DOORS BEGIN TO OPEN
Slowly, ever so slowly, light and truth are one,
I began to feel the resulting pain
It seemed to me that they had won.
In this system Justice cannot gain,
Irrefutable—without doubt.
Denied, nevertheless, an ageless story
Lies, false images they daily flout,
To control, Assert false glory
Erected upon a sand-based Mount.
In the TV trial’s aftermath, I began to focus on Loyd Jowers. I wanted to find a way to put on the record the evidence that we had uncovered about his involvement. I thought it would be sufficient to prove James’s innocence. To secure his freedom, we also needed to learn as much as possible about what Jowers knew to get to the bottom of the conspiracy in Memphis.
Wayne Chastain, a reporter with the Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1968 and later an attorney in Memphis, knew Jowers’s lawyer, Lewis Garrison. The two frequently discussed the case. Garrison, a man of formidable conscience, told Chastain that his client had dropped hints that he knew much more about the events of April 4 than anyone else and seemed to be looking for a way to open up.
Memphis private investigators Ken Herman and John Billings had worked for me on the television trial. Now they were acting on their own. Herman went to see Garrison about Jowers’s involvement in the killing. Garrison somehow learned we had unearthed evidence of Jowers’s involvement and told him not to say anything until a grant of immunity was obtained. He undertook an approach to the district attorney general to this end also on behalf of Jowers’s “heavy” Willie Akins, Betty Spates, Bobbi Smith, and James McCraw. I didn’t see how, apart from Jowers, any of the other clients could be charged with any crime. The statute of limitations had expired on any criminal acts committed after the crime.
Billings asked his next-door neighbor—black judge and founder of the National Civil Rights Museum, D’Army Bailey—to quietly ask the attorney general to review the request for immunity, which would shortly be submitted. I was annoyed that Herman and Billings had acted without instructions. They had a continuing legal and ethical responsibility to James, which derived from their association with his defense and myself as his lawyer. They had indirectly tipped off Jowers and Akins to what we knew, and it was quite possible they had put at risk already-fearful essential witnesses. If Betty and Bobbi knew that Jowers and Akins had become aware of their cooperation with us, we had little chance of convincing them to cooperate further.
I didn’t expect Attorney General Pierotti to approve the request for immunity since he and his office had long been closely associated with the official “solution” of the case. I had no involvement in Garrison’s request but was anxious for the truth to come out. It was obvious, however, that Jowers would not reveal what he knew unless some sort of satisfactory immunity or plea arrangement could be obtained.
Any number of plea-bargaining possibilities were open to the prosecutor and Garrison. I discovered an alternative route for obtaining immunity. A little-known Tennessee statute provision would allow us to sidestep the attorney general’s office and approach the grand jury directly and ask that body to hear evidence on the case. Garrison insisted on going the conventional route, believing the story was too big for Pierotti to suppress.
Garrison met with Pierotti on June 3 and laid out the request, stating that his unnamed clients wished to provide specific evidence pertaining to the killing of Dr. King in exchange for a grant of immunity from the state and federal governments. Pierotti asked Garrison for a brief statement outlining the evidence; Garrison submitted the formal written request on June 22, 1993.
Meanwhile bits and pieces of Jowers’s and Akins’s story began to be passed on to me, usually through Wayne Chastain, to whom Herman and eventually Lewis Garrison would talk. Supposedly, Frank Holt, a black produce truck unloader, was hired to do the shooting. We wanted him as a witness in our pretrial investigation, but Herman couldn’t locate him. Jowers also told Garrison that Frank Liberto had given him the contract to murder Dr. King, thus apparently independently confirming John McFerren’s story.
Jowers apparently acknowledged having seen James in the Grill on April 4 seated at a table with a dark-haired Latino. This jibed with James’s account of meeting with Raul on the afternoon of the killing. Jowers also indicated that the money for the contract came from New Orleans and was delivered to Memphis in an M. E. Carter Produce Company truck. Herman reported that Jowers had confirmed Betty’s story about the events of April 4 to the last detail.
There was no indication where and with whom the contact originated. Jowers may have only known local details of the killing, and he wouldn’t reveal all he knew until he was granted immunity. Akins, it emerged, only became involved with Jowers about a year after Dr. King was shot. While Jowers might have revealed information to him, he did not know him at the time of the killing.
