The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  Memphis private investigators Ken Herman and John Billings had worked for me on the television trial. Now they were acting on their own. Herman went to see Garrison about Jowers’s involvement in the killing. Garrison somehow learned we had unearthed evidence of Jowers’s involvement and told him not to say anything until a grant of immunity was obtained. He undertook an approach to the district attorney general to this end also on behalf of Jowers’s “heavy” Willie Akins, Betty Spates, Bobbi Smith, and James McCraw. I didn’t see how, apart from Jowers, any of the other clients could be charged with any crime. The statute of limitations had expired on any criminal acts committed after the crime.

  Billings asked his next-door neighbor—black judge and founder of the National Civil Rights Museum, D’Army Bailey—to quietly ask the attorney general to review the request for immunity, which would shortly be submitted. I was annoyed that Herman and Billings had acted without instructions. They had a continuing legal and ethical responsibility to James, which derived from their association with his defense and myself as his lawyer. They had indirectly tipped off Jowers and Akins to what we knew, and it was quite possible they had put at risk already-fearful essential witnesses. If Betty and Bobbi knew that Jowers and Akins had become aware of their cooperation with us, we had little chance of convincing them to cooperate further.

  I didn’t expect Attorney General Pierotti to approve the request for immunity since he and his office had long been closely associated with the official “solution” of the case. I had no involvement in Garrison’s request but was anxious for the truth to come out. It was obvious, however, that Jowers would not reveal what he knew unless some sort of satisfactory immunity or plea arrangement could be obtained.

  Any number of plea-bargaining possibilities were open to the prosecutor and Garrison. I discovered an alternative route for obtaining immunity. A little-known Tennessee statute provision would allow us to sidestep the attorney general’s office and approach the grand jury directly and ask that body to hear evidence on the case. Garrison insisted on going the conventional route, believing the story was too big for Pierotti to suppress.

  Garrison met with Pierotti on June 3 and laid out the request, stating that his unnamed clients wished to provide specific evidence pertaining to the killing of Dr. King in exchange for a grant of immunity from the state and federal governments. Pierotti asked Garrison for a brief statement outlining the evidence; Garrison submitted the formal written request on June 22, 1993.

  Meanwhile bits and pieces of Jowers’s and Akins’s story began to be passed on to me, usually through Wayne Chastain, to whom Herman and eventually Lewis Garrison would talk. Supposedly, Frank Holt, a black produce truck unloader, was hired to do the shooting. We wanted him as a witness in our pretrial investigation, but Herman couldn’t locate him. Jowers also told Garrison that Frank Liberto had given him the contract to murder Dr. King, thus apparently independently confirming John McFerren’s story.

  Jowers apparently acknowledged having seen James in the Grill on April 4 seated at a table with a dark-haired Latino. This jibed with James’s account of meeting with Raul on the afternoon of the killing. Jowers also indicated that the money for the contract came from New Orleans and was delivered to Memphis in an M. E. Carter Produce Company truck. Herman reported that Jowers had confirmed Betty’s story about the events of April 4 to the last detail.

  There was no indication where and with whom the contact originated. Jowers may have only known local details of the killing, and he wouldn’t reveal all he knew until he was granted immunity. Akins, it emerged, only became involved with Jowers about a year after Dr. King was shot. While Jowers might have revealed information to him, he did not know him at the time of the killing.

  Two and a half months after Garrison met with Pierotti, there was no sign that the attorney general was going to act or even that he was seriously considering Garrison’s request. I had, therefore, begun to think about ways of applying pressure in an attempt to force his hand.

  On August 16, I wrote to him, informing him that I was aware of Garrison’s petition, calling on him to either grant or make a plea bargain arrangement with Jowers. I pointed out its potential impact, both in setting the record straight and in bringing about the release of a man who had been unjustly imprisoned for almost a quarter century. The attorney general tried to fob off the request. On September 8, he wrote that he couldn’t consider granting immunity until he had “evidence, which can be proven beyond reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.” On September 15, he even denied having anything to consider, saying he had not been presented with “any document requesting formal immunity in the case nor any summary of evidence that might cause [him] to consider immunity should such an application be made.” It became clear he had no intention of considering the request.

  On October 4, at the request of Lewis Garrison and Ken Herman, Wayne Chastain met both men in Garrison’s office. Garrison gave him a copy of the actual request for immunity submitted to the attorney general on June 22. Despite Pierotti’s letter to me of September 15, the request was indeed a document asking for immunity containing a summary of the evidence on which it was based.

  It stated that Jowers (designated as “Witness Green”) was approached before the assassination and offered money to locate a person to assassinate Dr. King. The funds would come from another city through a local person or persons. Jowers, who had close contact with some persons in the MPD, was advised that he was in a strategic location to assist and that Dr. King would be a guest at the Lorraine Motel from a certain date. Jowers was to be provided with a weapon. Jowers located a person to do the job, and funds were delivered to Jowers before the assassination in volumes of large bills. At the time of the shooting, Jowers was stationed close to the assassin, and once the shot was fired, the weapon was passed to Jowers who disassembled it and wrapped it in a covering. Jowers had been advised by other conspirators that there would be a decoy following the assassination.

