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

"Discrimination is a hellhound" - MLK 1967

In the late afternoon of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a single gunshot fired from a distance. The manhunt for his assassin would be the largest in American history and cover two continents and five countries. King had been drawn to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers after two men were crushed to death in a garbage truck accident. His assassin was drawn to Memphis by racism and a desire to kill King. In the end the manhunt led to a drifter who had escaped from prison in a breadbox nearly a year before, and would culminate sixty-five days later when he was apprehended by Scotland Yard detectives in London.

I've been sitting on this book for nearly a year, not show more especially interested in the history of the civil rights movement but having enjoyed other books by the author. I'd appreciated Hampton Sides ability to tell a good story in Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, and having recently finished another excellent book on the near assassination of Ronald Reagan, I thought it might be time to read this one - and Hellhound doesn't disappoint! Sides brings the story alive with thousands of small details, reconstructing the trail of Prisoner #416J as he morphs through a list of aliases - Eric Starvo Galt, Harvey Lowmeyer, John Willard, Paul Bridgman, Ramon George Sneyd - but in the end he was just a middle-aged racist named James Earl Ray who'd been discharged from the Army for "ineptness" and carried a rap sheet as long as his arm.

But Sides weaves the story of Galt/Ray into the mission of Martin Luther King and his fading civil rights campaign. The non-violence movement was splintering under the frustration of others such as Jesse Jackson, and the initial march in Memphis had gone terribly awry further undermining his Poor People's Campaign. J. Edgar Hoover hovers on the sidelines as well, as the adversary who had relentlessly spied on King to being responsible to hunt down his killer. Sides is careful to stick to the facts - mentioning but not veering off into conspiracy theories - which results in a story that's impossible to put down. The account of King's shooting is extremely sad, but it was a fascinating part of history which I had largely ignored and a book I strongly recommend. show less

Fascinating account of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last days, and of the activities of his killer, James Earl Ray, a/k/a Eric S. Galt et al., before and after the assassination until he was finally apprehended by an astute Scotland Yard detective just before he would have boarded a plane in London bound for Brussels and (he hoped) eventually Rhodesia where extradition would not have been possible. There's a lot more of interest in the book as well, and it got me thinking about how disconnected I was from the world in 1968. Although naturally I was aware of the assassination, and I remember seeing photos of Ray after he was caught and during his trial, I am amazed now to realize that I was in Washington, DC, on our Senior Class trip less show more than 3 weeks before the shooting in Memphis. I was probably in the National Cathedral about a week before MLK gave his final Sunday sermon there just days before he died. (I've been digging around in old scrapbooks and memory books today, and I found a ticket stub from Ford's Theater dated March 23, 1968.) There were fires and looting and race-related violence in the aftermath in Washington, not to mention, a bit later, Resurrection City in the backyard of the White House. And while that was still going on, the assassination of Robert Kennedy and his funeral. It never registered with me on a personal level until now that these things were happening in places I had so recently visited --the Mall, the White House, the National Cathedral, Arlington National Cemetery. The book is very well written, in what the author terms a "novelistic" style, without too much attribution or reference to sources in the body of the text. There is an extensive section of notes, however, and the author's references are thoroughly documented. I am now quite interested in reading more by Hampton Sides, who goes on my list of favorite non-fiction authors, along with Shelby Foote and David McCullough.
March 2017 show less

Forget about spoilers. Hampton Sides has done the seemingly impossible: created a heart-pounding, electrifying account of the stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 and the manhunt for his killer. But everyone knows the outcome. King was shot dead by James Earl Ray who was arrested several weeks later in London’s Heathrow Airport. Everybody knows that. So how exactly did Sides keep the suspense ratcheted up until the very last page? This is a true crime story like no other.

