Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (2 page)

IF THE GUARDS had been watching him closely during the past few weeks of April 1967, they would have observed that 416-J was behaving strangely. He had been plowing through travel books about Mexico and checked out an English-Spanish dictionary from the prison library. He experimented with making his skin darker by applying a walnut dye.
⁶
He drank considerable quantities of mineral oil
⁷
(one of the many odd health remedies he swore by) and stayed up far into the night, his mind racing with ideas.

Often as not, those ideas were fueled by amphetamines, which by whatever name--speed, bennies, splash, spaniels--were rife inside the walls of Jeff City. He usually took the drug in pill or powder form, but he also shot up with needles, and he was known among the prison population as a "merchant" in the amphetamine trade. "When he was using,"
⁸
said one inmate who'd known him for years, "he would lay down in his cell and he would think. He would say how it made his mind clear up. He would go all the way back until he was six or seven years old. Or, he might go over a job and see the mistakes he had made."

Lately, 416-J had been practicing yoga in his cell, or at least something that
looked
like yoga. He would curl himself in a tiny ball and hold the position for hours, straining to crunch his body into the tightest possible space. This human pretzeling might have looked odd to a guard walking the cell block, but then 416-J was always doing push-ups and calisthenics, always grunting and walking on his hands and carrying on in there.

But there was something else: just the day before, on April 22, 416-J had received a guest down in the visitation room. This was highly unusual--he was a loner who seemed to have no family or friends on the outside. The prison grapevine had it that the visitor was his brother
⁹
from St. Louis, but 416-J would not talk about it to anyone.

At around eight o'clock this morning, he was allowed to leave his cell and head up to the kitchen. He toted a small sack of toiletries, which drew no one's attention, since culinary employees like him were allowed to shower and shave in the kitchen bathroom. He took the elevator up to the bakery, arriving well before the start of his eleven o'clock shift. He proceeded to cook--and devour--a rather astonishing quantity of eggs
¹⁰
: one dozen.

Then 416-J slipped into the break room, ostensibly to wash up. Inside his sack were a small mirror, a comb, a razor with several extra blades, a bar of soap, and twenty candy bars. There was also a Channel Master pocket transistor radio that he'd bought from the prison canteen two days earlier. As required by Jeff City rules, the number 00416, in tiny print, was permanently etched on the side of the radio's housing. In his shoes, pressing uncomfortably into the soles of his feet, were two wads of cash
¹¹
totaling nearly three hundred dollars.

Somewhere in the break room, several days earlier, 416-J had hidden a clean white shirt, and a pair of prison pants that he had dyed black with stencil ink, taking special care to cover up the telltale stripe down the side. Quickly, he removed his prison garb, then slipped on the black pants and white shirt. He put his prison uniform
back on
, so that he now wore two layers of clothing.

Next, 416-J took the elevator down to the loading dock area, where a hinged metal box had been partially loaded with fresh bread for the honor farm. The box--four feet by three feet by three feet--was easily large enough for a man to climb inside. And that's exactly what the prisoner did. He crushed several layers of the warm soft bread as he eased himself into the box, and then curled into a tight fetal ball.

At this point he must have had an accomplice--or several accomplices--because a false bottom, punctured with tiny holes for ventilation, was placed on top of him. And then, above that, several more layers of bread were loaded into the box until it was filled. The hinged lid was closed tight. Then the box was dollied outside and placed near the lip of the loading dock.

A few minutes later, a freight truck pulled up. Two inmates hoisted the bread crate into the bed of the truck, which was enclosed with a canopy on three sides but open in the rear. When the prisoners waved the truck on, the driver pulled out from the loading area and approached the security tunnel. An officer came out and inspected the vehicle for a stowaway. He checked the undercarriage and the engine. Then he climbed up into the truck bed to examine the cargo.

The prisoner, hot and clammy inside his tight berth, breathed uneasily in the doughy fumes as someone above him opened the lid of the bread box. The guard thumped and shook the container a bit but saw to his satisfaction that the loaves were stacked all the way to the top. The prisoner must have sighed in relief as he heard the box lid swing shut.

Stepping back from the truck, the guard nodded his okay. The gate clicked open and the driver roared on, bound for the honor farm.

THAT SAME MORNING, at precisely the moment 416-J was making his escape, a politician whom the prisoner greatly admired sat a thousand miles away in an NBC television studio. Facing questions from the moderator, Lawrence Spivak of
Meet the Press
, this controversial figure announced to the country that he was considering running for the White House. His name was George C. Wallace, the former governor of Alabama who had stunned the nation a few years earlier by standing in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to prevent integration.

