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This is Episode 2: The Tracks. Fourth of July in 1991 fell on a Thursday. But most people's celebrations started the next day, Friday, July 5th, through Sunday, July 7th. Cities across America were buzzing with fireworks, cookouts, and parades. And Williamston was no different. Citizens did all the things you'd expect a tiny town to do: eat, drink, and be merry.
People moseyed from one neighbor's yard to another, picked up barbecue plates, and drank to their heart's content. It was business as usual for local law enforcement, too. Fourth of July weekend is always a busy weekend. Always high call volume, a lot of alcohol-related offenses. And by that, I mean back then DUI and fights and that sort of thing. This is Andy Holloman, a retired Williamston police detective who worked for the city back in 1991.
I don't remember anything specific about that weekend other than it was busy as always. He and a handful of other officers who worked for WPD patrolled Main Street and the neighborhoods throughout town, while their counterparts with the Martin County Sheriff's Office handled calls that came in from beyond the city limits. Think of Williamston as a small bubble sitting inside of a larger bubble. The larger bubble is Martin County.
Even though the sheriff's office was the bigger agency back then, it was only bigger by a little. We're talking eight to ten deputies tops. They were smaller departments. Everyone had a lot more responsibility. It was not nearly as specialized as it tends to be now. The jurisdictions of the two agencies were separated by, well, nothing really. It's just an imaginary line drawn on a piece of paper.
The one unambiguous part of the map that did clearly define where the city stopped and the county's jurisdiction began was a stretch of CSX-owned railroad tracks. These tracks have been around for decades and are still operational today. Martin County is known as a Tier 1 county, meaning very rural and poor. But the one thing it had going for it in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was a thriving textile industry.
If you drive a mile or so from Williamston's city center, you're likely to pass an old yarn mill or paper plant. Most of these businesses are shuttered now, but back in 1991, they were thriving, and their operators mainly used the railroad to transport goods or buy products out of the area. Back then, the frequency of trains was only one train a day. Go one day and come in the middle of the night.
That's Randy Jones, a retired CSX engineer who worked for CSX for 41 years. He operated the overnight train that cut through Martin County. Before retiring in 2013, Randy knew his Williamston-Martin County route like the back of his hand. It consisted of one engineer, me,
40 to 50 cars.
At around 2.15 in the morning on Monday, July 8th, 1991, Randy and his crew were operating their train like usual. He was in the front engine and the rest of the guys were in the back car, known as the caboose. The locomotive was puffing along at a safe speed, headed eastbound through Martin County, slowly climbing in elevation as it made its way up a slight incline. It had a few hundred yards in front of it before it was going to pass through a designated railroad crossing at Wildcat Road.
a long, winding street that was partly in the city and partly in the county. It was nothing but woods. There's no houses. There was no pathways. It was in a desolate piece of the country right there. The trees and fields that zipped past Randy as he operated the train were blurs of black and green. There were no light sources, except for the headlamp on the train. It does light up the area significantly within, say,
where you can actually see or pinpoint anything with any accuracy out to about maybe, I'm guessing about maybe 30 yards at most, where you can see something clearly. At 2.20 a.m., in the dim beam of his train's headlight, Randy saw something concerning laying across the tracks in front of him.
I saw what looked like either an individual or debris from a storm or something. I did not see anything move. There was no movement at all of what was sitting there. It looked like the form of an individual, but at the same time, was it mannequins or was it a bunch of trash to be made? It looked like it was a human.
It was impossible for Randy to tell, which wasn't good, because he was running out of time. By the time you see it, you cannot, you know, you're not going to stop the thing. As the train quickly approached the mass draped over the rails, Randy blew the engine's horn four times to warn whatever was there that it needed to get out of the way. That horn is easily being able to be heard for more than a mile. If you can't hear that horn...
Something was wrong. Despite the loud burst from the train's horn, the object in front of Randy remained motionless. And before he knew it, the worst had happened. And I shot the brakes on the train for fear of not knowing what it was.
Right as Randy's engine and rail cars barreled over the object, he realized the mass he'd been watching for the past few moments wasn't trash. It was a man's body. He'd caught a small glimpse of it at the very last second. He was laying between the rails. It looked like his head was propped up on one side, his feet were propped up on the other. It was turned away from me. I could not see a face.