Two and a half months after Garrison met with Pierotti, there was no sign that the attorney general was going to act or even that he was seriously considering Garrison’s request. I had, therefore, begun to think about ways of applying pressure in an attempt to force his hand.
On August 16, I wrote to him, informing him that I was aware of Garrison’s petition, calling on him to either grant or make a plea bargain arrangement with Jowers. I pointed out its potential impact, both in setting the record straight and in bringing about the release of a man who had been unjustly imprisoned for almost a quarter century. The attorney general tried to fob off the request. On September 8, he wrote that he couldn’t consider granting immunity until he had “evidence, which can be proven beyond reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.” On September 15, he even denied having anything to consider, saying he had not been presented with “any document requesting formal immunity in the case nor any summary of evidence that might cause [him] to consider immunity should such an application be made.” It became clear he had no intention of considering the request.
On October 4, at the request of Lewis Garrison and Ken Herman, Wayne Chastain met both men in Garrison’s office. Garrison gave him a copy of the actual request for immunity submitted to the attorney general on June 22. Despite Pierotti’s letter to me of September 15, the request was indeed a document asking for immunity containing a summary of the evidence on which it was based.
It stated that Jowers (designated as “Witness Green”) was approached before the assassination and offered money to locate a person to assassinate Dr. King. The funds would come from another city through a local person or persons. Jowers, who had close contact with some persons in the MPD, was advised that he was in a strategic location to assist and that Dr. King would be a guest at the Lorraine Motel from a certain date. Jowers was to be provided with a weapon. Jowers located a person to do the job, and funds were delivered to Jowers before the assassination in volumes of large bills. At the time of the shooting, Jowers was stationed close to the assassin, and once the shot was fired, the weapon was passed to Jowers who disassembled it and wrapped it in a covering. Jowers had been advised by other conspirators that there would be a decoy following the assassination.
Betty Spates (designated as “Witness Brown … a close acquaintance of Jowers”) would state that she was “within a few feet of the location where the shot was fired.” Betty would also testify that she saw Jowers with a rifle immediately after hearing the shot. She would state that previously she saw a large amount of money that had been delivered to Jowers. The money was in stacks of large-denomination bills. McCraw (“Witness Black”) stated that on the day after the killing, Jowers showed him the gun and told him it was the one used to assassinate Dr. King. Willie Akins (“Witness White”) would testify that he was asked, after the fact, by Jowers to take care of certain people “who knew too much.” Jowers told him he’d received the gun after the killing from the actual assassin.
Bobbi Smith (“Witness Gray”) would testify she was aware of the large amount of money paid to Jowers just before the assassination and that she had knowledge of other details about the actual killing. The submission ended with a formal request for immunity for all five people.
Jowers’s story, as summed up for Chastain by Garrison, was that he had agreed at the request of produce man Frank Liberto to hire a man to kill Dr. King on his last visit to Memphis, and that he was paid $1,000,000, which he passed on.
Since I had no doubt that the attorney general would continue to stonewall any action based upon this evidence, I had to take steps on behalf of James. I instructed Chastain as local counsel to approach the grand jury on James’s behalf. I planned to ask the grand jury to subpoena attorney Garrison, at which time, if he so chose, he could request immunity for his client(s) in exchange for their testimony. I also formally asked the governor’s counsel to ask the governor to hold off on issuing any ruling on our Motion for Exoneration since new evidence was forthcoming. I suggested that the governor could look foolish if he went ahead and ruled against us in light of information that would shortly be revealed.
We delayed our actual submission hoping to maximize the possibility of the members taking our submission seriously. Acting independently, we began briefing certain representatives of the American mass media.
By the beginning of December, I was increasingly frustrated. There was no progress on the request for immunity and the media were unwilling to take up the issue and consequently there was no public pressure. On Tuesday evening, December 7, I gave Wayne the go-ahead for the grand jury submission.
