Ep 4 of 14: The Timeline
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This is Episode 4, The Timeline.

Whenever a person dies under suspicious circumstances, the first thing most investigators do is try and retrace the victim's last steps. They ask the critical questions: Where were they? Who were they with? What were they doing? Collectively, in theory, this timeline should shed light on how the victim ended up dead. In some cases, it might even help identify their killer.

In Doug Wagg's case though, there are a lot of holes, gaps in his timeline, hours, days even, that no one knew where he was or what he was doing. And Doug himself could be partly to blame for that. In order for me to really get a sense of his movements, I traveled home to North Carolina. I needed to be on the ground where he'd been on the ground.

Williamston was familiar enough to me that I didn't have to GPS too many places, except for when it came to navigating to the exact spot where Doug died. That spot was very much off the beaten path. On a muggy afternoon last summer, I met Andy Holloman and Melissa at the railroad crossing along Wildcat Road.

We parked our cars and trekked up rail to the spot where Doug's body was found. The brush was thick. Right in the middle of snake and bear season. And poison ivy was everywhere. We've got a fairly good path, a railroad access here for a little ways. Is this similar to how it looked in 91? It hasn't changed any since then, this part anyway. This is pretty much just like it was then. Railroad tracks don't change.

After about five minutes of walking and dodging God knows what hiding in the tall grass, we emerged and found the dead end of Belcher Road, the same road Andy and Tim had parked their cruiser on three decades earlier. This home wasn't here back then. This was all woods. The second driveway there is where we parked, and there was a path that walked through, walked through the edge of the woods and came out onto the tracks just another, oh,

20, 30 yards right back there. What did you see as you walked? We walked up onto the tracks, excuse me, and didn't see anything initially. The point of impact was back towards the crossing. So as we were walking towards the point of impact, I began to see something under the spikes. And if you want to walk through here, we can walk up on the tracks. Sure, sure.

Step by step, Andy walked me through everything he did back in July of 1991. The details he described during his first interview hit different now that we were there in person. Just as we're walking, I glanced down and I began to see something along the edge of the rail under the spikes. And I stopped and bent down and realized it was hair. And there were

Maybe not every spike, but every couple of spikes anyway. And in some places, eight or ten in a row, there was anywhere from a couple of strands of hair to a clump of hair stuck under the spikes. It was caught like on this edge of the spike as if something had been drug past it and it caught and it wasn't wrapped all the way around and it wasn't on this side of the spike, it was hung underneath here.

We didn't touch it. We walked along and the hair stopped just before we got to what we feel like was the point of impact. While listening to Andy, I was struck by the oddity of it all. If there was a possibility Doug was placed on the tracks, and to Andy's point, the people dumping him used the quiet dead-end space of Belcher Road to offload him via a small grass path that led to the isolated part of the tracks, away from the crossing, why would they go through all that trouble?

Why not just dump him from Wildcat Road? Why do the whole Belcher Road into the road and then pass through the trees? Like, that's odd, right? It is and it isn't. Even in the middle of the night, there's still a lot of traffic on this road. You know, sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much. But it would have been very obvious if anybody had, you know, it was much more...

surreptitious to come to the dead end street where a bunch of old people live and there's nothing in the last two blocks down the end of that street. They'd come right down here and park and, you know, bring a body or whatever out to the tracks this way. Now, what has always puzzled me is why they drug him back towards the crossings.

That has never made any sense to me. If you're going to dump him and you want it to look like the train got him, why not just pull him up onto the tracks and leave him right there? Why go through the hassle of, because it was, I don't remember the exact distance now. That's been a long, long time ago. But the point of impact was probably another 20 or 30 yards in that direction.

So why drag him that far before you decide to leave him for what could have just as easily happened 20 or 30 yards that way? In my mind, I wonder if the person was trying to put him closer to the crossing to perhaps...

simulate a pedestrian strike, but they had to unload their victim at a point where they wouldn't be seen. They're not seen putting a body on the railroad tracks, but they're putting a body on the railroad tracks in a place that you could say, oh, he came off of the road and he's wandering on the tracks, and that would normally happen at a grade crossing, right? Yep. That's the only thing I've ever been able to come up with.

Visiting the railroad tracks got Melissa thinking out loud, too. The location itself has always felt very off to her. At the time of his death, Doug was living with Sandy, his wife, at his in-law's house in the neighboring town of Jamesville. That house was way out in the country, some 16 miles away from the Wildcat Road railroad crossing. He didn't own a car, and there was no public transportation in Martin County.

