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

For McCall, Graham, and Griffin

The future looks bright

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws
at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives
.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. (1967)

And the days keep on worrying me
There's a hellhound on my trail
.

ROBERT JOHNSON (1937)

CONTENTS

A NOTE TO READERS

Prologue: #416-J

Book One: In the City of the Kings

Book Two: Who Is Eric Galt?

Book Three: The Hottest Man in the Country

Epilogue: #65477

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON SOURCES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A NOTE TO READERS

I was just a kid when it happened--six years old, living in a rambling brick house on Cherry Road close by the Southern Railway. My father worked for the Memphis law firm that represented King when he came to town on behalf of the garbage workers, and I remember my dad rushing home that night, pouring a screwdriver or three, and talking with alarm about what had happened and what it meant for the city and the nation and the world. I remember the curfew, the wail of sirens, a line of soldiers with fixed bayonets. I remember seeing tanks for the first time. Mainly, I recall the fear in the adult voices coming over the radio and television--the undertow of panic, as it seemed to everyone that our city was ripping apart.

Four days after the assassination, Coretta Scott King arrived in Memphis, wearing her widow's veil, and led the peaceful march her husband could not lead. For several miles, tens of thousands of mourners threaded through the somber downtown streets to city hall. Enveloped in the beautiful sadness, no one breathed a word. There was no shouting or picketing, not even a song. The only sound was leather on pavement.

All writers sooner or later go back to the place where they came from. With this book, I wanted to go back to the
pivotal moment
in the place where I came from. In April 1968, a killer rode into a city I know and love. He set himself up with a high-powered rifle a few blocks from the Mississippi River and took aim at history. The shock waves still emanate from room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, and continue to register across the globe. The Lorraine has become an international shrine, visited by the likes of the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela and the boys from U2--a holy place. People come from all over the world to stand on the balcony where King stood, squinting in the humidity, surveying the sight lines of fate. They try to imagine what really happened, and what larger plots might have been stirring in the shadows.

The first writer I ever met, the great Memphis historian Shelby Foote, once said of his Civil War trilogy that he had "employed the novelist's methods without his license," and that's a good rule of thumb for what I've attempted here. Though I've tried to make the narrative as fluidly readable as possible, this is a work of nonfiction. Every scene is supported by the historical record. Every physical and atmospheric detail arises from factual evidence. And every conversation is reconstructed from documents. I've consulted congressional testimony, newspaper accounts, oral histories, memoirs, court proceedings, autopsy reports, archival news footage, crime scene photographs, and official reports filed by the Memphis authorities, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Scotland Yard. Along the way, I've conducted scores of personal interviews and traveled tens of thousands of miles--from Puerto Vallarta to London, from St. Louis to Lisbon. Readers who are curious about how I constructed the narrative will find my sources cited in copious detail in the notes and bibliography.

As for King's assassin, I've let his story speak for itself. Whether witlessly, incidentally, or on purpose, he left behind a massive body of evidence. Much of my account of his worldwide travels comes from his own words. The rest comes from the record. The killer left his fingerprints, both literal and figurative, over everything.

HAMPTON SIDES, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

PROLOGUE
#416-J

April 23, 1967
Jefferson City, Missouri

THE PRISON BAKERS sweated in the glare of the ovens, making bread for the hungry men of the honor farm. Since dawn, they'd prepared more than sixty loaves, and now the kitchen was redolent with the tang of yeast as the fresh bread cooled on the racks before slicing. A guard, armed but not very vigilant, patrolled the galley perimeter.

One of the bakers on this bright Sunday morning was Prisoner #00416-J, a slender, fair-skinned man in his late thirties whose raven hair was flecked with gray at the sideburns. Beneath a flour-dusted apron, he wore his standard-issue garb--a green cotton shirt and matching pants with a bright identifying stripe down the outseam. Convicted of armed robbery in 1960, 416-J had served seven years inside the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City; before that, he'd put in four grim years in Leavenworth for stealing--and fraudulently cashing--several thousand dollars' worth of postal money orders. He'd spent most of his adult life behind the bars of one jail or another and had become a stir-wise creature, canny to the ways of prison survival.

More than two thousand inmates were crammed inside "Jeff City," this vast Gothic bastille, which, upon its founding in 1836, was the first U.S. prison west of the Mississippi. Over the decades, it had developed a reputation as a school for rogues--and as one of America's most violent prisons. In 1954, a team of corrections experts described riot-prone Jeff City this way: "Square foot for square foot, it is the bloodiest forty-seven acres in America."
¹
Yet the prison complex was set in a lazy, almost bucolic part of the Midwest. Beyond the limestone walls, tugboats churned through the Missouri River, and Vs of geese honked in the haze along the flyway toward summer haunts. Freight trains could often be heard singing out their whistle sighs as they clacked and heaved on the old tracks that ran beside the river.

At Jeff City, 416-J had spent a lot of time looking out over that countryside, dreaming of how to get himself there. He'd become an old hand in the bakery; he had done kitchen work for years and never made any trouble--in fact he scarcely drew any attention to himself at all. Most prison officials didn't know his name and could barely recall his face--to them he was just another inmate with a number. One Jeff City warden described him as "penny ante." A corrections commissioner put it slightly more bluntly: "He was just a
nothing
here."
²

A state psychiatrist had examined 416-J the year before and had found that though he wasn't outright crazy, he was "an interesting and rather complicated individual
³
--a sociopathic personality who is severely neurotic." He was intelligent enough, with an IQ of 106, slightly above average. But the psychiatrist noted that the prisoner suffered from "undue anxiety" and "obsessive compulsive concerns" about his physical health. He was a thoroughgoing hypochondriac, always complaining of maladies and poring over medical books. He imagined he had heart palpitations and suffered from some strange malformation of his cranium. He often could be seen with a stopwatch in hand, checking his own pulse. His stomach bothered him, necessitating that he eat bland foods. He took Librium for his nerves
⁴
and various painkillers for his nearly incessant headaches, but the doctor thought he should have more attention.

"It is felt that he is in need of psychiatric help,"
⁵
the state shrink observed in closing. "He is becoming increasingly concerned about himself." This evaluation could have been used to describe a lot of prisoners in Jeff City--maybe hundreds of them--so the corrections officers paid little attention to the psychiatrist's report.