Chasing King's Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Assassin

by James L. Swanson

In the tragic aftermath of the assassination, many people mourned. But some took to the streets, driven by feelings of helplessness and rage. The death of the great civil rights leader shook the nation and unleashed powerful forces. Riots broke out in more than one hundred cities. Dozens of people were killed, and hundreds injured. Sections of Los Angeles; Chicago; and Washington, DC, went up in flames. In Chicago alone, three hundred square blocks were partially or fully consumed by fire. Thousands of businesses were destroyed. The National Guard was called out to protect the U.S. Capitol from attack. And the assassin had vanished from the scene of the crime, leaving behind his rifle—but no answers as to why he had done it. African Americans blamed a racist society for King’s death, and the social unrest that followed in its wake threatened to undermine all the progress that King’s work had achieved.

  On the night of King’s assassination, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (brother of slain president John F. Kennedy) was in Indianapolis, Indiana, campaigning for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. Before boarding a plane for the city, he was told that King had been shot and wounded. When he landed, Kennedy learned that King had already died. The senator did not want to cancel his appearance, so he made his way to Seventeenth and Broadway, a poor section of town where he would speak to a black audience. When Kennedy arrived, it was obvious that the crowd hadn’t heard the news yet. They did not know that Martin Luther King was dead.

  He asked supporters holding signs to lower them so that everyone could see him.

  Kennedy began to speak.

  “I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world.”

  No one knew what he was going to say next: “Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”

  Gasps and moans arose from the crowd. Some people shouted “No!”

  Kennedy continued:

  “Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black—considering the evidence that there were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.”

  Kennedy pleaded with them to remain peaceful:

  “We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization—black people amongst blacks, and whites amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

  “For those of you who are black and are tempted to … be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.”

  Robert Kennedy had never before spoken in public about the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. It had so seared his soul that he could not bear to discuss it. Now, on this extraordinary night, he broke his rule: “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

  Kennedy asked the audience not to give in to despair and cynicism:

  “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, [and a] feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

  Kennedy closed with a plea for peace:

  “[Let us] dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

  This speech would be remembered as the finest one that Robert Kennedy ever gave. There was no riot in Indianapolis that night. But as Kennedy begged for peace in that city, riots in other places were breaking out in the streets of urban America.

  It is possible that Robert Kennedy felt some remorse or even guilt that night. He was aware that the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had wiretapped and hounded Martin Luther King. But Hoover alone did not have the legal power to spy on him. He needed authorization from his boss, the attorney general of the United States. And it was then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy who had signed the order allowing Hoover to conduct the surveillance. But that information was not public knowledge.

  And what of the man who had ordered the campaign of wiretapping, surveillance, and harassment against Martin Luther King? FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was an American legend. He had been in power for decades, and he ruled the FBI with an iron fist. Few leaders dared challenge him. It was rumored that he had collected secret files on most of the important figures in public life, especially politicians, and even presidents. He judged King harshly. In Hoover’s secret 1964 letter to his deputy, William Sullivan, he had written that King’s “exposure is long overdue” and he hoped that the civil rights leader was about to get his “just deserts.” Now, four years later, King had suffered even more than Hoover had hoped.

  Hoover assumed that he was done with Martin Luther King and could close his files on him. He was wrong. Yes, it was true that King’s murder was not a federal matter. It was a local crime. The assassin had violated the homicide laws of the state of Tennessee. Memphis police and state authorities had jurisdiction over the case. But President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Ramsey Clark had other ideas. They knew that there would be a national uproar if this investigation were left in the hands of local authorities. Martin Luther King was one of the most famous men in the world. The American people would demand that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency lead the investigation. It was decided that night. Attorney General Clark ordered J. Edgar Hoover—one of King’s harshest enemies—to take charge of the manhunt to track down his killer.

  Hoover was astute enough to know that he could not allow his personal hatred of King to impede the investigation. This would turn out to be the most important investigation in the history of the FBI. Hoover knew it was essential that his special agents identify and capture King’s murderer. In the days ahead, Hoover employed every asset at his disposal and held nothing back to investigate the murder of the very man he had harassed and despised. Hoover placed the bureau’s assistant director, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, in charge of the matter. Hoover’s orders were clear: The FBI must not fail. No one—not Hoover, Attorney General Clark, or President Johnson—realized yet what a difficult assignment this would prove to be.

  Ralph Abernathy spent the night of April 4 alone in room 306. King’s empty bed stood nearby. The death of Martin Luther King was a tragedy for African Americans, for the civil rights movement, and for the whole nation. But it was also a deep personal loss for his best friend, Ralph Abernathy. They had been inseparable brothers-in-arms in the fight for civil rights, and had known each other for seventeen years, since 1951.

