Deep Dive
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Monday mornings in Oak City, North Carolina are slow. Not much happens. It's a tiny town about 18 miles northwest of Williamston in a very rural part of the state. It's got a town hall, a gas station, a fire department, a bunch of churches, and one stoplight. Back in October 1992, there was even less stuff around, but it did have a bank, a BB&T branch that citizens visited on a daily basis.
However, on the morning of October 12th, no one would end up doing business inside the bank.
In fact, its doors wouldn't open again for a long time. Official investigation documents about what happened at the BB&T in October 1992 have been kept under lock and key for more than 30 years. The information you'll hear in this episode comes from the available news articles I gathered about this incident, publicly accessible medical reports, and eyewitness interviews from the people who were present during the crime.
There are some holes that I can't fill, and I'll tackle a few of those in the next episode. But for the most part, here are the basic facts that are undisputed. A few minutes before 9 a.m. on Monday, October 12th, an employee for the BB&T branch showed up to open the bank. But while walking toward the building from her car, she noticed the curtains and all the windows were pulled shut. Normally, staff didn't leave the bank that way, so she was immediately concerned that something was up.
She called Kevin Byers, Oak City's one-man police force. He was both the town's only officer and the de facto police chief. His office was just around the corner from the bank. Around 9.15 a.m., Kevin responded to the call and parked his cruiser near the front of the bank. Within seconds of getting out, Kevin heard gunshots and ducked for cover behind a nearby tractor. The piece of equipment was parked on some grass right across from the front of the bank.
Kevin could see that a man had stepped out of the bank's glass front doors and was shooting at him with a handgun. Kevin returned fire, and the guy from the bank retreated back inside. Kevin then radioed for deputies with the Martin County Sheriff's Office to come help him. He informed anyone who was listening that he was dealing with a bank robbery in progress.
The first MCSO deputy who heard Kevin's distress call was Tim Hines. He was on duty that morning headed into court, but he immediately dropped everything to go to Oak City. I remember calling him back and told him, "Hey, I'll be en route." I got out of the car and Kevin hollered back at me. He said, "They're shooting at us." My car actually got hit up there, doing all that shooting.
At the time, Tim and Kevin didn't know how many assailants were involved in the robbery, but Tim assumed that whatever was going on had the potential to involve hostages if they didn't make a move fast. He knew he was going to need more backup, so he got on his radio and told sheriff's office dispatchers to send everyone they could to the scene, including Jerry Beach. And I told them that we had a hostage situation. I needed 40 sheriffs to come up here.
Seconds later, Jerry notified Tim that he was on his way. Jerry called me on the radio and I told him, I said, "You need to come up the back way and set up behind the new fire station." He told me, "Okay," he was in route. When I looked up, he pulled up over here. Instead of parking his cruiser behind the town's fire station like Tim had told Jerry to do, Jerry parked his car near the rear corner of the bank, a good ways away from where Kevin and Tim were taking cover.
Jerry's position left him exposed because the back glass door of the bank was just a few feet away and allowed the gunman inside to get the drop on Jerry. After the gunshot rang out, Jerry crumpled to the ground just a few steps in front of his patrol car.
Another MCSO deputy who'd arrived seconds earlier and been standing near Jerry dragged the sheriff's body out of the line of fire and EMTs rushed to load Jerry into the back of an ambulance. Oak City resident Carol Brown was the paramedic who treated Jerry on the way to Martin County General Hospital. But as soon as he looked at the sheriff, he realized there wasn't much he could do.
We just got him on a backboard and all the deputies over there helped load him up and we put him on the ambulance. He was already pale white looking. Carol found a tear in the front of Jerry's shirt on his abdomen. It had some blood on it, but not a lot. Carol couldn't find any other injuries to Jerry, which led him to believe that the bullet that hit Jerry had not exited, which wasn't a good sign.
You could tell by his shadow breathing and being real pale that he lost a lot of blood somewhere. Jerry made it to the hospital by 10 a.m., but by then, he was already gone. There was nothing doctors could do for him. Word that he'd succumbed to his injury spread fast, and by 11.30 a.m., more than 200 law enforcement officers from eastern North Carolina descended on Oak City to respond to the scene.
