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

balcony and began furiously shooting in all directions, his index finger firing in pure reflex.

His camera found the courtyard of the Lorraine plunged into confusion. Like swarms of agitated hornets, firemen and policemen could be seen scattering from the engine house. Most of them dropped down the retaining wall and came running for the Lorraine. In the parking lot, no one seemed to know what to do, where to go, how to help. People ran in all directions--moaning, crying, praying, cursing. Some stayed crouched, half expecting another shot, fearing this might be a mass assassination attempt. Others labored under the mistaken idea that the explosion had been a bomb and that King had been hit by shrapnel.

Solomon Jones, King's chauffeur, aimlessly screeched the Cadillac back and forth over the parking lot, rubber crying over asphalt. In the confusion, Jones looked across Mulberry Street and thought he saw a man wearing what looked like 'something white over his head' standing in the brushy area beneath the brick rooming house.

In the motel office, the Lorraine's co-owner Loree Bailey began 'shaking like a leaf,'³⁷⁰ according to her husband. She wandered around the premises, moaning, 'Why? Why? Why?' A few minutes later, a blood vessel to her brain ruptured, causing a massive cerebral hemorrhage. She collapsed on the floor of her office, fell into a coma, and would die in the hospital a few days later.

Now the parking lot was filled with screams, shouts, wails, pleas, accusations: 'Motherfuckers ... Call an ambulance! ... Oh Jesus, oh Jesus ... Police shot him ... Don't move him--don't move his head! ... Motherfuckers finally got 'im.' Helmeted policemen, weapons drawn, streamed into the Lorraine courtyard.

At first, many in King's entourage thought the police were attacking them--that the Lorraine was under siege. Then the cops yelled, 'Where'd the shot come from? Where'd the shot come from?' Young, Abernathy, and the others standing over King raised their arms and pointed up and slightly to the right, toward the northwest and the brick rooming house half-obscured by brush. As they did so, Joe Louw snapped a black-and-white image that would run in papers around the world, a photograph suffused with palpable urgency and thinning hope.

It's not clear how Abernathy and the others so accurately intuited the sniper's location--none of them had seen anything, no puff of smoke or gleaming barrel, no suspicious flash in a window. The crack of the rifle had reverberated off so many brick facades and concrete surfaces, and with such muddying force, that it seemed impossible to pinpoint the direction from which the trouble had originated. The angle of King's splayed and twisted body provided only a general clue. Yet in that moment when the policemen asked the question from below, a basic deduction took place, a group reflex informed by instant apprehensions. Without hesitation or pause for parley, the arms shot up. Louw's camera captured it succinctly: a line of index fingers pointed one way, accusing in a single gesture.

Over a police radio, an officer relayed this information to police headquarters: 'We have information³⁷¹ that the shot came from a brick building directly east--correction--directly west from the Lorraine.' Now more policemen flooded into the courtyard, and so many radios were switched on that the police dispatcher at headquarters began to hear only a whining hum. 'Cut off some of the radios at the Lorraine, cut them off!' the dispatcher demanded. 'We're getting too much feedback.'

The sheriff's deputy William DuFour, a vigorous man in his mid-thirties, trundled up the Lorraine balcony steps and tried to take control of the situation. 'Where's he been hit?'³⁷² he asked. People on the balcony were unsure how to take DuFour's arrival--at this moment, especially, they were deeply suspicious of any white man in a police uniform. In seeming response to DuFour's voice, the muscles of King's face faintly pulled and twitched, as though he were trying to rise from his shock to answer DuFour's question. 'Dr. King, don't move!' shouted the deputy sheriff, cutting King off before he could further injure himself.

As DuFour tried to ascertain the severity of the wounds, James Bevel padded about the Lorraine courtyard, lost in a rambling soliloquy that veered from the senseless to the savant: 'Murder! Murder!³⁷³ Doc said that wasn't the way. Yet you knew he'd never be old. You couldn't think of him as an old man. It ended as it had to end. It was written this way.'

25 THE WEAPON IS NOT TO BE TOUCHED

GUY CANIPE, the owner of Canipe's Amusement Company, was sitting at his desk³⁷⁴ near the front of his shop, facing south, and listening to a selection of scratchy old 45s he'd punched into one of his jukeboxes for the two black customers in his store. An appraising man in his late fifties who wore a checked flannel shirt and spoke in a slow Texas drawl, Canipe liked any kind of music, his friends said, 'so long as it made him money.'

Surrounded by the carcasses of broken-down nickelodeons and pinball machines, he was sucking on a wad of tobacco and sifting through paperwork when he heard a thud in the enclave at the front of his store. Ordinarily, the noise wouldn't have registered with him. This was the sort of neighborhood where derelicts were always tossing trash--and where all manner of flotsam ended up on doorsteps; a year earlier, in fact, someone had left a perfectly good television on his doormat. But this time Canipe sensed something. He stood up, stepped over to the threshold, and beheld a curious bulge in his entryway, wrapped in a cloth that looked to him like a curtain.

Canipe looked up and spied a man heading south down Main Street. The stranger walked swiftly but did not break into a full run. Canipe could only see his back, but could tell he was a white man of medium build, neat in appearance, bareheaded, around thirty years old, and wearing a dark suit. He was, as Canipe put it, 'not like the kind of people you see down here.' By this time, the two black customers in Canipe's store, Julius Graham and Bernell Finley, had come forward, and they, too, got a look at the mysterious man.

He slipped behind the wheel of a white late-model Mustang about four or five spaces south of the shop, parked next to a large liquor billboard that said, VERY OLD BARTON, a popular brand of bourbon. The man cranked the motor and peeled off into the street heading north, passing right in front of the shop. Finley thought the Mustang made a 'screeching' sound and then sped off, 'like it was going to a fire--laying rubber down the street.' As far as Canipe, Graham, and Finley could tell, the driver was the only person in the vehicle, but the Mustang was going too fast for any of them to take down a license plate number.

Now Canipe inspected the bundle at his doorstep. At one end, a black pasteboard box peeked from the fabric. Canipe, who was an avid hunter, could see the word 'Browning' printed on the box and imagined for a second that someone had presented him with a generous lagniappe--a brand-new shotgun. The barrel glinted steel blue from the box. It was pointing at him.

Finley and Graham, curious, moved toward the door, but Canipe blocked their exit. He could see a policeman racing down South Main, his pistol drawn as he approached the bundle. 'Get back,' Canipe told his two customers. 'There's some kind of trouble out here and I don't want no part of it.'

The officer, Lieutenant Judson Ghormley of the Shelby County Sheriff's Department, had missed Galt and the squealing Mustang by no more than a minute. The forty-year-old Ghormley, who wore a khaki shirt and green uniform trousers, thought the little amusement shop was closed for the night and seemed surprised when Canipe cracked the door and poked his head out.

'You see who put this down?' Ghormley asked Canipe.

The shop owner told Ghormley he'd just missed the guy, and offered his description, with Finley and Graham chiming in. Finley could only say he was 'medium height, medium weight, medium complexion' and that he wore a 'dark suit--what color, I couldn't say.' Graham was sure of one thing: the man had driven off in a Mustang, a white late-model Mustang.

Soon Ghormley got on his walkie-talkie and conveyed the information to police headquarters. 'I have the weapon in front of 424 Main, and the subject ran south on Main Street!' he squawked excitedly.

The dispatcher shot back over the scratchy airwaves: 'You are not to touch the weapon!³⁷⁵ Repeat--the weapon is not to be touched! You are advised to seal the area off completely. Any physical description on the subject?'

Ghormley radioed back over his walkie-talkie: 'All we know is, he's a young white male, well dressed, dark