Melissa believes her brother ending up on the tracks was no accident. You can spin around in a circle and see, I mean, hundreds of places where they could have put a body or, you know, put him. Like, why here? Which, you know, almost leads me to believe that somebody was trying to cover up something. Why go through the extra step, you know, of making him look worse or, you know, I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.

I mean, even if he had just been in a fight and knocked out, I mean, you're putting a live person on the tracks. I mean, you could have just left him wherever you were fighting. In Andy's opinion, if Doug was purposely placed on the tracks to cover up the fact he'd been assaulted, that took a level of sophistication that would be atypical for the average criminal in Martin County. He would know he's lived there a long time and worked every type of call imaginable.

We just didn't have this kind of case where we found a body in the middle of nowhere. We got a call to, you know, a subject down, a person down in someone's front yard or in someone's house or, you know, and there was some, you know, maybe some cockamamie story about how they fell and hit their head or that's what, that was the bread and butter. That was the kind of thing. Not

get a call from the railroad saying one of our engineers has struck somebody this far away from this grade in the middle of nowhere. This was someone who had intimate knowledge of how to dispose of a body. You don't come up with this by the seat of your pants.

That knowledge can occur, you know, that can come from a whole lot of different methods. That can come from having friends who are in the business. You know, that can come from having done it somewhere else or several times or seen it done or, you know, maybe read about it or something. But this wasn't something that somebody cooked up in the heat of the moment.

The challenge with the theories like the ones Andy, Melissa, and I batted around on the railroad tracks is that none of what we discussed sheds any light on where Doug was before he ended up there. That information is something I had to turn to other sources to figure out. According to Doug's wife, Sandy, his whereabouts in the days before his death are a complete mystery.

Early in the morning on Friday, July 5th, 1991, they'd woken up and made plans to go to the local mall in the nearby town of Washington, North Carolina. The mall was hosting a trout derby that afternoon. And for those of you who don't know what a trout derby is, it's an indoor fishing competition. They had a great big tank that they would bring in, and all the fish had prizes. And they had some pretty good prizes, too. And he loved that. He thought that was the coolest thing.

But entering the Derby cost money, something Doug and Sandy couldn't spare. So Sandy says Doug made a resourceful last-minute decision and left her parents' house on his brother-in-law Eddie's bicycle, hauling a bag of aluminum cans, planning to trade them in for cash. However, after writing off that morning, Doug never returned. And I kept waiting for him to come back so we could go. I was ready, dressed and ready. No phone calls, no nothing. And he was gone.

Initially, Sandy wasn't too concerned. But after a few hours passed with no word from Doug, that changed. The highway that they lived on, or we all lived on, big trucks would go back and forth. And if you weren't careful, you'd get hit by one. So that's one thing we were thinking. Her concern turned to confusion when people began calling her parents' house to tell her Doug was in Williamston, just hanging out.

I want to say it was a cousin, but I can't swear to it. Somebody called me on the phone and said that they see him at the whatever, 7-Eleven or whatever in Martin County. I'm like, what are you talking about? It was right in town. And I'm sitting there going, what in the world? And then a little while later, you know, well, not a little while later, but several hours later, I got another phone call.

saying he was seen at such and such store. Well, I didn't know where such and such store was. I don't even remember the name of the store. After this long of a time, it probably still isn't even there, you know? And they were basically just giving you updates of where Doug was? Yeah. Even though you hadn't asked anyone in the community, where's my husband? No.

So it had to be somebody that knew us in order for that to happen, but I'm not sure who it was. So he's not showing up, and you're wondering where he's at, and then you start to get these phone calls from people just saying, hey, I saw Doug here, I saw Doug here, and you're still puzzled as to why he hasn't come home because those locations are not near your house. Right, and...

I want to say we took off going to look for him and couldn't find him. Had you guys done that in the past on previous occasions that he had left for a long period of time? So why specifically that day? Because he told me specifically he was going to be back in such and such time. Late at night on July 5th, Sandy says she called the Martin County Sheriff's Office to report Doug missing. And they said we had to wait 24 hours. That was a long 24 hours.

The next day, Saturday, July 6th, she called MCSO again and picked up where she'd left off. Did they take Doug's, you know, height? Height, eye color, the whole thing, yeah. What he was wearing, everything. Today, Martin County Sheriff's Office has no record of ever creating a missing persons report for Doug, likely because it's been purged from their files or it was never retained to begin with.

Sandy is sure though, that back in July 1991, the Sheriff's Office generated a missing person bulletin for Doug. If they did have a report back then, that may explain how Doug was tentatively identified so quickly, and MCSO knew to call Sandy's parents' house. Sandy would have likely provided her parents' home phone number when filing the report. I don't know this for sure because the records just don't exist anymore, but that seems like a logical guess.

