Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  AT THE LORRAINE Motel, a stunned and deeply sleep-deprived Ralph Abernathy started off the morning by giving a brief press conference in the motel parking lot, just below the now-infamous balcony, where janitors had scrubbed off the last of King's blood to make way for enormous wreaths of flowers. "This is one of the darkest days486 in the history of this nation and certainly in the life of my people," Abernathy said, although in the end he had no doubt that "non-violence will triumph." He never had any desire to lead the movement, he said. "No living man can fill his shoes. I always wanted to stand with him and not ahead of him."

  But as the new president of the SCLC, Abernathy wanted to assure the world that the cause would go on--starting with the Beale Street march that King had planned in support of the garbage workers. He announced that he would return on Monday to lead it. Not only would the demonstration be nonviolent, he vowed; in deference to King, it would be utterly silent. To run this memorial march, Bayard Rustin would be called in--the old pro, the bespectacled impresario of the civil rights movement, who, among other things, had stage-managed the March on Washington in 1963 where King had given his "Dream" speech.

  When a reporter asked Abernathy if he was worried that returning to Memphis might provoke another assassination attempt--perhaps on his life--Abernathy replied, "We're all willing to die for what we believe in."

  All the members of the inner circle rallied around Abernathy--except Jesse Jackson. He was in Chicago, where he had hired a public relations agent487 and was now giving a live interview to NBC's Today show. Reiterating his hyperbolic story from the previous night, he told the national audience that he was the last person to speak with King, and implied that he'd cradled King's bleeding head in his final moments. "He died in my arms," he said. As if to prove it, he still wore the blood-streaked turtleneck. Jackson failed to mention the odd way the blood got there. He then left for a busy itinerary of other interviews and public appearances, wearing his bloody shirt through the day. By inventing this halo-glow moment with the fallen King, Jackson apparently was trying to make the point that he, not Abernathy, had inherited King's mantle.

  The Today show was blaring from several rooms at the Lorraine, and some of King's entourage who saw Jackson's interview found the spectacle repugnant. Said James Bevel: "To prostitute and lie488 about the crucifixion of a prophet within a race for the sake of one's own self-aggrandizement is the most gruesome crime a man can commit."

  When he heard about it, Abernathy was much more charitable, even though he had cause for greater outrage. The only possible explanation, he said, was that Jackson "was somehow in shock,489 reliving the whole scene in his mind, and acting out what he might have wished to do during those last seconds."

  SHORTLY AFTER THE Today show went off the national airwaves, FBI special agent Neil Shanahan walked through the door490 of Aeromarine Supply Company at 5701 Airport Highway in Birmingham. There he met Donald Wood, the son of the store owner and an experienced salesman of firearms. Shanahan began to question Wood about a certain Remington .30-06 rifle that had come into the FBI's possession the previous night in relation to the Martin Luther King assassination.

  "Well, I sold a Gamemaster to a guy about a week ago," Wood volunteered, according to a report Shanahan filed shortly after the interview. Wood remembered the man well. In fact, he said, when he'd read in the paper this morning that the weapon left at the crime scene was a Remington .30-06, his thoughts turned immediately to this particular sale.

  "Would you happen to have a record of it in your files?" Shanahan asked.

  Wood said he did, and he soon retrieved from the Aeromarine office a sales invoice, dated Saturday, March 30. Shanahan felt a frisson of recognition, for there it was, in a clear and legible hand: Remington Model 760 Gamemaster .30-06, serial number 461476, with mounted Redfield variable scope--the exact weapon found outside Canipe's Amusement Company the previous night.

  The man who bought the rifle had stated that he lived in Birmingham, at 1907 South Eleventh Street. The name he gave was Harvey Lowmeyer. His signature was scrawled across the bottom of the invoice. By the messy way it was chicken-scratched, Shanahan couldn't tell for sure whether the name was spelled "Lowmeyer" or "Lowmyer."

  Agent Shanahan phoned this information to his superiors, and soon agents were dispatched to the address on Eleventh Street, only to discover that no one named Harvey Lowmeyer had ever lived there. Meanwhile, Shanahan asked Wood if he'd be willing to offer an official statement. Wood readily consented, and Shanahan brought him to the FBI field office, where he underwent several hours of questioning.

