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

Praise for Hampton Sidess

HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL

An authoritative, engrossing narrative. Thoroughly researched but executed with the pacing of a fine novel and a dash of top-notch police procedural. Meticulous.

The Miami Herald

Searing. A complex crime mystery that shifts the focus from Dr. King to his killer. Gripping.

The Wall Street Journal

As urgent a page-turner as any crime novela feat Sides accomplishes without sacrificing historical detail and insight.

St. Petersburg Times

Remarkable. A window on the passions and contradictions of an era a page-turner.

The Christian Science Monitor

A riveting re-creation of a tragedy. Through Sidess use of novelistic pacing, details and descriptions, he creates suspense that will propel readers through a slice of history.

USA Today

Enlightening a valuable contribution to the historical record [and] a memorable and persuasive portrait.

The Washington Post

Meticulously researched, reads like nothing so much as a novel creating plenty of plain old-fashioned suspense that makes the readers heart pound.

The Oregonian

Its as much thriller as history book and the compulsive story races along like a fugitive on the lam.

San Francisco Gate

Sidess meticulous yet driving account of Rays plot to murder King and the sixty-eight-day international manhunt that followed is in essence a true-crime story and a splendid specimen of the genrea genuine corker.

Salon

Remarkable journalism. Compulsively readable. [Sides] writes with a passion that resonates. Compelling.

The Dallas Morning News

A gripping drama of stalking and pursuit. Its as though we were eavesdropping on history.

New Statesman

Extraordinary remarkable journalism compulsively readable.

San Francisco Chronicle

Hellhound unfolds like a mysteryone read not for the ending but for all the missteps, gotchas and near misses along the way.

Time

The narrative races along, a deadly road trip heading to a disastrous conclusion. Has the pace and excitement of a classic thriller.

The Observer (London)

Exhaustively researched, fast-paced and at times minute-by-minute telling. To Sidess great credit, this is a feat of shoe-leather reporting and research. Astonishing briskly alive.

Austin American-Statesman

An epic of a kind, even a tragedy, in which one small mans hatreds light up a whole nations terrors. Racy, gripping brilliantly paced.

The Scotsman

Meticulous. A page-turner, and something more: It brings the disquiet of an era fully alive.

Bloomberg

A carefully researched and crisply written account. Sides crafts careful profiles of his major characters.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

[Sides] masterfully re-creates the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Though the outcome is clear, we are nonetheless raptand then devastated.

Time Out New York

Nailbitingly riveting.

Newsday

HAMPTON SIDES
HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL

A native of Memphis, Hampton Sides is an award-winning editor of Outside and the author of the bestselling histories Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, Anne, and their three sons.

Also by Hampton Sides

STOMPING GROUNDS
AMERICANA
GHOST SOLDIERS
BLOOD AND THUNDER

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2011

Copyright 2010, 2011 by Hampton Sides

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form as Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A portion of this work originally appeared in slightly different form in Memphis Magazine.

Photo credits: Title page, Henry Groskinsky/Getty Images; , Bettmann/CORBIS

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Sides, Hampton.
Hellhound on his trail / Hampton Sides.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 19291968Assassination. 2. Ray, James Earl, 19281998. I. Title.
E185.97.K5S534 2009
364.1524092dc22
2009043659

eISBN: 978-0-385-53319-5

Author photograph Gary Oakley

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

For McCall, Graham, and Griffin

The future looks bright

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws
at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . (1967)

And the days keep on worrying me
Theres a hellhound on my trail.

ROBERT JOHNSON (1937)

I was just a kid when it happenedsix years old, living in a rambling brick house on Cherry Road close by the Southern Railway. My father worked for the Memphis law firm that represented King when he came to town on behalf of the garbage workers, and I remember my dad rushing home that night, pouring a screwdriver or three, and talking with alarm about what had happened and what it meant for the city and the nation and the world. I remember the curfew, the wail of sirens, a line of soldiers with fixed bayonets. I remember seeing tanks for the first time. Mainly, I recall the fear in the adult voices coming over the radio and televisionthe undertow of panic, as it seemed to everyone that our city was ripping apart.

Four days after the assassination, Coretta Scott King arrived in Memphis, wearing her widows veil, and led the peaceful march her husband could not lead. For several miles, tens of thousands of mourners threaded through the somber downtown streets to city hall. Enveloped in the beautiful sadness, no one breathed a word. There was no shouting or picketing, not even a song. The only sound was leather on pavement.

All writers sooner or later go back to the place where they came from. With this book, I wanted to go back to the pivotal moment in the place where I came from. In April 1968, a killer rode into a city I know and love. He set himself up with a high-powered rifle a few blocks from the Mississippi River and took aim at history. The shock waves still emanate from room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, and continue to register across the globe. The Lorraine has become an international shrine, visited by the likes of the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela and the boys from U2a holy place. People come from all over the world to stand on the balcony where King stood, squinting in the humidity, surveying the sight lines of fate. They try to imagine what really happened, and what larger plots might have been stirring in the shadows.