Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (57 page)

Other commentator-sleuths went in a different direction. Could the name Eric Starvo Galt be a glancing reference to the most famous super-villain then populating the pages of international spy fiction? In several Ian Fleming novels, including
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
, James Bond's arch nemesis is Ernst Stavro Blofeld, an evil genius who leads a criminal organization called SPECTRE that's bent on "a most diabolical plot for murder on a mass scale." In the 007 films, Ernst Stavro Blofeld--a.k.a. Number 1--was depicted as a bald man in a Nehru getup; he had a hideous facial scar and was usually seen stroking a white Persian cat.

True crime growing from the pages of fiction? It didn't make much sense, but its pull was irresistible. All over the country, people began to comb through Bond thrillers and Ayn Rand books, underlining key phrases, hunting for esoteric clues. FBI agents even got in on the research. If nothing else, the allusions to James Bond and John Galt cemented early on the notion that the killer was part of a shadowy and well-oiled international conspiracy--a SPECTRE-like syndicate--that made him seem all the more exotic and mysterious.

IN TORONTO, Eric Galt's photograph was plastered on page one of the morning
Star
. The large headline read: FBI SAYS THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY--MYSTERIOUS SEAMAN SOUGHT IN KING DEATH. When Mrs. Szpakowski saw the picture that morning, April 18, she instantly thought of her roomer. She stared and stared at the photograph with the weird eyes, studying it from all angles. She thought about the man who called himself Paul Bridgman, his odd habits, his nervousness, his seeming addiction to newspapers. All morning she fretted over what to do. She showed a copy of the
Star
to her husband, Adam. Pointing toward the ceiling, she said, "He is the man who killed
⁶³⁸
Martin Luther King."

Who
is the man? What are you talking about?

"Paul Bridgman," she said. "The man upstairs. He's the killer they've been looking for."

"You're crazy in the head," Adam told his wife.

"But he looks just like him. We should call the police," she insisted.

"Fela, you're crazy. You'll only make a fool of yourself."

Mrs. Szpakowski relented. She never picked up the phone. Burying her suspicions, she went about her chores for the day. Then, while making the rounds the following morning, she learned that Paul Bridgman, without any notice, had vacated his room. He'd left his key on the table in the foyer. When she cleaned his room, Mrs. Szpakowski found an edition of the Toronto
Star
sitting on the bed, with the same picture of King's accused assassin. The image gave her a chill.

THE FBI REMAINED confident that the warrant they'd issued the previous day was correct, that Eric S. Galt was indeed their man. What they weren't sure about was whether Eric Galt was really Eric Galt. The suspect clearly had a penchant for using multiple aliases, and Galt could very well be just another one. As Cartha DeLoach well knew, isolating a suspect was one thing; positively identifying him was something else again.

To that end, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake and his men at the crime lab had been methodically poring over the fingerprints found on various objects in the bundle, in the Mustang, and in the Atlanta rooming house and comparing them with select batches of prints on file at FBI headquarters. Bonebrake had considerably narrowed the search by concentrating on men under fifty and over twenty-one, but that still left some three million sets of prints to examine--an aneurysm-inducing chore that could take many months and still turn up nothing.

Hoover and DeLoach realized they had to figure out some other way to narrow the search. DeLoach hunkered down with other high-ranking officials and sifted through all the evidence gathered thus far. As they did, a clear pattern began to emerge: Galt, even
before
the assassination, seemed to be acting like a man on the run. "All the signs were there,"
⁶³⁹
DeLoach said. "The aliases, the movement from one place to another, the reluctance to make friends, the caution, the restraint. Galt was behaving like an escaped convict trying to avoid detection."

Thus an idea was born. DeLoach picked up the phone and called Bonebrake's boss, Les Trotter, director of the FBI's Identification Division for fingerprints. DeLoach later recalled the conversation in his memoirs. "Les, we have pretty good evidence
⁶⁴⁰
that Galt is an escapee," DeLoach said. "How many 'Wanted' notices do we currently have in our files?"

"About 53,000," Trotter said.

DeLoach grimaced. "Well," he said, "at least that's better than three million."

The task before them was clear: DeLoach wanted Bonebrake's men to compare the "Galt" prints with the prints of all fifty-three thousand wanted fugitives. "You've got to put
all
your people on this," DeLoach said.

