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

calls and telegrams while greeting the tearful well-wishers who streamed into her house. Within hours, a greenhouse's worth of flowers had materialized, and phone company workmen came to install a bank of three telephones to handle the swelling volume of calls.

A newspaper reporter described the newly widowed Mrs. King as 'composed but dazed'⁴⁶² as she moved through the rooms at 234 Sunset, brushing past the portrait of Mahatma Gandhi on the wall and the bouquet of fake carnations King had recently given her. Financially, she had serious concerns about how she was going to carry on--King had not written a will,⁴⁶³ had only a minimum life insurance policy, and left scarcely any savings, other than this cozy little brick home on the southwest side of Atlanta, not far from the slums. The house, together with two joint checking accounts he shared with Coretta, would be judged too small in value to probate.

Yet already Coretta seemed profoundly resigned to her husband's death. 'I do think it's the will of God,' she said. 'We always knew this could happen.' It was something she had been preparing for, and even publicly speaking about, for years. Three years earlier, in Seattle, she had told a crowd, 'If something happens⁴⁶⁴ to my husband, the cause will continue. It may even be helped.'

All his campaigns had been dangerous, she said, 'but there was something a little different⁴⁶⁵ about Memphis. Martin didn't say directly to me that it's going to happen in Memphis, but I think he felt that time was running out.' Coretta said her husband had long felt 'a mystical identity with the meaning of Christ's Passion' and that it seemed appropriate that his death should come during the Easter season.

After President Johnson's call, the newly installed phones began to ring ceaselessly. The governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, called, offering a chartered plane for her use. The comedian Bill Cosby called, offering to come and entertain her kids. Senator Robert Kennedy called, offering another plane. Attorney General Clark conveyed his condolences and assured her that the FBI was on the case. Harry Belafonte, the calypso singer, phoned to say he'd be there the next day, 'just to do any little menial thing⁴⁶⁶--I want to share this sorrow with you.'

Among the offerings from Western Union, a telegram arrived from the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, in Addis Ababa. 'It is with profound grief,' the Lion of Judah said, 'that we have learned the shocking news of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King whose valiant struggles for the cause of human dignity shall long be remembered by all peace loving peoples.'

Coretta slipped away from the commotion and went back to the kids' rooms to put them to bed. As she later recalled in her memoir, it was clear that Dexter didn't fully comprehend what had happened. 'Mommy,' he said, 'when is Daddy coming home?'⁴⁶⁷

'He was hurt very badly,' Coretta answered, realizing she was unable at this late and frantic hour to face a conversation about death. 'You go to sleep, and I'll tell you about it in the morning.'

Then she spoke with Yolanda, her eldest child, with whom she'd been shopping all afternoon for an Easter dress. 'Mommy, I'm not going to cry,' Yoki said resolutely. 'I'll see him again in heaven.'

But something was bothering her, something clearly nagged at her young conscience. 'Should I hate the man who killed my father?' she asked.

Coretta shook her head. 'No, darling,⁴⁶⁸ your daddy wouldn't want you to do that.'

WITHIN AN HOUR of King's death, authorities transported his body across town to the office of the chief medical examiner at John Gaston Hospital on Madison Avenue, where it was promptly taken to a pathology suite in the basement. The corpse was placed on a stainless steel table in a room with a sloping tile floor equipped with a drain. A set of implements lay gleaming beneath the bright lamps--chisels, vibrating saws, an array of scalpels and forceps. The body was covered with a sheet of thick, crinkly medical paper. From beneath the sheet, a tag marked 'A-68-252' dangled from the subject's big toe.

The Shelby County medical examiner, the pathologist Dr. Jerry Francisco,⁴⁶⁹ emerged in a white lab coat. He was a tall, punctilious, soft-spoken man whose voice was tinged with the gentle twang of the hill country of western Tennessee. Although he was only in his mid-thirties, Dr. Francisco had already conducted many hundreds of autopsies; later in his career he would investigate the deaths of numerous Memphis-area celebrities-- including that of Jerry Lee Lewis's fifth wife, Shawn Michelle, and, most famously, Elvis Presley.