I’m still fairly numb from reading this driving narrative non-fiction of a time I remember very well. Sides did a superb job of getting at the psychology of the man found guilty of killing the African-American icon. Throughout the book, James Earl Ray appears show more to be a cypher, a non-entity. As the narrative opens, the prisoner who escapes underneath a truckload of bread is only identified as prisoner 416-J. From then on, we only know him by the many assumed names he goes by for the next year. We never see the name James Earl Ray until close to the end of the book. By doing this I think Sides has managed to show what an insignificant being this man was, shrewd one moment and horrendously stupid the next. After escaping he wanders from Missouri through the American South to Mexico and California, with no visible means of support, before returning a year later to Alabama/Georgia and Memphis where he stalks King. Along the way, we get to not know a guy who says very little, gets to know no one and has an unending supply of funds. He manages to stay in one sleazy motel room or flophouse after another. He’s drawn to the seamy side of life but doesn’t really fit in there either, in his neat suit coat, white shirt and tie.

Sides alternates this compelling narrative with descriptions of King’s frustrations with the pace of the civil rights movement and dissension within the ranks, his vitriolic disagreements with President Lyndon Johnson’s spending on the Viet Nam War while poverty runs rampant in the U.S., and J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance of King’s activities and his visceral hatred of King.

Once Ray commits the crime for which he initiated the greatest FBI manhunt in history, Sides highlights his every move, his apparent mistakes, his flight to Atlanta, Detroit, Windsor, Toronto, London, Portugal and his final apprehension by Scotland Yard at Heathrow where he is trying to board a plane for Brussels so he can eventually escape to Rhodesia, which has both apartheid and no extradition policy. At no time does the suspense let up---the driving narrative is palpable.

Hampton Sides apparently does not buy any of the conspiracy theories out there but his narrative did bring up some questions. Where was Ray getting all the money he needed to survive? Someone must have been helping him. Who? How does a man shoot a high-powered rifle, that he purchased just a couple of days before King was shot, with deadly accuracy, while standing in a cramped bathtub in a rooming house? And if the FBI was keeping King under surveillance, as has been documented, where were they while King was being stalked? But this book doesn’t address those questions. It just sits in Ray’s back pocket and follows along and oh my, what a ride it is. Highly recommended. show less

Ask most people "Who is Eric Starvo Galt?" and you will receive a not unexpected blank look. But mention James Earl Ray and you will receive a much different reaction.
This book chronicles the interwoven lives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Earl Ray during the few months prior to Dr. King's assassination, through the heinous act itself, until Ray is finally hunted down and brought to justice.
I have to commend the author for neither deifying Dr. King; nor stereotyping Mr. Ray. Chapters alternate throughout the book, telling the different stories as they happened. I thought the story was even handed and fair throughout. Well researched and documented, even though I am aware of what transpired, I still found myself turning the show more pages as if this was a thrilling novel.
My feelings are best summed up by the following exchange between Andrew Young and Dexter King, Dr. King's seven year old son."Uncle Andy, this man didn't know our Daddy, did he?" speaking of King's killer. "Why do you say that?" Young asked. "Because if he had, he wouldn't have shot him. He was just an ignorant man who didn't know any better." Out of the mouth of babes...
A fascinating inside look into one of America's darkest hours and the struggle to provide some measure of closure to an act that had the potential to turn America's racial struggle into a full blown civil war. show less

Everyone knows how Martin Luther King died but this book grabs and holds our interest with a mystery that remains unsolved: who was James Earl Ray and why did he do it? Hampton Sides reveals Ray to be a contradictory multifaceted figure. A little crazy, possibly conspiratorial, and a sad American archetype. Overall this was a fantastic book, cleverly structured and told with novelistic detail and pacing, Sides is a master craftsman, it's a nearly perfect book. Recommend it highly, it's more than just a true crime story, it shows MLK in an intimate light as a normal human being, flaws and all, which makes his death that much more immediate and real, and not a remote historical event.

This book is one of the few definitive works on the assassination of Martin Luther King. One of its predecessors, Gerald Posner's Killing the Dream debunks claims that King's murder was the result of an elaborate conspiracy. Hampton Sides' Hellhound... gives the backstory into who (the assassin) James Ray was, what motivated him, how he planned and carried out the murder, and how he managed to evade capture for the two months afterwards.

