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

39 ARMED AND DANGEROUS

AT THE FBI headquarters in Washington, the MURKIN investigation had been steadily building throughout the week, steadily swelling toward an evidentiary crescendo. Individually, the thousands of isolated puzzle pieces that agents had thus far accumulated meant little and proved nothing; taken as a whole, however, they were starting to paint a single portrait and point toward a single man. The mounting evidence kept landing on the same individual, over and over and over again--the same shadowy figure, nervous, fidgety, wearing a suit, living in flophouses, and driving a white Mustang.

In quite a literal sense, the puzzle pieces were coming together: they were now arrayed on a single large table in a harshly lit FBI examination room. Since April 4, the FBI had compiled a staggering amount of stuff--hundreds and hundreds of miscellaneous objects that seemed to bear no relation to one another, like the scattered debris at an airplane crash. A Schlitz beer can. A package of lima beans. A bullet housing. A strand of hair. A scrap of paper. A pocket radio. A receipt with handwriting on it. A shutter-release cable for a camera. A coffee cup immersion heater. A marked-up map. A pair of undershorts. A twenty-dollar bill. A portable television. A set of binoculars. A bottle of French salad dressing. A toothbrush. A rifle.

Cartha DeLoach had the bureau's best minds poring over this mass of evidence--not just fingerprint people, but handwriting people, fiber-analysis people, photographic specialists, ultraviolet light technicians, ballistics experts. The connections these professionals began to discern were dizzying, the links intriguing, the microscopic matches too numerous to count. What they saw was a thousand little arrows, each one seemingly pointing to some other arrow.

Fibers found in the trunk of the impounded Mustang matched fibers taken from the bundle's herringbone bedspread. Eric Galt's signature on the registration card at the New Rebel Motel in Memphis matched handwriting samples obtained all along the investigatory trail. Hairs in Galt's comb matched hairs found in the Mustang sweepings. The physical, the circumstantial, and the purely anecdotal seemed increasingly interwoven: The "Turista" stickers affixed to the car jibed with Stein's recollections that Galt said he'd once owned a bar in Mexico. When buying the gun in Birmingham, Lowmeyer had mentioned going hunting "with my brother," while people at both the bartending and the dancing schools also recalled that Galt mentioned a forthcoming trip to visit a brother. The story about Galt pressuring Charlie and Rita Stein, and their cousin Marie Tomaso, to lend their signatures to the George Wallace campaign seemed somehow connected to Galt's Alabama license plates, his former Alabama residence, and other emerging ties to George Wallace's home state.

Every imaginable detail--the Thermo-Seal laundry tags, the auto service sticker, the change-of-address form, the maps, the fingerprint-laden Afta aftershave lotion, the money orders, Marie Tomaso's Zenith television found abandoned two thousand miles away in Atlanta--seemed to link Galt's movements together. The car was connected to the bundle, was connected to the gun, was connected to the binoculars. Atlanta was connected to Memphis, was connected to Mexico, was connected to Los Angeles and Birmingham and back to Atlanta again. It was all a single web.

Two pieces of late-breaking evidence clinched the FBI's confidence that they were onto the right man. The first came on April 16, when agents in Atlanta found the laundry service⁶²⁵ Eric Galt had used on Peachtree Street. Annie Estelle Peters, the desk clerk at Piedmont Laundry, checked her records and noted that Galt had picked up his clothes on the morning of April 5, the day after the assassination--the same day he'd parked the Mustang at Capitol Homes and vacated his rooming house, leaving a note on his bed. Galt's inculpatory movements seemed now almost perfectly clear: staying in Memphis at the New Rebel Motel on the night of April 3, he had raced back to Atlanta after the assassination, whereupon he'd abandoned his car, picked up his laundry, cleared out of his room--and apparently left town for good.

Then, from George Bonebrake and his fingerprint experts, came the coup de grace: a fingerprint raised from a map⁶²⁶ of Mexico in Galt's Atlanta room matched a fingerprint found on the .30-06 Gamemaster rifle.

"Our net was beginning to close,"⁶²⁷ said DeLoach. "It was all becoming obvious--Galt and Lowmeyer and Willard were one and the same man." What kind of man was the subject of ongoing speculation, but DeLoach boiled the suspect down this way: "Poorly educated, without scruples, and with a touch of animal cunning. But we knew he had one weakness--he liked to dance."

UNTIL THIS POINT in the investigation, the FBI had been working in almost total secrecy. Hoover and DeLoach had repeatedly admonished all the SACs in all the field offices across the country that the word was mum--nothing, apart from that one artist's composite sketch of the killer, was to be leaked to the media or to any local law-enforcement agencies. This nearly complete lockdown on information served a strategic purpose, of course--to keep the assassin and any accomplices forever guessing--but it also made fertile ground for the sprouting of conspiracy theories.

