Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (56 page)

Then, from George Bonebrake and his fingerprint experts, came the coup de grace: a fingerprint raised from a map
⁶²⁶
of Mexico in Galt's Atlanta room matched a fingerprint found on the .30-06 Gamemaster rifle.

"Our net was beginning to close,"
⁶²⁷
said DeLoach. "It was all becoming obvious--Galt and Lowmeyer and Willard were one and the same man." What
kind
of man was the subject of ongoing speculation, but DeLoach boiled the suspect down this way: "Poorly educated, without scruples, and with a touch of animal cunning. But we knew he had one weakness--he liked to dance."

UNTIL THIS POINT in the investigation, the FBI had been working in almost total secrecy. Hoover and DeLoach had repeatedly admonished all the SACs in all the field offices across the country that the word was mum--nothing, apart from that one artist's composite sketch of the killer, was to be leaked to the media or to any local law-enforcement agencies. This nearly complete lockdown on information served a strategic purpose, of course--to keep the assassin and any accomplices forever guessing--but it also made fertile ground for the sprouting of conspiracy theories.

The longer the investigation crept along without resolution, the more it looked to a doubting public as though the agents of Hoover's famously King-hating bureau either were deliberately dragging their feet or were themselves involved in the assassination. DeLoach felt that arousing public suspicion was a risk the bureau would simply have to take. A case like this could only be solved behind the scenes--through methodical detective work, careful lab analysis, and a relentless pursuit of every plausible lead.

The media were emphatically shut out. For nearly two weeks, even the most enterprising crime reporters, journalists who previously enjoyed an "in" with the FBI, now found themselves rebuffed and stonewalled. The special agent in charge in Atlanta told one such reporter: "All I can say
⁶²⁸
is 'No comment.' We could talk all night and still all I could say is, 'No comment.'"

Wednesday, April 17, would be a very different day for the MURKIN case. It was the day the FBI would finally, briefly go public.

At the Justice Department that morning, the FBI announced that it was issuing a warrant
⁶²⁹
for a thirty-six-year-old fugitive named Eric Starvo Galt. The warrant stated that Galt--alias Harvey Lowmeyer, alias John Willard--along with a person "whom he alleged to be his brother," had entered into a conspiracy "to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate Martin Luther King, Junior." The Justice Department had to invoke this slightly garbled legalese because murder is a state and local, not a federal, crime; the FBI could arrest Galt for conspiring to violate King's civil rights, but not for murdering him.

The warrant went on to describe Galt's personal idiosyncrasies in some detail: "He probably does not have a high degree of education ... is said to drink alcoholic beverages with a preference for vodka and beer ... has a nervous habit of pulling at an earlobe with his hand ... an avid dancer ... left ear protrudes farther from his head than his right." Noting that Galt was a neat dresser and a devotee of country-and-western music, the warrant concluded: "He should be considered armed and dangerous."

The FBI also released to the media two photographs--the bartending school picture of Galt in his bow tie with his eyes closed, and then the same picture, with the eyes filled in by an FBI sketch artist. Perhaps it's true that the outward markers of human identity abide uniquely in the eyes, but neither one of the images looked much like the real fugitive--
especially
the one doctored by the artist. In that image, Galt looked like a wax figure, a mannequin, a freakish fake. Though it was hard to pinpoint just what was "off" about them, the drawn-in eyes gave Galt a creepy cartoon quality that, in terms of helping the public find the killer, would probably do more harm than good. His ruse before the camera seemed to have accomplished what he'd hoped.

The Eric Galt warrant, with its accompanying photos, represented the full extent of the FBI's offerings for the day. Justice Department officials in the room announced that they would take no questions. When one reporter tested an official by asking a question anyway--what was the provenance of the photos?--he brusquely replied: "No comment."

WHILE WASHINGTON REPORTERS were scrambling for the phones, the fugitive was walking down a street in Toronto not far from his rooming house, where he very nearly blundered into a disaster. Ramon Sneyd was out of sorts that day, flustered, anxious about the passport application he had submitted, through the Kennedy travel agency, the day before. With some trepidation, he realized he had two weeks to do nothing, two weeks for something to go wrong. What if the paperwork didn't go through? What if the photo set off alarm bells? What if the passport officials contacted the
real
Ramon Sneyd?

Perhaps it was this nagging jumble of worries that caused him not to pay attention to what he was doing that afternoon, leading him to make a stupid mistake: he jaywalked across a busy street.
⁶³⁰

Immediately, a policeman approached him. Excuse me, sir, the cop said, do you realize you have broken the law?

Sneyd's heart sank. For a brief moment, he thought the jig was up. You must cross at the intersection, the cop said. "I'm afraid I must issue you a ticket. The fine is three dollars."

