too momentous to leave to the Memphis Police Department. Clark also realized there was a strong likelihood that King's assailant had already crossed state lines, thus making this a multi-jurisdictional case.

Clark assigned a phalanx of Justice Department lawyers the task of finding workable legal grounds for the FBI's immediately taking on the case. They hastily zeroed in on Title 18, section 241 of the U.S. Code, which "prohibits conspiracies to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of the United States."

Attorney General Clark next put in a call to Cartha DeLoach, the assistant director of the FBI, who had just arrived at home. "I think the bureau
⁴¹²
should investigate," he told DeLoach, briefly outlining the "conspiracies to injure" clause Justice planned to invoke. No expense should be spared, Clark insisted. "Get as many facts as you can. I'll call the White House."

Clark's unspoken implication was that DeLoach should call Hoover, since Clark's relationship with the FBI director was so bad that the two were hardly on speaking terms. DeLoach took the cue and got Hoover on his private line. He recalled the conversation years later in his memoir.

"Some idiot shot Martin Luther King," DeLoach said.

The director had heard all about the assassination, of course, and wouldn't let DeLoach get a word in edgewise. "Do
not
accept responsibility for this investigation," Hoover demanded in his machine-gun sputter. "This is a local matter. Offer Memphis whatever help they need--ballistics, fingerprints, criminal records. But this case falls under the jurisdiction of city and state police."

Eventually, DeLoach was able to interrupt the Old Man's tirade long enough to say that he'd already heard from the attorney general. "Clark says he wants us to take over the case."

After a long pause, Hoover heaved a sigh. "Well he
would,"
he said in exasperation. Hoover must have shuddered at the thought that his bureau was now charged with the responsibility of solving the murder of a man he detested, a man he and his COINTELPRO agents had so determinedly tried to smear, sabotage, and "neutralize."

DeLoach explained that Justice had already ginned up some sort of legal rationale. DeLoach said he thought Clark's decision was sound. Even though King was a private citizen, how odd it would seem, to the country and to the world, for the FBI
not
to take charge of the most prominent national murder case since the JFK assassination. It was, he said, "a crime of immense importance
⁴¹³
to the nation" and one characterized by great "external pressures."

"OK, go ahead," Hoover curtly said, recognizing the futility of his argument. "But I want
you
to take charge. Don't let Clark turn this into a political circus. You make it clear this is the FBI's case."

Then, without another word, he hung up.

With this awkward and decidedly herky-jerky start, the FBI's search for MLK's killer began, a manhunt that would become the largest in American history, ultimately involving more than thirty-five hundred FBI agents and costing the government nearly two million dollars. From the moment of its inception, the investigation into King's assassination was characterized by a certain cognitive dissonance at the top: a hidebound FBI director charged with finding the assassin of a man he loathed, all the while answerable to (yet barely on speaking terms with) a liberal young attorney general who revered the deceased. Cartha DeLoach, as usual, found himself in the middle of it all. "Hoover remained at war
⁴¹⁴
with Clark," he later wrote, "and I was in the line of fire." It was an arrangement, DeLoach said, that would often leave his "pressure gauge registering in the red."

DeLoach believed that despite Hoover's hatred of King, the Old Man was committed to using every ounce of the bureau's considerable power to chase the assassin down. As DeLoach put it, "He was as anxious
⁴¹⁵
as anyone to find King's killer, even though he disapproved of the man. We had a job to do and we were prepared to do it. The case was handled in a very intensified manner, and everyone in the FBI was called upon to help out."

Ramsey Clark agreed: "The FBI's reputation
⁴¹⁶
was at stake, and there was nothing more important to Hoover than the bureau's reputation. Hoover was afraid people were going to say
he
did it. So he was all out for finding the killer. And from the start you could feel it in the pace and the seriousness of the people in the bureau."

DeLoach called Robert Jensen, special agent in charge of the FBI's Memphis field office. Jensen had already visited the crime scene and had been in close consultation with Memphis homicide detectives only minutes after King's shooting was first reported. "The AG wants us to take over the case," DeLoach announced. Jensen understood immediately what that meant: as the field office of origin, Memphis would serve, along with Washington, as the command center of the national investigation. Until the case was resolved, Jensen would have to play the formidable and thankless role of bureau point man--"the guy," as DeLoach put it, "with a thousand opportunities
⁴¹⁷
to screw up."

But DeLoach had faith in Jensen, whom he viewed as "very experienced and thorough." Born in Denmark
⁴¹⁸
and raised in Detroit, Robert G. Jensen had served as a navigator in World War II, flying twenty-five missions over Europe. After attending the University of Michigan, he'd spent twenty-one years in the FBI, serving in Philadelphia, Miami, Birmingham, and Washington, D.C. A bit of a golf nut, Jensen was taciturn, levelheaded, and equipped with a wry wit that was accentuated by slightly crooked front teeth. Most of all, he was calm, a quality that stood him in good stead as he faced the likely hysteria of the coming weeks.

