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ORDERS TO KILL -- THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MURDER OF MARTIN LUTHER KING |
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Chapter 6: Aftermath: April 5-18, 1968 ON THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, April 5, President Johnson met with twenty-one civil rights leaders called to Washington from across the country. He then went to the National Cathedral and attended a memorial service for Dr. King in the midst of the ongoing insurrection and civil disorder in the capital. Compared with the spontaneous violence of the night before, Friday in Memphis was relatively calm, as though the city had spent its anger in one short burst. The situation across the country was very different. By evening at least forty cities were in trouble; states of emergency were declared in Washington D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Wilmington, Del- aware, and Newark. Within twenty-four hours of the killing, the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle found in the bundle near the scene was traced, by its serial number, to the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham, Alabama. The manager, Donald Wood, told investigators that a person named Harvey Lowmeyer had first bought a .243 Winchester on March 29 and then, strangely enough, exchanged it for the Remington the next day. On the rifle was a Redfield 2 x 7 telescopic sight which had been mounted at Lowmeyer's request. A pair of binoculars also found in the bundle in front of Canipe's shop was traced by Memphis police to the York Arms Company, located a few blocks north of the rooming house on Main Street. The rifle was packed in a Browning rifle box, along with a Remington Peters cartridge box containing nine 30.06 cartridges -- four military type and five Remington Peters soft points. The rifle box had been wrapped in a bedspread, along with a zippered plastic overnight bag containing toiletries, a pair of pliers, a tack hammer, a portable radio, two cans of beer, and a section of the April 4 Memphis Commercial Appeal. In the rifle was an unejected cartridge case. The Memphis City Council passed a resolution expressing condolences to Dr. King's family and issued a reward of $50,000 for information leading to the capture and conviction of the assassin. Since the Commercial Appeal and the Press Scimitar had also each pledged $25,000, the reward offer came to $100,000. The march scheduled for Monday, April 8, was to go ahead as a memorial to Dr. King, with a rally in front of city hall, subject to the restrictions previously agreed upon and handed down by judge Bailey Brown. On that cloudy Monday, Dr. Spock and I joined some forty thousand people, mostly local blacks, and slowly marched between the ranks of the five thou- sand National Guardsmen who lined the route from Hernando Street to City Hall. Eventually Dr. Spock and I mounted the specially erected platform and joined the family, Ralph Abernathy, and others who would address the large outpouring of mourners. We went to Atlanta the next day for the funeral. There were about 100,000 mourners, including Vice Pres. Hubert Humphrey, walking slowly behind a mule-drawn caisson to the campus of Morehouse College for a service and then on to the burial in South View Cemetery. Prominent individuals who had increasingly turned their backs on Dr. King when during his last year he most needed them turned up at his funeral. The hypocrisy sickened me. That evening, Robert Kennedy invited a number of us to a gathering in his hotel suite. I did not go-I regarded the senator's politically motivated actions as distasteful. I had long ago come to expect that from the Kennedys as a result of my previous experience as Robert Kennedy's Westchester County, New York, citizens chairman during his senatorial campaign in 1964. (We would learn years later that a less mature Attorney General Kennedy had given in to Hoover's pressure to permit the wiretapping of Dr. King.) Negotiations aimed at settling the Memphis sanitation workers' strike would soon resume under intense presidential pres- sure for a settlement. An agreement was reached on April 16: the union was recognized and a pay raise was agreed to, as were the procedures for a dues checkoff through the Public Workers Federal Credit Union. The strike had lasted sixty-five days. *** ON APRIL 10, Mrs. john Riley, in apartment 492 of the Capitol Homes Housing Project in Atlanta, telephoned the local FBI field office to report a Mustang that had been left in a small parking space near her building. She described it as white with a 1968 Alabama plate in the back and two Mexican tourist stickers on the windshield. She had heard that the police were looking for a man driving a white Mustang in connection with the killing of Dr. King. The Mustang, she reported, had been parked in that space since April 5. A quick check showed that the car was registered in the name of Eric S. Galt, 2608 South Highland Avenue, Birmingham. The ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes. On April 12, the Miami FBI office issued and then immediately withdrew a statewide police bulletin calling for the location -- though not the apprehension-of one Eric Starvo GaIt. A handwriting comparison indicated that Galt was also the man calling himself Harvey Lowmeyer who bought the rifle at the Aeromarine store in Birmingham. An analysis of fibers found in the trunk of the Mustang matched those on the pillow and sheets in room 5B of the rooming house rented by John Willard on April 4. From interviews with acquaintances of Galt, the FBI learned that he had attended the International School of Bartending on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Tomas Reyes Lau, its director, provided a photograph of the man. Money orders cashed in the Los Angeles area, found to have been bought at the Bank of America by Eric S. Galt, were made out to the Locksmithing Institute of Bloomfield, New Jersey. The records of that institute showed that Galt had been receiving lessons by mail beginning in Montreal on July 17,1967, with the latest lesson having been sent to 113 14th Street, Atlanta. Local FBI agents descended on those premises on April 16. Learning that Galt still had ground-floor room number 2, they established physical surveillance for twenty-four hours. Author Gerold Frank maintained that when no one appeared, two agents acting under instruction from Cartha DeLooach, the FBI's assistant director in Washington, disguised themselves as hippies and rented a room adjoining No. 2 from James Garner, the landlord.5 The connecting door was padlocked from the other side, so, according to Frank, DeLoach gave instructions to take the door off the hinges to get in (DeLoach has denied this). Thus, they obtained-possibly illegally because no warrant had been issued-a variety of items from the room, including a map of Atlanta with a clear left thumb print. Someone -- apparently J. Edgar Hoover himself-suggested that the available fingerprints be compared against the prints of white men, under fifty, wanted by the police-the fugitive file. There were reportedly fifty-three thousand sets of prints in this category. On April 17, the Birmingham FBI office sought a federal fugitive warrant for Eric Starvo Galt pursuant to an indictment charging a conspiracy to violate Dr. King's civil rights. Beginning on the morning of April 18, the FBI specialists undertook the task of fingerprint comparison; by the next morning, the seven hundredth card matched. It belonged to a fugitive from a Missouri penitentiary. His name was James Earl Ray. It was clear: Galt and Ray were the same man.
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