Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (50 page)

So as the two mules kept up their doleful clip-clop through Atlanta, the questions multiplied through the ranks of the marchers. The whole power structure, the whole zeitgeist, seemed implicated. As Coretta herself said, "There were many fingers
⁵⁷⁹
on the rifle."

Even the most alert and conspiracy-tuned observer could not have guessed one irony along the funeral route: late that morning, the cortege passed within a few blocks of the Capitol Homes housing project, where, still sitting locked and abandoned in the parking lot, a white hardtop Mustang with Alabama plates shimmered in the eighty-degree heat.

NEARLY A THOUSAND miles due north, Eric Galt was in his room on Ossington Avenue
⁵⁸⁰
with a growing collection of Toronto newspapers. He was half watching the coverage of the King funeral on the console television while working on a letter to the registrar of births--a letter that he would mail later that day.

The networks sprinkled the funeral coverage with periodic bulletins about the manhunt and also updates on the rioting, which--in most places at least--had finally ended. The statistical tally emerging from the smoldering ruins was staggering: Fires had erupted in nearly 150 American cities, resulting in forty deaths, thousands of injuries, and some twenty-one thousand arrests. In Washington alone, property damages were estimated at more than fifty million dollars. Across the nation, close to five thousand people had become "riot refugees."

The feckless author of all this chaos was sitting quietly in Toronto, Ontario, writing a letter. Mrs. Szpakowski was curious about her new tenant, who was now calling himself Paul Bridgman. There was a sadness about him, a loneliness. Once, when he was away, she went in to clean the room and noticed newsprint crumpled everywhere. Residual piles of frozen-food cartons and pastry crumbs and cellophane wrappers spoke of bad food eaten alone at odd, small hours. Bridgman never brought a visitor into the room. Not once did she hear laughter in there--just the garbled tones of the television.

Galt was starting to get out more at night, making his usual sorts of rounds. He apparently visited a brothel on Condor Avenue and made several appearances at a go-go nightclub called the Silver Dollar,
⁵⁸¹
where he watched the dancers and drank Molson Canadian.

Mrs. Szpakowski thought her guest was immersed in a big project of some sort. He seemed serious, rushed, preoccupied to the point of being flustered when interrupted. Sometimes he'd go out to use a pay phone in a booth down the street, always moving at a brisk, businesslike clip. Other times he would walk down to the corner of Dundas Street and hop on a streetcar.

In fact, her new tenant
was
immersed in a project, and a rather complicated one at that, one that would take several weeks to complete. Galt had been working on the ten or so names he'd retrieved the day before from the reading room of the
Telegram
. He looked up their listings in the Toronto phone book and found that two of them, Paul Bridgman and Ramon Sneyd, were both still living in Toronto--and that both resided in a suburb east of the city, not far away, known as Scarborough.

Before going the next step, Galt felt he needed to make sure these unsuspecting candidates of identity theft bore at least a vague resemblance to his own likeness. So it was "time to play detective,"
⁵⁸²
as Galt later put it. He went to Scarborough and loitered in the shadows by these two men's houses until he caught glimpses of them. Although on close inspection neither Bridgman (a teacher) nor Sneyd (a cop) especially looked like him, Galt was encouraged to learn that they met his general description--dark hair, fair skin, receding hairline, slender-to-medium build, Caucasian.

That was all he needed: if either one had been obese, or bald, or marked by a pronounced scar, or of another ethnicity altogether, Galt would have to start his search anew. They weren't perfect, but Bridgman and Sneyd passed.

Then Galt did something truly brazen, something that illustrated the extent of his desperation: he called Bridgman and Sneyd on the telephone, probably from the same phone booth Mrs. Szpakowski saw him talking on. One night, Paul Bridgman, who worked as the director of the Toronto Board of Education's Language Study Centre, picked up his home telephone, shortly after finishing his supper.

"Yes, hello,"
⁵⁸³
Bridgman later recalled hearing the caller say. "I'm a registrar with the Passport Office in Ottawa. We're checking on some irregularities in our files here and we need to know if you've recently applied for a passport."

Bridgman was naturally a little suspicious. He didn't understand why some bureaucrat in Ottawa would call on official business during the evening. "Are you sure you have the right person?"

"Bridgman," Galt assured him, spelling out the surname. "Paul Edward Bridgman. Born 10 November, 1932. Mother's maiden name--Evelyn Godden."

"Well yes, that's correct," Bridgman replied, deciding the caller must be on the level after all. Soon Bridgman freely told Galt the information he needed to know: Yes, he once had a passport, about ten years ago, but it had expired, and he had not bothered renewing it.

"Thank you very much," Galt said, and hung up.

Galt was concerned that Bridgman might pose a problem--his old passport might still be on file in Ottawa and might set off alarm bells if Galt applied for a new one. So he got back on the phone and reached Ramon Sneyd. Going through the same routine, Galt was relieved to learn from Sneyd that the man had never applied for a passport in his life.

That settled it in Galt's mind: while he might develop the Bridgman alias for sideline purposes, he would
become
Ramon George Sneyd.

