Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

3 THE MONTH OF THE IGUANA

ON AN EMPTY⁴⁰ beach outside of Puerto Vallarta, brushed by the sibilance of Colima palms, Eric Galt aimed his camera at the young Mexican woman stretched across the sand. Fussing with his new Polaroid 220 Land camera, he tried to find the right plays of light, tried to frame a shot like the ones he'd seen in the pinup magazines.

It was a warm tropical day in November 1967. Through his viewfinder, Galt could see the waves tunneling in from the Pacific. At his back, the foothills climbed steeply toward a jungle of orchids and bromeliads, its canopy swarming with parrots.

The monsoon season had ended, and the atmosphere had taken on a new crispness, so that Galt could see across the Bahia de Banderas, the second-largest bay in North America, to the shaggy headlands of Punta de Mita far to the north. Along the great scallop of shoreline were scores of secret beaches like this one, some of them reachable only by boat, hidden places where tourists could linger all day and fry like wild Calibans in the sun.

The beach that Galt had found was so secluded that his model, a local girl named Manuela Medrano, had little cause to feel self-conscious; save for the ubiquitous fishing pangas bobbing in the distance, the photographer and his subject had the place all to themselves.

At one point, Galt told Manuela to climb behind the wheel of his Mustang, put her feet on the dashboard, and hike up her skirt. She giggled and smiled, but she was happy to oblige him, and he began to photograph her from different angles. Such exhibitionism was nothing out of the ordinary for her; though she was only twenty-three years old, Manuela had long worked in a brothel called the Casa Susana--Puerto Vallarta's largest--where she was considered one of the marquee attractions.

Galt played with the instant camera some more, coaching Manuela on her poses. He'd snap a shot, remove the exposed film, and watch the image resolve before his eyes.

A pale, nervous man in his late thirties with a lanky build, Galt knew nothing about the art or business of photography, but he was eager to learn. For some time, he'd been toying with the idea of getting into the porn industry, X-rated films as well as girlie magazines. It was one of several business schemes swimming in his head. He imagined that one day he would manage a stable of talent, with publishing connections, distribution connections, connections to buy off the law. He was ambitious and willing to work hard. He knew that if he ever hoped to become a player, he would first have to master all his new equipment.

Through a mail-order catalog, he had recently bought a Kodak Super 8⁴¹ movie camera, a Kodak Dual projector and splicing machine, a twenty-foot remote-control cable, and various accessories. He also looked into purchasing sound stripers, a sound projector, and an automatic cine printer to run off copies of the films he eventually hoped to make. He read Modern Photography magazine. He procured sex manuals and sex toys. He studied the smut magazines to learn what looks were selling and noted that publishers particularly liked to have pictures set in exotic foreign locales--like secluded beaches in the tropics.

But when Galt examined his Polaroids of Manuela, he was cross with himself. The images didn't grab him; they were flat and uninteresting. Perhaps he was beginning to fear he had no talent behind the camera. Manuela could see the frustration on his face. Visibly upset,⁴² he took the Polaroids and tore them all up.

ERIC STARVO GALT had ridden into Puerto Vallarta on Highway 200 three weeks earlier. On that afternoon--Thursday, October 19--he checked in to the Hotel Rio at the end of the cobblestoned main drag and just a block from the beach. The Rio was a modest but respectable enough place⁴³ with white stucco walls, iron-lace balustrades, and a roof of Spanish tiles. For about four bucks a night, he secured a second-floor room that overlooked the river Cuale, where fishermen would string nets across the brackish water and fry their catch in the shade of the rubber trees that lined the musky banks.

The hotel management didn't know what to make of this mysterious new guest. Galt was a fidgety gringo who wore shades and mumbled when he spoke. His two-door Mustang hardtop was a 1966 model with mud-splattered whitewall tires and Alabama license plates. Galt told the front desk he was a "publisher's assistant,"⁴⁴ but he told others around town that he was a writer on vacation. He kept a manual typewriter in his room, and he sometimes stayed up late at night pecking away at the keys while listening to a pocket transistor radio.