For two whole days after Sandy says she reported Doug missing, she never heard a word. The next time she heard from law enforcement was when deputies showed up to inform her and her parents that Doug was dead. There was no mention of the bike he'd been riding being found at the railroad tracks, so its whereabouts were unknown then and remain unknown to this day. The only other source of information about where Doug was between July 5th and July 8th is the medical examiner's report.

Like I mentioned at the end of the last episode, Doug's autopsy report has a section of information that's kind of choppy, and I assume the contents of which were provided to Dr. Harris via law enforcement. Just in case you need a reminder, here's what it said.

This man is reported to have been seen on the night of Friday, July 5th, 1991, in the company of two local black men who are reported to be in the drug trade. He was seen on Saturday, July 6th, 1991, by officers in Williamston, and again from 3 o'clock to 5 o'clock Sunday, July 7th, 1991, by patrons of a local store, drinking at that time, the last reported time he was seen alive. A couple of things stick out to me right away.

It mentions that on the Friday night Doug first vanished, he was seen in the company of two known drug dealers. That piece of information is just casually mentioned with zero follow-up. And what's worse, the two men aren't named. Then, the next day, July 6th, the day MCSO allegedly generates a missing person report for Doug, Williamston police officers see him, but they don't stop him and say, hey, your wife and in-laws are looking for you.

Now, maybe the missing person report came out after these city cops saw Doug. I don't know. If that's the case, then I understand why WPD officers didn't stop him. But then there's the part in the autopsy report that talks about Doug drinking at a local store in the late afternoon, early evening of Sunday, July 7th. Yet we know from his toxicology report that nine hours later, when his body was found on the railroad tracks, he had no alcohol in his system.

Collectively, what I think all this information implies is that for three days, Doug was hanging out with unsavory characters, doing irresponsible things, and avoiding going home. There are a lot of things based on this information that wouldn't make Doug a high priority for law enforcement. He was an adult who didn't want to go home on the heels of a holiday weekend. Big deal. Maybe that's why Jerry Beach, the Martin County Sheriff at the time, didn't move heaven and earth to find Doug or work his case.

But you see, that's where I think Jerry Beach miscalculated. If his detectives had dug just a little further into Doug's life and talked to Sandy more, they would have discovered something very important, a clue Doug Wagg had made sure to put in writing. It was the last thing he ever wrote to me. It was very vague, but it was very clear to say, "Don't go asking questions."

Sandy, where do I begin? I want to turn some people in to the police. Can you help me straighten out my life? Life.

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In late March of 1991, three and a half months before his death, Doug turned 27 years old. That was also around the same time he learned he was going to become a father. He and Sandy got married two months later in May. And like many relationships that blossom and move fast, they had their share of problems. For one, they had no money and were living in a small room in the front of Sandy's parents' house.

Mom and Daddy and Doug all had a relationship of their own that I didn't know anything about, but kind of could see them talking, you know, and I guess they kind of put down the rules. Periodically, Doug would have to leave Martin County to earn money bailing pine straw for a friend of one of Sandy's uncles. Other times, he'd just disappear for a day or two without warning. That was something he'd done his whole life. However, this behavior was a big adjustment for Sandy.

I never knew what was going on. He never told me he had an addiction problem to anything. He just said he had some issues, and I said, "Okay, and I take you as you are." And that's just how I was. I still am that kind of person. I just blessed him out for not letting me know where he was because I was worried. You know, "Don't do that to me. You're supposed to be with me. I mean, I'm not going to do that to you."

At one point, tensions were high in the Davis household after Doug did something very irresponsible. He took the car that they lent him to use to go to work. He turned around and sold it. Somehow, someway, mom and daddy got it back. It was an old, beat-up car. Some kind of Chrysler car or something. I don't even know. It had fins on the back. That's how old it was. It was an old burgundy, rusty-looking thing.

Were they upset by that? Oh, yes. Yes. And see, I didn't know, because they wouldn't tell me any of this. They just told me that they had talked to him. So I figured mom and daddy had it under control. And they were fine with him still living there after that? Well, they were trying to help him. Because we were going to have a child together, they wanted to make sure he was working towards that goal. Whenever Doug was gone, he'd write Sandy letters expressing how much he loved her, what he was struggling with, and how he wanted to be a better husband.

If text messaging was around back then, I imagine Doug would have been a full-page texter. A few months before his death, Sandy came home and discovered a note he'd left for her on their counter. It was short, handwritten, and scribbled on the back of a piece of open mail. The original document is now gone, but Melissa, Doug's sister, found a photocopy of it in some boxes of old stuff. Yes, that's it. I asked Sandy to read it.

Sandy, where do I begin? When will it end? I'm so scared and so much in love with you. I feel as if I am lost. Something must be done. I want to be so much closer to you than I am. Just kidding. She brought me some tissues in. It's been a while since I've seen this. I want to be so much closer to you than I am. But I'm so much in love with you, it scares me. I get scared, then I run.

Please help me one way or another. I can't take it anymore. I just could not stand to lose you, but I continue to push you away. Help me get help. I have managed to blow $275 while I was gone. God has his hand out to me and it's about time I took it. I need you and God. I need to sit down and have some real prayer with you and Jesus. I have not slept since Friday. When I woke up for work,

I feel like I'm about to die. I want to turn some people in to the police. Can you help me straighten out my life? What I have of one anyway. Let's talk, not argue, Doug." So the question you're probably asking: Did Doug ever go to the police in between writing this letter and when he died? And the answer is: I don't know. But three big things that jump out to me about this note are: One, Doug said he wanted to get help.

Two, he blew $275 on something. And three, he wanted to turn some people into the police. That declaration alone is huge. It indicates he knew incriminating information about someone or a group of people. When you really stop and think about it, whatever Doug knew about these people was significant enough for him to hint to his wife that the authorities should know about them.

The fact that Doug penned the note is proof he was willing to snitch, which was not something he'd ever done before, according to his family. He just, he wasn't a confrontational person. I feel like he was street smart, and I don't feel like he would have willingly put himself in a situation that would have caused harm to him.

I've tracked down hundreds of old court records related to nearly every criminal infraction Doug Wag ever had. It took me months of sifting through microfilm, making calls, and physically visiting jails and courthouses to obtain his old arrest reports. What I discovered is that in every case, from misdemeanors to traffic infractions to felonies, not once did Doug ever roll on someone.

Time after time, he had co-defendants, yet he didn't sell them out, even in instances where he could have gotten a better deal for himself. Here's an example of what I mean.

Between 1982 and 1983, Doug and another young man from Memphis were facing burglary and stolen property charges after taking firearms from a wealthy Memphis businessman's home. The pair technically became fugitives until 1986. When it came time to face the music, Doug stayed quiet, said nothing. His co-defendant, not so much.

That guy took a plea deal early, spilled the beans, and Doug ended up pleading guilty later, resulting in him getting a longer jail sentence and higher fines. Now, Doug deserved the punishment he got. I'm not disagreeing with that. But what I took away from reading all the documents and transcripts about this firearms theft is that Doug could have easily decided to snitch, but he didn't, not even to save himself.

Doug's sisters, Melissa and Jessica, were around back then when that burglary situation happened, albeit they were just kids. But they do remember Doug going to jail in Tennessee for about a year. Melissa even visited her brother there once. Both women think Doug's unwillingness to snitch in that situation was a result of his natural disposition to just stay unseen and unheard.

In their opinion, his silence wasn't because he was some hardened criminal who knew to keep his mouth shut, but because he was just so naturally shy and timid. Unfortunately, back in 1991, Sandy, Doug's wife, never asked her husband any of the questions she and we now have today. After Doug left her that letter, they didn't speak about it. It was only after his death that she realized it could be important.

I think he probably saw some stuff he shouldn't have seen and then knew he saw it. Or he just jumped in and did stuff he wasn't supposed to do and then realized he was doing the wrong thing. You know, I just don't have an answer answer. The fact that Doug wrote the cryptic note on the back of an open envelope, though, is kind of noteworthy. According to Sandy, Melissa, and Shirley, he always wrote notes to loved ones on lined paper, not loose scraps at the last minute.

Here's Melissa. The way that the letter was written, it kind of looked like he might have been in some type of distress, possibly, like looking at his other, you know, the other letters that he had written previously, his other handwriting. You know, some of it, it just seemed like there was more distress. I felt like it was all over the place. In the first part of the letter, it mentioned something about $275 that he managed to blow away.

I thought that was really interesting. It almost seemed a bit desperate in a way. His other writings to me didn't really seem desperate in the same sense. So where was Doug's sense of desperation coming from? Maybe somebody else was killed and he was fearing for his life. What were his secrets? Now you're a liability to us. What if you run your mouth too much? I was determined to find the answers to these questions.

And it turns out the Martin County Clerk of Courts was a good place to start. This is so big to me. Hopefully it's going to give us another lead as to who his friends were out there, who he was hanging out with. Somebody close enough to let them drive their car. That's coming up on the next episode of CounterClock. Episode 5, The Car. The Car.

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