THE SAME MORNING of the King funeral, the FBI agents Neil Shanahan and Robert Barrett were 150 miles away in Birmingham, trying to learn what they could about a man named Eric S. Galt.

Galt was in no way a suspect yet--his only crime was having checked in to the New Rebel Motel in Memphis the night before King's murder and having driven a car similar to the getaway car (which just so happened to be one of the most popular cars on the American road). The address he'd listed on the New Rebel registration card was correct (if lapsed), and the interview that Agents Saucier and Shanahan had conducted the previous night with Galt's former landlord, Peter Cherpes, hadn't particularly set off any alarm bells. The man that Cherpes had described was a drifter--an itinerant seaman and shipyard laborer with ties to the Gulf Coast--but that was surely no crime. In fact, state police failed to turn up anyone named Eric Galt with an arrest record in Alabama.

Yet the FBI was duty-bound to follow every lead--and the Galt name was just one of innumerable leads to be followed. Inquiries around Mobile and the Gulf Coast turned up no Eric Galt, as did phone calls to Seafarers International and other maritime unions. A quick check with the motor vehicle division in Montgomery did reveal that Eric S. Galt had applied for an Alabama driver's license in September 1967, noting on his application that he was a "merchant seaman, unemployed." Further checks with vehicle registration records showed that an Eric Galt did indeed have a currently titled, licensed, and registered white two-door 1966 Mustang, bearing the same license plate number he provided on the New Rebel registration form--1-38993.

Working off the VIN, the FBI quickly traced the car back to its previous owner, a Birmingham man named William D. Paisley who was a sales manager for a Birmingham lumber company.

Shanahan and Barrett showed up at Paisley's place of work
⁵⁸⁴
and asked him some questions--never mentioning that they were investigating the assassination of Martin Luther King. Paisley only vaguely recalled the man, but yes, he had sold a pale yellow 1966 Mustang to an Eric Galt some eight months earlier, back in August 1967. Paisley had offered the car for sale in the classified ads in the
Birmingham News
for $1,995. He recalled that Galt, after phoning the house and making arrangements to meet, then came to the Paisley residence by taxi on the early evening of August 28. The man carefully examined the Mustang and seemed to like it. It had whitewall tires, a push-button radio, and a remote-control outside mirror. The tires had had a bit too much wear--they were clearly bald in places--but the body was in near-perfect shape. "This is one of the cleanest ones I've seen," Galt enthused.

"You want to take her for a spin?" Paisley asked.

Galt said no, he didn't have a current driver's license. His previous license, he said, was issued back in Louisiana--and anyway, it had expired, and he didn't want to risk getting stopped by the police. So Paisley got behind the wheel and cranked up the V-8 engine, and Galt hopped in the passenger seat. They tooled around the neighborhood for a quarter hour, while Galt fiddled with the knobs and dials and played with the push-button radio.

Galt told Paisley he liked the red leather interior but wasn't so sure about the pale yellow paint color, which was so light it was almost white. (Galt didn't tell Paisley the real reason for his distaste, but as Galt later put it, "If you are going to do something illegal,
⁵⁸⁵
I'd rather not have a white car to do it in.") When they got back to the house, Galt thought about the car a few more minutes and then, without even looking under the hood or attempting to negotiate the price, told Paisley, "I'll take it off your hands."

Shaking on the deal and agreeing to meet the next morning to complete the transaction, they talked a bit while standing outside Paisley's house. Galt said that he worked on a Mississippi River barge and that he had a lot of money saved up. He said he'd recently been through an ugly divorce--his ex-wife was an Alabama woman, he said, from the mountain country up around Homewood.

When Paisley offered his sympathies, Galt replied, "Yeah, that's the way it goes."

They met the next morning outside the Birmingham Trust National Bank--"that's where I keep my money," Galt had told Paisley. Galt, who was wearing a sport jacket and an open-collared shirt, said he had $1,995 in cash, fresh from the bank. From his shirt pocket, he removed a prodigious wad of bills--mostly twenties, but a few hundreds as well--and started counting the money out in the open.
"Man
, let's be careful with this kind of money," Paisley said, and they moved into the foyer of the bank to finish the transaction.

Paisley gave Galt the title and a bill of sale and then fished in his pocket for the keys. They shook hands and that was it--Paisley never saw the man again.

IN THE HISTORIC quadrangle at Morehouse College, the mule-drawn wagon wound its way to the steps of Harkness Hall, and the large public requiem began. Some 150,000 people crammed onto the campus green and stood for hours in the oppressive heat beneath jumbled canopies of parasols. Mahalia Jackson sang "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," the spiritual King had asked Ben Branch to play "real pretty" moments before he was shot on the Lorraine balcony. So many old ladies fainted in the crowd that the lengthy schedule of eulogies had to be radically truncated. The final speaker, and the marquee attraction, was Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, the president emeritus of Morehouse, a distinguished lion of an orator and King's most beloved mentor. The grizzled theologian, whose parents had been former slaves, spoke plainly, with a measured indignation in his voice.