Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (40 page)

The Shelby County medical examiner, the pathologist Dr. Jerry Francisco,
⁴⁶⁹
emerged in a white lab coat. He was a tall, punctilious, soft-spoken man whose voice was tinged with the gentle twang of the hill country of western Tennessee. Although he was only in his mid-thirties, Dr. Francisco had already conducted many hundreds of autopsies; later in his career he would investigate the deaths of numerous Memphis-area celebrities--including that of Jerry Lee Lewis's fifth wife, Shawn Michelle, and, most famously, Elvis Presley.

By temperament and training, Dr. Francisco was a stickler for detail and loved to recite the arcane lore of his profession from the time of its Norman origins in medieval England. Dr. Francisco took relish in pointing out that in addition to dissecting the cadavers of important people who'd died under mysterious circumstances, the coroners of ancient London were required by law to serve as "the Keeper of the Royal Aquarium."

At around 9:00 p.m., Abernathy was summoned from the Lorraine and ushered into the lab to identify the body, in accordance with legal protocol. An attendant removed the sheet of medical paper, producing a harsh crackling sound. Gazing at the body on the sterile metal table, Abernathy thought his friend "somehow looked more dead"
⁴⁷⁰
than he had seemed when he'd left him in the hospital just two hours earlier. "I stared for a moment," Abernathy wrote in his memoirs, "a mute witness to the final dehumanization of Martin Luther King, Jr., his transformation from person to thing. I knew in that moment that I could leave this body now, leave it forever."

Abernathy nodded and curtly told Dr. Francisco what he needed to hear. "This," he said, "is the body
⁴⁷¹
of Martin Luther King, Jr.," and he signed the requisite form.

Then Francisco asked Abernathy to reach Coretta King by phone to secure her permission to conduct the autopsy. Abernathy hesitated. He failed to understand why an autopsy was necessary; no one doubted for a moment what had killed his friend. "It seemed incredible to me," Abernathy later wrote, "that such a procedure could make any difference now." He hated to trouble Coretta with such a gruesome request and wanted to spare her the shock of yet another indignity.

"How important is it?" he asked.

"Very
," Dr. Francisco assured him--in fact, it was required by law. He explained that for forensic purposes he needed to determine with greater specificity the angle of the bullet's path. Any future prosecution of King's assailant would legally require an autopsy to determine with absolute certainty that King had died as a direct result of the gunshot wound. A host of secondary questions might be answered, too: Could there have been a
second
bullet? Could the wound have been caused by a pistol, fired at close range? Could the doctors at St. Joseph's have done anything to save King's life? "It might tell us something
⁴⁷²
we didn't know before," Dr. Francisco added, according to Abernathy. "Something that could save another person's life."

Reluctantly, Abernathy made the call to Mrs. King and then handed the phone to Dr. Francisco. She readily gave her consent, speaking in a voice that seemed to Dr. Francisco remarkably calm and composed.

After Abernathy left the autopsy suite, Dr. Francisco's first task was to remove the bullet from King's body. About 9:30 p.m., with three Memphis police officers serving as official witnesses, Dr. Francisco excavated the main fragment from an area just beneath the skin of King's left shoulder blade. He attached a tag to the lump of metal, labeling it "252." The police witnesses described the badly marred and distorted bullet as "giving the appearance
⁴⁷³
of being a 30-06," but it had mushroomed almost beyond recognition. It had a copper jacket and a nose composed of soft lead, the police officers surmised, "as it was very flattened."

Dr. Francisco wrapped the deformed bullet in cotton and gave it to the police witnesses, who tagged it with a receipt and dropped it into a brown manila envelope. The three police witnesses then left the examining room to deliver the package to Inspector Zachary of the MPD's Homicide Bureau--who, in turn, would hand it over to Special Agent Jensen of the FBI.

Dr. Francisco prepared to go about his macabre work, feeling the weight of history upon him. He recalled that, after the assassination of President Kennedy, alleged irregularities associated with the autopsy became the subject of much speculation--and ultimately helped to hatch any number of conspiracy theories. "More than any case
⁴⁷⁴
I'd ever been assigned to, I knew the work had to be without flaw," he later said. "I said to myself, 'Not a single mistake, Francisco.'" In a literal sense, history
was
watching him: photographers, working in both color and black and white, diligently captured every stage of the procedure on film.

The autopsy was unusual in another respect--the high level of security under which it was conducted. The Memphis authorities feared that plotters in a conspiracy, or a hostile mob, might try to sabotage Dr. Francisco's examination or even steal King's body. So while he worked, Memphis policemen, armed with shotguns, were stationed on both sides of the examining room door. Dr. Francisco later recalled, with characteristic understatement: "I felt very safe."
⁴⁷⁵

Now Dr. Francisco examined his subject, noting the various scars and bruises on King's body, the blood spatters, the needle marks from the emergency room. "This," he later wrote, "is a well developed,
⁴⁷⁶
well nourished Negro male measuring 691/2 inches in length. The hair is black, the eyes are brown. There is a line mustache present."

Following the usual protocol, Dr. Francisco systematically removed, examined, and weighed the various organs--including the spleen, pancreas, liver, gallbladder, and brain--all of which he judged to be healthy and normal. Then he made a close inspection of King's injury, with the aid of X-ray images that had been taken at St. Joseph's Hospital. Around the wound's entrance, he found and collected on slides trace amounts of a black substance that, upon microscopic examination, was later determined to be a residue of lead left by the soft nose of the bullet. Dr. Francisco described the path of the bullet through King's body as "from front to back, above downward, and from right to left"--an important orientation, for it went far in confirming the suspected location of the fired rifle.

