30

The Confession

On December 16, 1993, sixty-seven-year-old Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, which had been beneath the South Main Street rooming house in Memphis, appeared on ABC’s Prime Time Live. He told cohost Sam Donaldson that he had been paid money to kill King and had hired a gunman to do it. Jowers named Frank Liberto, a deceased Memphis produce dealer who was long rumored to have had mob connections, as the moneyman.1 Hidden in shadows during the program, Jowers was a powerful witness, who despite the pleading of the ABC producers refused to say more. His attorney, Lewis Garrison, a personal injury and workers’ compensation lawyer with an affinity for loud checked suits, closed off further discussion—his client wanted immunity from prosecution before he said anything else.²

The Jowers “confession” had the apparent earmarks of authenticity. Many researchers of the case had long suspected that Liberto had some involvement in the assassination. John McFerren, a local civil rights worker, said he had heard Liberto, only an hour before the assassination, tell someone on the telephone, “Kill the son of a bitch on the balcony. Get the job done! You’ll get your five thousand.” Now Jowers had provided firsthand evidence tying Liberto to the King murder.

Moreover, Kenny Herman, William Pepper, John Billings, and Jack Saltman had worked hard to encourage Jowers to reveal information they thought he was withholding from their HBO mock trial. Pepper had already brought the Jowers information to the attention of the then district attorney general, John Pierotti. Billings was convinced that the investigative work he had done with Kenny Herman was a major breakthrough. “This isn’t just a theory,” he told a local newspaper. “We know beyond a doubt that James Earl Ray had nothing at all to do with the assassination.”3 Herman, meanwhile, had been looking for witnesses to corroborate Jowers’s story.

“Somebody had told me there were waitresses who had worked at Jim’s Grill and that I should try to talk to them,” Herman told the author. “When I interviewed Jowers before he went on television, he didn’t admit anything to me, but told me the names of the girls were Betty and Bobbie. I found Betty Spates. She was actually working across the street from Jim’s Grill, at a paper company. She was only sixteen then [1968], and had been Jowers’s lover. She told me that on the afternoon of the assassination, she had gone over to the restaurant to visit Jowers, and when she went into the kitchen he was on his knees and had a big gun, a long rifle with a flashlight on top of it, and he disassembled it in front of her. Then he said to her, ‘You won’t hurt me, will you?’”⁴

Spates told Herman that a week before the murder, she found something else in the kitchen. There were two stoves there, one used for cooking and one that was not used at all. Inside the second one was a box, two feet square and at least seven inches high. It was stuffed with money. “And she remembered there were no ones or fives,” says Herman.⁵

When Herman interviewed Bobbie, Betty’s sister, she remembered that the morning after the assassination, Jowers picked her up to drive her to work. She was a part-time waitress at his restaurant. “‘You missed everything,’ he told her,” says Herman. “Then he said he had found the gun used to kill King. But he never showed it to her.”⁶

The third witness Herman uncovered was a former taxi driver, James McCraw. “On his third or fourth interview,” recalls Herman, “McCraw said that after the assassination, Jowers had shown him a box that contained a gun. ‘That’s the gun that killed Martin Luther King,’ Jowers bragged.”⁷

Armed with this new revelation, Herman had driven to Martin, Tennessee, and confronted Jowers with the evidence he had gathered. Jowers denied any complicity and called McCraw and the others liars. It was not until the Prime Time Live interview that Jowers abandoned his denials and “confessed” he was part of the conspiracy.

Since that 1993 television appearance, Pepper and other new Ray lawyers, such as Memphians Jack McNeil and journalist turned attorney Wayne Chastain, have tried earnestly either to get the district attorney general to grant Jowers immunity from prosecution, or to get the grand jury to indict him. Both efforts have consistently failed.*

While the lawyers pushed the legal fronts, Herman and Saltman tried to sell Spates’s story of what she knew about Jowers. “For a while it looked like Fox was going for it,” says Herman. “We were all going to make a bundle, but after she talked to them it didn’t go anywhere.”⁸ In 1997, a few months after Dexter King, Martin’s son, had met with James Earl Ray and endorsed Ray’s innocence, Dexter also held a secret meeting with Jowers. The King family, relying largely on Pepper’s advice, came to believe that Jowers is one of the keys to unlocking the truth of what really happened on April 4, 1968.

