Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (38 page)

MAYOR HENRY LOEB had been on his way to Oxford, Mississippi, to give a talk at Ole Miss Law School, when he received the news of King's shooting over a portable telephone. He immediately canceled his appearance and had his driver wheel the car around and speed back to Memphis. Within twenty minutes he arrived at city hall, a shining new edifice of white marble surrounded by beds of nodding tulips one block from the river. Once inside his office, Loeb turned on the police intercom and learned that King was dead.

He decided that he should give his own live television statement, and soon the cameras were set up in his office; its walls were decorated with the city's official seal--featuring a tufted cotton boll and a steamboat. "We of Memphis are deeply saddened by the tragic event that has just occurred in our city," he began. "And we extend our deepest sympathies to Dr. King's family." In the harsh lights, Loeb looked shaken and wan, but tried to project an air of steely calm. He wore a white oxford cloth shirt that fairly crinkled with starch--one that had been pressed, no doubt, by a steady black hand in one of his family's many commercial laundries. On the wall behind him, television viewers could see a framed picture of the PT boat he'd served on in World War II.

"Every conceivable effort is being made to apprehend his assassin," Loeb continued. "We call upon all citizens of our community, as Dr. King would have wished, to maintain peace and honor." Loeb called for three days of mourning and ordered flags at all municipal buildings flown at half-staff. The next day, all Memphis schools would be closed. While urging his city to refrain from violence, the mayor neglected to mention that on the carpeted floor by his shoes, concealed in the foot well of his desk, was a loaded shotgun.

Shortly after giving his statement, Loeb sat in a near-catatonic state in his office huddled with several city leaders, white and black. The city councilman Jerred Blanchard, a blustery Republican attorney who had played football at Yale, thought Memphis was now "damned to hell
⁴³⁶
all over the world--the man who was recognized as the Negro leader of all the leaders, slain, assassinated. Just a modern form of lynching."

Loeb called in a chaplain to pray for the city, for the country, and for the soul of Martin Luther King. Then Mayor Loeb did something no one had ever seen him do in public life, something that seemed almost inimical to his bull-moose demeanor: he broke down and cried.

"I'm so sorry
⁴³⁷
it had to happen like this," he told the black city councilman Fred Davis. Tears rolled down the mayor's cheeks.

"We tried to comfort him," Davis later recalled. "He talked about God. He was just stunned."

A LITTLE LATER, Loeb rose from his gloom, stuffed a pearl-handled .38 revolver in his pocket, and ventured out in a convoy of unmarked police cars for a tour of the anguished city. The white neighborhoods, he found, were ghostly quiet. Most families were locked inside their homes, many with newly purchased shotguns and handguns at the ready--during the previous weeks, gun shops in Memphis had enjoyed a sensationally brisk business, especially among white customers. "Our neighborhood was like a tomb,"
⁴³⁸
one white city councilman later recalled. "We were armed, ready for anything. If a Negro had stopped to change a tire, I don't know whether he'd be left alive or not."

Most white Memphians seemed genuinely shocked by the murder--or at least shocked that it had happened in their city. ("This is the darkest day I've ever seen,"
⁴³⁹
said the city council chairman, Downing Pryor. "I am sad, sad, sad.") But there were already a few hints of celebration in the white community, too. Through the night, racist wags repeatedly called in a song request to a popular white radio station: "Bye Bye Blackbird." Lucius Burch, the Memphis attorney who'd successfully argued the SCLC position in court that day, received repeated hate calls from a half-demented white lady who gleefully chastised him for representing "that nigger King."
⁴⁴⁰

When Loeb's police convoy passed through Orange Mound and other black neighborhoods of Memphis, he found hundreds and then thousands of people emerging onto the streets. Most were simply seeking to absorb the shock of the news, to grieve in the safety of numbers, but others were clearly hunting for trouble. Fires were starting to break out around town, including one at a large lumberyard. The night air shrieked with sirens and burglar alarms. Across Loeb's police radio came reports of sniper shootings, smashed window fronts, rock-throwing clashes. People were reportedly shooting at police cars--even police
helicopters
--and several city buses had been stoned.

Much of the rage was aimed directly at the mayor himself: a Molotov cocktail exploded at a Loeb's dry cleaner, and city hall received numerous death threats. It was all Loeb's fault, many declared in the loudest tones: if he hadn't been so intransigent in his Old South ways, so tone-deaf to the cry of history and the irreproachable dignity of I AM A MAN, then King would never have needed to come in the first place, to be made a martyr on Memphis soil.

Loeb took the death threats seriously and arranged to have his family moved from the mayor's residence to an undisclosed location.

At Mason Temple, where King would have appeared after dinner for yet another garbage strike rally, hundreds gathered in despair. A number of black militants showed up, and the mood turned ugly, especially after rumors began to circulate that the Memphis Police Department had orchestrated King's assassination. An elderly church lady, crippled with arthritis, told people she was ready to go out and fight. "The Lord," she said, "has deserted us."
⁴⁴¹
One unidentified member of the Invaders tried to intervene, pleading for calm--at least until Dr. King was in the ground. "Just respect the man
⁴⁴²
enough not to go out and do it tonight," he told the growing crowds. "Wait till he's buried. That's just what the honkies want us to do. Come right out there like a bunch of wild Indians, and they could wipe us out like they did the Indians."

At police headquarters, Director Holloman, closely monitoring news of the events erupting across the city, grew alarmed to the point of panic. He reported that "rioting and looting is now rampant
⁴⁴³
... we are in a very critical emergency situation--the city is under attack." The feeling of panic was made worse by a general breakdown in telephone communications. The lines were so jammed that many callers found it difficult to get a dial tone; during the first few hours after the assassination, more than thirty thousand long-distance calls went out of Memphis. As the first units of what would amount to four thousand National Guardsmen began to roll into the city, the situation seemed to be spiraling out of control.

