Loyd Jowers

Loyd Jowers was the owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. In 1993, Jowers appeared on the ABC News program Prime Time Live and related the details of an alleged conspiracy involving the Mafia and the U.S. government to kill the civil rights leader. According to Jowers, the alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, was a scapegoat, and was not the only person responsible for assassinating King. Instead, Jowers said that he hired Memphis police Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the fatal shot. A Memphis civil trial in 1999 supported this claim. In 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report denying allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King.