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

AT THE AIRPORT in Atlanta, Coretta King hurried down⁴¹⁰ the long corridor, with Mayor Ivan Allen and Dora McDonald at her side. As they neared the gate for the Memphis flight, she heard her name called out over the airport's PA system.

Coretta was optimistic at first. 'Someone is paging me,' she said brightly. Then she was seized by a 'strange, cold feeling,' she later wrote, 'for I knew it was the word from Memphis and that the word was bad.'

When Mayor Allen took off to retrieve the page, Dora said, 'Come on, we need a room where we can sit down,' and led Coretta to the outer entrance of the ladies' room, where they waited a few awful minutes, holding hands. Then Mayor Allen returned, with a stricken expression on his face. Assuming a peculiar formality, he walked up to Coretta, looked her in the eyes, and said, 'Mrs. King, I have been asked to tell you that Dr. King is dead.'

The words hung in the air as passengers pressed toward their gates. Dora and the mayor tried to comfort Coretta. For a time they stood weeping together in a clutch. But the plane was about to leave. 'Mrs. King,' Mayor Allen said, taking her hand in his. 'What do you want to do? Do you want to go on to Memphis?'

She shook her head. 'I should get back home,' she said, 'and see about the children.'

IN A FIFTH-FLOOR conference room at the U.S. Justice Department building in Washington, Attorney General Ramsey Clark received word of King's death just moments after it was announced in Memphis. Fearing that the nation was about to come apart at the seams, Clark viewed King's death as 'a tragic setback⁴¹¹ and stunning on a personal level.'

The attorney general instantly knew that the FBI would have to take over the case--although murder, even the murder of a nationally prominent citizen, was not a federal crime. But the assassination of Martin Luther King was too momentous to leave to the Memphis Police Department. Clark also realized there was a strong likelihood that King's assailant had already crossed state lines, thus making this a multi-jurisdictional case.

Clark assigned a phalanx of Justice Department lawyers the task of finding workable legal grounds for the FBI's immediately taking on the case. They hastily zeroed in on Title 18, section 241 of the U.S. Code, which 'prohibits conspiracies to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of the United States.'

Attorney General Clark next put in a call to Cartha DeLoach, the assistant director of the FBI, who had just arrived at home. 'I think the bureau⁴¹² should investigate,' he told DeLoach, briefly outlining the 'conspiracies to injure' clause Justice planned to invoke. No expense should be spared, Clark insisted. 'Get as many facts as you can. I'll call the White House.'

Clark's unspoken implication was that DeLoach should call Hoover, since Clark's relationship with the FBI director was so bad that the two were hardly on speaking terms. DeLoach took the cue and got Hoover on his private line. He recalled the conversation years later in his memoir.

'Some idiot shot Martin Luther King,' DeLoach said.

The director had heard all about the assassination, of course, and wouldn't let DeLoach get a word in edgewise. 'Do not accept responsibility for this investigation,' Hoover demanded in his machine-gun sputter. 'This is a local matter. Offer Memphis whatever help they need--ballistics, fingerprints, criminal records. But this case falls under the jurisdiction of city and state police.'

Eventually, DeLoach was able to interrupt the Old Man's tirade long enough to say that he'd already heard from the attorney general. 'Clark says he wants us to take over the case.'

After a long pause, Hoover heaved a sigh. 'Well he would,' he said in exasperation. Hoover must have shuddered at the thought that his bureau was now charged with the responsibility of solving the murder of a man he detested, a man he and his COINTELPRO agents had so determinedly tried to smear, sabotage, and 'neutralize.'

DeLoach explained that Justice had already ginned up some sort of legal rationale. DeLoach said he thought Clark's decision was sound. Even though King was a private citizen, how odd it would seem, to the country and to the world, for the FBI not to take charge of the most prominent national murder case since the JFK assassination. It was, he said, 'a crime of immense importance⁴¹³ to the nation' and one characterized by great 'external pressures.'

'OK, go ahead,' Hoover curtly said, recognizing the futility of his argument. 'But I want you to take charge. Don't let Clark turn this into a political circus. You make it clear this is the FBI's case.'

Then, without another word, he hung up.

With this awkward and decidedly herky-jerky start, the FBI's search for MLK's killer began, a manhunt that would become the largest in American history, ultimately involving more than thirty-five hundred FBI agents and costing the government nearly two million dollars. From the moment of its inception, the investigation into King's assassination was characterized by a certain cognitive dissonance at the top: a hidebound FBI director charged with finding the assassin of a man he loathed, all the while answerable to (yet barely on speaking terms with) a liberal young attorney general who revered the deceased. Cartha DeLoach, as usual, found himself in the middle of it all. 'Hoover remained at war⁴¹⁴ with Clark,' he later wrote, 'and I was in the line of fire.' It was an arrangement, DeLoach said, that would often leave his 'pressure gauge registering in the red.'

DeLoach believed that despite Hoover's hatred of King, the Old Man was committed to using every ounce of the bureau's considerable power to chase the assassin down. As DeLoach put it, 'He was as anxious⁴¹⁵ as anyone to find King's killer, even though he disapproved of the man. We had a job to do and we were prepared to do it. The case was handled in a very intensified manner, and everyone in the FBI was called upon to help out.'

Ramsey Clark agreed: 'The FBI's reputation⁴¹⁶ was at stake, and there was nothing more important to Hoover than the bureau's reputation. Hoover was afraid people were going to say he did it. So he was all out for finding the killer. And from the start you could feel it in the pace and the seriousness of the people in the bureau.'

DeLoach called Robert Jensen, special agent in charge of the FBI's Memphis field office. Jensen had already visited the crime scene and had been in close consultation with Memphis homicide detectives only minutes after King's shooting was first reported. 'The AG wants us to take over the case,' DeLoach announced. Jensen understood immediately what that meant: as the field office of origin, Memphis would serve, along with Washington, as the command center of the national investigation. Until the case was resolved, Jensen would have to play the formidable and thankless role of bureau point man--'the guy,' as DeLoach put it, 'with a thousand opportunities⁴¹⁷ to screw up.'

But DeLoach had faith in Jensen, whom he viewed as 'very experienced and thorough.' Born in Denmark⁴¹⁸ and raised in Detroit, Robert G. Jensen had served as a navigator in World War II, flying twenty-five missions over Europe. After attending the University of Michigan, he'd spent twenty-one years in the FBI, serving in Philadelphia, Miami, Birmingham, and Washington, D.C. A bit of a golf nut, Jensen was taciturn, levelheaded, and equipped with a wry wit that was accentuated by slightly crooked front teeth. Most of all, he was calm, a quality that stood him in good stead as he faced the likely hysteria of the coming weeks.

DeLoach ordered Jensen to gather the crime scene information and get the physical evidence on a plane straightaway so forensic experts at the FBI's crime lab could begin to analyze it. 'As you well know,'⁴¹⁹ DeLoach told Jensen, 'this has to be solved as soon as possible. We need to full-court press this--all your people on the job till they drop.'

WHEN INSPECTOR NEVELYN ZACHARY of the Memphis Police Department's Homicide Bureau arrived at 424 South Main Street, the bundle was still there in the vestibule of Canipe's Amusement Company, guarded over by a policeman holding a shotgun. Zachary had the bundle photographed just as it was found. Then he put on gloves so as not to tamper with the evidence and took the bundle into his possession. But Zachary's custody of this extraordinary little trove would only last several hours, while Clark, DeLoach, and Hoover conferred about whether the FBI should fully enter the case. Some time after 8:00 p.m., the bundle was raced to the downtown field office of the FBI and placed in the hands of Special Agent Jensen.

Now Jensen removed⁴²⁰ the faded green herringbone bedspread that was loosely wrapped around the contents. To him, it looked like an old bedspread that had come from a cheap motel somewhere. He laid out the material on a well-lit table in an examining room and put on a pair of latex gloves. Then, sensing that the solution to the case might well be contained in these very belongings, Special Agent Jensen began to take a careful