Galt found the scenery around Puerto Vallarta "idyllic"⁴⁵ and soon grew so fond of the life there that he considered settling down permanently. Before coming to Puerto Vallarta, he had spent most of 1967 on the move--St. Louis, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, then Birmingham, Alabama. He wasted a few days in Acapulco but found that he hated the place--it was overdeveloped and touristy, he thought, and "everybody there wanted⁴⁶ money, money, money." Puerto Vallarta, on the other hand, was still a ragged paradise--bathwater ocean, blood orange sunsets, wild lagoons prowled by crocodiles. Frigate birds and pelicans flapped in the skies. Humpback whales, having migrated here to breed in warm waters, could sometimes be seen spouting in the bay. The steep hillsides flickered with butterflies, and every morning a thousand roosters announced the day. The people around P.V. seemed poor but happy, living outside, eating outside, sleeping on rooftop pallets beneath the stars. Everything about the place was relaxed, especially the dress code, which succinctly boiled down to a popular local aphorism: "Men, wear pants. Women, look beautiful."

Not long after he arrived in Puerto Vallarta, Galt began a regular nocturnal routine of visiting the cathouses. There was one particularly cheap place where a customer could climb a ladder to a stack of cubicles, each occupied by a prostitute. He'd dive into one of these little matchboxes and have a quick-and-dirty for a few pesos, with the moans of the other lovemakers seeping through the paper-thin walls. It resulted in a kind of erotic feedback loop⁴⁷: each noisy couple going at it, while simultaneously hearing all the other noisy couples, created an exquisite cacophony that Galt found titillating.

Later Galt began frequenting⁴⁸ the slightly classier Casa Susana. In the downstairs receiving room, which also served as a bar and cantina, the whores sat on metal chairs lined along the dingy walls. Small translucent lizards clung to the ceiling and cheeped in the shadows between their mosquitoey meals. A grinning bartender with atrocious teeth kept the booze flowing while customers sat around tables or danced to Broadway tunes playing on a decrepit jukebox. Rustic, easygoing, a bit down-at-the-heels, Casa Susana was a community gathering place of sorts; lots of locals went there just for the spectacle, and it was not uncommon for squealing children, or even squealing pigs, to scamper through the downstairs rooms.

Something about Manuela Aguirre Medrano caught Galt's eye. She was slightly plump, but she was young, with a broad smile and dreamer's eyes the color of rich chocolate. She introduced herself as Irma--her professional name, it turned out, lifted from the French stage show Irma la Douce, which Billy Wilder had recently turned into a Hollywood film starring a chartreuse-stockinged young Shirley MacLaine as a popular Paris prostitute.

Galt took Manuela upstairs and had his way with her for the equivalent of about eight dollars. He returned a few nights later and requested her again. Gradually they struck up a friendship. Galt would sit with her through the night at a table in the Casa Susana cantina, drinking screwdrivers. Manuela spoke almost no English, and he almost no Spanish, so they whiled away the hours with caveman gestures and awkward smiles.

Sometimes they would go out together during the day and drive around Puerto Vallarta in his Mustang, fishtailing on the muddy roads. Having grown up in a town with only a few relics and sputtering jalopies, a town where most men drove only burros, Manuela had never seen such a fancy car, let alone ridden in one, and she felt like a queen as he squired her about the ciudad.

On several occasions they drove the twelve miles down to the beach at the little village of Mismaloya, where four years earlier John Huston had filmed The Night of the Iguana. Eric and Manuela liked to sit and drink cervezas under a palm tree in a secluded cove not far from the Iguana set, which was still largely intact. The great bay was spread before them, and in the foreground dolphins could often be seen playing around a chain of three cave-riddled rock islands, known as Los Arcos.

