The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  1. Raped Angolan women

  2. Were tried and convicted of these crimes

  3. Were executed by the victims

  In fact none of the above was true. The story was revealed by the agent who promulgated it to be false and to have been totally concocted at the CIA station in Zaire and disseminated through the extensive worldwide agency network. Schapp revealed that his research clearly indicated that the agency alone—not to mention its counterparts in the rest of the American intelligence community—owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it had its people, ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors, in virtually every major media organization. As we had seen and were indeed experiencing every day of the trial, this inevitably resulted in the suppression or distortion of sensitive stories and the planting and dissemination of disinformation.

  Schapp then turned to the coverage of the King assassination and examined the extraordinary universal media hostility against Dr. King when he came out against the Vietnam War and the same reaction against his family when they decided to advocate a trial for James Earl Ray. Cited were specific examples of media distortions and blatant lies, which characterized the media coverage of the case and James Earl Ray’s alleged role for over thirty years. Particular mention was made of the totally baseless New York Times front-page column piece reporting on alleged investigations by the FBI, the HSCA, and the Times of the 1967 Alton Illinois bank robbery. This piece was far worse than distorted or slanted reporting since the investigation did not take place and the Ray brothers were never even suspects as the Times article stated. It was a domestic example of the type of pure fabrication similar to the story about the Angolan rapes.

  Schapp explained that a Harvard neurologist had helped him to understand the power of the neurological impact upon human cognizance, intelligence functioning, and reasoned decision making when the same story is told over and over again. The impact makes sense when the same story is told repeatedly. That impact makes the story a knee-jerk part of the people who are exposed to it. Even if they are convinced on one occasion by powerful evidence to the contrary, the next day will usually find them reverting to the long-held belief, which has became a part of themselves—often integral to their very identity. Nothing less than some sort of intense deprogramming experience with ongoing reinforcement is required.

  After analyzing the powerfully comprehensive control of the media by the forces that control American public policy and examining their identical policy and coverage in terms of the assassination, the systematic brainwashing of Americans in respect of this case became abundantly clear to the court, jury, and those present. Bill Schapp’s analysis and testimony highlighted the absence of the media in our courtroom. In effect, by not being there, they proved his point. As noted earlier, only one local television journalist stayed.

  Considering all of the aspects of the cover-up in this case, the ongoing media role is the most sinister precisely because it, if not powerfully controverted, as was done with the trial, perpetuates the lies and disinformation from one generation to the next, for all time.

  The Defendant

  The defendant Loyd Jowers had made a number of admissions over the years that, taken cumulatively, constituted powerful evidence of his involvement in the assassination. A number of witnesses took the stand, each with a particular piece of the picture of Jowers’s role.

  Taxi driver James Milner, who met Jowers in the early 1970s, recounted how he came to work closely with Jowers during 1979 and 1980, seeing him about eight hours a day. On one occasion during this time about twenty years ago, he testified that Jowers told him that Dr. King was killed not by James Earl Ray but by a law enforcement officer and that he knew all about it.

  Milner said that after Jowers told him that Dr. King was actually killed by a law enforcement officer, he added that, “You can take that to the bank.” After that admission over twenty years ago, Milner said that in 1998 he carried on a long-distance telephone relationship with his friend over a period of around three months. During these conversations, Milner testified that Jowers essentially told him what happened. Milner said he asked Jowers if he pulled the trigger, and the response was, “I was involved to a certain extent, but I did not pull the trigger.” He said Jowers stated that Frank Liberto sent him a large sum of money in a produce box. He took it and put it in an old stove. Then, the man he knew as Raul picked it up. Loyd told him that the assassination was planned for over two days in meetings in his café, attended by five men—only three of whom he knew.

  Milner said that Jowers told him that Frank Liberto instructed him to be at the back door around 6:00 p.m. where he would receive a “package.” He was there, heard a shot, and then took the “still-smoking” rifle from his friend Earl Clark. He tried to flush the cartridge shell down his toilet, but it stopped up his toilet. When he retrieved it later that night, he threw it in the Mississippi River. The next morning, Jowers said Raul picked up the rifle.

  As noted earlier, J. J. Isabel testified, confirming his earlier statement that he and Jowers each drove a chartered bus to Cleveland and shared a hotel room, and after dinner and beers (with Jowers having more than a few), sat on their beds talking. Isabel said Jowers confirmed his knowledge about his involvement in the assassination. Isabel said Jowers’s response gave him pause. He dropped the subject and never raised it again.

  Bobbi Balfour (Betty Spates’s sister, previously Smith), one of Jowers’s waitresses, testified that on the morning of the day of the assassination, Jowers instructed her not to bring food upstairs in the rooming house to Grace Walden Stephens, who was bedridden and recuperating from an illness. Grace and Charlie Stephens’s room was right next to the one rented by James Earl Ray in mid-afternoon, and which appeared to have been used by Raul for setting up James. Ms. Balfour also testified that Jowers picked her up and drove her to work the next morning. On the way, she said, he told her that the police had found the murder weapon out behind the cafe.