The Jowers confession, however, is not nearly as straightforward as the story presented by Herman and Pepper. Jowers had first been interviewed at length by the Memphis police and the FBI starting on the afternoon of the assassination. The stories he told them are quite different from what he said to Prime Time Live. He originally said that on the day of the murder he arrived at Jim’s Grill around 3:50 P.M. A white Mustang with out-of-state license plates was parked in his usual parking space directly in front of the restaurant.⁹ (That was Ray’s car, shortly before he drove it away to buy binoculars.) After parking next to the Mustang, the forty-one-year-old Jowers went into the restaurant. There were a dozen men inside that he recognized, and one stranger, a white man, who was eating eggs and sausages. It was unusual to have a stranger in his out-of-the-way grill—most of the customers were local workers or residents.^†10

Jowers was standing at the cash register at 6:00 P.M. when he heard a loud noise. He said it sounded like it came from the rear of the building, possibly the kitchen.¹¹ Thinking that one of his skillets had fallen to the floor, he began walking toward the rear to see what had caused the noise.¹² When he reached the last booth in the small restaurant, he stopped and asked a regular patron, Harold Parker, if he had heard a noise. Then Jowers looked inside the kitchen door, saw nothing suspicious, and started back to the front of the restaurant. As he was walking toward the cash register, the stranger stopped him and asked for a beer. Jowers served him, and then continued toward the cash register. Then he looked outside and noticed the Mustang was gone. A moment later, a policeman, with his gun drawn, rushed inside Jim’s and ordered Jowers to lock the door and not to let anyone out until the police had arrived to take the names and addresses of everyone there.13 Jowers estimated that the policeman had appeared at the door only several minutes after he and the dozen customers had heard the loud noise.¹⁴

The next morning the same stranger reappeared and again asked for eggs and sausage. Jowers noticed he was well dressed and considered him “out of place” for the neighborhood.¹⁵ Therefore, he reported him to the police as a suspicious person, and the police arrested the stranger just as he left the restaurant.¹⁶

Jowers’s subsequent descriptions of that stranger should have been the first warning sign that there might be questions about his reliability as a witness. Ten months after the assassination, he told investigators for the district attorney general that the stranger had since become a “regular customer” and his name was Jim Sanders.¹⁷ Then he told Renfro Hays that he had not seen the stranger since the murder, and after looking at a photo lineup said it was actually Walter “Jack” Youngblood, a self-proclaimed adventurer who boasted of ties to the CIA.*¹⁸ Then, years later, Jowers told another researcher that he no longer thought the stranger was Youngblood.¹⁹ But when Pepper showed him photographs of Youngblood, Jowers again flip-flopped. “Yep, that’s him all right.”²⁰

Actually, the stranger’s arrest record is in the district attorney general’s files, and he was Gene Crawford, a drifter who turned out to have no connection to the case.²¹ He was released soon after his arrest. He did not even bear a resemblance to Jack Youngblood.

But even before the Youngblood identification became an issue with Jowers, the district attorney general’s office had learned, in early 1969, of a witness who not only insisted that Jowers was involved in the assassination, but also claimed to have seen Ray outside the rooming house at a time so close to the assassination that he could not possibly have gotten back inside in time to shoot King. A month before Ray pleaded guilty, the prosecutors sent investigators to interview the witness, who turned out to be none other than Betty Spates, then seventeen, the same person who popped up twenty-four years later with a different version of the Jowers story for Kenny Herman. At the time, prosecutors did not know that Spates was having an affair with Jowers. When they interviewed her on February 12, 1969, Spates admitted her claims about Jowers were a hoax, and claimed that she had been offered $5,000 by supporters of Dr. King to concoct the story because they did not believe Ray had shot King and wanted to force the prosecutors to expand the investigation.22 That temporarily closed the Jowers file for the district attorney general.*

Spates’s accusation, and her subsequent retraction, was never made public, and as a result, Jowers stayed out of the limelight in the assassination investigation. Early buffs such as Harold Weisberg and Mark Lane, who often made tenuous assertions about people only remotely connected to the case, barely mentioned Jowers in their books.^†23 The only other time he appeared in the case, prior to his sensational confession, was in October 1974, when he testified for Ray in the habeas corpus proceeding, saying that he personally knew Charlie Stephens was “pretty drunk” the day of the assassination and therefore might not be reliable.²⁴

However, when Pepper sent the new Jowers evidence to the district attorney general, John Pierotti, in late 1993, Pierotti decided it required a serious investigation.^‡ He appointed a small group within the office to investigate the claim, as well as other new evidence that Pepper and Herman had uncovered relating to the long-standing mystery of Raoul (see Chapter 31). Leading the special task force was John Campbell, a thirty-six-year-old assistant district attorney general. Campbell, a native Memphian who resembles a young James Caan, is a devout Catholic and family man, considered by his peers to be one of Memphis’s smartest prosecutors. With a rapid machine-gun style of talking, and dressed stylishly in double-breasted suits and an endless assortment of new shirts and ties, he reinvigorated the prosecution’s dormant investigation of the case. The best evidence that Campbell was serious in pursuing leads in the King murder was his request that Mark Glankler be assigned as his investigator. Glankler, whose father is one of the city’s premier attorneys, is a former member of Airborne Special Operations, and before joining the district attorney general’s office was a crime-scene detective for the nearby Germantown police. The then thirty-nine-year-old Glankler showed a natural affinity for investigative work, winning more merit citations in less time than anyone in department history.