By temperament and training, Dr. Francisco was a stickler for detail and loved to recite the arcane lore of his profession from the time of its Norman origins in medieval England. Dr. Francisco took relish in pointing out that in addition to dissecting the cadavers of important people who'd died under mysterious circumstances, the coroners of ancient London were required by law to serve as 'the Keeper of the Royal Aquarium.'

At around 9:00 p.m., Abernathy was summoned from the Lorraine and ushered into the lab to identify the body, in accordance with legal protocol. An attendant removed the sheet of medical paper, producing a harsh crackling sound. Gazing at the body on the sterile metal table, Abernathy thought his friend 'somehow looked more dead'⁴⁷⁰ than he had seemed when he'd left him in the hospital just two hours earlier. 'I stared for a moment,' Abernathy wrote in his memoirs, 'a mute witness to the final dehumanization of Martin Luther King, Jr., his transformation from person to thing. I knew in that moment that I could leave this body now, leave it forever.'

Abernathy nodded and curtly told Dr. Francisco what he needed to hear. 'This,' he said, 'is the body⁴⁷¹ of Martin Luther King, Jr.,' and he signed the requisite form.

Then Francisco asked Abernathy to reach Coretta King by phone to secure her permission to conduct the autopsy. Abernathy hesitated. He failed to understand why an autopsy was necessary; no one doubted for a moment what had killed his friend. 'It seemed incredible to me,' Abernathy later wrote, 'that such a procedure could make any difference now.' He hated to trouble Coretta with such a gruesome request and wanted to spare her the shock of yet another indignity.

'How important is it?' he asked.

'Very,' Dr. Francisco assured him--in fact, it was required by law. He explained that for forensic purposes he needed to determine with greater specificity the angle of the bullet's path. Any future prosecution of King's assailant would legally require an autopsy to determine with absolute certainty that King had died as a direct result of the gunshot wound. A host of secondary questions might be answered, too: Could there have been a second bullet? Could the wound have been caused by a pistol, fired at close range? Could the doctors at St. Joseph's have done anything to save King's life? 'It might tell us something⁴⁷² we didn't know before,' Dr. Francisco added, according to Abernathy. 'Something that could save another person's life.'

Reluctantly, Abernathy made the call to Mrs. King and then handed the phone to Dr. Francisco. She readily gave her consent, speaking in a voice that seemed to Dr. Francisco remarkably calm and composed.

After Abernathy left the autopsy suite, Dr. Francisco's first task was to remove the bullet from King's body. About 9:30 p.m., with three Memphis police officers serving as official witnesses, Dr. Francisco excavated the main fragment from an area just beneath the skin of King's left shoulder blade. He attached a tag to the lump of metal, labeling it '252.' The police witnesses described the badly marred and distorted bullet as 'giving the appearance⁴⁷³ of being a 30-06,' but it had mushroomed almost beyond recognition. It had a copper jacket and a nose composed of soft lead, the police officers surmised, 'as it was very flattened.'

Dr. Francisco wrapped the deformed bullet in cotton and gave it to the police witnesses, who tagged it with a receipt and dropped it into a brown manila envelope. The three police witnesses then left the examining room to deliver the package to Inspector Zachary of the MPD's Homicide Bureau--who, in turn, would hand it over to Special Agent Jensen of the FBI.

Dr. Francisco prepared to go about his macabre work, feeling the weight of history upon him. He recalled that, after the assassination of President Kennedy, alleged irregularities associated with the autopsy became the subject of much speculation--and ultimately helped to hatch any number of conspiracy theories. 'More than any case⁴⁷⁴ I'd ever been assigned to, I knew the work had to be without flaw,' he later said. 'I said to myself, 'Not a single mistake, Francisco.'' In a literal sense, history was watching him: photographers, working in both color and black and white, diligently captured every stage of the procedure on film.

The autopsy was unusual in another respect--the high level of security under which it was conducted. The Memphis authorities feared that plotters in a conspiracy, or a hostile mob, might try to sabotage Dr. Francisco's examination or even steal King's body. So while he worked, Memphis policemen, armed with shotguns, were