  Abernathy did not mourn alone. Somebody hung a solitary wreath of flowers on the motel room door. Then another one appeared. And another. Soon, dozens of wreaths and floral arrangements from anonymous mourners framed the doorway and hung from the balcony railing.

  On the morning of April 5, at around 5:00 a.m., the evidence that the FBI had collected in Memphis arrived in Washington, DC, for investigation and forensic analysis. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and FBI assistant director Deke DeLoach flew to Memphis early that morning to show how seriously the federal government was taking the case.

  Later that morning, an FBI agent went to the Aeromarine store, where the owner’s son verified that they had sold the murder weapon, as confirmed by the gun’s serial number: 461,476. He could give only a vague description of the buyer, even th
ough the purchaser had come back a second time to buy a more powerful rifle.

  When the FBI interviewed another customer who had spoken to Ray, they got a better description, including insights into whether the assassin had knowledge of firearms or was an experienced hunter. The customer said he doubted it. The FBI agent in charge in Memphis, Robert Jensen, handled the initial investigation and supervised the collection of the first pieces of evidence.

  Ray left behind a potential treasure trove in front of Canipe’s store. From this location, officials had retrieved the Remington Gamemaster rifle and the Redfield scope in a cardboard rifle box, which were wrapped in a blanket. Here they also found the cheap blue suitcase measuring twenty by thirty inches, containing maps, newspapers, the binoculars, some clothing, a tube of toothpaste, a can of shaving cream, a transistor radio, two cans of beer, and a twenty-round cardboard ammunition box containing nine cartridges. From the bathroom of the rooming house, they recovered one spent brass bullet casing, while in the bedroom, they only found the carrying strap for the binoculars.

  All of this material was processed, labeled, and bagged to document the chain of custody before it was rushed to FBI headquarters in Washington. The bureau collected other evidence, too: the mangled bullet that was excised from King’s body at the autopsy, as well as King’s bloody clothes. Agents even removed the windowsill from the rooming house bathroom window.

  The same morning, April 5, at around 6:00 a.m., James Earl Ray arrived in Atlanta.

  And that morning in cities scattered all across America, the rising sun revealed plumes of smoke ascending from the ruins of burned buildings. Americans awoke to newspaper headlines of nationwide looting, arson, violence, and murder.

  Ray did not plan to remain in Atlanta for long. He retrieved his .38-caliber revolver from his room and dropped off some clothes for cleaning at the local laundry, probably to create a false impression that he had not left town. He also left a misleading note for his landlord, indicating that he would return sometime in the future. Of course he gave false information—it was just a ruse in case the police ever came calling for him. He might have bought a copy of the newspaper to read about his crime.

  Ray would have to part ways with his beloved Mustang. He loved the car, and it had served him well on several important journeys, including the cross-country drive from California to Memphis, and during his escape from Memphis to Atlanta after the assassination. But the word was out. The police were looking for a well-dressed white man driving a late-model, light-colored Mustang. He had another long journey ahead of him, but it was too risky to keep it. Ray had to ditch it.

  Ray drove his car into the parking lot of the Capitol Homes public housing. He wiped it down to smear any identifiable fingerprints, then he abandoned it there. He proceeded to the Greyhound station and caught a bus out of town. He had a long way to go. His first destination was Cincinnati, Ohio.

  While Ray rode the highways, the FBI was on the case. As soon as the initial evidence arrived in Washington, the agency’s legendary fingerprint lab went to work. Meticulous technicians examined every item with intense scrutiny. As a career criminal, Ray knew all about fingerprint evidence, a knowledge he demonstrated when he tried to wipe down the Mustang. But he had been in a hurry in room 5B and in the bathroom; thus, when he fled the rooming house after he shot King, it was possible that he accidentally left some prints there. He might have also left prints on his rifle or on the items in his suitcase. It was the lab’s job to find out if he did. Without fingerprints, it would be much harder for the FBI to identify the assassin.

  The lab announced its results—it had pulled six fingerprints. They came from the rifle, the scope, the binoculars, a newspaper, a bottle of aftershave, and a beer can. It was the first major break in the case. Now the Bureau had to identify to whom these prints belonged.

  The FBI firearms lab went to work trying to match the bullet recovered from King’s body to the suspected murder weapon, Ray’s rifle. Once fired from a weapon, a bullet has a unique set of markings on it. Agents of the FBI can fire a bullet from a gun and use a microscope to compare the rifling grooves on the test bullet to the bullet recovered from the victim’s body. Bureau agents conducted ballistic tests to determine whether the bullet recovered from King’s body could have been fired from the rifle found in the recessed entry of Canipe’s on South Main Street. They concluded that the bullet extracted from King’s body was fired from the same type of barrel as the rifle found on Main Street, and that the fatal bullet was of the same type of unfired rounds discovered at the rooming house. The bullet could have been fired from the Gamemaster, but its passage through King’s body had left it too damaged to allow the lab to match any marks on it to the rifling pattern of the barrel.

