Ep 5 of 14: The Car
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We're only four episodes into this season, and by now you guys totally get why this case needed my attention. On its surface, what happened to Doug Wagg in the summer of 1991 in Williamston, North Carolina may seem like maybe just a wrong place, wrong time situation, a tragic accident.

But after hearing from Andy Holliman, the curious officer who felt something was off about Doug's death, it's at least conceivable that Doug might have been a victim of foul play. And what was up with Martin County Sheriff Jerry Beach getting so angry at Andy for raising some alarm bells? Oh, and in case you missed it, Doug was the eldest of five siblings, and he wasn't a native of North Carolina.

A few years ago, Melissa, his second youngest sister, spearheaded an effort to figure out what happened to him, and she reached out to me in 2022. Angel, Michael, and Jessica, the rest of the Wag siblings, all want answers too. Another person you heard from was pathologist Kent Harshbarger, who broke down why some of the damage to Doug's body might point to him having been assaulted prior to going on the tracks, and why other injuries exclude that conclusion.

Next was Randy Jones, the engineer who was driving the train that hit Doug, and he recounted how it would have been impossible for Doug not to hear the locomotive's horn blaring if he'd been conscious on the railroad tracks. And lastly, there's Sandy, Doug's widow. She revealed some strange things Doug alluded to shortly before his death, which included him wanting to turn some people into the police. Why would Doug make such a declaration? What does it even mean?

Well, that's what I'm going to try and find out in the next few episodes. This is episode five, The Car. On Sunday, June 2nd, 1991, at 1.55 in the morning, a police officer working in the small one-stop light town of Chacoanity, North Carolina, pulled over a lone sedan. The driver inside was a young white man in his mid to late 20s who failed to completely stop at a stop sign or flashing red lights.

When the CPD officer asked the guy to show him his driver's license, the driver complied. Within a few minutes, the cop had logged the information from the man's Illinois driver's license into his computer and issued a minor traffic citation. Two months later, on August 13th, 1991, when the driver was due in Beaufort County Court to pay his summons, he didn't show. And that's because he was dead.

The driver of the sedan, if you haven't guessed it by now, was Doug Wagg. I learned the details about this traffic stop while visiting the Martin County Clerk of Courts office in Williamston. Inside the building, there's a dimly lit vault lined wall to wall with filing cabinets and wooden shelves. There are tens of thousands of old court records stuffed into manila envelopes or bound tightly into thick leather books. Thankfully, I didn't have to search through every one of those to find what I was looking for.

Most clerk of court offices in North Carolina have a walk-up kiosk with a computer terminal that lets you search for records using a person's name. The results tell you if that person has court records in any county in the state, not just the one you're visiting. When I plugged Doug's name and information into the Martin County terminal, I didn't get any hits for him there because he had no criminal record in Martin County. However, I did find the traffic citation for him that existed in nearby Beaufort County.

Eventually, I got my hands on a printout of the citation and a digitized court record related to it. The info was slim, but it was a decent place to start. The summons stayed dormant for decades and was eventually dismissed by the district attorney's office in 2019 due to lack of payment. I guess by then they realized the guy who was issued the citation was long gone.

This wasn't earth-shattering. It's not like the citation was for the missing window of time right before his death or anything. The citation was one month and six days before he died. But it was something. I mean, whose car had Doug been driving in the middle of the night? And was it someone else's? Because if you remember, according to Sandy, in the summer of 1991, she and Doug didn't have their own car.

She says the junker her parents sometimes let them borrow was off limits to Doug after he sold it without their permission. To me, the who about this car might answer the why. As in, why was he even in Chacoinity? Chacoinity is a minuscule town about 30 minutes south of Williamston, just across the Tar River. Sandy says she has no idea whose vehicle Doug was driving when he got this traffic citation.

For Melissa, Doug's sister, the car is a big deal. Whose car is it? You know, like, I mean, they didn't, Sandy says they didn't have a car. You know, this is so big to me because this is either going to tell me, hopefully it's going to give us another lead as to who his friends were out there or who he was hanging out with. Somebody close enough to let them drive their car.

The police officer who issued Doug the traffic citation in June of 1991 did not write down what make or model the vehicle was that Doug was driving. The section of the ticket where that information was supposed to go was marked with a U for unknown. It was 1:55 in the morning. Maybe visibility wasn't great. Who knows? Whoever's vehicle Doug was driving had to have trusted him enough to let him drive it, right? I think the possibilities as to why he was in it are limited.