The forty-seven-year-old George Wallace was a firebrand who typically pranced and fulminated and played to the audience with his energetically arching beetled brows; it was sometimes said that he could strut while sitting.
¹²
On this morning, however, Wallace tried to project an air of presidential sophistication and calm. He wore a crisp suit, modulated his voice, and kept his stage theatrics to a minimum. His usual oil slick of hair seemed to shine just a little less greasily. He was not a racist, Wallace wanted to assure the nation, and his campaign was not predicated on a "backlash against anybody of color."
¹³

However, he added, "There
is
a backlash against big government in this country." He looked deep into the camera, his bituminous eyes lit up for the millions of Americans who were waking across the heartland.

"This is a movement of the people,"
¹⁴
he said, "and it doesn't make any difference whether the leading politicians endorse it or not." His campaign would focus on the "average man in the street ... this man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, the barber, the beautician, the policeman on the beat, the little businessman. They are the ones. Those are the mass of people that are going to support a change on the domestic scene in this country."

Then, with a faint snarl, Wallace squinted at the camera and said: "If the politicians get in the way
¹⁵
of this movement, a lot of them are going to get run over."

ONCE OUTSIDE THE walls of Jeff City, 416-J crawled out of the box, trampling and mashing the bread as he wriggled himself free. The bread was so ruined that when it arrived at its destination, the farmhands gave it all to the chickens.
¹⁶
Standing in the truck bed under the covered canopy, the prisoner stripped out of his uniform and stuffed the old green prison clothes in his sack. Having peeled down to his dyed black pants and white shirt, he now looked passably like a civilian. The truck crossed over the river and was now moving along at nearly fifty miles an hour, too fast for him to make a safe exit. But when the driver slowed for a few seconds at the graveled entrance to the farm, the prisoner leaped out of the back. The truck chuffed on--the driver hadn't seen him in his mirror.

Now 416-J walked hurriedly down to the river's edge. He made for an old junkyard near the bridge and hid in the weeds among the rusted husks of abandoned cars, keeping his ears tuned all day for the sound of men on horseback or the yelping of bloodhounds. Every so often he turned on his little transistor radio for bulletins announcing his escape. So far, so good: the newscasts mentioned nothing, although soon the Missouri Corrections Department would put out a "Wanted" notice with a modest reward of fifty dollars for his recapture.

Once darkness descended, he crossed back over the river and began walking west along the railroad tracks toward Kansas City--which was a ruse, for he had no intention of going to Kansas City. The prison officials knew he had family in St. Louis (about a hundred miles due east), and they would naturally suspect that he'd head in that direction. By walking west toward Kansas, he hoped he could buy some time.

So for six days he clomped west along the railroad tracks, eating his stash of candy bars, drinking water from the occasional spring, and lighting campfires with matches he stole from an old trailer. "I looked at the stars a lot,"
¹⁷
he said later. "I hadn't seen them for quite a while." One night a couple of railroad crewmen startled him as he warmed himself by the fire. He told them he'd been hunting along the river and had gotten drenched. They seemed to buy his story and left him alone. But then another night he saw state troopers patrolling the rural road that paralleled the tracks, and he was sure they were on his scent.

By the sixth day, however, he began to sense that the heat was off. He kept listening to his radio and was surprised that the newscasts made no mention of his escape. Somewhere along the way, he found a file or some other suitable tool and tried to rub away his prison number--00416--from the housing of the radio.

On the sixth night, he saw a little store in the distance, its lights gleaming invitingly. Not wanting to look like a desperado, he cleaned himself as best he could and shambled inside. He bought sandwiches and some beer--the first real food he'd had since the enormous mess of eggs he'd fixed for himself in the prison bakery.

He was ravenous, footsore, and irritable from a fugitive week of tense nerves relieved by little sleep. But now, as he ate his sandwiches, he might have allowed himself a smirk of satisfaction.
A bread box!
He had to savor it, had to congratulate the classic beauty of the feat. Jeff City was an impossible joint to break out of--that's what he'd always heard, that's what most of its denizens believed. In the institutional memory of the place, there had only been three known escapes--and they had all failed.

He'd been stuck inside Jeff City's sad gray ramparts for seven years, and he had another eighteen hanging over him. While there, he'd organized his life around the goal of escape--it was the central idea that had focused and sustained him. He'd scrimped and schemed in the shadows of a deliberate and tenacious obscurity. He'd perfected a kind of anti-identity, so that no one would notice him when he was there--or miss him when he was gone.

That night, 416-J called his brother
¹⁸
and arranged a rendezvous spot. Then he hopped an eastbound freight train.
¹⁹
Feeling what must have been some mixture of anxiety and delight, he rolled past the Jeff City prison complex. How many jittery nights had he lain awake in his prison cell, listening to the whistle of locomotives running over these same tracks that now gave him flight?

Sprung from Jeff City's walls, he let his mind begin to churn with thoughts of other jobs, other projects of greater complexity and ambition. But now he was heading home, in the direction of St. Louis.