“I didn’t know if there was a conspiracy or not in the King assassination,” says Glankler. “But I knew that once I was on board, I would do my damnedest to find out if there was anybody or anything out there that had not been found in the original investigation. My only charge from the general was to find the truth, whatever that happened to be.”25

Glankler, together with another investigator, Johnny Simmons, from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, began collecting background information. One of the first things they learned was something that Jowers did not tell Sam Donaldson on the ABC program: that he had actually provided Pepper and Herman the name of the assassin he hired—Frank Holt, a black man who had been a local laborer in Memphis in 1968.²⁶ Holt was supposed to have shot King from the thick foliage behind Jim’s Grill, and Jowers said he later disposed of the rifle. It turned out that Holt had been walking to Jim’s Grill when the assassination had occurred, and a policeman made him go inside and stay there after the murder. He was one of the dozen patrons from whom police later took names and addresses that same afternoon.²⁷ Now Jowers claimed Holt had been there because he had hired him to kill King. Jowers then said he had Willie Akins, a man who did some odd jobs for him, kill Holt.*²⁸

If Holt was dead, it was a safe name for Jowers to give, since no one would be able to test the reliability of his accusation. Holt, however, was alive. Glankler had picked up word that he was living in Florida. He went there searching for him, as did Kenny Herman, who had heard the same thing. The rumor was quickly spread among reporters that the man Jowers had identified as the assassin might still be living, and soon they, too, were hunting for him.

Reporters for The Tennessean beat everyone else to the sixty-two-year-old Holt. He was stunned when he heard the accusations against him, and adamantly denied having anything to do with King’s killing. To clear his name, he asked for a polygraph, which he took and passed.29

Once Holt was found, Jowers and his boosters quickly changed their stories. Pepper claimed that Jowers had merely named Holt in order to “distance himself” from the assassination.³⁰ Akins, who was supposed to have killed Holt on Jowers’s orders, now said Holt had disappeared before he could dispose of him.³¹ Jowers privately told his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that Holt might still be involved, but that he was not the shooter.³²

Pepper, Herman, and Saltman were not dissuaded by the exposure of Jowers’s purported hired assassin. Instead, they went their separate ways to exploit the story. Pepper filed an unsuccessful habeas corpus proceeding to free Ray based on Jowers’s confession, and Herman and Saltman approached various media outlets hoping to package and sell the story. Disagreement on how best to publicize the story led to the final break between the Pepper camp and what had become the Saltman, Herman, and Billings team.³³

Pepper set out to obtain sworn statements from the witnesses who had earlier been interviewed by Herman. He intended to use them in a legal action to free Ray. Betty Spates signed an affidavit on March 8, 1994, in which she greatly expanded on her earlier statement to Herman. In her new version, she not only repeated that she had seen Jowers disassembling a rifle at about 4:00 P.M. on the day of the assassination, but now claimed that she also saw him with a rifle when she visited before noon, and again when she returned to the grill around 6:00 P.M. During this last visit, as she walked into the kitchen she heard “a sound like a firecracker” and then “within seconds Loyd [Jowers] came running through the back door carrying another, different rifle. He was white as a ghost and very excited.… He looked like a wild man. His hair was all messed up and he had obviously been on his knees on the damp ground because the knees of his trousers were wet and muddy.”³⁴

Even Pepper, who had spent thirteen hours with Spates in preparation for her affidavit, said, in an understatement, “It was somewhat worrying that this was the first time she had mentioned a second gun.”³⁵ Worse yet for her credibility, but never revealed by Pepper, was that Spates had independently told another of Ray’s attorneys, Wayne Chastain, that she had also seen Jowers in the foliage behind his restaurant around noon, testing the gun sight by aiming the rifle toward the Lorraine Motel.36

Although the scene Spates described with Jowers was supposed to be one of great panic and excitement, the seventeen-year-old, who admittedly knew nothing about guns, swore that she could tell the gun was different from the one she had seen earlier, since the barrel was shorter and the handle was darker. She watched Jowers hide the rifle on a shelf under the counter. Somehow, no one else in the restaurant saw or heard any of the commotion.

In her affidavit, Spates said that Jowers only twice referred to the incident in subsequent years, but she knew she should not talk about it since Willie Akins, Jowers’s part-time worker, had supposedly shown up in 1983 and 1984 and tried to kill her and her two sons, once firing “three shots into a sofa where I was sitting.… He told me that Loyd had paid him $50,000 to kill me.” Akins also told Spates that “he had followed my sister Bobbi off and on over five years, trying to get her to go out with him so that he could kill her.”³⁷ Spates said she never called the police to tell them about the threats or the attempted murders.

