Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
Hampton SidesOverview
"On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the maximum-security Jefferson City Penitentiary in Missouri, stuffed himself into a bread-filled metal box bound for the prison farm workers. He became the first man to successfully escape in the institution's 131-year history. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man drifted through the American South, down into Mexico, and then to Los Angeles. His dream was to become a director of porn films." "On February 1, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, two garbage men were crushed to death by the hydraulic press of their antiquated truck. The exclusively African American workforce, which labored for long hours with little pay, went on strike. A month later, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. joined their cause. Exhausted by constant death threats and the toll of his punishing schedule, the Nobel laureate was at the nadir of his extraordinary career. Beset on the left by the Black Power movement, which felt his nonviolent methods were a form of Uncle Tomism, and viciously harassed by J. Edgar Hoover, who considered him a dangerous radical, King desperately wanted to further his faltering civil rights crusade. But the garbage workers' march down Beale Street, the historic avenue of the blues, turned violent. Humiliated, King vowed to return to Memphis in April." "Hiding in the seedier precincts of Los Angeles, his porn career going nowhere, the man calling himself Eric Galt became a follower of George Wallace, the segregationist demagogue who was running for president of the United States. Galvanized by Wallace's racial rhetoric, Galt threw himself into the campaign and began tracking the movements of King." "In Hampton Sides's account, we see these two men - one whose courage and savvy embodied one of the twentieth centuries' greatest causes; the other who lived his stunted life in the shadows - as they crisscross the country, Galt stalking King, until the devastating moment at a Memphis motel when the drifter catches up with his prey." Against the backdrop of the resulting nationwide riots, political crises, and the pathos of King's funeral, Sides deftly weaves a crosscut narrative of the assassin's flight and the massive, desperate search to find him - led, ironically, by the same FBI whose director had hoped to hound King to death. The epic chase would involve thousands of agents, traverse multiple countries, and take three months of meticulous detective work until Galt - a.k.a. Harvey Lowmeyer, a.k.a. Ramon George Sneyd, a.k.a. James Earl Ray - was captured only days before he planned to take refuge in the racist state of Rhodesia.
Synopsis
From the acclaimed bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, a taut, intense narrative about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history.
On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man—whose real name was James Earl Ray—drifted through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he was galvanized by George Wallace’s racist presidential campaign.
On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage men were crushed to death in their hydraulic truck, provoking the exclusively African American workforce to go on strike. Hoping to resuscitate his faltering crusade, King joined the sanitation workers’ cause, but their march down Beale Street, the historic avenue of the blues, turned violent. Humiliated, King fatefully vowed to return to Memphis in April.
With relentless storytelling drive, Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the Lorraine Motel when the drifter catches up with his prey. Against the backdrop of the resulting nationwide riots and the pathos of King’s funeral, Sides gives us a riveting cross-cut narrative of the assassin’s flight and the sixty-five-day search that led investigators to Canada, Portugal, and England—a massive manhunt ironically led by Hoover’s FBI.
Magnificent in scope, drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, this nonfiction thriller illuminates one of the darkest hours in American life—an example of how history is so often a matter of the petty bringing down the great.
The Barnes & Noble Review
The first thing that gets you is how smart and how witless the criminal was, both at once. Prisoner 416-J -- as he is initially known, and sequentially by several aliases, until he emerges near the end as his own contemptible self -- managed in 1967 to pull off the first escape in the history of the maximum-security Missouri State prison. Subsequently committing a far more audacious, deadly, and despicable crime than the armed robbery he had been in for, he escaped from another maximum-security facility in Tennessee after having evaded, for a time, the widest FBI manhunt to date. It would be hardly credible in a James Bond movie. Yet he was also patently dumb -- not to mention a loose cannon of a sociopath, responsible for taking the life of one of the great civil rights heroes of all time -- and so the story of James Earl Ray is, from beginning to end, a profound head-slapper.