Huston's movie--"One man ... three women ... one night," went the desperate poster tagline--starred Richard Burton as a defrocked priest and Ava Gardner as the randy owner of a cheap seaside hotel not unlike the one where Galt was staying. During the filming, dozens of paparazzi descended on Puerto Vallarta to cover the combustible mix of personalities, including the playwright Tennessee Williams (on whose play the film was based), yet the world media were primarily interested in the torrid affair that Burton was then pursuing with Elizabeth Taylor. Although both were married to other people at the time, Burton invited Taylor down to Puerto Vallarta to be with him during the filming. He ensconced her in a house across the street from his and then built a pink "love bridge" to connect the two residences.

Their romance was considered such an international scandale that even Vatican officials weighed in, accusing Taylor of "erotic vagrancy." Iguana's box-office success, combined with its accompaniment of behind-the-scenes press, cemented Puerto Vallarta's reputation as a place of louche living and sultry intrigue--and got the first wave of gringos coming.

In 1966, the writer Ken Kesey, on the lam from the FBI after faking his own suicide following a series of drug busts, had come to hide out in Puerto Vallarta and its shaggy environs. Now, a year later, Eric Galt was part of the exodus. He'd first read about Puerto Vallarta in one of the many magazine articles that covered the making of Huston's movie. During his nearly monthlong stay in Mexico, he lived an expatriate life of sloth and debauchery quite true to the spirit of Huston's film. In between his drinks and his whoring, he was (or was pretending to be) an author, a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker; he was developing a kind of recombinant personality, sifting and sampling the lifestyles he'd read and heard about.

Like the doomed iguana in the story, Galt appeared to be a creature who'd come to the end of his rope. Manuela found him strange. He complained of headaches,⁴⁹ stomach problems, and other maladies. He was introverted, distracted, perpetually tired. He rarely tipped⁵⁰ and never laughed. He was paranoid of the cops, always looking over his shoulder. Under the seat of his car, he carried a loaded Liberty Chief .38 snub-nosed revolver, which he called his "equalizer."⁵¹ He claimed to have served twenty years in the U.S. Army. He made trips into the hills⁵² from time to time, apparently to buy marijuana.

For someone who hung out in grimy whorehouses, he was a surprisingly meticulous dresser and a person of tidy habits. He took lunch nearly every day at 3:00 p.m. at the same place, the Discotheque Cafe, where he always ordered the same thing--a hamburger and a Pepsi. Galt was keen on learning Spanish and toted an English-Spanish phrase book nearly everywhere he went. He was equally keen on learning the steps of local Mexican dances;⁵³ though Manuela tried to teach him what she knew, his clumsy feet never got the hang of it.

Yet for all his oddities, Galt was nice to her, Manuela had to admit. They walked the Malecon together, soaking up the colorful street life--the Day of the Dead curios, the vendors selling mangoes on a stick, the weird beaded figurines of the peyote-loving Huichol Indians who lived back in the Sierra Madre. Several times, when he'd been drinking, he asked Manuela to marry him (she politely refused). He even went out and looked at a piece of property to buy--a local man proposed to barter his land for Galt's Mustang. "I seriously considered the trade,"⁵⁴ Galt later said. "Mexico's an earthy place. I got to like Puerto Vallarta so much, I was thinking I could throw up a lean-to and retire."

ONE EVENING AT the Casa Susana, Manuela Medrano glimpsed another side of Eric Galt that gave her pause. He entered the cantina around nine that night--a Monday--and took a seat next to her at a table, as was their usual routine. They sat and drank and tried to listen to the jukebox, but a few tables over, six American revelers were making a racket--apparently, they'd just come in off a yacht. Two of them were white, and four were black.

One of the African-Americans, who was drunk, stumbled as he brushed by Galt's table, perhaps en route to the bathroom, and he reflexively reached out and touched Manuela's arm to break his fall. Galt suddenly tensed and leaned into Manuela, blurting out something about "niggers." She had never known him to blow his stack like this. "He said many insulting things⁵⁵--son of a bitch and other names," she recalled, although the language barrier made it difficult for her to understand most of what he was saying. He suddenly rose, stormed over to the table, and yelled an insult to the offending black man. There was a standoff, with hot stares and macho posturing, but then Galt came back and sat down.

