Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (46 page)

AS THE HANLEY Bell Street Funeral Home was taking delivery of King's body in Atlanta, Eric Galt was only a few miles away, at the Greyhound bus terminal, buying a one-way ticket
⁵³³
for points north. The waiting room was the usual sweaty swirl of humanity--soldiers on leave, itinerant workers, mothers comforting croupy babies. People sat smoking on the molded plastic benches, half listening to the shrill squawk of the loudspeaker announcing delays and cancellations, the buses now boarding for Charleston, New Orleans, and Tallahassee.

Galt had a few belongings in a single suitcase--some clothes, whatever toiletries he hadn't dumped in Memphis, a book on self-hypnosis, and his dog-eared copy of
Psycho-Cybernetics
by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Probably he bought a copy of the
Atlanta Constitution
and, secreting himself behind the broad, inky sheets, read of all the destruction he had wrought from coast to coast. On the front page, the immense banner headline read: DR. KING SHOT,
⁵³⁴
DIES IN MEMPHIS; RIFLE FOUND, HUNT FOR KILLER PRESSED.

The
Constitution
noted a number of details about King's suspected slayer--more details than Galt would have felt comfortable with, perhaps, but nothing that pointed directly to him. The physical description was vague and somewhat inaccurate. The suspect, the
Constitution
reported, was "a young, dark-haired white man who dashed out of a flophouse across the street from King's hotel, dropped a Browning rifle on the sidewalk and fled in a car." The paper also noted, in an eerie juxtaposition, that a group of "old-line Georgia segregationists" had succeeded in raising a considerable war chest for George Wallace's presidential campaign--"so there will be a man in the White House who recognizes the viewpoint of the southern white people."

The
Constitution
's progressive editor and publisher, the legendary Ralph McGill, had an editorial on page one. Whether Eric Galt read it is doubtful, but it was aimed right at him: "The moment the triggerman fired, Martin Luther King was the free man. The white killer was the slave--a slave to fear, a slave to his own sense of inferiority, a slave to hatred, a slave to all the bloody instincts that surge in a brain when a human being decides to become a beast."

Around one o'clock, Galt boarded the coach that said "Cincinnati" on the destination marquee, with the familiar lean hound lunging across the length of the cargo compartments. Galt crept down the narrow aisle and took a seat. Like most cross-country Greyhound coaches, the bus had a tiny rear lavatory that was doubtless ripe with the smell of chemicals losing the fight against cidered urine.

That afternoon the bus churned north out of Georgia in clouds of diesel fumes, grinding up through the striated limestone foothills at the border with Tennessee. The bus stopped in Chattanooga, and Knoxville, and then pressed on toward Kentucky. With every mile he put behind him, Galt must have felt a deepening relief. He was out of the Deep South now, burrowing into regions of the country that carried no association with himself or his crime. He was likely starting to breathe easier, knowing that his jag from Memphis, to Birmingham, and then to Atlanta was growing colder as he vanished into the murky inseams of the country.

Yet no matter how far north the bus ventured, he found that no place was untouched by King's death, no stop along the dreary string of terminals was immune from uncertainty and anger and fear. Galt could escape from his crime but not from its powerful recoil.

By nightfall Galt was in the hills of Kentucky, gliding through bluegrass and bourbon country toward Lexington, then crossing the muddy Ohio into Cincinnati, where he got off at the Greyhound terminal.

In his memoirs, Galt said he had a layover of two hours, so he checked his suitcase in to a locker
⁵³⁵
and went to a nearby tavern--not only for drinks to ease his nerves, but also to gather some news. Cooped up on the bus, and lacking his pocket radio, he was starved for information on the manhunt. He must have been relieved to learn from the evening papers that authorities had made no substantial new breaks in the case. The Mustang had not been found, and there was no mention of a rooming house in Atlanta. Late that night, he boarded a second bus,
⁵³⁶
bound for Detroit.

WHILE GALT'S GREYHOUND motored north, Attorney General Ramsey Clark and his small entourage boarded the Jetstar in Memphis and took off for Washington. Clark had been getting disturbing reports of incipient rioting in D.C. throughout the day, so they cut short their time in Memphis. Around five o'clock, the jet rose into the Memphis sky and arrowed toward the capital.

On board, Cartha DeLoach continued to be a font of optimism. The search for the man in 5B was proceeding crisply, in his estimation. Thus far, it seemed nearly a textbook operation. DeLoach had been in repeated contact with FBI headquarters and had all the reports in hand--laundry tags, ballistics, fibers, hairs, fingerprints, gun receipts, physical descriptions--the case was coming together with rapid efficiency. The new Los Angeles twist presented some unexpected complications, he had to concede, but otherwise all evidence seemed to be pointing to one suspect, or possibly two, living and plotting the crime out of the Southland. DeLoach assumed of course that both "Lowmeyer" and "Willard" were fictitious, but to be sure, FBI agents were checking every permutation of those names throughout the South.

DeLoach was so confident, in fact, that he was willing to make a wager with Attorney General Clark: the bureau would catch King's killer within twenty-four hours--that is, by five o'clock Saturday night--or he would present Clark with a bottle of the finest sherry
⁵³⁷
he could find. Clark shook on the deal, even though it was a bet he sincerely hoped to lose.

Though he was more skeptical, Clark had to admit that the case was shaping up well. "We had considerably more evidence,
⁵³⁸
considerably earlier, than we ever expected," he recalled. "But we didn't realize the suspect was one of these unique types of people who tends to do just the
opposite
of what you'd expect. You'd think he'd go right, and he goes left. He was intent on giving us a merry chase--to put it mildly."