Editorials
Janet Maslin
…a viscerally dramatic account of the last days of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.…Remarkably, [Sides] has embroidered the facts without losing a sense of veracity. He augments the truth, but he does it responsibly. He skirts certain issues, like the question of whether or not Ray acted alone, without losing his sharp focus. And he brings to life the story of Dr. King's last days without bogging it down in too many small particulars. Both Dr. King and Ray come to life in these remarkable pages, generating great suspense without surprise, thanks to readers' terrible foreknowledge of what will happen when these two cross paths.—The New York Times
David J. Garrow
[Sides's] depiction of his home town's role in the story is enlightening, and his efforts to present King's struggles and the FBI's behavior cover familiar ground with hardly a misstep…But the "hellhound" who rightly remains the book's centerpiece…is of course Ray…Sides draws a memorable and persuasive portrait of the amateur assassin whose motivation may be simpler to grasp than most previous investigators have realized.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
The counterpoint between two driven men—one by a quest for justice, the other by an atavistic hatred—propels this engrossing study of the King assassination. Sides, author of the bestselling Ghost Solders, shows us a King all but consumed by the flagging civil rights movement in 1968 and burdened by presentiments of death. Pursuing him is escaped convict James Earl Ray, whose feckless life finds a belated, desperate purpose, perhaps stimulated by George Wallace’s presidential campaign, in killing the civil rights leader. A third main character is the FBI, which turns on a dime from its long-standing harassment of Kingto a massive investigation into his murder; in Sides’s telling, the Bureau’s transoceanic hunt for Ray is one of history’s great police procedurals. Sides’s novelistic treatment registers Ray as a man so nondescript his own sister could barely remember him (the author refers to him by his shifting aliases to emphasize the shallowness of his identity). The result is a tragedy more compelling than the grandest conspiracy theory: the most significant of lives cut short by the hollowest of men. Photos. (Apr. 27)Publishers Weekly
Sides delivers an arresting account of the last days of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hunt to capture his killer, James Earl Ray. Sides provides not just a clear history of events, but a gripping narrative that puts readers into the room with key people including King, Ray, and J. Edgar Hoover. The author reads with a clear and strong voice that keeps a good pace and agreeable rhythm. He slips easily into the accents and only marginally invokes the speaking styles of different famous people's voices (including King himself), thereby reminding listeners of who is speaking but without hammy mimicry. While his narration is not as enthralling as the action itself, Sides maintains a solid rhythm and projection throughout. A Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 8). (May)The Barnes & Noble Review
The first thing that gets you is how smart and how witless the criminal was, both at once. Prisoner 416-J -- as he is initially known, and sequentially by several aliases, until he emerges near the end as his own contemptible self -- managed in 1967 to pull off the first escape in the history of the maximum-security Missouri State prison. Subsequently committing a far more audacious, deadly, and despicable crime than the armed robbery he had been in for, he escaped from another maximum-security facility in Tennessee after having evaded, for a time, the widest FBI manhunt to date. It would be hardly credible in a James Bond movie. Yet he was also patently dumb -- not to mention a loose cannon of a sociopath, responsible for taking the life of one of the great civil rights heroes of all time -- and so the story of James Earl Ray is, from beginning to end, a profound head-slapper.
It is also, as structured by Hampton Sides, author of the well-received histories Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers, a vigorously paced narrative of a murder that shocked the world, as well as a trenchant depiction of a place -- Memphis, Tennessee -- that even for sixties America seems bizarrely alien. The bullet from Ray's rifle that struck Martin Luther King, Jr. as he stood on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel cut down a recklessly courageous advocate for racial equality. At the same time, it helped blast to a sudden end an ethos of almost medieval stratification in the Old South.
