Loyd Jowers
| Loyd Jowers | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
November 20, 1926 Lexington, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Died | May 20, 2000 (aged 73) Union City, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Occupation | Owner of Jim's Grill |
Loyd Jowers (November 20, 1926 – May 20, 2000) was the owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. In 1993, Jowers appeared on ABC's Prime Time Live and related the details of an alleged conspiracy involving the Mafia and the U.S. government to kill King. According to Jowers, the perpetrator, James Earl Ray, was a scapegoat, and was not directly responsible for the assassination. Jowers said that he hired Memphis police Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the fatal shot. The existence of such a conspiracy, and Jowers' involvement, was supported in the verdict of a 1998 court case which was brought against Jowers by the King family. The allegations and the finding of the Memphis jury were later rejected by the United States Department of Justice in 2000 due to lack of evidence.
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. After four weeks of testimony which involved over 70 witnesses and thousands of pages of never before seen 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."
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