As Johnson tried to eat lunch, an aide who'd been looking out the window toward Pennsylvania Avenue interrupted the president and his fellow diners. "Gentlemen," he said. "I think you better see this."522
Johnson stood up and, with a hint of trepidation in his step, wandered over to the window. The president didn't say a word; he only pointed: toward the east, an immense pillar of fire climbed over the cornices of downtown Washington and billowed in the sky. Soon the corridors of the White House smelled of smoke.
The president was almost philosophical. "What did you expect?" he later told one adviser. "I don't know why we're so surprised. When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off."
A FEW HUNDRED yards away, at FBI headquarters in the Justice Department building, the crime lab technicians remained burrowed in their work. While fingerprint experts combed through hundreds of thousands of stored print cards, other analysts sifted through the physical evidence that had been flown up from Memphis. Taken together, these dozens of objects formed a vast puzzle. The significant and the random, the potentially crucial and the probably meaningless, were all assembled in a forensic riddle on a well-lit table in the crime lab. The search for the man in 5B was moving not only outward into the country but downward into the close realm of slides and tiny threads teased from artifacts, downward into the swimming lenses of laboratory microscopes. Quite apart from fingerprints, the assailant had left faint trails that he was not aware of--traces of his physiology, hints of his movements, windows into the habits of his mind.
That afternoon, the fiber expert Morris S. Clark523 began to microscopically examine the green herringbone bedspread that was twirled around the gun in front of Canipe's. He found human hairs--dark brown Caucasian hairs--entangled in the picked and faded fabric, as well as in the teeth of "Willard's" hairbrush, in the clothes, and on some of the other belongings in the bundle. The hairs, oily and fine, all seemed to come from the same man.
Down the hall, meanwhile, another search was in progress. On the handle of the duckbill pliers found in the blue zippered bag, FBI investigators took note of a little price sticker stamped with the word "Rompage." A quick telephone call to the National Retail Hardware Association in Indianapolis revealed that Rompage was a large hardware store in Los Angeles, located at 5542 Hollywood Boulevard. This presented something of a left turn: suddenly, in a single phone call, the manhunt had been enlarged two thousand miles to the West Coast.
Agents from the Los Angeles field office were quickly dispatched to Rompage,524 armed with the crude portrait of "John Willard" that Jensen's artist had sketched in Memphis. Tom Ware, the Rompage manager, didn't recognize the unprepossessing man in the sketch, which was no surprise. But he knew the pliers well. In October 1966, his logbook showed, he had bought a large "seconds" order of duckbill pliers at a bargain-basement price. He'd slapped the "Rompage" stickers on them and displayed them in a big barrel of discounted items near the store entrance. They were hot sellers.
And so the niggling but possibly salient question arose: Did the slayer of Martin Luther King buy a pair of pliers in Los Angeles sometime over the past year and a half? Did he once live in Los Angeles, perhaps in the vicinity of the store? FBI agents began to interview every known regular customer of Rompage Hardware--contractors, plumbers, carpenters, electricians. Their efforts proved little more than a goose chase.
But another hunt now under way at FBI headquarters was leading somewhere. Examiners had found laundry tags stamped in the inseams of the undershirt and the pair of boxer shorts left in Willard's bag. The tiny tag was made of white tape525 and bore the number "02B-6." Investigators contacted experts in the laundry industry and eventually reached the Textile Marking Machine Company in Syracuse, New York, whose representatives soon confirmed that the laundry tag in question was made by a stamping appliance manufactured by their plant. The tag was a relatively new proprietary material known as Thermo-Seal Tape, and the Syracuse company kept a thorough log of all the laundries throughout the nation that had bought the Thermo-Seal marking machine. Digging deeper into their books, company accountants found no record of any purchases by laundries in Memphis or Birmingham--the two cities the FBI was mainly focusing on. Most of the Thermo-Seal machines now in use were on the West Coast.
Where on the West Coast? the agent following up this particular lead wanted to know.
The Thermo-Seal rep consulted his records and replied, "Out in California. Mainly in the Los Angeles area." In fact, he said, close to a hundred laundries in Los Angeles had adopted the Thermo-Seal system. At the FBI's request, the company quickly began to compile a comprehensive list of them all.
