Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  Ghormley radioed back over his walkie-talkie: "All we know is, he's a young white male, well dressed, dark colored suit."

  Within minutes, the police dispatcher broadcast the very first description of the shooter and the probable getaway car: "Suspect described as young white male,376 well dressed, believed in late-model white Mustang, going north on Main from scene of shooting."

  It was 6:10.

  INSIDE THE ROOMING house, Charlie Stephens dashed back to his room377 and peered out the window. Across the way, the courtyard of the Lorraine Motel was pure chaos. On Mulberry Street, policemen scurried this way and that, and a line of officers advanced on the rooming house and formed a cordon.

  From down below, in the brambled rear lot of the rooming house, a helmeted policeman gave Stephens a start. "Hey!" the cop yelled. "Get back from that window!"

  Although Stephens had heard the gun go off in the bathroom, he had no idea what was really going on--he didn't even know Martin Luther King had been staying at the Lorraine.

  The policeman eyed Stephens suspiciously. "Stay in your room," he commanded. "No one is allowed to leave the building!"

  "But what is it?" Stephens yelled back. "What's happening?"

  The look of pure befuddlement on Stephens's booze-reddened face must have convinced the cop that this man could not be judged a serious suspect. "It's Martin Luther King," the policeman said. "He's been shot."

  AT THAT MOMENT, the sound of an approaching siren punctured the night. Fire department ambulance 401--a long-finned modified red Cadillac that looked rather like a hearse--screeched around the corner and pulled into the Lorraine courtyard. Emergency technicians hopped out and removed a stretcher from the rear doors of the ambulance. They hauled it up to the balcony and, with Abernathy and the others helping, managed to slide King onto the soft white bedding. The gurney stays were cinched in place, and firemen administered oxygen to King from a portable tank. Then a group of about six men, including Andy Young and the sheriff's deputy William DuFour, guided King's stretcher down the steps, negotiating the sharp turn of the staircase.

  Young, for one, believed there was no hope for King, that this frantic press of medical attention was probably a useless formality. He thought King was already dead, or at least irretrievably on his way.

  In the parking lot, concerned onlookers parted for the stretcher as it jounced over the asphalt. Georgia Davis, her eyes brimming with tears, threaded her way through the small crowd. She stood transfixed as the medics threw open the twin doors and eased King into the ambulance. Abernathy climbed in the back and crouched at King's side. On instinct, Davis followed Abernathy's lead and started to get into the ambulance, eager to be with her lover. But Andy Young touched her shoulder and said softly, "Georgia, I don't think378 you want to do that."

  She seemed puzzled for a moment, her face caught in the flashing red dome light, but she realized Young was right: this was not her place. Any photographer could capture her there at King's side, and the awkward truth of a mistress would become part of history forever. She backed away from the ambulance and melted into the crowd.

  The rear doors slammed shut, and at 6:09 the ambulance roared off for St. Joseph's Hospital, the nearest emergency room to the Lorraine. The driver, J. W. Walton, got on the radio and yelled to a dispatcher, "Give me the loop lights!"379 At Memphis Fire Headquarters, a city engineer threw a master switch that held the traffic lights at green on all north and south streets, while all the cross streets remained red. Now Walton could race to the hospital without having to slow down at even the busiest intersections.

  The ambulance, escorted by several policemen on motorcycles, sped through downtown Memphis. One of the medics hovered over King, taking his pulse and blood pressure. A different oxygen mask was placed over his mouth, and the resuscitator pump soughed away. As the siren wailed in the twilight, Abernathy wondered if his friend could hear it, and if he was frightened.

  "Is he alive?"380 Abernathy asked.

  The medic gave a perfunctory nod. "Barely," he said. "Just barely."

  After four breakneck minutes the ambulance pulled up to the St. Joseph's emergency room--the same emergency room that had treated James Meredith two years earlier after he'd been shot on his ill-fated march from Memphis. Catholic-run St. Joseph's Hospital was one of the largest and most prominent institutions in Memphis, but it had been chosen for one simple reason: it was closest to the Lorraine.

  At 6:15 p.m., Martin Luther King, unconscious but with his heart still beating, was wheeled through the swinging double doors and down a long corridor toward the emergency room. Abernathy walked briskly at his side.

