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

26 A PAUSE THAT WOULD NEVER END

AT THE LORRAINE, Jesse Jackson was on the phone, frantically trying to get word to Coretta. He sat on the edge of the bed and dialed the number over and over again on the black rotary telephone. He didn't want her to have to hear the news over the airwaves, through the sterile voice of a news announcer. When he finally caught her, at about 6:20, she had just returned to the King home at 234 Sunset. She'd been shopping most of the afternoon in downtown Atlanta with her twelve-year-old daughter, Yolanda, to buy her a new dress for Easter Sunday. Coretta was lying down in her bedroom, resting her feet, her ankles crossed, when she picked up the beige receiver from the bedside phone. "Hello?"

"Coretta, Doc just got shot,"³⁸² Jackson said, indelicately blurting out the news. The report he gave her contained a hopeful fib: her husband had only been hit in the shoulder.

"I ... understand," she said, after a long pause. There was a formality to the way she said it. Jackson thought she bore the news with stoic reserve, almost as though she'd been expecting it. This was a phone call, she later said, that she'd been "subconsciously waiting for" nearly all her married life.

As she talked with Jackson, her sons, Dexter and Marty, came racing into the room. They'd been watching TV elsewhere in the house, sitting on the floor, when a news bulletin flashed across the screen, saying their daddy had been shot in Memphis.

"Mama?" Dexter interrupted excitedly. "You hear that?³⁸³ What do they mean?"

Coretta raised her finger to her lips to shush the boys, and they waited impatiently at the foot of the bed as their mother finished hearing what Jackson had to say.

"They've taken him to St. Joseph's Hospital," he told her.

"I understand,"³⁸⁴ she replied again. "I ... understand." As he recalled years later in his memoir, Dexter didn't understand why his mother kept saying those words, but he dreaded the tone in her voice.

"I don't know how bad it is," Jackson said. "But you should get a plane out right away."

"I'll check for the next flight," she told Jackson, and calmly hung up.

INSIDE ST. JOSEPH'S, a team of nurses and ER orderlies³⁸⁵ wheeled King into a small, harshly lit chamber with pale green walls. They transferred King to an operating table and snipped away his blood-stiffened jacket, shirt, undershirt, and tie--giving the clothing to Memphis Police Department witnesses as possible evidence. King lay with his head turned slightly to his left, the gaping wound at the base of his neck no longer bleeding. His face was still partially covered with a towel. A crucifix hung on the wall, the dying Christ's visage brooding over banks of medical machines and arrayed instruments.

Among the first physicians on the scene was Dr. Ted Galyon, who, using a stethoscope, detected a clear heartbeat and a radial pulse. An IV tube was inserted into King's left forearm to administer vital saline fluids, another in his ankle to infuse blood.

At 6:20, Dr. Rufus Brown, a young white physician from Mississippi still in his surgical residency, entered the room. Dr. Brown could see that King was having trouble breathing--the bullet had ravaged his windpipe, and the lungs weren't getting sufficient air. Without a moment's hesitation, Dr. Brown picked up a scalpel. "Tracheotomy," he said to the hovering staff, and pressed the blade into the base of King's throat. Several minutes later a cuffed endotracheal tube was inserted into the new hole, and King was connected to a respirator.

Ralph Abernathy was there in the emergency room, watching all this. He leaned against a wall, along with the Reverend Bernard Lee. Dr. Brown eyed the two men uneasily--it was against hospital policy for loved ones to be present in the room. A nurse sidled up to Abernathy and said, "You really must go."

Abernathy was adamant. "I'm staying,"³⁸⁶ he said, with enough declarative force to end the matter. He and Lee stood against the wall and watched the frantic proceedings. Abernathy was amazed by the size of the wound--it extended from King's jaw down his neck toward the clavicle.

Within minutes, nearly a dozen doctors were crowded into the room--including a thoracic surgeon, a heart surgeon, a neurosurgeon, a pulmonary specialist, a renal specialist, and several general surgeons. Examining the injuries, the doctors found blood bubbling in the chest. Probing further, they could see the apex of King's right lung bulging up through the wound. They clamped various severed vessels deep inside King's right chest cavity and inserted a tube that quickly drew nearly a thousand cc's of pooled blood.

