Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  Abernathy nodded and curtly told Dr. Francisco what he needed to hear. "This," he said, "is the body471 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 something472 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 appearance473 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 case474 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 store477 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 Americans478 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.

  At 5:10 a.m. eastern time, Friday, April 5, Fitzpatrick personally delivered the evidence to Special Agent Robert A. Frazier of the FBI Crime Lab on Pennsylvania Avenue. Ballistics, fiber, and fingerprint experts were already waiting.

  BOOK TWO

  WHO IS ERIC GALT?

  For murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak

  With most miraculous organ.

  SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

  30 A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS

  JUST AFTER DAWN on Friday, April 5, a Lockheed Jetstar taxied479 from the immense hangar that housed presidential planes and then shot down the runway at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. On board the twelve-seat business jet were Ramsey Clark, Cartha DeLoach, and several other government officials, including the brilliant young black Justice Department lawyer Roger Wilkins. On this early morning, they were hastening to Memphis on a vital mission: to officially kick off the federal investigation into Martin Luther King's assassination--and to assure the city, and the nation, that the Justice Department would expend every resource to find and prosecute King's killer.

  That morning Clark wore a crisp black suit with a thin tie of diagonal blue and white stripes. He already felt exhausted, and the day was only beginning, a day that promised to be as stressful as any he'd experienced as attorney general. Clark had hardly slept the night before--no one at the Justice Department had.

  The jet banked over Prince Georges County and climbed west over Washington, where the fires from the previous night's rioting still smoldered. Clark looked out the window at the city where he had been largely raised and schooled.

  DeLoach tried to brighten the mood. He was confident that the FBI would find the killer--or killers--within a matter of hours. While the plane was in the air, he was in constant communication with the bureau and would periodically share the latest bulletins with Clark. The probable murder weapon, he said, was safely ensconced in the crime lab, two floors above Clark's office in the Justice building, and was now undergoing analysis. Working off the serial number on the rifle--461476--FBI officials had already called the Remington Arms Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and traced the weapon to a gun wholesaler in Alabama and finally to a gun shop in Birmingham called Aeromarine Supply Company; FBI agents in Birmingham would soon be dispatched to question the employees who sold the gun.

  Then DeLoach learned of a tantalizing new lead: in 1958 the Memphis Police Department had arrested a white male fugitive named John Willard480 who had committed arson and whose last known whereabouts were in Mississippi. MPD sleuths, as well as FBI agents from Memphis and Jackson, were already combing the region in hopes of tracking the man down.

  DeLoach had been in such a hurry this morning that he hadn't had time to eat. Now he opened his briefcase481 and found a sandwich next to his large revolver. As he tucked into his breakfast, he looked out the window at the Shenandoah Valley, which was now sharpening with the vivid greens of spring. The jet hurtled past the mountains of Virginia at four hundred miles per hour and headed over Tennessee.

  Two hours later, at 7:20 a.m. central time, the Jetstar landed in Memphis. Stepping off the plane, Clark and DeLoach saw that the place had a decidedly martial cast. National Guardsmen and riot police ringed the perimeter of the runway, and military planes were parked along the tarmac. Flags flew at half-staff.

  Special Agent Robert Jensen met Clark and DeLoach on the tarmac and drove them into the troubled city, which was just now stirring from the curfews.

  AT THAT SAME moment, Eric Galt eased his Mustang into the parking lot of a forlorn housing project in Atlanta called Capitol Homes. It was about 8:20 eastern time on a drizzly Friday morning, and the city was waking up to the banner headlines in the Constitution proclaiming that Atlanta's most famous citizen had been slain. Galt had been driving through the night, worried all the while that some state trooper might notice the make and color of his car and end his escape before he even got out of the South. From Birmingham to Atlanta, he had avoided main highways and driven strictly on back roads. "At daybreak I stopped for gas482 on the outskirts of Atlanta," he later said; he then went to the Capitol Homes project--a location he had scoped out483 two weeks earlier.

  Galt hated giving up his loyal Mustang--over the past seven months he had driven it some nineteen thousand miles. Ditching it like this violated his sense of frugality. "I sure hated that I didn't have time to sell it for at least $1,000," he wrote. But he knew there was no time to put an ad in the paper and fool around negotiating with customers and all the usual rigmarole; the whole world, it seemed, was searching for this car.

  Capitol Homes was a complex of old redbrick buildings occupied almost entirely by white tenants. Trash was heaped in one corner of the parking lot, and a playground slide lay toppled on the ground. The general drabness of the eight-hundred-unit complex was relieved by a flower garden near the entrance off Memorial Drive. Rising over the neighborhood, as if to mock its dreariness, was the elegant neoclassical Georgia state capitol, with its massive gold-ribbed dome shimmering through curtains of rain.

  That morning a woman named Mary Bridges,484 who lived in apartment 550 of Capitol Homes, was in a rush to get her twelve-year-old daughter, Wanda, off to school. Through her front window, Mrs. Bridges spotted a white two-door Mustang hardtop with whitewall tires pulling in to the parking lot. The car abruptly stopped, then made a screeching sound as it jerked rearward into a vacant parking place a few yards from her door. The Mustang had Alabama plates, and the car windows were affixed with Mexican "Turista" stickers.

  Mrs. Bridges opened her door and stood at the threshold with Wanda, watching the man emerge from the Mustang, lock th
e door, and hurriedly scuffle away. He seemed nervous, wary. She had never seen the man before, or the car. He had "soot-black hair" and wore a dark suit--the coat dramatically flared out in the morning breeze. Without a raincoat or umbrella, and carrying no luggage, he hurried along the wet sidewalk, turned left at the flower garden, and disappeared down Memorial Drive.

  She thought he might be a traveling insurance salesman, but something about the mystery visitor disturbed her. Mrs. Bridges turned to Wanda and said, half-joking, "He might have a gun."

  Galt was relieved to have shed his car, severing himself from the most conspicuous piece of evidence that tied him to Memphis. What he did next is not precisely known, but in all likelihood he flagged down a taxi. At 8:41 a.m., a United Cab Company driver485 named Chuck Stephens was heading west on Memorial Drive when he was hailed by a white man Stephens later described as about thirty years old, six feet tall, slender, and neat. The man was standing in the spitting rain on Memorial near Fraser Street--just a few blocks from Capitol Homes. Stephens pulled over, and the man hopped in, asking to be taken to the Greyhound bus depot. Stephens nodded and headed downtown, thinking it odd that his passenger was going to the bus station without any luggage. The man didn't say a word during the short drive. Upon reaching the Greyhound terminal, he paid the fare--ninety-three cents--and climbed out into the drizzly street.

  Galt's plan was to take the first bus north to Detroit. But when he got to the station, he inquired about the times and found the next coach bound for the Motor City wasn't scheduled to leave until around 11:00 a.m.--and that bus was running late. Realizing he still had a few hours to spare, Galt decided to make a dash for his flophouse neighborhood around Peachtree Street to pick up his laundry and a few things from his room.