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This is episode 11, The Aftermath. During my investigation, I'd heard from multiple sources a kind of wild story.
One that I normally have a hard time believing. But at this point, I'm so deep in the weeds with this, I had to at least check it out. It goes like this: Jerry Beach was set up and killed by someone wearing a uniform, not Larry Jones.
I know, it feels ridiculous even saying it out loud. But if there's one thing I've learned in this investigation, it's that a claim like that cannot go unaddressed, especially after I had heard it so many times from multiple people. The crux of this allegation is that Jerry was a liability because Spanky had confided in him about some law enforcement officers being involved in the deaths of Tremaine Howell, Nikki Wilson, and Joyce Jean Wilson.
Jerry was supposed to meet with Tremaine's parents the morning he ended up being killed, but he moved that meeting at the last minute. It's believed by some that Larry's attempt to rob the BB&T in Oak City was just a big ruse to lure Jerry into a situation where he could be killed yet still look like a hero cop. And Larry would take the fall, or at least be made to take the fall.
Brandy Bacote, who was like a sister to Spanky and was someone he confided in about what he saw at the Roanoke River the night Tremaine and the girls died, as well as the howls Tremaine's parents, are all convinced this is the truth. They say that Jerry Beach can put up with a lot of things here in Williamston, but...
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 not opening it back up. It's always shut it away. And then people whispers about, they whispering about it, just like this story. You scared to tell different people what happened because you don't even know if their kids coming after you.
But if this idea that Larry Jones was part of a plot to kill Sheriff Jerry Beach is true, then that would mean at least some members of law enforcement had to be in on it. They had to have been behind the robbery ruse and somehow gotten Larry Jones to be the patsy. And because I know from my reporting that there were some crooked cops in Martin County, that suggestion isn't hard to accept.
But in order for this theory to work, it means that someone who radioed for Jerry to come to Oak City had to be one of those bad cops. The first voices Jerry would have heard that got him to respond to the call about the bank robbery were Oak City Police Chief Kevin Byers and Jerry's own deputy, Tim Hines. Tim is someone you've heard from periodically this season. He mentioned in his interview with me that he specifically radioed for Jerry. I can remember...
So it's pretty clear that it was Tim who asked Jerry to drive the 18 miles or so from Williamston, where MCSO's headquarters was, out to the BB&T in Oak City.
Something else that's worth noting is that the other first responding officer at the scene, Kevin Byers, later told a local newspaper that every morning leading up to the October 12th incident at the BB&T, he made a habit of daily staking out the bank to keep watch for any suspicious activity.
In his comments to the Greenville Daily Reflector, Kevin said that he was nervous that Oak City's bank would get robbed, just like some other branches in nearby towns had been. And that's true. There had been a few other bank robberies in the areas surrounding Oak City.
You see, according to an article by the Associated Press published right after the Oak City incident, there had been a bank robbery two months earlier just a few minutes up the road in Hamilton, North Carolina. In that robbery, a tall black man wearing surgical gloves, a red long-sleeved dress, red and yellow dangling earrings, sunglasses, and a wig had walked into a Wachovia bank on a Friday morning and threatened to tell her with a handgun. Eventually, he rounded up all the staff at that branch and locked them in the vault.
After that, he stuffed cash into several bags and took off in a car. A similar type of robbery in another nearby small town had occurred just before that in June of 1992. The suspect in that case was described the same as the Hamilton robber, black male, tall, wearing an obvious disguise, and he locked all the employees in the bank vault.
Authorities didn't officially link the heists in June and August, but it seemed based on the news coverage I read that investigators at least thought it could be the same guy who was responsible. So this is why Kevin said as the one-man officer for Oak City, he'd been on a high alert, watching his town's bank every day. However, on the morning of October 12th, Kevin spontaneously decided not to stake out the BB&T like he'd been doing every day before.
When asked why, he gave no explanation. He just said he didn't. I'd love to talk to Kevin about it, but when I looked into him, I found out that he died several years ago, and he didn't die with an upstanding reputation. Turns out, after a few years of being Oak City's only police officer in the early 90s, Kevin left law enforcement and went on to rack up multiple arrests for drug fraud, financial fraud, assault, check fraud, and trespassing.
