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

37 THE MURKIN FILES

BY APRIL 10, the day after King's funeral, the hunt for the man in 5B had begun to take on a momentum of its own. Working around the clock, Ramsey Clark had set up a situation room on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. Cots were placed in various corners of the office, and food was brought in to sustain the teams of bureaucrats working on the legal aspects of the case. "It was a huge operation,"⁵⁸⁷ Clark later recalled. "I didn't go home, I just stayed there all the time, I had a little place in my office where I'd sleep. It was the biggest investigation ever conducted, for a single crime, in U.S. history."

Several times a day, Clark met with Deke DeLoach over at the FBI nerve center and demanded to hear the latest from the bureau. DeLoach hated these briefings, of course, but he knew he had no choice but to work with the attorney general--while doing his best to keep Clark and Hoover at arm's length. Sadly, on April 10, there wasn't much to report. After an initial flurry of activity, the manhunt had seemingly ground to a halt. Now the case was fraying into multiple slender strands. Over the past few days, the FBI offices had been flooded with crazy leads, sensational rumors, and tantalizing tips that the bureau agents dutifully followed but that never seemed to pan out.

The case now had an official name at least. On all memos and enciphered Teletype messages, in all FBI and Justice Department correspondence, the investigation was to be called MURKIN, a bit of bureaucratic shorthand that simply stood for "Murder, King." Some three thousand agents were now working the case, which was now termed a "special investigation." Although the main activity was still to be found in Robert Jensen's office in Memphis, and in Birmingham, already the investigation had spread out to every field office in the country. In hopes of hunting down biographical traces of Eric Galt, or Harvey Lowmeyer, or John Willard, FBI investigators were now combing through every known repository of names--voter registration lists, parole board lists, telephone directories, utility company records. They were checking with rental car agencies, airlines, credit card companies, motor vehicle divisions, the IRS, and the Selective Service. So far, nothing very promising had turned up.

J. Edgar Hoover, meanwhile, had been frantically sending out Teletype messages to all the FBI "territories," underscoring the urgency of the investigation. "We are continuing⁵⁸⁸ with all possible diligence and dispatch," Hoover wrote to all special agents in charge on April 9. "The investigation is nationwide in scope as countless suspects are being processed and physical evidence is being traced. You may be completely assured that this investigation will continue on an expedited basis until the matter has been finally resolved. Leads are to be afforded immediate, thorough, imaginative attention. You must exhaust all possibilities from such leads as any one lead could result in the solution of this most important investigation. SAC will be held personally responsible for any failure to promptly and thoroughly handle investigations in this matter."

Attorney General Clark was satisfied that the FBI, despite its history of dirty tricks with respect to King and his organization, was turning over every stone and working in all haste to find the assassin. But he had no shortage of questions for DeLoach. At this juncture, Clark asked, what is your view of the killer?

"A racist,"⁵⁸⁹ DeLoach replied. "Maybe a member of a hate group. Well groomed, but somebody who would feel at home in a flophouse. And not too bright. Obviously he hadn't planned the crime very well."

"What are the possibilities of a conspiracy?" Clark wanted to know.

"So far, there's no real evidence he had help, either in planning or execution. If he had, his escape would have been better and he would have left fewer witnesses."

The bureau, DeLoach informed Clark, was now exhausting an inordinate amount of time and energy tracking down what seemed to be wild leads. A combination of two factors--the posting of a reward for finding the killer, and the release of an artist's composite sketch to the media--had rapidly accelerated the inflow of these sorts of calls. While the portrait of the assassin published in newspapers and magazines from coast to coast did catch the aquiline sharpness of Galt's nose, it was otherwise so bland and generic-looking it could have been anyone. Still, people swore they saw the assassin in Rock Hill, South Carolina; in Mountain View, California; in Joplin, Missouri; at LaGuardia Airport.

