Ep 12 of 14: The Dead Man
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In early March 1993, two months after Larry Jones died in prison, a grand jury in Martin County decided that the NCSBI agents who'd shot and killed Gene Wiggins, Larry's hostage at the BB&T, were not criminally liable for their actions. The men were reinstated to the NCSBI, and the agency paid the Wiggins family $250,000 as a settlement. According to news reports, that money was paid to Ernest Wiggins immediately.

I can't see the specific terms of the settlement for myself, it's confidential, so I don't know for sure if by accepting the payout that prevented the Wiggins family from ever filing a wrongful death civil suit against the NCSBI. But it might have.

What I do know is that the family never did sue the state. And that's an important detail. Because if a civil lawsuit had been filed, that would have opened the door for the agency's investigative findings to be examined in court. The $250,000 was two things. Compensation for the Wiggins' loss and payment for them to just go away.

By the summer of 1993, when Nikki and Joyce Jean Wilson should have been wrapping up their junior and sophomore years, and Tremaine Howell should have had two semesters of college under his belt, the investigation into their deaths and the investigation into the BB&T incident were both wrapped up. Not long after that, Larry and Denise Howell ended up separating and eventually divorced. All this stuff that I was being that mother of a gun to,

Another person whose life was slowly unraveling was Spanky.

He'd seen the news. He knew Sheriff Jerry Beach had been murdered. He learned about Larry Jones's untimely death while awaiting trial. Spanky's adoptive mother, Lynette Brown, and her daughter, Brandy Bucotte, said after both of those things occurred, Spanky was ready to get out of Martin County for good. His fear and anxiety were at an all-time high because according to Brandy and Lynette, he felt there were specific officers in Williamston who had it out for him.

They had been watching him. They tried to stop him in traffic, trying to just get him on anything. He knew his time was borrowed. He knew it because of what he knew. He was a living testimony, and they needed him gone to complete with killing everybody involved in that day that knew what they did.

According to Brandy, Spanky managed for several months, despite getting stopped by the cops a few times, to avoid getting any charges laid against him. Until one day, his luck ran out. He was arrested for larceny of a motor vehicle, a crime he was ultimately convicted for in September 1993. He spent nine months in a prison in Western North Carolina, then got out in June of 1994.

Immediately following his release, Brandy and Lynette sent Spanky to live with friends in Greenville, North Carolina, which was about 40 minutes away from Williamston. Everyone agreed that a change of scenery would be good for him. For a while, things improved. Brandy said Spanky got a job, started seeing a new girlfriend, and didn't have any problems with the law. Then, on Sunday, October 22nd, 1995, something terrible happened. Spanky unexpectedly died.

According to a Greenville PD accident report, he and two of his friends were involved in a car accident that killed both Spanky and one of his passengers. The saga of events that led up to the crash began when Greenville police officers received a call that someone had triggered a silent alarm inside a popular car dealership on one of the city's main roads. Units throughout the city were told to be on the lookout for a dark-colored sedan with several black young adults inside it.

According to Lynette Brown, Spanky and his friends were responsible for triggering the silent alarm, but not for the reasons you might think. He turned the music up in the car and it set off the silent alarm in the building of the car dealership. From what I was told, they followed him. And when they followed him, they began to chase him.

The Greenville Police report is very slim on info, but it does explain that the chase escalated quickly. And within a matter of minutes, it ended with Spanky crossing over a median, driving into oncoming traffic, and swerving out of control into a tree. A teenage girl riding in his backseat was killed on impact. Spanky and the young man in his passenger seat were both severely injured, but still alive after the crash.

EMTs transported them to a hospital in Greenville, where Spanky eventually passed away from his injuries. It wasn't until eight hours later that authorities got a hold of Lynette Brown and her daughter Brandi to tell them what had happened. He was alive. We wasn't notified. We didn't get a chance to say goodbye. We could have said goodbye. I feel like he was so terrified, his last hours with no family, nobody, and he was suffering. He suffered.

He was scared." Naturally, Lynette and Brandy wanted to know everything they could about the circumstances surrounding Spanky's death. Their first question was simple: Why had the officers pursued Spanky and his friends so aggressively? Lynette told me she ended up speaking with Greenville PD afterwards and learned that units had no real probable cause to pursue Spanky's car until after the chase began.

