police officials made press statements. A Tactical Patrol Force Captain, Harry Kaiser, said no
unusual occurrences had been noted, and he anticipated no trouble. Deputy Police
Commissioner Walter Arm said that "hundreds" of extra policemen would be put into the Harlem
area, including some members of the Bureau of Special Services. An Assistant Chief Inspector,
Harry Taylor, speculated that the assassins had not rushed from the ballroom among the crowd,
but had kept running past the stage and escaped on 165th Street. In the early evening, thepolice
department's Chief of Detectives Philip J. Walsh quit a vacation he was on to join the hunt for the
killers, and he said he looked forward to "a long-drawn-out investigation." Police and reporters at
the shooting scene had pictures taken of the stage, with white chalk marks now circling five bullet
holes in the speaker's stand; there were other holes in the stage's mural backdrop, indicating
slugs or shotgun pellets which had either missed Malcolm X or passed through him. Police
declined to discuss a rumor sweeping Harlem that they had some motion pictures which had
been taken in the Audubon Ballroom as the murder took place. Another rumor that gained swift
momentum was that when Sister Betty had leaned over her husband's body, she had removed
from his coat pocket a paper on which he had written the names of those he had supposedly
learned were assigned to execute him.
Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm stressed that the department had made efforts to
protect Malcolm X. Twenty different times the department had offered protection to Malcolm X or
to some of his assistants, and the protection was refused, said Commissioner Arm, and
seventeen times uniformed police guards had been offered for the OAAU meetings at the
Audubon Ballroom, the most recent time being "last Sunday." Asked about the pistol permit that
Malcolm X had said publicly he planned to request, Commissioner Arm said that as far as he
knew, Malcolm X had never actually filed a request.
A number of questions have been raised. The "suspect" arrested by Patrolman Hoy as he was
being chased from the meeting has, at present writing, not been identified publicly. Deputy Police
Commissioner Walter Arm's statement that Malcolm X refused police protection conflicts directly
with the statements of many of his associates that during the week preceding his assassination
Malcolm X complained repeatedly that the police would not take his requests for protection
seriously. Finally, although police sources said that a special detail of twenty men had been
assigned to the meeting and that it had even been attended by agents of the Bureau of Special
Services, these men were nowherein evidence during or after the assassination, and Talmadge
Hayer, rescued from the crowd and arrested as a suspect immediately after the assassination,
was picked up by two patrolmen in a squad car cruising by.
On long-distance telephones, reporters reached the Chicago mansion headquarters of Elijah
Muhammad. He would not come to the telephone, but a spokesman of his said that Muhammad
"has no comment today, but he might have something to say tomorrow." No statement could be
obtained either from Malcolm X's oldest brother, Wilfred X, the Black Muslim minister of Mosque
Number 1 in Detroit. At his home, a woman told reporters that Minister Wilfred X was not there,
that he had not gone to New York, and she didn't believe he had any plans to do so. (Minister
Wilfred X, reached later, said that he anticipated attending the Black Muslim convention in
Chicago on the following Sunday, and regarding his brother, "My brother is dead and there is
nothing we can do to bring him back.")
As dark fell, many Negro men and women assembled before Louis Michaux's bookstore, where
most of Harlem's Black Nationalist public activity centered. A small group of OAAU members
opened their Hotel Theresa headquarters and sat in the room and would not make any
statements to reporters.
The New York Daily News came onto the newsstands with its cover page devoted to "Malcolm
X Murdered" over the photograph of him being borne away on the stretcher, and a sub-caption,
"Gunned Down at Rally." In Long Island, where she had been taken just after her father's murder,
six-year-old At-tallah carefully wrote a letter to him, "Dear Daddy, I love you so. O dear, O dear, I
wish you wasn't dead."
The body-still listed as "John Doe" because it had not yet been formally identified-had been