"Tips" arrived from all points of the compass.⁵⁹⁰ From the Denver area came a rumor that the killer was an Italian-American associated with a racist outfit called the Minutemen. From North Carolina came a lead that Bobby Ray Graves, the Exalted Cyclops of the Klan in Boiling Springs, was behind the assassination. Out of Baltimore, a local tavern owner reported to police that he overheard "a Cuban" saying that he'd recently been in Memphis and that he knew King was going to be killed five days before it happened. A respected black grocer and civil rights activist from west Tennessee came forward with a chilling story that, only a few hours before the assassination, he'd overheard a Memphis meat market owner, an Italian with possible Mafia ties in New Orleans, yelling into the telephone, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch⁵⁹¹ on the balcony and then you'll get paid."

Most of the tips were clearly from well-meaning people, but others bore a rascally quality. The Miami field office received an anonymous note scribbled on a scrap of paper that said, cryptically, "Go to LaGrange, Georgia, and you will have King's killer." The writer claimed he'd met the assassin, whom he described as "weird and funny talking," at a recent gun show in Memphis and that the man had bought a .30-06 "much like the gun that killed King."

FOR A TIME, it seemed that every psychotic street person, every muttering hobo and colorful transient, was picked up for questioning. A surprising number of tips came from people seeking to implicate their own family members. A Louisiana caller said her ne'er-do-well son drove a 1967 white Mustang and hadn't been heard from since the day of the assassination. A woman from Chicago said the killer looked "an awful lot like my ex-husband."

God help anyone whose last name was Galt, Willard, or Lowmeyer--or any spelling variation thereof. John Willards were found in Los Angeles, Des Moines, and Spokane. Another John Willard, located in Oxford, Mississippi, was interrogated long enough to establish that he had been mowing his own lawn at the time of the assassination. A Reverend Ralph Galt in Birmingham was questioned repeatedly. "We don't know a thing about this person," his wife told the press. "We've checked all the relatives we can think of--and we wonder if it's not a fictitious name."

For a short time, the FBI entertained the possibility that the killer may have been the jealous husband of one of King's lovers--or, more likely, that a jealous husband may have paid someone else to carry off a hit. In Los Angeles, agents interviewed a prominent black dentist who was the husband of King's longtime mistress there, but the questioning went nowhere. In Memphis, meanwhile, Jensen's agents briefly investigated the possibility that the Invaders--having fallen into a bitter argument with King's staff the very day of the assassination--may have been behind King's death, but again, this line of inquiry proved barren.

Then a woman in Memphis called Holloman's office⁵⁹² with a tip that raised an eerie possibility: The night after the assassination she had watched a local TV special on Dr. King that, for the first time, aired extensive footage of his final "Mountaintop" speech. When the camera panned the audience at Mason Temple, the woman spotted a mysterious white male who looked a good bit like the artist rendering. To her, the man briefly caught in the bright lights looked uncomfortable and out of place. Police detectives went to the local NBC affiliate and reviewed the footage. Soon they found the frames the caller was referring to, and sure enough an unknown and awkward-looking white male momentarily flashed on the screen--an odd man out "whose actions did not coincide with the male coloreds and female coloreds at the rally." The grainy image was too blurred and brief to make out very much, but the question inevitably arose: Was King's killer present at his final talk? Was the assassin watching as King looked out over the audience and talked about threats from "some of our sick white brothers"?

Another call came from the Mexican consulate⁵⁹³ in Memphis. Rolando Veloz, the acting consul, told local police that on April 3, he issued a visitor's permit to a suspicious-looking young man who bore a "striking resemblance" to the broadcast description of King's assassin. Veloz said the man gave the name John Scott Candrian with what proved to be a phony address and telephone number in Chicago. "He came here the day before the slaying," said Veloz. "I asked him what was the purpose of his trip. He hesitated for a moment, then answered, 'I'm just going to Mexico.'" On the application, the man said he would enter Mexico on or about April 13 and that he planned to visit the Pacific seaport of Mazatlan.

This tip was considered strong enough that the FBI immediately expanded the MURKIN investigation to Mexico and enlisted the support of the federales while keeping a close eye on all crossing points along the border. Mexican authorities soon made a potentially astonishing discovery: the bullet-riddled body of what appeared to be a white male American tourist⁵⁹⁴ washed up on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. The unidentified corpse vaguely resembled the man in 5B, but the hands were so shrunken and decomposed that experts, hoping to compare the dead man's fingerprints with the prints on file at the crime lab in Washington, couldn't get an accurate impression, even after injecting the fingers with fluid to puff them up. This investigatory cul-de-sac raised a possibility that was voiced with increasing dread throughout the ranks of the FBI: that the object of their massive search may already be dead--an assassinated assassin, killed off by the very conspirators who had hired him.

THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, Mrs. John Riley had been thinking⁵⁹⁵ about the Mustang parked outside her window at the Capitol Homes housing project in Atlanta. What was it doing there, untouched for five long days? Why hadn't anyone come to retrieve it? She worried and stewed over what to do. She talked with her neighbors about it. She even consulted with the preacher at her church. But it was her thirteen-year-old son, Johnny, who convinced her to pick up the phone.

On the afternoon of April 10, the day after the King funeral, Johnny heard a report on the television. A newscaster said the authorities were monitoring the border with Mexico, looking for the man who had applied for a tourist permit in Memphis a day before the assassination. Though that report was based on information that would soon prove to be specious, it sparked his adolescent imagination.

"Mom," Johnny said. "That car has stickers on the window. They say, 'Turista.' Whoever drove it has been to Mexico."

Mrs. Riley was sufficiently convinced that she found the number for the local FBI office and put in a call. Whoever picked up the phone wasn't particularly impressed by what this demure housewife had to say. Over the past five days, the overworked and under-rested agents in the Atlanta field office had ventured on every kind of snipe hunt and fool's errand. This sounded like another one.

"I suggest you call the Atlanta police," the man told her, and furnished a number for the stolen-auto division.

She dialed the number and again met with a tepid response. Roy Lee Davis, with the auto theft division, ploddingly took down the information and hung up. He checked with the stolen-auto files and found nothing reported for a 1966 white Mustang with Alabama plates, and nearly filed the information away as extraneous and unremarkable. Then something told Davis to share this piece of information with some Atlanta detectives down the hall who'd been following the King assassination case--and their curiosity was piqued.

Later that night, a cruiser from the Atlanta Police Department slipped into the Capitol Homes parking lot and drove up to the Mustang. Many of the apartment windows were bathed in the blue murk of television sets--the postponed Academy Awards were on. (In the Heat of the Night edged out Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate for Best Picture, and Katharine Hepburn claimed her second Best Actress Oscar, this time for her role in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a controversial movie, also starring Poitier, about an interracial marriage.)

Mrs. Riley peeked out her window and spotted the cruiser. She naturally assumed that the police had come in response to her call, but was surprised and a little deflated that after only a cursory inspection, they quickly pulled away from the Mustang and drove off the lot, seemingly uninterested. Figuring the Mustang must have "checked out" after all, Mrs. Riley went back to watching the Academy Awards--and didn't give it another thought.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, while parts of Washington were digging out from the ashen ruins of the riots, Lyndon Johnson presided over a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. On this day, Thursday, April 11, the president was signing into law⁵⁹⁶ the Civil Rights Act of 1968, perhaps the last great bill of the movement. The act--whose brisk passage in the House the previous day had largely been in response to the King assassination--made it a federal crime to discriminate in the sale, rental, and financing of some 80 percent of the nation's dwellings. It also gave federal prosecutors increased powers to go after murderers of civil rights figures.

With a mixed throng of white and black leaders looking on, the president now sat at a desk and took up his fountain pen. Calling the act's passage "a victory for all Americans," Johnson declared: "With this bill, the voice of justice speaks again."

It was, some pundits said, the dying gasp of the civil rights era.

IN TORONTO THAT same morning, Eric Galt was walking down Yonge Street, intent on an errand of disguise. He turned in to Brown's Theatrical Supply Company⁵⁹⁷ and bought a makeup kit. Playing with the cosmetics later that day, he applied a little foundation and powder and eyebrow liner. He parted his hair in a different way and was a bit more conservative with his hair cream. Then he donned a dark suit, a narrow tie with a discreet waffle weave, and his best white dress shirt. As a final touch, he put on a recently purchased pair of dark horn-rimmed glasses, which, sitting on his surgery-sharpened nose, gave him a vaguely professorial cast.

Looking in a mirror, Galt was happy with the transformation: Ramon Sneyd was now ready for his close-up.

