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This is Episode 8, The Trio. ♪
There's a saying that goes, "When the same thing happens once, it's an accident. If it happens twice, it's a coincidence. But if it happens three times, well, then that's a pattern." When it comes to suspicious deaths, patterns are truly what matter, perhaps the most.
In the summer of 1992, one year after Doug Wagg's death, a terrible pattern began cropping up in Williamston, and it would leave traces of itself throughout Martin County for years to come.
Knowing what I know about Doug's case, I'd wager to say this disturbing pattern started with him. And just like public interest in his death vanished in a matter of days, the cases I'm going to tell you about over the course of the next few episodes also suffered the same fate. And because of that, most people don't have a clue how important these cases really are and why reinvestigating them might just hold the key to unraveling one of the biggest,
and darkest secrets in Eastern North Carolina history. During several production trips I took to Williamston to interview people associated with Doug's case, I kept having folks mention another case to me, one of three teens who mysteriously died the year after Doug. Locals would bring the case up over and over again, not because they thought it was connected to Doug's, they just kind of made these remarks offhand, sort of a, "Hey, you should know about this one too," kind of thing.
I filed their suggestions away in my brain, trying to stay focused on Doug's case. But during my interview with Sandy Wag, this other case and all the suggestions people had made to me came surging back into my mind. It happened while I was listening to Sandy talk about her life after losing Doug. She explained how difficult things were when she became a new single mom. Right after having Douglas, she immediately had to get a job and found one at the Walmart in Williamston.
She ended up working there for several years, years that she says were pretty lonely because she didn't have any friends who understood the grief she was going through. She said the only person she really bonded with was an elderly woman who also worked at the Walmart. This woman's name was Thelma Rouse. And coincidentally, when the two of them first met, they realized they had an interesting connection. She says, I know who your husband was. I'm like, how do you know that?
because he helped her buy groceries one day and she never forgot him. They were just happened to be at Winn-Dixie or somewhere and she didn't have enough money and so he just paid the rest of it. The longer Sandy and Thelma worked together, the closer friends they became. In early August 1992, similar to Sandy, Thelma experienced a sudden and unexpected loss in her family. I loved her to pieces. She was an awesome woman.
I mean, we were both back there crying because we were talking about what I was going through. And she explained to me what had just happened with her grandson. Thelma's 18-year-old grandson, Tremaine Howell, had been found dead floating under a bridge next to Williamston's public boat ramp on the nearby Roanoke River, an area less than five minutes from the Walmart Thelma and Sandy worked at. And Tremaine wasn't alone.
15-year-old Nikki Wilson and 14-year-old Joyce Jean Wilson were with him. From the jump, all three teenagers' deaths were considered highly suspicious. How somebody could hurt somebody is beyond me, especially as horrific as whoever did that to these kids. That was unreal.
Williamston Police Department and neighboring Bertie County Sheriff's Office, which had jurisdiction over the waterway, closed the teens' cases after about a week, stating that Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean had all drowned. The end.
Like I said, I'd heard about this before, and what I'd been hearing is that the case wasn't as quite as open and shut as authorities made it out to be. Sandy had heard this too, and knowing that there was a connection between Tremaine and Doug, even if a couple degrees of separation, it made me wonder, what if there was a connection? Even saying that out loud sounded a little outlandish to me in the beginning. But how can you rule something out unless you dive in?
So what did I do? I spent six months reinvestigating the deaths of these three teenagers from top to bottom. And what I found is astonishing. So fast forward with me 13 months after Doug Wagg was found on those train tracks.
According to official documents from Williamston PD, around 6 p.m. on Monday, August 3rd, 1992, Tremaine Howell left his parents' house on West Church Street with a buddy of his named Alex Brown. Everyone referred to Alex by the nickname Spanky. Tremaine and Spanky were the same age and had grown up together. When they left, Tremaine was driving his mom Denise's beige 1987 Toyota pickup truck.