  Betty Spates (designated as “Witness Brown … a close acquaintance of Jowers”) would state that she was “within a few feet of the location where the shot was fired.” Betty would also testify that she saw Jowers with a rifle immediately after hearing the shot. She would state that previously she saw a large amount of money that had been delivered to Jowers. The money was in stacks of large-denomination bills. McCraw (“Witness Black”) stated that on the day after the killing, Jowers showed him the gun and told him it was the one used to assassinate Dr. King. Willie Akins (“Witness White”) would testify that he was asked, after the fact, by Jowers to take care of certain people “who knew too much.” Jowers told him he’d received the gun after the killing from the actual assassin.

  Bobbi Smith (“Witness Gray”) would testify she was aware of the large amount of money paid to Jowers just before the assassination and that she had knowledge of other details about the actual killing. The submission ended with a formal request for immunity for all five people.

  Jowers’s story, as summed up for Chastain by Garrison, was that he had agreed at the request of produce man Frank Liberto to hire a man to kill Dr. King on his last visit to Memphis, and that he was paid $1,000,000, which he passed on.

  Since I had no doubt that the attorney general would continue to stonewall any action based upon this evidence, I had to take steps on behalf of James. I instructed Chastain as local counsel to approach the grand jury on James’s behalf. I planned to ask the grand jury to subpoena attorney Garrison, at which time, if he so chose, he could request immunity for his client(s) in exchange for their testimony. I also formally asked the governor’s counsel to ask the governor to hold off on issuing any ruling on our Motion for Exoneration since new evidence was forthcoming. I suggested that the governor could look foolish if he went ahead and ruled against us in light of information that would shortly be revealed.

  We delayed our actual submission hoping to maximize the possibility of the members taking our submission seriously. Acting indep
endently, we began briefing certain representatives of the American mass media.

  By the beginning of December, I was increasingly frustrated. There was no progress on the request for immunity and the media were unwilling to take up the issue and consequently there was no public pressure. On Tuesday evening, December 7, I gave Wayne the go-ahead for the grand jury submission.

  He was to deliver a letter and an affidavit to testify the next day. He rushed it in and, on his own initiative, attached the names and addresses of the people to be subpoenaed. I was concerned that we had provided Pierotti with the names of the witnesses and warned him any contact with these witnesses outside of the grand jury room would be closely scrutinized. Earlier, when Betty Spates had tried to come forward and get the truth out to clear James, she was visited unofficially in her home and, the record indicated, then called in officially and interrogated. Frightened off, it took twenty years for her to come around again.

  I called Andrew Billen at the London Observer, one of England’s oldest and most reputable broadsheets. Initially skeptical, Billen had covered the TV trial and had a good working knowledge of the case. He was excited—so was his editor. Convinced that no American media entity would break the story, I gave the Observer the go-ahead.

  I learned from a source that Jack Saltman, the Thames Television producer of The Trial of James Earl Ray, was talking to various people, trying to break the story and name the witnesses, whose names I had stipulated from the outset had to be confidential. I was appalled. It was clear that Ken Herman had been working with Saltman for some time and that they had made an arrangement. In confidence, I had disclosed the existence of the “security” witnesses and the nature of their testimony. I believed that my trust was being flouted. Such a disclosure was likely to drive all of the witnesses away, and James would be the loser.

  I confronted Herman. Our relationship, which had been strained since the trial, was now severely damaged. I instructed Wayne to add the names of Ken Herman and Jack Saltman to the list of those persons to be subpoenaed.

  The next day, Thursday, December 9, Wayne delivered the names directly to an attendant at the entrance to the grand jury room and waited. He was not called. On Friday, the attorney general and his number-two were closeted together and the local FBI Special Agent in Charge had also been in for meetings. Wayne’s request to appear before the grand jury was making them anxious. The pressure was building.

  Next, I became specifically aware of and increasingly concerned about the “rogue” efforts of Herman and John Billings to locate the man, Frank Holt, whose name had surfaced as the possible shooter. We all believed that Holt was now in the Orlando area. I told them that I would go to Orlando to approach and personally interview Holt if he could be found. I also sent them formal notices asserting my attorney’s privilege, on behalf of James, over everything they knew or had connected with the case.

  The Observer article was released around 10:00 p.m. on Saturday evening, and I fielded calls for a few hours. Around 2:00 a.m. Wayne called, saying that the London Sunday Times and the Commercial Appeal had called him. The Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted Pierotti as having denounced Garrison and me, calling the entire story a “fraud” or “scam.” On the morning the Observer hit the newsstands, I caught the flight to Orlando. We had an address for Holt, supplied by Buck Buchanan, an Orlando private investigator hired for the purpose.

  Memphis investigator Cliff Dates met me in Orlando, and we went to 32 North Terry, a small transient boarding house. Herman and Billings were also chasing the story and had got there first. Later, as we drove around, we saw a gray Cadillac approaching. We both recognized Ken Herman in the back, sitting between a black man in a baseball cap and John Billings seated on the other side. I was hindered in my search for Frank Holt by having to spend part of the next two days (December 14 and 15) negotiating with the ABC Primetime Live producers. I had learned that Jack Saltman had sold the story and his counseling service to them.