Police shot a twenty-six-year-old black man named Ellis Tate nine times and mortally wounded him--the officers claimed he fired a rifle at them from the shadows of a liquor store. Fearing that an all-out racial war was imminent, T. O. Jones, leader of the garbage strike, barricaded himself in a room in the Peabody Hotel. A black worker at the Memphis Firestone plant grabbed a rifle and some ammunition, went to a cemetery near his house, and took charge of a hill, commando style. "That's what I thought
⁴⁴⁴
everybody else was going to do," he later said. "I just expected to go to war."

The Reverend James Lawson, anticipating the mayhem from the moment he heard of King's shooting, went straight to WDIA, Memphis's most popular black radio station, and began to broadcast messages through the night. "Stay calm,"
⁴⁴⁵
Lawson urged. "It would be a compounding of this death if people around our country should decide that now is the time to let loose an orgy of violence. It would be a denial of Dr. King's life and work. Stay calm.
Stay calm."

At Billy and Gwen Kyles's house, meanwhile, the soul food dinner still simmered on the stove. The dressed-up guests gathered in silence, in rooms heavy with succulent smells. No one had an appetite. "I went numb,"
⁴⁴⁶
Gwen Kyles said. "I felt like somebody had knocked all my senses out." She paced the floor of her dining room, past the long line of empty chairs, crying, "They've torn it now--they've torn it."

ERIC GALT KEPT driving through the Mississippi night, hewing to back roads wherever possible, putting miles between himself and the turmoil emanating from Memphis. The news on the radio surprised him--there were scattered reports of riots and looting, not only in Memphis, but all across the country. Federal troops and National Guardsmen were now marching into major cities, the president had made a televised statement, the nation's capital was on fire. The sheer magnitude of what he'd done must have begun to dawn on Galt. He could feel the heat of the whole country coming down on him: he was, he realized, the most wanted man in America.

Sleep was certainly not an option now--he would have to stay up through the night and make a beeline for Atlanta, where he planned to pick up whatever belongings he'd left at Garner's rooming house. What he would do after that was uncertain, but given his familiarity with Mexico, he was probably thinking of driving
south
, perhaps toward Puerto Vallarta. Lit with the success of his deed, and the adrenaline rush of flight, Galt didn't need amphetamines to keep him burning around the clock.

Although he was headed for Georgia, and possibly Mexico, Galt's larger goal was to reach southern Africa. "Rhodesia"--the word dangled before him like a banner. He knew that under the pariah government of Ian Smith, Rhodesia observed no extradition treaties with the United States. Galt had been toying with the idea of immigrating there for several months, ever since he first moved to Los Angeles from Puerto Vallarta. Galt liked what Smith was doing in Rhodesia, and he had an idea that if he could ever reach Salisbury, the people there would welcome him as a hero, grant him instant citizenship, and harbor him from any American attempts at prosecution. "I thought I was going to get away,"
⁴⁴⁷
he later said. "I thought I could get to Africa and those folks over there wouldn't send me back." And because it was an English-speaking country, he thought he could "blend in with the population." He wasn't exactly sure what he would do once he got there. Become a bartender, perhaps? A locksmith? Serve in a mercenary army? But the idea of Rhodesia burned in his imagination, the promise of sanctuary and refuge, the possibility of living in a society where people understood.

Before he could get there, however, Galt was determined to make this brief detour to Atlanta. It may have seemed brazenly risky to head straight for the hometown of the man he'd just killed, yet there was also a clever counter-intuition in such a course. The main thing was Galt had left a few items in his rooming house that he felt he needed--his .38 revolver, some self-help books, and probably some money he'd stashed away, as well as the pile of clothes that he'd checked at the cleaners around the corner on Peachtree Street.

As he passed through Holly Springs and New Albany and Tupelo, Galt kept trolling the radio waves for news. Somewhere along the way, he heard a bulletin that the police were looking for a white Mustang driven by a "well-dressed white man." This must have given him a shock, for until that point he was confident he'd gotten away scot-free, that no one had spotted him or his car. Hearing this bit of bad news changed everything: he knew immediately that he'd have to ditch the Mustang, and he somehow thought that without a car, Mexico would not be a plausible destination. Instead, he would head for Canada and then try to get to Rhodesia from there.

Though this newest twist ratcheted up the pressure, there was nothing Galt could do about it. Until he reached Atlanta, all he could do was keep his cool. "I had to drive slow,"
⁴⁴⁸
he later wrote, "and be careful so as not to attract attention and get arrested for speeding."

By nine o'clock he had passed into Alabama--"Heart of Dixie"--where at least his license plate would attract no notice. He harbored a vague hope that George Wallace's Alabama, like Ian Smith's breakaway state of Rhodesia, would protect him, that the majority of its citizens would praise him for his act and shield him from pursuers. That was one of the main reasons he had chosen to live for a time in Birmingham before his adventures in Puerto Vallarta--staying there long enough to secure an Alabama driver's license, buy a car, and get it titled, licensed, and registered there. That, too, was the reason he had bought the gun and scope in Birmingham. It was a pitifully naive train of reasoning, but Galt believed that Wallace would likely smile on his crime, viewing him as an Anglo-Saxon patriot from Dixie's finest state. If Galt were ever caught and convicted, he was confident that Governor Wallace, if not
President
Wallace, would grant him a full pardon after a short prison sentence.