Sometime in the afternoon of April 11, he walked into the Arcade Photo Studio,⁵⁹⁸ also on Yonge Street, and met the manager, Mrs. Mabel Agnew. He told her he needed some passport photos.

Mrs. Agnew was happy to oblige. She led him to the rear of the studio, which was decorated with a vanity mirror and travel poster of Holland, and sat him on a revolving piano stool before a gray-white screen. Galt doubtless hated the whole ritual, as always, but this time he peered just off camera and kept his eyes wide open, throwing everything he had into playacting his new role. Mrs. Agnew couldn't get her subject to smile, but she finally managed to snap off a decent shot. He left while the pictures developed and returned a few hours later. For two dollars, he retrieved three passport-sized prints.

The image turned out well. His countenance bore a discerning quality, a certain cosmopolitan panache. He could pass for a lawyer, or an engineer, or an international businessman. He almost looked handsome.

AT EXACTLY THE same hour that Galt's passport photos were ripening in a darkroom vat, FBI agents in Atlanta were about to enjoy the week's greatest breakthrough. At four minutes past four o'clock that afternoon, a convoy of bureau sedans⁵⁹⁹ converged on the Capitol Homes project. In a ruckus of slamming doors and squawking radios, a dozen FBI agents crawled from the cars and swarmed around the abandoned vehicle.

It was no mistake--this was without a doubt Eric S. Galt's car: a white two-door V-8 1966 Mustang hardtop with whitewall tires and a red interior, VIN 6TO7C190647, bearing Alabama license plate number 1-38993.

While some agents inspected the vehicle, taking measurements, notes, and photographs, others soon fanned out and began interviewing Capitol Homes tenants. Did you see the individual who parked this car? Can you give a physical description? Had you ever seen the man before? Kids teetered on bicycles, spellbound by all the commotion, but it was more excitement than most of the tenants had bargained for. "There must have been a billion of 'em⁶⁰⁰ out here," one lady said. Complained another: "I had to go to bed. It made me sick, so many of them asking me the same thing over and over and over."

Soon a tow truck appeared in the parking lot. Guarded by a police escort, the wrecker hauled the Mustang off to a federal building at the corner of Peachtree and Baker streets. There, deep inside a large locked garage, a detail of agents in latex gloves worked the car over, systematically emptying all its contents and dusting its surfaces for fingerprints.

Every inch of the impounded car⁶⁰¹ was examined. Agents took soil samples from the tire wells, fluid samples from the engine, sweepings from the carpets, seats, and trunk. Fibers, hairs, and several high-quality latent palm prints were teased from the Mustang's recesses and contours. From the glove compartment, inspectors found a pair of sunglasses and a case. From the trunk, they retrieved, among other objects, a pair of men's shorts, a pillow, a fitted sheet, various tools, a container for a Polaroid camera, and a small contraption that appeared to be an air-release cable for a camera shutter. On the right window, a prominent sticker said, "Direccion General de Registro Federal de Automoviles, 1967 Octubre Turista, Aduana de Nuevo Laredo, Tam."

All these contents and samplings were inventoried, wrapped in plastic, and boxed up to be personally sent by air courier to the crime lab in Washington. But one item found on the Mustang urgently spoke for itself and required not a second of lab analysis. Affixed to the inside of its left door, a small sticker showed that Eric Galt had had the oil changed in his Mustang at 34,289 miles. The sticker said, "Cort Fox Ford, 4531 Hollywood Boulevard."

WITHIN AN HOUR of the Mustang's discovery in Atlanta, Special Agent Theodore A'Hearn⁶⁰² of the FBI's Los Angeles field office arrived at the service desk of the Cort Fox Ford dealership in Hollywood, California, and met a man named Budd Cook Jr. One of the garage's service specialists, Cook dug into his records and soon found the work order, which he himself had taken down only a month and a half earlier. The paperwork was made out to Eric S. Galt and dated February 22, 1968.

He brought the car in at 8:00 that morning, Cook noted. It was a 1966 Mustang.

Do you remember what Galt looked like? A'Hearn asked.

Cook searched his memory and came up short. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of customers had passed through this garage over the previous months. Regrettably, he could not furnish a description of any sort.

"But," Cook said, "Galt's address is right here on the work order."