Spanning from 1996 to 2007, he had criminal cases in five different North Carolina counties. So even if Kevin was alive, I'm not sure how much weight I'd actually put in him telling me everything was on the up and up that October day in 1992. That left me with Tim Hines, who by his own admission was the person directing Jerry on what to do and where to go once he arrived at the BB&T. Jerry called me on the radio.
And I told him, I said, you need to come up the back way and sit up behind the new fire station. Jerry didn't listen to Tim's words, though. And instead, Jerry parked his car near the rear corner of the bank, near an MCSO deputy who'd just arrived seconds earlier. And it turns out that this MCSO deputy, whose name Tim let slip almost in passing, was no stranger in my investigation.
He was a person that Mike Wells, another former Martin County Sheriff's deputy, had memories of. To this day, I still believe he called that bastard and told him we were coming. Yep. The guy standing right beside Jerry Beach when he died was the same deputy who Mike Wells told me was investigated for tipping off drug dealers and suspected of thwarting the efforts of the Roanoke-Chowan Drug Task Force in the early 1990s.
I'm not going to share this deputy's name because like I said before, he was never convicted of any crimes related to corruption or what happened to Jerry. But I was immediately suspicious when I learned that he was the guy in close proximity to Jerry when Jerry was killed. And even more suspicious is what Sheriff Beach yelled toward the bank as he stepped out of his cruiser right before he was shot. According to Tim Hines, Jerry hollered out a name,
This felt like a big deal to me.
But first things first, Tim is casually referring to Larry as a boy. Larry was a 38-year-old black man. Tim's use of the word boy is the exact kind of language that proves underlying racism is still a problem.
But second, Larry didn't have any criminal history in Martin County in the 1990s. So there should have been no reason for Jerry Beach, the sheriff, to know him by name and call out to him when he responded to the bank robbery if no one up until that point knew it was Larry who was holding up the bank. Now, there is a different possible explanation.
Jerry had actually been investigating one of the other bank robberies that I told you about earlier, the one in the town of Hamilton, because that was in his jurisdiction. Maybe sometime between August and October, Jerry began to suspect Larry Jones was the Hamilton robber. Maybe Jerry took a gamble when he got out at the BB&T in Oak City, and he yelled out Larry's full name just to see what would happen.
Maybe that's why Larry shot in Jerry's direction. I know, that's a lot of maybes. Too many maybes for comfort. So I decided to ask someone who might be able to tell me whether there was any plausibility to this theory. That person is Maynard Harold Jr. Maynard was the criminal defense lawyer appointed to represent Larry Jones in the wake of the BB&T incident. Interestingly, Maynard also represented Ezekiel Brown prior to 1992 in a drug case.
In getting to know Maynard, I've come to realize that he was an in-demand defense attorney in rural Martin County, and he took on a lot of clients during the 1990s. From the get-go, Maynard knew Larry Jones' case was going to be high-profile. He believed he and his client would likely become hated men in eastern North Carolina. I immediately knew that it had a tremendous impact throughout the county.
And throughout law enforcement, not only the local law enforcement, but all of the surrounding counties, I knew he had killed the sheriff. I personally knew the sheriff. I assumed that I was not going to be very popular among the law enforcement. I specifically recall one of my good friends who was a deputy sheriff. He asked me what ended up.
What the F was I doing taking on a case like this? Did Larry indicate to you or law enforcement indicate to you that he was suspected in any other bank robbery crimes prior to this incident? The law enforcement was, as I think the way one of my friends in law enforcement said they were looking into
So Jerry knowing Larry's name because of some information he might have learned while investigating the Hamilton Bank robbery seems possible. But according to what Maynard Harrell said, unlikely.
If it's not that, then the only other explanation is that Jerry somehow knew ahead of time that Larry was going to rob the BB&T on the morning of October 12th. But how and why? Those are two questions that unfortunately only Jerry Beach can answer, and he took those answers to the grave. But there are some other answers we should have gotten from Larry's trial. I mean, even simple ones, like confirming his gun was the one that fired the bullet that killed the sheriff.
I told you in the last episode that I was never able to find documentation that ballistics testing was ever done. And maybe that's because just a few months after Larry's arrest, the criminal case against him would become irrelevant.
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On Monday, January 11th, 1993, while Larry's lawyer Maynard Harold Jr. was preparing for trial, he got an unexpected call.