The book carefully traces the events leading up to the assassination -- the weeks during which the Rev. King traveled from city to city, struggling to maintain the commitment of the civil rights movement to non- violence, while Ray stalked his intended victim, culminating in that tragic day in Memphis. show more Following the murder, Ray (under the name Eric Galt) barely manages to elude the city police, and what results is the most massive manhunt in US history. Piece by piece the FBI builds its file, follows Ray to Canada, and finally to England, where he is captured by Scotland Yard. Although some argued the FBI did not pursue the case aggressively, such claims get absolutely no support here. In Sides' account, the search for the killer involved thousands of agents, multiple countries, and every investigative resource that could be brought to bear. Ray himself gets much attention, and he fits the mold we Americans have come to know well -- uneducated, unintelligent, a loner, a petty criminal who is in and out of prison -- yet to my mind (as a reader) he remains an enigma. The question of where he got the money to survive during his desperate flight is not explicitly addressed; presumably Ray had enough saved from his previous criminal exploits.

Hampton Sides adopted a matter - of - fact journalistic style that sticks closely to the established facts. I am grateful that the author refused to use such devices as made- up dialogue, unwarranted speculation, and accounts of what the protagonist was (supposedly) thinking. The result is low key in tone but exciting in content. Endnotes to the book offer detailed documentation of the text. I doubt that this work will change the minds of conspiracy theorists (who, in Sides' words, believe that "every organization this side of the Boy Scouts of America was involved in King's death.") However, for readers interested in a detailed, responsible, and well- paced account of the assassination and its aftermath, they could hardly ask for more than this excellent book show less

In Hellhound on His Trail, Hampton Sides has written a history book that reads like a suspense/thriller novel. His story follows the assassination of Martin Luther King by James Earl Ray. More than four decades after the event, Sides brings to life the characters involved and the era in which it occurred. He meticulously researched many of the minutia known about both the assassin and his victim during the period immediately preceding the killing and the three months thereafter, the time it took the FBI and numerous other law enforcement agencies to locate and arrest the killer.

James Earl Ray was a loner, a loser, and an extreme racist who had spent much of his adult life in prison. He was also remarkably resourceful, streetwise, and show more canny. Moreover, he seemed preternaturally inconspicuous and unobtrusive. The narrative begins in spring of 1967 with Prisoner #00416-J (as he was then characterized) serving a term for armed robbery in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, a maximum-security facility. He accumulated some cash through trading in drugs and amphetamines, which were plentiful in the prison. He escaped by hiding scrunched up under and among some freshly baked loaves of bread that the prison bakery had sent out for delivery to the ostensibly trustworthy prisoners working outside the prison walls. He was resourceful enough to escape to Mexico without leaving a trace. He returned to the United States in November 1967, taking a large cache of marijuana, assumed the alias of Eric S. Galt, and blended into an underworld of cheap hotel and rooming houses. He was someone no one ever noticed.

Martin Luther King was internationally famous for his work in breaking down the legal barriers of Jim Crow legislation in the South through non-violent protest. King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and had led a protest march to Washington where he delivered his “I have a dream” speech, a paean to racial justice. But by late autumn 1967, his career was decidedly on a downward trend. Black leaders impatient with the slow pace of reform, like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown, had captured the imagination of many disaffected black citizens, and had incited numerous urban riots. Moreover King’s well-defined goal of abolishing discriminatory legislation and government regulation had been achieved, at least theoretically. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been enacted, negating most of Jim Crow legislation through federal preemption.

With the passage of these laws, King then turned his energy to ameliorating the lot of the poor of all races, and not just that of poor blacks. That decision did not sit well with all his entourage. Nevertheless, King turned toward organizing another march on Washington to be called the Poor People’s Campaign, this one with the laudable goal of eradicating poverty, but with little idea of how that could be accomplished and with no specific proposals toward achieving the goal.

