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In early May 1967, three hundred miles downstream from St.

and the International Hunt for His Assassin

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. But if he hadn't done that, he would have been caught immediately with the weapons in his arms.

Everything needed to solve that case was in the bundle with the weapons and various other belongings that he had there. "He had to do a very impulsive thing: He ditched the weapon. "He ran down the stairs, took a left and turned - and he was running toward his car, which was a white Mustang parked on the street, when he saw some policemen," Sides explains. Within seconds, Memphis police officers were on the scene, trying to determine who had killed King. "It became pretty clear that's where the shot came from." The screen had been jimmied from the groove, and there was a palm print on the wall, and various people in the flophouse heard a shot coming from that bathroom," Sides says. "After the assassination, the police found that the window in the bathroom had been jerked up 5 inches. Instead, he went down the hall to a filthy communal bathroom, where he could see King's balcony if he leaned out the window. From the room he rented, there was no direct line of sight onto the balcony where King was shot. Ray checked into a flophouse across the street from the Lorraine. "It's actually extraordinary how little security King had. He had no bodyguards, no entourage watching out for him," Sides says. "Not only that, but King had no security detail. Though it would be unheard of today, both King's location and his room number had been reported in the local media. It was public knowledge, Sides says, that King was staying at the Lorraine Hotel. In his new book, Hellhound on His Trail, Sides carefully weaves the movements of King's assassin, James Earl Ray, with those of King, who had traveled to Memphis to support sanitation workers on strike. and the International Hunt for His Assassinįour decades later, Sides, an editor-at-large for Outside magazine and the author of the historical books Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, has returned to the subject of King's assassination. Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr.