Nation: The Man in Room 5

He was not a very methodical murderer. U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who descended on Memphis with 75 federal lawmen 14 hours after Martin Luther King was shot, said that the assassin had shed an "unsually large" amount of physical and psychological evidence.

In the frowzy—and unlocked—communal bathroom where the killer waited for more than an hour before he could fire the fatal shot, investigators found a handprint, a thumbprint and an expended casing from his rifle. On the street outside the rooming house, where he occupied Room 5 with a clear view of King's motel across the way, he dropped...