The longer the investigation crept along without resolution, the more it looked to a doubting public as though the agents of Hoover's famously King-hating bureau either were deliberately dragging their feet or were themselves involved in the assassination. DeLoach felt that arousing public suspicion was a risk the bureau would simply have to take. A case like this could only be solved behind the scenes--through methodical detective work, careful lab analysis, and a relentless pursuit of every plausible lead.

The media were emphatically shut out. For nearly two weeks, even the most enterprising crime reporters, journalists who previously enjoyed an "in" with the FBI, now found themselves rebuffed and stonewalled. The special agent in charge in Atlanta told one such reporter: "All I can say⁶²⁸ is 'No comment.' We could talk all night and still all I could say is, 'No comment.'"

Wednesday, April 17, would be a very different day for the MURKIN case. It was the day the FBI would finally, briefly go public.

At the Justice Department that morning, the FBI announced that it was issuing a warrant⁶²⁹ for a thirty-six-year-old fugitive named Eric Starvo Galt. The warrant stated that Galt--alias Harvey Lowmeyer, alias John Willard--along with a person "whom he alleged to be his brother," had entered into a conspiracy "to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate Martin Luther King, Junior." The Justice Department had to invoke this slightly garbled legalese because murder is a state and local, not a federal, crime; the FBI could arrest Galt for conspiring to violate King's civil rights, but not for murdering him.

The warrant went on to describe Galt's personal idiosyncrasies in some detail: "He probably does not have a high degree of education ... is said to drink alcoholic beverages with a preference for vodka and beer ... has a nervous habit of pulling at an earlobe with his hand ... an avid dancer ... left ear protrudes farther from his head than his right." Noting that Galt was a neat dresser and a devotee of country-and-western music, the warrant concluded: "He should be considered armed and dangerous."

The FBI also released to the media two photographs--the bartending school picture of Galt in his bow tie with his eyes closed, and then the same picture, with the eyes filled in by an FBI sketch artist. Perhaps it's true that the outward markers of human identity abide uniquely in the eyes, but neither one of the images looked much like the real fugitive--especially the one doctored by the artist. In that image, Galt looked like a wax figure, a mannequin, a freakish fake. Though it was hard to pinpoint just what was "off" about them, the drawn-in eyes gave Galt a creepy cartoon quality that, in terms of helping the public find the killer, would probably do more harm than good. His ruse before the camera seemed to have accomplished what he'd hoped.

The Eric Galt warrant, with its accompanying photos, represented the full extent of the FBI's offerings for the day. Justice Department officials in the room announced that they would take no questions. When one reporter tested an official by asking a question anyway--what was the provenance of the photos?--he brusquely replied: "No comment."

WHILE WASHINGTON REPORTERS were scrambling for the phones, the fugitive was walking down a street in Toronto not far from his rooming house, where he very nearly blundered into a disaster. Ramon Sneyd was out of sorts that day, flustered, anxious about the passport application he had submitted, through the Kennedy travel agency, the day before. With some trepidation, he realized he had two weeks to do nothing, two weeks for something to go wrong. What if the paperwork didn't go through? What if the photo set off alarm bells? What if the passport officials contacted the real Ramon Sneyd?

Perhaps it was this nagging jumble of worries that caused him not to pay attention to what he was doing that afternoon, leading him to make a stupid mistake: he jaywalked across a busy street.⁶³⁰

Immediately, a policeman approached him. Excuse me, sir, the cop said, do you realize you have broken the law?

Sneyd's heart sank. For a brief moment, he thought the jig was up. You must cross at the intersection, the cop said. "I'm afraid I must issue you a ticket. The fine is three dollars."

Sneyd was surprised, amused, relieved, and elated--all at the same time. But when the cop inquired, "Name and address, please," Sneyd realized he had a problem. He wasn't sure what to tell him. He knew that the real Ramon Sneyd was a Toronto policeman--who knew, maybe even a friend of this very traffic cop?--and so he recognized using that name was too risky. In his wallet, stupidly, he still had his Alabama driver's license, made out to Eric Galt--who, although Sneyd didn't know it yet, was the most wanted man in North America.

He had to think on his feet. He gave some other phony name that surfaced from his imagination, then provided an address, 6 Condor Avenue, which happened to be the real address of a brothel that he had apparently visited in Toronto.

He worried the cop might smell something fishy and feared that he might ask for an ID. But this was wholesome Canada, trusting Canada. The cop believed him. He wrote up the ticket, took Sneyd's three dollars, and went along his way.

Sneyd was disgusted with his obtuseness--not only for jaywalking, but also for still having his Galt ID on his person. As soon as he could, he shredded his driver's license⁶³¹ and tossed it in his trash. For a brief time, while awaiting the arrival of his birth certificate and a passport, he was without identity, dwelling in a document-less purgatory, a man without a name.