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Loyd Jowers
Loyd Jowers (November 20, 1926 – May 20, 2000) was an American restaurateur and the owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. For the first 25 years after the assassination of King, Jowers testified that he was in the restaurant at the time of the assassination, a fact supported by the other witnesses in the restaurant.
In 1993, Jowers appeared on the ABC News program Prime Time Live and claimed to have been part of an alleged conspiracy involving the Mafia and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson to kill King. According to Jowers, the alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, was a scapegoat, and was not the only person responsible for assassinating King. Jowers named a number of different people as the alleged assassins, including a black man who was in the area and an unidentified person, before later saying that he had hired Memphis police Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the fatal shot. A civil trial in Memphis in 1999 supported this claim, while not having been shown existing evidence of Jowers' contradictions. In June 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report denying allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King.
In a 1993 episode of ABC's Primetime Live, Jowers told reporter Sam Donaldson that he hired someone to kill King as a favor to a friend in the mafia, produce merchant Frank Liberto. Jowers said Liberto, who had died prior to the ABC interview, had paid him $100,000 to arrange the assassination. He did not name the person he claimed to have hired, but said it was not Ray.
In 1998, the King family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators" for the murder of King. The King family was represented by attorney William Pepper, who had previously served as the attorney of James Earl Ray, King's formerly accused assassin, in a televised, mock trial. According to The Washington Post, Pepper had "for years claimed the assassination was the result of a vast conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA and the Army, organized crime and various state and local officials." After four weeks of testimony which involved over 70 witnesses and thousands of pages of new evidence, a Memphis jury unanimously found, on December 8, 1999, that Jowers was part of a conspiracy to kill King, and that the assassination plot also involved "others, including governmental agencies."
At a press conference following the verdict, Coretta Scott King stated that "there is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. ... the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame."
Following statements by Dexter King and other family members, Dexter was subsequently told by a reporter that "there are many people out there who feel that as long as these conspirators remain nameless and faceless there is no true closure, and no justice." He replied:
No, he [Mr. Lloyd Jowers] named the shooter. The shooter was the Memphis Police Department Officer, Lt. Earl Clark who he named as the killer. Once again, beyond that you had credible witnesses that named members of a Special Forces team who didn't have to act because the contract killer succeeded, with plausible denial, a Mafia contracted killer.
The Memphis county prosecutor said on several occasions that Jowers' claims were without merit and that he was motivated to sell his story for a book or a movie. Ray's lawyer claimed two sisters who worked at Jowers' restaurant would corroborate Jowers' claim, but both recanted their stories. One sister said that Jowers had fabricated the story so he could make $300,000 from selling the story; she in turn corroborated his story in order to obtain money to pay her taxes. In a telephone conversation taped by authorities, Jowers' main witness stated that his story was false.
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Loyd Jowers
Loyd Jowers (November 20, 1926 – May 20, 2000) was an American restaurateur and the owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. For the first 25 years after the assassination of King, Jowers testified that he was in the restaurant at the time of the assassination, a fact supported by the other witnesses in the restaurant.
In 1993, Jowers appeared on the ABC News program Prime Time Live and claimed to have been part of an alleged conspiracy involving the Mafia and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson to kill King. According to Jowers, the alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, was a scapegoat, and was not the only person responsible for assassinating King. Jowers named a number of different people as the alleged assassins, including a black man who was in the area and an unidentified person, before later saying that he had hired Memphis police Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the fatal shot. A civil trial in Memphis in 1999 supported this claim, while not having been shown existing evidence of Jowers' contradictions. In June 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report denying allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King.
In a 1993 episode of ABC's Primetime Live, Jowers told reporter Sam Donaldson that he hired someone to kill King as a favor to a friend in the mafia, produce merchant Frank Liberto. Jowers said Liberto, who had died prior to the ABC interview, had paid him $100,000 to arrange the assassination. He did not name the person he claimed to have hired, but said it was not Ray.
In 1998, the King family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators" for the murder of King. The King family was represented by attorney William Pepper, who had previously served as the attorney of James Earl Ray, King's formerly accused assassin, in a televised, mock trial. According to The Washington Post, Pepper had "for years claimed the assassination was the result of a vast conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA and the Army, organized crime and various state and local officials." After four weeks of testimony which involved over 70 witnesses and thousands of pages of new evidence, a Memphis jury unanimously found, on December 8, 1999, that Jowers was part of a conspiracy to kill King, and that the assassination plot also involved "others, including governmental agencies."
At a press conference following the verdict, Coretta Scott King stated that "there is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. ... the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame."
Following statements by Dexter King and other family members, Dexter was subsequently told by a reporter that "there are many people out there who feel that as long as these conspirators remain nameless and faceless there is no true closure, and no justice." He replied:
No, he [Mr. Lloyd Jowers] named the shooter. The shooter was the Memphis Police Department Officer, Lt. Earl Clark who he named as the killer. Once again, beyond that you had credible witnesses that named members of a Special Forces team who didn't have to act because the contract killer succeeded, with plausible denial, a Mafia contracted killer.
The Memphis county prosecutor said on several occasions that Jowers' claims were without merit and that he was motivated to sell his story for a book or a movie. Ray's lawyer claimed two sisters who worked at Jowers' restaurant would corroborate Jowers' claim, but both recanted their stories. One sister said that Jowers had fabricated the story so he could make $300,000 from selling the story; she in turn corroborated his story in order to obtain money to pay her taxes. In a telephone conversation taped by authorities, Jowers' main witness stated that his story was false.