Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (35 page)

A FEW MILES away, at the FBI headquarters in Atlanta, the news of King's death came flooding in over the radio. Reaction in the office hallways was mixed. Over the past decade, agents in the Atlanta field office had probably exhausted more man-hours on King--following and wiretapping and bugging and attempting to smear him--than they'd spent working on any other single subject. Code-named "Zorro," King was the office bogeyman, the subject with the most voluminous file, and the quarry of a thousand investigatory trails.

Two agents,
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who happened to be standing next to each other when the news came in, succinctly captured the office's divergent opinions on King. The first, Arthur Murtagh, allowed as how he thought King's death was a tragedy. "He was a credible person," he said. "He was doing what he could to help his people."

The agent standing next to him, James Rose, chastised Murtagh for his naivete, and the two colleagues became embroiled in a heated argument. Rose said King was a Commie, a charlatan, and a threat to the nation's security; he was trying to take over the country and give it to the Russians.

According to Murtagh, Rose exclaimed, "They got Zorro!" and nearly jumped up and down with joy. "Thank God, they finally got the S.O.B.!"

27
A FEW MINUTES AND A FEW MILES

AT POLICE HEADQUARTERS, Director Frank Holloman received word of King's death within seconds and alerted his highest-ranking officers to brace the entire force for the storm he expected would soon rage in the streets--looting, arson, possibly a full-scale race riot. Right now, though, his attention was focused on the incredible high-speed pursuit that had just taken place out on Summer Avenue.

Holloman had some of his best men analyze a recording of the broadcast. Several things about the episode began to seem glaringly strange. Not a single bystander or motorist anywhere along Summer called to report a car chase or gunshots. This was an amazing fact, for Summer was one of Memphis's busiest thoroughfares and the chase had taken place at rush hour, just after the first news bulletin of King's shooting was broadcast--a time, that is, when the city was on edge and primed for trouble.

As officers analyzed the tape and plotted times and locations on a map, they realized that the chase would have had to keep up an
average
speed of eighty miles per hour, nearly impossible on that traffic-snarled artery. Surely such a high-speed pursuit would have produced accidents, or near accidents, while creating a spectacle no motorist driving along Summer could forget.

Furthermore, sheriff's department officers in cruisers parked at several key intersections farther out Summer insisted that they never saw or heard anything unusual--no blue Pontiac, no white Mustang, no squealing tires or revving engines, no windshields shot out. It seemed to them like a phantom car chase.

Bill Austein, the CB enthusiast who had originally flagged down Officer Rufus Bradshaw, nursed doubts of his own. After the transmission fizzled off the airwaves, he and Bradshaw sat in the parking lot of Loeb's Laundry and sifted the extraordinary narrative they'd just heard. Austein realized that the broadcaster's voice sounded oddly calm and steady for a young man purportedly speeding at eighty miles an hour, swerving from lane to lane, with gunfire shattering his windshield.

It was also strange that the transmitter never identified himself, despite repeated urgings by Austein and other Memphis CB operators to do so. If the guy was willing to risk so much to catch a speeding car, and even put his life in danger, why wouldn't he say who he was?

Austein had additional questions about the signal itself. Throughout the broadcasts, he had repeatedly checked the little floating needle on his radio--the S-meter, it was called--and noticed that the signal strength never diminished, even though the pursuit was supposedly taking the Pontiac many miles to the northeast, well beyond the city limits, where the signal should have faded to nothing.

This was extremely fishy, Austein realized, for it meant that the broadcaster, whoever he was, had to have been stationary for much or all of the transmission--either parked in his car or radioing from a home base. The more he thought about it, the more Austein became convinced that the chase was "entirely a hoax,"
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most likely perpetrated by a teenage CB enthusiast, just for yuks. The prankster had doubtless been listening to the police radio, where he picked up the first report that the getaway car was a white Mustang--and then let his imagination run wild.

