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

CHAPTER 11

WALKING BUZZARDS

¹⁷⁹ At the wheel of the big truck: My account of the deaths of Robert Walker and Echol Cole is largely drawn from the news story in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Feb. 2, 1968. See also Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, pp. 1-2; Beifuss, At the River I Stand, p. 30; and Branch, At Canaan's Edge, pp. 684-85.

¹⁸⁰ in 1964, two garbage workers were killed: Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, p. 2.

¹⁸¹ "He was standing there": Memphis Commercial Appeal, Feb. 2, 1968.

¹⁸² Earline Walker: Branch, At Canaan's Edge, p. 685.

¹⁸³ Elvis Presley--whose wife, Priscilla, had given birth: Guralnick, Careless Love, p. 288. See also Branch, At Canaan's Edge, p. 685.

¹⁸⁴ "I am so lucky": Goldman, Elvis, p. 404.

¹⁸⁵ "This you can't do": Beifuss, At the River I Stand, p. 40.

¹⁸⁶ Henry Loeb III was a garrulous: My sketch of Loeb relies on biographical details adapted from "Profile: Henry Loeb," a comprehensive, two-part article that ran in Memphis magazine in January and February 1980.

¹⁸⁷ he called them "nigras": The Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter Joe Sweat, quoted in Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, p. 119.

¹⁸⁸ "the world's least likely revolutionaries": Wills, "Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case," reprinted in The New Journalism, ed. Tom Wolfe, p. 392.

¹⁸⁹ "This is not New York": Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, p. 117.

¹⁹⁰ Lawson had studied the tenets: For a good biographical sketch of Lawson's earlier days in the civil rights movement, see Halberstam, The Children.

¹⁹¹ "You are human beings": Lawson, quoted in Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, p. 211.