‘Hellhound’ traces killer’s path before, after King assassination

“Hellhound on his Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Manhunt for his Assassin” by Hampton Sides, $20.95

Hampton Sides’ last two bestsellers, 2002’s “Ghost Soldiers” and 2006’s “Blood and Thunder,” were based on epic-scale events, the bold rescue of American POWs from the Philippines during World War II and the conquest of the Old West.

Both had been well-chronicled, almost mythologized, in their day but had largely faded from popular view, leaving Sides with a broad canvas from which to work.

Sides has tackled a much tougher challenge with his latest nonfiction narrative. The canvas is still large, but only 42 years have passed since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was cut down on the balcony in front of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. The celluloid images are seared into the collective memory.

Forests have been cleared documenting the history of King, the civil rights movement, the assassination and the urban riots that followed as well as all of the 1960s memoirs and tangential histories of LBJ, the Vietnam War, J. Edgar Hoover. and the assassinations of JFK before and RFK after MLK.

To Sides’ considerable credit, he’s been able to craft an authoritative, engrossing narrative from such familiar, well-trod terrain. “Hellhound on his Trail” is heavily footnoted and thoroughly researched but executed with the pacing of a fine novel and a dash of top-notch police procedural.

Halfway through, the tragic twin story arcs of the grand civil rights leader and the amphetamine-popping, criminal drifter finally intersect in Sides’ native Memphis.

The most compelling part of “Hellhound” is Sides’ portrait of James Earl Ray and his meticulous re-creation of the killer’s zigzagging path to Memphis and beyond. Just 12 months before he put King in the crosshairs, Ray had escaped from a maximum-security prison in Missouri, drifting to Mexico under one of his dizzying array of aliases.

In and out of prisons most of his adult life, Ray was the product of a messy Illinois childhood, a shapeshifting cipher who rarely left an impression on people he encountered. (Sides drives this point home by referring to the assassin for the first 300-plus pages by his prisoner number or the fake names under which he was traveling. He only becomes James Earl Ray when law enforcement finally confirms his actual identity).

He was fastidious, almost vain, about his appearance, yet lived in squalid rooms and frequented filthy Mexican whorehouses. He was undoubtedly a racist.

He so admired Alabama Gov. George Wallace that, after his brief Mexican sojourn, Ray briefly volunteered for the segregationist’s presidential campaign in Southern California.

During his time on the lam in L.A., Ray also got a nose job, took cha-cha lessons, attended bartending school, inquired about locksmithing classes, dabbled in hypnotherapy and self-help psychology, and tried to break into the porn business as a director.

After the assassination, Ray moved with shocking ease from Memphis to Birmingham to Atlanta, where he picked up his dry cleaning and abandoned his beloved white Mustang before catching a Greyhound to Toronto. He hid for weeks in Canada, easily acquiring another identity before fleeing to Europe. His poorly conceived plan was to find safe haven as a mercenary in Ian Smith’s white supremacist Rhodesia.

Ray’s capture, after 65 days on the run, may have been the FBI’s finest moment. It was a monumental international achievement in a precomputer, pre-DNA era of shoe-leather policing and fingerprint analysis — and no small irony, Sides notes, given J. Edgar Hoover’s incessant red-baiting surveillance and obsessions over King’s extramarital peccadilloes.

In the months before he was slain, King, the modern prophet of non-violent protest, told several confidants he had been having premonitions of his violent demise. The conspiracy theorists won’t like it, but the tragedy that Sides has so ably captured is how a giant of American life was so quickly erased — and the course of history irreversibly altered — by a cretin as small as James Earl Ray.