Blind Spot: The Jowers Affair

Just when it seemed that James Earl Ray’s dubious and discredited claims would fade into the background noise of history, leaving him to rot in his prison cell, disregarded by the press and the culture generally, events conspired to haul his claims of being a patsy out of mothballs. In 1993, on the ABC program Prime Time Live, Sam Donaldson interviewed a beshadowed man on national television, and this man claimed to have accepted money and hired a gunman to murder Dr. King, making it clear that he had far more to say if he were granted immunity from prosecution. This man was one Loyd Jowers. Sixty-seven years old at the time of his television appearance, Jowers was the owner of Jim’s Grill, the restaurant beneath the rooming house that served as a sniper’s perch to the assassin. Jowers’s confession began a new line of investigation leading to a new conspiracy claim for Ray’s then lawyer, a conspiracist named Dr. William Pepper—that’s right, Dr. Pepper—to focus on and promote. In 1997, Dexter King, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s second son, visited James Earl Ray and confronted him about his involvement in the murder. Shockingly, he then announced on behalf of his whole family, that they believed in Ray’s innocence. A few months later, Dexter also met with Loyd Jowers. Likewise, the Kings believed that Jowers’s testimony was the key to proving the murder of Dr. King had been the result of a conspiracy. This marked the beginning of a campaign by those who had survived Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to get Jowers’s story on the record. When they, along with Ray’s legal counsel, failed to get Jowers immunity, Coretta Scott King brought a civil suit against Jowers as well as “other unknown co-conspirators” for the wrongful death of her husband, seeking only $100 in symbolic compensation, as their true goal was not monetary reward but rather to finally get the truth. To some, the result was the final revelation of James Earl Ray’s innocence and proof of a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. But sometimes, the act of muddling or obscuring truth can masquerade as its disclosure when in fact it’s only making the truth harder to discern.

Loyd Jowers claimed that Frank Liberto, a Memphis produce dealer with a reputation for mafia connections who had long been suspected of involvement in the King assassination, had given him a substantial sum of money to arrange for King’s death, out of which he had paid the assassin. Now, patrons on Patreon will recognize the name Liberto from January’s Patreon exclusive Blindside edition of the podcast, in which I explored the conspiracy claim about his and the mafia’s involvement. Suffice to say here that there is every reason to doubt Liberto had anything to do with the murder of Dr. King, but his name had been floated in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and had never really disappeared from the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder, so it’s no great surprise that Jowers would name him in the late 1990s. However, as the Jowers angle was looked into by Ray’s attorney Dr. Pepper and his investigators—who themselves have major credibility issues, as outlined in my most recent Blindside Patreon episode and as I will further discuss shortly—they claimed to have uncovered numerous witnesses who could corroborate Jowers’s involvement in the murder. One was a cab driver, James McCraw, who told an investigator on Dr. Pepper’s team that Jowers had shown him a box with a rifle in it and bragged that it was the very rifle that had killed King. Another was one Bobbie Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill, who said Jowers had told her the day after the assassination that he’d found the murder weapon. And finally, there was Bobbie’s sister, Betty, a 16-year-old girl and Loyd Jowers’s erstwhile lover who worked across the street from the grill at a paper company. Betty Spates also put the rifle in Jowers’s possession, for she said she went to the restaurant that afternoon and saw him on his knees disassembling it. Moreover, Betty corroborated the claims that Jowers had an influx of money, for she claimed to have seen a great deal of cash secreted away in a disused stove a week prior to the King slaying. And as Dr. Pepper’s investigation continued, Betty’s revelations became more and more outrageous. She said she had visited the grill several times on the day of the assassination, each time seeing Jowers with a rifle. Before noon, she saw him with the gun; around noon, she saw him in the foliage back of the restaurant, aiming the gun up at the Lorraine Motel as though rehearsing the assassination; at around 4pm, she saw him disassembling the rifle; and then at 6pm, right after the moment of the assassination when she had heard a firecracker sound, she saw Jowers running back into the restaurant by the back door, the knees of his trousers muddy, his hair disheveled, his face pale and agitated. In his hands was a second, different rifle from the one she had earlier seen him carrying. Not only did this testimony seem to corroborate Jowers’s involvement, but it also contradicted his own claim that he had merely paid someone else to shoot King, instead indicating that he himself had been the shooter. And one other claim of Betty’s tends to confirm that she was not conspiring with Jowers in a hoax: she said that a known employee of Jowers’s, Willie Akins, had come into her home in the mid-1980s, fired a gun into the sofa beside her, and told her that Jowers had paid him to kill her.

