Orders to Kill

by William F Pepper Esq

  He said that he didn’t see Frank Liberto again until 1965. He refused to acknowledge any business dealings with him. In 1966 he left Veterans Cab and went to work for the Yellow Cab Company, owned by Hamilton Smythe, as a dispatcher. The next year (1967) he opened a restaurant called the Check Off Inn on 153 East Calhoun Street, the site of the old Tremont Cafe. He maintained that when he eventually opened Jim’s Grill in the summer of 1967 his wife ran the Check Off Inn, but it was not clear how she could have done this while working full-time for the Memphis Stone and Gravel Company. He also denied that there had been any gambling going on at the Check Off.

  When he opened Jim’s Grill he moved Lena, a cook from the Check Off, over to the grill. He also hired Betty Spates and her sisters Alda Mae Washington and Bobbi Smith. At the time a white woman also worked for him as a waitress, but he couldn’t remember her name.

  He described an Esso gas station on the corner of Vance and Second, and he remembered another station on Vance and Third which he thought was a Shell station. (I thought that either of these could have been where James went to try to have his spare tire repaired around the time of the shooting.)

  He acknowledged driving both a white Cadillac and a brown Rambler station wagon and said that it was possible that the Cadillac was in his wife’s name. He confirmed that his wife, Dorothy, had her hair done every Thursday. (April 4, 1968, was a Thursday.)

  Though he bought most of his supplies from Montesi’s supermarket, he said that fresh vegetables came from M. E. Carter and that deliveries were made every day.

  He said that the back door from the rooming house was boarded up, but he couldn’t explain why it appeared to be open in police evidence photographs I showed to him taken shortly after the killing.

  Jowers said that on April 4 he drove the white Cadillac to work and that Bobbi Smith worked on the morning of April 4 but left around 4:00 p.m. He said Betty Spates did not work at all that day because one of her children was sick. Also, he said that Big Lena and Rosie Lee had gone from his employ months earlier and that he himself had fixed breakfast for the “eggs and sausage” man. (Sometime prior to Jowers’s deposition I had located Rosie Lee Dabney and she confirmed that she was waiting on tables in Jim’s Grill on the afternoon of April 4. She said she served eggs and sausage to a stranger on the afternoon of the shooting and again the next morning. An MPD report dated April 6 stated that Dabney was on duty all day on April 4 and that she had served eggs and sausage to a stranger.) Jowers could not identify a photograph of Jack Youngblood as the “eggs and sausage man.” At the time of the gunshot he said that he was drawing a pitcher of beer.

  Jowers confirmed with certainty that the bushes in the backyard had been cut down. He actually drew a line surprisingly close to the building up to where he said the thick bushes came. He acknowledged that the waitresses probably did take food up to Grace Walden but denied telling Bobbi not to take food up to her on the morning of April 4.

  He denied driving Bobbi to work on the morning of April 5 or going out to the back or even looking out there on the morning after the shooting. He said he drove the white Cadillac that day.

  Incredibly, he categorically denied having any relationship with Betty Spates. He also denied knowing anything about the Oakview house and ever staying overnight there. He did, however, admit to speaking with Spates on December 13, 1993, the night the Prime Time Live program was filmed, to warn her, he said, that reporters were on the way to her house.

  I showed Jowers a copy of the transcript of the ABC Prime Time Live program and he agreed it was an accurate statement. I then entered it into the record. When I began to question him on the statements he made on the program, he invoked the Fifth Amendment. I noted for the record that the transcript had already been agreed to and entered into evidence and that in my opinion the protection of the Fifth Amendment was not available to him. Garrison then agreed to stipulate “… that the questions were asked and Mr. Jowers gave these answers” (the answers being those responses given during the television program).

  Jowers’s testimony was extraordinary for the number of untruths he told, many of which were clearly contradicted by other evidence and testimony and some of which contradicted his earlier statements.

