Imus Would Like Hampton Sides by His Side at All Times

After waiting for what felt like a lifetime to speak with Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail, the day finally arrived for Imus to ask his guest who killed Martin Luther King, Jr. 

“He goes by various names: Eric Galt, Harvey Lowmeyer, John Willard, Ramon Sneyd, Paul Bridgeman,” said Sides. “But he’s more famously known as James Earl Ray.”

Sides began this project thinking Ray had been part of a vast conspiracy, which is what he’d always heard growing up in Memphis. “As I got into the evidence, it became pretty clear to me he did it,” Sides said of Ray. “He bought the weapon, he bought the scope, he bought the ammo, he bought those binoculars right before the assassination, and he left the scene of the crime one minute after in the getaway car that everyone describes.”

Imus was armed himself this morning, but with notes, a rare and uncharacteristic event. First, he asked Sides to talk about Vince Hughes, the police dispatcher on duty on April 4, 1968, the day King was murdered.

“He’s devoted his entire retirement to collecting everything, digitizing everything to do with the assassination: Royal Canadian Mounted Police documents, Interpol, Scotland Yard, Memphis police, FBI, photographs, recordings, video, you name it,” said Sides, who called Hughes’s stash of 20,000 documents “my ace in the hole.”

Like Sides, Hughes believes Ray shot King. “But I leave a lot of doors open about what sort of help he may have had along the way, who might have been aiding and abetting him, who might have been helping with aliases,” said Sides. “The biggest question is: who was paying for all his travels?”

Ray, whom Sides called “an oddball,” was a career criminal who escaped in April of 1967 from the Missouri State Penitentiary, where was serving time for armed robbery. As far as anybody knows, he had never before committed murder.

In the year between his escape and King’s killing, Ray did “a variety of things,” said Sides. He traveled to Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, and Birmingham, Alabama, where he bought a car and got a drivers license as Eric Galt, a name he borrowed from an actual person who lived in a Toronto suburb.

Though Ray wrote two books, testified for 18 hours to a House Select Committee, and gave numerous interviews, his account of events cannot be trusted. “He lies a lot, he changes his story a lot,” said Sides. “Many times in the narrative when he’s by himself, I have to say, ‘according to his memoirs, this is what he was doing.’”

Ray wound up in Los Angeles in March of 1968, the same time King was there giving a series of speeches, all of which were within a mile of Ray’s hotel. “On March 18, he goes down to his hotel, says he’s leaving,” Sides said. Ray also filed a change of address form with the post office, indicating an address in Atlanta, Georgia, King’s hometown. “He didn’t know anyone there, and starts driving east toward Atlanta,” Sides added.

Imus wondered about the actual shot Ray made from the famed rooming house to the Lorraine Motel balcony where King was shot. “It’s difficult to shoot a gun with a scope,” he told Sides, who believes Ray, a former Army man, had trained with that caliber weapon before.

Ray played what Sides called “a game with everyone, and with history,” and his motivation for assassinating King was difficult to define. “He confessed to the crime, he plea bargained, and three days later he recanted parts of his testimony,” said Sides.

Whether Ray’s version of events is true or not, he wasn’t the only person tracking King. In the famous photo taken moments after King was hit, there are a number of undercover cops pictured, along with King’s pals and fellow civil rights leaders Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy. Also on his trail was J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, who was tried to sink King’s career by getting word out of his numerous affairs with women.

Despite bogus accounts given by Jesse Jackson, King had no real last words. The bullet hit him in the jaw, severed his spinal column, and he never spoke again. Ray, on the other hand, was on the lam for a while, and almost got away. If not for an airport worker at Heathrow noticing he had two passports with him, Ray would have boarded a plane to Rhodesia, and perhaps disappeared forever.

Imus, of course, was easily fooled. “I was thinking, he’s going to get away!”

That’s how good this book is. Buy it. Now.

-Julie Kanfer