Beyond the credibility problem of a story about a hired killer who shoots a sofa instead of his intended target, there were serious questions with tangential parts of the story she continued to spin to investigators: She said that Jowers had bought her and her sisters a home in Memphis (he had not, and in fact they had borrowed money to get it themselves); she claimed to be working at Jim’s Grill that day (she was never officially employed there); she asserted that in 1968, and again in 1973, several unidentified men offered her placement in the witness protection program if she would tell what she knew about Jowers and others (there is no evidence that any such government offer was even considered for Spates); and she said that Jowers had given her the rifle to dispose of, and she had given it to her brother, Essie (she later recanted that).³⁸ Although she insisted she was in the restaurant at the time of the assassination, the police did not list her as being there. Betty claimed that was because she was black and all the blacks in the restaurant were told to go into the kitchen, where they were ignored while the police took information only from the white customers. In 1968 in Memphis, that sounds plausible. However, Memphis police records show that of the twelve people whose names and addresses were taken down, three were black.³⁹

But the key development regarding Spates’s story came on January 25, 1994, when Mark Glankler of the district attorney general’s office, together with his partner, Johnny Simmons, interviewed her.⁴⁰ Spates started by changing her story that she had been at Jim’s Grill at 6:00 P.M. She said she had been there “before noon.”⁴¹ She admitted that she could not have been at the restaurant at 6:00 P.M. because she distinctly recalled being at the Seabrook Wallpaper Company across the street (where she was a shipping clerk), and “I remember these girls were crying, saying that Dr. King just got killed.… And I [then] ran across the street.”42 One of Betty’s sisters, Bobbie, did work at Jim’s Grill as a waitress, and Betty initially feared something had happened to her. That was why, she said, she ran from her own office to the restaurant after hearing about a shooting. Although she insisted she had seen a gun around noon, she was adamant now that she saw no gun near or after the assassination. As for the box of money, she at first said she had not seen that, but had been told about it by another of her sisters, Alta. (Alta told The Tennessean that Betty was simply not trustworthy.) Later, Betty changed her story back again—she had personally seen the money.⁴³ Spates informed the state investigators that Herman had paid her $500 “as a Christmas present” for her statement. (Herman told the author that Betty was about to be cut off by the local utility company, so he had merely helped her out.)

Finally, after some prodding from Glankler and Simmons, Betty Spates began to confess. She claimed that the story of Jowers having a gun at the time of the assassination had been planted by Herman and Saltman, together with the help of Jowers’s attorney, Lewis Garrison. Herman and Saltman, she said, “wanted me to put on a recorder that Loyd was standing in the back door and a black man passed the rifle to him and ran and jumped off the banister, came around the front of the building and the police pushed this same guy that was supposed to have shot King in the door of the restaurant.… It was supposed to be that homeless man, Frank Holt.”⁴⁴ Spates contended that Lewis Garrison, whom she described as “a very mean man,” had actually given her the name Holt.⁴⁵ (Herman, Saltman, and Garrison adamantly deny all of Spates’s charges.)

One night, Spates told the investigators, Jowers, Garrison, and Willie Akins telephoned her on a conference call. To ensure she had a witness to the conversation, she had her son and daughter pick up extension lines and listen to the conversation. The men, she said, told her “that if I had only said that I seen him accept this gun from this black man at six o’clock that we could of split $300,000. So see, I wouldn’t have to work anymore.” Three hundred thousand dollars was evidently the amount that Jowers and others thought the story was worth for sale. Jowers knew that Spates was behind in her house payments and also owed two years of back taxes. When the investigators asked her if Jowers’s motivation in confessing to the crime was to profit from a book or movie, Spates replied, “Yeah, it sure is.… [B]ecause its so many people that has said, they say they’re from London, they have said how much money that could get for the book that’s going to be written and the movie that will be made.”⁴⁶ Asked if she believed Jowers’s story was truthful, she did not hesitate: “No.”

Spates’s recantation contradicted the sworn statement she provided Pepper a few months later in March 1994. When he learned that she had told two completely different stories, Pepper said, “We found [it] distressing.”47 He finally obtained a copy of the signed transcript of Spates’s interview with the state investigators and confronted her about the discrepancies. “She said she didn’t read it because her glasses were broken,” Pepper asserted.⁴⁸ He also put part of the blame for her changing story on “a brain tumor that affected her memory from time to time, but until then I had not taken it seriously.”

However, unknown to Pepper, Herman, and Saltman, the district attorney general’s investigation had uncovered more evidence that Jowers’s story was not true and perhaps contrived to make money. Lewis Garrison, who represented Jowers, had also represented Willie Akins, the man who supposedly had tried to kill Frank Holt for Jowers, as well as James McCraw, the taxi driver who provided corroboration for Jowers’s tale. Glankler and Simmons had separately interviewed Bobbie, Betty’s sister. They learned that Herman and Pepper had visited her initially in December 1992, and she told them that while Jowers used to keep extra money, a couple of thousand dollars, in the second stove in the kitchen, there was none there around the time of the assassination. She had not seen a suitcase filled with cash, and certainly had not told Betty anything of the sort.⁴⁹ Bobbie never saw Jowers with a gun, nor had Betty ever told her about seeing him with a rifle.

Herman and Pepper claimed that, on the day after the assassination, Jowers told Bobbie that he had the gun that killed King. She also denied that to the state investigators. Jowers merely said, Bobbie contended, that the murder weapon had been found by the police right near the restaurant, and that she had missed all the excitement because she had left work by the time of the murder.⁵⁰

Bobbie also warned the state investigators that her sister Betty was not honest. “You know you can’t believe half of the things Betty says, and that’s true.” Betty would, according to Bobbie, lie about “anything … Betty would tell a lie about and then if you don’t believe her then she’ll sit and cry, make sure so you will believe what she says. Betty is a big liar.”⁵¹ When asked what motivated Betty to make up the story, Bobbie simply replied, “Money … Just to make money.”