  Wood said that Harvey Lowmeyer had first come into Aeromarine the day before the date on the invoice. On that day--Friday, March 29--he purchased a Remington Model 700 .243, but called back later to say he wanted to exchange it for something more powerful. "My brother says I got the wrong one," Lowmeyer had said. Wood told Lowmeyer he could come back the following morning and make the exchange.

  As agreed, Lowmeyer had walked into Aeromarine the next morning. Wood told Lowmeyer it would take a while to remove the scope from the .243 and mount it on the .30-06. Around three o'clock, Lowmeyer returned. Wood put the Gamemaster in an old Browning box. Lowmeyer bought some Remington-Peters ammunition and completed the transaction--paying in cash.

  What did this Lowmeyer look like?, Agent Shanahan asked.

  To Wood, he seemed like a "meek individual"--soft-spoken, mumbly, nervous. He recalled that Lowmeyer wore a slightly rumpled dark brown business suit with a white shirt and a tie. He was approximately five feet eight inches tall, weighed about 160 pounds, and looked to be in his mid-thirties. He had a medium complexion. His dark brown hair was swept back from his forehead.

  Through Wood, Shanahan located a regular Aeromarine customer named John DeShazo who had spoken with Harvey Lowmeyer in the store the day he bought the original .243 rifle. An NRA loyalist who often spent hours at a time inside Aeromarine, DeShazo confirmed Wood's version of events, as well as his description of Lowmeyer, but he added a few details. DeShazo had smelled alcohol on Lowmeyer's breath. "He wasn't drunk,491 bleary-eyed, or slurring his speech," DeShazo said, "but he'd definitely been drinking."

  DeShazo went on: "The man gave the impression that he was not from Alabama. He didn't look like a hunter or an outdoorsman. He appeared out of place in the store, didn't know a thing about rifles and had no business getting one. I thought at the time that this is the type of guy who buys a rifle to kill his wife--the type of guy who gives the use of weapons a bad name."

  31 LOOPS AND WHORLS, LANDS AND GROOVES

  AT THE FBI Crime Lab492 in Washington, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake spent the early-morning hours of April 5 poring over the contents of the package that had been couriered up from Memphis. A slight, fastidious man, Bonebrake was one of the world's foremost authorities on dactyloscopy, the study and classification of finger and palm prints. Bonebrake had worked as a fingerprint examiner for the FBI since 1941. His was an esoteric profession493 within the crime-fighting universe--more art, it was said, than science, a closed world of forensic analysis predicated on a foundation of facts so incredible that a thousand bad TV detective shows over the decades had done little to diminish the essential mystery: that the complex friction-ridge patterns on human fingertips and palms, unique to every individual on earth, carry trace amounts of an oily residue excreted from pores that, when impressed upon certain kinds of surfaces, can be "raised" through the use of special dusting powders or chemicals--and then photographed and viewed on cards.

  As far-fetched as the discipline seemed to most laymen, fingerprint analysis by 1968 had been the standard technique of criminal identification for more than half a century. It replaced a bizarre and not terribly accurate method of French origin called the Bertillon system, which required the careful measuring of a criminal's earlobes and other anatomical parts. Fingerprinting wasn't perfect, but it was the best system in existence for narrowing the pool of potential culprits in many situ
ations. In many cases, fingerprinting was a godsend, providing the breakthrough that solved the crime.

  In 1968, the FBI categorized fingerprints according to the Henry classification system, which was developed by Britain in the late nineteenth century. The system recognizes three primary friction-ridge patterns--arches, loops, and whorls. Loops, the most common pattern, are assigned a numerical value according to the number of ridges contained within each pattern found on each digit. Loop patterns can be further described as "radial" or "ulnar," depending on which direction their microscopic tails point.

  Bonebrake got started with his meticulous work shortly after dawn. Most of the prints that he found were fragments or smudges that contained little or no information of value. The twenty-dollar bills that Mrs. Bessie Brewer had provided yielded no usable prints whatsoever. Eventually, however, Bonebrake was able to lift six high-quality specimens from the Remington rifle, the Redfield scope, the Bushnell binoculars, the front section of the Commercial Appeal, the bottle of Mennen Afta aftershave lotion, and one of the Schlitz beer cans.

