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

24 LIKE A MAN ON A CROSS

THE BULLET STRUCK the right side of King's face at a velocity of 2,670 feet per second. The soft-nosed projectile shattered his mandible and, following the downward angle of its path, exited from the underside of his jaw only to reenter, burrowing into the flesh of his neck. As it did so, it sliced through his shirt collar and coat lapel and cleanly sheared away the taut cinch of his brown necktie just back from the knot.

The bullet worked its violence precisely as it was designed to do: soft-pointed rounds, forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, hotly expand upon striking their target. Considered a humane agent of dispatch for hunted animals, the bullets are designed to rupture tissue and wreak maximum trauma, so a victim has little chance of survival even when no major organ or artery has been hit.

The bullet's impact knocked King backward, spraying a fantail of blood on the balcony floor and the ceiling above him. Shards of jawbone skittered across the cement floor. Instinctively, he grasped at his throat with his right hand and fumbled for the railing with his left. Within a second, King was splayed on his back, his legs crimped at awkward angles, his wing-tip shoes caught in the bottom rungs of the metal railing. His right pants leg was hitched up to mid-calf, exposing his ribbed black socks. His eyes rolled. His head moved slightly, from left to right.

The wound gushed with his pulse, the blood forming an expanding pool around his head and shoulders. A Salem menthol was crushed in one hand. His arms spread out wide on the cold concrete; he had come to rest in a posture that some at the Lorraine would later compare to crucifixion. One witness said, "His arms went out³⁶² to the sides like he was a man on a cross."

Abernathy, applying Aramis aftershave on his face inside 306, heard what sounded like a firecracker or a backfiring car outside, but he thought little of it. The astringent lotion tingled on his hands and cheeks. Firecracker? he thought again, and glanced out the door, which was slightly ajar. He saw King's wing-tip shoes on the floor of the balcony, tucked under the railing. His first thought, alarmed but optimistic, was that King had taken cover in reaction to the popping noise outside. Then, when Abernathy got to the door, he saw the blood and knew.

"Oh my God, Martin's been shot!"³⁶³ he screamed. He headed for the balcony, but feared the sniper might still be out there somewhere. He glanced down into the Lorraine courtyard and saw the others stooped behind vehicles, hugging tires, taking cover. Abernathy could hear screams and shouts from down below: My God, my God, my God! Duck! Get down! Hit the ground! ... Don't get up--he's still out there!

A few seconds passed before Abernathy emerged onto the balcony, and he stayed in a crouch. King lay diagonally on the cement floor, to the left of the door. Carefully stepping over him, Abernathy saw that his friend looked afraid and tried to comfort him by patting his left cheek. The wound on his right jaw was worse than Abernathy had feared. Ragged and torn, it was, he thought, as large as a fist. A slash of bone shone through. The blood "glistened," Abernathy later said, and it steadily pooled around King's head, soaking his shirt and suit coat.

King breathed with a raspy difficulty. His quivering lips appeared to be forming the word "Oh," but produced no sound. He seemed to be trying to say something. His eyes wobbled in their sockets, then steadied and sharpened. His gaze fell on his friend. Abernathy thought King was trying to communicate something through his eyes.

"Martin," Abernathy said softly. "It's all right.³⁶⁴ Don't worry. This is Ralph. This is Ralph."

WITHIN FORTY-FIVE seconds of firing the shot, Eric Galt had scrambled down the rooming house stairs--twenty-five steps in all--and thrown open the door. It was 6:02 p.m. when he emerged into the twilight on South Main. The night was cold and damp, the street strangely deserted. Most of the businesses had closed for the night, and the brick and glass storefronts simmered in a thin soup of neon. With the Gamemaster still bundled under his arm, Galt turned left and dashed south along the cracked sidewalk. His fake-alligator loafers clopped on the cement as he aimed for his Mustang, parked sixty feet away.

It was all too easy. South Main was ghostly quiet, and there was no indication of the carnage he'd just created a block away. No one even noticed him--let alone tried to stop him. But as he approached his Mustang, he saw the three Memphis police cars of TAC Unit 10 parked just ahead. They were angled toward the Lorraine, at the Butler Avenue fire station. Just around the corner, several policemen stood outside the fire station brandishing weapons.

If Galt continued down South Main, one of these officers would see the suspicious-looking package under his arm. The odds of his reaching the Mustang undetected were slim. He made an impulsive decision he would later rue: he would have to ditch the rifle.

He was passing by Canipe's Amusement Company, the cluttered shop at 424 South Main that leased and serviced jukeboxes and pinball machines. The storefront had a recessed entry; its plate-glass windows angled in from the sidewalk, creating a triangular vestibule, so the doorway was slightly hidden from the cops' line of sight. This fortuitous cavern might buy him a minute. It's not clear whether Galt noticed, but the owner, Guy Canipe, was seated at his desk. Farther back in the shop, two black patrons were rummaging through the store's collection of secondhand 45 records, which Canipe sold for a quarter apiece. From somewhere in the store, music droned from a jukebox.

Instinct told Galt what to do. Within seconds, he jettisoned the whole incriminating bundle in the entryway. The rifle box, wrapped in its dingy bedspread, made a solid thunk³⁶⁵ as it crashed against the Canipe's door.

"MARTIN, CAN YOU hear me?" Abernathy asked. "Are you in pain?"

The life was leaching from King's face. Within minutes, his skin turned an ashen hue. He was slipping into shock. His blood pressure was plummeting, his lips turning blue, his skin clammy and cool. He seemed to stare into space, his pupils dilated. "The understanding,"³⁶⁶ Abernathy said, "drained from his eyes."