By lunchtime, authorities had identified and made contact with the perpetrator inside the bank. Turns out there was just one suspect, a man named Larry Darnell Jones, a 38-year-old man who'd grown up in Oak City, but at the time was living with his two-year-old son and longtime girlfriend 90 miles away in Raleigh. And Larry Jones was armed with a 9mm handgun.
Paramedic Carol Brown knew Larry Jones well and was baffled when he learned he was the man holding up the bank. I thought he was a good guy. Went to school, he was a year above me in school. He'd always been nice, come to the store, always nice. Didn't, uh, didn't, he used to drink beer a little bit, but not much. I mean, he was always a decent guy. I had no idea he would do something like that. Larry's mother, Viola Jones, didn't find out that her son was the prime suspect until hours afterwards.
What was going through your mind? Had Larry ever done anything like this in his past? Did he have any criminal activity or any sort of...
Viola was just as bewildered as Carol Brown about why Larry would do this. While inside the bank, Larry had taken two people as hostages, Ernest and Jean Wiggins, a married middle-aged couple from Williamston who owned their own cleaning business. They'd shown up to clean the bank earlier in the morning by themselves, but had been ambushed and forced inside against their will.
Hostage negotiators with the FBI spoke with Larry over the phone several times throughout Monday afternoon. Larry was using the bank's landline to communicate with authorities and make demands. It's unclear if he told authorities what his motive was for the crime. Still, law enforcement continued to engage with him and even delivered lunch and dinner to him and his hostages.
During these brief interactions with law enforcement, Larry communicated that he didn't have any intention of hurting Ernest and Jean Wiggins. He said he didn't trust the police or anyone involved in law enforcement, but wouldn't explain why. Throughout the day, he was allowed to speak over the phone with his mom, siblings, girlfriend, and young son. They all tried to coerce him to surrender, but he wouldn't.
At one point, authorities promised to give Larry the combination to the bank's vault, but FBI agents eventually walked that offer back and refused to bring Larry a getaway vehicle. At another point, Jean Wiggins was able to make a phone call using the bank's landline. She got through to a church friend of hers in Williamston. The women's conversation was brief, and Jean only managed to say, quote, "'This is Jean. I'm in the bank. Tell the saints to pray.'" End quote.
Then the phone line went dead. The hostage situation dragged on into Monday night. Shortly after midnight, which was technically early morning Tuesday, October 13th, law enforcement saw Jean Wiggins start to come out of the rear door of the bank. She yelled, I'm coming out. But then a man who police presumed was Larry pulled her back inside. Between 1245 a.m. and 1 a.m., Larry exited the bank using Jean and Ernest as human shields.
According to retired Williamston police officer Mike Wells, Larry had dressed the couple in the clothing he'd been wearing all day to try and trick law enforcement. She had on a green camouflage jacket, just like the guy the bank robber had on, just like it. I can still see it. Larry yelled for two nearby FBI agents to give him a truck, but the agents refused. That's when all hell broke loose. I knew something was getting ready to happen. I saw him come around the corner.
While Larry and the Wiggins had been out front, NC SBI agents had stealthily entered the back of the bank, unbeknownst to Larry. As Larry and his hostages were retreating through the front double doors of the bank, the agents who'd come in the back startled Larry and set off a percussion grenade, which if you don't know is an explosive device that's meant to stun someone with light and sound, not harm them. Within seconds of that percussion grenade going off, a firefight erupted inside the bank.
In a split-second decision, Jean Wiggins tried to make a run for it. The woman come running out. She fled through the front doors right into the line of sight of oncoming NCSBI agents. Mike Wells saw Jean get gunned down. I can still hear them guns. She was shot seven times at close range. She bled out on the sidewalk in front of the bank and eventually was pronounced dead at Martin County General Hospital.