  Most of these prints appeared to come from different fingers, but already Bonebrake could tell that two of the prints--those taken from the rifle and the binoculars--were from the same digit of the same individual. Both seemed to have been deposited by a left thumb, and, upon further study, the print pattern would turn out to be unmistakable: an ulnar loop of twelve ridge counts.

  This was an important find. The FBI had the fingerprints of more than eighty-two million individuals on file--a number obviously too large to work with, as fingerprint examiners had to do all matching the old-fashioned way, by hand, eyeball, and magnifying glass. This tiny little detail, however, narrowed the search considerably: an ulnar loop of twelve ridge counts on the left thumb. Bonebrake's task was still formidable, but now he had something definite on which to draw comparisons. He made large black-and-white blowups of all six of the latent prints, and then he and his team got started.

  ON ANOTHER FLOOR of the FBI Crime Lab, Robert A. Frazier spent the morning494 examining and test-firing the Remington Gamemaster after it had been dusted for fingerprints. A ferociously methodical man with nearly three decades' experience, Frazier was the chief of the FBI's Firearms Identification Unit, where a team of ballistics experts worked around the clock in what was widely considered the world's preeminent weapons-testing facility. Here technicians fired rifles into water recovery tanks, examined bullet fragments and firearms components under high-powered microscopes, and subjected objects to arcane tests to detect such things as the presence of gunpowder and lead.

  Within a few hours, Frazier and his team had made a long list of important preliminary findings.

  First, the projectile which Dr. Francisco had extracted from Martin Luther King's body only a few hours earlier was a .30-caliber metal-jacketed, soft-nosed bullet made by the Remington-Peters Company--identical in manufacture to the unused Remington-Peters .30-06 rounds found in the ammo box that was part of the bundle.

  Second, Frazier was able to ascertain the kind of barrel from which the bullet was fired. The barrels of modern firearms are "rifled" with spiral grooves that are designed to give bullets a rapid spinning motion for stability during flight. The raised portions between the grooves are known as lands. The number, width, and direction of twist of the lands and grooves are called the class characteristics of a barrel, and are common to all firearms of a given model and manufacture. Frazier determined that the bullet that killed King had been fired from a barrel "rifled with six lands and grooves, right twist," and that the Gamemaster, analyzed under a microscope in his laboratory, exhibited the same land-and-groove pattern.

  Third, the spent cartridge that Special Agent Jensen had removed from the chamber had been fired in the same Gamemaster rifle, as evidenced by a tiny "extractor mark" Frazier found imprinted on the metal casing. At the base of this spent cartridge case, Frazier discovered a head stamp that said, "R-P .30-06 SPRG," indicating that it was a Remington-Peters round of the same caliber as the ammunition found in the ammo box.

  Frazier concluded, based on the "physical characteristics of the rifling impressions" as well as other factors, that the bullet removed from King's body could have been fired from the Remington Gamemaster. However, he could not say with scientific certainty that the bullet came from this rifle, "to the exclusion of all other rifles." This was because the bullet, as he described it in his report, "had been distorted due to mutilation" as it struck hard bone while passing through King's body.

  Frazier knew that the mechanical components of individual firearms (such as the firing pin and breech face) have distinctive microscopic traits that can engrave telltale markings on bullets. The tiny striations often found on fired bullets are known as individual identifying characteristics and are, in effect, the ballistics equivalent of a fingerprint. Frazier had hoped the bullet that killed King would exhibit these telltale markings, but it didn't: the round, having been chipped, dented, warped, and broken into several discrete parts, was missing the critical information.

  Though a dismaying discovery, it was not uncommon; bullets often came to Frazier's lab in sorry condition. Such was the secondary effect of firearms violence: projectiles, in doing their damage, themselves became damaged.

  Frazier also studied the windowsill that had been removed from the communal bathroom at Bessie Brewer's rooming house. Making microscopic comparisons between the half-moon indentation in the windowsill and various markings on the rifle barrel, he determined to his satisfaction that the dent could have been caused by the Gamemaster's recoil upon firing--it was "consistent" with the barrel's contours and appeared to have been created recently--but again, he stopped short of an absolute confirmation.

