Orders to Kill

by William F Pepper Esq

  Andrew Billen, who thought the silence of the American media extraordinary, wrote a follow-up article on the television revelations in the Observer.

  Having 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 (December 16) John Billings, who was trying to keep lines of communication open, called to tell me that they had still not found Holt. He said that the leads were strong and it was only a question of time before he surfaced. He insisted that when they found him I would be the first to know. I just listened. Earlier that morning Jim Smith had said that it was all over Memphis that Holt was the person implicated. He also said that he had heard that Holt had been found.

  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 one shelter to another since any semblance of continuing stay was 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 had taken and passed a lie detector test.

  I was concerned about Holt’s safety and pleaded with Lewis not to mention his most recent address in the piece they were going to run the next day. Lewis said he would raise my concern with his editor. It was obvious that the decision was not his to make.

  The Tennessean published a feature article on their interview with 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. Checking the schedules of flights to Orlando that day, I concluded that Holt had likely been put on a direct American flight. I asked Buck Buchanan to meet the flight and offer Holt a temporary safe house. Though the Tennessean had not printed Holt’s address, since his name and general location were public and he had publicly refuted the allegations that he was the shooter, I thought his life might very well be in danger. After all, Akins had contended that Jowers had asked him in 1974 to get rid of Holt.

  Buchanan met the plane and Frank Holt accepted the offer of protection and temporary accommodation until I could arrive to interview him on Wednesday. Buck settled him into a motel just outside of Orlando.

  On Tuesday, Buchanan was contacted by the Tennessean as well as 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 newspaper 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 him out to, as he put it, “shoot full of holes” the story told by Loyd Jowers.

  Buchanan told the reporter that he could give him no information unless authorized to do so by his client, and he told the Memphis investigators that he was instructed by an attorney and bound by the privilege. (I found this investigator’s attitude refreshing.) He advised me that they did not ask him to request my permission to allow them to have access to Holt, nor did I ever receive any request from the attorney general or any member of his staff. They went away empty-handed.

  Buchanan met me on my arrival in Orlando around 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 23, and we took Holt out to dinner. He was a generally placid, almost expressionless man, and as we talked over the next three and one half hours, rapport was gradually established. He was concerned about his safety, saying that he wanted to leave the Orlando area and go to Tampa or elsewhere in the state.

  The next morning Buck brought Holt around to my motel, where from about 8 a.m. until noon I interviewed him. He was uneasy about the tape recorder so I kept it off, taking notes instead. I had the benefit of informal comments he had volunteered to Buchanan before I arrived, including his impression that I had some responsibility to stop Jowers from telling lies about him.

  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 with the truck to Gulfport, Mississippi, and New Orleans where they would pick up some produce and bring it back 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) out on Scott Street in the market, also had some interest in M. E. Carter because he frequently came around to the company’s Front Street offices. 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 also recalled that Charles Liberto, whom he thought was Frank Liberto’s brother, seemed to have a negative feeling about Dr. King.

  Holt said that he drank beer at Jim’s Grill two or three times a week and had frequented the cafe before Jowers took it over after Jim’s death. He insisted that he didn’t really know Jowers and that Jowers certainly didn’t know him except to serve him.

  He remembered Betty Spates and her sister, who were waitresses in the grill. He knew that Jowers had something going with Betty, and he recalled that he had heard that this was why Jowers split up with his wife. He recalled that Betty and Bobbi were always friendly to him when Jowers was not around but that they were less so when he was present.

  He recalled going upstairs in the rooming house to visit and drink beer with two friends—Applebooty and Commodore. Applebooty had worked at the warehouse at M. E. Carter. The last time Holt remembered being upstairs in the rooming house was before Commodore moved, which was 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. Bessie Brewer, the manager of the rooming house, had stated that the occupant of the room before James was named Commodore, except she said that he had become ill and was taken to the hospital where he died.

  Holt said that on the day before the shooting he had gone on a delivery run deep into Mississippi and that they did not return until late morning or early afternoon of the following day, Thursday, April 4. When he reached Memphis he made the rounds of a few bars and eventually ended up in Jim’s Grill late in the afternoon. To the best of his recollection he was inside the grill at the time of the shooting and could not explain the reference in the FBI report that he was passing the grill on his way to work. He did not recall ever being interviewed by the police or FBI. I found his recollections somewhat worrying, but the discrepancy could have been explained by Holt’s own faulty memory, hampered by the passage of time and his alcohol abuse.