State agents said because she was also black like Larry Jones and was in clothing similar to his, they had mistaken her for Larry. Right after the shootout, authorities grabbed Larry and Ernest from the bank and realized they'd both been shot too. Ernest had been shot twice in the leg and Larry had been shot three times. Once in the side of the head, once in the abdomen, and once in the leg. Larry was handcuffed, arrested, and loaded into an ambulance.
Coincidentally, Carroll Brown was the paramedic who tended to him. They thought he'd been shot worse than he had, but only a bullet glazed his head. The shot in his leg was one where he got shot that morning by an Old City police officer.
We went to the hospital with him and Martin General. When I got back, they wanted to interview me and they said, "How bad was the hurt?" I said, "Well, not bad." They said, "What do you mean?" I said, "We just had a bullet that glazed his head, you know, and just glazed it. It wasn't, you know, bad." And they said, "The only place that's legal is where he got shot that morning." His pants and everything was already dry, the blood was already dry on his pants and everything. And I said something to Larry. He said it happened that morning.
Larry and Ernest underwent surgeries at the county hospital. They both lived and were assigned rooms to recover in. Larry was watched around the clock by armed guards and was immediately charged with first-degree murder. But what felt like the end to this bank robbery could actually be the very messy middle of our much bigger story. And Jerry Beach's body is the proof.
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Two hours after Sheriff Jerry Beach was shot and killed, Dr. Mary Gilliland began conducting his autopsy. As a reminder, Mary is the same pathologist who performed Tremaine Howell, Joyce Jean Wilson, and Nikki Wilson's autopsies just two months earlier in August 1992. During Mary's examination of Jerry, she found a deformed lead bullet in his chest cavity.
The entry wound in his lower torso was oddly shaped, which confirmed something important for Mary. The bullet had hit something else before entering Jerry's body. Instead of the bullet passing through nose first, it went through sideways. I then followed the track through the small bowel and the aorta. That's the main artery that comes out of the heart.
It supplies all of the blood to the abdomen and the legs, and it had a hole in it. That's going to allow the release of a great deal of blood. The bullet that killed Jerry had never left his body. He bled out internally over the course of a few minutes. His death had been swift and almost instantaneous. Nothing that anyone could do would make a difference.
The bullet fragment that she'd pulled out of Jerry went to state agents, and in short order, the NCSBI concluded that the bullet that killed Jerry had ricocheted off a meter box between Jerry and the back door of the bank. So had Larry intended to kill Jerry? Maybe. Had he just fired at random and unluckily hit the sheriff? Possibly. Or was it even his bullet that killed Jerry at all?
No one can answer that question because ballistics testing was never done. Two days after the robbery, on Wednesday, October 14th, Jerry Beach's funeral was held at First Christian Church in Williamston. Close to 1,000 people attended and hundreds more watched his procession snake through town. It passed by homes and businesses like a somber parade. Sarah Stahls remembers the chilling effect his funeral had on Martin County.
The county shut down. It put the county on its knees. He was such a loving, doting dad, wonderful husband. We lost so much more than an officer. County historian Wayne Peel still remembers the sobering scene. I can remember probably a line six across, at least six, maybe eight across, of men and women in uniforms, all different kinds of uniforms,
You could tell there were obviously some deputy sheriffs, county, highway patrol, and they were marching in front of the casket. We did not hear anything other than their steps on the pavement. Now that was impressive, very moving.
But Jerry's death wasn't the only casualty citizens of Martin County cared about after the bank robbery. Jean Wiggins, an innocent bystander who was a beloved mother, friend, and church volunteer from Williamston, had been killed too.
Jean was also a black woman, so the idea that NCSBI agents had gotten confused and mistaken Jean for Larry Jones just because she'd been wearing his jacket and happened to be black too really upset residents. They publicly called for an investigation into the matter. Black citizens who knew her and her family felt like the NCSBI needed to be held accountable for the role its agents played in her death.
Initially, law enforcement wasn't too keen about the idea, but black residents persisted and got the NAACP involved to help keep the pressure on the NCSBI. Here's former MCSO Deputy Tim Hines. I won't call it unrest, but the black community kind of...