He and Spanky zipped across town to visit with Nikki and Joyce Jean at Joyce Jean's mother's apartment in a complex called Roanoke Apartments. That community sat right behind the Walmart shopping center, where Tremaine's grandmother would eventually work with Sandy. And this area was only a few minutes away from Tremaine's house. I made a map that shows how close everything is if you want to check it out on the blog post for this episode, or look at your screen if you're listening in the app.
Nikki Wilson didn't live with her cousin, Joyce Jean. She was actually from a town just north of Williamston called Mary Hill. But during the summer, she often hung out at her aunt's house. For a few hours, the group of teenagers chilled at the apartment and did what teens do in the fading days of summer. They cracked jokes, talked, and listened to music on the front porch. Around 9 o'clock that night, they decided to jump in Tremaine's pickup truck and drive right around the corner to get some sodas from the Walmart.
Before they took off, though, Spanky opted to stay behind. He said he didn't want to ride along and just asked his friends to bring him a drink when they returned. So Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean left without him. A half hour, then an hour, and then two hours ticked by. But the trio never returned to Roanoke Apartments. Around midnight, Spanky figured his friends had just ditched him or found something else fun to do, so he started walking home to where he lived just a few minutes across town.
That's around the same time that Denise Howell, Tremaine's mother, noticed something was wrong. She waited and worried about Tremaine into the early morning hours of Tuesday, August 4th. And when she couldn't take it any longer, she called her husband, Larry, who was driving a long haul truck out of state and told him what was going on. At 9:15 a.m., she walked into the Williamston Police Department and reported her youngest son missing. Not long after that, Nikki and Joyce Jean's parents showed up at the station to do the same.
I got my hands on copies of those original forms and connected with Larry and Denise Howell. They told me that Tremaine and the girls vanishing was completely out of character, which is why they were so concerned. Tremaine was scheduled to move into college the following week, and he was excited that Fayetteville State had offered him a full-ride art scholarship. Tremaine was an artist. He loved drawing. He learned to draw pieces of superheroes and
Documentation about what exactly happened in the first 24 hours of the police's investigation, other than the missing person reports being taken, no longer exists according to Williamston Police Department.
What I can tell you is that Larry Howell raced home to Martin County to comfort his frantic wife, and together with their older son Terrence and Nikki and Joyce Jean's families, they scoured the city of Williamston looking for their missing children. Based on everything I've read in old newspaper clippings, it doesn't appear law enforcement did a whole lot to search for Tremaine and the girls during this time.
The local paper, The Enterprise, reported that officers spoke with people working at the Walmart who said they saw Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean buying soda from an outside vending machine shortly after 9 p.m. But then they got back in Tremaine's truck, and after that, no one saw them.
During the first 24 hours, Williamson PD didn't issue a be on the lookout bulletin for the missing Toyota. And according to Denise and Larry, their son and his friends were immediately treated as runaways.
But all that changed the next day, Wednesday, August 5th, when some fishermen taking off from the city's public boat ramp called into police to report they'd found two bodies floating in an algae-covered retention area beneath the U.S. 17 bridge that crossed over the Roanoke River.
The bodies were reported to be those of a young black male and a young black female. They were in open water, but sort of near the river's edge, bumping up next to the bridge's concrete support beam, about 20 yards from the boat ramp. A little further downstream, floating near a lumber yard, there was a third body in the water, another young black female. Each of the victims was fully clothed, with their shoes still on.
When police responded, they brought them all onto the shore beneath the U.S. 17 overpass and preliminarily identified them as Tremaine, Joyce Jean, and Nikki. Since they were the only teens who'd been reported missing in Williamston, that assumption was a reasonable one to make. Among the group of responding law enforcement officers at that scene was Mike Wells. I remember everything about it.
and Martin County Sheriff's Deputy Tim Hines. All I done was stood on the bank. I was down there about 20, 25 minutes. Unlike Mike and Tim, who'd gotten word of the gruesome discovery through official channels, the families of the teens learned that their kids were dead in a much different way. They didn't caught till that they found it.