  He remembered another Frank who had worked at M. E. Carter. He was also tall, and only had one eye. He didn’t know him well but thought he was married and lived in the area. (For some time Ken Herman and John Billings had been looking for a one-eyed Frank Holt with a street name of Chicken Hawk. I wondered if they could have confused the two.) Holt even said that he had seen the o
ther Frank on the afternoon of April 4 and believed that he was wearing a lumber jacket of some sort. He did not think that the other Frank was any more likely to have been involved in the shooting than he was. (I resolved to try to locate him, nevertheless, but we were unable to do so.)

  Holt said that he had no gun of any kind at that time. He had hunted rabbits and squirrels in Mississippi with a single-shot .22 rifle years ago but had no experience with larger caliber guns such as that which was used to kill Dr. King.

  He said he had known Coy Love, the street artist, but didn’t recall seeing him on April 4.

  When asked why Loyd Jowers or anyone would have named him, he was puzzled. “They probably thought I was dead,” he said. Holt had been gone from Memphis for 24 years, leaving in late 1969, and returning only for a few hours in 1993 to visit a sick friend.

  He had no interest in notoriety and abhorred being linked to the assassination. My impression after our interview was that he was credible and that I was not likely to see a more unpromising candidate for the assassin.

  Buck and I spent that afternoon with Holt, as he took another lie detector test, essentially covering the same ground as the Tennessean’s had, and underwent hypnosis. Both sessions were videotaped, and both the hypnotist and the polygrapher involved concluded that Frank Holt was not involved in the crime.

  Late in the afternoon of December 23, I shook hands with Frank Holt and said good-bye. I told him that I believed that he had further assisted in the clearing of his name.

  I returned to England for Christmas believing that Jowers was either covering up his own role as the shooter or was protecting someone else. Akins’s claim that he tried to find Holt and kill him in 1974 was incredible. By that time Holt had been gone from Memphis for five years.

  In 1974, Jowers may have been constructing one of his self-protective stories, for around this time James was about to obtain a habeas corpus hearing. When threatened by events over the almost twenty-six-year history of this case, Jowers had always developed such stories. The morning after the shooting he told Bobbi that he had found a gun in the back and turned it over to the police. On that day he told cab driver McCraw a similar story. In 1968–1969 he identified Jack Youngblood to Wayne Chastain as the mysterious stranger who was in the grill and who had been picked up by the police, only to deny it to Wayne and reporter Jeff Cohen in 1972. He then confirmed the Youngblood story to me in 1978 when the HSCA investigation was preparing to call James. Regarding the presence of the waitresses in the grill on April 4, Jowers was strikingly inconsistent. In 1982, as I was pursuing some other leads in Memphis, he apparently instructed Akins to kill Betty. Six years later he finally tried to obstruct my locating Betty as well as her sisters Bobbi and Alda and the other waitress, Rosie Lee Dabney. It is thus possible to see an erratic pattern of cover-up or attempted cover-up activity by Loyd Jowers over the entire history of the case. This conduct has only begun to make sense in the perspective of the events of the last two years.

  27

  Breakthroughs: January–April 15, 1994

  IN AN INTERVIEW with the Tennessean on January 7, 1994, attorney general Pierotti said that he was going to tell the grand jury to go ahead and listen to what Chastain had to say. The foreman, Herbert Robinson, said that even though Chastain was “a pain” they would hear him sometime after January 18, when the new grand jury was formed. (At the time of this book going to press Wayne would still be waiting to be called.) I found this appalling in light of attorney general Canale’s strong undertaking to the jury at James’s March 10, 1969, guilty plea hearing. At that time he pledged that “if any evidence was ever presented that showed there was a conspiracy” he would take “prompt and vigorous action in searching out and asking that an indictment be returned….”

  Fortunately we had already decided not to wait for this to happen but to proceed with the filing of a petition for a trial.

  On January 7, I flew to Nashville and met with James for about two hours before participating with him in a public television interview, which was to be aired on the following Sunday. He was in good spirits and was particularly interested in the possibility of using the imminent petition as a means of obtaining the declassification of relevant files, reports, and documents.

  The interview went well. When the interviewer raised a question about James’s ex-wife Anna’s claim that he confessed to her over a prison telephone, James pointed out that these telephone calls were monitored and that there was a sign stating this by each phone, so that he was unlikely to discuss anything of a sensitive nature on the phone, much less confess guilt.