I think it was from the News and Observer, but it was from some newspaper wanting to know if I knew why my client had taken his life. Maynard was blindsided. He had no idea what to tell the reporter on the other end of the phone. No one from Central Prison had called to inform him that his client was dead. He quickly got on the road and headed toward Raleigh. Went back and talked to the police
He just did it. What the prison supervisor was referring to was Larry hanging himself inside his cell on the morning of Saturday, January 9th.
Maynard had just met with Larry in person the day before, on the 8th. He told me that during this meeting, Larry seemed upbeat and eager to work on the case. In fact, one of the things they talked about was getting all the discovery documents from the state. You know, stuff like police reports, evidence reports, any reports about ballistics testing, anything that proved Larry's gun had actually been the weapon that fired the bullet that killed Jerry. Well, those things were supposed to come any day.
But now that Larry was dead, the state didn't have to send them.
When you met with Larry the last time you spoke, did he display any signs or indications that he was under distress that would have perhaps prompted him to take this action? Absolutely none. Through what he was saying, his demeanor, his actions, the verbal language he was using, nothing indicated to me that he was not totally mentally ill.
By the they, do you think she meant...
the white community, the law enforcement community. My opinion at that time, the day was referring to those that had him in custody. I've spent a lot of time digging into the circumstances surrounding Larry Jones' reported suicide and allegations made by his family that he might have been killed by prison staff or someone in law enforcement so that his case would never go to trial. What I'll say is that there are a few interesting things worth noting.
For one, the NCSBI was the agency called in to investigate Larry's death, which is the same agency that was also spearheading the criminal investigation against him for the Oak City bank robbery incident. To me, it kind of feels like someone should have noted a potential conflict of interest there, but no one did.
And as you already know, that agency's records are exempt from public access. And even weirder, state law also prohibits the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections from releasing any information about Larry's death, even to his own family. So based on Larry's autopsy report and several archive news articles I found, here's what I know about the day Larry died.
At 5.04 a.m. on Saturday, January 9th, a guard who was patrolling Larry's floor inside Central Prison saw Larry laying asleep in his bed. 56 minutes later, at 6 a.m., another guard walked by Larry's cell and found him unconscious, hanging in front of a six-foot-tall metal locker with a noose tied around his neck.
The noose was reportedly made from pieces of ace bandage. The bandage had been torn into sections, braided into several cords, and then those cords were tied together in knots so that it would be long enough to go around Larry's neck, over the top of the locker, and down to the leg of his bed. At 6.05 a.m., the prison's doctor arrived, and five minutes later at 6.10 a.m., he pronounced Larry dead.
Larry's body was immediately sent to the North Carolina office of the chief medical examiner in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a city about 40 minutes west of Raleigh. A pathologist there conducted his autopsy at 1.15 p.m. the same day and determined that the ligature around Larry's neck was between three and three and a half feet long.
The end that had been fixed to Larry's bed had a white sock tied to it, and the sock had presumably been used to fasten the cord to the immovable bed frame so that it would tighten when Larry hanged himself. Bruising to Larry's neck showed telltale signs that he'd essentially strangled himself to death because no bones in his neck were broken. The pathologist's final diagnosis was that he'd died from lack of blood supply to his brain.
The limited information in Larry's autopsy report leaves a lot to be desired. For example, there is a brief mention of some dried paper material being found on Larry's lips, but what that came from and why it was there was never explained. Something else that's puzzling is the fact that no one questioned whether the braided cord of Ace Bandage was the ligature that actually killed Larry.
I mean, I wanted to see some definitive proof that authorities proved it was strong enough to hang a 145-pound man who was just a few inches shorter than six feet tall. But again, there was none of that. In the end, Larry's death was quickly ruled a suicide. Maynard Harold Jr. still is unsure how he feels about that. I've thought about this many times. I ended up with this ultimate thought. It was done.
How long does it actually take if somebody has got it set in his mind that that's what I'm going to do? I don't, I'll leave it at that. On January 11th, 1993, three days after Larry died, Martin County's district attorney dismissed all the charges against him. That decision meant there would be no trial. There would be no examining evidence. There would be no witnesses taking the stand.
Larry would never get the chance to face his accusers and tell his side of the story. The only other person on earth who got to hear Larry's version of events before his untimely death was Maynard Harrell. He basically told me that he didn't really intend to shoot the sheriff. I don't think this ever came out, but as I recall, it was drug-related.
