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

30 A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS

JUST AFTER DAWN on Friday, April 5, a Lockheed Jetstar taxied⁴⁷⁹ from the immense hangar that housed presidential planes and then shot down the runway at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. On board the twelve-seat business jet were Ramsey Clark, Cartha DeLoach, and several other government officials, including the brilliant young black Justice Department lawyer Roger Wilkins. On this early morning, they were hastening to Memphis on a vital mission: to officially kick off the federal investigation into Martin Luther King's assassination--and to assure the city, and the nation, that the Justice Department would expend every resource to find and prosecute King's killer.

That morning Clark wore a crisp black suit with a thin tie of diagonal blue and white stripes. He already felt exhausted, and the day was only beginning, a day that promised to be as stressful as any he'd experienced as attorney general. Clark had hardly slept the night before--no one at the Justice Department had.

The jet banked over Prince Georges County and climbed west over Washington, where the fires from the previous night's rioting still smoldered. Clark looked out the window at the city where he had been largely raised and schooled.

DeLoach tried to brighten the mood. He was confident that the FBI would find the killer--or killers--within a matter of hours. While the plane was in the air, he was in constant communication with the bureau and would periodically share the latest bulletins with Clark. The probable murder weapon, he said, was safely ensconced in the crime lab, two floors above Clark's office in the Justice building, and was now undergoing analysis. Working off the serial number on the rifle--461476--FBI officials had already called the Remington Arms Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and traced the weapon to a gun wholesaler in Alabama and finally to a gun shop in Birmingham called Aeromarine Supply Company; FBI agents in Birmingham would soon be dispatched to question the employees who sold the gun.

Then DeLoach learned of a tantalizing new lead: in 1958 the Memphis Police Department had arrested a white male fugitive named John Willard⁴⁸⁰ who had committed arson and whose last known whereabouts were in Mississippi. MPD sleuths, as well as FBI agents from Memphis and Jackson, were already combing the region in hopes of tracking the man down.

DeLoach had been in such a hurry this morning that he hadn't had time to eat. Now he opened his briefcase⁴⁸¹ and found a sandwich next to his large revolver. As he tucked into his breakfast, he looked out the window at the Shenandoah Valley, which was now sharpening with the vivid greens of spring. The jet hurtled past the mountains of Virginia at four hundred miles per hour and headed over Tennessee.

Two hours later, at 7:20 a.m. central time, the Jetstar landed in Memphis. Stepping off the plane, Clark and DeLoach saw that the place had a decidedly martial cast. National Guardsmen and riot police ringed the perimeter of the runway, and military planes were parked along the tarmac. Flags flew at half-staff.

Special Agent Robert Jensen met Clark and DeLoach on the tarmac and drove them into the troubled city, which was just now stirring from the curfews.

AT THAT SAME moment, Eric Galt eased his Mustang into the parking lot of a forlorn housing project in Atlanta called Capitol Homes. It was about 8:20 eastern time on a drizzly Friday morning, and the city was waking up to the banner headlines in the Constitution proclaiming that Atlanta's most famous citizen had been slain. Galt had been driving through the night, worried all the while that some state trooper might notice the make and color of his car and end his escape before he even got out of the South. From Birmingham to Atlanta, he had avoided main highways and driven strictly on back roads. "At daybreak I stopped for gas⁴⁸² on the outskirts of Atlanta," he later said; he then went to the Capitol Homes project--a location he had scoped out⁴⁸³ two weeks earlier.

Galt hated giving up his loyal Mustang--over the past seven months he had driven it some nineteen thousand miles. Ditching it like this violated his sense of frugality. "I sure hated that I didn't have time to sell it for at least $1,000," he wrote. But he knew there was no time to put an ad in the paper and fool around negotiating with customers and all the usual rigmarole; the whole world, it seemed, was searching for this car.

Capitol Homes was a complex of old redbrick buildings occupied almost entirely by white tenants. Trash was heaped in one corner of the parking lot, and a playground slide lay toppled on the ground. The general drabness of the eight-hundred-unit complex was relieved by a flower garden near the entrance off Memorial Drive. Rising over the neighborhood, as if to mock its dreariness, was the elegant neoclassical Georgia state capitol, with its massive gold-ribbed dome shimmering through curtains of rain.