  I also met again with former Commercial Appeal reporter Steve Tompkins. We had spoken several times by telephone during the intervening months, and he had decided to assist me in his spare time. He agreed to reach out to certain contacts of his in greatly varying positions in army intelligence, the Pentagon, and the Special Forces. He had no way of knowing what the response would be, and though he would try to put me in touch with the various people who might have answers to some of my questions, he doubted that they would meet with me face to face. First of all, he said, this was because I was a lawyer—and these guys distrusted all lawyers. Secondly, I was James Earl Ray’s attorney and this made their assistance even more risky.

  Tompkins said that from his experience these people had always kept their word. Though they would not volunteer any information, they had always answered his questions truthfully.

  A couple of the Special Forces “grunts” (noncommissioned officers) would likely cooperate. In addition to covert operations relating to domestic turbulence in 1967, they had been involved in gunrunning activities into New Orleans. The operations were coordinated by a master sergeant who was a part of their group. The sales were made to Carlos Marcello’s operation and delivered to barges in a cove bordering property owned by Marcello. A man named Zippy or Zip Chimento handled these transactions for Marcello. The soldiers were given the name of Joe Coppola, who was connected with the Louisiana Highway Patrol, in case they had any trouble transporting the guns by truck. When I checked I learned that Zip Chimento was in fact a confidant and associate of Marcello and Joe Coppola was the commissioner of the Highway Patrol.

  ON MONDAY, January 10, Wayne filed the petition for the trial along with five volumes of exhibits and two video exhibits. Wayne and I then drove out to Jim Lawson’s old church, Centenary Methodist, where a press conference had been scheduled to call for an independent grand jury investigation. When we got there a number of participants, including Jim Lawson, who had flown in from Los Angeles, had already arrived. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the former chaplain of Yale University and pastor of Riverside Church in New York, whom I had not seen in sixteen years, came in shortly after with John Frohnmeyer, a lawyer who had resigned from his post as the Bush administration’s appointee to the National Endowment for the Humanities and was in the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt. Rev. Coffin had just arrived to take up a post there on sabbatical. The group also included Rev. C. T. Vivian, Dr. King’s former aide; Rev. Joseph Agne, director of racial justice for the National Council of Churches in New York; Rev. Ken Sehested of the Baptist Peace Fellowship in Memphis; Rev. Mark Matheny, chairman of the Asbury United Methodist District Council on Ministries in Memphis; Rev. Herbert Lester, pastor of Centenary United Methodist; and Rev. William Vaughan III, pastor of Good Samaritan United Methodist Church.

  I briefed the group and answered questions for about two hours. The following two-hour press conference focused on the group’s commitment that a grand jury should independently investigate the murder of Dr. King under the leadership of its own foreman and an independent prosecutor not associated in any way with the Shelby County district attorney general. All agreed that the Shelby County D.A. couldn’t be regarded as an objective, impartial investigator.

  Wayne and I left the meeting feeling uplifted. Later that day we learned that the petition had gone to the court of Judge Joe Brown, whom
Wayne held in high regard, and a hearing had been scheduled for the following morning.

  The next morning Wayne and I arrived at the Criminal Justice Center to find television cameras already ensconced in the courtroom. During the brief hearing, the judge raised the question of whether or not our petition could prevail because of prior decisions that had been reached on some of the issues, primarily related to overturning a plea of guilty. We argued that those prior decisions were made without the benefit of the new evidence we now sought to produce which proved James’s actual innocence of the crime. The judge asked both sides to prepare memoranda of law on the issues, scheduling a hearing for April 4, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the assassination.

  Early that afternoon John McFerren and a friend, Freddie Granberry, came down from Somerville for a meeting in the restaurant at the Ramada hotel. McFerren promised that this time he would not “chicken out” and that he was ready to sing like a bird. He said that he recalled hearing from a local man, Tommy Wright, that on Saturday mornings Liberto would meet with a high-level Tennessee state official at his law office in Fayette County. Tommy said that they would meet regularly on Saturday mornings. Alarm bells went off. I recalled that Randy Rosenson had insisted that in 1978, around the time of his interviews by HSCA staff, he had been visited by the same high-level Tennessee state official, who tried to get him to say that he had been acquainted with James Earl Ray. If Rosenson had known James then he could have dropped the cigarette pack containing the card himself. If he didn’t know James then someone else had to have left the pack and card behind. James had always stated that he believed the card was linked to Raul. Since the state and the HSCA had taken the position that Raul did not exist, any evidence to the contrary had to be a problem for them.