At around 6:30, the neurosurgeon Dr. Frederick Gioia stepped into the fray.³⁸⁷ A Sicilian-American from upstate New York who had trained in Geneva, Switzerland, Dr. Gioia was an endearingly gruff, intense man with delicate surgeon's hands. Over the years, he had treated countless cases of gunshot trauma. Dr. Gioia quickly confirmed that the bullet had damaged King's jugular vein and windpipe, and then had driven down into the spinal cord, cutting it completely--apparently ricocheting through several vertebrae and lacerating the subclavian artery in the process. As Dr. Gioia later put it, "A defect in the vertebral bodies of C-7 to T-2 was present with a complete loss of spinal cord substance." Along its zigzagging path inside his body, the fraying bullet had torn loose shards of bone that became, in effect, tiny projectiles, wreaking further internal damage. The main part of the bullet had come to rest along his left shoulder blade; Dr. Gioia could feel the hard mass of metal--or what was left of it--just under the skin, wedged against the scapula.

Shortly after making this determination, Dr. Gioia set down his instruments and shook his head. He came over to speak with Abernathy and Lee. "It would be a blessing³⁸⁸ if he did go," the doctor said, his piercing blue eyes peering over his surgical mask. "The spine is cut and he has sustained awful brain damage." Shards of bullet, he noted, had severed prominent nerves near the base of the skull.

If King did survive, he would be paralyzed from the neck down and would probably live in a vegetative state. There was very little Dr. Gioia could do, very little anyone could do at this point. By most medical definitions, King was already brain-dead. The organs were alive, and the lungs drew breath thanks to the respirator, but King's vital systems had ceased to function as an organic whole.

Yet his heart kept beating.

EVER SINCE THE first dispatcher alerts around 6:10 p.m., the Memphis police had been on the lookout for a late-model Mustang driven by a well-dressed white man possibly answering to the name John Willard. Cruisers were placed at nearly every major thoroughfare leading from the city, and all across Memphis policemen pulled over every Mustang they saw. This was no mean task, as the wildly popular Mustang was one of the most common cars on the road. A quick check with area Ford dealers would reveal that some four hundred light-colored Mustangs had been sold over the past three years in Memphis and Shelby County.

Still, several promising leads soon developed. At 6:26, a sheriff's department dispatcher broadcast an alert, based on information of uncertain origin, that put the assailant's Mustang heading north and east out of the city: "Subject now believed north of Thomas from Parkway, dark hair, dark suit."

Ten minutes later, a police lieutenant named Rufus Bradshaw,³⁸⁹ driving car 160, was flagged down by an agitated young man named Bill Austein at the corner of Jackson and Hollywood in north Memphis. The twenty-two-year-old Austein, who drove a white and red Chevrolet Chevelle and worked for a heating and air-conditioning company, was a licensed citizens-band radio enthusiast (FCC call letters KOM-8637). Lieutenant Bradshaw described him as "looking like the deacon of a church." Austein said he was just now receiving an extraordinary transmission over the CB radio in his Chevelle--a transmission on Channel 17, one of the lesser-used frequencies, that urgently concerned the shooting of Martin Luther King.

His curiosity piqued, Bradshaw pulled his cruiser alongside Austein's car in the parking lot of a Loeb's Laundry and listened with fascination to the chatter on his radio. For the next twelve minutes Bradshaw heard a live narration purportedly being transmitted from a blue 1966 Pontiac hardtop barreling toward the northeastern precincts of the city--a Pontiac that was in hot pursuit of a fast-fleeing white Mustang. The broadcaster claimed the man he was following was "the man who had shot King."

As he attempted to decipher this unfolding story, Bradshaw got on his own radio and excitedly relayed to the central police dispatcher what he was hearing. The headquarters dispatcher, who could not directly raise the CB signal himself, listened to Bradshaw and, in spurts and fragments, broadcast an often garbled version of his narration. "White male, east on Summer from Highland, in white Mustang, responsible for shooting," the dispatcher began. The minutes slipped by, and the chase escalated from seventy-five miles per hour, to eighty, ninety, ninety-five, as the Mustang and pursuing Pontiac hurtled east through rush-hour traffic and ran red lights by the dozen. The CB operator in the Pontiac, who spoke with brisk officiousness in a cracking adolescent voice, said he had two companions in the car.

Several times the transmission faltered due to atmospheric conditions, distorting the voice to the point of incoherence, but then the signal would regain its clarity. The chase progressed to the city's far eastern outskirts, then into the suburbs of Raleigh and on toward the naval air base at Millington. As night fell over Memphis, Martin Luther King's assailant appeared to be making for the honeysuckled hill country of rural Tennessee.

