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

invited!'

Jackson had in fact finagled an invitation for himself, but he didn't look like he was going to a dinner party. He was wearing a mod olive turtleneck sweater and a leather coat, a fashion decidedly out of step with the tie-wearing squares of the inner circle. When someone in the Lorraine parking lot gave him a once-over as if to question his attire, Jackson quipped, 'All you need for dinner is an appetite.'

King laughed at Jackson's hipster threads and his resourcefulness at adding himself to the guest list. On this night the Leader was full of charity. He zestfully tugged at his coat lapels, as was his habit when he felt confident and ready for the world. He was clean shaven, sweet smelling, and dressed to the nines. He looked at Jackson and flashed a broad smile.

Georgia Davis was down in 201³⁵⁴ with the door slightly ajar. As she fixed her hair in the bathroom mirror, she could hear King carrying on with his staff, could hear the Voice, rich and melodious, booming across the courtyard. She could tell he was in a good mood. She wished he would stop jabbering--she was getting hungry. She looked at her watch: 6:00. They were all supposed to be at Kyles's house by now. Then she glanced out the window and saw King on the balcony. He just stood there, the life of his own party, smiling and joking and talking away.

INSIDE THE MILDEWY bathroom,³⁵⁵ Galt removed the Gamemaster from its box and loaded it with a single Remington-Peters .30-06 round. Galt must have felt he was running out of time--otherwise he would have loaded the clip with more bullets. He jerked the window up with such force that it jammed after opening only five inches. Probably using his rifle tip, he poked the rusted window screen and dislodged it from its groove; the screen tumbled to the weedy lot below.

The bathroom was disgustingly dirty;³⁵⁶ the toilet bowl was streaked, and a dented piece of wainscoting trim ran along peeling walls the color of a robin's egg. Galt climbed into the old claw-footed bathtub, which was scuzzy and stained, its tarnished drain clogged with a tangle of hairs. A flimsy contraption dangling over the tub's rim held a shrunken nub of soap. Galt leaned his body against the wall and rested the rifle on the paint- flaked windowsill.

Squinting through the Redfield scope, he found King, still standing there on the Lorraine balcony. Galt's loafers must have squeaked as they rubbed on the surface of the bathtub, leaving black scuff marks. A television murmured somewhere down the hall; a ventilation fan thumped in a nearby window. The smell of charred burgers tendriled up from Jim's Grill, where happy-hour Budweiser was flowing and intense games of barroom shuffleboard were in session.

Galt likely heard Willie Anschutz rattling the bathroom door, a disruption that doubtless tried his concentration. He had to move fast. He brought King's head within the crosshairs. It was starting to grow dark outside, but the chemical emulsion on his scope's lens enhanced targets in twilight. In the distance behind the Lorraine was the immense gray post office building, a hazy monstrosity looming in the crepuscular light.

King continued to hold court, oblivious to danger. His face nearly filled the scope's optical plane. He was 205 feet away, but with 7x magnification, he appeared only 30 feet away. It was an easy shot, a cinch.

Galt leaned into the rifle and took aim. At 6:01 p.m., he wrapped his index finger around the cool metal trigger.

THE CADILLAC WAS still idling down below, and the various members of the party were edging toward their cars. King did not move from his perch on the balcony--he seemed transfixed by the evening, enchanted by the scene in the courtyard. Andy Young was shadowboxing with James Orange, a wild bearish man as big as an NFL linebacker. 'Now you be careful with preachers half your size!' King called out to Orange.

Jackson, standing beside the Cadillac, introduced King to Ben Branch, a saxophonist and bandleader originally from Memphis, who had come down from Chicago to play music in support of the sanitation workers; he and his band had a gig that night over at Mason Temple, where King and his entourage were headed after the Kyles dinner.

'Oh yes,' King said. 'He's my man. How are ya, Ben?'

'Glad to see you, Doc,' Branch called up.

'Ben, I want you to sing for me tonight at the meeting. I want you to do that song, 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord.'' King had loved the great gospel standard for years. It was a tragic, sweet song written in the depths of the Depression by a black composer named Thomas Dorsey after his wife and baby died in childbirth:

When the darkness appears and the night draws near

And the day is past and gone

At the river I stand

Guide my feet, hold my hand.

'I want you to sing it like you've never sung it before,' King told Branch. 'Sing it reeeeeeal pretty.'

'I sure will, Doc.'

Solomon Jones hopped out of the Caddie and yelled up to King. 'It's getting chilly,' said Jones. 'I think you'll need a topcoat.'

'Okay, Jonesy,' King answered. 'You really know how to take good care of me.' He fished for a pack of Salem menthols from his pocket and grasped a cigarette in his hand. He straightened up and stepped back from the railing. He was just turning, perhaps to retrieve his cashmere topcoat inside the room, when a ragged belch rang out over the parapets.

THE MEMPHIS POLICEMAN Willie Richmond, watching the Lorraine³⁵⁷ from inside the firehouse, heard the noise. It did not register with him as the report of a rifle--it was just a loud noise, perhaps a backfiring truck, and it seemed to come from somewhere off to the northwest. But fireman George Loenneke saw everything. Through Richmond's field glasses, through the little peephole in the newspapered window, the scene reeled out in slow motion before Loenneke's eyes: King falling backward from the handrail. King tumbling to the balcony floor. King staying there and not getting up. Loenneke gave Richmond the binoculars for a look. No one else inside the station had heard anything or had an inkling of what had happened.

Richmond turned and ran through the firehouse, yelling: 'He's been shot!³⁵⁸ The Reverend King has been shot!'

CHARLIE STEPHENS, STILL trying to repair the old radio in his room just a few feet away from the bathroom, heard the concussion through the thin plywood wall. Even in his alcoholic stupor, he instantly knew what it was. Having fought in Europe, he was well acquainted with the sound of weapon fire. 'I know a shot when I hear one,'³⁵⁹ he later said. 'When that explosion went off, it sounded like a German 88.'

Inside the bathroom, Eric Galt withdrew the rifle from the cracked window. He knew he'd made a serious hit to King's head. The aerosol mist of blood would have been visible through the scope. King had been knocked back and had largely disappeared from view on the balcony's concrete floor.

Galt scrambled out of the bathtub and threw the still-warm Gamemaster and his other belongings into the bedspread. He wrapped it all up in a bundle, unlocked the bathroom door, and took off down the hall, heading for the stairs.

Charlie Stephens opened the door³⁶⁰ and saw a man in a dark suit leaving the bathroom hallway with a long package under one arm. He assumed it was the stranger in 5B, but he saw him only from the back.

Willie Anschutz, who like Stephens had heard the alarming noise from the bathroom, was standing farther down the corridor. The roomer in 5B brushed past him, carrying a bundle under one arm. 'He had something about three and a half foot long,' Anschutz recalled, 'wrapped up in something, it might have been an old piece of blanket.' He was walking at a businesslike clip, but not quite running. A smirky smile curled across his face.

'Hey, that sounded like a shot!'³⁶¹ Anschutz said to the man.

Covering his face with his free hand, the tenant who called himself John Willard calmly replied, 'It was.'