Hellhound On His Trail, Sides - B

                                                Thanks to my friend Jack Blair for the recommendation and the loan of this book. The Hellhound is James Earl Ray and he is on the trail of Martin Luther King, Jr.   The trail ends in Memphis, a city which in no way was predestined to be their meeting place. In February of 1968, two black men, non-union hourly workers of the Memphis Sanitation Dept., were swallowed up and killed by a defective garbage truck. The truck had killed before and the compensation for the dead was a month of severance pay.  The strike that ensued brought King to Memphis a few weeks before his death. By 1968, King had shifted his focus to economic rights and support of the strike fit perfectly into his poverty theme.  At the same time, Eric Galt (the name Ray had been using since a Missouri prison break a year before ) was driving through the deep South and decided to take a detour to Selma, where King was scheduled to speak.  Galt missed King and went ahead to Atlanta where he followed King's schedule in the papers.  He went to Birmingham, purchased a rifle and drove to Memphis, where King was to meet the strikers and hopefully, lead a peaceful parade.  Knowing where King customarily stayed, Galt rented a room in a boarding house across the street.  A minute or so after 6pm on April 4th, King stepped out onto the balcony of Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel.  Galt looked down on him from 200 feet away, a distance that seemed only 30 ft. when viewed through the 7X magnification scope on his Remington Gamemaster.  Within minutes of the firing of a single shot, Galt had tossed the rifle, gotten to his Mustang and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead.  The FBI had his fingerprints within 24 hours, along with other leads and clues. But this was the analog era, and fingerprint data was analyzed manually. As the FBI had millions of fingerprints, it took a decision  by Asst. Director Deke Deloach about a week later to narrow the field.  The clues indicated that the murderer was someone on the run and using aliases.  DeLoach ordered the search to be limited to the 53,000 sets of  convict's prints .  Within a  day, they had Ray's identity and broadcast it, literally, around the world. By then he was in Toronto.  Eventually, with the cooperation of the RCMP,  the FBI learned he was in London, and Scotland Yard arrested him in early June.   Sentenced to 99 years, he escaped once and died in prison in 1998.