  Jowers, for reasons best known to himself and his counsel, insisted on deposing Betty Spates. Lewis Garrison served a subpoena on her, and she came along in a hostile frame of mind. Before beginning, I took her aside and explained that Jowers, who had denied having any relationship with her, had insisted that she be called. Initially, she was inclined not to remember anything, but gradually she decided to cooperate. She confirmed the factual truthfulness of the affidavit she had given to me which I have discussed in detail earlier.

  Willie Akins was also deposed and stated that years after the event Jowers admitted to him that he was involved in the killing. Jowers described his meeting with Raul, Raul having brought the gun to him at the grill, and Frank Liberto arranging for a delivery of a large sum of money in a produce box which was included in a regular delivery. The scene was striking. Jowers greeted Akins cordially and then Akins, under oath, proceeded to directly incriminate his old friend. Akins continued to maintain that years later he had been asked by Jowers to kill Frank Holt. At the end of the deposition Jowers and Akins went off together talking about old times.

  Betty’s sister Bobbi Smith was also subpoenaed and appeared as scheduled on December 22. Under oath she confirmed what she had told me in an informal interview on December 18, 1992, two years earlier. Jowers had told her not to take breakfast upstairs to Grace Walden on the morning of April 4. She usually did this about twice a week around 10–10:30 a.m., after the morning rush was over. I had always thought that this was significant because it meant that something was going on up there well before noon that day, some four or more hours before James arrived to rent the room. Bobbi also said that Jowers picked her up on the mornings of April 4 and 5, as usual, in his brown station wagon which on April 4 he parked just north of the grill in front of the U.S. fixtures store. (I remembered that during and after hypnosis Charles Hurley, who was picking up his wife Peggy on South Main Street that afternoon, recalled seeing a brown station wagon on that side of the street.) On the way in on the morning of April 5, Jowers told Bobbi about the rifle being found in the backyard after the killing. She also confirmed that Jowers often spent the night at the Oakview house where she lived with her mother and Betty in 1969, and that he had a longstanding affair with Betty during all of this time. She also said that at the time of the killing Betty did have a job at the Seabrook Wallpaper company across the street from Jim’s Grill.

  Finally, she said that she had told the same story to the TBI investigators sent by Pierotti and she did not understand why they would say that she knew nothing or had retracted her story. They told her not to discuss the matter with anyone.

  SOMETIME AFTER TELLING ME his story about Frank Liberto, Nathan Whitlock told me about a rumor of an earlier King murder contract put out to a member of a family named Nix who lived in Tipton County, Tennessee. Nathan said he understood that Red Nix had been given a new car and a rifle and was paid $500 a week to track and kill King. If he succeeded he was to get $50,000. Whitlock thought the offer came from Frank C. Liberto. Red had been killed not too long after Dr. King was shot. At Whitlock’s suggestion I met with Red’s brother, Norris, and Bobby Kizer, who jointly owned and ran the Neon Moon nightclub on Sycamore View in East Memphis. They confirmed that Red was given a new car and was put on a payroll for a job. “He was after someone all right,” said Norris Nix, “but I don’t know who.” They believed that Tim Kirk, who was a friend of Red Nix, would know who hired him, and offered to ask him to tell me what he knew. He could, they said, free my client. Bobby Kizer even offered to go up to the prison with me to talk to Kirk.

  I was surprised. I thought I knew everything Kirk had to say. Eventually I visited him again to ask him about the Red Nix murder contract. He said with certainty that the contrac
t was put out by Carlos Marcello, not Frank C. Liberto. It was sometime in mid-1967. He said Nix knew Marcello and undertook various jobs for him. A car had indeed been provided. This was the first indication directly linking Marcello to a contract on Dr. King. Nathan Whitlock had been under the impression that Frank C. Liberto had also been behind the Nix contract. Kirk said there was no way. It came directly from New Orleans and Carlos Marcello.

  Kirk said that Red Nix was set up and killed sometime after the assassination and that it could well have been related to his knowledge about the contract. He promised to try to check out what was behind Red’s murder. Try as he did, he was unable to learn anything.