Holloman's men soon reached more or less the same conclusion. Of course, the possibility remained that the CB radio enthusiast was
not
some random practical joker, but rather some nefarious individual who, as part of an elaborate plot, had manufactured a bogus car chase to throw the Memphis police off the killer's scent. Holloman briefly considered this possibility--it was well known in law-enforcement circles that many members of the United Klans of America communicated through citizens-band radios--but he had no time to speculate about that now. As a precaution, he would later have his detectives check every auto body and glass repair shop in Memphis to learn whether any blue Pontiac owners came in with a shattered windshield. For now, all Holloman could say with certainty was that for a few vital minutes, his police department had been had.

WHATEVER THE RADIO prankster intended, his hoax had only one beneficiary, and that was Eric S. Galt. The spectacular story of the car chase diverted attention to the wrong part of the city and in all likelihood helped buy Galt a precious fifteen minutes.

Having thrown down his bundle and peeled off in his Mustang--missing the first onrushing wave of police officers by as little as thirty seconds--he sped down Main Street past Huling Avenue, then headed off on one of the most far-flung and convoluted getaways in American history.

Galt's immediate goal was to exit the state as quickly as possible, which was an easy thing to do from downtown Memphis, since the city lay along the river at the alluvial convergence of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Galt could have sped west and taken the immense iron-truss bridge over the Mississippi River, which would have spilled him out into Arkansas in no more than three or four minutes. Instead, he headed southeast
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toward Mississippi on Highway 78--Lamar Avenue, the same route he'd come in on earlier that day from the New Rebel Motel.

By 6:10, when the first bulletin describing the make of his car squawked over police radios, Galt was on his way out of town. For a white-knuckled ten minutes, he found himself crawling in bumper-to-bumper traffic--a few slow miles of congestion caused by a road construction project. According to his memoirs, Galt turned on his car radio and scanned the AM stations for bulletins.

The traffic jam had cleared by 6:30, and he passed the New Rebel Motel, with its neon Confederate colonel flickering on the sign out front, lighting up the dusky highway. Minutes later, he crossed into rural Mississippi, aiming in the direction of Birmingham and Atlanta, his Mustang boring into the rust red hills under the mantle of darkness. Except on Summer Avenue, Memphis police did not erect roadblocks along the major thoroughfares leading out of the city. Galt had managed to keep just ahead of the ever-enlarging dragnet by the thin margin of a few minutes and a few miles.

As Galt cut across the Magnolia State, the bundle must have weighed on his mind, the nagging realization that he'd left a constellation of things behind at the crime scene that could lead to him. With growing alarm, he tried to recall just what, besides the weapon, was stuffed in that ungainly pile he'd dropped on the sidewalk.

But for now, Galt could savor his triumph. Through an exquisite confluence of timing, dumb luck, and the idiosyncrasies of geography, Eric Galt had slipped safely from the orbit of metropolitan Memphis and was now pushing with impunity deep into the Mississippi hill country.

There was something else, too. The broadcasters now broke in
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over the airwaves to announce a stunning piece of news: Martin Luther King Jr. was dead.

AT THE AIRPORT in Atlanta, Coretta King hurried down
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the long corridor, with Mayor Ivan Allen and Dora McDonald at her side. As they neared the gate for the Memphis flight, she heard her name called out over the airport's PA system.

Coretta was optimistic at first. "Someone is paging me," she said brightly. Then she was seized by a "strange, cold feeling," she later wrote, "for I knew it was the word from Memphis and that the word was bad."

When Mayor Allen took off to retrieve the page, Dora said, "Come on, we need a room where we can sit down," and led Coretta to the outer entrance of the ladies' room, where they waited a few awful minutes, holding hands. Then Mayor Allen returned, with a stricken expression on his face. Assuming a peculiar formality, he walked up to Coretta, looked her in the eyes, and said, "Mrs. King, I have been asked to tell you that Dr. King is dead."

The words hung in the air as passengers pressed toward their gates. Dora and the mayor tried to comfort Coretta. For a time they stood weeping together in a clutch. But the plane was about to leave. "Mrs. King," Mayor Allen said, taking her hand in his. "What do you want to do? Do you want to go on to Memphis?"

She shook her head. "I should get back home," she said, "and see about the children."