  IN FRONT OF Canipe's Amusement Company on South Main, Lieutenant Judson Ghormley stood sentinel over the curious bundle the stranger had dropped on the ground. Faithful to the dispatcher's command, Ghormley had not laid a finger on it, but had simply parked himself in front of the door with his pistol drawn and awaited instructions from farther up the chain of command.

  Captain Jewell Ray381 of the police department's Intelligence Division raced down Main Street and halted in front of Canipe's. Thirty-six years old, a native of Memphis with a slow, custardy drawl, the craggy-faced Ray wore plain clothes--a sport coat and a tie. "Captain," Ghormley told Ray. "The guy dropped this."

  Captain Ray crouched on a knee and studied the bundle. A dingy green bedspread was loosely twirled around a black cardboard box. He could also see a blue zippered satchel. Not wanting to taint the evidence with fingerprints, he removed a pencil from his breast pocket and used it to pull back the edge of the box cover. On the box he could plainly see the word "Browning." Next to the rifle, he saw a box of ammunition.

  Impressed but also puzzled by the trove, Captain Ray ordered two other policemen, armed with shotguns, to guard it until homicide detectives arrived. As more police flooded the area, he had them block the doors to Canipe's and all the adjoining businesses along South Main, including Jim's Grill.

  "No one leaves the area," he barked. "This entire block is to remain secure until Homicide gets here."

  At that, Captain Ray, accompanied by Lieutenant Jim Papia, clambered up the narrow steps of Bessie Brewer's rooming house. On the second floor, they found tenants circulating in the dim halls, animatedly discussing what had happened. They first met a wild-eyed middle-aged man named Harold Carter who said he heard something "that sounded a mighty lot like a shot, but I'm crazy--don't pay any attention to what I say." Captain Ray then moved on to the deaf-mute, Mrs. Ledbetter, who gestured and made guttural mumbling sounds that made no sense, but she pointed down the hall. Willie Anschutz stepped into the conversation and told Captain Ray the shot had come from the bathroom. There was a guy in the bathroom who wouldn't come out, Anschutz said. "Then I heard what sounded like a shot in there. He took off down the hall with something in his arms. I told the guy, 'That sounded like a shot.' And he said, 'It was.'"

  Then Captain Ray met Charlie Stephens, who appeared to be drunk and agitated by all the commotion. "Yeah, the shot come from the bathroom," Stephens said. "It was the new tenant, the guy in 5B. This afternoon, when he moved in, I heard a noise in there--sounded like he was moving furniture."

  Ray and Papia raced down the hall and turned the coat-hanger "doorknob" of 5B. The door screaked open, revealing a cheerless room devoid of personal belongings or luggage. The two officers had a sinking feeling, an eerie sense that they'd missed their man by a matter of minutes. The bed was tidily made, but there was still a depression on one side of the mattress, as though someone had just been sitting there. The window overlooking the Lorraine was open. The curtains had been slid to one side and now rippled faintly in the breeze. A straight-backed chair was by the window, facing toward the Lorraine, and a large rickety dresser had been scooted across the floor, evidently to make room for the chair.

  Ray and Papia walked to the window and tried to figure the sight lines. "Looks like he was settin' here watching," Lieutenant Papia said. "But it's not a good angle to shoot fro
m."

  Captain Ray tried to picture the shooter standing there and agreed. He began to think that Stephens was right--maybe the shot came from the bathroom.

  As they turned to leave, however, Papia spotted something: on the floor were two short black leather straps. Papia thought they had come from a camera.

  Now Captain Ray and Lieutenant Papia clomped down the linoleum hall to the bathroom. They opened the door and moved toward the window, which was cracked open about five inches. Ray tried to open the window farther, but it was jammed. He peered down into the littered yard and spotted a wire-mesh screen directly below, as though it had been jimmied from its groove.

  Outside, through the gloaming, Ray and Papia could see the Lorraine dead ahead, about two hundred feet away. The motel parking lot was a confusion of swirling squad-car lights and chattering radios. Unlike in 5B, the sight line from this window to the Lorraine was a direct one. "Yeah," said Papia, "he could get a good shot from here."