  Information about the Marcello/Red Nix contract reminded my assistant Jean about something that Memphis investigator Jim Kellum had included in one of his reports in 1992 before he asked to be released. It concerned an informant who had allegedly mentioned a similar contract which was put out at a meeting in Jackson, Tennessee. Kellum agreed to arrange a meeting. On the morning of December 20, 1994, Kellum brought to breakfast “Jerry,” a longtime trusted informant of his. Jerry told of attending a meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, in mid-1967 at the Blue Note Lounge. There, a wheelchair paraplegic named Joe “Buck” Buchanan, who was into a variety of illegal activities and well connected in New Orleans, put out a $50,000 contract on Dr. King, which Jerry believed had come from that city. Jerry also said that Tim Kirk was at that meeting, as was one of the Tiller brothers from Memphis (who we knew had some association with Kirk). When I raised the meeting with Kirk he said he had a vague recollection of the event. It seemed that this contract was later picked up by Red Nix, possibly directly from Marcello.

  Jerry said that Joe Buchanan was killed some years later, shot sitting in his wheelchair in his front yard, after being set up by a woman he knew well. Jerry said that she was probably still alive and would likely know why Buchanan was killed and who ordered him to be shot. Jerry agreed to try to locate her and find out. He ultimately became unable or unwilling to do so.

  More than ever the trail of the Memphis contract that actually resulted in Dr. King’s death led to New Orleans and pointed toward the involvement of the Mafia organization of Carlos Marcello. Marcello had not just given his approval but had taken on the job and had attempted to subcontract it on more than one occasion—the last time being through his Memphis associates which included Frank C. Liberto and the Memphis Godfather.

  FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS THERE had been rumors about a Yellow Cab taxi driver having seen someone going down over the wall just after the shooting. As part of the investigation for the television trial, I had asked two of my investigators, Herman and Billings, to get the names of Yellow Cab drivers working on April 4. They were not forthcoming.

  Finally, in autumn of 1994 a driver came forward of his own volition. At first, he tried to tell his story to the attorney general but he encountered total disinterest. Then, after spotting Lewis Garrison’s name in the local paper in an article about the case, he telephoned him and left his name. Garrison duly passed it on to me and I spoke to him on November 5, 1994.

  Louie Ward told me a story he had held back, out of fear, for twenty-six years. He had been driving on the night of April 4 and around 6:00 p.m. he was parked near the corner of Perkins and Quince. Suddenly he heard the dispatcher come on the radio, obviously responding to a driver’s call about an emergency (the drivers could only hear the dispatcher’s side of conversations with the other drivers). He heard the dispatcher say that he would send an ambulance and then, in response to something else the driver said, the dispatcher said he would send one anyway and call the police. From what he had heard Ward learned that the emergency was the shooting of Martin Luther King. He also realized that the driver was taking a fare to the airport. Ward went straight to the airport and met up with the driver who told him his story. Ward said that the driver, whose name he could not recall and who probably was in his early sixties, was driving car 58. The driver said that he had gone to the Lorraine shortly before 6:00 p.m. to pick up a passenger with an enormous amount of luggage. As they finished loading up his taxi in the Lorraine parking lot, the driver turned to look at the area of dense brush and trees opposite the motel. His passenger quickly punched him on the arm in order to get his attention and (so the driver later thought) distract him from looking at the brush, saying, “Look up there—Dr. King’s standing alone on the balcony. Everybody’s always saying how difficult it would be to shoot him since he is always in a crowd. Now look at him.” At that precise moment the shot rang out and the driver saw Dr. King get struck in the jaw and fall. The driver said he grabbed his microphone and told his dispatcher that Dr. King had been shot. The dispatcher said he would call an ambulance, and the driver said that considering the wound he didn’t think it would do much good. Then Ward said the driver told him that he saw a man come down over the wall empty-handed, run north on Mulberry Street, and get into a black and white MPD traffic police car which was parked across the middle of the intersection of Mulberry and Huling. At that point the driver told the dispatcher to tell the police that one of their units had the man. Meanwhile, the passenger was becoming irritable, saying that they had to leave immediately because otherwise the ambulance and other cars would box them in and he had to make his plane. They left.