That morning a woman named Mary Bridges,⁴⁸⁴ who lived in apartment 550 of Capitol Homes, was in a rush to get her twelve-year-old daughter, Wanda, off to school. Through her front window, Mrs. Bridges spotted a white two-door Mustang hardtop with whitewall tires pulling in to the parking lot. The car abruptly stopped, then made a screeching sound as it jerked rearward into a vacant parking place a few yards from her door. The Mustang had Alabama plates, and the car windows were affixed with Mexican "Turista" stickers.

Mrs. Bridges opened her door and stood at the threshold with Wanda, watching the man emerge from the Mustang, lock the door, and hurriedly scuffle away. He seemed nervous, wary. She had never seen the man before, or the car. He had "soot-black hair" and wore a dark suit--the coat dramatically flared out in the morning breeze. Without a raincoat or umbrella, and carrying no luggage, he hurried along the wet sidewalk, turned left at the flower garden, and disappeared down Memorial Drive.

She thought he might be a traveling insurance salesman, but something about the mystery visitor disturbed her. Mrs. Bridges turned to Wanda and said, half-joking, "He might have a gun."

Galt was relieved to have shed his car, severing himself from the most conspicuous piece of evidence that tied him to Memphis. What he did next is not precisely known, but in all likelihood he flagged down a taxi. At 8:41 a.m., a United Cab Company driver⁴⁸⁵ named Chuck Stephens was heading west on Memorial Drive when he was hailed by a white man Stephens later described as about thirty years old, six feet tall, slender, and neat. The man was standing in the spitting rain on Memorial near Fraser Street--just a few blocks from Capitol Homes. Stephens pulled over, and the man hopped in, asking to be taken to the Greyhound bus depot. Stephens nodded and headed downtown, thinking it odd that his passenger was going to the bus station without any luggage. The man didn't say a word during the short drive. Upon reaching the Greyhound terminal, he paid the fare--ninety-three cents--and climbed out into the drizzly street.

Galt's plan was to take the first bus north to Detroit. But when he got to the station, he inquired about the times and found the next coach bound for the Motor City wasn't scheduled to leave until around 11:00 a.m.--and that bus was running late. Realizing he still had a few hours to spare, Galt decided to make a dash for his flophouse neighborhood around Peachtree Street to pick up his laundry and a few things from his room.

AT THE LORRAINE Motel, a stunned and deeply sleep-deprived Ralph Abernathy started off the morning by giving a brief press conference in the motel parking lot, just below the now-infamous balcony, where janitors had scrubbed off the last of King's blood to make way for enormous wreaths of flowers. "This is one of the darkest days⁴⁸⁶ in the history of this nation and certainly in the life of my people," Abernathy said, although in the end he had no doubt that "non-violence will triumph." He never had any desire to lead the movement, he said. "No living man can fill his shoes. I always wanted to stand with him and not ahead of him."

But as the new president of the SCLC, Abernathy wanted to assure the world that the cause would go on--starting with the Beale Street march that King had planned in support of the garbage workers. He announced that he would return on Monday to lead it. Not only would the demonstration be nonviolent, he vowed; in deference to King, it would be utterly silent. To run this memorial march, Bayard Rustin would be called in--the old pro, the bespectacled impresario of the civil rights movement, who, among other things, had stage-managed the March on Washington in 1963 where King had given his "Dream" speech.

When a reporter asked Abernathy if he was worried that returning to Memphis might provoke another assassination attempt--perhaps on his life--Abernathy replied, "We're all willing to die for what we believe in."

All the members of the inner circle rallied around Abernathy--except Jesse Jackson. He was in Chicago, where he had hired a public relations agent⁴⁸⁷ and was now giving a live interview to NBC's Today show. Reiterating his hyperbolic story from the previous night, he told the national audience that he was the last person to speak with King, and implied that he'd cradled King's bleeding head in his final moments. "He died in my arms," he said. As if to prove it, he still wore the blood-streaked turtleneck. Jackson failed to mention the odd way the blood got there. He then left for a busy itinerary of other interviews and public appearances, wearing his bloody shirt through the day. By inventing this halo-glow moment with the fallen King, Jackson apparently was trying to make the point that he, not Abernathy, had inherited King's mantle.