With Bobbie’s permission, Glankler tape-recorded a telephone conversation between her and Betty on January 21, 1994. Betty, of course, did not know that her sister was talking to her on behalf of the prosecutors. In that conversation, Betty admitted that her story about passing a gun from Jowers to her brother, Essie, was false. “All them lies they got in the paper,” she said. “And then there is Essie, walking around lying. I can’t get over that.”⁵² Essie did not even live in Memphis at the time of the assassination, Betty said, and anyway, she had no gun to give him. Again, she said she had only been to the restaurant around noon, and admitted, “When Martin Luther King got killed I wasn’t there [at Jim’s Grill].” It was Jowers, she told her sister, who told her to modify the time in her story. She claimed that on that early visit, Jowers did have a gun, but it “wasn’t no bigger than a pistol,” not the rifle with a scope she had described to Herman and Pepper.53 She also admitted she had never seen any money in the stove.⁵⁴

Bobbie then asked her, “Well, why’d Loyd tell you to tell them that you see’d him coming in the back door at six o’clock?”

“Because he can, they can make it into a movie, he’ll get paid.… That’s why Loyd doing this here. He’ll get paid $300,000 if he had somebody back this statement up.… I was trying to get some money for my, to pay my income tax …”⁵⁵

Betty finally admitted to her sister, “I ain’t seen no gun.”⁵⁶

If Spates’s story was concocted, what of the other witnesses who helped corroborate part of Jowers’s story? One, John McFerren, supported the proposition that Memphis produce dealer Frank Liberto—who supposedly paid Jowers to arrange the assassination—was indeed connected to the assassination. Pepper and others believe that if Liberto’s involvement in the murder is firmly established, that adds credibility to Jowers. Even independent of Jowers’s confession, McFerren’s story has long been considered one of the most powerful in the case—that of a man without any apparent reason to lie, who may have fortuitously stumbled upon evidence of a conspiracy.

What exactly had McFerren, a civil rights activist who lived in nearby Somerville, said? On April 4, 1968, he went to the Liberto, Liberto and Latch produce market in Memphis. About an hour before the assassination, he overheard a heavyset man, whom he later identified as Liberto, shout into a phone, “Kill the son of a bitch on the balcony. Get the job done! You’ll get your five thousand.” A little later, he heard Liberto again on the phone, this time saying, “Don’t come out here. Go to New Orleans. You know my brother. Get the money from him.”⁵⁷ The House Select Committee concluded that “an indirect link between Liberto’s brother, Salvatore, and an associate of New Orleans organized crime figure Carlos Marcello was established.”*⁵⁸

Three days after the assassination, McFerren, afraid of contacting the police, instead called Baxton Bryant, the executive director of the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, a local civil rights organization.⁵⁹ In turn, Bryant brought in David Caywood, a prominent attorney who was chairman of the Memphis branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. Bryant and Caywood drove to Somerville, picked up McFerren, and took him to Memphis. After midnight, in a suite at the grand Peabody Hotel, FBI agents and Memphis police officers interviewed McFerren. The authorities then interviewed Liberto and his family members in New Orleans, as well as James Latch, vice president of the produce company.60 All those interviewed denied any involvement in, or knowledge of, King’s murder, but both Frank Liberto and his partner, Latch, admitted making disparaging remarks about King in the presence of their customers.⁶¹ The authorities finally closed the file, concluding that while they could not be sure of the significance of what McFerren claimed to have heard, they were convinced that Liberto was not involved in any plot to kill King.⁶²

The House Select Committee on Assassinations reinvestigated the McFerren story, saying, “Because Liberto lived in the Memphis area and because of reports that he had displayed pronounced racial bias, the committee determined that McFerren’s story warranted additional investigation.”⁶³

The committee conducted extensive interviews of Liberto, family members, neighbors, and business associates. It also investigated the backgrounds of Liberto and his brother through the FBI and municipal police departments. Liberto and members of his family, under oath, provided the committee essentially the same information they had given the FBI in 1968. The committee could find no link between Liberto, his family, or his associates and the King assassination.

Moreover, there are serious problems with McFerren’s full story. In 1968 he had told the FBI, as well as the Select Committee, that James Earl Ray had worked at the Liberto produce company before the assassination, either in the fall or early winter of 1967.⁶⁴ Once, according to McFerren, Ray had even loaded groceries into his car.⁶⁵ McFerren also said that Ray was so dark that he initially thought he was Cuban, Mexican, or Indian.⁶⁶ He described Ray as about twenty-five years old, with jaundiced skin, coarse black hair, and a fungus on his cheek and neck—“jungle rot” he called it—that left scars and pock marks.⁶⁷ Of course, Ray was not even in Memphis at the time McFerren says he worked at Liberto’s company.