One, he could have been out partying and just driving a friend's car. However, the police officer who stopped Doug clearly didn't suspect him of drunk driving or doing something sketchy because the cop just wrote Doug the citation and then moved on. If Doug did look drunk or high or nervous, the CPD officer didn't pick up on it. Knowing what we know about Doug's tendency to roam, there's a really good possibility he could have just been out looking for a good time.

He loved music, hard rock music. He was an outstanding guitarist, the electric guitar. I remember him sitting on his bed and playing the guitar. His trip through Chacoanity could have been him coming home from a club or bar in Beaufort County. That region is much more coastal and had places to drink as well as possibly get cocaine.

In the month of June 1991, Doug had been unaccounted for a few times. Sandy told me as much during her interview. Doug's mom surely remembers one time in late June, right before she married her second husband, Sandy called her in Memphis, asking if anyone had heard from Doug. Sandy called me about a week before Harold and I got married,

and asked if I had seen Dougie, or had heard from, not seen him, but if I had heard from him. And I told her that I hadn't, and she said that he'd been gone for several days and she didn't know where he was. Sandy didn't report Doug missing then, but I talked to someone who had seen him in both Martin County and Beaufort County in June of 1991, a woman named Jennifer Waters. She's actually the woman who signed the marriage license for Doug and Sandy.

Jennifer didn't see Doug on the night he was pulled over, unfortunately. But interviewing her was extremely helpful.

Jennifer told me she saw Doug out and about a few times after he got married, but not once did she ever think he had fallen off the wagon. Sure, she saw him around the party scene, but in her opinion, he wasn't partying like she and her friends were.

Did it seem to you that Doug was using substances or using cocaine or drugs of any kind, or was he just in the crowd? I didn't hear anything of him being into drugs. He looked pretty healthy to me when I saw him and met him. What happened after, you know, I don't know, but the times that I met him, it seemed pretty healthy.

Back in the 90s, Jennifer struggled with substance use herself. She says cocaine and all sorts of drugs flowed freely in and out of eastern North Carolina. It was easy to come by. It was easily, well, you could easily get it from basically anywhere. You'd find somebody that could know somebody, you can get some crack or acid or cocaine.

Sure, Doug could have been on a late night drive looking for drugs the night he got pulled over. But I had another thought, an alternate scenario that might explain Doug's overnight drive in the mystery car. What if Doug wasn't finding somebody to get drugs from? What if Doug was that somebody? It might be why he kept his wife in the dark. Let's say hypothetically, he was transporting drugs for someone.

that could explain why he was in a vehicle he didn't own. The little seed that planted this theory for me was really the timing. It's interesting to me that on the first Sunday in June, he was out at 1:55 a.m. getting stopped in Chacoanity. And then almost exactly a month later, the first Sunday in July, he was out at the same exact time of night, but instead of being in a car, he was dead on the railroad tracks.

The only way for me to suss out this theory more was to figure out who owned the car Doug was driving in June. No, there was no registration information, but I did discover something I never expected to.

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Though the cop put a U under the information about the car as unknown, he did write down the license plate, DTA 2131, and he noted the plate was issued from North Carolina. But here's where things get weird. I called the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles asking for information about who the registered owner of that plate was in the early 90s.

Several staff members searched their databases for me, but... You ran the license plate number that I provided you from the citation, and you didn't find any record that it exists with the state of North Carolina.

I was thoroughly confused. In my hand, I had a traffic ticket that indicated the license plate DTA 2131 from North Carolina was on a car Doug Wag was driving a month before his death. Yet, the state had no record of the tag ever existing. That seemed sketchy to me. But one explanation I thought of was that maybe the tag was real, but just never meant to be found in the DMV's system.

You know, something was masking it. In my research, I found an old report from the Division of Fiscal Research for the North Carolina General Assembly. That entity is a nonpartisan service that provides research and analysis to legislators about how money is being spent and for what purposes. The report I read was produced in April 2000, so nine years after Doug Wag's death.

But it talked all about how in 1991 specifically, laws were amended to allow local and state law enforcement entities the use of fictitious and confidential license plates, aka ghost cars.

Furthermore, the DMV was prohibited from keeping the registration or ownership information of these ghost plates in the normal vehicle records database. The DMV was required to keep any information about these plates in a separate confidential file, a file that, quote, no person could obtain the identity of the vehicle owner from using the license plate number, end quote.

Even more bizarre, the North Carolina Attorney General supported this rule and took it a step further, stating that even the identifying information kept in that separate confidential file for ghost plates should be purposely falsified so as to keep all information confidential.