Austein kept breaking in and requesting the name or call number of the CB operator in the Pontiac, but the man refused to answer. All he would volunteer was the make and year of his vehicle. On the strength of the gripping transmissions relayed by Bradshaw, police dispatchers diverted cruisers to northeast Memphis in the hope of intercepting the speeding vehicles. Roadblocks were erected, highway patrolmen alerted. As Fire and Police Director Frank Holloman and his staff listened to this white-knuckled narrative, a palpable excitement began to run through headquarters, a gathering hunch that they might be zeroing in on the mysterious John Willard. Other people listening in over the airwaves got caught up in the chase. At one point some other CB operator, obviously not a fan of the civil rights movement, broke in over the static and stated, "Let him go, as this may be the subject that shot Martin Luther King."

At 6:47, as the cars headed out Austin Peay Highway, the chase seemed to turn from dangerous to potentially lethal: the witness in the blue Pontiac suddenly screamed over his CB, "He's shooting at me! He's hit my windshield!"

Squawked Bradshaw: "The white Mustang is firing at the blue Pontiac! The white Mustang is firing at the blue Pontiac!"

Austein broke in and asked the CB operator in the Pontiac if he could make out the license plate number on the Mustang, but the driver said he was leery of getting that close--he feared the shooter in the Mustang might open fire again.

Then, at 6:48, Austein's CB receiver fell silent, the staticky reports mysteriously terminated, and Holloman's hottest lead went ice-cold.

THE SCENE OUTSIDE St. Joseph's Hospital was one of deepening chaos and confusion. People shouted and cursed, they cried and prayed, they stood quietly at the edge of the parking lot and held vigil by candlelight. Helmeted policemen stood at attention, wearing riot gear, loaded shotguns at the ready. Weird rumors hatched, intensified, and rippled through the milling crowds. The assassin had been caught and killed on the Mississippi River bridge, it was said. President Johnson was on his way to Memphis on Air Force One. Ralph Abernathy had been shot, too, and was dying alongside King. One of the more far-fetched and optimistic pieces of gossip had it that King had walked into the ER under his own power while holding a towel over his face, that the bullet had only grazed his jaw, and that he would be meeting with the press momentarily to assure the world he was safe.

By 6:30 the crowds outside grew so unruly that hospital officials, fearing a riot, requested more police to set up barricades. Only the closest of King's staff--Young, Bevel, Chauncey Eskridge--were able to enter the facility. A resourceful reporter for the Commercial Appeal, realizing he was following one of the biggest stories of his career, suddenly complained of chest pains--"I think I'm having a heart attack!" he moaned--and gained admittance to the ER.

In the waiting room, Andy Young sat³⁹⁰ with his head in his hands, and an FBI agent paced the corridors. Eskridge leaned on the wall in the waiting room and said, "Why, why would anybody want to do this? I just don't understand it." Young found a phone booth down the hall and called Coretta, not knowing that Jackson had just reached her from the Lorraine. She was hurriedly packing, planning to hop on the next flight to Memphis. A television newscast droned somewhere in the background of the King home.

Young disabused her of the hopeful idea that King was merely shot in the shoulder. "The neck,"³⁹¹ Young corrected her. "It's very serious. But he's not dead, Coretta. He's not dead."

"I understand," Coretta said again--Young thought she sounded "almost serene." She was scheduled to depart Atlanta on the 8:25 flight, she told him.

"All right," Young replied. "We'll be looking for you at the airport. But, Coretta, bring someone with you."

She said she would--in fact, Ivan Allen, the mayor of Atlanta, had offered to drive her to the airport, and Dora McDonald, King's personal secretary, was ready to fly with her to Memphis. Hanging up the beige receiver,³⁹² she turned to Yolanda, Dexter, and Marty, who'd been trying to follow the conversation. Coretta opened her mouth to speak, but Yoki, as Yolanda was nicknamed, cupped her hands over her ears and ran out of the room, screaming, "Don't tell me! Don't tell me!"

Coretta gathered her two boys in her arms and took a deep breath. "Your father--there's been an accident."³⁹³

JESSE JACKSON EMERGED from his room at the Lorraine and, looking deeply distracted and in disarray, roamed about the courtyard in the swirling lights of the squad cars.

"I need to see Dr. King!"³⁹⁴ Jackson yelled impatiently to someone off in the distance. "Can I get a ride to the hospital to see Dr. King?" He saw a gaggle of reporters attempting to interview the musician Ben Branch. "Don't talk to them!" Jackson yelled. Branch agreed, thinking Jackson meant that they should all decline interviews until Abernathy and Young returned from the hospital. They, after all, had been closest to King and had seen the most. Branch told the reporters, "No comment," and walked away.