McFerren also claimed he had positively picked out a photo of Ray for the FBI.⁶⁸ However, an FBI memorandum states that when McFerren was shown six photographs of possible suspects, he immediately eliminated three, including one of Ray.⁶⁹ On three different occasions, he quickly eliminated Ray’s picture. As for the three photos he narrowed it to, one was of a man who had been in prison when King was killed, and two others were not in Memphis on the day of the assassination.⁷⁰ The person he finally picked from the photos was a five-five, 152-pound, twenty-five-year-old white man who looked nothing like Ray. When the FBI agents finally told him which photo was Ray, McFerren suddenly said that he resembled the man who had worked at the market, especially since “the hair is combed the same way.”71

He also said, regarding the second telephone conversation at the produce market, that he overheard another worker answer the phone and, in passing the receiver to Liberto, say, “Ray wants to speak to you.”⁷² Among his new disclosures to committee investigators was that Governor George Wallace was supposedly behind the King assassination, and that from his own investigation he had discovered that the same man who killed JFK had also murdered King.⁷³

And there are other inconsistencies. The author interviewed David Caywood, who was the ACLU attorney who picked up McFerren in Somerville and took him to the Peabody Hotel, where the police and FBI interviewed him. When asked if he recalled what McFerren told him, he recounted basically the same story that has been given over the years, but said McFerren left out the part of the story that claims Liberto said, “Kill the son of a bitch on the balcony.” Even with the passage of years, Caywood was certain that McFerren had never included the phrase “on the balcony.” “That would have jumped right out at me,” he says. “It would have set off all kinds of bells because the day before King was shot, I was on that very balcony at the Lorraine with him. McFerren did say something about ‘shoot the son of a bitch,’ but there was nothing about the balcony in anything he told me.”⁷⁴ By the time the police and FBI interviewed McFerren a few hours later, he had added the balcony to Liberto’s purported conversation. That is a critical addition, of course, because it ties the statement directly to the King assassination.

McFerren, over the years, has complained that people followed, threatened, and hurt him because of the information he had.⁷⁵ For instance, in 1976, after an initial conversation with House Select Committee investigators, he claimed that he had been shot (the Justice Department did not confirm it) and that “they” were out to get him, but he could not say who “they” were since the police were also after him and his phone was bugged.*⁷⁶

The Select Committee said, “On the basis of witness denials, lack of corroborating evidence and McFerren’s questionable credibility, the committee concluded that his allegation was without foundation and that there was no connection between his story and the assassination of Dr. King.”*⁷⁷

The McFerren-Liberto story, instead of bolstering Jowers’s tale, casts even further doubt on its authenticity.

The last major witness cited by Pepper and Herman to support Jowers is James McCraw, the cabdriver. Ten months after the assassination, McCraw gave a statement to the untiring investigator Renfro Hays. McCraw said that on the day of the assassination, he had been dispatched around 6:00 P.M. to pick up Charles Stephens, the boarder who was one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses, but discovered he was too drunk to get out of bed.⁷⁸ With coaxing from Hays, McCraw later added that he noticed that the bathroom, which was at the end of the hallway near Stephens’s room, was empty. He never mentioned anything about Jowers or a murder weapon until Pepper and Herman reached him. The cabdriver, twenty-four years after the event, suddenly remembered that the day after the assassination, Jowers had shown him the murder weapon.⁷⁹

The district attorney general’s file on the assassination includes taxi company records subpoenaed in 1968, including the master sheet containing names of employees, times they went on duty, mileage driven and gas used while on their shift, and the like. On the day of the assassination, McCraw went to work at 3:15 P.M. and had no call or pickup at the rooming house, where he claims he saw Stephens and the empty bathroom.⁸⁰ “We had no reason to believe that he was even there,” says Jim Beasley, the former assistant district attorney assigned to the prosecution.⁸¹ There is also no reason to think that McCraw’s confirmation about Jowers showing him the murder weapon the next day is any more credible than his statement about visiting the rooming house at the time of the assassination. Not only did attorney Lewis Garrison represent both Jowers and McCraw, but Garrison admitted to the author that McCraw and Jowers had known each other for many years, and that Jowers even employed McCraw after the assassination. It is possible that McCraw’s corroboration was an instance of trying to help his friend Jowers make the big score that he hoped the King confession would bring.*

The state investigators, Glankler and Simmons, have also spoken to Jowers’s relatives, including a sister in Memphis. “She knows that he is not telling the truth, but she won’t say much more to get him in trouble,” Glankler says. “They are really afraid that he has already said so much that he might actually go ahead and get himself indicted.”⁸² Glankler also located a friend of Jowers’s, Robert Ferguson. “Jowers told me before he ever went on TV that he was going to have a movie made about the King assassination,” recalls Ferguson, who counts himself as one of Jowers’s closest friends for nearly a decade. “And he told me he was going to be in the movie. I did not believe it then, and do not believe it now. I think it was one Budweiser too many in his mouth.”⁸³

Ferguson brought up something that Pepper, Herman, and Saltman have failed to disclose: Jowers has been an alcoholic since the late 1970s. “He’s drunk seventy-five percent of the time,” his lawyer, Lewis Garrison, told the author.⁸⁴

Moreover, Jowers’s own story has changed dramatically during the past few years, growing in scope and ambition, casting further doubts on his reliability. Jowers refused to meet with the author, but Lewis Garrison did pass along Jowers’s latest version. When the author met Garrison in his Memphis office in April 1997, he had spoken with his client only two days earlier.

