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Police Procedural Tells of King Assassination
 Lynn Bonney - The Gazette
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August 07, 2010
April 4, 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. is shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. The murder sparks a manhunt for a mysterious gunman and captures the curiosity of a 6-year-old boy.
The boy, Hampton Sides, has returned to his childhood memories to explore the two men whose lives became linked on that April night: King and James Earl Ray. Sides’ account, “Hellhound on His Trail,” explores the assassination, the “pivotal moment in the place where I came from.” Drawing from a wide range of materials and original research, he recreates the pivotal moment that brought two utterly disparate men together — a bullet from a Remington Gamemaster rifle.
Sides’ has structured his book to let readers know Ray as others knew him, identifying him by the series of aliases he used before and after the assassination. Only when the killer is captured does the author call him by his real name.
Begin in April 1967 in Jefferson City, Mo., where Prisoner 00416-J escapes from Missouri State Penitentiary, hidden in a crate of bread. He is Eric Starvo Galt when he surfaces in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, photographing prostitutes and investigating career opportunities in the pornography industry. In Los Angeles, Galt volunteers for the presidential election campaign of George Wallace, the former Alabama governor whose divisive, segregationist philosophy foreshadows the disaffection of many conservatives today.
Galt reads self-help books, enrolls in bartending classes and frequents low-life bars and brothels. He dresses impeccably and undergoes plastic surgery to alter his nose. His goal is to be the kind of person nobody can describe. He succeeds so well that even the surgeon who performed the rhinoplasty can’t remember what he looked like.
Now John Willard, he leaves Los Angeles for the American South, passing through New Orleans, Atlanta, Selma, purchasing guns and staying in cheap motels and boarding houses. Eventually, he will reach Memphis, where King is making a visit to support striking garbage-workers.
Sides recreates mid-1960s Memphis, home of the Cotton Carnival, a tribute to the crop that had made a boomtown before it was displaced — in turn, displacing farmworkers to low-paying, often dangerous jobs in the city.
And he draws a picture of King as a man conscious that he was making history, a flawed hero with mistresses and marital conflict. Nevertheless, King’s dedication to the cause shines through, even if it does not impress J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI agents will rise above their director’s prejudice to track the killer.
That killer, now Raymon George Sneyd, is hiding in Canada before traveling to London. He hopes to make his way to Brussels, then to Portugal, then on to Angola, but his freedom ends at Heathrow Airport, where he is arrested by a Scotland Yard detective.
Sentenced to 99 years, James Earl Ray will make one more escape before being recaptured. Eventually he will die in prison.
Sides has written a police procedural, not unlike “Helter Skelter,” the story of the Manson family. He avoids conspiracy theories, although suggesting that Ray may have gotten help from his brothers along the way. The writing is clean and compelling and doesn’t get in the way of a narrative that proves again that some stories don’t need embellishment to capture the imagination. |
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