There are, however, a myriad of reasons to doubt Betty Spates’s claims. Firstly, the story of Akins’s murder attempt was not very believable, and she had never even called the police about it. Secondly, there was the way her story expanded proportional to Dr. Pepper’s interest in it, a telltale sign of someone saying what an investigator wants to hear. Then there was the fact that elements of her statements proved untrue. At one point she said she was working at Jim’s Grill that day, but she had never worked there as her sister Bobbie had. She also claimed that Jowers had bought her a house to keep her quiet, and that government men had approached her with an offer to place her in witness protection, neither of which turned out to be true. And she went on to recant major aspects of her story, such as that Jowers had asked her to dispose of the rifle and that she had been at the restaurant at the time of the assassination, the latter detail having already been disproven since the police locked down Jim’s Grill just after the shooting to interview those inside, among whom she was not listed. But perhaps the biggest red flag on Betty Spates’s testimony comes from statements she had made to investigators at the time of the assassination. Twenty-four years earlier, back when the two had still been romantically involved, Betty Spates was already making claims about Jowers’s involvement in the crime. After the assassination, Betty was spreading the story that, very close to the time of the shooting, she had seen James Earl Ray outside the rooming house, making it impossible for him to be upstairs pulling the trigger. Instead of Ray, she was offering Jowers as a suspect, failing to disclose their relationship, which, if strained, might have been a motive for falsely accusing him. However, when Ray’s prosecutors visited her in 1969, she admitted her claims were a hoax, explaining that she had been promised five grand to make the false statements by friends of Martin Luther King who wanted to force investigators to expand their scope beyond James Earl Ray.

Loyd Jowers, via Wikimedia Commons

The final nail in the coffin of the Spates testimony was hammered in when she revealed that one of Dr. Pepper’s investigators, eager to obtain some smoking gun evidence of Ray’s innocence, in this case both figurative and literal, had actually offered Betty money. She called the $500 the investigator gave her a Christmas present, and the investigator told Gerald Posner, the author of my principal source, Killing the Dream, that he had only been helping Betty out with some overdue utility bills, but Spates eventually made a clear confession that she had taken monetary compensation for the story that she offered. And this was not the only time that Dr. Pepper’s team of investigators would prove themselves dishonest. At about the same time they were encouraging Betty Spates’s stories, they had also found another woman, Glenda Grabow, who was willing to go on the record that she knew who Raoul was. She said she had been involved in an abusive relationship with him when she was fourteen, and he had admitted to her that he had killed Dr. King. On her testimony, Dr. Pepper tracked down an actual suspect, a Portuguese immigrant living in New York named Raul, spelled slightly differently than James Earl Ray had always spelled it. Nevertheless, in 1995, after decades of playing coy and not identifying anyone as his Raoul, Ray pointed at this suspect’s photo and confirmed it was his mystery man. But there were numerous problems. Grabow’s story was so implausible that Dr. Pepper himself left most of it out of his book. Besides his claims to have killed King, Grabow’s Raul was involved with Carlos Marcello, the famous New Orleans crime lord, and met with Jack Ruby, with whom Grabow says she was also romantically involved. Moreover, Grabow happened by chance to have seen her Raul standing on the hood of his car outside the Houston airport upon JFK’s arrival in Texas, training a scoped rifle in the president’s direction, asserting that she had accidentally foiled the first attempt on Kennedy’s life, resulting in Raul moving to Plan B at Dealey Plaza. Of course, none of this helped Ray, so Dr. Pepper omitted it. And to further demonstrate the untrustworthiness of the Pepper team’s investigative practices and therefore the unreliability of all their witnesses, Gerald Posner describes audio tapes of Dr. Pepper’s investigators questioning Grabow, in which they ask leading questions and even put Raoul’s name in her mouth, as she had only referred to him by a racial epithet that they assured her was only his nickname: Dago. But the really unforgivable part of this farce Dr. Pepper’s team created is the fact that the Raul that Grabow and Ray identified was an innocent family man whose life was turned upside down by these accusations, ruining him financially and leaving him no peace in his retirement.

Likewise, then, considering the unprincipled techniques of Dr. Pepper’s investigators, the statement of Betty’s sister Bobbie is also suspect. As for the taxi driver, McCraw, like Betty, we know that he told a far different story when questioned during the months after the assassination. Back then, the only thing he had to say was that, on the day of the assassination, he had picked up Charlie Stephens, the chief witness placing Ray in the rooming house, and that Stephens was drunk. But even this appears to be a fabrication, as taxi company records do not indicate he was even there. It’s possible McCraw said what he did in order to corroborate the claims his friend Loyd Jowers was making. So then we must finally examine Jowers’s own reliability, already troubled by the fact that he had been an alcoholic for decades, as attested to by his own attorney (Posner 289). But disregarding that, we see inconsistencies in the stories he has told about what happened that day as well. Originally, much like Betty Spates, Jowers only told authorities things that might help exonerate James Earl Ray, making one wonder if he too was hoping to claim the money Spates said was being offered by King’s supporters. He said that at around 4pm, he saw the white Mustang out front, and inside his restaurant was a white man he didn’t recognize, eating sausages and eggs. At 6pm, he said, he heard the report of the rifle sounding like a skillet crashing onto the floor and walked toward the rear of the establishment to investigate. At that time, and just after, the white stranger was still present and asked him for a beer. But of course, this stranger could not have been Ray, because Jowers remembered that the Mustang had disappeared while the man remained. And the white stranger came back the next day, and the suspicious Jowers called the police, who identified him as a drifter named Gene Crawford. But this did not stop Jowers from spinning tales about the man, saying sometimes that he was a regular customer named Jim Sanders and other times that he was a CIA operative named Jack Youngblood, neither of which are true.

