open his own bar and restaurant. He said he was going to enroll in some school to learn how to be a bartender.'
'YES,' TOMAS LAU said, 'Eric Galt was a student here.'606 A suave man with a trim mustache, Lau was director of the International School of Bartending at 2125 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The FBI agents Theodore A'Hearn and Richard Raysa, after canvassing all the bartending schools in Southern California, had quickly found Lau's establishment.
Lau believed Galt was 'diligent and well-coordinated' and had the potential to become a fine bartender. Lau thought so much of Galt that he even went to the trouble of finding him a job. 'But he declined,' Lau recalled. 'He said he was going to visit his brother somewhere and didn't want a job. He said he'd call me if he still needed a job when he got back.'
Another pupil at the school, a man named Donald Jacobs,607 recalled that Galt said he'd been a cook in the merchant marine and worked on riverboats and barges on the Mississippi. Jacobs doubted this was true, because he noticed that Galt's hands 'didn't appear calloused or used to hard work.'
Beyond the fact that Galt had 'thin lips and a slight Southern accent,' Lau had trouble recalling what his former pupil looked like. Then he remembered graduation day. 'I've got a picture of him somewhere,' he volunteered.
'How's that?' Agent A'Hearn couldn't believe what he'd just heard.
'All our graduates get their picture taken with me and the diploma,' Lau explained. 'It's something we've always done around here.'
Lau scoured his scrapbooks and soon found the photograph, which was snapped at the school on March 2. For the first time, an FBI agent was peering at the image of the man now being hunted by three thousand bureau colleagues across the country.
There stood Lau, proudly posing with his student--a slender, narrow-nosed, dark-haired, fair-skinned man wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie. The portrait looked pretty much like all the other graduation photos gracing Lau's scrapbooks, though Agent A'Hearn did notice one peculiarity: Galt's eyes were shut.
38 
CANADA BELIEVES YOU
ARMED AT LAST with a photograph of the manhunt's prime suspect, the FBI began to assert its true institutional might--pressing with renewed focus and multi-tentacled determination all across the country. In Los Angeles, agents canvassed the banks in the vicinity of the St. Francis Hotel in search of any monetary trails left by Eric Galt. This proved a hugely successful tack: Although Galt had kept no savings or checking accounts and had failed to establish any credit history, at the Bank of America in Hollywood the agents found that an Eric Galt, in fact, had purchased a series of modest money orders in late 1967 and early 1968. Several of the orders were made out to an establishment in Little Falls, New Jersey, called the Locksmithing Institute.
Within an hour, agents in New Jersey visited the 'institute' and learned that it offered correspondence courses in key cutting, lock picking, safecracking, alarm wiring, and other skills of the trade to students all over the world. Before enrolling in the course, Galt had signed an oath swearing that he'd never been convicted of burglary, adding: 'I shall never use my knowledge to aid or commit a crime.' According to the Locksmithing Institute's records, Galt's last lesson had been mailed to him, only a week earlier, at 113 Fourteenth Street Northeast in Atlanta.
This lead was immediately flashed to the Atlanta field office, and in minutes a team of agents, driving an unmarked car, pulled up to Jimmie Garner's rooming house on Fourteenth Street. Believing there was a strong possibility that Galt was still hiding inside, the agents stayed in the shadows and kept the building under close surveillance; for the first day, the FBI refrained from asking any questions for fear of exposing themselves--or prematurely tipping off the media.
Two other agents, meanwhile, disguised themselves as hippies608--bell-bottom jeans, beads, the whole shtick--and rented a room next to Galt's. Inside, they discovered that the two rooms shared a connecting door; by placing their ears on wood panels, they were able to determine to their satisfaction that Galt's room was vacant. They tried to open the door but found it was locked. A call was then placed to Deke DeLoach in Washington, who said, 'Take the door off its hinges609 if you have to, but get in there!'
The tie-dyed agents did as they were told, and with a little handiwork they were soon inside Galt's room. The dark and sparsely furnished space hardly seemed lived-in, but after poking around in dressers and under tables, they spotted a few telltale artifacts.610 They found a booklet titled 'Your Opportunities in Locksmithing' and a portable Zenith TV. Behind a desk they found a pamphlet, 'What Is the John Birch Society?' They noted a small stash of grocery supplies, residue from the budget repasts of a man who appeared to be both a hermit and a pack rat--Nabisco saltines, Kraft Catalina French dressing, Carnation evaporated milk, Maxwell House instant coffee, French's mustard, a package of lima beans.
Also scattered about the room were a number of road maps--the kind usually handed out for free at gas stations--maps that, taken together, seemed to offer a succinct chart of Galt's travels. There were maps of Los Angeles, Mexico, California, Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma, Louisiana, Birmingham, and the southeastern United States.
Finally the agents located a map of Atlanta, which was marked up in pencil. Inscribed on the map were four little circles that, upon closer inspection, seemed to have a chilling import: one circle was near Martin Luther King's home; one indicated Ebenezer Baptist Church and the SCLC office; another designated the approximate location of Jimmie Garner's rooming house; and a final circle marked the Capitol Homes public housing project, where the Mustang had been abandoned. It seemed clear evidence of an organized plot; not only had Galt charted King's world--and likely stalked him--but he had staked out, well ahead of time, a safe and inconspicuous place where he could ditch his car.
The agents left everything as they'd found it, and after installing the door back on its hinges, they retreated to their 'room.' They'd learned enough from their surreptitious, albeit legally tenuous, reconnaissance to give DeLoach what he needed. Galt was not living there; there were no clothes, no suitcases, no signs of tenancy other than those old groceries. Now it was time to come out of the shadows--to question Jimmie Garner, issue a search warrant, and confiscate all the assorted belongings in Galt's room.
OVER THE PAST few days, FBI agents in Los Angeles had been developing their own series of intriguing leads. While they were conducting follow-up interviews at the bartending school, Tomas Lau had found in his files a sheet of paper on which Galt had listed three local 'references,' with addresses. They were Charlie Stein, Rita Stein, and Marie Tomaso.
Special Agents William John Slicks and Richard Ross611 found Charlie Stein at his apartment at 5666 Franklin Avenue, just around the corner from the St. Francis. From the start it was clear that Stein was one odd duck--by turns cagey, rambling, and cosmic--but he was cooperative enough. He told the agents the story of how he met Galt; how his sister Rita needed someone to pick up her distressed twin girls in Louisiana; how she'd managed to convince Stein to accompany Galt in his Mustang on a cross-continental drive to New Orleans around Christmastime; and how Galt, before going on the trip, had insisted on the bizarre precondition that Stein, Rita, and their cousin Marie Tomaso first lend their signatures to George Wallace's California primary effort.
'He said he'd been in the Army,' Stein recalled. 'He said he was from Alabama, and that he planned to go
Stein's memories of the drive to New Orleans were vague at first, but when he was reinterviewed the next day, he began to open up. 'Galt had money to spend--he said he was part owner of a bar down in Mexico but that he'd sold his interest. He stopped a few times to make long-distance calls at phone booths. He liked hamburgers with everything on them, and liked to sip a beer while he drove. He was always playing country and western music on the car radio.'