Dispatch called and told them that they could call it off at any time because the car wasn't stolen. They had ran the tags. The car wasn't stolen. And another police, a female police lady, crossed the media and head on to him on Memorial Drive and ran him off the road. And he hit a tree.

The only person who survived the crash was Spanky's male passenger, a 20-year-old whose name is redacted from the police report. In 1995, Brandy and Lynette asked around to try and find out more about this guy, but all they ever learned was that he'd moved out of state right after the crash.

After Spanky's death, Brandy became suspicious. She began to believe that what happened in Greenville was somehow part of a conspiracy orchestrated by police officers from Williamston to silence Spanky for good. They ran him off the road. It was a setup. They didn't call his family. He was alone. Like, they didn't want nobody to communicate with him.

Initially, I had a hard time believing Brandy's theory. It felt kind of far out there. But then she said something else interesting.

The police from Martin County was moved from Martin County to Pitt County. Some of the law enforcement individuals that Spanky would have been fearful of for good reason ended up working in the city and county that he went to live in. Yes. That's why he didn't stop. That's why he wouldn't stop. He knew that that was going to be his last road, his last ride.

I fact-checked Brandy's claim that several of the cops who were involved in Spanky's crash transferred from Williamston PD to Greenville PD sometime before October 1995. But according to employee records for Williamston PD, Martin County Sheriff's Office, and Greenville PD, none of the officers listed in Spanky's crash report overlapped between the different agencies, which means there's no proof supporting Brandy's claim.

However, administrators for the city of Williamston would not give me rosters for all the police officers who were on the force between 1992 and 1995. If I had that, I could look for myself to see who left on what date. The city of Greenville also wouldn't give me its rosters, which would show who they hired between 1992 and 1995.

By process of elimination, I could determine pretty quickly if there were any names that overlapped. But since that's not an option, that's where I hit a dead end. To me, Brandy's belief that Spanky's death was orchestrated by the same officers who he claimed to be afraid of in Williamston feels like a stretch. It's not impossible, but I just couldn't find enough proof that backs it up.

If there's anyone out there who knows more, please contact me. If you're the surviving passenger who walked away from that crash in Greenville in 1995, please reach out. I really want to hear from you. You can email me at counterclock at audiochuck.com.

Where I'm left with all this is having to accept an all too familiar reality. Everyone with the critical answers to all the cases I've been looking at, Doug Wagg, the teenagers, Jerry Beach, Larry Jones, Spanky, they're all dead. At this point in my investigation, I'm convinced there's a reason for that. It no longer feels like coincidence.

The fact is, something sinister was happening in Williamston, North Carolina in the early 1990s. Who exactly was involved? I'm not sure. I believe, based on the facts I've uncovered, that whatever was going on was rooted in drugs, facilitated by corrupt cops, and puppeteered by some well-connected, organized criminals.

If you'll remember, Larry Howell, Tremaine Howell's father, talked about this when he was describing how drug dealers like Ezekiel Brown became so powerful in Williamston in the 90s, and they always seemed to skirt consequences for their crimes. Ezekiel used to be a big-time drug dealer. He knew the whites who were here in town, the big people in Williamston who were hooked up in the drug. They used to have here what you call the big team drug.

Do you think Ezekiel Brown was one of those? Yeah, he was one of them.

To learn more about the inner workings of the drug underworld in Martin County, I needed to find a source who had been on the inside. Someone who had nothing but time on his hands. This call is from... Richard Smith. An inmate at Nash Correctional Institution. ♪

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He's currently serving a life sentence for first-degree murder at Nash Correctional Institution in North Carolina, a facility about an hour west of Williamston. In 1996, Richard and three of his friends were convicted of murdering a well-known general store owner in Williamston during a smash-and-grab robbery. Richard was the getaway driver, and to this day, he deeply regrets the crime. If I could change things and put that man back in the store, I would.

Before he got locked up in 1996, Richard sold drugs, committed robberies, and assaulted people in Martin County. His rap sheet is long.

And by his own admission, he was not a good person in the early 1990s. Coincidentally, he knew Spanky, but not super well.

And stuff like that.

I'd wanted to write to Richard because during my investigation, his name had come up a few times. Folks like Andy Holliman and Mike Wells had listed him off along with other notable figures in the drug dealing business in Martin County during the 90s.