THE ELECTRA PROP jet sped for Atlanta, bringing Martin Luther King home to the city of his birth, the city of his alma mater and his church and his family. About thirty-five people sat on the plane, with the coffin parked in the rear, where several seats had been removed. The short journey of 398 miles seemed long and tedious, and most people just stared out the window as the engines droned on. In one hour, the plane arced over the same rural countryside that Eric Galt had taken twelve hours to drive across, on meandering back roads, the previous night.
Ralph Abernathy sat in silence, thinking of the curious and dreadful turn of fate that had transpired over the past three days. He remembered how King had reacted to the bomb threat on the flight from Atlanta to Memphis that Wednesday morning. "I thought of the brittle smile526 on his face when the captain announced the threat and reassured us that everything was safe," Abernathy said in his memoirs. "There had been a normal and very human fear behind that smile." Now, three days later, King lay in a coffin in the rear of a plane going in the opposite direction. Abernathy peered out the window, at the wet Southland surging with spring. "Martin was unworried,527 at peace," he said. "For just an instant, staring at the greening woods below and thinking of what was to come, I almost envied him." Abernathy knew he'd be returning to Memphis in three days to lead the memorial march down Beale Street, and the thought occurred to him that he might end up flying home in his own bronze box.
The plane landed in Atlanta, where the rain had turned to a gentle, all-suffusing mist. Coretta's four children, all dressed up, had been brought to the airport tarmac, and now they climbed the portable stairs and boarded the plane. Bernice, who was five, practically skipped down the aisle, seemingly without a care. Andy Young gathered her up in his arms. Bunny--as everyone called her--looked around the cabin, and then a puzzled expression formed on her little face. "Where's Daddy?" she said. "Mommy, where is Daddy?"
Coretta's heart ached. "Bunny," she said, taking her daughter in her arms. "Daddy is lying down in the back528 of the plane. When you see him, he won't be able to speak to you. Daddy has gone to live with God, and he won't be coming back."
Little Dexter, who was seven, understood the meaning of the big box in the rear of the plane but was leery of confronting the full truth. "I'd look around529 at the plane's interior, anywhere but at the coffin," he later wrote. "I didn't want to think about my father in there, unable to get out." He kept asking Coretta random questions--"What's this? What's that?"--while fidgeting and pointing to different features of the aircraft. "Mother knew I was avoiding530 the fact of our father's corpse. I was curious about him being in the casket, but I didn't want to face it."
The casket was removed from the rear of the plane and loaded into a hearse. Everyone disembarked, formed a motorcade, and followed the King family to the Hanley Bell Street Funeral Home, where crowds were already forming outside.
Coretta asked the funeral director to open the coffin. She fretted that the morticians in Memphis had botched their work, that they'd failed to "fix his face," as she put it. But when the lid swung open, she was pleased. His countenance "looked so young and smooth531 and unworried against the white-satin lining of the casket," she wrote. "There was hardly any visible damage."
The childre
n were brought in to see their father. They stared and stared, in disbelief, in curiosity, in dread. Andy Young was standing nearby when Dexter said, "Uncle Andy, this man532 didn't know our Daddy, did he?" speaking of King's killer.
Why do you say that? Young asked.
"Because if he had, he wouldn't have shot him. He was just an ignorant man who didn't know any better."
AS THE HANLEY Bell Street Funeral Home was taking delivery of King's body in Atlanta, Eric Galt was only a few miles away, at the Greyhound bus terminal, buying a one-way ticket533 for points north. The waiting room was the usual sweaty swirl of humanity--soldiers on leave, itinerant workers, mothers comforting croupy babies. People sat smoking on the molded plastic benches, half listening to the shrill squawk of the loudspeaker announcing delays and cancellations, the buses now boarding for Charleston, New Orleans, and Tallahassee.
Galt had a few belongings in a single suitcase--some clothes, whatever toiletries he hadn't dumped in Memphis, a book on self-hypnosis, and his dog-eared copy of Psycho-Cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Probably he bought a copy of the Atlanta Constitution and, secreting himself behind the broad, inky sheets, read of all the destruction he had wrought from coast to coast. On the front page, the immense banner headline read: DR. KING SHOT,534 DIES IN MEMPHIS; RIFLE FOUND, HUNT FOR KILLER PRESSED.