Sneyd was surprised, amused, relieved, and elated--all at the same time. But when the cop inquired, "Name and address, please," Sneyd realized he had a problem. He wasn't sure what to tell him. He knew that the real Ramon Sneyd was a Toronto policeman--who knew, maybe even a friend of this very traffic cop?--and so he recognized using that name was too risky. In his wallet, stupidly, he still had his Alabama driver's license, made out to Eric Galt--who, although Sneyd didn't know it yet, was the most wanted man in North America.

He had to think on his feet. He gave some other phony name that surfaced from his imagination, then provided an address, 6 Condor Avenue, which happened to be the real address of a brothel that he had apparently visited in Toronto.

He worried the cop might smell something fishy and feared that he might ask for an ID. But this was wholesome Canada, trusting Canada. The cop believed him. He wrote up the ticket, took Sneyd's three dollars, and went along his way.

Sneyd was disgusted with his obtuseness--not only for jaywalking, but also for still having his Galt ID on his person. As soon as he could, he shredded his driver's license
⁶³¹
and tossed it in his trash. For a brief time, while awaiting the arrival of his birth certificate and a passport, he was without identity, dwelling in a document-less purgatory, a man without a name.

40
THE PHANTOM FUGITIVE

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, newspapers all across North America and the world carried page-one photos of Eric Starvo Galt. He was the talk of the nation, the subject of party chatter, the name on the lips of every radio voice along the dial. But the queer-looking pictures, together with the bizarre train of facts that the FBI had assembled, seemed to raise more questions than they answered. What kind of name was Eric Starvo Galt? What kind of assassin was this--this avid dancer who listens to hillbilly music? What was the story behind those eyes?

Papers all over the country were full of inflamed speculation. Crime reporters out-purpled each other with nicknames for the wanted man. He was "the man without a past."
⁶³²
He was "the man who never was." He was "the sharp-nosed stranger," "the will-o'-the-wisp," "the mystery man," "the phantom fugitive."

Those fake-looking ovoid eyes in the photographs raised doubts across the country. Though both Jimmie Garner and the gun salesman at Aeromarine claimed to recognize the man in the photo, other key witnesses along the trail began to voice their concerns that the FBI had the wrong man. Peter Cherpes, Galt's Greek-American landlord in Birmingham, said: "No, that's not him,
⁶³³
I don't think so." Charlie Stephens, the tubercular alcoholic in Memphis who'd glimpsed John Willard in the rooming house hallway, said the FBI portrait "doesn't register." Bessie Brewer shared her roomer's doubts. "I just don't know,"
⁶³⁴
she told reporters. "I just don't know if it's him."

Some journalists injected notes of profound skepticism. Galt, said a
Newsweek
writer a few days later, "was a two-dimensional cutout,
⁶³⁵
with a name that could have been pasted together out of paperback novels." Galt, like Willard and Lowmeyer, must be an alias, for the "deepest catacombs of a record-happy society--from the IRS to the Selective Service--yielded nothing under his name." A reporter for Memphis's
Commercial Appeal
thought the character the FBI had presented to the world bore all the hallmarks of bad crime noir. "Fiction wouldn't touch it,"
⁶³⁶
the reporter wrote. "The worst detective story writers in the world know how far they can stretch things before the reader throws down the magazine and says, 'Oh, let's not be ridiculous.'"

The sheer oddness of the name Eric Starvo Galt already had people guessing. Journalists and commentators began to ransack the bins of pop culture for clues, and a kind of spirited scavenger hunt of the zeitgeist got under way.

It was widely noted that John Galt was the elusive protagonist of Ayn Rand's controversial 1957 novel,
Atlas Shrugged
. Rand's thousand-page anvil of prose begins with the question "Who is John Galt?"--and as her libertarian saga unfolds, Galt emerges as a savior-like figure who exposes the evils of the welfare state and then brings American civilization to its knees with a top-down strike of the nation's leading innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, and captains of industry, who decamp to a secret city lofted high in the Rocky Mountains.
Atlas Shrugged
laid out, in fictional form, Ayn Rand's personal philosophy of objectivism, which held that altruism toward society's unfortunates was not only misguided and ineffectual but also evil; that rational self-interest was the only moral principle that could guide a person to happiness; and that government should keep out of the great clashings of human affairs. "I swear by my life and my love of it," Galt declares in the novel's most famous line, "that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

Could there be a connection here? Could Eric Galt be a literary allusion, a planted clue, that harked back to the granite-hard philosophies embedded in
Atlas Shrugged?
Could the killer be a radical Ayn Randian? Or some hit man hired by a wacko libertarian industrialist? A reporter for the
Atlanta Constitution
noted that in the novel, John Galt "destroyed the production plants
⁶³⁷
of civilization because he hated the 'welfare state' that took from the producers and gave to the weak"--and then went on to observe that Martin Luther King, with his cries for the redistribution of wealth that lay at the heart of his coming Poor People's Campaign, was "perhaps the world's most outspoken proponent of those things the fictional John Galt hated."