Maynard can't remember whether Larry told him he owed money to someone for drugs or if he needed money to buy drugs, but regardless of which it was, I think the bottom line is the same. Larry communicated to his attorney before his death that he was desperate for cash to either supply himself with drugs or get oppressors off his back, and that's how he got tangled up in the bank robbery.
Did Larry indicate to you at all if he had been aided in this endeavor in any way? No, he never indicated that he was part of a certainly not organized crime or had any help or assistance in this, that he had acted alone.
If the case had gone to trial, Maynard's plan was to paint his client as a desperate lone wolf bank robber who'd unfortunately committed a murder in the process of trying to make a quick grab for cash. He felt confident jurors would buy that narrative and not sentence Larry to death, which was the best possible outcome in Maynard's mind. And yet, Larry died anyway.
And it's because of this abrupt end to everything that Viola Jones, Larry's mother, became even more convinced that there was a larger conspiracy going on involving powerful people in law enforcement. To this day, she believes so much more would have come to light if her son had lived to see his day in court. You think that he was murdered by law enforcement then?
Yeah.
Not going to trial also means we'll never know if it was Larry's bullet that killed Jerry Beach. And why does that matter so much? Well, because there have been different versions of exactly where the shot that killed Jerry came from. The bullet that lodged in Jerry's body was a ricochet. Some folks who were at the shooting say it hit a meter box between the back door of the bank and where he was standing. But pathologist Mary Gilliland was told something very different.
She noted in Jerry's autopsy that the path the bullet took included passing through a glass door, then struck Jerry's body left to right, front to back, at a downward angle.
Now, I found the downward angle part kind of weird. How does a bullet that's been shot on the same plane as the victim go through a window or hit an obstruction, but then enter a person's torso at a downward angle? Jerry's clothing wasn't examined for gunshot residue either, which was another detail that bothered me.
Mary Gilliland said no soot or stippling was found on his skin. But again, Jerry was clothed when he was shot. You wouldn't expect to see that if there was a barrier or barriers between his skin and his shooter. My head really started spinning, though, when Mary mentioned what she did after retrieving the bullet from Jerry's body. She immediately handed it over to the NCSBI and never heard anything else about it.
And I gave it to Dennis Honeycutt on October 14th at 1652 hours, which is 4.52 in the afternoon, and we'd like to close the office at 5. Denise and Larry Howell, Tremaine Howell's parents, were disturbed by the fact that no specific information about Jerry's death was ever released.
The fact that he'd been murdered before he could meet with them was troubling enough. But then when they learned Larry Jones had also died unexpectedly in prison before going to trial, well, that was the last straw.
The Howells so firmly believed there was a conspiracy going on that they exhumed their son Tremaine's body in February 1993 to have a pathologist from out of state examine him again. But by that point, Denise says Tremaine's body was fairly decomposed and the results of the second autopsy only confirmed one thing, that he drowned. The second autopsy couldn't provide any further insight about what might have preceded him going into the Roanoke River.
So, was Larry Jones a patsy? I don't know. Is what he did in Oak City, Jerry Beach's murder, and the teenagers' deaths from August 1992 all somehow connected? I don't know. It sure feels like there's something there, though. And I'm not the only person who thinks that. Daryl Knox, the former police chief of nearby Robersonville Police Department, randomly brought up how widely believed this rumor was throughout Martin County.
While we were discussing something totally unrelated to these crimes, he randomly chimed in with this. We all got to go and kill them three people in the room.
So, just so I am clear, at the time, there was voices in the community that you're saying were accusing law enforcement of whatever happened to the teenagers as well as what happened to Larry Jones. I think a lot of it was when you hung the man, that was y'all killed that black man. Oh yeah, y'all probably killed him here too.
So the thought that there was some kind of conspiracy going on was at least out there. What I keep coming back to, though, is why. Why did Larry Jones do what he did on October 12th? He went to the BB&T on a Monday morning. Now, historically, the FBI statistics show that bank robbers usually strike on Fridays or days closer to the end of the week because there's more cash in-house then. So why did Larry pick a Monday?
Then there's the fact that he took hostages. I found myself wondering why he involved Ernest and Jean Wiggins in the first place. If he wanted quick money, why didn't he just wait until the first employee showed up? Why didn't he just slide a note across the teller counter like most robbers do? Why did he use the cleaning crew as a means to get inside the bank?