As Clark sped toward Washington, he thought about America's historical penchant for gun violence. Like many liberals across the nation, he hoped that the King assassination might quicken the gun-control debate on Capitol Hill, and he vowed to push for a policy requiring a permit to own a gun--especially high-powered rifles like a .30-06. "We are virtually unique
⁵³⁹
among nations in our failure to control guns," he would write. "Destroyers of life, causers of crime, guns had once again scarred our national character, marking another terrible moment in our history."

DeLoach rode in silence most of the flight to Washington, absorbed in very different thoughts. The day in Memphis had been long and stressful, and his head was throbbing from lack of sleep and the pressure of the investigation. J. Edgar Hoover's long-standing "feud" with King, as DeLoach called it, would inevitably stir deeper doubts within already suspicious segments of the American public, who wondered if the FBI had been involved in the assassination--or if Hoover had directly ordered it. DeLoach realized that even if he won his bet and the FBI
did
catch King's killer by tomorrow, it still wouldn't be enough "to dam the flood
⁵⁴⁰
of criticism and abuse that was coming our way."

It was past ten o'clock when the Jetstar began its approach into Washington. The plane was twelve miles out, over the horse country of Virginia, when Clark and DeLoach first spotted the smoke--a long, doomed finger extending all the way from the District. Since all commercial flights into National Airport had been banned, Clark asked the pilot to drop down and fly low along the Potomac. What they saw stunned them.

"I looked down at a city in flames," Clark recalled. Smoke engulfed all of downtown and the Mall. Only the great illuminated dome of the Capitol and the sharp white obelisk of the Washington Monument punctured the seething blankets. Clark could see infernos blazing up around U and Fourteenth streets, and also within a few blocks of his own office at the Justice Department building, the same building where FBI Crime Lab analysts were burning midnight oil, poring over the King assassination evidence.

The spreading conflagrations made the previous night's scattered rioting seem tame--the pilot of the Jetstar thought it looked like Dresden. All told, more than five hundred fires had been set throughout the city. At President Johnson's behest, much of the District was now occupied by federal troops,
⁵⁴¹
spearheaded by the Third Infantry Regiment, the so-called Old Guard, a corps of elite troops out of Fort Myer specifically trained, like the loyal Praetorians of ancient Rome, to protect the seat of government in the event of crisis--a Russian invasion, presumably, or the landing of Martians.

The White House was reinforced with sandbags and ringed with troops, its great lawns bathed in blinding floodlights. Machine-gun nests were erected all around the Mall and the Capitol building, where soldiers, some fresh from Vietnam, stood in nervous vigil, their rifles fixed with bayonets. One reporter thought the scene on Capitol Hill had "the air of a parliament
⁵⁴²
of a new African republic."

The Jetstar made several low passes over the District. Looking down at the city where he grew up, the city he loved, Clark recalled accounts he'd read of the British sacking and torching Washington during the War of 1812. "In all my life,"
⁵⁴³
he said, "I never thought we'd see Washington
burning."

34
HOME SWEET HOME IN TORONTO

THROUGH THE EARLY morning hours of April 6, Eric Galt's Greyhound continued to grind north through flat Ohio farm country, creeping toward Detroit. According to his memoirs, the coach reached the Motor City
⁵⁴⁴
around eight that morning, a bright warm Saturday. Galt bought a fresh copy of the
Detroit News
, whose pages were dominated by reports of the assassination and the riots it had ignited. Detroit itself had been particularly hard-hit: though nothing like the riots in Washington, or the massive riots that hit Detroit in the summer of 1967, looting and arson had been widespread since Friday. The previous night, police had fired on several crowds of rioters, killing one man. Now three thousand National Guardsmen patrolled the streets, and Detroit's mayor, Jerome Cavanaugh, repeated for the media what had effectively become a national mantra: "It is better to overreact
⁵⁴⁵
than underreact."

As he scanned the paper, Galt must have been relieved by the vagueness of the reports on the manhunt. It seemed that no new leads had developed. The articles made no mention of an Eric Galt or a Harvey Lowmeyer, no mention of a Mustang found in Atlanta. The authorities seemed to be concentrating on a nonexistent man named John Willard. Now that he was poised on the border, only miles away from Windsor, Canada, Galt could breathe a little easier.

He knew that crossing between the United States and Canada was a lax affair requiring no documentation, and that travelers were seldom stopped and questioned. But in the wake of the King assassination, he worried that the border guards might be taking special precautions. Galt checked himself in the bathroom mirror and decided he looked too much like a fugitive to cross the border into Windsor. His dark beard had come in strong over the past two days, and he feared that unless he got cleaned up, he might arouse suspicions should a customs agent stop him. Unfortunately, he had dumped all his shaving toiletries with the bundle back in Memphis.

Galt later claimed that he stashed his suitcase
⁵⁴⁶
in a locker at the Greyhound terminal, took off across a grassy park, and found an old-fashioned barbershop where he requested a shave. The barber hesitated--he'd stopped shaving customers years ago--but Galt prevailed upon the man and climbed into his chair. Soon the barber was working up the lather with a mug brush and sharpening the blade on his leather strop. If the subject of Martin Luther King's assassination came up, what might have been said between the two men is not known. But for the next ten minutes or so, without realizing his customer's identity, the barber gingerly dragged his straight razor over the face and neck of Martin Luther King's assassin.