The corona of warm blood oozed outward over the concrete slab. Earl Caldwell, the New York Times reporter staying at the Lorraine, thought that the blood was strangely thick and viscous--that instead of flowing, it layered upon itself, like "crimson molasses."³⁶⁷ Marrel McCullough, an undercover policeman who had been spying on the Invaders, cradled King's head in a white motel towel and wrapped one end around the wounds to stanch the bleeding. King's eyes were open but tracked independently of each other.

Now he was surrounded by people--Andy Young was there, and Jesse Jackson, and McCullough. Young knelt at King's side and felt his right wrist for a pulse. He thought he detected a beat--faint and thready, but still there. Studying King's eyes, Young wondered whether he was aware of what had happened, whether he'd heard the report of the rifle, whether he felt anything at all. "Ralph," he said softly. "It's all over."

"Don't say that," Abernathy replied with a grimace. "Don't say that."

Inside room 306, Billy Kyles was leaning against the wall, screaming and crying. He held the telephone receiver in one hand and pounded the wall with the other. He had been trying to call an ambulance but couldn't get through. He pounded and pounded the wall, screaming, "Answer the phone! Answer the phone! Answer the phone!" But the Lorraine operator, who had left her desk and hurried outside to investigate the commotion, wouldn't pick up.

"Let's not lose our heads," Abernathy told Kyles, adding that surely someone else had called an ambulance by now. Kyles pulled himself together and went onto the balcony with a hotel bedspread and a pillow for King's head. Kneeling down to cover King in the orange bedspread, he spotted the Salem cigarette crumpled in his hand. Thinking that King wouldn't want people to see cigarettes, Kyles discreetly slipped it out of his grip.³⁶⁸

A few doors down, in room 309, Joseph Louw trembled with a manic rage.³⁶⁹ He wanted to grab a gun and kill the first white person he saw, but the only thing he had to shoot with was his still 35 mm camera, hidden in his dresser. He yanked open the drawer and scooped up the camera. Then he emerged onto the balcony and began furiously shooting in all directions, his index finger firing in pure reflex.

His camera found the courtyard of the Lorraine plunged into confusion. Like swarms of agitated hornets, firemen and policemen could be seen scattering from the engine house. Most of them dropped down the retaining wall and came running for the Lorraine. In the parking lot, no one seemed to know what to do, where to go, how to help. People ran in all directions--moaning, crying, praying, cursing. Some stayed crouched, half expecting another shot, fearing this might be a mass assassination attempt. Others labored under the mistaken idea that the explosion had been a bomb and that King had been hit by shrapnel.

Solomon Jones, King's chauffeur, aimlessly screeched the Cadillac back and forth over the parking lot, rubber crying over asphalt. In the confusion, Jones looked across Mulberry Street and thought he saw a man wearing what looked like "something white over his head" standing in the brushy area beneath the brick rooming house.

In the motel office, the Lorraine's co-owner Loree Bailey began "shaking like a leaf,"³⁷⁰ according to her husband. She wandered around the premises, moaning, "Why? Why? Why?" A few minutes later, a blood vessel to her brain ruptured, causing a massive cerebral hemorrhage. She collapsed on the floor of her office, fell into a coma, and would die in the hospital a few days later.

Now the parking lot was filled with screams, shouts, wails, pleas, accusations: "Motherfuckers ... Call an ambulance! ... Oh Jesus, oh Jesus ... Police shot him ... Don't move him--don't move his head! ... Motherfuckers finally got 'im." Helmeted policemen, weapons drawn, streamed into the Lorraine courtyard.

At first, many in King's entourage thought the police were attacking them--that the Lorraine was under siege. Then the cops yelled, "Where'd the shot come from? Where'd the shot come from?" Young, Abernathy, and the others standing over King raised their arms and pointed up and slightly to the right, toward the northwest and the brick rooming house half-obscured by brush. As they did so, Joe Louw snapped a black-and-white image that would run in papers around the world, a photograph suffused with palpable urgency and thinning hope.

It's not clear how Abernathy and the others so accurately intuited the sniper's location--none of them had seen anything, no puff of smoke or gleaming barrel, no suspicious flash in a window. The crack of the rifle had reverberated off so many brick facades and concrete surfaces, and with such muddying force, that it seemed impossible to pinpoint the direction from which the trouble had originated. The angle of King's splayed and twisted body provided only a general clue. Yet in that moment when the policemen asked the question from below, a basic deduction took place, a group reflex informed by instant apprehensions. Without hesitation or pause for parley, the arms shot up. Louw's camera captured it succinctly: a line of index fingers pointed one way, accusing in a single gesture.

Over a police radio, an officer relayed this information to police headquarters: "We have information³⁷¹ that the shot came from a brick building directly east--correction--directly west from the Lorraine." Now more policemen flooded into the courtyard, and so many radios were switched on that the police dispatcher at headquarters began to hear only a whining hum. "Cut off some of the radios at the Lorraine, cut them off!" the dispatcher demanded. "We're getting too much feedback."

The sheriff's deputy William DuFour, a vigorous man in his mid-thirties, trundled up the Lorraine balcony steps and tried to take control of the situation. "Where's he been hit?"³⁷² he asked. People on the balcony were unsure how to take DuFour's arrival--at this moment, especially, they were deeply suspicious of any white man in a police uniform. In seeming response to DuFour's voice, the muscles of King's face faintly pulled and twitched, as though he were trying to rise from his shock to answer DuFour's question. "Dr. King, don't move!" shouted the deputy sheriff, cutting King off before he could further injure himself.

As DuFour tried to ascertain the severity of the wounds, James Bevel padded about the Lorraine courtyard, lost in a rambling soliloquy that veered from the senseless to the savant: "Murder! Murder!³⁷³ Doc said that wasn't the way. Yet you knew he'd never be old. You couldn't think of him as an old man. It ended as it had to end. It was written this way."