How we found out that they found the bodies, some people came and called up. Said, do you know they're down at the river now getting their bodies out? When I got down there to the river, they had three bodies on the shore. They ended up there wrapped up in sheets and all. So when I saw them, I was going to go there soon. They told me I couldn't do it. I said, why not? That's my son's body. No, you can't go there soon.
Larry never got to see his son that day or make an official ID. Why? Because he was told that the top brass at Williamston PD had already done that for him. The police chief, Michael Hollimer, identified your son.
Bucky Holloman, the police chief of Williamston Police Department, identified your son's body. That felt strange to me. Not letting Tremaine's next of kin officially identify him just seems bizarre.
But even though the question of where Tremaine and his friends had been for two days was answered, the truck they'd been driving was still missing. Old news reports state that officers from Williamston PD and deputies from Martin County and neighboring Bertie County searched the river near the boat ramp looking for the vehicle, but didn't find it. Finally, at 6.20 that night, law enforcement issued a stolen vehicle report for the pickup, which went out statewide. The handwritten document says, quote,
The use of the word homicides proves that law enforcement's initial assumption was that somebody had killed the teens and then likely stolen their truck. But here's where things, in my opinion, begin to go off the rails a little bit.
Because the teens disappeared from Williamston, the missing persons part of the investigation remained with the city police department. It was Williamston PD's job to figure out why they'd vanished and when.
However, because their bodies were found in the Roanoke River, which technically fell within Bertie County Sheriff's Office's jurisdiction, the death investigation portion was handled by that department. So the question of whether they died accidentally or been murdered was that agency's job to figure out.
I know it's kind of strange, but for context, the Roanoke River itself is the dividing line that separates Bertie County from Martin County. And it also happens to be the official city limit of Williamston.
To make matters even more complicated, the sheriff of Bertie County requested the NCSBI assist. So if you're counting, that makes three agencies involved in the case all doing slightly different things. When I requested the SBI's files, they denied my FOIA request, stating that none of their investigatory reports are considered public records, regardless of whether a case is open or closed.
So what, if anything, the SBI did remains a mystery. Bertie County Sheriff's Office no longer has any files related to this investigation, so they say. Which meant the only place I had left to turn to that I knew would give me more information was Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean's autopsies. In North Carolina, those records are public.
When I read through the reports, I saw a familiar name on every page. Dr. Mary Gilliland, the forensic pathologist based in Greenville who'd reviewed Doug Wagg's case with Dr. Harris in July 1991.
On the morning of Thursday, August 6th, 1992, Mary performed autopsies on all three teenagers. She observed the condition of their skin, their hair, their teeth, their bones, and their organs. And by lunchtime, she'd concluded that the teens all likely died on the night of August the 3rd, shortly after they disappeared. Their bodies had been in the river for at least two days.
She ruled their cause of death as drowning and their collective manner of death as accidental. There were no injuries to any of them other than the changes after death, which are horrendous. Drowning is what's called a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning if there's nothing else and they're found in water, that is the best conclusion.
While she'd been working, Williamston PD officers and Bertie County deputies had combed the Roanoke River trying to find the Howells' missing pickup truck. But just like when they'd searched on Wednesday afternoon, they'd found nothing. Even helicopters flying overhead hadn't been able to spot anything in the water that looked like a truck. The following day, Friday, August 7th, police called off the river search because they said they felt confident the truck wasn't there.
In the days after that, law enforcement's theory as to what might have happened was kind of all over the place. The sheriff of Bertie County told the press he didn't think foul play was involved. He was convinced the teens had died in some kind of freak accident after leaving the Walmart and going down to the river landing to hang out. But he couldn't explain why the truck was still missing. Mike Wells heard variations of this theory.
The guy that was driving his friends and stuff, they said, you know, his thing was that he'd get the girls in the truck and he'd run up to the river and slam all the brakes right quick before he goes in. He would do that a bunch of times. But Andy Holloman heard something completely different. They had committed a kind of like a suicide pact. They had driven into the river.
