Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (48 page)

Almost no uniformed policemen could be found along the route of the march. Holloman, rightly figuring his men in blue had outworn their welcome in the black community, did not want to risk provoking another confrontation. Instead, several thousand National Guardsmen lined the street--projecting a federal and presumably more neutral presence. The guardsmen's M16s were fixed with bayonets, but (though the marchers didn't know this) the rifles were kept
unloaded
.

Holloman, for his part, was much less worried about potential violence from within the ranks of the marchers than from outsiders who might be "intent on discord," as he put it. He genuinely feared that King's killer was still in Memphis and that he might attempt an encore, setting his sights on Abernathy, or Mrs. King, or any one of the score of powerful dignitaries and popular celebrities marching in the procession. His fears were well-grounded. Jim Lawson, for one, had received a death threat the previous night; someone had called his house and vowed that "once you reach Main Street,
⁵⁵⁹
you'll be cut down." Abernathy said he was worried about people out there for whom "the spilling of one man's blood
⁵⁶⁰
only whetted their appetite for more."

All morning, before the march started, Holloman had his men sweep the entire march route clean: All office building windows were to remain closed, and no one would be allowed to watch from a rooftop or balcony. Every potential sniper's nest was investigated and blocked off. Hundreds of undercover cops and FBI agents were posted throughout the march to look for suspicious movement.

All their precautions proved unnecessary, it turned out. The march was beautiful, pitch-perfect, decent. It moved forward without incident, a slow river of humanity stretching more than a dozen city blocks. Arranged eight abreast, the mourners silently plodded past department store windows that had been carefully cleared of lootable items, which were replaced with discreet shrines honoring King. Coretta marched at the front, with Abernathy, Young, Jackson, and Belafonte. There were clergymen, black and white, and then labor leaders and garbage workers. Farther back could be found such celebrities as Sammy Davis Jr., Bill Cosby, Ossie Davis, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Isaac Hayes, and Sidney Poitier (whose racially charged
In the Heat of the Night
was up for Best Picture in the now-postponed Academy Awards).

Most of the marchers were black, but there was also a surprising sprinkling of prominent white Memphians--some of them well-known conservatives. Foremost among these was Jerred Blanchard, a lawyer and staunch Republican city councilman who'd gotten drunk on whiskey the previous night and then awakened with something of an epiphany. "I guess it was my mother
⁵⁶¹
speaking to me, or my wife," Blanchard said. "I really am a right-wing Republican. I've fought in several wars ... I've never liked labor unions. But it was decency that said, 'You get your old south end in that march. To
hell
with the country club.'"

The long column of mourners kept snaking north on Main Street toward city hall, with Mrs. King still in the lead. "There she is, there she is!" bystanders exclaimed under their breaths.

Among the businesses that Mrs. King passed was the York Arms Company, the same sporting goods store Eric Galt had visited just four days earlier. The shop's owners had removed all the hunting rifles from the windows and locked the place up tight in advance of the march. One of the items left in the window, however, was a pair of binoculars: they were Bushnell Banners, 7x35, with fully coated optics.

THAT SAME DAY, as Mrs. King and her legions of marchers slowly approached city hall, two of Robert Jensen's G-men, Agents John Bauer and Stephen Darlington, were driving out on Lamar Avenue, near the city's border with Mississippi. Bauer and Darlington, two rookies who both happened to hail from Pennsylvania, had been stopping at scores of economy inns all over Memphis, trolling for scraps of information--mainly about the models and makes and colors of the automobiles that motel guests had been driving the past week. It was hard, tedious work, and so far their efforts had turned up nothing promising. Now the agents pulled their bureau sedan
⁵⁶²
in to the puddled parking lot of the New Rebel Motel. In the misty rain, the wipers slapped the windshield. The Confederate colonel glowered down from his sign.

Bauer and Darlington walked into the office and had a word with Anna Kelley, the New Rebel's owner. "We're with the FBI," Darlington said, and asked if she'd mind if they asked some questions. Mrs. Kelley nodded her consent.

Darlington and Bauer especially wanted her to concentrate on the night of April 3, the night before Martin Luther King was killed. Had anyone checked in to the New Rebel driving a white Ford sports car?

Anna Kelley consulted her records and soon found someone. His name was Jerry Goalsby, from Ripley, Mississippi. He had checked in to the New Rebel that night, April 3, and had left the following morning. According to the registration card, Goalsby was driving a Ford of some type.

Agent Darlington pressed her. What color? What model?

Mrs. Kelley frowned. The card only said, "Ford."

"Anyone else driving a Ford that night?" Darlington asked.

Kelley riffled through the other registration cards from April 3. "Well, yes," she said. "Here's one." A man from Alabama had checked in to the New Rebel at 7:15 p.m. that same evening. As she recalled, it was a rainy night, tornado warnings in the forecast. She never saw the man herself, and couldn't give any sort of physical description. But according to the card, he drove a Mustang with Alabama tags, license number 1-38993. The card didn't specify the car's color.

