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

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."

As he scanned the paper, Galt must have been relieved by the vagueness of the reports on the manhunt. It seemed that no new leads had developed. The articles made no mention of an Eric Galt or a Harvey Lowmeyer, no mention of a Mustang found in Atlanta. The authorities seemed to be concentrating on a nonexistent man named John Willard. Now that he was poised on the border, only miles away from Windsor, Canada, Galt could breathe a little easier.

He knew that crossing between the United States and Canada was a lax affair requiring no documentation, and that travelers were seldom stopped and questioned. But in the wake of the King assassination, he worried that the border guards might be taking special precautions. Galt checked himself in the bathroom mirror and decided he looked too much like a fugitive to cross the border into Windsor. His dark beard had come in strong over the past two days, and he feared that unless he got cleaned up, he might arouse suspicions should a customs agent stop him. Unfortunately, he had dumped all his shaving toiletries with the bundle back in Memphis.

Galt later claimed that he stashed his suitcase⁵⁴⁶ in a locker at the Greyhound terminal, took off across a grassy park, and found an old-fashioned barbershop where he requested a shave. The barber hesitated--he'd stopped shaving customers years ago--but Galt prevailed upon the man and climbed into his chair. Soon the barber was working up the lather with a mug brush and sharpening the blade on his leather strop. If the subject of Martin Luther King's assassination came up, what might have been said between the two men is not known. But for the next ten minutes or so, without realizing his customer's identity, the barber gingerly dragged his straight razor over the face and neck of Martin Luther King's assassin.

Clean shaven, Galt returned to the terminal for his suitcase and hailed a taxi. His worries about the border proved unwarranted--his cab crossed under the Detroit River through the fumy Windsor Tunnel without so much as a glance from the authorities. (It was a point of local interest that the Detroit-Windsor crossing was the only major border crossing where one had to go south to pass from the United States into Canada.) The cabbie drove to the Windsor train station. For a one-way fare of $8.20, Galt took the noon train on Canadian National Railways. The four-hour trip was an easy one, making a northeastern stitch across the farm country of Ontario, roughly paralleling Lake Erie, passing through the city of London. At around four o'clock the train pulled in to his destination, Canada's largest city--Toronto.

Galt stowed his suitcase at Union Station and set off on foot in search of a cheap place to stay. As usual, his radar was keen--according to his memoirs, he made his way to a rooming place at 102 Ossington Avenue, in a polyglot neighborhood, sometimes called Little Italy, on the west side of downtown Toronto. Owned by a middle-aged Polish couple, the old redbrick walk-up apartment was not far from the Trinity-Bellwoods Park, and only a few blocks from a mental hospital. Across the street from the apartment was a sparring gym where, two years earlier, Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, had trained for his winning bout against the Toronto boxing legend George Chuvalo.

Mrs. Feliksa Szpakowski, a bosomy middle-aged woman with a broad face and horn-rimmed glasses who wore her gray hair in a bun, opened the aluminum storm door and greeted Galt at the front steps. In broken English, she told him she could let him a room on the second floor for eight Canadian dollars a week.

Mrs. Szpakowski showed him up to the room,⁵⁴⁷ which was, by Galt's standards, clean and well-appointed. The floors were tiled in new linoleum, the walls were painted a cheery canary yellow, the curtains and matching bedspread done in a bright red floral pattern. The only art on the wall was a picture of Christ and a framed needlepoint that said, "Home Sweet Home." In the alcove of the bay window was a big console television, its rabbit-ears antenna waiting to take in the news of the world.

Galt liked the room and paid Mrs. Szpakowski a week's rent. She didn't ask for a name at first, and he didn't volunteer one. But she did ask him, in her thick Slavic accent, what he did for a living.

"Real estate," Galt told her. He said he worked for Mann and Martel, a local firm.

That was good enough for Mrs. Szpakowski, though it seemed a little odd to her that such a well-dressed real estate agent--he was wearing his usual suit--would be interested in a room in this ethnic working-class part of town.