Wesley Liverman, the commander of the Roanoke-Chowan Drug Task Force, remembers everything about the case was unsettling. How they got in the river. You were looking at everything. Anything could have happened. You don't know what the truth is. You don't know what really happened. And the only ones that could tell you are deceased.
Investigators' suggestion that Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean were somehow responsible for their own deaths because they'd been fooling around and playing chicken with the pickup truck near the boat ramp was absolutely preposterous to Larry and Denise Howell. That's why I know they were lying when they said we were at the roof. Tremaine wouldn't even go to the beach. He went to the beach once, and he almost drowned. And he didn't never go to the beach no more. You couldn't get him to go to the beach.
According to interviews the girls' families gave to newspapers back in 1992, both Nikki and Joyce Jean were also fearful of the water. Because just like Tremaine, neither of them knew how to swim.
Mike Wells remembers the more his boss, Bucky Holliman, and the sheriff of Bertie County tried to tell the Howells the teens had drowned, the worse the relationship between the family and police got. Oh, Lord, she would come behind the police department and stand out there in the parking lot. Every time I'd come out, screaming, hollering, screaming, hollering. I said, you know, we were trying to explain to them, you know, to think that what we thought had happened, he rode to the roof. Ah, he didn't do that. He didn't do that.
Denise and Larry's suspicion that something fishy was going on only got stronger when something truly bewildering happened on Monday, August 10th, 1992, one week to the day that their son and his friends vanished. That's when the missing pickup truck reappeared, just inside the shoreline of the Roanoke River, right at the base of the boat ramp where police had already searched.
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I haven't been able to find any documentation that explains why. But for some reason, law enforcement in Williamston and Bertie County resumed their search of the Roanoke River for the Howells' missing pickup truck on Monday, August 10th, despite previously calling off that effort.
Within an hour or so, a pair of local fishermen who joined police as volunteers hooked onto a large object about 20 feet beneath the surface, a few meters out from the end of the boat ramp. Around 2:30 p.m., divers went down into the murky water to investigate and quickly spotted the Howells truck. It was completely submerged and sitting upright on all four tires. The headlights were pointed toward the shoreline, with the rear of the truck closer to the middle of the river.
Police called a wrecker to the scene, and slowly but surely, it hoisted the truck from the waterway by cables that divers had attached to the front end. As the water drained from the truck, everyone looking on could see that the windows were rolled down, the keys were still in the ignition, and partially consumed soft drink bottles had been left inside. A few of the containers even floated out the windows with the outpouring water. Larry Howell was shocked, filled with disbelief.
But he also had a hunch. So they pulled the truck up out the river, pulled it on shore, and opened it, and the door opened. The truck's supposed to have been sitting in that water, I know, at least over five days. The record guy who was pulling it out, I told him, I said, I believe that truck will start. He said, oh, that truck been sitting in the water. It won't start. I said, I believe it'll start. He said, oh, it won't start. The battery's dead.
The only sign of damage on the truck was a dent in the right front fender. Denise and Larry said that dent had not been there on the evening Tremaine left their house for the last time. Larry's sister, Cynthia Jackson, who would have been Tremaine's aunt, felt this whole situation was suspicious.
They had drugged the river for the vehicle and it wasn't found. But then about a week later, the truck mysteriously pops up and when they pulled out the water, the lights were on and the truck started. And that doesn't make any sense. If it had been in the water for that long, I really don't believe that truck would have started.
The Howell family was convinced someone had put the truck in the river after official searches for it were called off on Friday, August 7th. And since it was discovered on Monday the 10th, that left only Saturday, August 8th or Sunday, August 9th for someone to be able to pull something like that off. What's really peculiar is that in my research, I found newspaper articles that state the city of Williamston suffered a citywide blackout on Saturday, August 8th.
Homes went dark and streetlights went out for several hours. The source of the problem was reported to be an unexplained equipment malfunction at a power station in Martin County that supplied the city with electricity. The howls pointed to the mysterious blackout as a possible means by which the truck could have been moved and dumped in the river. Law enforcement dismissed this suggestion, though, pretty much right away.
