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

Remington Gamemaster .243 caliber. 'You got a scope that'll fit it?'

Baker brought out a variable scope manufactured by Redfield. Galt liked the look of it and asked what the price tag would be for the rifle and scope.

Baker tallied it up. 'That'll be $248.59, sir.'

Galt said he'd take it, and while Baker went to work mounting the scope to the rifle, another customer, a local gun enthusiast and NRA stalwart named John DeShazo, sidled up to Galt and gave him a start. 'What're you gonna do with that?' DeShazo said.

'Oh,' Galt replied, 'I'm going deer hunting ... with my brother.'

DeShazo thought he smelled liquor on Galt's breath. 'That one's powerful,' he said.

Galt stammered something about going hunting up in Wisconsin. DeShazo thought the customer didn't look like an outdoorsman and concluded, after watching him handle other weapons in the store, that he didn't know much about rifles. 'You've really got quite a gun there,' DeShazo said. 'You'll have to learn how to use it.'

Galt chose some boxes of ammo for the rifle and told Baker he was ready to pay up. He signed the sales slip 'Harvey Lowmeyer' and said he lived at 1907 South Eleventh Street in Birmingham. He opened his wallet and paid the bill in cash--all in twenties--and shambled out of the store with the rifle box under his arm.

Later that afternoon, Galt called Aeromarine Supply Company and said he wanted to exchange the rifle. 'My brother says I got the wrong one,' he told Don Wood, the storeowner's son, who answered the phone. 'I'm going to need a heavier gun.'

Wood told Galt he would gladly accept an exchange. However, the store was closing up, so Galt would have to drop by in the morning. Galt took a room at the Travelodge motel in Birmingham, with the intention of returning to Aeromarine with the .243-caliber rifle first thing the next morning.

AFTER HIS MEETING with the Invaders, King finished dressing and headed down to a Rivermont conference room to face the media. He looked sharp, dressed in a green-blue silk suit and a razor-thin tie, but Abernathy worried about his friend; King was too exhausted and too depressed to perform before hostile journalists. They were going to destroy him.

Once he entered the brightly lit room, however, King seemed to undergo a transformation. He was poised, forceful, brimming with cautious optimism. The cameras caught no hint of the doubts that had washed over him the previous night. Astonished, Abernathy thought King showed a 'lion quality.'

Why did you run away from the march yesterday?

'I did not run away from the march,'²⁵⁷ King insisted in a level tone. It was a matter of principle: 'I have always said that I will not lead a violent demonstration.'

The trouble, he pointed out, was caused not by legitimate participants but by a few undisciplined young people on the sidelines. His decision to lend a hand to the Memphis cause was predicated on 'a miscalculation,' he said. 'When I spoke here two weeks ago, thousands of people [were] assembled inside and outside. Nobody booed, nobody shouted Black Power. I assumed the ideological struggles that we find in most cities, particularly in the North, were non-existent here.'

King said he now understood his mistake. If he could do it over again, he would sit down and confer at length with the city's black youth. They were 'just angry,' he said, 'feeling a sense of voicelessness in the larger society and at the same time a sense of voicelessness in the black community.'

One of the journalists asked King whether the Beale Street violence presaged another long summer of riots across the nation.

'I cannot guarantee anybody that Memphis or any other city in this country will not have a riot this summer,' King replied. 'Our government has not done anything about removing the conditions that brought riots into being last summer.'

So you can't give the country a guarantee?

'I don't know what you mean by 'guarantee.' I don't want to put myself in the position of being omniscient. I can only guarantee that our demonstrations'--ones fully vetted and organized by the SCLC--'will not be violent.'

What had happened in Memphis the previous day was disappointing and even tragic, he said, but he had not lost faith. The philosophy of nonviolence was still the only hope for America and the world--it was, in fact, the only alternative to human annihilation. 'Nonviolence can be as contagious as violence,' he insisted, and that was something he aimed to prove next month during the Poor People's Campaign on the Mall. 'We are fully determined,' he vowed, 'to go to Washington.'

After the reporters dispersed, King turned to Abernathy and Lee, relieved that the ordeal had gone as well as it had. 'It was perhaps his finest performance²⁵⁸ with the press,' Abernathy thought. Lee said that King 'must be called²⁵⁹ to do what he is doing--he could not have changed as he did in one night if God had not put His hands on him.'

Yet King's thoughts were already somewhere else. 'Can you do something for me, Ralph?' King asked.

'What's that?'

'Can you get me out of Memphis?'²⁶⁰

WHEN THEIR PLANE arrived in Atlanta early that night, Abernathy retrieved his car at the airport and dropped King off at the Butler Street YMCA.²⁶¹ King hoped a steam bath and a rubdown from his blind masseur would lift his spirits.

Afterward, King, Abernathy, and their wives had a somber dinner at the Abernathy house.²⁶² Juanita Abernathy cooked fish and a special casserole she prepared only once a year--a concoction made from pig's ears, pig's feet, and pig's tail. Following the heavy meal, they lounged around the house. Coretta and the Abernathys tried to cheer King up, to little effect. He was still licking his wounds.

He talked about going on a fast, as Gandhi had done, to purify the movement. He talked about the old times in Montgomery, dredging up names long forgotten and reliving youthful triumphs from the halcyon days of the struggle. He tried to snooze on a love seat in the Abernathy family room, gently grousing that the chair was too small.

IN BIRMINGHAM the next morning, Eric Galt returned to Aeromarine²⁶³ Supply Company as the doors opened at 9:00. Don Wood waited on him. Something about this customer didn't seem right, and Wood wanted to oversee every aspect of the transaction. He quickly deduced, as John DeShazo had, that Galt knew little about rifles--and even less about deer hunting.

Galt told Wood he'd like to look at the Remington Gamemaster 760 .30-06-caliber rifle. Wood took it down from the rack, and Galt immediately liked the look and feel of it. It was a pump-action rifle, 'the fastest hand- operated big game rifle made,' according to the Remington literature.

As Galt handled the Gamemaster, Wood asked him, 'What you need that one for? That .243 there will kill anything in Alabama.'

'Well, see, I'm going to hunt in Wisconsin,' Galt replied.

The implication was that the bucks were bigger up that way, so he needed a rifle that could fire bigger ammo. Certainly the .30-06 version of the Gamemaster 760 fit the bill. It had prodigious amounts of 'knockdown power,' enough to kill anything in Alabama and Wisconsin, too. The ammunition the Gamemaster fired had real heft--it weighed twice as much as the .243-caliber round Galt had purchased the day before.

Galt asked some technical questions about the velocities and trajectories of various rounds. Wood recommended the Remington-Peters .30-06 soft-pointed Springfield High Velocity Core-Lokt cartridge--150 grain-- which he noted would travel 2,670 feet per second. Mushrooming on impact, the bullet would bring down the biggest buck on earth at three hundred yards. At one hundred yards, it was said to be capable of stopping a charging rhinoceros. And it was astonishingly accurate, Wood said: for a target standing a hundred yards away, the bullet would drop only one-hundredth of an inch.

The rifle's pump-action feature especially appealed to Galt. It would allow him to keep his finger poised on the trigger and his eye fixed on the sight while smoothly pumping the rifle's slide mechanism to reload. As the Remington brochure put it, 'The pump-action aids²⁶⁴ the shooter in staying on-target during second- and third-shot situations ... helping you to put that buck in the freezer.'

Galt said he'd take it, even though the Gamemaster .30-06 cost a little more than the .243. For a scope, Galt