So, to this day, the only way to know what state agency, law enforcement department, or employee held the registration for a ghost plate would be to look at the hard copy registration card inside the vehicle itself. But even if you did that, the information on that card might be completely made up to mask the real owner. And you want to know who spearheaded this whole ghost plate endeavor in 1991?

the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, or NCSBI. Yep, not a surprise to me. You want to know what else is wild? There were supposed to be caps on how many ghost plates could be floating around in 1991. The General Assembly only signed off to permit 125. But in 1991 and 1992, there were 491 of them on cars. 491.

the majority of which came back to vehicles associated with operations tied to the NCSBI and small or mid-level police departments.

The report I found specifically said, quote,

End quote.

Now, if that doesn't freak you out, I don't know what will. Is it possible Doug Wagg was driving a vehicle in June of 1991 that had a fictitious license plate on it and the Chocowinity officer who stopped him didn't know that? Absolutely. Is that why the DMV now has no record of DTA 2131 ever existing? Could be.

If the plate on the car Doug was in was legit, though, and not a ghost plate, I wondered if perhaps the cop writing Doug's citation just wrote the state down wrong. You know, maybe he jotted down NC, but really meant SC for South Carolina or something.

Playing a hunch, I had a private investigator friend of mine named Eddie do some more digging for me. Turns out the only states that the license plate DTA 2131 has ever existed in are Ohio and New York. It's conceivable that the officer wrote down NC instead of NY. I ruled out the Ohio match pretty quickly because DMV records for that plate didn't start until the early 2000s, which means the plate wasn't in circulation in the 90s.

However, the New York plate, DTA 2131, was around back then. Records show it had once been on a 1991 Honda Civic DX Series sedan. This car looks exactly how you think it looks: small, compact, classic early 90s shape. The only thing I don't know is what color it was. I posted a sample image on the blog post for this episode, or you can see it right now in the app if you're listening there.

According to vehicle records I obtained online, the Honda was manufactured in 1990 and sold for the first time in December of that year at a dealership in Rochester, New York. It had 20 miles on it. The identity of the car's first owner is protected by New York's privacy laws. Whoever they were, though, they were issued a brand new license plate, DTA 2131.

The fact that the Honda was manufactured in 1990 means it was brand new when it was issued the DTA 2131 New York plate. In theory, if Doug was driving this Honda Civic when he was stopped in Chacoanity, he was driving a brand new vehicle with brand new out-of-state tags. What's even more bizarre is that the report my PI ran on the Civic indicates it was categorized as a governmental vehicle in 1991.

meaning the first year of this car's life, it was either owned by or registered to a state entity. So what does this all mean? It means that if the Chalkewinity police officer made a mistake and wrote NC instead of NY, but he wrote the plates numbers and letters correctly, then it's possible Doug was driving this 1991 Honda Civic that was also a governmental vehicle out of New York.

Obviously, those bizarre facts alone prompted me to find out as much about this car as I could. I just could not stop thinking about it. After some serious sleuthing on the internet, I got a hold of the last known owner of the Civic who purchased it in 2006, 15 years after Doug could have been driving it.

That woman's name is Ann, and she lived in upstate New York when she bought the car in 06. In an email, she told me that she purchased it for a few hundred dollars cash from a man she didn't know and almost immediately realized it had transmission issues. Carfax records show it had 124,000 miles on it at that point. Ann said she saw the Honda for sale on the side of the road and bought it to use as a winter vehicle for when the weather got bad.

Because the mileage was high and it gave her problems, she quickly gifted it to her nephew who didn't drive it. And eventually it sold again to another person who put a different license plate on it in 2009. I asked Anne several follow-up questions about what condition the car was in when she bought it, what color it was, if the man who sold it to her was from New York, what he looked like, pretty much all the questions.

She replied saying the only things she remembered was that he was in his late 40s or early 50s. The car itself was in rough shape and was either black or red. Unfortunately, the New York DMV and Department of Transportation purges vehicle records every four years after inactivity.

So, they couldn't tell me anything about who might have owned that specific Honda Civic in 1991, or who the former registrants were for the license plate DTA 2131. But privacy laws would likely have prevented the entities from releasing that information to me anyway. I know three things to be true right now. One, Doug was definitely driving a car he didn't own.

Two, when he was pulled over, it was in the dead of night. He was 30 minutes south of where he was living, and no one knew why he was there. Three, if he was in the 1991 Honda Civic, then that means he was driving a brand new car that had out-of-state plates.