Memphis was not simply the place where someone famous happened to be murdered; it was a worldview. By Sides's adroit account, this could not have happened anyplace else. Or, if it could, it would have had to have been in a town similarly cooking in the heat from the fires of acrimony that burned all over the United States in the late sixties. It would also have had to have been overtaken by the exact series of events that made the proponent of nonviolence feel the need to return to Memphis, against the wishes of his advisers, to try to keep the lid from blowing off the pot.
Many arbitrary stars need to align for an assassination to occur, and the first to blink into sight here was an otherwise local event: the exceptionally horrible deaths of two black sanitation workers in East Memphis, crushed by their faulty, antiquated truck. None of the workers -- or their survivors, when it came to that -- had recourse, power, compensation, or (needless to say) a union.
As Sides perceptively writes,
The "tub-toters" of the Public Works Department were little better off than sharecroppers in the Delta, which is where they and their families originally hailed from. In some ways they still lived the lives of field hands; in effect, the plantation had moved to the city. . . . All week long, they quietly haunted the neighborhoods of Memphis, faceless and uncomplaining, a caste of untouchables. They called themselves the walking buzzards.
But they did not aim to sustain a wordless watch at the borders of the refuse pile any longer. They organized, then called a strike. The clean fabric of the city with its own plantation-era monarchy, celebrated at an annual Cotton Carnival, was starting to show stains. The heat was now building, and soon it would be fanned into flame by the placards of the striking workers, which read, "I AM A MAN."
On March 28, 1968, King went to Memphis to lead a march of these sick and tired. It turned into a debacle, the type that King most feared: riven with angry violence. He decided to return within a week, to lead a much larger, and hopefully peaceful, demonstration. He envisioned it as a kickstart to his grandly scaled Poor People's Campaign, planned later to descend on Washington, D.C.
Since we already know what happened within a week, the only technique left to the author who wishes to fully dramatize a tragedy -- the cold stars aligning one by one, the forces moving inexorably from opposite sides of the stage to their fateful collision in the middle -- is intercutting. It is highly effective. As used in Hellhound, the wayward wanderings of Ray -- aka Eric Galt, aka Ramon George Sneyd, aka Harvey Lowmeyer -- alternate with the more purposeful movements of King, in addition to those of what one might be tempted to consider the story's other criminal: J. Edgar Hoover. (Sides reports that Hoover, upon learning MLK was named Time's "Man of the Year" for 1963, obscenely commented, "They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with that one.") It is but one of a few too many ironies of this vicious business that King's sworn enemy would later become responsible for sending half his 6,000 agents on a nine-week, $2-million dollar search for his killer.
After the assassination, Ray managed to cross the border (rather easily) into Canada. Then, with the FBI a ways back on the trail, he flew to Europe, en route, or so he hoped, to armed heroism as a mercenary in Rhodesia. He was finally captured, in London, by virtue of a British detective's hunch; for a moment, it looked as though he would get entirely away. Which is what he proceeded to do, a few months after being locked tight inside another "escape-proof" pen.
Although Hellhound on His Trail is exuberantly detailed -- the author is as skilled with research as he is with muscular prose -- the reader might feel nagged by one omission, a crucial one. What could possibly have motivated this small-time crook to stalk and kill a man of the stature of Martin Luther King, Jr.? To be sure, he was a racist (among those he looked up to were Hitler and George Wallace); but so were many southern whites of the time. And then you see it, not trumpeted but reading like hard, sad truth: the reason was no reason. Circumstance, only that. Ray, whose highest aspiration was to direct porn films, was the sorry product of a sordid family life with a "hundred-year history of crime and squalor and hard luck." There was nothing like a real ideology that sent James Earl Ray disastrously into the path of an inspiring, effective, and desperately needed leader; he was intellectually incapable of that. Rather, it was pre-existing anger and hate -- internal states that went free-floating into the ether of a time that was chemically favorable to them. There was unloosed anguish over the Vietnam War; there were race riots that brought up the bile of fear in white throats. It turned out to be a particularly rich period for assassination.
--Melissa Holbrook Pierson