Loyd Jowers

Loyd Jowers
Jowers at the 1999 trial
Born	(1926-11-20)November 20, 1926 Lexington, Tennessee, U.S.
Died	May 20, 2000(2000-05-20) (aged 73) Union City, Tennessee, U.S.
Occupation	Restaurateur
Known for	Alleged conspirator in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Loyd Jowers (November 20, 1926^[1] – 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.^[2]

In 1993, Jowers appeared on the ABC News program Prime Time Live and claimed to be part of an alleged conspiracy involving the Mafia and the U.S. government 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, a man named Raoul named by Ray to have been involved, and someone he could not identify before finally settling on the story that he hired Memphis police Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the fatal shot. A Memphis civil trial in 1999 supported this claim, not having been shown evidence of Jowers' contradictions. In 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report denying allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King.^[3]