Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (54 page)

ARMED AT LAST with a photograph of the manhunt's prime suspect, the FBI began to assert its true institutional might--pressing with renewed focus and multi-tentacled determination all across the country. In Los Angeles, agents canvassed the banks in the vicinity of the St. Francis Hotel in search of any monetary trails left by Eric Galt. This proved a hugely successful tack: Although Galt had kept no savings or checking accounts and had failed to establish any credit history, at the Bank of America in Hollywood the agents found that an Eric Galt, in fact, had purchased a series of modest money orders in late 1967 and early 1968. Several of the orders were made out to an establishment in Little Falls, New Jersey, called the Locksmithing Institute.

Within an hour, agents in New Jersey visited the "institute" and learned that it offered correspondence courses in key cutting, lock picking, safecracking, alarm wiring, and other skills of the trade to students all over the world. Before enrolling in the course, Galt had signed an oath swearing that he'd never been convicted of burglary, adding: "I shall never use my knowledge to aid or commit a crime." According to the Locksmithing Institute's records, Galt's last lesson had been mailed to him, only a week earlier, at 113 Fourteenth Street Northeast in Atlanta.

This lead was immediately flashed to the Atlanta field office, and in minutes a team of agents, driving an unmarked car, pulled up to Jimmie Garner's rooming house on Fourteenth Street. Believing there was a strong possibility that Galt was still hiding inside, the agents stayed in the shadows and kept the building under close surveillance; for the first day, the FBI refrained from asking any questions for fear of exposing themselves--or prematurely tipping off the media.

Two other agents, meanwhile, disguised themselves as hippies
⁶⁰⁸
--bell-bottom jeans, beads, the whole shtick--and rented a room next to Galt's. Inside, they discovered that the two rooms shared a connecting door; by placing their ears on wood panels, they were able to determine to their satisfaction that Galt's room was vacant. They tried to open the door but found it was locked. A call was then placed to Deke DeLoach in Washington, who said, "Take the door off its hinges
⁶⁰⁹
if you have to, but get in there!"

The tie-dyed agents did as they were told, and with a little handiwork they were soon inside Galt's room. The dark and sparsely furnished space hardly seemed lived-in, but after poking around in dressers and under tables, they spotted a few telltale artifacts.
⁶¹⁰
They found a booklet titled "Your Opportunities in Locksmithing" and a portable Zenith TV. Behind a desk they found a pamphlet, "What Is the John Birch Society?" They noted a small stash of grocery supplies, residue from the budget repasts of a man who appeared to be both a hermit and a pack rat--Nabisco saltines, Kraft Catalina French dressing, Carnation evaporated milk, Maxwell House instant coffee, French's mustard, a package of lima beans.

Also scattered about the room were a number of road maps--the kind usually handed out for free at gas stations--maps that, taken together, seemed to offer a succinct chart of Galt's travels. There were maps of Los Angeles, Mexico, California, Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma, Louisiana, Birmingham, and the southeastern United States.

Finally the agents located a map of Atlanta, which was marked up in pencil. Inscribed on the map were four little circles that, upon closer inspection, seemed to have a chilling import: one circle was near Martin Luther King's home; one indicated Ebenezer Baptist Church and the SCLC office; another designated the approximate location of Jimmie Garner's rooming house; and a final circle marked the Capitol Homes public housing project, where the Mustang had been abandoned. It seemed clear evidence of an organized plot; not only had Galt charted King's world--and likely stalked him--but he had staked out, well ahead of time, a safe and inconspicuous place where he could ditch his car.

The agents left everything as they'd found it, and after installing the door back on its hinges, they retreated to their "room." They'd learned enough from their surreptitious, albeit legally tenuous, reconnaissance to give DeLoach what he needed. Galt was not living there; there were no clothes, no suitcases, no signs of tenancy other than those old groceries. Now it was time to come out of the shadows--to question Jimmie Garner, issue a search warrant, and confiscate all the assorted belongings in Galt's room.

OVER THE PAST few days, FBI agents in Los Angeles had been developing their own series of intriguing leads. While they were conducting follow-up interviews at the bartending school, Tomas Lau had found in his files a sheet of paper on which Galt had listed three local "references," with addresses. They were Charlie Stein, Rita Stein, and Marie Tomaso.

Special Agents William John Slicks and Richard Ross
⁶¹¹
found Charlie Stein at his apartment at 5666 Franklin Avenue, just around the corner from the St. Francis. From the start it was clear that Stein was one odd duck--by turns cagey, rambling, and cosmic--but he was cooperative enough. He told the agents the story of how he met Galt; how his sister Rita needed someone to pick up her distressed twin girls in Louisiana; how she'd managed to convince Stein to accompany Galt in his Mustang on a cross-continental drive to New Orleans around Christmastime; and how Galt, before going on the trip, had insisted on the bizarre precondition that Stein, Rita, and their cousin Marie Tomaso first lend their signatures to George Wallace's California primary effort.