He was to deliver a letter and an affidavit to testify the next day. He rushed it in and, on his own initiative, attached the names and addresses of the people to be subpoenaed. I was concerned that we had provided Pierotti with the names of the witnesses and warned him any contact with these witnesses outside of the grand jury room would be closely scrutinized. Earlier, when Betty Spates had tried to come forward and get the truth out to clear James, she was visited unofficially in her home and, the record indicated, then called in officially and interrogated. Frightened off, it took twenty years for her to come around again.
I called Andrew Billen at the London Observer, one of England’s oldest and most reputable broadsheets. Initially skeptical, Billen had covered the TV trial and had a good working knowledge of the case. He was excited—so was his editor. Convinced that no American media entity would break the story, I gave the Observer the go-ahead.
I learned from a source that Jack Saltman, the Thames Television producer of The Trial of James Earl Ray, was talking to various people, trying to break the story and name the witnesses, whose names I had stipulated from the outset had to be confidential. I was appalled. It was clear that Ken Herman had been working with Saltman for some time and that they had made an arrangement. In confidence, I had disclosed the existence of the “security” witnesses and the nature of their testimony. I believed that my trust was being flouted. Such a disclosure was likely to drive all of the witnesses away, and James would be the loser.
I confronted Herman. Our relationship, which had been strained since the trial, was now severely damaged. I instructed Wayne to add the names of Ken Herman and Jack Saltman to the list of those persons to be subpoenaed.
The next day, Thursday, December 9, Wayne delivered the names directly to an attendant at the entrance to the grand jury room and waited. He was not called. On Friday, the attorney general and his number-two were closeted together and the local FBI Special Agent in Charge had also been in for meetings. Wayne’s request to appear before the grand jury was making them anxious. The pressure was building.
Next, I became specifically aware of and increasingly concerned about the “rogue” efforts of Herman and John Billings to locate the man, Frank Holt, whose name had surfaced as the possible shooter. We all believed that Holt was now in the Orlando area. I told them that I would go to Orlando to approach and personally interview Holt if he could be found. I also sent them formal notices asserting my attorney’s privilege, on behalf of James, over everything they knew or had connected with the case.
The Observer article was released around 10:00 p.m. on Saturday evening, and I fielded calls for a few hours. Around 2:00 a.m. Wayne called, saying that the London Sunday Times and the Commercial Appeal had called him. The Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted Pierotti as having denounced Garrison and me, calling the entire story a “fraud” or “scam.” On the morning the Observer hit the newsstands, I caught the flight to Orlando. We had an address for Holt, supplied by Buck Buchanan, an Orlando private investigator hired for the purpose.
Memphis investigator Cliff Dates met me in Orlando, and we went to 32 North Terry, a small transient boarding house. Herman and Billings were also chasing the story and had got there first. Later, as we drove around, we saw a gray Cadillac approaching. We both recognized Ken Herman in the back, sitting between a black man in a baseball cap and John Billings seated on the other side. I was hindered in my search for Frank Holt by having to spend part of the next two days (December 14 and 15) negotiating with the ABC Primetime Live producers. I had learned that Jack Saltman had sold the story and his counseling service to them.
I saw the program as potentially being useful to the effort to free James, but I was afraid that they might name the witnesses. If Betty and Bobbi were named without their consent and before their statements could be heard in a courtroom, they would probably repudiate earlier statements or not discuss the matter at all. This, of course, is exactly what happened before.
I contacted the ABC producer. Eventually, he promised that only the witnesses they actually interviewed would be named. On the program, which aired nationwide on Thursday, December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray, saying that he did not shoot Dr. King but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $1,000,000 to facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a man named Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized.
Jowers’s “clean-up man” Willie Akins confirmed he was ordered to kill the unnamed “shooter” who ran off to Florida before he could “pop” him.
The producer’s promise was worthless. Betty had been surreptitiously filmed leaving her place of work. Though partially obscured, she was recognizable, and she was named.
The next morning I asked Cliff Dates to contact Betty. She was hurt, hostile, and blamed me. She didn’t realize that Herman and Saltman hadn’t worked with me for eight months. Since she wouldn’t talk to me, I sent her a letter explaining the facts.
The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast, there was no news coverage of the previous night’s program, not even on ABC. A small mention was made in USA Today and the Washington Post, which featured Pierotti’s new willingness to investigate the case further, though not to reopen it. Here was a confession, on prime time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.