The Constitution noted a number of details about King's suspected slayer--more details than Galt would have felt comfortable with, perhaps, but nothing that pointed directly to him. The physical description was vague and somewhat inaccurate. The suspect, the Constitution reported, was "a young, dark-haired white man who dashed out of a flophouse across the street from King's hotel, dropped a Browning rifle on the sidewalk and fled in a car." The paper also noted, in an eerie juxtaposition, that a group of "old-line Georgia segregationists" had succeeded in raising a considerable war chest for George Wallace's presidential campaign--"so there will be a man in the White House who recognizes the viewpoint of the southern white people."
The Constitution's progressive editor and publisher, the legendary Ralph McGill, had an editorial on page one. Whether Eric Galt read it is doubtful, but it was aimed right at him: "The moment the triggerman fired, Martin Luther King was the free man. The white killer was the slave--a slave to fear, a slave to his own sense of inferiority, a slave to hatred, a slave to all the bloody instincts that surge in a brain when a human being decides to become a beast."
Around one o'clock, Galt boarded the coach that said "Cincinnati" on the destination marquee, with the familiar lean hound lunging across the length of the cargo compartments. Galt crept down the narrow aisle and took a seat. Like most cross-country Greyhound coaches, the bus had a tiny rear lavatory that was doubtless ripe with the smell of chemicals losing the fight against cidered urine.
That afternoon the bus churned north out of Georgia in clouds of diesel fumes, grinding up through the striated limestone foothills at the border with Tennessee. The bus stopped in Chattanooga, and Knoxville, and then pressed on toward Kentucky. With every mile he put behind him, Galt must have felt a deepening relief. He was out of the Deep South now, burrowing into regions of the country that carried no association with himself or his crime. He was likely starting to breathe easier, knowing that his jag from Memphis, to Birmingham, and then to Atlanta was growing colder as he vanished into the murky inseams of the country.
Yet no matter how far north the bus ventured, he found that no place was untouched by King's death, no stop along the dreary string of terminals was immune from uncertainty and anger and fear. Galt could escape from his crime but not from its powerful recoil.
By nightfall Galt was in the hills of Kentucky, gliding through bluegrass and bourbon country toward Lexington, then crossing the muddy Ohio into Cincinnati, where he got off at the Greyhound terminal.
In his memoirs, Galt said he had a layover of two hours, so he checked his suitcase in to a locker535 and went to a nearby tavern--not only for drinks to ease his nerves, but also to gather some news. Cooped up on the bus, and lacking his pocket radio, he was starved for information on the manhunt. He must have been relieved to learn from the evening papers that authorities had made no substantial new breaks in the case. The Mustang had not been found, and there was no mention of a rooming house in Atlanta. Late that night, he boarded a second bus,536 bound for Detroit.
WHILE GALT'S GREYHOUND motored north, Attorney General Ramsey Clark and his small entourage boarded the Jetstar in Memphis and took off for Washington. Clark had been getting disturbing reports of incipient rioting in D.C. throughout the day, so they cut short their time in Memphis. Around five o'clock, the jet rose into the Memphis sky and arrowed toward the capital.
On board, Cartha DeLoach continued to be a font of optimism. The search for the man in 5B was proceeding crisply, in his estimation. Thus far, it seemed nearly a textbook operation. DeLoach had been in repeated contact with FBI headquarters and had all the reports in hand--laundry tags, ballistics, fibers, hairs, fingerprints, gun receipts, physical descriptions--the case was coming together with rapid efficiency. The new Los Angeles twist presented some unexpected complications, he had to concede, but otherwise all evidence seemed to be pointing to one suspect, or possibly two, living and plotting the crime out of the Southland. DeLoach assumed of course that both "Lowmeyer" and "Willard" were fictitious, but to be sure, FBI agents were checking every permutation of those names throughout the South.
DeLoach was so confident, in fact, that he was willing to make a wager with Attorney General Clark: the bureau would catch King's killer within twenty-four hours--that is, by five o'clock Saturday night--or he would present Clark with a bottle of the finest sherry537 he could find. Clark shook on the deal, even though it was a bet he sincerely hoped to lose.