Yet that was not the end of it. As the jukebox played on, Galt continued to sulk. In a few minutes, the black man wandered over and tried to make peace, but Galt muttered yet another insult. Then he rose again from the table and this time went outside to the parking lot. A few minutes later he returned.

"Where did you go?" Manuela asked.

"Feel my pocket," he replied, with a furtive look.

She ran her hand over his pocket and realized he had a gun, the same revolver he carried under the seat of his Mustang.

Apparently unaware of this latest development, the party of Americans soon got up and left the cantina: they were prudently calling it a night. Then Galt started for the door in pursuit. "I'm going to kill them,"⁵⁶ Manuela thought he said.

She managed to intervene, somehow communicating to him that the police would be dropping by soon for their usual ten o'clock visit. It would be foolish for him to cause trouble with these men now--foolish for him, and foolish for the whole operation at Casa Susana. Her argument carried weight--Galt had always seemed deeply fearful of any sort of run-in with the police--and he finally began to simmer down. It was unclear, in the end, whether Galt's fierce reaction to the black patron at Casa Susana grew from racial prejudice or simply from the fact that a strange man had touched what passed for his woman. But Manuela had never seen Galt like this before. The whole fracas made her extremely uncomfortable--and leery of his mercurial moods.

Yet in his sloppier moments of drunkenness, he kept proposing to Manuela, and she kept on refusing. Among other things, she knew that he was sleeping with other women--or, rather, seeing other whores. One night when she rebuffed his proposal a final time, Galt pulled his .38 revolver on her and threatened to kill her.

GALT DID NOT linger long in Puerto Vallarta. Predictably, his relationship with Manuela fizzled, and for a week or so in early November he took up with another young local woman, named Elisa, who worked as a cigarette girl and photographer's aide at the Posada Vallarta. They went out to nightclubs and slept together at the Hotel Las Glorias.

Galt's main interest in Elisa was her knowledge of photography. He wanted to soak up everything she'd learned from her day job. Much as he had done with Manuela, he took Elisa out to secluded beaches, and they'd kill the afternoons taking Polaroids. On one occasion, using the remote cable he had purchased, he straddled Elisa⁵⁷ and photographed the two of them in a pornographic pose. Other times, he would take mug shots of himself. He seemed obsessed with the contours of his own face. He had a mirror,⁵⁸ and he would stare at himself for minutes at a time, grimacing at certain features he didn't like--his prominent and slightly bulbous nose, his jug ears. He said he wanted to have "a face that no one can describe."

Galt told Elisa he was heading to purchase marijuana in Yelapa, a nearby fishing village without electricity or roads that was accessible only by boat. A few American expats had set up there, living the simple life with the locals in open thatch palapas, and hippies went in search of the strong weed that was said to grow in the jungles hanging over the town. Before Galt took off on his errand, he gave Elisa forty-eight dollars to rent a little love-nest apartment for them, but instead she took the money and bolted for Guadalajara. She left him a note with the bartender of the Posada Vallarta--a Dear John letter, basically--in which she pleaded with him to forgive her.

Galt had been resoundingly jilted, and it was enough to sour him on Puerto Vallarta for good. "I couldn't accomplish anything⁵⁹ further in Mexico in the way of securing permanent residency," he rationalized. "I don't believe you can live in Mexico.⁶⁰ They don't have no middle class, see, you are either on top or on the bottom, and I think it would be difficult to accustom yourself to living on the bottom because there is all types of ailments and things."

A week later, probably on November 16, Eric Galt carefully stuffed the inner tube of his spare tire with some of Jalisco's finest cannabis. He packed up his Mustang and headed out of town. Soon he was on Highway 15, aiming north, in the direction of Tijuana.⁶¹