The Third King Tragedy

Famed as the place where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church attracts many visitors. No one paid much attention when a short, chunky black man wearing a tan suit and thick glasses slipped into a seat a few feet from the organ.

Mrs. Martin Luther King Sr., 69, wife of the pastor and mother of the slain civil rights leader, was playing. As the 500 worshipers bowed their heads for the Lord's Prayer, Marcus Wayne Chenault, 23, opened fire with two revolvers.

"I'm tired of all this!" he screamed.

"I'm taking over!" And he sprayed bullets wildly until both guns were empty.

He wounded three people, two of them --Mrs. King and Deacon Edward Boykin, 69--fatally.

"Nice Boy." Martin Luther King Sr., 74, was just entering the red brick church as his wife was shot. When he asked Chenault why he did it, the youth replied: "Because she was a Christian and all Christians are my enemies." The next day Chenault declared that his real name was "Servant Jacob." "I am a Hebrew," he said. "I was sent here on a purpose and it's partly accomplished."

Seeking the meaning of these remarks in Chenault's character and past, investigators found confusion and paradox. In the bluegrass country of Winchester, Ky., where he was raised, people remembered Wayne Chenault as quiet, easygoing and studious, a "nice boy" who had a newspaper route and attended Baptist church regularly with his devout parents. Later in Dayton, Ohio, where his father is now a chemical plant security guard, he was known as a clean-cut teen-ager who stayed out of trouble and was "always making people laugh."

After he entered Ohio State University in 1970, Chenault began to change. Recently he had come to be regarded as an oddball and a loner who had few friends and fewer dates. He was a junior majoring in education when he dropped out last December and began venting his increasingly eccentric views through a blaring loudspeaker propped in his second-floor window near the campus in Columbus. Until last week, however, no one took seriously his amplified boast that he was "the baddest ______________mother on the block."

Chenault's religious beliefs appeared to be a confused amalgam largely of his own devising. Said a Columbus neighbor, Denise Underwood, 20: "One week he was eating this because he wanted to be a Jew; then one week he wouldn't eat this because he wanted to be a Muslim." The core of his murky philosophy was hatred of Christianity. Probably central to his motivation was his sense of inadequacy and need for attention. Only two weeks before the killings he told a friend that he would soon "be all over the newspapers."

In Cincinnati last week law officers found a onetime bowling-alley maintenance man named Stephen Holiman, 68, who claimed to be Chenault's spiritual mentor. Holiman, a black, has devised a curbstone theology which holds that God is black, the ancient Israelites were black, and that today's blacks descend from the Old Testament's Jacob. He took credit for introducing Chenault to these ideas, as well as to his belief that black ministers are "liars" who rob their followers of "millions of dollars a year." In Chenault's Columbus apartment, police found a list of ten black churchmen and civil rights leaders, headed by Martin Luther King Sr. Not seeing him in church, Chenault may have picked King's wife as a substitute target. (Police also intend to question Chenault about the unsolved killings of two black ministers in Dayton in the past two months.)

Final Farewell. Death brought Alberta Christine Williams King more public attention than she had ever received in her lifetime. A shy woman, "Mama" King, or "Bunch" as her husband affectionately called her, stayed quietly in the background, but many friends called her the hidden force behind her crusading son and husband. "She sounded no trumpets to call attention to her greatness," said the Rev. L.V. Booth of Cincinnati's Zion Baptist Church at her funeral.

For Martin Luther King Sr., it was the third time in six years that he said a final farewell to a member of his family. A little more than a year after Martin Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, King's younger son, the Rev. A.D. Williams King, drowned in a swimming pool. "I'm not gonna quit and I'm not gonna be stopped," said "Daddy" King at the funeral. "We've got to carry on." Then, as he gazed at his wife's white casket he added softly, "So, Bunch, I'm coming on up home. I'll be home almost any time now."

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