  Ward heard the driver repeat the story to three MPD officers at the airport, and observed a second interview being conducted later that evening in the Yellow Cab office by other policemen. After that evening Ward said he never even saw the driver of car 58 again. Ward was working full-time at the Memphis army depot and was on the job round the clock the next two or three days. It was only after this period that he was able to return to his part-time taxi driving. When he went back to the South Second Street Yellow Cab office for the first time after the killing he asked after the car 58 driver. Three or four of the drivers in the office told him that he had fallen or had been pushed from a speeding car onto the Memphis-Arkansas bridge late on the evening of April 4. Ward also said that at that time there was speculation by some of the drivers that since the man seen fleeing the area wasn’t carrying a gun that perhaps it was hidden in the back of Loyd Jowers’s café because all of this activity took place behind that building.

  Ward agreed to undergo hypnosis in order to see if he could recollect the names of the driver of car 58 and the dispatcher. Subsequently, under hypnosis, he recalled that the driver’s name was Paul, and that after the fleeing man got into the passenger side of the MPD traffic car, the car headed north at top speed. Louie Ward agreed to try to help us locate the dispatcher on duty.

  I did manage to locate and depose a former Yellow Cab dispatcher named Prentice Purdy. Under oath in May 1995 Purdy stated that he nearly always worked the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift and that was his schedule on the day of the assassination. He did recall a full-time driver named Paul and said that he believed that he almost exclusively did airport runs. He said that he could not specifically recall ever seeing Paul after April 4, but he did not know if or when he had died. He said he was unable to remember Paul’s last name, though he did agree to continue to think about it. I telephoned him a few days later and he still was unable to recall the name but within the week he had left a message on Chastain’s answerphone and I called him back. He said Paul’s last name was Butler.

  Telephone records indicated that a Paul Butler who was a driver for the Yellow Cab company was listed in the 1967 Memphis residential telephone directory. His wife, Betty, continued to be listed in 1968 as his widow. According to social security death listings Paul Butler died in August 1967. He obviously could not have been the driver of car 58 on April 4, 1968. We were back to square one.

  The story was consistent with Solomon Jones’s observations, but I wondered why Ernestine Campbell or William Ross would not have seen this person. When asked, Ernestine said that at that time she had focused her entire attention on the balcony and then on Jesse Jackson’s actions at the foot of the stairs. I also reca
lled that immediately after the shot William Ross had turned and run back to the driveway, so within seconds of the shooting as he stared at the balcony his back would have been to the wall on the opposite side of the street. The fleeing man could well have been missed by Ross though seen by Jones, who had stared at the area of the origin of the shot for a brief while after it was fired.

  I recalled the curious photograph shown to Ed Redditt during the course of the investigation by the Justice Department, which showed the evidence bundle on the corner of Mulberry and Huling. The chain of events recounted by Ward might explain why at some time there could have been a plan to drop the incriminating evidence bundle on this street corner which now appeared to be on the actual escape route of the assassin.

  ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 9, I met with Steve Tompkins in his G-10 office in the Tennessee State Capitol Building. He had prepared a chronology of events for me, which I was eager to analyze and discuss. He had printed it out before he left the office the previous night. He looked everywhere but couldn’t find it. When he thought about it he remembered placing it on a desk in the office with his secretary’s resume on top of a manila legal size folder. Both were gone. He was convinced that his office had been entered and the file taken.

  I had recently had a similar experience. On one visit to Birmingham my address/appointment book had disappeared. I had come to make it a habit to carry with me at all times the most sensitive working files. After completing a number of telephone calls I left the room, taking the file bag with me, but leaving the address book behind, lying on the unmade bed.

  When I returned I needed a phone number and looked for the book. It was nowhere to be found.

  I located the housekeeper who had, in my absence, cleaned the room and made the bed. She remembered seeing the book and moving it before changing the sheets. She returned to the room with me and showed me the end table against the wall where she had placed the book on top of a sweater which I had also left lying on the bed. The sweater was there exactly where she had placed it, but the book was missing. She and I looked behind and under the table and the bed and all over the room. It remained missing and has never turned up.