I had concluded that the governor would not seriously consider the basis for the motion for exoneration. I filed a petition on James’s behalf seeking a trial on the basis of the new evidence discovered during the course of our investigation as well as the sensational public admissions of Loyd Jowers. On the night the program aired, John Billings, who was trying to keep lines of communication open, called to tell me that they had still not found Holt. When they found him, I would be the first to know. I just listened. Earlier that morning, I had learned it was all over Memphis that Holt was the person implicated in the killing.
I was scheduled to fly back to London on Friday, December 17. About an hour before the flight I learned that Dwight Lewis of the Nashville Tennessean newspaper had left a message on the office answering machine: they had found Frank Holt, and he wanted to get my reaction to Holt’s statement. My heart stopped. I called Lewis, who told me that two of the Tennessean’s reporters and a photographer had located Holt that day at the men’s homeless center on Central Boulevard in Orlando, one of the shelters where I had “hung out” earlier in the week. He would move from shelter to shelter—long stays were not allowed. He apparently said that he had been inside Jim’s Grill on the afternoon of April 4 but knew nothing about the assassination. The Tennessean had flown him to Nashville, where he took and passed a lie detector test.
The paper published a feature article on their interview of Frank Holt on Sunday December 19. That morning, I learned that Lewis had gone to the airport to put Holt on a plane bound for Orlando. I asked Buck Buchanan to meet the flight and offer Holt a temporary safe house. Though the Tennessean had not printed Holt’s address, his name and general location were public, and he had publicly refuted all allegations that he was the shooter. I thought his life might very well be in danger.
Buchanan met the plane, and Frank Holt accepted the offer of protection and temporary safe house accommodations until I could arrive to interview him on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Buchanan was contacted by the Tennessean and by investigators from Attorney General Pierotti’s office. He had left his name at the homeless center the previous week when searching for Holt, and both the newspaper and the Shelby County officials had become aware of his interest.
The prosecutor had had five witnesses under his nose for over six months and had made no move to interview them, yet the Tennessean’s story was not even two days old, and Pierotti had already sent a team to another state to search Buchanan out to, as he put it, “shoot full of holes” the story told by Loyd Jowers.
Buchanan met me on my arrival in Orlando on Wednesday, December 23, and we took Holt out to dinner. He was a generally placid, almost expressionless man, concerned about his safety, and wanting to leave the Orlando area. The next day, I interviewed Holt for four hours at my motel. Though I questioned him repeatedly, his story never varied. He said that he had left his home in Darling, Mississippi, in the mid-1950s and ended up in the Jacksonville area, which he had come to regard as a second home. In the early 1960s, he went to Memphis and eventually took a job at the M. E. Carter Produce Company as a driver’s helper, going on deliveries to towns in Arkansas and Mississippi. Occasionally, he would travel to New Orleans to bring back produce to Memphis. This was the job he was doing in 1968 at the time of the assassination.
He had the impression that Frank Liberto, who had his own produce business (LL&L) also, had some interest in M. E. Carter. Occasionally, he overheard conversations between Liberto and the “big wheels of M. E. Carter,” and on one occasion during the sanitation workers’ strike, he heard Liberto say, “King is a troublemaker, and he should be killed. If he is killed, then he will cause no more trouble.”
Holt said that he drank beer at Jim’s Grill two or three times a week. He recalled going upstairs in the rooming house to visit and drink beer with two friends: “Apple Booty” and Commodore. Apple Booty had worked the warehouse at M. E. Carter. The last time Holt remembered being upstairs in the rooming house was before Commodore moved, sometime before the shooting. From his description of the layout, it appeared clear that Commodore had occupied room 5-B, the room rented by James on the afternoon of April 4, under the name John Willard.
Holt said that on the day before the shooting, he had gone on a delivery run deep into Mississippi and did not return until late morning or early afternoon of the following day. When he reached Memphis, he made the rounds of a few bars and eventually ended up in Jim’s Grill late in the afternoon. To the best of his recollection, he was inside the Grill at the time of the shooting and could not explain the reference in the FBI report that he was passing the Grill on his way to work. He did not recall ever being interviewed by the police or FBI. This could have been explained by Holt’s own faulty memory, the passage of time, and/or alcohol abuse.