I could not actually see shoes or feet. Randy estimated that after hitting the man, the train traveled roughly half a mile to three quarters of a mile down the tracks before coming to a full stop. That's pretty typical for that large of a train, by the way. I checked. After coming to a stop, Randy communicated to the men working with him that they'd hit something. And then...
Randy remembers deputies with the Martin County Sheriff's Office and a trooper from the North Carolina Highway Patrol arrived on scene pretty quickly. According to the fire department's records, emergency responders were on scene at 2.32 a.m.,
Randy stayed inside the train's engine to ensure it wouldn't move and spoke with a member of law enforcement standing below him outside of the train's small front window. The man Randy told me he spoke with was a North Carolina Highway Patrol trooper named Bob Wright.
On several pieces of paperwork, Bob is specifically listed as one of the first responding officers to the scene. However, when I spoke with Bob last year, he informed me somebody had made a big mistake. I have no idea how my name got on that report. I didn't do it. I wasn't there. I know nothing about it. You did not respond to the railroad tracks? Do you know any other officers or troopers who worked with you that...
How is it possible that this kind of error was made on a report like this, saying that NCHP was involved and personnel were involved, yet it's not true? You're from Bethel.
Correct. You know the law enforcement around Bethel? Well, my dad was the chief there for a number of years, from 93 to 97. And you know he didn't have the money to hire rocket scientists? Correct. Okay. You get non-rocket scientists out in the road, they're tired, they've worked all day, anything can happen. I just, you know, it's just...
Yeah, it's just interesting to me, like, to the extent that your name is brought up by individuals and in documentation and that NCHP's involvement is brought up...
I honestly have to question whether it was really a mistake or whether it was put in there just to be put in there. Like, I don't want to accuse anyone of anything, but it's odd to me that you have that much mention. I do not know. I cannot say anyway, but I never heard any of that. I was a senior trooper here. I mean, I'm 91. I was the one with who had been here the longest.
It was such a strange discrepancy. It reeks of incompetence. Randy Jones wasn't all that impressed either with the cops' investigation on the ground.
He said after about an hour or so, MCSO cleared him to leave the scene, and he drove the train to its intended destination. He was never spoken to again after that. Has anyone other than me contacted you about this in the last 30-plus years? No. They did not seem to be very pinpoint digging into the facts. More or less, I just reported to them that
Whatever this was, it was late. It was on the track. I ran over it. It was determined it was human. We called you. And that was about the extent of it. It was in a very desolate spot on that railroad track. I mean, there was no houses around it. It was way down in the track. And I think the law enforcement had to walk away.
I can't tell you if Martin County investigators tried to answer that question, or if they did any kind of investigation at the death scene other than collect the body. And that's because no one knows what happened during those crucial early morning hours on July 8th, 1991.
Not even the Martin County Sheriff's Office. 1991, no computers, everything's done by hand, handwritten reports. That's True Robinson, the current chief deputy of the department.
We do have a large amount of paperwork, old reports that are boxed up, maintained in storage. And there have been multiple hours spent going through those boxes, trying to locate a report that ties back to this particular incident. The only thing that we were ever able to locate was a log of
where report numbers are issued out. And the date of the incident, the description of the incident was, I believe it said subject hit by a train and it had the name of a responding officer. But as far as a report, we can't find a report on that.
MCSO's reports, if there ever were any, are no longer around, so I don't have a nice, neat narrative that describes everything deputies did post-train strike. The most obvious being how they even identified Doug Wagg as the victim. Yet, shortly after Martin County investigators were said to have arrived on scene, the phone rang at Doug's in-law's house in nearby Jamesville, where he was living with Sandy, who was seven months pregnant with their son.
The phone rang. I answered the phone. Yes, I need to speak to someone who knew him. That didn't sit well with me at all. I said, well, I'm his wife. Where's he at? And they wouldn't tell me squat. So I had to go wake my mama and my daddy up. They knew it wasn't good. Mama knew in her gut it wasn't good. I had no clue. I was totally oblivious because I'm thinking, no, I don't know, maybe he just got hurt. I'm thinking, we're still going to be okay.