"He said he'd been in the Army," Stein recalled. "He said he was from Alabama, and that he planned to go
back
to Alabama one day. He said that if the Negro wanted to live free, he should move to the North or the West. But if the Negro wants to be a slave, he should remain in the South."

Stein's memories of the drive to New Orleans were vague at first, but when he was reinterviewed the next day, he began to open up. "Galt had money to spend--he said he was part owner of a bar down in Mexico but that he'd sold his interest. He stopped a few times to make long-distance calls at phone booths. He liked hamburgers with everything on them, and liked to sip a beer while he drove. He was always playing country and western music on the car radio."

What did he look like?
the agents asked him.
How did he dress?

"He wore a brown suit and a watch. I'll tell you this, the guy put on an excessive amount of hair cream."

Agents Ross and Slicks found that Stein's cousin Marie Tomaso had sharp recollections
⁶¹²
of her own. As a cocktail waitress at the Sultan Room and as a fellow tenant in the St. Francis Hotel, Tomaso had seen Galt on more than thirty occasions, she guessed. "He usually drank vodka, or beer," she remembered. "He liked to eat beef jerky. His hands were clean, no calluses. He always had a solemn expression. He was real pale, as if he stayed indoors all the time."

Once Tomaso and Galt shot some billiards together. "He wasn't very good, but you could tell he'd played some pool." Although he was mostly quiet and shy, he had a temper. She recalled the time when Galt turned on her and Rita, furious at their suggestion that Charlie, not Rita, would accompany him to New Orleans. "I got a gun," he'd said. "If this is a setup, I'll kill him."

Sometime around late February, she and Galt arranged to swap televisions. He wanted to exchange his clunky Montgomery Ward console TV, which he'd purchased a few months earlier through a classified ad, for her little Zenith. The trade didn't make much sense to her, because her Zenith really wasn't as good a set, but he explained: "I need a portable--I'm doing some traveling the next few months."

She was happy to take delivery of the big console and went up to Galt's room to help him carry it down. On the back of the television set was a handwritten sign
⁶¹³
that said: MARTIN LUTHER COON.

WHEN SPECIAL AGENTS John Ogden and Roger Kaas
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knocked on Jimmie Garner's door that Easter Sunday, April 14, the Atlanta landlord was deeply confused--and quite possibly a little drunk. His office records were in shambles, and at first he mixed up Galt with another tenant, a worker from North Carolina who had checked in only a few days earlier. But at the agents' steady prompting, memories of Eric Galt slowly came flooding back to his befogged mind.

Galt had moved in on March 24--"he wore a suit and looked for all the world like a preacher," Garner said. He paid ten bucks a week in rent and stayed in room 2. On March 31, Galt paid a second week's rent, and that was the last time Garner had seen him. On the afternoon of April 5, Garner entered Galt's room to change the linen and found on the bed a scrap of cardboard on which Galt had scrawled in ballpoint pen: "Had to go to Birmingham--left TV. Will return to pick up soon." But Galt
hadn't
returned, and Garner had all but given up on his tenant--in fact, he was beginning to covet that abandoned Zenith for himself.

That night FBI agents kept an eye on the rooming house in case Galt did try to circle back for his things. The next morning, Monday, April 15, Agents Kaas and Ogden showed up again for another round of questioning.
Can we see Galt's room?
they wanted to know.

"Sure," Garner said. Hoisting a big ring of jangling keys, the landlord opened up room 2 and gladly showed them the space. Garner apparently had no idea that FBI agents had already snuck in and cased the joint, but he was beginning to guess what the investigation was all about. "How you guys coming along on the King case?" he asked at one point.

While Garner looked on, the agents donned gloves and collected all of Galt's belongings. (To Garner's chagrin, they took away the TV set, too.) The evidence was soon boxed up at the FBI field office and then entrusted to Agent John Sullivan, who drove straightaway to the Atlanta airport, hopped a Delta flight for Washington, and personally transported the latest trove to the FBI Crime Lab.

Jimmie Garner, meanwhile, was whisked away to the FBI Atlanta office for more questioning. An agent laid out six photographs of six different white males and asked Garner, "Was your roomer any one of these guys?"

Garner didn't hesitate in picking a photograph of Eric Galt--the portrait that had been taken with Tomas Lau at the bartending school. "If this isn't the guy," Garner said, "it's his twin brother."

THE NEXT MORNING, in Memphis, the sanitation strike that had lured King to his death was finally drawing to a close. Nearly every day since the assassination, while garbage continued to pile up on the streets and citizens began to suspect King's killer would never be found, negotiators had exhausted long hours at the Hotel Claridge downtown, desperately trying to hammer out an agreement. Several times the discussions had devolved into shouting matches, finger wagging, fist shaking--"we were numb,
⁶¹⁵
played out emotionally," said one of the mediators--and the parties representing the city and the union nearly walked away.

It was President Johnson's personal emissary, Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds, who kept things on track. "Whether you realize it or not," he told the negotiators, "the eyes of the world are on this table."