IN ATLANTA THAT same day, the King home was a hive of round-the-clock planning. Trying to decide how best to eulogize the fallen monarch of black America was testy, high-concept business. Titanic egos had flown in to offer Coretta their creative vision. The services must be flawlessly choreographed, letter-perfect. Some of King's friends wanted a massive rally to be held in Atlanta's largest football stadium; others preferred a small dignified ceremony for a select few; still others envisioned a movable funeral--a march to honor the man who'd accomplished so much by putting one foot in front of the other. Emotions ran high. During one of the planning sessions, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte⁵⁴⁸ fell into an argument so bitter that the two West Indian friends wouldn't speak to each other for several years.

This funereal strategizing was going on in a house jam-packed with mourners and well-wishers. Probably the most noteworthy of the callers at 234 Sunset that afternoon was Senator Georgia Davis, who had driven to Atlanta with A. D. King's lover, Lucretia Ward, in Ward's baby blue convertible Cadillac. "I didn't want to face Coretta,"⁵⁴⁹ Davis said, but AD thought a ritual of meeting and forgiveness was necessary for everyone's healing. They walked dolorously through the house until they found Coretta. Davis took her hand and simply said, "I'm sorry."

Coretta silently nodded, casting a beatific expression that was impossible to read. Davis knew she shouldn't be there--it was an excruciatingly awkward moment. "Sorry for what?"⁵⁵⁰ Davis later wrote, analyzing her own apology. "I was sorry she had lost her husband; I was sorry the world had lost a savior; and, on some level, I think I was apologizing for my relationship with her husband." She regretted hurting Coretta, but, she said, "I have never regretted being there with him. I would come whenever he called, and go wherever he wanted."

GALT LEFT HIS room to retrieve his suitcase from Union Station. When he returned about an hour later, he switched on the big television in his room. The rest of the weekend, he didn't leave his room⁵⁵¹ except to buy newspapers and pastries at a local bakery. He'd close his door and stay there night and day. The television was always on.

Little had changed in the news since Galt had left Detroit that morning. Though many American cities still lay smoldering, the worst of the rioting was over. To Galt's relief, the weekend seemed to bring no fresh developments in the manhunt. Ramsey Clark appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday morning, and while he said he was confident that the killer would be found, the attorney general offered no details that indicated the FBI had a suspect. Clark didn't say so, but the case was losing some of the momentum it had enjoyed in its opening hours.

Galt, for now, was safe. That morning, Palm Sunday, was quiet across the United States, a time of sorrow and reflection after three days of convulsions. The America that Galt had left behind now seemed to be grinding to a halt for a prolonged period of mourning. The papers announced that the Academy Awards, scheduled for that night, would be postponed until after King's funeral--as would the National Hockey League play-off game in St. Louis and the season openers of at least seven Major League Baseball teams, from Cincinnati to Los Angeles.

The only person who seemed to be observing any sense of normalcy was the man ultimately in charge of the investigation--J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director, it was reported, was spending the weekend as he often did. He was in Baltimore,⁵⁵² at the horse races.

Much of the news that Palm Sunday came out of Memphis, where a nearly spontaneous racially mixed crowd of some ten thousand people gathered in Crump Stadium for a kind of town hall meeting. This soul-searching event, called Memphis Cares, was put on by a prominent local businessman named John T. Fisher. It went on for hours, and was, by turns, beautiful and haunting and cathartic. The Reverend Jim Lawson, the man who had invited King to Memphis in the first place, took the stage and assumed the angry tone of a biblical prophet: "This man, in the full prime⁵⁵³ of his life, is dead, shot down, executed in cold blood. We have witnessed a crucifixion in the city of Memphis. Is it a sign from God? If it is a sign, it is an awful one: that God's judgment is upon our land. That the time is now upon us when not one stone will be left upon another, but that this city and this nation which we love dearly will become nothing more than a roost for vultures and a smoldering heap of debris."

The television kept blaring from Galt's room; Mrs. Szpakowski thought it was odd how much time her new tenant spent in there, apparently watching TV and reading the papers. She spoke with him once during the weekend, as he was returning with newspapers bundled under his arm. "I noticed how worried⁵⁵⁴ he looked," she recalled. "I thought maybe he was worried about his family. I really thought he might be from the mental hospital down the street."