According to Sandy, her dad, Willie, spoke with deputies on the phone and then a few minutes later left the house with her younger brother, Eddie. I think my dad identified the body. He was white as a sheet when he came out of there. I think I had to drive home. I remember my dad saying he wished I never had to go through anything like that. There's really no way to word it how you feel when you lose somebody you're thinking you're going to spend the rest of your life with. And all I could think about was this baby and
You know, that's all I could think about. But how the authorities even knew to contact the Davis family in the first place is what no one can explain. They knew to call your family's residence because Doug Wag was who had been found. How did they know? I don't know. Did Doug have ID on him? Uh-uh. Was it at the house with you guys? Uh-uh. I don't know where his ID went to. There was no ID on him, but they had him ID'd pretty quickly.
And I don't know how.
Melissa, Doug's sister, as well as his other siblings, told me they were told in 1991 that Doug had a piece of paper in his pocket with his name written on it. And that's how the cops knew who he was. But even in that scenario, how or why deputies ended up contacting the Davis family is still strange. And full disclosure, I have no idea where that tidbit of information about a piece of paper being in Doug's pocket with his name on it originated from.
It's not mentioned in any documentation I've been able to retrieve related to his case. And Melissa and her siblings aren't sure who first mentioned that detail back in 1991. It was just something that they remember hearing.
But the only thing that makes any sense to me, absent a scrap of paper with his name on it, is that someone in law enforcement at the railroad tracks looking at Doug's mangled body had to have recognized who he was in order to know to call Sandy's parents. I mean, think about it. They had to have known Doug was somehow associated with Sandy and her family. But how they knew that is what I can't figure out.
Remember, Doug wasn't from Martin County. He'd only lived there for a matter of months before his death. So it wasn't like he was a hometown face that deputies would have seen over and over again. He'd also never been arrested by either the city or the county. So he wasn't a frequent flyer at the county jail or anything like that.
What's frustrating is I can't ask the first responding deputy on scene if he recognized Doug, because that deputy is now dead. I can't ask Sandy's parents either, because they're also dead. According to a corporate spokeswoman for CSX, who I emailed back and forth with last year, CSX purges train strike incident records after seven years, so it has nothing on this investigation either. But you know the deal by now. No way I was giving up there.
I went a little higher up the food chain and contacted the Federal Railroad Administration, the government agency that, among other things, documents and records all locomotive accidents in the United States. And there, in the depths of the FRA's archives, I found some interesting information. Information that is both really good and really bad.
Whenever a train strikes something that's not supposed to be on a railway, the company that owns the train tracks is required by federal law to file what's referred to as a Railroad Injury and Illness Summary Form. It's technically called a 6180-55A form. That document has a bunch of different boxes on it for things like time of the incident, date of a crash, the location, a narrative of events, etc.,
However, when the FRA sent me the 55A form that CSX filed related to Doug's death, it was shocking to read. Most of the boxes were blank.
In 1991, CSX failed to include the day of the incident, the time, the county, the latitude and longitude of the strike, or any information about their employees. The section of the form where the narrative of events was supposed to be was also empty. But according to the FRA, narratives weren't technically required on 55A forms until 1997. So I guess CSX is off the hook there.
Still, everything else that was supposed to be on the form wasn't. Here's Melissa, one of Doug's younger sisters. Just as basic as anything. You know, this is horrible to say, but I mean, like they had hit an animal on the tracks or something. You know, there was no extra effort or even minimum effort involved.
put into filling out that form and making sure that all of the boxes are checked. For them not to have followed through with what they were required to do, to me is negligence.
And just to emphasize Melissa's point a little more, I did some digging into the FRA's data and discovered that in 1991 in North Carolina, there were a total of 72 incidents on CSX-owned railroads. Of those 72 incidents, 10 of them were categorized as trespasser incidents, resulting in serious harm or death.
Doug was one of those 10 trespasser incidents. So it's not like CSX was filing 55A forms for cases like his left and right, or were too busy to take the time to fill his form out sufficiently. They should have done better, and they didn't. That's all I can say about that. At the time, though, no one in Doug's family in Tennessee knew what was going on in North Carolina.