  Betty Spates’s story, which first surfaced in 1992, was put into evidence as a rebuttal witness through her deposition and her earlier affidavits, in which she stated that she was standing at the back door of the Grill’s kitchen around 6:00 p.m. on April 4, 1968, when she saw Loyd running from the bushes carrying a rifle. His face was white as a sheet, and the knees of his trousers were wet and muddied. Rushing by her, she said he broke down the rifle; then wrapping it in a cloth he carried it into the Grill, where he put it under the counter. For all of the intervening years, Betty Spates thought Loyd himself was the assassin because she didn’t see anyone else in the bushes.

  Defense counsel Garrison attacked Spates’s credibility, quoting from a statement she gave to the Shelby County district attorney general and FBI investigators, in which she denied seeing anything. She had subsequently told me that she felt threatened by the two official investigators. We intended to call defendant Jowers at this stage of the proceedings, but after the first week of the trial, his health deteriorated, preventing his return to the courtroom. Consequently, we read portions of his deposition into evidence. That evidence included the statements discussed earlier that he confirmed he made in a December 16, 1993, television interview with Sam Donaldson on his Primetime Live program, in which Jowers admitted that he became involved in facilitating the assassination at the request of Memphis mobster Frank Liberto, to whom he owed a big favor. As noted earlier, he was told that no police would be around and that a scapegoat was in place.

  The most critical testimony in terms of evidence-damning admissions by Loyd Jowers came from Ambassador Andrew Young and Dexter King.

  Both testified that Jowers admitted to being approached by Frank Liberto. Jowers would receive a lot of money, which he was to turn over to a person named Raul who would visit him and who would leave a rifle with him.

  He said these events took place, and subsequently there were meetings in his Grill where the assassination was actually planned.
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br />   The testimony revealed that Jowers said that on the day of the planned event, Earl Clark collected the rifle from him within an hour of the killing. The next time he saw the rifle was when he took it from the shooter when it was still smoking after the shot.

  Jowers insisted that he didn’t know who was going to be killed and contended that he did not actively participate in the planning sessions. Both Dexter King and Andrew Young testified that on this point, they didn’t believe him. They agreed that he appeared to be an old man wanting to relieve himself of a great burden, but that he didn’t quite seem able to bring himself to be completely truthful as to his role and the extent of his knowledge in front of the victim’s son.

  The interview session conducted by Dexter King and Andrew Young was tape-recorded, and that recording, authenticated by Ambassador Young was introduced into evidence in its entirety.

  Damages

  The King family did not bring the action for the purpose of obtaining a large damage award against Loyd Jowers or his co-conspirator agents of the City of Memphis, State of Tennessee, and the Federal Government.

  The family decided to request only nominal damages in the amount of $100 toward the funeral expenses of their loved one. Three of the five family members testified with great dignity. Mrs. King, Dexter, and Yolanda, each in her or his own special way, told the jury what it meant to lose Martin Luther King Jr. as a husband and a father. From their perspectives, the jury and the court had a unique opportunity to focus on the personal loss to young children of a loving, caring, and playful father, as well as the sudden absence suffered by their mother as she was traumatically separated from her lifetime partner. One began to get a glimpse of the burden of being the close family of a man, a human being, who becomes a legendary, heroic figure in life, then mythologized, and perhaps beatified, if not sainted, on earth. (At the time of this writing, Dr. King has been declared a martyr by the Vatican—the first step toward sainthood.)

  The Case for the Defense

  Defense counsel Garrison called this case the most important litigation he had tried in his forty years of practice. He had, however, been placed in a most difficult position by his client’s admissions, which were driven by a desire, on the one hand, to obtain immunity from prosecution (which began in 1993) and, on the other, to unburden his conscience in his waning years. The defense therefore took the position that Mr. Jowers had no liability, but if he did, it was minuscule compared with that of the co-conspirators, who were agents of the city, state, and federal governments. The strategy was to minimize Jowers’s involvement, and consequently, it made little sense not to acknowledge the role played by the alleged co-conspirators.

  Therefore, throughout the presentation of the plaintiffs’ case, the defense focused on eliciting evidence from relevant witnesses on cross-examination, which tended to minimize his client’s involvement, though not that of a co-conspirators’.

  At the conclusion of the plaintiffs’ case, the defense moved for a dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ wrongful death action had been filed outside of the one-year statute of limitations. After extensive oral arguments, the judge denied the motion.

  The most hotly disputed defense motion, and the last before Lewis Garrison opened his case, was for a mistrial based upon the inability of his client to attend the trial and assist with his defense due to his deteriorating health condition.

  The judge was unhappy with the language of a doctor’s letter in support of this motion, noting that it did not explicitly state that Jowers was unable to attend court or testify. The court denied the motion for a mistrial, and the defense moved on with its case.