The guest--what was his name? Agent Bauer demanded.

She showed him the card. It said, in plain block lettering, "Eric S. Galt, 2608 Highland Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama."

AFTER HOLING UP in his room all weekend at the Szpakowski rooming house in Toronto, Eric Galt finally emerged that Monday morning and, according to his memoirs and other accounts, made his way down to the offices
⁵⁶³
of Toronto's
Evening Telegram
. He told the front desk that he had come to look at back issues of the newspaper.

Soon he was led to the paper's reading room. How far back you interested in? the librarian asked.

Galt said he was interested in the 1930s, and the librarian indicated that would be on microfilm.

Galt was shown the microfilm machines, and soon a box arrived with reels dating back to the early 1930s. The librarian demonstrated how to work the machine, threading the brittle ribbon of plastic through the guides and sprockets. Galt flipped on the light and adjusted the focusing knob until a grainy world of black and white swelled into view.

For the next several hours, Galt advanced through the early 1930s, through the initial years of the Great Depression. He skipped over the headlines about Roosevelt, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the imprisonment of Al Capone, Amelia Earhart's transatlantic solo flight. Galt wasn't interested in news or sports, wasn't interested in history at all. With each day's paper, he always spun back to the same section: births and obituaries.

Galt was trolling for names--specifically, the names of baby boys born in the early 1930s in Toronto. As he scrolled through 1932, ten or more birth announcements caught his eye and he jotted down the particulars. One of them was named Ramon George Sneyd. "At the Women's Hospital," the paper said, "on Saturday, October 8th, to Mr. and Mrs. George Sneyd (nee Gladys Mae Kilner), a son, Ramon George." Communing with these faded names in the murky light of the microfilm screen, Eric Galt was frantically looking for a way to cease being Eric Galt: he was hunting for a new identity.

It's possible that he had gathered valuable tips from someone about how to obtain a new alias, but if so, Galt never revealed who it was. In any case, the methods Galt used were ludicrously simple. "I'd read somewhere,"
⁵⁶⁴
he later said, "that Soviet spies in Canada routinely assumed the names of actual Canadians [by] taking them from gravemarkers or from the birthing notices in old newspapers. I'd been trying for years to get out of the United States on some system like this." It was a clever technique, but not exactly an esoteric one. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police report noted at the time, "Teenagers are adopting
⁵⁶⁵
this practice to obtain birth certificates for persons over twenty-one years in order that they can frequent beverage rooms."

Satisfied with the day's catch, Galt left the reading room around noon with his collection of names and headed back for the Szpakowski rooming house. On his way, though, he likely made a brief expeditionary detour
⁵⁶⁶
--to roam through one of Toronto's graveyards.

THE GREAT SILENT march in Memphis came to rest at an echoey marble plaza beside city hall, where an aluminum stage and a powerful public address system had been erected beneath the city's official insignia--cotton boll and steamboat. Rosa Parks, the grandmotherly prime mover of modern civil rights, sat on the platform with Mrs. King, Teddy Kennedy, and other dignitaries as the rear of the march caught up and filled in the public square. It was still spitting rain, but occasionally sunshine would spear through the brooding clouds; as Southerners say, the devil was beating his wife.

Several hours of speeches commenced--labor speeches and political speeches, some dry and some fiery, but all exhorting the city to do the right thing and settle the strike so that King's death could be redeemed in some way and the fatigued nation could get back to its business.

The whole program was really directed at Henry Loeb, but the mayor wasn't showing his face to this hostile crowd. In fact, he probably wasn't even inside city hall. He had been up all night, negotiating with strike representatives, prodded along by Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds, whom President Johnson had personally dispatched from Washington to serve as an envoy. The talks had dragged on until 6:00 a.m., but the city still had not reached a resolution. The sour garbage would keep piling up on the curbsides, filling the streets with rank odors, growing happy rats.

King's death in defense of garbage workers made a certain kind of metaphorical sense, especially to the clergymen in the audience, several of whom pointed out a deep biblical irony: Jesus Christ was crucified between two thieves,
upon a mound of trash
.

Now labor leaders, one after another, came to the stage and fulminated. The Memphis strike had clearly become a cause celebre not just for municipal workers but indeed for all labor organizations around the country: the AFL-CIO, the UAW, the UFWA, the USWA, the IUE--all had representatives on the stage. The whole scene was a white Southern businessman's worst nightmare: Reds encamped at city hall!

AFSCME's Jerry Wurf, who'd been up all night with Loeb in the negotiations, vowed: "Until we have justice
⁵⁶⁷
and decency and morality, we will not go back to work." But it was the legendary Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers who got lathered up into a fever pitch. "Mayor Loeb," he said, "will somehow be dragged
⁵⁶⁸
into the 20th Century!"