  I saw the program as potentially being useful to the effort to free James, but I was afraid that they might name the witnesses. If Betty and Bobbi were named without their consent and before their statements could be heard in a courtroom, they would probably repudiate earlier statements or not discuss the matter at all. This, of course, is exactly what happened before.

  I contacted the ABC producer. Eventually, he promised that only the witnesses they actually interviewed would be named. On the program, which aired nationwide on Thursday, December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray, saying that he did not shoot Dr. King but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $1,000,000 to facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a man named Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized.

  Jowers’s “clean-up man” Willie Akins confirmed he was ordered to kill the unnamed “shooter” who ran off to Florida before he could “pop” him.

  The producer’s promise was worthless. Betty had been surreptitiously filmed leaving her place of work. Though partially obscured, she was recognizable, and she was named.

  The next morning I asked Cliff Dates to contact Betty. She was hurt, hostile, and blamed me. She didn’t realize that Herman and Saltman hadn’t worked with me for eight months. Since she wouldn’t talk to me, I sent her a letter explaining the facts.

  The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast, there was no news coverage of the previous night’s program, not even on ABC. A small mention was made in USA Today and the Washington Post, which featured Pierotti’s new willingness to investigate the case further, though not to reopen it. Here was a confession, on prime time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.

  I had concluded that the governor would not seriously consider the basis for the motion for exoneration. I filed a petition on James’s behalf seeking a trial on the basis of the new evidence discovered during the course of our investigation as well as the sensational public admissions of Loyd Jowers. On the night the program aired, John Billings, who was trying to keep lines of communication open, called to tell me that they had still not found Holt. When they found him, I would be the first to know. I just listened. Earlier that morning, I had learned it was all over Memphis that Holt was the person implicated in the killing.

  I was scheduled to fly back to London on Friday, December 17. About an hour before the flight I learned that Dwight Lewis of the Nashville Tennessean newspaper had left a message on the office answering machine: they had found Frank Holt, and he wanted to get my reaction to Holt’s statement. My heart stopped. I called Lewis, who told me that two of the Tennessean’s reporters and a photographer had located Holt that day at the men’s homeless center on Central Boulevard in Orlando, one of the shelters where I had “hung out” earlier in the week. He would move from shelter to shelter—long stays were not allowed. He apparently said that he had been inside Jim’s Grill on the afternoon of April 4 but knew nothing about the assassination. The Tennessean had flown him to Nashville, where he took and passed a lie detector test.

  The paper published a feature article on their interview of Frank Holt on Sunday December 19. That morning, I learned that Lewis had gone to the airport to put Holt on a plane bound for Orlando. I asked Buck Buchanan to meet the flight and offer Holt a temporary safe house. Though the Tennessean had not printed Holt’s address, his name and general location were public, and he had publicly refuted all allegations that he was the shooter. I thought his life might very well be in danger.

  Buchanan met the plane, and Frank Holt accepted the offer of protection and temporary safe house accommodations until I could arrive to interview him on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Buchanan was contacted by the Tennessean and by investigators from Attorney General Pierotti’s office. He had left his name at the homeless center the previous week when searching for Holt, and both the news
paper and the Shelby County officials had become aware of his interest.

  The prosecutor had had five witnesses under his nose for over six months and had made no move to interview them, yet the Tennessean’s story was not even two days old, and Pierotti had already sent a team to another state to search Buchanan out to, as he put it, “shoot full of holes” the story told by Loyd Jowers.

  Buchanan met me on my arrival in Orlando on Wednesday, December 23, and we took Holt out to dinner. He was a generally placid, almost expressionless man, concerned about his safety, and wanting to leave the Orlando area. The next day, I interviewed Holt for four hours at my motel. Though I questioned him repeatedly, his story never varied. He said that he had left his home in Darling, Mississippi, in the mid-1950s and ended up in the Jacksonville area, which he had come to regard as a second home. In the early 1960s, he went to Memphis and eventually took a job at the M. E. Carter Produce Company as a driver’s helper, going on deliveries to towns in Arkansas and Mississippi. Occasionally, he would travel to New Orleans to bring back produce to Memphis. This was the job he was doing in 1968 at the time of the assassination.

  He had the impression that Frank Liberto, who had his own produce business (LL&L) also, had some interest in M. E. Carter. Occasionally, he overheard conversations between Liberto and the “big wheels of M. E. Carter,” and on one occasion during the sanitation workers’ strike, he heard Liberto say, “King is a troublemaker, and he should be killed. If he is killed, then he will cause no more trouble.”

  Holt said that he drank beer at Jim’s Grill two or three times a week. He recalled going upstairs in the rooming house to visit and drink beer with two friends: “Apple Booty” and Commodore. Apple Booty had worked the warehouse at M. E. Carter. The last time Holt remembered being upstairs in the rooming house was before Commodore moved, sometime before the shooting. From his description of the layout, it appeared clear that Commodore had occupied room 5-B, the room rented by James on the afternoon of April 4, under the name John Willard.