THE NEXT MORNING, April 12, Agent Thomas Mansfield⁶⁰³ made his way to the large and slightly down-at-the-heels St. Francis Hotel at 5533 Hollywood Boulevard. He asked to speak with the proprietor, and presently a man named Allan Thompson appeared at the front desk. As the resident manager, Thompson had lived at the St. Francis for nearly two years and knew the history of the place, all its various denizens and comings and goings.

Yes, Thompson said. He recalled a man named Eric Galt. Thompson found a registration card that showed Galt had lived at the St. Francis for about two months, checking out on March 17. He resided in room 403 and paid eighty-five dollars a month in rent. "He had dark hair, combed back," Thompson remembered. "Slender to medium build. Quiet, wore conservative business suits. Kept irregular hours. Far as I could tell, he was not employed." Thompson said another tenant now occupied 403, and that Galt had not left any belongings in the room.

"Did he give any indication where he was going next?" Agent Mansfield asked.

"Well, yes," Thompson said, producing a change-of-address card that said, "General Delivery, Main Post Office, Atlanta, Georgia." The card was dated March 17, 1968, and signed "Eric S. Galt."

THAT SAME DAY, April 12, two other FBI agents, Lloyd Johnson and Francis Kahl,⁶⁰⁴ were only a few blocks away, speaking to a woman named Lucy Pinela. Ms. Pinela was the manager of the Home Service Laundry and Dry Cleaning. Over the past week, the FBI had searched all over the country for laundries that used the Thermo-Seal marking machine--the same identification machine that had produced the tiny laundry tag found on the pair of undershorts left with the bundle now in FBI possession in Washington. The FBI's exhaustive search had led them, most promisingly, to Southern California, where numerous laundries were using the Thermo-Seal system. One of those laundries was Home Service.

Yes, Ms. Pinela told the agents, her shop had been using the Thermo-Seal machine for a while now. At their request, she stepped back into the workroom and showed them the apparatus and even stamped out a few samples on articles of clothing to demonstrate how the machine worked and what the resulting tags looked like.

Agents Johnson and Kahl then showed her a photograph of the undershorts found in Memphis, with the tag plainly visible: 02B-6. Ms. Pinela recognized the sequence immediately. On closer inspection, another employee who regularly used the marker said she was positive the tag in question had been stamped at Home Service because the 0 was partially cut off--a defect peculiar to their Thermo-Seal machine.

The owner of Home Service, a man named Louis Puterman, then produced some documents from his office files. After a little rummaging, he came up with something that fairly screamed off the page: laundry ticket number 3065, bearing Thermo-Seal tag number 02B-6. The ticket was made out to "E. Galt."

Once she saw the name, Lucy Pinela recalled the customer. Galt never left an address or a phone number, but he was a regular, she said; he'd been bringing his clothes to Home Service for months. He was about thirty-five years old, brown haired, and had a narrow nose. "He usually brought in button-down dress shirts," she said. "Never work clothes."

He was very regular in his habits, she said. He would bring in his dirty clothes every Saturday afternoon and, at the same time, pick up the previous week's clothes. Then, for some reason, he stopped coming in. She hadn't seen him for about a month.

WHILE THIS INTERVIEW was taking place, other FBI agents in Los Angeles learned that Eric Galt had briefly secured a telephone service in his room. Although the line had been disconnected in late January, the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company was able to supply the FBI with records of every outgoing and incoming call related to that number--469-8096. This led the agents on an interesting series of goose chases.

One of the numbers turned out to be that of a woman who had sold Galt a console Montgomery Ward TV set through a newspaper classified ad. Another number was listed in the name of Elizabeth Pitt, a woman who had placed a singles ad in a lonely hearts club broadsheet: "Tall skinny auburn haired divorcee, 41, seeks prospective husband with patience," the ad read. Galt had apparently called Pitt with the idea of getting her to appear in a pornographic film, but the phone conversation went nowhere, and they never even went out on a date. A third number turned out to be the Wallace campaign headquarters in Century City--which, for the time being, meant nothing to investigating agents. Probably the most productive find in the bank of numbers Galt had called was that of the National Dance Studio in Long Beach, California.