A few minutes later one of the television crews spotted Jackson. "Jesse? Reverend?" a reporter said. "Could you tell us just what happened, please?"

Jackson demurred at first--"Can you excuse us, Jack? Can it wait a little while?"--but the reporter persisted. "Would you tell me just what happened so we can get this film in, please?"

Finally Jackson relented. More than anyone else in the SCLC (aside from King himself), the twenty-six-year-old Jackson was a natural before the klieg lights, and when the cameras began to whir, he brightened just a little. "The black people's leader," he began, "our Moses, the once in a 500-year leader, has been taken from us. Even as I stand at this hour, I cannot allow hate to enter my heart at this time, for it was sickness, not meanness, that killed him. The pathology and the neurosis of Memphis, and of this racist society in which we live, is what pulled the trigger. To some extent Dr. King has been a buffer the last few years between the black community and the white community. The white people don't know it, but the white people's best friend is dead."

When the reporter pressed him for details about what happened at the Lorraine immediately after the shot, Jackson replied, "People were, uh, some were in pandemonium, some in shock, some were hollering, 'Oh God.' And uh ..."

He glanced off camera and hesitated a moment. Perhaps the stress of the tragedy was getting the better of him, or perhaps he sensed an opportunity, but at this point Jackson began to spin a small fiction that would grow in the days ahead, one in which he imagined himself playing the approximate role that Abernathy had in fact played on the balcony. "And I immediately started running upstairs to where he was," Jackson said. "And I caught his head.³⁹⁵ And I tried to feel his head. I asked him, 'Dr. King, do you hear me? Dr. King, do you hear me?' And he didn't say anything. And I tried to--to hold his head. But by then ..."

The SCLC staffer Hosea Williams glanced from his room window and saw Jackson speaking to the press. Curious, he wandered out to the courtyard and listened. Jackson's account gave Williams pause, because in all the confusion he couldn't remember Jackson ever getting near the fallen King, let alone cradling his head in his arms. Some people at the Lorraine couldn't remember seeing Jackson at all after the shot was fired, while others said he'd hidden somewhere behind the swimming pool's privacy wall until the ambulance arrived.

Williams was thus already suspicious when he thought he heard Jackson tell the television reporter, "Yes, I was the last man in the world King spoke to."

It's possible that the older and more seasoned Williams felt a stab of jealousy over the brazen way in which the young Jackson assumed the limelight. But the baldness of this apparent lie so infuriated Williams that he climbed over a railing and pushed his way toward him, yelling, "You dirty, stinking, lying ...!"³⁹⁶ People standing around the Lorraine had to physically restrain him to keep him from assaulting Jackson. "I was gonna stomp him in the ground!" Williams fumed.

Even as King clung to life in the hospital, internecine dissension seethed in the ranks; the young Turks were beginning to fight for proximity, real or imagined, to the heat of the drama. "It's a helluva thing³⁹⁷ to capitalize on, especially one you profess to love," Williams later told a reporter. "The only person who cradled Dr. King was Abernathy. I have no hang-ups about Jesse talking to the press. But, why lie?"

The conflict with Williams seemed to rattle Jackson. He told another SCLC staffer that he was sick and had decided to leave for Chicago later that night. "This whole thing's³⁹⁸ really shot my nerves," Jackson said, noting that he planned to check in to a hospital back home.

Yet his account was already gaining purchase in the media, and his star as King's logical successor was beginning to rise. As the NBC correspondent David Burrington³⁹⁹ reported from the Lorraine, only minutes later: "The Reverend Jesse Jackson of Chicago, one of King's closest aides, was beside him when he was shot while standing on a veranda outside his motel room."

INSIDE THE St. Joseph's ER, the attending doctors could tell that King's heart was faltering. At 6:45 p.m., Dr. Ted Galyon ordered a medical technician to wire King's bare chest to an EKG machine. The heartbeat was desperately weak--the electric needle scratched languid zigzags across the slow-spooling paper. Dr. Galyon requested an Adrenalin injection directly into the heart muscle, while another physician initiated closed-chest cardiac massage--using the heels of his hands to rhythmically knead the lower sternum. High along King's rib cage, right beside his breastbone, the doctors could see an impressive old scar--the cross-shaped wound left from the surgery King had undergone in 1958 to remove the letter opener the demented lady had plunged into his chest at the book signing in Harlem.

