Loyd Jowers (November 20, 1926May 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.
In 1993, Jowers appeared on the ABC News program Prime Time Live and claimed to have been part of an alleged conspiracy involving the Mafia and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson 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 and an unidentified person, before later saying that he had hired Memphis police Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the fatal shot. A civil trial in Memphis in 1999 supported this claim, while not having been shown existing evidence of Jowers' contradictions.
In June 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report denying allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King. Jowers said Liberto, who had died prior to the ABC interview, had paid him $100,000 to arrange the assassination. According to The Washington Post, Pepper had "for years claimed the assassination was the result of a vast conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA and the Army, organized crime and various state and local officials."
At a press conference following the verdict, Coretta Scott King stated that "there is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. ... the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame."
Following statements by Dexter King and other family members, Dexter was subsequently told by a reporter that "there are many people out there who feel that as long as these conspirators remain nameless and faceless there is no true closure, and no justice." He replied:
<blockquote>No, he [Mr. Lloyd Jowers] named the shooter. The shooter was the Memphis Police Department Officer, Lt. Earl Clark who he named as the killer. Once again, beyond that you had credible witnesses that named members of a Special Forces team who didn't have to act because the contract killer succeeded, with plausible denial, a Mafia contracted killer. John Campbell, an assistant district attorney in Memphis who was part of the criminal trial against James Earl Ray, said: "I'm not surprised by the verdict. This case overlooked so much contradictory evidence that never was presented, what other option did the jury have but to accept Mr. Pepper's version?"
Gerald Posner, an investigative journalist who wrote the book Killing the Dream, in which he makes the case that Ray was the killer, said after the verdict: "It distresses me greatly that the legal system was used in such a callous and farcical manner in Memphis. If the King family wanted a rubber stamp of their own view of the facts, they got it." On June 9, 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report rejecting allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King, including the findings of the Memphis civil court jury. He was reported to have suffered from lung cancer at the time of his death.