My PI friend Eddie, who also happens to be a retired New York police narcotics detective, told me that everything about Doug's movements that night in early June screams he was likely transporting drugs or something illegal.

Obviously, that's speculation, though. I can't prove it. But for what it's worth, Eddie also mentioned it's very common for drug traffickers to hire runners who are in vulnerable places in life, people who need to make quick cash and who don't have criminal records in the states they're living in. Sounds like our man Doug, don't you think? He really wasn't a member of the community, hadn't been there for very long. He didn't have family there.

Even more interesting, Eddie says traffickers will make sure the cars their runners use are in good condition. No broken taillights, no sagging bumpers, new cars. Vehicles that are less likely to grab a police officer's attention and give him or her a reason to pull the car over. And if you remember...

The Chacoanity police officer who wrote Doug his citation only pulled him over because Doug had failed to fully stop at a red light. That infraction was an operator error, not a vehicle defect. Where I'm left with this car situation is that everything about it feels suspicious. Like I'm missing something very important. Deep down, I had a hunch that this car was somehow connected to whoever Doug alluded to in his cryptic note to Sandy before his death.

Or maybe it was connected to the two drug dealers allegedly seen with him the Friday before he died. The fact is, there are just too many coincidences to ignore. Sandy, Doug's widow, believes this too. Somebody somewhere knew and was doing stuff they shouldn't have been doing, trying to make the almighty dollar. And it was screwing up a bunch of lives in the process. I think that some people were running drugs. I think he succumbed to whatever the temptation was.

and realized he didn't want to do that no more. But he also realized he was in a precarious situation with whomever these people were. Not your everyday run-of-the-mill people. These had to be higher-up people somewhere. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But I've always thought this for these past 30 years. Jennifer Waters is also convinced something much larger was behind Doug's behavior before his death and why he turned up dead on the railroad tracks.

There was always a suspicion that the murder had happened there on the tracks. If they knew Doug and all this happened around that time and he was somebody that nobody really knew, had no ties to anything, they could have set him up or stuff like that. Because I'm telling you, the person I witnessed and my mother wouldn't have put her name on that marriage certificate if he didn't feel like there was a good thing there.

You mean she thought he had, you know, a good character? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yes. She would not have vouched for him. She would have walked away. Somehow or another, somebody made Doug the fall guy, made him look bad. You know, thinking, hey, nobody could have come looking for him. Nobody could have questioned anything anybody says about him. There's nobody here to question it.

The last thing Jennifer said is something Angel, Doug's oldest sister, and his brother Michael have thought about a lot. Maybe my brother was doing drugs. Maybe he decided that he's going to go down this different path now. Well, we can't let you go down that different path because now you're a liability to us. What if you run your mouth too much? You're not allowed to make a change in your life. At times, I think...

Oh, it's just people he hung around with. Something went crazy, whatever. But then when you look at facts that we know are facts, everything that seems to be hidden, everything that seems to be missing, everything that is super questionable, I know there's more. There's more to it. And somebody knows. Somebody knows. Knowing my brother and knowing even in his bad choices, it doesn't add up.

Somebody is covering it up. Somebody. And the more that we find out, I think that somebody is somebody's, plural. The rumor that Doug was killed by some bad people who were trying to prevent their illegal activities from being exposed circulated openly back in 1991.

Pete Davis, one of Sandy's uncles who helped Doug find a job when he moved to North Carolina, heard the rumor around town so much that to him, it became the accepted truth. During our interview, when I asked Pete about Doug's death, he responded like it was matter of fact. I had heard something about that he got in some trouble with somebody or they didn't like him or something. So they took him down there and the word was that they put him out.

Early on, Sandy was so frightened by the thought, she became paranoid, and rightfully so. We were being followed.

Speaking of Douglas, he's still around and lives in eastern North Carolina. He was born in October 1991, three months after his dad died.

I hate that he never got the chance to meet me at all. I mean, I know when I watched my daughter be born, you know, it changed my life completely. You know, maybe it would have done the same for him. I don't know. It just...

I don't know. It puts you in a whole different mindset when you have a child because they become more important than yourself and anything that you have going on. You put their needs first. So maybe if he was around, you know, after I was born, it would have shifted for the better. It sounded like he wanted to do the right thing. He wanted to be a good person. He just had his demons, as everyone does, and sometimes it seemed like his demons won the fights more often than he'd like.