When asked why Loyd Jowers named him, he was puzzled. “He probably thought I was dead,” he said. Holt had left Memphis in late 1969. He had no interest in notoriety and abhorred being linked to the assassination. He seemed credible and a most unlikely assassin. That afternoon, he took another lie detector test and underwent hypnosis. Both the hypnotist and the polygraph concluded that Frank Holt was not involved in the crime. Late in the afternoon of December 23, I shook hands with Frank Holt and said good-bye. He had, I had told him, further assisted in clearing his name.
I returned to England believing that Jowers was lying about Holt’s involvement and was either covering up his own role as the shooter or was protecting someone else by implicating Holt. Even his claim that he had asked Akins to find Holt and kill him in 1974 was incredible. By that time, Holt had been gone from Memphis for five years.
In 1994, Jowers may have been constructing one of his self-protective stories, for around this time James was about to obtain a habeas corpus hearing. When threatened by events over the almost twenty-six-year history of this case, Jowers had always developed such stories. It would take time to discover why.
Breakthroughs: January–April 15, 1994
In an interview with the Tennessean on January 7, 1994, Attorney General Pierotti said that he was going to tell the grand jury to go ahead and listen to what Chastain had to say. The foreman, Herbert Robinson, said that even though Chastain “was a pain,” they would hear him sometime after January 18 when the new grand jury was formed. He was still waiting to be called in 1995. I found this appalling. When James pleaded guilty on March 10, 1969, the original prosecutor, Attorney General Canale, pledged on the record of that hearing that “if any evidence was ever presented that showed there was a conspiracy, [he] would take prompt and vigorous action in searching out and asking that an indictment be returned….”
Fortunately, we had already decided to proceed with filing a petition for trial. I flew to Nashville to meet James who was in good spirits and interested in the possibility of using the imminent petition to obtain declassification of relevant documents, files, and reports.
On Monday January 10, Wayne filed the petition for the trial along with five volumes of exhibits and two video exhibits. We then drove out to Jim Lawson’s old church, Centenary Methodist, where a press conference had been scheduled to call for an independent grand jury investigation. When we got there a number of participants, including Reverend Lawson, who had flown in from Los Angeles, had already arrived. I briefed the group, which included several prominent church leaders (among them, my dear friend and marital pastor, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, whom I had long regarded as one of the most articulate preachers in America), and we answered questions before the two-hour press conference. This focused on the group’s commitment that a grand jury should independently investigate the murder of Dr. King under the leadership of its own foreman and an independent prosecutor not associated in any way with the Shelby County district attorney general. All agreed that he couldn’t be regarded as an objective, impartial investigator.
We left the meeting feeling uplifted. Later that day, we learned that the petition had gone to the court of Judge Joe Brown, with the hearing scheduled for the following morning. When we arrived at the Criminal Justice Center, television cameras were already there. During the brief hearing, the judge raised the question of whether or not our petition could prevail because of prior decisions that had been reached on some of the issues, primarily related to overturning a plea of guilty. We argued that those prior decisions were made without the benefit of the new evidence we now sought to produce, which proved James’s actual innocence of the crime. The judge asked both sides to prepare memoranda of law on the issues, scheduling a hearing for April 4, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the assassination.
Early that afternoon we met John McFerren, who on April 4, 1968 had overheard Frank Liberto calling for Dr. King to be shot on the balcony and who promised that this time he would not “chicken out.” He recalled hearing from a local man, Tommy Wright, that on Saturday mornings Liberto would meet regularly with a high-level Tennessee state official at his law office in Fayette County. Alarm bells went off. James had found a government business card with the name Randy Rosenson scribbled on the back in the white Mustang before crossing the border from Mexico to California. Raul, who had paid for the car, kept a spare set of keys. Randy Rosenson had insisted that in 1978, around the time of his interviews by HSCA staff, he had been visited by the same high-level Tennessee state official who tried to get him to say that he had been acquainted with James Earl Ray. If Rosenson had known James, then he could have dropped the cigarette pack containing the card himself. If he didn’t know James, then someone else had to have left the pack and card behind. James had always stated that he believed the card was linked to Raul. The State and the HSCA had taken the position that Raul did not exist, so any evidence to the contrary had to be a problem for them.