The Today show was blaring from several rooms at the Lorraine, and some of King's entourage who saw Jackson's interview found the spectacle repugnant. Said James Bevel: "To prostitute and lie⁴⁸⁸ about the crucifixion of a prophet within a race for the sake of one's own self-aggrandizement is the most gruesome crime a man can commit."

When he heard about it, Abernathy was much more charitable, even though he had cause for greater outrage. The only possible explanation, he said, was that Jackson "was somehow in shock,⁴⁸⁹ reliving the whole scene in his mind, and acting out what he might have wished to do during those last seconds."

SHORTLY AFTER THE Today show went off the national airwaves, FBI special agent Neil Shanahan walked through the door⁴⁹⁰ of Aeromarine Supply Company at 5701 Airport Highway in Birmingham. There he met Donald Wood, the son of the store owner and an experienced salesman of firearms. Shanahan began to question Wood about a certain Remington .30-06 rifle that had come into the FBI's possession the previous night in relation to the Martin Luther King assassination.

"Well, I sold a Gamemaster to a guy about a week ago," Wood volunteered, according to a report Shanahan filed shortly after the interview. Wood remembered the man well. In fact, he said, when he'd read in the paper this morning that the weapon left at the crime scene was a Remington .30-06, his thoughts turned immediately to this particular sale.

"Would you happen to have a record of it in your files?" Shanahan asked.

Wood said he did, and he soon retrieved from the Aeromarine office a sales invoice, dated Saturday, March 30. Shanahan felt a frisson of recognition, for there it was, in a clear and legible hand: Remington Model 760 Gamemaster .30-06, serial number 461476, with mounted Redfield variable scope--the exact weapon found outside Canipe's Amusement Company the previous night.

The man who bought the rifle had stated that he lived in Birmingham, at 1907 South Eleventh Street. The name he gave was Harvey Lowmeyer. His signature was scrawled across the bottom of the invoice. By the messy way it was chicken-scratched, Shanahan couldn't tell for sure whether the name was spelled "Lowmeyer" or "Lowmyer."

Agent Shanahan phoned this information to his superiors, and soon agents were dispatched to the address on Eleventh Street, only to discover that no one named Harvey Lowmeyer had ever lived there. Meanwhile, Shanahan asked Wood if he'd be willing to offer an official statement. Wood readily consented, and Shanahan brought him to the FBI field office, where he underwent several hours of questioning.

Wood said that Harvey Lowmeyer had first come into Aeromarine the day before the date on the invoice. On that day--Friday, March 29--he purchased a Remington Model 700 .243, but called back later to say he wanted to exchange it for something more powerful. "My brother says I got the wrong one," Lowmeyer had said. Wood told Lowmeyer he could come back the following morning and make the exchange.

As agreed, Lowmeyer had walked into Aeromarine the next morning. Wood told Lowmeyer it would take a while to remove the scope from the .243 and mount it on the .30-06. Around three o'clock, Lowmeyer returned. Wood put the Gamemaster in an old Browning box. Lowmeyer bought some Remington-Peters ammunition and completed the transaction--paying in cash.

What did this Lowmeyer look like?, Agent Shanahan asked.

To Wood, he seemed like a "meek individual"--soft-spoken, mumbly, nervous. He recalled that Lowmeyer wore a slightly rumpled dark brown business suit with a white shirt and a tie. He was approximately five feet eight inches tall, weighed about 160 pounds, and looked to be in his mid-thirties. He had a medium complexion. His dark brown hair was swept back from his forehead.

Through Wood, Shanahan located a regular Aeromarine customer named John DeShazo who had spoken with Harvey Lowmeyer in the store the day he bought the original .243 rifle. An NRA loyalist who often spent hours at a time inside Aeromarine, DeShazo confirmed Wood's version of events, as well as his description of Lowmeyer, but he added a few details. DeShazo had smelled alcohol on Lowmeyer's breath. "He wasn't drunk,⁴⁹¹ bleary-eyed, or slurring his speech," DeShazo said, "but he'd definitely been drinking."

DeShazo went on: "The man gave the impression that he was not from Alabama. He didn't look like a hunter or an outdoorsman. He appeared out of place in the store, didn't know a thing about rifles and had no business getting one. I thought at the time that this is the type of guy who buys a rifle to kill his wife--the type of guy who gives the use of weapons a bad name."