There was probably some mixed feelings there. Yes, it disturbed some people, but they weren't going to go out here and throw rocks at police cars, and they weren't going to go out here and set stuff on fire. There was some unrest, but it wasn't really civil unrest.
Kelly Alexander, the state president for the NAACP at the time, told local newspapers that Black citizens would probably have more confidence in a third-party review of the incident versus the NCSBI conducting its own internal investigation of the shooting. I spoke with Kelly last year, and he still remembers the tension around this topic. The victims and the victims' families are owed an investigation.
And I owed some compensation. The kind of statement that I made was in line with NAACP orthodoxy, as in investigate and determine what's going on. The goal is to try to get, you know, some justice.
Kelly says the reason so many Black community members in Martin County were demanding a thorough investigation was because too often they'd felt like Black citizens were not seen as being as important as white citizens when they were killed in a collateral damage situation. Black folks who had been injured in a collateral sense were kind of dismissed. There was a push to question Black
whether or not the amount of force that was being used was, you know, was A, appropriate, and B, if the law enforcement person was being held accountable when it was deemed that the wrong amount of force had been used. The immediate defense on the police side is, we're sorry, we're acting in good faith,
Even though we had this bad result, the agreed party was unlikely to get any relief at all.
News articles published on October 18th, one week after the bank robbery incident, brought up the fact that there was still unrest in minority communities about the lack of a thorough investigation into the deaths of Tremaine Howell, Nikki Wilson, and Joyce Jean Wilson. And even though that was an entirely separate case in everyone's mind, the point was being made. Black citizens are dying and no one is caring. No one is paying attention.
But if you're paying attention now, you can see it. It's not comfortable to look at, but the truth often never is. And when we ignore it, we miss the bigger picture. And although Doug Wagg was a white man, he was also grouped into a class of citizens whose society often discards as not deserving of a full investigation.
Jean Wiggins got a modest funeral at her local church where Ernest, her husband, attended on crutches, and members of their congregation mourned for days. Larry Jones was transferred to Central Prison in Raleigh to await his trial for murder, kidnapping, and robbery. And Jerry Beach got a bridge named after him just outside of Williamston. A bronze plaque memorializing his sacrifice hangs outside the entrance to the sheriff's office. I've passed by it many times.
But you know what else is hanging at the sheriff's office? A poster, right above current Deputy Sheriff Drew Robinson's desk. It's a picture by Norman Rockwell, and beneath it, there's a quote that says, "The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said." And you know what? I agree. Something wasn't being said.
The official response I got from the NCSBI when I asked for copies of its files about the bank robbery investigation was, "No, I couldn't have them." I found that really odd because it's documented in news articles that shortly after the incident, the NCSBI held a press conference where their own agents released evidence photos and 400 pages of files about what the agency concluded happened the day Jerry Beach died.
When I asked for those same files, current staff told me they weren't familiar with any such release of information. They once again stated nothing the agency has about this case is considered public record, despite it being more than three decades old and no longer open. The second prosecutorial district in North Carolina who charged Larry Jones also put up walls when I asked for their records.
Okay, even though it's closed? All our files are considered confidential.
According to the way North Carolina State Statute Chapter 132 is written, district attorney's offices can keep their files confidential if the contents of those files were provided as part of a law enforcement criminal investigation, even when the case has been closed for years. I know, it's incredibly frustrating.
But by these agencies so clearly communicating no, I realized there was something in their responses that wasn't being said. And that something might just be the fact that so many of the details of what transpired on October 12, 1992 at the BB&T Bank don't make any sense. And if you listen to every voice, you might just get the full story.
They said that Jerry Beach had put up with a lot of things here in Williamston, but they said he would come to tell me about what he had heard, well, knew about Tremaine Dell. He was about to come and tell me about Tremaine Dell. And all of a sudden, they said the bank robbery, and they called him, he gets shot. He came to work every day honest,
And they defeated him. They did away with him. He was murdered. This has been whispered, like, from generation to generation. Like, it's been going on for a long time. We all just wondering why they're not opening it back up. I'm diving into all of that on the next episode of CounterClock, episode 11, The Aftermath.
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