  Captain Ray discovered that the wooden windowsill had a curious marking, a half-moon indentation that appeared to him to have been freshly made; thinking it could have been caused by the recoil of a firing rifle barrel, he made a note of it, and later that night homicide detectives removed the sill and took it into evidence. By the look of things, the sniper would have had to stand in the bathtub to squeeze off the shot. Indeed, there appeared to be new scuff marks in the tub. Above the tub, higher along the wall, was a large palm print. It seemed likely to Captain Ray that the sniper, while climbing into the tub, had used one hand to steady himself against the wall.

  Captain Ray ordered a policeman to guard the bathroom, and another to stand watch over 5B and secure the crime scene until homicide detectives and FBI agents could take over the case.

  "Where's the landlord?" Captain Ray asked. Eventually comprehending him, Mrs. Ledbetter tugged at his sleeve and led him down the corridor to Bessie Brewer's room and office in the flophouse's adjoining wing. The deaf-mute gestured toward the door of room 2 and groaned.

  "Open up!" Ray commanded, pounding on the door. "Police!"

  A bolt slid open, and a nervous-looking Mrs. Brewer appeared at the door. In the room, an episode of Rawhide flickered on the television.

  "Who rented room 5B?" Captain Ray wanted to know.

  Mrs. Brewer couldn't remember the man's name. Flustered, she began to rummage around her office for the receipt book. She had heard the shot, she volunteered, or at least what sounded like a shot. She had stepped out into the hall and run into Willie Anschutz, who told her, "Your new roomer ran down the stairs with a gun!" She'd dashed down to 5B only to find it empty, just as Captain Ray and Lieutenant Papia would find it a few minutes later. Then, worried about her safety, she'd scurried back to her office and bolted the door.

  The man in 5B had checked in around 3:00 or so, Mrs. Brewer said, and paid for a week's rent. He was dressed in a sharp-looking dark suit, like what a businessman would wear. She first showed him a nicer room toward the front of the building, but he turned it down.

  "Here it is," Mrs. Brewer said, grasping the receipt book. She opened it up and found the stub for $8.50 made out earlier that day.

  The roomer's name, she told Captain Ray, was John Willard.

  26 A PAUSE THAT WOULD NEVER END

  AT THE LORRAINE, Jesse Jackson was on the phone, frantically trying to get word to Coretta. He sat on the edge of the bed and dialed the number over and over again on the black rotary telephone. He didn't want her to have to hear the news over the airwaves, through the sterile voice of a news announcer. When he finally caught her, at about 6:20, she had just returned to the King home at 234 Sunset. She'd been shopping most of the afternoon in downtown Atlanta with her twelve-year-old daughter, Yolanda, to buy her a new dress for Easter Sunday. Coretta was lying down in her bedroom, resting her feet, her ankles crossed, when she picked up the beige receiver from the bedside phone. "Hello?"

  "Coretta, Doc just got shot,"382 Jackson said, indelicately blurting out the news. The report he gave her contained a hopeful fib: her husband had only been hit in the shoulder.

  "I ... understand," she said, after a long pause. There was a formality to the way she said it. Jackson thought she bore the news with stoic reserve, almost as though she'd been expecting it. This was a phone call, she later said, that she'd been "subconsciously waiting for" nearly all her married life.

  As she talked with Jackson, her sons, Dexter and Marty, came racing into the room. They'd been watching TV elsewhere in the house, sitting on the floor, when a news bulletin flashed across the screen, saying their daddy had been shot in Memphis.

  "Mama?" Dexter interrupted excitedly. "You hear that?383 What do they mean?"

  Coretta raised her finger to her lips to shush the boys, and they waited impatiently at the foot of the bed as their mother finished hearing what Jackson had to say.

  "They've taken him to St. Joseph's Hospital," he told her.

  "I understand,"384 she replied again. "I ... understand." As he recalled years later in his memoir, Dexter didn't understand why his mother kept saying those words, but he dreaded the tone in her voice.

  "I don't know how bad it is," Jackson said. "But you should get a plane out right away."

  "I'll check for the next flight," she told Jackson, and calmly hung up.