By sunrise on July 8th, Sandy's parents had called Doug's parents to tell them he was dead. But after that, Shirley and Doug Sr. were left to wait on law enforcement to fill them in on the details. And that never happened on July 8th, or the day after. I remember sitting on the floor and trying to figure out what's going on, you know. Nobody can explain.
losing a child. I don't care if it's a car accident, if it's on the tracks or what it is. I don't remember ever talking to anybody in law enforcement. I didn't know who to contact. I had no idea. I wasn't even sure where he was killed. While they waited to get more information, Shirley called all of her children to let them know the terrible news. Angel, the oldest girl in the family, remembers this moment vividly. My mom called me
It was early morning and I was in bed and my mom called and when I picked it up and she told me, it was like, wait, what? And I'm like, wait, what happened? You know, he was hit by a train. What? So immediately things go in your head. You think when you hear that and it's like, you know, Doug's been killed. He was, you know, hit by a train. So you think, oh, he was in a car. He was crossing the tracks or trying to beat the train or something like that. And then
Despite CSX not sending its own investigators to work in conjunction with local law enforcement and the sheriff's office not putting much effort into processing the death scene, there was one person who took a curious interest in the case. Andy Holliman.
As a Williamston City Police detective, he had no jurisdiction on the railroad. That didn't mean he couldn't at least go check things out. There is a thing called extraterritorial jurisdiction, and it can extend up to three miles. This was only a few yards in our ATJ, outside the actual city limit boundary. We all knew it was a sheriff's office case, but it was right there.
And if we could go out and offer any assistance and probably be a little nosy too, as cops are naturally nosy, then why not? I probably got to work between 7 and 7.30. I've always been an early bird. And Tim came in, Tim Hines, who worked for me in the detective's division. Tim came in a little before 8 and said, hey, did you hear we had a train wreck last night?
And I immediately thought vehicle versus train or whatever. And I said, no, I didn't hear anything about it. And he said, yeah. He said, a boy got killed. I said, struck a car? He said, no, he was on the tracks. I said, okay. He said, you want to ride out there? I said, sure, why not? Let's ride out there.
It took Andy and Tim just a few minutes to make their way from the Williamston Police Station to the railroad tracks outside of town. When they arrived around 10 a.m., Doug's body had already been removed and transported 45 minutes away to the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina State University in Greenville for an autopsy. Personnel from the sheriff's office had left the scene too. They were all gone. There was no one there.
Andy and Tim park their cruiser on a dead-end road called Belcher Road, which sits perpendicular to the railroad tracks. Then they walk through a small stretch of grass and trees before emerging onto the railway. To get up to the actual railroad ties, they had to step down several feet into a ditch filled with granite rocks, then step up several feet to be on the railroad tracks.
Some of the first responders may have accessed the scene this way in the middle of the night. But based on what the train's engineer Randy Jones told me, it's more likely any deputies or EMS units who responded parked their cars near where the tracks intersected with Wildcat Road, at the actual railroad crossing. From there, they would have had an easier walk level with the railroad tracks to get to Doug's body.
To get a better sense of what I'm referring to, check out the blog post for this episode on our website, counterclockpodcast.com. An aerial map I created will help you visualize and orient things much better. After a few minutes of looking around and not seeing much, Andy started asking himself the obvious questions. Why was he down here? This is kind of the middle of nowhere. Where would he have been coming from or going to to be down here?
He and his partner discovered a spot on the railroad ties that appeared to be the strike point. There was disturbed gravel. There was blood. A little ways up rail from that, they found a pair of mangled eyeglasses and something else very unexpected. Something caught my eye, and I said, Tim, I got hair. And he said, no, you don't. I said, I got hair underneath this spike. Tim ran back to the car and got a handful of evidence bags and came back, and we started looking.
following that trail of hair. And it went all the way back, probably 25 or 30 yards. The hair was up rail, meaning it's in the opposite direction the train was moving. Finding clumps of hair stuck beneath the railroad spikes so far up rail from the strike point felt strange to Andy.
It meant that Doug had been there and lost hair there, but then he'd been physically hurt further down rail. Even stranger, the last place Andy and Tim found hair as they worked backwards was immediately next to a spot where someone could have accessed the railway if they were willing to fight through some thick brush.
When Andy looked closely at that spot, he saw what he believed were tire tracks in a matted section of the thick grass. But that wasn't even the most alarming thing. There was what appeared to me to be a drag mark, and it led right back to the railroad tracks. In that moment, it was clear to Andy, an experienced detective, what he was looking at, a crime scene.
It was obvious which way the train was headed and which way the body was drugged, where the point of impact was. The hair that I found was before the point of impact, in the opposite direction of the direction that the body was drugged. He was drugged down the tracks and placed on the tracks. Dragged down the tracks by someone, well before the train had ever arrived.