By this time, King was considered to be a thorn in the side of President Lyndon Johnson, but was hated by the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover thought King was a communist, and was particularly concerned about King’s proposed mass gathering of poor people in a tent city in the Capitol. The FBI conducted a campaign of spying on King. Although it uncovered some of King’s sexual escapades and leaked them to the press (not to mention, to his wife Coretta), nothing seemed to come of the disclosures, which the press self-censored. It was clearly a different era in journalism.

On February 1, 1968, a horrible accident causing the grizzly death of two black men working as garbage collectors in Memphis, Tennessee set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in King’s assassination. The two men were seeking shelter from some rain when the garbage truck on which they were working malfunctioned, caught both of them in its maw, pulled them into its grinding mechanism, and literally crushed them both. Their deaths triggered the formation of a labor union by the all black garbage collecting work force and an illegal strike (municipal workers were not permitted to unionize or to strike) to protest low wages and dangerous working conditions.

The city government resisted the strike vigorously, if legalistically. Substitute workers were hired, but not enough to prevent the garbage from accumulating throughout the city. The strike attracted the attention of national labor and civil rights leaders, including James Lawson, a friend of MLK. Lawson persuaded King to lead a march in Memphis. The march was organized independently of King’s organization. Without King’s leadership and discipline over young hot heads, however, the march turned into a riot of looting and vandalism. King was discredited and very embarrassed. King’s second trip to Memphis was much more successful than the first, since he and his organization were able to arrange a dignified non-violent protest march.

Sides’ narrative intersperses Galt/Ray’s peregrinations with King’s preparation for the Poor People’s Campaign. Galt became obsessed with the possibility of killing King, following his travels closely through the press. Galt learned King would return to Memphis and that he would be staying at the Lorraine motel, a black-owned enterprise. Galt rented a room in a cheap boarding house that provided him a second story view of the Lorraine’s balcony and courtyard. He purchased a high power hunting rifle, a powerful optical scope, and soft-tipped ammunition. He knew little about guns, but said he needed a deadly weapon because he would be hunting large game.

King was basking in the aura of a successful march and standing on his balcony waiting for others in his entourage to join him for dinner. Galt fire one shot, hitting King in the jaw. The soft-tipped bullet then careened through his throat and into his shoulder. King died shortly thereafter in a hospital operating room.

Several anecdotes add poignancy to the aftermath of the assassination. King had spent his last night with Georgia Davis, one of his mistresses. She attempted to get into the ambulance to accompany King to the hospital, but Andrew Young avoided some bad press by touching her shoulder and saying, “Georgia, I don’t think you want to do that.” Jesse Jackson smeared his shirt with King’s blood and tried to claim he was the last person to speak to King. Others in King’s immediate circle strongly admonished him for grandstanding.

King’s closest friends and successor, Ralph Abernathy, tried to carry on his legacy by completing the Poor People’s Campaign, which proved to be a disaster without King. Tens of thousands of people erected a tent city on the National Mall, but milled aimlessly for weeks, accomplishing little but incurring the ire of the national government and alienating many white former sympathizers.

The final one-fifth of the book covers Galt’s escape, his travel to Canada, England, Portugal, and back to England, where he was finally captured after the most exhaustive manhunt in history. He had sought to get to South Africa, where he thought the apartheid government might welcome him as a hero, or at least not extradite him.

The author shows how the FBI changed over night from trying to discredit King to trying to catch his killer. Much of the credit must go to Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who may have hated Hoover as much as Hoover hated King. It was only through extremely arduous and thorough police work that Galt was identified as James Earl Ray and located at London’s Heathrow Airport.

Evaluation: The book is fast paced, well-written, very detailed, and thoroughly researched. It manages to describe events without much speculation, basing its assertions on the testimony of the participants, particularly of the killer. The description of the police-FBI investigation reads like a crime thriller. Other reviewers have observed that it contains little that had not been written before, but it provides a sometimes heart-pounding refresher for people like me who have forgotten many of the details of forty years ago.

(JAB) show less