Jowers now claims that Liberto approached him in early March 1968, “when they knew Dr. King was coming here.”⁸⁵ (The SCLC had not decided that King would return to Memphis until March 30, 1968.) Further, there was no $100,000 payment for the murder. Some money was involved, but primarily Jowers did it in order to cancel gambling debts he owed Liberto. Jowers says there were at least two meetings to plan the assassination, both held at Jim’s Grill. Each one was attended by Marrell McCollough, the Memphis police department undercover officer; Sam Evans, head of the police tactical units; Inspector N. E. Zachary, chief of homicide; and two or three others that Jowers did not recognize.* As for Ray, Jowers now claims to have seen him at least three times on the day of the assassination, always at the grill, and says that while Ray was part of the plot, he was not the shooter.

According to Garrison, another man who appeared at the restaurant gave Jowers money in a box. “Jowers is hard of hearing,” says Garrison, “and thought the man said his name was Royal, but he now knows it was Raoul.”⁸⁶ Garrison says Raoul was the one who killed King. “Raoul came in around five-thirty and took the gun and went out back. Later he gave the gun to Jowers after the shooting, and Jowers wrapped it in a tablecloth. The next day he came and retrieved it.”^†

In fact, all the fanfare about Jowers and his confession might never had gotten off the ground if researchers had merely compared Jowers’s original statements to the FBI and the Memphis police to the statements of other customers in Jim’s Grill. Jowers had initially said that after hearing the loud noise, he walked toward the kitchen but paused by the last booth and asked a regular patron, Harold Parker, if he had heard a noise.87 When Parker was interviewed by the FBI on April 15, 1968, he was unaware of what Jowers had told the authorities, yet he confirmed that Jowers had stopped by his table and asked if he had just heard the noise. A few minutes later a deputy sheriff entered the restaurant and told everyone to remain there.⁸⁸ That corroboration of what Jowers really did is the most effective refutation of the claim that he was running back inside the restaurant with the rifle that killed Martin Luther King.

Some people, convinced of a widespread conspiracy, are not dissuaded by the facts. “If you grant Jowers immunity,” said Martin’s son Dexter King, “he will tell everything he knows. There’s a cover-up going on. They don’t want him to talk. They’re contributing to suppressing the truth.”⁸⁹

“We will not give him immunity,” says John Campbell, the assistant district attorney general who has led the investigation into the Jowers story. “From investigating it, it looks real bogus. But if we get pressured into giving him immunity, that would be a disaster. Overnight, the value of Jowers’s story would skyrocket. With immunity, he could say anything he wants to. Hell, he could hold a press conference and say he killed King and there would be nothing anybody could do about it. Also, just by the fact that he had immunity from the state, it would imply we thought there was some validity to his story, and that would also increase the value of what he could sell it for. We are not going to help someone, or a group of people, make a financial killing with a false story.”⁹⁰

* The latest failure was in December 1997. Jack McNeil, together with Herman and Billings, relied on a seldom used statute (4012–104 of the Tennessee Code Annotated) to bypass the district attorney general’s office and brought the Jowers information be fore a three-member panel of the grand jury. That panel had to then decide whether enough evidence existed to recommend that the entire thirteen-member grand jury hear the evidence and consider issuing an indictment. The panel voted unanimously against forwarding the matter to the entire grand jury.

^† Ray, not knowing that Jim’s Grill seldom saw strangers, told Hanes and Huie that he had met Raoul there. Later that same afternoon, after Raoul supposedly told Ray to leave the rooming house for a few hours, Ray said he again stopped in the grill. However, no one remembered seeing anyone who looked like Ray or his description of Raoul in the restaurant on the day King was killed.

* A local attorney, Russell Thompson, and two Memphis ministers, James Latimer and John Baltensperger, gave variations of a story in which they were visited by a stranger within days of the assassination. The stranger, depending on the version, claimed either his roommate or himself had killed King. The stranger also talked about the Kennedy assassination, which was supposedly a mafia contract. It is not clear why the stranger would have “confessed” his involvement to any of those three strangers, but Pepper at least accepts their accounts as true, and speculates in Orders to Kill that the stranger might have been Youngblood.

* The prosecutors had learned of the Betty Spates allegation after she had told a local bail bondsman, James Alexander Wright, that James Earl Ray had not killed King, but that her boss had. The bail bondsman, in turn, had told the Memphis police, who in formed the prosecutors. The two investigators for the district attorney general who took Spates’s recantation, John Carlisle and Clyde Venson, did not remember obtaining it when asked by Jack Saltman in the mid-1990s. Betty Spates has denied telling a bail bondsman any story, and also denied ever talking to state investigators in 1969. Realizing that such an early involvement in a similar, but fraudulent, story is deadly to Spates’s credibility, Saltman and other buffs have tried to raise the inference that the in vestigator’s report in the district attorney general’s office is a forgery.