Though he was more skeptical, Clark had to admit that the case was shaping up well. "We had considerably more evidence,538 considerably earlier, than we ever expected," he recalled. "But we didn't realize the suspect was one of these unique types of people who tends to do just the opposite of what you'd expect. You'd think he'd go right, and he goes left. He was intent on giving us a merry chase--to put it mildly."
As Clark sped toward Washington, he thought about America's historical penchant for gun violence. Like many liberals across the nation, he hoped that the King assassination might quicken the gun-control debate on Capitol Hill, and he vowed to push for a policy requiring a permit to own a gun--especially high-powered rifles like a .30-06. "We are virtually unique539 among nations in our failure to control guns," he would write. "Destroyers of life, causers of crime, guns had once again scarred our national character, marking another terrible moment in our history."
DeLoach rode in silence most of the flight to Washington, absorbed in very different thoughts. The day in Memphis had been long and stressful, and his head was throbbing from lack of sleep and the pressure of the investigation. J. Edgar Hoover's long-standing "feud" with King, as DeLoach called it, would inevitably stir deeper doubts within already suspicious segments of the American public, who wondered if the FBI had been involved in the assassination--or if Hoover had directly ordered it. DeLoach realized that even if he won his bet and the FBI did catch King's killer by tomorrow, it still wouldn't be enough "to dam the flood540 of criticism and abuse that was coming our way."
It was past ten o'clock when the Jetstar began its approach into Washington. The plane was twelve miles out, over the horse country of Virginia, when Clark and DeLoach first spotted the smoke--a long, doomed finger extending all the way from the District. Since all commercial flights into National Airport had been banned, Clark asked the pilot to drop down and fly low along the Potomac. What they saw stunned them.
"I looked down at a city in flames," Clark recalled. Smoke engulfed all of downtown and the Mall. Only the great illuminated dome of the Capitol and the sharp white obelisk of the Washington Monument punctured the seething blankets. Clark could see infernos blazing up around U and Fourteenth streets, and also
within a few blocks of his own office at the Justice Department building, the same building where FBI Crime Lab analysts were burning midnight oil, poring over the King assassination evidence.
The spreading conflagrations made the previous night's scattered rioting seem tame--the pilot of the Jetstar thought it looked like Dresden. All told, more than five hundred fires had been set throughout the city. At President Johnson's behest, much of the District was now occupied by federal troops,541 spearheaded by the Third Infantry Regiment, the so-called Old Guard, a corps of elite troops out of Fort Myer specifically trained, like the loyal Praetorians of ancient Rome, to protect the seat of government in the event of crisis--a Russian invasion, presumably, or the landing of Martians.
The White House was reinforced with sandbags and ringed with troops, its great lawns bathed in blinding floodlights. Machine-gun nests were erected all around the Mall and the Capitol building, where soldiers, some fresh from Vietnam, stood in nervous vigil, their rifles fixed with bayonets. One reporter thought the scene on Capitol Hill had "the air of a parliament542 of a new African republic."
The Jetstar made several low passes over the District. Looking down at the city where he grew up, the city he loved, Clark recalled accounts he'd read of the British sacking and torching Washington during the War of 1812. "In all my life,"543 he said, "I never thought we'd see Washington burning."
34 HOME SWEET HOME IN TORONTO
THROUGH THE EARLY morning hours of April 6, Eric Galt's Greyhound continued to grind north through flat Ohio farm country, creeping toward Detroit. According to his memoirs, the coach reached the Motor City544 around eight that morning, a bright warm Saturday. Galt bought a fresh copy of the Detroit News, whose pages were dominated by reports of the assassination and the riots it had ignited. Detroit itself had been particularly hard-hit: though nothing like the riots in Washington, or the massive riots that hit Detroit in the summer of 1967, looting and arson had been widespread since Friday. The previous night, police had fired on several crowds of rioters, killing one man. Now three thousand National Guardsmen patrolled the streets, and Detroit's mayor, Jerome Cavanaugh, repeated for the media what had effectively become a national mantra: "It is better to overreact545 than underreact."