DeLoach ordered Jensen to gather the crime scene information and get the physical evidence on a plane straightaway so forensic experts at the FBI's crime lab could begin to analyze it. "As you well know,"
⁴¹⁹
DeLoach told Jensen, "this has to be solved as soon as possible. We need to full-court press this--all your people on the job till they drop."

WHEN INSPECTOR NEVELYN ZACHARY of the Memphis Police Department's Homicide Bureau arrived at 424 South Main Street, the bundle was still there in the vestibule of Canipe's Amusement Company, guarded over by a policeman holding a shotgun. Zachary had the bundle photographed just as it was found. Then he put on gloves so as not to tamper with the evidence and took the bundle into his possession. But Zachary's custody of this extraordinary little trove would only last several hours, while Clark, DeLoach, and Hoover conferred about whether the FBI should fully enter the case. Some time after 8:00 p.m., the bundle was raced to the downtown field office of the FBI and placed in the hands of Special Agent Jensen.

Now Jensen removed
⁴²⁰
the faded green herringbone bedspread that was loosely wrapped around the contents. To him, it looked like an old bedspread that had come from a cheap motel somewhere. He laid out the material on a well-lit table in an examining room and put on a pair of latex gloves. Then, sensing that the solution to the case might well be contained in these very belongings, Special Agent Jensen began to take a careful inventory.

The first and most obvious thing that drew his attention was the black cardboard rifle box. It was originally made for a Browning but now contained a Remington Gamemaster .30-06 rifle. Jensen quickly ascertained that it was a Model 760, serial number 461476, and it seemed to be newly purchased: it hardly had a scratch on it. The weapon was mounted with a Redfield telescopic sight. The magazine was empty, but inside the chamber he found a spent casing, which he carefully removed.

Jensen also found a twenty-round box containing nine cartridges. They were Remington-Peters .30-06 soft-pointed, metal-jacketed Springfield High Velocity cartridges--150 grain.

Beside the box of ammo was a blue plastic zippered suitcase approximately twenty by thirty inches, stuffed with an odd miscellany of objects. Among other things, Jensen removed a magnetic tack hammer, a pair of flat-nosed duckbill pliers with the words "Rompage Hardware" stamped on the handle, and two road maps--"The United States" and "Georgia-Alabama." He also found that morning's front section of the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
. On page one, the newspaper conspicuously carried reports about Dr. King's efforts in Memphis and mentioned that King and his entourage were staying at the Lorraine Motel.

Then, from deeper inside the bag, Jensen retrieved a pair of binoculars, which seemed brand-new and were packed with an instruction booklet and lens cloth as well as a box and a black leather carrying case. The binoculars were made by the Bushnell company, serial number DQ 408664. Jensen confirmed that two slender buckled leather straps that Memphis police had earlier found in John Willard's room fit the binoculars perfectly--evidence that whoever dropped the bundle outside had almost certainly been in 5B.

There was little mystery when and where the binoculars had been purchased--Jensen found a paper sack that said, "York Arms Company," with a receipt for $41.55, dated that very day. York Arms, Jensen knew, was just down Main Street from the rooming house, on the same stretch of the street where the striking garbage workers had been picketing each day with their I AM A MAN sandwich boards.

The bag held a few clothing items, too--a pair of long black socks, a gray cloth belt, a pair of gray and white undershorts rather clumsily darned in the crotch with brown thread, a white handkerchief, a Jockey Power-Knit T-shirt. Picking further into the folds of the suitcase, Jensen found a brown bag containing two aluminum cans of Schlitz--"The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous," the labels said. Stickers affixed to the can bottoms indicated that the six-pack had been taxed and purchased in Mississippi.

Jensen found that most of the remaining items in the suitcase were drugstore sundries--a tube of Colgate toothpaste, a Pepsodent brand toothbrush, an aerosol can of Gillette shaving cream, Right Guard deodorant, razor blades, Bufferin tablets, a bar of Dial soap, Palmolive Rapid Shave, One A Day vitamins, Mennen Afta aftershave lotion, Head & Shoulders shampoo, a box of Band-Aid sheer strips, Brylcreem, a can of Kiwi brown shoe polish. There were also two small hotel-size bars of soap--Cashmere and Palmolive--that the assailant had perhaps taken from a motel bathroom somewhere along his travels. Whoever he was, Jensen thought, the guy was frugal and very keen on personal hygiene and the maintenance of his clothes--an incongruous fact, given the slovenly standards at Mrs. Brewer's flophouse. Some of these toiletries had been bought in the Memphis area, Jensen realized: they bore adhesive price stickers stamped "Oliver Rexall, Whitehaven."

There was one final item in the suitcase, a piece of merchandise that gave Jensen pause: a pocket-sized transistor radio made by Channel Master. The radio looked as though it had some miles on it; the maroon plastic housing was smudged and scratched, and the perforated silver grille over the speaker had a few dings.

On the side, faintly scratched in small numerals, the radio bore a curious aftermarket identification number. But Special Agent Jensen couldn't make out the numerals; to him, it looked as though the number had been deliberately tampered with in order to make it illegible.

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THEY'VE TORN IT NOW