The connection being alleged between Liberto and the official could explain why pressure was put on Rosenson to say that he knew James. McFerren said that another source of information was his lawyer from Jackson, Tennessee, Mr. H. Regan. He had told McFerren quietly, years ago, that the same state official “handled” matters and looked out for the interests of organized crime in Tennessee. Retired MPD Captain Tommy Smith confided that various senior officers of the department were regularly on the take back in 1968, but he didn’t know any details. He was out of the loop. He also said that the police officers who went to the FBI Academy—N. E. Zachary, Robert Cochran, Glyn King, and others—formed a special clique.
In late January, I was finally able to speak again with Betty Spates. She said that Jowers, Akins, and others were interested in doing a book or movie about the case. They wanted her to change her story to say she saw a black man handing the rifle to Loyd in the doorway of the kitchen seconds after the shooting. Willie Akins came around with a tape recorder and she was supposed to listen to help get her story straight. When she refused to go along with this farce, Akins told her that she had “blown it” for all of them. They could have split $300,000 if she had cooperated.
Betty totally refuted the story involving Frank Holt and strongly insisted, as before, that when she saw Jowers running toward the back door of Jim Grill’s kitchen, no one was with him. In mid-January, Betty told me that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had called and wanted to interview her. I advised her to meet with them and answer their questions truthfully. Over the last weekend of January, John Billings told me that he had learned that Pierotti had asked the FBI to conduct an investigation into the new Jowers evidence. He said that they had already spoken to McCraw, who was sticking to his story. Billings offered to be interviewed by the FBI, and Ken Herman was also willing to throw new light on the case. Billings was told that the attorney general would have to agree. The impression Billings received was that they wouldn’t be interviewed and that by using the FBI, Pierotti was distancing himself from direct responsibility for the investigation while still controlling the inquiry. They were never interviewed. I wrote to Pierotti offering any reasonable assistance to the FBI investigation of the new evidence. I told him James was interested in being released and not in solving the murder. If released, James intended to leave the country, but while he stayed inside, the investigation aimed at establishing his innocence would, of course, continue.
On March 7, 8, and 9, I spent a total of thirteen hours with Betty Spates. She agreed to tell me her story from the beginning, adding that she had been racking her brains, trying to remember each detail about what she observed on April 4, 1968. I met her in her darkened home on Roland Street. She told the story of her involvement with Jowers and the Grill as she had always told it, adding details. There were a few surprises, however, when she related the events of April 4, 1968.
Now Betty remembered going over to the Grill just before noon on that day and noticing that Loyd was nowhere around. Somewhat nervous, and always insecure in her interracial, extra-marital relationship with Jowers, she went back to the kitchen at the rear to look for him. The door was slightly ajar. She was only in the kitchen for a short time when Loyd came through the back door carrying a rifle. The gun had a fairly light brown stock and handle and a barrel that appeared to be of normal length; she did not remember seeing a scope. She said that Loyd did not appear to be in a hurry or under stress. He was almost nonchalant. She was startled and asked, “Loyd, what are you doing with that gun?”
He replied, half-jokingly, “I’m going to use it on you if I catch you with a nigger.”
She said, “Loyd, you know I wouldn’t do that.” He said he was only kidding, that she knew he’d never hurt her.
He put the gun down alongside a keg of beer and then, as though he had second thoughts, picked it up again, and proceeded to break it down in front of her. He carried the pieces through the Grill, went out the front door, and turned left, walking several feet to where his old brown station wagon was parked. As she watched through the window, he put the broken-down rifle into the back of the wagon, looking around afterward to see if anyone was watching. Then he came back inside. She confirmed that during the course of the afternoon, she was in and out of the Grill. Although Jowers always discouraged her from being around on Thursdays when his wife would drop by, that Thursday, he seemed especially ill at ease and kept chasing her out. That only made Betty more suspicious that he was cheating on her, and she was in the Grill when Jowers’s wife came in around 4:00 p.m. Mrs. Jowers walked straight up to her and called her a whore and told her to get out. Loyd intervened, telling his wife to get out herself and directing Betty to get behind the counter. Sullen and speechless, Loyd’s wife stalked out.
