Loyd Jowers

Loyd Jowers (November 20, 1926 – May 20, 2000) was an American restaurateur and the owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. For the first 25 years after the assassination of King, Jowers testified that he was in the restaurant at the time of the assassination, a fact supported by the other witnesses in the restaurant. In 1993, Jowers appeared on the ABC News program Prime Time Live and claimed to have been part of an alleged conspiracy involving the Mafia and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson to kill King. According to Jowers, the alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, was a scapegoat, and was not the only person responsible for assassinating King. Jowers named a number of different people as the alleged assassins, including a black man who was in the area and an unidentified person, before later saying that he had hired Memphis police Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the fatal shot. A civil trial in Memphis in 1999 supported this claim, while not having been shown existing evidence of Jowers' contradictions. In June 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report denying allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King.