But what had really pushed me to put pen to paper and write Richard was an old arrest report I'd found from 1991 that listed him and a man named Guy Sproul as co-defendants in an armed robbery. To refresh your memory, Guy Sproul was a convicted drug dealer from Williamston who was also co-defendants in a cocaine distribution case with Ezekiel Brown.

It's possible Guy might have been one of the two alleged drug dealers last seen with Doug Wagg on the Friday night before he died in July 1991. Even though the identity of the men allegedly seen with Doug has never been confirmed by law enforcement or anyone else, I figured Richard might be able to tell me if Doug ever associated with Guy or Ezekiel, or really anyone in the drug dealing business back in 1991.

In my letter to Richard, I included one of the flyers Melissa, Doug's sister, had made with Doug's picture on it. It wasn't a solid no, but it also wasn't a promising yes. But since we were already on the phone, I figured I'd keep Richard talking just to see what else I could glean from him.

As we talked, he told me some interesting things, none of which were about Doug, but a lot was about everything else in this story. You remember the time when them two girls and the boy got drowned in a run-up river?

Yep. Just like many people in Martin County in 1992, Richard had heard about the suspicious deaths of Tremaine Howell, Nikki Wilson, and Joyce Jean Wilson. He'd also watched the BB&T incident play out on the news, and he'd seen Jerry Beach's funeral parade through town. He also remembered reading about Larry Jones' suicide. Even Richard couldn't help but wonder if people in his illegal line of work were colluding with corrupt members of law enforcement related to those deaths.

He'd personally been arrested multiple times in Martin County for dealing drugs, and the more times he got locked up, the more he says he became aware that corruption was rampant in the small rural county.

How did you know that?

If you trying to beat the charge, if you trying to say the dope don't belong to you or the money don't belong to you, so they get to keep the money. They ain't gonna turn all that money in. As a drug dealer, Richard says his cocaine supply came from a supplier just north of Williamston in Bertie County, who got his stash from far out of state. They was getting theirs from New York. You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. And I know that for a fact. I'm just gonna put it that way. Because I done took rides with them. You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So you had personal knowledge that significant amounts of drugs were coming from New York? Yeah. And that was during the early and mid-1990s? In the 90s, yeah. Once a year, Richard says, a large boat would appear on the Roanoke River at night. It carried the cocaine that would end up in the hands of his suppliers in nearby Bertie County, which he would later sell in Martin County.

Remember, the distance between these two counties is just a thin, invisible line separated by the Roanoke River. He personally believes Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean might have witnessed something at the Walmart or the Roanoke River that got them killed.

Do you think that anyone in law enforcement was involved in what happened to those teenagers?

I think Jerry Beach knew the answer to the question, and that's why Jerry Beach was killed. There's something fishy about the whole thing. Jerry Beach knew that the police forces were crooked, and it was right basically after those kids wound up getting killed. And I believe Jerry Beach was about to expose them. You have 30 seconds remaining. You had a gang out there in Williamston back then. Also...

This sounded like a group I needed to find out more about.

A lot of assault, a lot of theft, a lot of forgery. You could count on a certain number of homicides every year. But the only person who had the information I needed... Guy Spruill. Guy Spruill. Guy, he had people everywhere that were selling for him. ...wasn't going to be easy to find. I think the police got him here somewhere. He was informing me.

That's coming up on the next episode of CounterClock, episode 13, The Nexus.

The National Sales Event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new car like a legendary Camry. Built for performance and available with all-wheel drive, you can count on your new Camry to get anywhere you need to go. Or check out an affordable and reliable Corolla with a trim for every lifestyle. From the hip sedan to the sporty hatchback, there's a Corolla built just for you. Check out more National Sales Event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com.

Toyota, let's go places. Ever dream of a three-row SUV where everything for every passenger feels just right? Introducing the all-new Infiniti QX80 with available features like biometric cooling, electronic air suspension, and segment-first individual audio that isolates sound.

Right to the driver's seat. Discover every just right feature in the all new QX80 at infinityusa.com. 2025 QX80 is not yet available for purchase. Expected availability summer 2024. Individual audio cannot buffer all interior sounds. See owner's manual for details.