Before Melissa and I started digging around, Douglas knew almost nothing. All he'd ever been told was that his father had died in a train accident. I would ask a million questions and I didn't really get a whole lot of answers to them. My grandmother at the time, I remember asking her about it when I was probably about 16 or so and

And all I remember her telling me was something about the Martin County Police Department and just to be careful when you go looking because, you know, you never know who's watching or who's involved or anything like that. In every sense of the phrase, Douglas has been catching up in real time as my investigation has unfolded. For the first time, he's grappling with the same questions and emotions his aunts and uncles are. Why wasn't the case treated like...

any other normal case. Seems to be a lot of missing pieces that just aren't there. To say that it didn't matter and, you know, he wasn't even from around here, I don't see what that has anything to do with it.

You know, just because he wasn't around there, whatever he may have done in his time there doesn't exclude him from being, you know, from being at the time a living person. It frustrates me because maybe if they did their jobs accordingly, like they were supposed to, no matter who it was or when it was or where they were from, we could maybe have answers or at least have more than what we have now.

Even though Douglas' contribution is limited, I felt like interviewing him this season was necessary. His mother wasn't quite as thrilled about the idea. I've always been scared to talk about it because I never wanted anything to happen to my son. And now he's married with kids, I don't want nothing happening to them. But Douglas wants answers so badly that he even joined me, Melissa, and Andy Holliman at the railroad tracks during one of my visits to Martin County.

It's weird to think that I'm standing, you know, where he was at one point. And it's just, it's kind of surreal. But, you know, it's from where we began it and where Melissa has started this whole thing. I mean, we've come quite a ways, I feel like, from not knowing anything to, you know, at least having more of a, you know, maybe not a full picture, but a better picture than what we certainly had to begin with.

Two question marks for me were the identities of the men supposedly seen with Doug on the Friday night before he died. You know, the two drug dealers. Well, in early September 1991, two months after Doug was killed, the Enterprise newspaper in Williamston printed a story about two men who were arrested for dealing crack cocaine near a small convenience store in town. These men's names were Kenneth Williams and Ezekiel Brown.

Shortly after that article came out, Sandy remembers someone in town telling her Kenneth and Ezekiel were the men who Doug had last been seen with. She never got any more info than that, though. A few years ago, Sandy sent Melissa the news clipping, and Melissa recently sent it to me. I've spent a lot of time researching Kenneth and Ezekiel. Their criminal records prove they specialized in trafficking cocaine in Martin County.

Multiple sources I've spoken with have told me they were well-known drug dealers. Andy Holliman and another retired Williamston police officer I interviewed named Mike Wells knew these two men well. Mike and Andy had personally arrested Ezekiel and Kenneth in the early 90s for selling cocaine or committing other felonies. Do the names Ezekiel Brown or Kenneth Williams ring any bells to you? Oh, yeah.

Zeke Brown. Yep. He was the man. Zeke Brown. He was the man bringing, had the money, the drugs. Another man who was once a co-defendant with Ezekiel Brown in a drug case is Derek Guy Spruill, who I'll refer to from here on out as Guy Spruill. Like Ezekiel and Kenneth, Guy was a known drug dealer in Williamston.

Court documents for all three men prove they knew one another and were selling together. Sometimes they'd get caught, sometimes they wouldn't.

Arrest reports show they dealt at locations throughout Martin County, but the places they most often got caught were parking lots of convenience stores or mini-marts in Williamston. That's incredibly coincidental, considering the information in Doug's autopsy report, which states he was seen drinking and hanging out at a local convenience store in Williamston mere hours before he was found on the railroad tracks.

Ezekiel is supposed to have been the last person that he was definitely identified to have been seen with. How do we know that? How did you know that? That was in a report that I saw online.

from somewhere. Again, I didn't know it at the time, but I do know who Ezekiel was. He and Kenneth both were known to be, you know, kind of low-level drug dealers and run shot houses and just get anything to get into trouble. And trouble typically followed them around.

Andy just said that Ezekiel was one of the two men who was last seen with Doug. However, the information in Doug's autopsy report does not list either of the men's names. Andy is assuming Ezekiel was one of the men based on his memory of what he thinks he read in a report. I've never seen whatever report it is he's referring to.

We knew that the autopsy mentioned that it was two known drug dealers that he'd last been seen with, but then we didn't really know much information about them. Did they know our brother? That's a hard question to answer. If, hypothetically, it was Kenneth and Ezekiel, Kenneth Williams died over a decade ago, and starting in 1993, Guy Sproul went to prison for 15 years. But Ezekiel, he's still alive, living in Martin County, actually.