Further indications of Jowers’s penchant for changing his story around whenever his details are proven false came after his dramatic television appearance, when he named the gunman he had paid to kill King. He claimed to Dr. Pepper and his team that he had hired Frank Holt, a black day laborer. In Jowers’s version, Holt pulled the trigger in the foliage out back, and Jowers disposed of the murder weapon. And before anyone went looking for Holt, he said he had hired Willie Akins to kill the gunman, so there was no point spending any time trying to track him down. Willie Akins, of course, was the same inept assassin who supposedly shot the heck out of Betty’s couch but never actually harmed her despite accepting money to murder her, and here again, he appears to have failed, for Holt was alive and denied involvement and even passed a polygraph. After this, Jowers began to claim that his co-conspirators were members of the Memphis police department, and that the gunman in particular was Lieutenant Earl Clark. This time, he was slippery enough to only implicate men he knew were dead and could not defend themselves.

In Jowers’s favor, one might point out that he had nothing to gain from his confession. He was elderly; perhaps, the guilt had weighed on him and he only wanted to come clean before he died. But just as we know the Pepper team gifted some money to Betty Spates, there are indications that much greater promises of money were being made. In the end, when Betty Spates confessed that her story of seeing Jowers with the gun had come from Dr. Pepper’s team, she also indicated that Jowers’s attorney was involved. According to her, they wanted her to say she had seen Frank Holt hand the rifle to Jowers by the back door before running around to the street, where the police then led him right back in the front door of the restaurant, for the record showed that police officers had pushed Frank Holt into Jim’s Grill from the sidewalk that day. And they told Betty that if she said this thing, she and Jowers could divide $300,000 dollars. So, if this story is true, then it’s clear Jowers believed there was something in it for him to make his confession. After all, if he were only motivated by his guilty conscience, why would he play so coy and refuse to divulge any particulars until he had an immunity deal? Where this money might have come from is a trickier question. Perhaps there would be money in television appearances, like the one Jowers had already made, but not three hundred grand. More likely, Dr. William Pepper anticipated his book, Orders to Kill, would make a killing, so to speak, and he could comfortably apportion a few hundred grand to the little people whose wild stories made it so incendiary. This was similar, in fact, to how James Earl Ray had managed to obtain the services of so many famous lawyers: by offering them a slice of the money his story would make.

Cover of Orders to Kill, via Google Books

But of course, Dr. William Pepper and his team could not have made a media circus of James Earl Ray’s case some 30 years after the assassination without some help. One figure that helped to keep the case in the limelight was Judge Joe Brown, whom you may know as a television personality. Judge Brown actually fought to get Ray’s case assigned to him and afterward refused to recuse himself when it became apparent that he strongly supported the defense and believed there was a conspiracy to murder King. Then of course, the support of Dexter King and other King family members certainly helped to legitimize Dr. Pepper’s efforts. It would be one thing for the family to publicly forgive Ray for his crime, something that many SCLC preachers and friends of King have done as a testament to the power of God’s grace and mercy. It is another thing entirely for Dr. King’s son to shake the hand of the man who murdered his father and tell him he got a raw deal. It is, however, completely understandable for the King family to seek the whole truth about the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is therefore especially troubling and distasteful for someone to mislead them and misrepresent the facts in order to make them believe something that isn’t true. This is how blind spots crop up in history. Believable lies are propagated, provable truths are twisted and purposely misinterpreted, and falsehoods are taken to heart and spread by those who are most drawn to believe them. In fact, heap enough untruths on anyone and they’ll find it hard to sift through for the truth. In the civil case of Coretta Scott King vs. Loyd Jowers, for example, after sitting, and even sometimes dozing, through hours and hours of second- and third-hand testimony, the jury found in favor of Coretta Scott King, suggesting that the evidence proved Loyd Jowers and other conspirators, “including government agencies,” were responsible for King’s death, not James Earl Ray. But in response to all the noise made by Dr. Pepper and the Kings, Attorney General Janet Reno launched a Department of Justice investigation and essentially concluded what the House Select Committee on Assassinations had concluded, that Ray was not framed but rather was the shooter. And as for indications that Ray’s brothers may have been co-conspirators, while they did not deny this possibility, they simply could not justify its further investigation because, after 30 years, they just didn’t have any leads on new evidence. There the case of the conspiracy to murder Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stands, and people, it seems, as always, will believe what they want to believe.