It's not like Ernest and Jean could let him into any of the money drawers or the main vault. So what use were they to him? How did he even know when they'd be there to clean? In October 1992, he lived and worked an hour and 20 minutes away in Raleigh. So had he watched the bank ahead of time to know what the Wiggins' cleaning schedule was?
Viola Jones, Larry's mother, told me the only thing that makes sense to her about why Larry did this is what Maynard Harrell said. It had something to do with drugs. Over the last three decades, she's thought a lot about everything that went down on October 12th in Oak City. And she's convinced her son did not act alone. Something I never saw mentioned in any investigator's comments was how Larry got from where he lived in Raleigh to the BB&T.
People who were at the crime scene on October 12th told me that Larry hid his car in a patch of woods a few blocks from the crime scene, which means he then would have had to walk to the bank on foot to rob it, which I find kind of strange and honestly a bit risky. But even more bizarre than that is the fact that after taking Ernest and Gene Wiggins as his hostages, but before police were called, Larry reportedly hid their car too.
Here's Carroll Brown, the paramedic who treated both Jerry Beach and Larry Jones. He took their car and hid the car. When they got there, I reckon he must have put them in the bank and took their car and drove the car down and hid the car. That's pretty risky to leave your hostages alone. Yeah, I think you taped them up or something like that. But yeah, I reckon he left them in the bank and then walked back over here just waiting for the bank to open up.
Another Oak City resident who heard the same thing is Steve Cannon. He actually took it and hid it, I want to say, down the road somewhere or something, or just parked it and then came back. So obviously, somehow or another, he kept them here, I guess, during that time frame. Steve bought the old BB&T building about 20 years after the robbery and began running a family-owned insurance business out of it. Some of the bricks on the exterior walls still have chips in them from bullets 30 years ago.
I've posted pictures of what the property looks like now in the blog post for this episode, so you can really get a sense of the area. The images should also be popping up on your screen if you're listening in the app. Every day, Steve stares at the walls in his office and the floors under his feet that were once a chaotic crime scene. He can't help but still ask questions about what really happened in there.
There was some speculation that he had somebody help him. Because, you know, did he stay here and then somebody took the car? Which I don't think that answer was, that was never answered. You know, that question wasn't.
As far as I've been able to find, Steve's right. The question of whether law enforcement thought Larry Jones had an accomplice was never addressed publicly. I'm not sure investigators even asked. But to me, Larry leaving his hostages in the bank to go move their car, even if they were bound in some way, feels really risky.
One detail Steve mentioned to me that caught my attention was that Larry left a message for police inside the BB&T after the hostage situation ended. Steve was just a kid in 1992, but his dad was the mayor of Oak City. And after the bank robbery, he got to tag along for a little tour of the crime scene the day after.
I do remember coming in here after the fact, after all the investigation was done with my dad. The one thing I do remember that on that glass wall there, he had painted in blood DJ time on that wall right there.
DJ time. Steve says investigators believe the letters Larry had scrawled in blood on the bank's interior glass wall stood for Darnell Jones, Larry's initials for his most common nickname, DJ. But what exactly the phrase DJ time meant, no one really knew. Information about the bloody message was never publicized, and Steve says authorities looking into the crime just chalked it up to the ramblings of a desperate man who'd become unhinged.
But I'm not so sure Larry's message should be dismissed quite so easily. He clearly had some intention behind what he did. I couldn't help but think back to the reporting from 1992 that stated Larry would only communicate with the FBI during the hostage situation. He'd made it clear several times he did not trust local law enforcement. So was the bloody message somehow connected to that? It's hard to know.
It's a clue that's as ominous to me as the alleged piece of paper Doug Wagg's family says was left in his pants pocket with his name written on it when he was found.
And it's alarming that the only people who can clear up these mysteries are dead. Doug, the teenagers, Jerry Beach, Larry Jones, and Spanky. I told you in episode nine that the reason you weren't going to hear from Spanky himself was because he died in 1995. And that's true. He did die that year. But what I didn't tell you is how.
He was scared. He didn't know who to trust. He only trusted us. So we got him out of the situation, we thought, until another, until somebody found him. That's coming up on the next episode of CounterClock, episode 12, The Dead Man.
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Toyota, let's go places.
Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.