From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 319-323:
THE FBI REMAINED confident that the warrant they’d issued the previous day was correct, that Eric S. Galt was indeed their man. What they weren’t sure about was whether Eric Galt was really Eric Galt. The suspect clearly had a penchant for using multiple aliases, and Galt could very well be just another one. As Cartha DeLoach well knew, isolating a suspect was one thing; positively identifying him was something else again.
To that end, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake and his men at the crime lab had been methodically poring over the fingerprints found on various objects in the bundle, in the Mustang, and in the Atlanta rooming house and comparing them with select batches of prints on file at FBI headquarters. Bonebrake had considerably narrowed the search by concentrating on men under fifty and over twenty-one, but that still left some three million sets of prints to examine—an aneurysm-inducing chore that could take many months and still turn up nothing.
Hoover and DeLoach realized they had to figure out some other way to narrow the search. DeLoach hunkered down with other high-ranking officials and sifted through all the evidence gathered thus far. As they did, a clear pattern began to emerge: Galt, even before the assassination, seemed to be acting like a man on the run. “All the signs were there,” DeLoach said. “The aliases, the movement from one place to another, the reluctance to make friends, the caution, the restraint. Galt was behaving like an escaped convict trying to avoid detection.”
Thus an idea was born. DeLoach picked up the phone and called Bonebrake’s boss, Les Trotter, director of the FBI’s Identification Division for fingerprints. DeLoach later recalled the conversation in his memoirs. “Les, we have pretty good evidence that Galt is an escapee,” DeLoach said. “How many ‘Wanted’ notices do we currently have in our files?”
“About 53,000,” Trotter said.
DeLoach grimaced. “Well,” he said, “at least that’s better than three million.”
The task before them was clear: DeLoach wanted Bonebrake’s men to compare the “Galt” prints with the prints of all fifty-three thousand wanted fugitives. “You’ve got to put all your people on this,” DeLoach said.
“When do you want us to begin?” Trotter asked.
“How about today?”
The examiners began working in the late afternoon of April 18, exactly two weeks after the assassination. Additional experts from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Richmond hastened to Washington to assist in the round-the-clock effort. DeLoach said he didn’t need to remind them that “we’re under tremendous pressure, and that our cities are powder kegs.”
Bonebrake zeroed in on Galt’s left thumbprint found on both the rifle and the binoculars. It was their highest-quality print, the one that manifested a clear loop pattern with twelve ridge counts. To his pleasant surprise, Bonebrake learned that the FBI files of known fugitives held only nineteen hundred thumbprints with loops of between ten and fourteen ridge counts. This was encouraging: suddenly the monumentality of Bonebrake’s project had shrunk by several orders of magnitude. The teams of experts ranged around a table, facing a blowup poster of Galt’s thumbprint. They got out their magnifying glasses and went to work.
At 9:15 the next morning, April 19, Les Trotter called DeLoach. “We’re getting there,” Trotter said, noting that Bonebrake and his team hadn’t slept a wink and that they’d already plowed through more than five hundred sets of cards. “Give us just a little more time.”
“OK,” DeLoach said, and then ducked into a weekly meeting of FBI muckety-mucks led by Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s right-hand man. DeLoach was reluctant to tell Tolson the truth—that although countless specialists were hard at work and making progress, the investigation seemed to be momentarily stymied.
Several hours later, as the meeting was adjourning and DeLoach was gathering up his papers, the phone rang. It was Les Trotter on the line. “Deke,” he said, and already DeLoach thought he could detect a “note of triumph” in Trotter’s voice. There was a long pause, and then Trotter gloatingly said: “Tell the Director. We’ve got your man!”
“Are you sure?”
“No doubt about it. Bonebrake’s experts found an exact match just a few minutes ago, on the 702nd card.”
“I take it he’s not really Eric Galt. Or Lowmeyer. Or Willard.”
“Nope,” Trotter said. “His card number is 405,942G. The guy’s a habitual offender. Escaped last year from the state pen at Jeff City, Missouri. His name is James Earl Ray.”
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