  INSIDE ST. JOSEPH'S, a team of nurses and ER orderlies385 wheeled King into a small, harshly lit chamber with pale green walls. They transferred King to an operating table and snipped away his blood-stiffened jacket, shirt, undershirt, and tie--giving the clothing to Memphis Police Department witnesses as possible evidence. King lay with his head turned slightly to his left, the gaping wound at the base of his neck no longer bleeding. His face was still partially covered with a towel. A crucifix hung on the wall, the dying Christ's visage brooding over banks of medical machines and arrayed instruments.

  Among the first physicians on the scene was Dr. Ted Galyon, who, using a stethoscope, detected a clear heartbeat and a radial pulse. An IV tube was inserted into King's left forearm to administer vital saline fluids, another in his ankle to infuse blood.

  At 6:20, Dr. Rufus Brown, a young white physician from Mississippi still in his surgical residency, entered the room. Dr. Brown could see that King was having trouble breathing--the bullet had ravaged his windpipe, and the lungs weren't getting sufficient air. Without a moment's hesitation, Dr. Brown picked up a scalpel. "Tracheotomy," he said to the hovering staff, and pressed the blade into the base of King's throat. Several minutes later a cuffed endotracheal tube was inserted into the new hole, and King was connected to a respirator.

  Ralph Abernathy was there in the emergency room, watching all this. He leaned against a wall, along with the Reverend Bernard Lee. Dr. Brown eyed the two men uneasily--it was against hospital policy for loved ones to be present in the room. A nurse sidled up to Abernathy and said, "You really must go."

  Abernathy was adamant. "I'm staying,"386 he said, with enough declarative force to end the matter. He and Lee stood against the wall and watched the frantic proceedings. Abernathy was amazed by the size of the wound--it extended from King's jaw down his neck toward the clavicle.

  Within minutes, nearly a dozen doctors were crowded into the room--including a thoracic surgeon, a heart surgeon, a neurosurgeon, a pulmonary specialist, a renal specialist, and several general surgeons. Examining the injuries, the doctors found blood bubbling in the chest. Probing further, they could see the apex of King's right lung bulging up through the wound. They clamped various severed vessels deep inside King's right chest cavity and inserted a tube that quickly drew nearly a thousand cc's of pooled blood.

  At around 6:30, the neurosurgeon Dr. Frederick Gioia stepped into the fray.387 A Sicilian-American from upstate New York who had trained in Geneva, Switzerland, Dr. Gioia was an endearingly gruff, intense man with delicate surgeon's hands. Over the years, he had treated countless cases of gunshot trauma. Dr. Gioia quickly confirmed that the bullet had damaged King's jugular
vein and windpipe, and then had driven down into the spinal cord, cutting it completely--apparently ricocheting through several vertebrae and lacerating the subclavian artery in the process. As Dr. Gioia later put it, "A defect in the vertebral bodies of C-7 to T-2 was present with a complete loss of spinal cord substance." Along its zigzagging path inside his body, the fraying bullet had torn loose shards of bone that became, in effect, tiny projectiles, wreaking further internal damage. The main part of the bullet had come to rest along his left shoulder blade; Dr. Gioia could feel the hard mass of metal--or what was left of it--just under the skin, wedged against the scapula.

  Shortly after making this determination, Dr. Gioia set down his instruments and shook his head. He came over to speak with Abernathy and Lee. "It would be a blessing388 if he did go," the doctor said, his piercing blue eyes peering over his surgical mask. "The spine is cut and he has sustained awful brain damage." Shards of bullet, he noted, had severed prominent nerves near the base of the skull.

  If King did survive, he would be paralyzed from the neck down and would probably live in a vegetative state. There was very little Dr. Gioia could do, very little anyone could do at this point. By most medical definitions, King was already brain-dead. The organs were alive, and the lungs drew breath thanks to the respirator, but King's vital systems had ceased to function as an organic whole.

  Yet his heart kept beating.

  EVER SINCE THE first dispatcher alerts around 6:10 p.m., the Memphis police had been on the lookout for a late-model Mustang driven by a well-dressed white man possibly answering to the name John Willard. Cruisers were placed at nearly every major thoroughfare leading from the city, and all across Memphis policemen pulled over every Mustang they saw. This was no mean task, as the wildly popular Mustang was one of the most common cars on the road. A quick check with area Ford dealers would reveal that some four hundred light-colored Mustangs had been sold over the past three years in Memphis and Shelby County.