  “Nobody paid any attention to me on the bus or at the bus stops,” Ray recalled. So when his first bus arrived in Cincinnati at 1:30 a.m. on April 6, he then took another north to Detroit, Michigan. He was making a break for the Canadian border. He arrived in Detroit at 8:00 a.m. and took a taxi to Windsor, Canada. It was as simple as that. James Earl Ray had escaped the United States. At noon on April 6, he took a four-hour train ride to Toronto. The next morning, Palm Sunday, Ray watched the news on television. The identity of King’s assassin was still unknown.

  Ray was determined to keep it that way and began work on an ingenious scheme. “On Monday [April 8] I went to the library and went through birth announcements for 1932,” he recalled. Ray asked to see old newspapers from October and November, 1932.

  What did he hope to find?

  “I was looking for two names to use in applying for a passport,” and he wrote down ten possibilities, including birth dates, names of parents, and mothers’ maiden names. Though he had been born in 1928, he thought he could pass for younger, possibly due to his plastic surgery.

  Then he cross-referenced those names with the current Toronto telephone directory, where he found two of them, including a man named Ramon George Sneyd.

  He then called Sneyd on the telephone.

  “Posing as a government employee, I telephoned … [him] to see if [he] had ever had a passport. I couldn’t use the name of anyone who had ever had a passport as his picture would be on file.”

  The answer was no. Ray had his new identity.

  Ray did not want to stay in Canada forever. He wanted to escape to another country, but for that he needed a passport—and one not in his own name.

  But here Ray made a critical mistake. He immediately got photos taken but failed to apply for a passport right away. He did not realize how easy it was to get a Canadian passport and mistakenly thought he would also need a documented birth certificate in order to prove his new identity—that of George Sneyd. For this, he would need to request a duplicate copy from a government office—which he did, posing as Sneyd. But such requests take time, and this left Ray waiting aimlessly, allowing the FBI to close in.

  The FBI suspected that the assassin had spent the night prior to the murder somewhere in or near Memphis, but they had no clue where. Per its famous strategy of canvassing, the Bureau deployed agents in a systematic grid. Agents began visiting all the hotels, motels, and rooming houses in the area, hoping that the assassin had stayed at one of them. At the New Rebel Motel, they hit the jackpot and discovered that a man using the name Eric S. Galt, claiming to be an Alabama resident, had checked out on April 4. He had driven a white Mustang with Alabama license plates 1-38993. The FBI obtained copies of the car registration and tracked down the original owner, who had sold it to Ray, who had bought it under a false name. But where was the car? It was still sitting in the parking lot of the Capitol Homes apartments in Atlanta! The Mustang had attracted the attention of residents, who speculated whether it was the one wanted in the assassination. On April 10, a tenant finally reported the car to the police, but authorities were slow to respond. Finally, on April 11, the FBI seized the car and all the possessions that Ray had left in it. One of the most valuable clues was an oil change stic
ker from a car dealership in California.

  The evidence pointed to a man named Eric Starvo Galt, who had at one time lived in California. The investigation shifted to the West Coast. From laundry tickets, the FBI learned Galt’s California address, and that he had left a forwarding order to have all his mail sent on for general delivery at the main post office in Atlanta. Now this evidence connected both East and West Coasts. Was Galt the same man who used the John Willard name to register at the Memphis rooming house across from the Lorraine Motel on April 4? And was Galt the man who had used the name Lowmeyer to buy the Gamemaster rifle from the Aeromarine store?

  Were Galt, Willard, and Lowmeyer all the same man?

  And was this man—whoever he was—the murderer of Dr. King?

  While the FBI intensified its pursuit of the still unidentified assassin, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s family and the nation prepared to bid King farewell.

  Several days earlier, on Friday, April 5, the day after the assassination, Coretta Scott King had flown to Memphis. There she claimed her husband’s body so he could be buried at home in Atlanta. When the plane landed, she had their children brought aboard. She wanted them to see their father now, in private, before the public viewing later.

  But the children were confused. “Mommy, where’s Daddy?” their five-year-old daughter, Bernice, asked, puzzled that her father was not there waiting for her.

  Coretta struggled to make her understand. “Daddy is lying down in his casket in the back of the plane,” she said, “When you see him, he won’t be able to speak to you.” The good-byes had to be heartbreakingly one-sided, because, as their mother explained, “Daddy has gone to live with God, and he won’t be coming back.”