"When do you want us to begin?" Trotter asked.

"How about
today?"

The examiners began working in the late afternoon of April 18, exactly two weeks after the assassination. Additional experts from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Richmond hastened to Washington to assist in the round-the-clock effort. DeLoach said he didn't need to remind them that "we're under tremendous pressure,
⁶⁴¹
and that our cities are powder kegs."

Bonebrake zeroed in on Galt's left thumbprint found on both the rifle and the binoculars. It was their highest-quality print, the one that manifested a clear loop pattern with twelve ridge counts. To his pleasant surprise, Bonebrake learned that the FBI files of known fugitives held only nineteen hundred thumbprints with loops of between ten and fourteen ridge counts. This was encouraging: suddenly the monumentality of Bonebrake's project had shrunk by several orders of magnitude. The teams of experts ranged around a table, facing a blowup poster of Galt's thumbprint. They got out their magnifying glasses and went to work.

At 9:15 the next morning, April 19, Les Trotter called DeLoach. "We're getting there,"
⁶⁴²
Trotter said, noting that Bonebrake and his team hadn't slept a wink and that they'd already plowed through more than five hundred sets of cards. "Give us just a little more time."

"OK," DeLoach said, and then ducked into a weekly meeting of FBI muckety-mucks led by Clyde Tolson, Hoover's right-hand man. DeLoach was reluctant to tell Tolson the truth--that although countless specialists were hard at work and making progress, the investigation seemed to be momentarily stymied.

Several hours later, as the meeting was adjourning and DeLoach was gathering up his papers, the phone rang. It was Les Trotter on the line. "Deke," he said, and already DeLoach thought he could detect a "note of triumph" in Trotter's voice. There was a long pause, and then Trotter gloatingly said: "Tell the Director. We've got your man!"

"Are you
sure?"

"No doubt about it. Bonebrake's experts found an exact match just a few minutes ago, on the 702nd card."

"I take it he's not really Eric Galt. Or Lowmeyer. Or Willard."

"Nope," Trotter said. "His card number is 405,942G. The guy's a habitual offender. Escaped last year from the state pen at Jeff City, Missouri. His name is James Earl Ray."

BOOK THREE
THE HOTTEST MAN IN THE COUNTRY

Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new
.

JOHN DRYDEN, "THE SECULAR MASQUE"

41
THE TOP TEN

AS THE FBI prepared to break the news around the world, Ramon George Sneyd kept a low profile in his digs on Toronto's Dundas Street West. For nearly a week, he refused to venture from his room. Sun Fung Loo, the Chinese lady who ran the place with a lax eye and a wide, gummy smile--and who usually had a small child strapped to her back--hardly ever saw her tenant. "He came with a suit on
⁶⁴³
and a newspaper in his hand," she said. "He never spoke to anybody."

Luckily for Sneyd, Mrs. Loo could neither speak nor read English and, unlike Mrs. Szpakowski, exhibited no interest in the careers and backgrounds of her roomers. She took his rent and left him alone.

Paranoid, exhausted from worry, running out of money, Sneyd knew he must stay in a nerve-racking holding pattern for nearly two weeks while he waited for his passport, birth certificate, and airline ticket to arrive. At some point he bought a new cheap transistor radio to replace his trusty Channel Master, and from Dundas Street West he constantly monitored the airwaves for any news on the manhunt.

On Sunday night, April 21, he did emerge from his room. The Loo rooming house had no television, and that night there was a particular show he wanted to watch--ABC's wildly popular series
The FBI
, which presented semi-fictionalized dramas spun from the FBI's actual case files. Sneyd visited several bars in the neighborhood and found to his dismay that they were all tuned to watch
The Ed Sullivan Show
, but eventually he found a tavern where the barkeep was willing to switch the tube to ABC, which came in over the rabbit ears from an affiliate station across Lake Ontario, in Buffalo, New York. Wearing his horn-rimmed glasses, Sneyd sat at the crowded bar,
⁶⁴⁴
ordered a drink, and endeavored to stay in the shadows. He watched the one-hour show, which starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in the role of Inspector Lewis Erskine. But what Sneyd had really come for was the little kicker that famously ended the program each week--in which the FBI presented the current list of the ten most wanted public enemies in America.