It was a horrific thought and one that Andy couldn't keep to himself. After dropping Tim off at WPD, Andy headed straight to the Martin County Sheriff's Office to tell the then-sheriff, Jerry Beach, what he'd found. He hand-delivered the physical evidence bags he and Tim had collected. But Andy didn't get the reaction from Jerry Beach that he expected. Walked into the sheriff's office and I said, Sheriff, this fatality you had this morning,
He said, yeah, what about it? I said, well, I said, Tim and I rode out there and just had a little look around. And he kind of went high and to the right, ballistic. He didn't like it at all. And I said, but, oh, Sheriff, I said, who have you got working on it? Because they didn't really have an investigator's division then. And he said, well, I'm working on it. I said, okay. I said, well, I've got this evidence here. And I laid it on his desk, and he really got mad.
He said, I don't know what you think you're doing in my county working my crime scene, but this was an accident. And I said, but Sheriff, I really believe this was a homicide. And he let me know pretty quick he didn't care what I thought. And the best thing I could do was stay out of his jurisdiction and do my job and not worry about his. Don't worry about it. Andy's one of us. And that response did not set well with him.
Mainly, I was just pissed off at being dismissed like I was. Somebody was going to get away with murder because I felt like there was a homicide that was going to go and was not being investigated. Similar to Jerry Beach, Andy's boss, Williamston Police Chief Bucky Holliman, no relation to Andy, chewed Andy out for what he'd done at the railroad tracks. He told me that I didn't work for the sheriff's office, I worked for the town and not to cause trouble for him and stay my ass in the city limits.
At that time, tensions were high between the Martin County Sheriff's Office and the city police department. I don't know why Jerry and Bucky didn't like each other. It was a known, it was a given. They didn't like each other. So anything that you did, you didn't tell them what you were doing. You didn't call Bucky and if a deputy was out in the county and screaming for help, you didn't call the police chief and say, hey, is it okay if I go out there? You just went. You might get sued out for it later, but...
right that minute a brother needed help and you were going to help him. Tim Hines, Andy's partner in 1991, also remembers a visceral rift between MCSO and WPD. We were three blocks down from each other. The Sheriff's Department was here and the Police Department was down there. It was two different worlds. It ain't politics, it's just small-town good old boys syndrome.
During my interview with Tim, he was unable to remember any details about the morning he went to the train tracks with Andy. He didn't deny he was there. We went out there, I don't know, 8, 9, we got to work at 8. But he couldn't recall picking up evidence. I don't remember that because, like I said, if you know anything about law enforcement, once you touch evidence, you got to follow that chain. And I don't remember doing that.
Do you remember seeing a significant amount of blood or anything like that? I don't recall, but I don't think so. Because that would have stood out to you, right? Yes. Why do you think Jerry Beach would have told Andy, don't worry about this? I wish I could answer that. I can't. Because when I went to work with the Sheriff's Department, I basically took Jerry's place as an investigator. And if I had something like that, I always called in the SBI.
Did you catch that? Yep. Tim Hines was not only a former Williamston police officer, he also worked for Martin County Sheriff's Office too. He became a deputy and changed departments within weeks of Doug's death because he says the pay was better. Tim claims that when he took his new position with MCSO, he was a grunt. He didn't hear or know anything about Doug's case. Personally, at the time, it was something that happened. I had no idea
Yes, it was this. Or yes, I think it was this. It was just, oh my God, look what happened in Martin County. I never really got involved in it. And what I mean involved in it, I didn't ever ask no questions. Why the county didn't do anything, I don't know. Can't explain why they won't document it.
Thankfully, Andy Holliman was the polar opposite of his former partner. He took it upon himself to be a thorn in everyone's side, to make sure the forensic pathologist who was going to be conducting Doug's autopsy had every scrap of information possible. The medical examiner in the state of North Carolina is a very powerful individual. And I knew the ME who was working the case. I called him and talked to him. Just told him what I knew, told him what I had found.
Andy didn't know it in 1991, but his determination would prove to be critical for so many reasons. If he had not gone and talked to the coroner and put that in the report, I don't think any of that would have been in there. And I honestly don't think that we would be here right now. It's all coming up in the next episode of CounterClock, episode three, The Damage.