  Finally, Frazier examined King's bloody clothes, subjecting them to chemical tests. He found "no partially burned or unburned gunpowder" on King's dress shirt, suit coat, and necktie, which conclusively confirmed what everybody who'd been at the Lorraine already knew--that King had not been shot at close range. But when Frazier tested the clothing with sodium rhodizonate, he found lead particles on King's coat lapel, the right collar of the shirt, and the severed tie. This lead residue was compositionally consistent with the lead in the bullet extracted from King's body--and consistent with what Frazier would expect a high-velocity .30-06 round to deposit around the site of a wound.

  WHILE THE FBI pored over King's mangled clothes, Eric Galt was in Atlanta, only a few miles from King's church and birthplace; he, too, had clothes on his mind. Around 9:30 a.m. eastern time, Galt dropped by the Piedmont Laundry on Peachtree Street to pick up the clothes he had left before he went to Memphis. The laundry's counter clerk, Mrs. Annie Estelle Peters,495 had waited on Galt when he dropped off the clothes on April 1, and she immediately recognized the returning customer when he walked through the door. As before, he was neatly dressed and clean shaven; this time, though, he seemed to be in a hurry. He was abrupt in his speech and impatient when she left the counter to locate his clothes.

  She returned with his items--three pieces of dry cleaning and an assortment of regular laundry totaling $2.71, which he paid for in cash. There was a black-checked coat, a pair of gray trousers, a striped brown tie, four undershirts, three underdrawers, a pair of socks, and a washcloth. All his laundry items were affixed with tiny identifying tags that said, "EGC-83"--which was Galt's permanent "laundry mark" for all his dealings with Piedmont. Hastily, Galt picked up the folded laundry, neatly stacked in a rectangular package of stapled paper, and slung the hangered dry-cleaning items over his shoulder. He walked out of the shop and headed up Peachtree, in the direction of his rooming house on Fourteenth Street.

  Galt didn't barge into the rooming house--he watched and waited from a distance until he was "satisfied there was no unusual activity496 around the place." Then he moved quickly. Neither the tenants nor the owner, Jimmie Garner, saw him. He tidied up his room a bit, throwing some trash in a plastic bag and dropping it into a garbage can out back. He als
o threw out the manual typewriter he'd had since his time in Puerto Vallarta--it would be too cumbersome, he realized, for his fugitive travels to Canada. He packed a suitcase with his clean laundry and his self-help books and his Polaroid camera. He retrieved his .38 Liberty Chief revolver from its hiding place in the basement and stuck it in his belt. He assembled a wad of bills497 that he later estimated to be slightly more than a thousand dollars--money saved, he later claimed, from various smuggling and fencing schemes over the past year. He stamped and addressed an envelope to the Locksmithing Institute in Little Falls, New Jersey, containing the final lesson in his locksmithing correspondence course, an envelope he would mail later that morning. Then he dashed off a short note498 for Mr. Garner on a piece of cardboard--a note clearly designed to throw authorities off his scent. He said he unexpectedly had to go to Birmingham but would come back for his remaining belongings--he specifically mentioned the portable Zenith television--in a few days. He placed the note on his bed and left his key in the lock. Then Galt grabbed his suitcase and never returned to 113 Fourteenth Street Northeast.

  Probably hailing another cab, he headed for the bus station.

  AT THE R. S. LEWIS Funeral Home just a few blocks from Beale Street, Martin Luther King's corpse lay in a temporary bronze casket in a viewing room of purple drapes and lurid stained glass. He was clothed in a fresh dark suit.

  No public viewing had been announced, yet hundreds of people had been lining up since dawn outside the funeral home, hoping to view the body. The Lewis specialists, listening to crackling recordings of King's speeches, had labored through the night--embalming, grooming, dressing, and beautifying the body. "There was so much to do,"499 the mortuary's co-proprietor Clarence Lewis told a reporter. "The jawbone was just dangling. They had to reset it and then build all that up with plaster." They'd had to work in such a rush that Ralph Abernathy, having been in Dr. Francisco's autopsy suite the night before, worried that his friend might not be presentable. "I didn't know whether the funeral home would attempt to repair the indignity of the autopsy," he said. But when he arrived from the Lorraine, Abernathy was amazed at what the Lewis cosmetologists had done with their tinting powders and restorative waxes. "The body appeared unblemished,"500 Abernathy said. "The morticians had done their job well."