Special Agent George Aiken⁶⁰⁵ promptly drove down to the studio, which was located at 2026 Pacific Avenue in Long Beach, in a low-slung building with palm trees out front. There he met the owner, Mr. Rodney Arvidson, who had a vivid memory of his former student. In a large room with a record player and blocking-tape marks on the parquet floor, Galt had taken cha-cha, fox-trot, and swing lessons for several months. "He told me he'd been down in Mexico, sometime in 1967, and that he owned a restaurant," Arvidson said. "He said he was fluent in Spanish, but when I would speak to him in Spanish, he wouldn't say anything back, which led me to believe he wasn't actually conversant."

"How did Galt dress?" Agent Aiken asked.

"Always wore a shirt and tie. He had a pair of shiny black alligator loafers." Arvidson remembered thinking that Galt's appearance didn't jibe with his personality--that he dressed like a businessman, but talked and carried himself like an uneducated and socially awkward person from a decidedly rural, working-class background. "He couldn't seem to relax," Arvidson said. "He didn't smile easily. He was pleasant but evasive--he would never talk about himself and he wouldn't look you in the eye. He had a crooked smile. He said he was a merchant seaman and wanted to return to the sea."

Though Galt seemed to be unemployed, he had plenty of money. Every time Arvidson informed him that another payment was due, Galt would reach into his trousers and happily peel off some twenties from a large roll of bills. All told, he paid more than four hundred dollars for dance lessons and never seemed to balk at the fees.

Arvidson found a card in his office files showing that Galt had previously taken fox-trot and cha-cha dancing lessons while living in Alabama. "Leaving in a couple of months to work on a ship," the card said. "Wants to travel." A box marked S was checked--indicating that Galt was single.

Cathryn Norton, a dance instructor at the studio, told Agent Aiken she had frequently given Galt lessons. "He was a fair dancer," she allowed. "But he wasn't friendly with anyone. He always wore a suit, kept his fingernails clean and neatly trimmed." Norton recalled that he sometimes smoked filter cigarettes and that he had "a nervous habit of pulling on his earlobes with his fingers."

One night someone connected with the dance school hosted a private party at his house, and about twenty people showed up. "Galt came and left alone," Norton recalled. "He had some punch and stayed pretty much to himself. He was like a clam."

Galt's last lesson was on February 12. "When he quit," Arvidson recalled, "all he said was that he wanted to open his own bar and restaurant. He said he was going to enroll in some school to learn how to be a bartender."

"YES," TOMAS LAU said, "Eric Galt was a student here."⁶⁰⁶ A suave man with a trim mustache, Lau was director of the International School of Bartending at 2125 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The FBI agents Theodore A'Hearn and Richard Raysa, after canvassing all the bartending schools in Southern California, had quickly found Lau's establishment.

Lau believed Galt was "diligent and well-coordinated" and had the potential to become a fine bartender. Lau thought so much of Galt that he even went to the trouble of finding him a job. "But he declined," Lau recalled. "He said he was going to visit his brother somewhere and didn't want a job. He said he'd call me if he still needed a job when he got back."

Another pupil at the school, a man named Donald Jacobs,⁶⁰⁷ recalled that Galt said he'd been a cook in the merchant marine and worked on riverboats and barges on the Mississippi. Jacobs doubted this was true, because he noticed that Galt's hands "didn't appear calloused or used to hard work."

Beyond the fact that Galt had "thin lips and a slight Southern accent," Lau had trouble recalling what his former pupil looked like. Then he remembered graduation day. "I've got a picture of him somewhere," he volunteered.

"How's that?" Agent A'Hearn couldn't believe what he'd just heard.

"All our graduates get their picture taken with me and the diploma," Lau explained. "It's something we've always done around here."

Lau scoured his scrapbooks and soon found the photograph, which was snapped at the school on March 2. For the first time, an FBI agent was peering at the image of the man now being hunted by three thousand bureau colleagues across the country.

There stood Lau, proudly posing with his student--a slender, narrow-nosed, dark-haired, fair-skinned man wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie. The portrait looked pretty much like all the other graduation photos gracing Lau's scrapbooks, though Agent A'Hearn did notice one peculiarity: Galt's eyes were shut.