  First, he called Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles. In response to questions put to him on direct examination, Reverend Kyles described his civil rights experiences in Tennessee and the events surrounding the sanitation workers’ strike and Dr. King’s visit. He said that they were all under surveillance and he referred to the Redditt-Richmond surveillance operation which was conducted from the rear of the fire station. He said that he learned that one of the black officers (he was referring to Willie B. Richmond) who engaged in that activity was so troubled by it that he became an alcoholic, left the police force, and died (implying that he committed suicide). He gave his usual account of how he went into Dr. King’s room about an hour before the assassination, spending the last hour of Dr. King’s life with him. He described their conversation or “preacher talk.” He gave an emotional statement of how he had come to believe that it was God’s will that he had been present when this great man died. He said, inexplicably, that Dr. King did not die using drugs or from engaging in some other criminal activity but because he was there to help the garbage workers. He described how a little old lady came to one of his speeches and told him how she just wanted to shake his hand because his hand had touched Dr. King. Thus, he considered himself blessed to have had this experience. When Lewis Garrison surrendered the witness, Kyles was riding high with his credibility intact.

  I had decided that my associate Juliet Hill-Akines would conduct the cross-examination of Reverend Kyles. Her task was to destroy any credibility that came from him being a pastor. She focused on how he drew pleasure from women, such as the one he described reaching out to him and seeking to touch his hand. Then, her questions dealt with Willie B. Richmond, indicating not only that he was alive but also that he had testified at this trial. Kyles was surprised. The jurors appeared to be amused. She walked him through a previous statement Richmond had made which refutes his claim to have been in Dr. King’s room. He had said he simply knocked on the door and had a few words with Dr. King who then closed the door, and Kyles walked over to the balcony some way down from the room.

  Richmond stated:

  A. Immediately after the Invaders left, the Reverend Samuel Kyles came out of room 312 and went to the room where Martin Luther King was living. He knocked on the door and Martin Luther King came to the door. They said a few words between each other and Reverend Martin Luther King went back into his room closing the door behind him, and the Reverend Samuel Kyles remained on the porch.

  Q. Right. So you’re telling us there from your eyewitness report that Reverend Kyles knocked on Martin Luther King’s door at about ten minutes to six or shortly after ten minutes to six, said a few words to Dr. King after he opened the door. Then when the door was closed, Dr. King went back into his room and Reverend Kyles remained on the—you call it the porch, but on the balcony?

  A. The balcony.

  (Op. cit., 1096)

  Reverend Kyles said that statement was simply not true. He could not explain, however, why Richmond would lie about these simple facts. Then Juliet played a videotape of a speech he had given on the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination. In it, he described again how he spent Dr. King’s last hour on earth with him and Reverend Abernathy in room 306. Then, as he described how he and Dr. King stood together on the balcony at the railing, he seemed to get carried away as he said, “… only as I moved away so he could have a clear shot, the shot rang out….” The jury and the judge looked stunned.

  Juliet played the tape three times, so it became very clear that Kyles had, in fact, admitted stepping aside so that a shooter could get a clear shot. When she asked him who he was thinking about getting a clear shot, he said he supposed it would have been James Earl Ray.

  (Whereupon a portion of the videotape was replayed for the court and Jury.)

  Rev. Kyles: “What preachers talk about when they get together, revivals and all the like. About a quarter of six we walked on the balcony, and he was talking to people in the courtyard. He stood here and I stood there. Only as I moved away so he could have a clear shot, the shot rang out.”

  (Op. cit., 1596)

  At one point during cross-examination, Kyles mouthed silently to her, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” The jury was stunned; some mouths opened in disbelief. When he was dismissed, he walked behind the attorneys’ chairs and asked Garrison, “What did yo
u get me into?”

  Garrison replied, “I just called you as a witness.”

  Yolanda King sat through Reverend Kyles’s testimony.

  Next, the defense called Frank Warren Young from the Shelby County criminal clerk’s office. He brought with him the original transcript of the record of the guilty plea hearing and authenticated it so that it could be placed in evidence and in the record. The defense thus ensured that James Earl Ray’s guilty plea was in evidence for the jury’s review.

  On cross-examination, I asked him to look at the first pages of the transcript and observe whether or not James Earl Ray had been put under oath by Judge Preston Battle (required practice during a guilty plea hearing). He had not been sworn. I next asked him to read James’s interruption of the proceedings when he stated that he had never agreed with Ramsey Clark or J. Edgar Hoover that there had been no conspiracy and he did not want to do so now.

  As their next witness, the defense called former MPD lieutenant Eli Arkin. Arkin, who was a senior intelligence officer, confirmed that he had picked up Detective Redditt at the fire station and eventually, after the meeting in the MPD Central Headquarters, on director Holloman’s instructions, taken him to his home. Shortly after they arrived, the assassination took place. Eli Arkin’s confirmation of the presence and activity of the 111th Military Intelligence Group in Memphis added to the defense’s mitigating claim.