King did not react to the resuscitative efforts now under way, and when a doctor shone a bright penlight in his eyes, his pupils were massively dilated and unresponsive. One of the surgeons, shaking his head, turned and spoke under his breath to Ralph Abernathy and Bernard Lee. "He won't make it,"⁴⁰⁰ he said.

Abernathy looked dazed and puzzled. "Then why are they all still in here?" he replied, casting his eye over the busy team of physicians, nurses, and orderlies.

The doctor said gently, "With somebody as well-known and important as Dr. King, you try everything. But nothing's going to work now."

The doctors continued to massage King's heart for more than fifteen minutes, but the EKG needle stopped scribbling altogether. The tape emerging from the machine showed no cardiac function at all. The same doctor came over to Abernathy and Lee again and said, "He's going. If you'd like to spend a few last moments with him, you can have them now."

Abernathy took King in his arms and held him. His breathing was "nothing more than prolonged shudders,"⁴⁰¹ Abernathy said. "The breaths came farther and farther apart. Then, a pause came that lengthened until I knew it would never end."

Dr. Jerome Barrasso entered the room and at 7:05 p.m. pronounced Martin Luther King dead.

Abernathy joined hospital officials outside in making a brief statement to Memphis, and the world. As they did so, the St. Joseph's chaplain, Father Coleman Bergard, was summoned to the emergency room. Following the hospital's protocol, Bergard leaned over the body and gave conditional absolution, praying for the soul of Martin Luther King.

Then, gently, Father Bergard closed King's eyes.⁴⁰²

IN ATLANTA, KING'S parents listened to the radio⁴⁰³ at Ebenezer Baptist Church. They knew their son had been shot and seriously wounded, but they still held out hope. Martin Luther King Sr. had a little radio set up near his desk in his upstairs study. As he prayed aloud, Alberta King cried in silence. She had grown up in Ebenezer and had been the church's organist since 1932; Ebenezer was her home, and her sanctuary, the best possible place for her to be in such a crisis. "Lord, let him live, let him live!" King senior moaned as the minutes drained away.

Then the somber bulletin came over the airwaves. King turned to his wife, but neither said a word. For years they had feared the coming of news like this--its possibility had lurked behind every late-night phone call, behind every startling noise. Daddy King recognized that in the face of concerted evil, his son had nowhere to hide. "No matter how much protection⁴⁰⁴ a person has, it will not be enough if the enemy is hatred," he would write. His son's fate, he realized, had been sealed years earlier. "To avoid it was impossible, even as avoiding the coming of darkness in the evening."

The Kings held each other in the study and tried to absorb the blow. Mrs. King recalled her conversation with both her sons earlier in the day, how from the motel room in Memphis they had teased her by each pretending to be the other. It had meant so much to her to hear from them, to know they were together and safe.

Daddy King removed his glasses, and the tears coursed down his cheeks, toward his gray-flecked mustache. "I always felt I would go first," he said over and over. He could only think of his son as a child, growing up, like his mother before him, in this very church, his young life revolving around Ebenezer. "My first son,⁴⁰⁵ whose birth had brought me such joy that I jumped up in the hall outside the room where he was born and touched the ceiling--the child, the scholar, the boy singing and smiling--all of it was gone. And Ebenezer was so quiet; all through the church, the tears flowed, but almost completely in silence."

A FEW MILES away, at the FBI headquarters in Atlanta, the news of King's death came flooding in over the radio. Reaction in the office hallways was mixed. Over the past decade, agents in the Atlanta field office had probably exhausted more man-hours on King--following and wiretapping and bugging and attempting to smear him--than they'd spent working on any other single subject. Code-named "Zorro," King was the office bogeyman, the subject with the most voluminous file, and the quarry of a thousand investigatory trails.

Two agents,⁴⁰⁶ who happened to be standing next to each other when the news came in, succinctly captured the office's divergent opinions on King. The first, Arthur Murtagh, allowed as how he thought King's death was a tragedy. "He was a credible person," he said. "He was doing what he could to help his people."

The agent standing next to him, James Rose, chastised Murtagh for his naivete, and the two colleagues became embroiled in a heated argument. Rose said King was a Commie, a charlatan, and a threat to the nation's security; he was trying to take over the country and give it to the Russians.

According to Murtagh, Rose exclaimed, "They got Zorro!" and nearly jumped up and down with joy. "Thank God, they finally got the S.O.B.!"