After a while, Betty went back across the street returning to the Grill to check on Loyd sometime before 6:00 p.m. She believed that Bobbi was still there. Loyd, however, was again nowhere in sight. Eventually, she went back toward the kitchen, noticing that this time the door between the restaurant section and the kitchen was tightly closed. Thinking that this was unusual, she made her way into the kitchen, where she noticed that the door leading to the backyard was ajar. Soon after she recalled hearing what sounded like a loud firecracker, and then within seconds, she looked out, and saw Jowers rushing from the brush area through the door carrying another rifle. When she first saw him, he was about ten to fifteen feet from the door. He was out of breath, she said, and white as a ghost. His hair was in disarray, and the knees of his trousers were wet and muddy as though he had been kneeling in the soggy grass or brush area.
When he caught his breath, he didn’t appear angry but plaintively said to her, “You wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt me, would you?”
Betty said, “Of course I wouldn’t, Loyd.” Without another word, he moved quickly to the door leading into the Grill which opened right next to the counter on the left. In one quick step, with the rifle at his side, he was behind the counter. She saw him break the rifle down, wrap it in a cloth, and put it on a shelf under the counter and push it farther back.
She remembered that the rifle was distinctive. It had a dark mahogany brown stock, a scope, and a short barrel that made the gun look like a toy. Something was screwed or fixed on to the barrel somehow, fitting over it and increasing its diameter.
In this statement, for the first time, Betty had spoken of two separate instances of seeing Loyd Jowers bringing a gun in from the brush area behind the kitchen. It was worrying that this was the first time she had mentioned a second gun. On the other hand, this account corroborated what McCraw had said all along about Jowers showing him the gun under the counter.
Betty went on to say that a few months after the killing in 1968, she was visited by three people who she believed were government officials. One was black, another white, and the third appeared to be Spanish or Latino. They offered her and her sisters new identities, relocation, and money, for “[their] own protection.” They refused, supported by their mother, and the men left. Two of the same men returned about five years later. (This would have been around the time that James was being given an evidentiary hearing in federal court.) The offer was repeated and again refused.
Jowers’s friend Willie Akins had acted aggressively toward Betty, firing at her and her two sons on one occasion and firing three shots into her sofa on another. She believed he was trying to frighten, not kill, her. Betty signed detailed affidavits in support of all of these events. When we filed Betty’s primary affidavit with the court, the Tennessean published its contents. Shortly afterwards, Attorney General Pierotti leaked a statement taken by the FBI on January 25 that we found distressing. In it, also purportedly under oath, Betty denied seeing Jowers with the rifle at 6:00 p.m. and further denied having any information supporting James’s innocence. When I asked Betty about it, she did not recall giving the specific answers recorded. She said they only asked her to respond to specific points in Ken Herman’s statement.
It did appear, however, that she had signed the FBI statement. I obtained a copy. The handwritten statement, dated January 25 1994, appeared to contradict the affidavit she had given me on March 8, 1994. However, she said she didn’t read it because her glasses were broken. It was read to her, and the investigator wrote as he asked her questions, telling her not to volunteer information but to simply answer questions. She said the men from the attorney general’s office and the FBI made her afraid. Betty went out of her way to assure me that she now wanted to testify and to clear her name of any hint of being a liar.
The April 4 hearing had been put off until April 15. Though the hearing was to focus on the law, I argued the law by substantially elaborating upon and applying the facts. This enabled me to put a long list of suppressed factual evidence and factual discrepancies on the record and, of course, to be heard by the judge and the media seated in the chairs normally occupied by the jury.
Pierotti spoke for about fifteen minutes as part of the state’s rebuttal argument and appeared to be agitated. At the end of the argument, the judge complimented both sides and then, referring to lengthy notes, stated that although the state might be technically correct, requiring him to deny the petition, nevertheless he was going to allow us to put forward evidence. This evidentiary record would be available to an appellate court, he said, as well as to history. In an impassioned reference to the importance of Dr. King, he said history compelled him to allow as much information as possible to be placed before the public under the auspices of his court. The state was stunned. Judge Brown said he would not finalize or file any judgment until after the submission of evidence was over. We were elated.