THE MOST WANTED MAN IN AMERICA

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31652, 11 April 1968, Page 15

THE MOST WANTED MAN IN AMERICA

(N.Z.PA.-Reuter—Copyright;

MEMPHIS, April 9.

The woman who rented him a dosshouse room remembers him as a neatly-dressed man with a silly smile. The American nation will remember him as the man who touched off violence throughout the country. Today he is the most wanted man in America.

He stood in a grimy bathtub, rested his

.30-06 rifle on a windowsill and, with a single shot, snuffed out the life of Dr Martin Luther King, the dedicated Negro leader.

The police say the assassin is probably between 26 and 32 years of age and has a white car. The Attorney-General (Mr Ramsey Clark), who was called in to help with the Investigation, says all evidence paints to his being "a loner.”

The authorities believe they have succeeded in identifying him by name. Whoever he was, the assassin had less than 24 hours in which complete his plan. It had been noted in local newspapers that Dr King would be stopping at the Lorraine, a hotel-motel, where he was

shot to death while strolling alone on the balcony of his room.

But this information was not enough. The Lorraine is a large complex, and the killer had to wait until he could learn which room Dr King had been given. This, presumably, would have left the assassin hardpressed for time to find a vantage point from which to shoot

The most striking fact is that the windows of the dosshouse which faces the Lorraine Hotel cannot be seen from the street a view of them is blocked by a high wall and some peach trees.

Easily visible from the street and more tempting to a sniper against the Lorraine are several other old hotels, from which the angle of fire would be no more difficult But the dosshouse windows are twice as dose. The assassin walked into the dosshouse nattily dressed, said he was "John Willard”

and paid foe hit room for a week with a crisp $2O bill. The only trace he left was an impression on the mattress on which he sat, perhaps for half an hour, probably looking out the window. Perhaps he decided he could get a better aim from the bathroom down the hall, for he went into the bathroom and locked the door, refusing to answer when someone pounded on it To fire the fatal shot he had to stand in the bathtub. He used a telescopic sight on his rifle, which was a powerful, well-made weapon, not a cheap, mail-order model. But it was a strange choice. Its pump action, experts say, would have cost him precious seconds if he had needed a second shot. After the kill he walked quickly, but calmly along the hallway and down the stairs into the late evening sunlight. His car was parked in front of the dosshouse. Normally he could have walked straight out of the door, with his rifle and his small blue bag, and stepped into his car. But another car had pulled up so close behind his that he could not squeeze through. He would have to walk around the second car, in which there were people. So he turned left, and when he did he may have seen the three police cars up the street. He dodged into a shop doorway and paused beside a dusty display of old gramophone records. From inside the store. Guy Canipe saw him. “I saw him drop the rifle, but I didn’t go out,” he said. “If you have seen a man drop a rifle in your doorway, what would you have done?” The killer deposited the rifle and the bag in the doorway and, empty-handed, went back to his car and drove away. Several hundred Federal agents and Memphis detectives have been working on the case, but what other evidence they have gathered remains secret. A reward of SUSIOO.OOO has been offered for information of the killer’s whereabouts.