Last year, I set out to find him. None of his phone numbers worked, so I visited every address I could for him. At one house, a man opened the door. He looked like he'd just woken up and wasn't in a good mood. He said Ezekiel wasn't home, but he would pass along my phone number. Less than an hour later, my phone rang. I was in the car with Melissa and Jessica, but quickly snatched up my recorder to capture the conversation.

After I explained to Ezekiel who I was, I mentioned Doug Wagg's name. Did you ever know a guy by that name? I don't recall. You know, because it's been such a long time ago, I don't recall it then. He was a white guy, blonde hair, usually wore glasses, pretty thin. Any of that ring a bell?

Do you ever remember the story of a guy being found dead on the railroad tracks in Williamston? Nobody ever talked to you about that? I don't recall. Did they say how he was killed?

No, that's kind of a difficult thing. You know, there's the belief that he may have been dead before he was put on the railroad tracks. But unfortunately, the damage that the train did to his body made it hard to determine whether he had been killed beforehand. And just a way I interrupted, but just a Doug way you talking about? Yeah, his name was Doug Wagg.

I found it odd that Ezekiel asked me how Doug was killed. It felt like a red flag to me that he would ask that specific question about a man who he just said he didn't know. Most people I've spoken with about Doug just assume the train is what killed him. No one, except Ezekiel, asked me to clarify if law enforcement knew exactly how Doug had been killed. As our conversation went on, I asked Ezekiel if he knew Kenneth Williams.

Yeah, how so? I remember singing him a couple of times.

I saw an incident where you guys may have both been like arrested at the same time in like September of 91 by Williamston PD. Do you do you ever remember like being arrested with Kenneth? Yes, I remember that. You know, that was a long, long time ago. Yeah, that was quite a while ago. The case got thrown up. Yeah. The case that I saw the charges, they didn't really stick. Is there do you have any memory of maybe why that was?

I can tell you why. Court records indicate Ezekiel cut a deal with the prosecutors when he and Kenneth got busted. Kenneth went away. Ezekiel did not. I'm not surprised Ezekiel, who's gone on to commit more crimes in Martin County since the 90s, stopped short of admitting this detail to a journalist on the record. Anyway, when I swung our conversation back to Doug, Ezekiel maintained he didn't know him.

I texted him a picture of Doug and still nothing. Then Ezekiel did something I didn't expect. He offered to help me. I'm going to try to find out some more information. And you said you're independent.

So you make money off of doing news, like doing little news, and you sell it to places like MSNBC, NBC, Fox News, stuff like that. Not exactly. So, no, I actually work – I'm a podcast producer, so I work in audio journalism. So when I say I'm independent, what I mean is I don't work for, like, a newspaper or, like, a magazine or, like, a network, you know, a news network or, like –

you know, a local news station or anything like that. So... But you do podcasts. Oh, okay. To date, Ezekiel has never called me back. The phone number he called from went out of service a few weeks after our conversation. I haven't been able to get a hold of him since. What I gathered from our brief chat, though, is that he's the kind of guy who, if he doesn't know something, he's good at finding it out. He also understands the power of leveraging information for a price.

Keep that in mind, because I'll be bringing Ezekiel and Guy Sproul back up later this season. Their names are ones you're going to want to remember. Even though I'd talked with Ezekiel, I hadn't found much tethering him or the other men directly to Doug on July 4th weekend of 1991. I can't say for a fact any of them were the men who were seen with Doug the Friday night before his death. It's possible, but not provable.

Drew Robinson, the current deputy chief of Martin County Sheriff's Office, is familiar with Ezekiel, Kenneth, and Guy. He's aware their names have come up in conversations about Doug's whereabouts prior to his death. Many different people may have many different theories on what happened and may implicate other people and think that certain people had...

differing roles in this incident. And we have to be very careful and not move forward based on someone else's theory, someone who does not have the facts that we have, and go and accuse someone of doing something. As far as I can tell, zero follow-up was done by the Martin County Sheriff's Office to identify the two men allegedly seen with Doug the Friday night before his death.

No one ever went to the convenience store he was supposedly drinking at either. Because Doug's death was so quickly written off in 1991 with no real investigation, that's caused Melissa and her siblings to wonder if law enforcement had a reason for being so inefficient. Maybe it was something further deeper with the police department, and that's why they're covering it up. They're covering their own asses.

That's coming up on the next episode of CounterClock, episode six, The Force, which starts right now.

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