He regarded King's wounds as almost immediately catastrophic and felt certain that no amount of medical intervention could have saved him. "Death," Dr. Francisco summarized in his autopsy narrative, "was the result of a gunshot wound to the chin and neck with a total transection of the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinal cord and other structures of the neck. The severing of the spinal cord at this level and to this extent was a wound that was fatal very shortly after its occurrence."

"This," he succinctly concluded, "was
not
a survivable gunshot wound."

King's body was wheeled out of the autopsy suite and given over to the custody of the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home--the same black-owned mortuary that had provided King with a Cadillac and chauffeur during his stay at the Lorraine. The Lewis morticians had been hired to conduct the embalming, makeup, and other tasks necessary to prepare the body for public viewing.

Around 11:00 p.m., as the shotgun-wielding policemen stood guard outside the Tennessee Institute of Pathology, King's body was loaded into the rear of a hearse and driven across the desolate city on curfew-flushed streets prowled only by the occasional tank. The downtown was ghostly quiet but blindingly bright. "Every light in every store
⁴⁷⁷
was on (the better to silhouette looters)," observed Garry Wills, who'd just arrived on assignment for
Esquire
. "Jittery neon arrows, meant to beckon people in, now tried to scare them off. Nothing stirred in the crumbling blocks. Even the Muzak in an arcade between stores reassured itself, at the top of its voice, with jaunty rhythms played to no audience."

At 11:15, King's body arrived at R. S. Lewis and the morticians began their work.

PRESIDENT JOHNSON, a bit of an insomniac even on peaceful nights, padded down to the Oval Office sometime in the early morning hours, dressed in his bathrobe. All through the night, the news stories and telegrams had been flooding into the White House. World reaction to King's death was immediate and far-reaching. Johnson was not quite prepared for the magnitude of the shock King's death was causing around the globe. In this nerve center of the world, the Situation Room memorandums and State Department telexes kept piling up, and the news-ticker machines steadily hammered away.

On one of the wire services, the Reverend Billy Graham, traveling in Australia, was quoted as saying that "tens of thousands of Americans
⁴⁷⁸
are mentally deranged. [King's slaying] indicates the sickness of the American society and will further inflame passions and hates." In New Delhi, the Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, said Martin Luther King's slaying "is a setback to mankind's search for light. Violence has removed one of the great men of the world."

The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, said the whole nation "died a little" with King's murder. The retired baseball legend Jackie Robinson, reached in New York, was practically speechless: "I'm shocked. Oh my God, I'm very frightened, very disturbed. I pray God this doesn't end up in the streets."

A telegram from an analyst at the American embassy in Paris summarized the French reaction to King's slaying that morning: "Press and radio, which in recent months had almost lost sight of King in the glare of the more flamboyant [Stokely] Carmichael, now proclaim King as the only truly great leader among American negroes and agree he cannot be replaced."

The London papers quoted the British pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell as saying that the murder of Dr. King is only "a foretaste of the violence that will erupt in America because the U.S. government cannot finance a full-scale war in Vietnam and alleviate the misery of its most oppressed citizens."

The morning paper in Nairobi said King's death "once again reminds the world of the sick society America is ... It may well be that the era of non-violence has died with its prophet."

Not all the incoming commentary praised the fallen King or his methods. The South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond told a wire service reporter: "I hesitate to say anything bad about the dead, but I do not share a high regard for Dr. King. He only
pretended
to be nonviolent." Texas's governor, John Connally, concurred. While acknowledging that King "did not deserve this fate," Connally insisted that the civil rights leader "contributed much to the chaos and turbulence in this country."

The presidential candidate George Wallace could not be reached for comment, but Bob Walters, California chairman of Wallace's campaign, had this to say about the deceased: "Although he claimed to be a nonviolent man, he spread seeds of violence which are now in the country. You shall reap what you sow."

The wires also reported that the racist J. B. Stoner of the National States Rights Party was giving a speech in Meridian, Mississippi, when he heard the news of King's death. Gloating, the bow-tie-wearing demagogue told a crowd of like-minded segregationists: "Martin Lucifer Coon is a good nigger now."

SOME TIME AFTER midnight, Memphis time, Special Agent Jensen finished reviewing and tagging all the physical evidence now in the FBI's possession: the bullet removed from King's body, the rifle and scope and ammunition, the binoculars, the transistor radio, the suitcase with all its miscellaneous contents, King's shorn necktie and bloodied shirt, photographs from the autopsy, the old windowsill with the tiny half-moon indentation that Homicide Bureau detectives had removed from the communal bathroom. There were also three twenty-dollar bills that FBI agents had obtained from Bessie Brewer--one of which she believed the man in 5B had given her when he signed in.

Jensen sealed the contents in clear plastic and boxed them up, writing on the outside of the package, "FBI Crime Laboratory, Washington, DC." He gave it to Special Agent Robert Fitzpatrick, who would serve as a personal courier for this important parcel. Fitzpatrick rushed to the airport, where a chartered jet was waiting. Shortly before 1:00 a.m., he boarded the plane and flew through the morning hours, the package at his side at all times. The jet landed at Washington's National Airport just before dawn. An armed escort met Fitzpatrick at the terminal and sped him to the city.