^† He was evidently so unimportant to them that both misspelled his name as Lloyd, instead of Loyd. Weisberg mentions him only twice and Lane only once, both in connection with his owning Jim’s Grill.

^‡ Pepper is naturally suspicious. When he travels, he usually uses a pseudonym, and journalists who have interviewed him when he appears at court say he often wears a bulletproof vest.

* Akins is currently serving a sixty-year sentence in Huntsville, Texas, on a narcotics-related conviction. The author interviewed Marvin Ballin, Akins’s former attorney in Memphis. “I wouldn’t believe Willie if he swore on a stack of ten Bibles. He would tell a story for money in a New York minute. I always had that feeling when I spoke to him.”

* Based on McFerren’s story, a writer, William Sartor, hypothesized that organized crime was responsible for the King assassination. In his investigation, Sartor attempted to connect Frank Liberto with organized crime figures in Memphis and New Orleans. In an unpublished manuscript, often referred to by conspiracy buffs, Sartor offered one of the wildest mob-related theories about the case; the only thing missing was evidence.

* When the author tried to interview him in 1997, McFerren said, “I don’t know you are who you say you are. You could be anyone. Send me some proof of who you are.” He was subsequently sent a letter of introduction and several previous books. On another trip to the Somerville area, the author again called and asked for an interview. McFerren still refused. “You could have just bought those books and made up some letterhead. I don’t know you are the person who wrote those books. Lots of people are trying to get to me. I won’t be around here if you come near.”

* A possible motivation for McFerren’s story was revealed in an April 18, 1968, interview with the FBI. A week before the assassination, McFerren said, he had been to Liberto’s produce market, and one of the workers asked him, “What do you think about your buddy?” When McFerren asked, “Who are you talking about?” the worker replied, “Martin Luther King.” “I tend to my own business,” McFerren said. At that point, Liberto, who was sitting nearby, said, “Somebody ought to shoot the son-of-a-bitch.” Liberto, after the assassination, admitted that he and some coworkers had made derogatory remarks about King, and might even have said something like McFerren recounted in that conversation. McFerren, meanwhile, was a civil rights activist and president of Somerville’s Civic and Welfare League, and might have actually thought after King’s murder that the remark he heard the previous week did indicate some level of foreknowledge on the part of Liberto. In order to boost the impact of his statement, he may have moved it up to an hour before the assassination and added in some details he knew about how King was killed. The story might also have been as simply motivated as punishing Liberto for having made the crude remark the previous week (MURKIN ME Sub. D, section 3, p. 50).

* Another witness sometimes cited to boost Jowers is Nathan Whitlock, a thirty-eight-year-old cabdriver whose mother owned a Memphis pizza parlor that Liberto frequented in the 1970s. Whitlock claimed that when he was only eighteen he had heard the rumors about Liberto and the King assassination and confronted him. Liberto supposedly told him, “Well, I didn’t kill [King], but I had it done.” When Whitlock asked about Ray, Liberto said he was “nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri” and a mere “set-up man.” Whitlock swore to this in a November 3, 1994, deposition in a civil suit Pepper filed on behalf of Ray against Jowers. ABC News, and Sam Donaldson, used Whitlock to substantiate the story they aired about Jowers. But it stretches credulity that Liberto, who supposedly masterminded the King assassination and kept it a secret from everyone, somehow admitted it to a teenager who suddenly confronted him. Even Kenny Herman, who liberally accepts most new testimony, is skeptical about Whitlock. “Oh, watch out, he’s definitely capable of making up stories, and he’s very interested in what money he might make out of this,” Herman told the author. “He’s always asking when the big payoff is coming.”

* Most people named by Jowers are deceased. Lewis Garrison told the author that “Zachary is also dead, so we can’t follow up with him.” Actually, the author found Zachary; he is still living in Memphis, and was infuriated at the allegation. “I will be very happy to take them into court for that slander,” he said. “I could use a little extra money in my retirement.” McCollough is alive, works for the CIA, and has steadfastly refused to comment on the case or his surveillance on King.

In October 1997, when Jowers met with William Pepper and Dexter King, he again changed his story and included two more Memphis policemen, John Barger and Earl Clark, in the plot. Both were also deceased.

^† Although Garrison was still saying, as late as August 1997, that the real murder weapon had disappeared after the assassination and that the gun found with Ray’s prints was a planted weapon, he was evidently unaware that his client had flip-flopped on that very issue. When a Criminal Court judge, Joe Brown, ordered in March 1997 that Ray’s rifle be tested once again to see whether new technology might be able to exclude or include the death bullet as having come from that gun, Jowers evidently feared the tests might match the bullet to Ray’s gun. That, of course, would gut his story. So he called Mark Glankler, the state investigator, and told him, “Ray’s gun is the real gun. That was the one that shot King.” It is not clear how that could fit into any previous version he has told.