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."