The SBI examined the pickup truck for two hours after it was pulled from the river, but didn't find anything they felt was suspicious. So the truck was released to a local body shop and then given back to Denise and Larry. Police didn't want it because they didn't consider it evidence in a potential crime. The next day, the Bertie County Sheriff told the press that finding the truck was a huge relief because it solved the mystery once and for all.
He said Tremaine and the girls must have gone into the river while inside the vehicle. And though they'd gotten out through the open windows, they'd ended up drowning because they didn't know how to swim. He said search crews had likely just missed the pickup truck during the earlier searches. But the teen's families did not buy that narrative. Larry and Denise felt in their gut that something was seriously wrong and police were not being thorough.
Denise publicly told newspapers, news stations, whoever would listen that she believed her son and his friends had been killed and dumped in the river. She accused the Williamston Police Department and Dr. Mary Gilliland of being involved in a cover-up. Evidence the Howells used to support their accusation against police came from a collection of errors and discrepancies they'd found in Tremaine's autopsy report.
For one, Mary Gilliland didn't write down Tremaine's age correctly. On one page, she said he was 16 years old, and on another, she wrote that he was a healthy 19-year-old male. In reality, he'd just turned 18. She'd also incorrectly written down that Tremaine disappeared on August 2nd, when he actually disappeared on August 3rd. I sometimes miss things. I sometimes miss...
three things on one report that is very important to the people involved and they may decide, well, you're pretty sure of yourself and we're not. How can you be so sure of yourself if you've got errors here, here and here? We will be terribly concerned forever and ever and I say, I'm sorry. I did the best that I could to let you know what happened.
Of all the perceived errors the family found in Mary's work though, one took the cake. It had to do with Tremaine's teeth. When Larry finally got to see his son's body, he viewed it at Manson Mortuary in Williamston days after Tremaine was pulled from the river.
he noticed right away that Tremaine's front two teeth were missing, not broken or chipped, but gone from his gums. However, in the autopsy report, Mary had stated that Tremaine's teeth were unremarkable and healthy,
When Denise and Larry pointed out this discrepancy to police and the medical examiner's office, Mary agreed to amend Tremaine's autopsy report and address the fact that she'd failed to mention that his two front teeth were missing.
But in the amendment, Mary stated the reason she'd left this detail out originally was because she believed Tremaine's teeth had been gone since childhood, not dislodged right before or at the time of his death. She didn't actually re-examine Tremaine's gums though, or call his dentist's office to get his dental records. She just made this assumption, wrote it in the amendment, and attached it to the official autopsy report.
I pressed Mary on this because something about it just fell off. Initially in the autopsy, you had said Tremaine's teeth were natural and in good state. But then in the addended portion, you said the missing central incisors are not recorded but were observed with no evidence of injury to the lips or gums. Why did you put that sentence in there? I could see that he didn't have any teeth there and he didn't have an empty socket.
that would be the sign of them having been in his face when he got into the car with the girls and something had happened to him after that. It was, they've been out for a long time. They may have been knocked out, but a long time ago.
I fact-checked this with Tremaine's mom, though, as well as his dad and his aunt, Cynthia Jackson, who all saw Tremaine right before he died. And they say Tremaine definitely had his two front teeth. Probably about two, three weeks before he died, his father and his other brother died.
came to my residence and he had all his teeth. Everybody had all their teeth. They were smiling, we were glad to see each other. None of his teeth were missing. Tremaine's mother, Denise, sent me Tremaine's high school senior pictures too, photos taken two months before he died. In them, he has all his teeth.
So what does this mean? It means something happened to Tremaine on the night he died that caused his two front teeth to dislodge from his mouth. Unfortunately, Denise Howell didn't give me the photo of Tremaine showing his teeth until after I interviewed Mary in person. I followed up with her about this and sent her the pictures of Tremaine with his teeth, and her response to me was, quote,
Thank you for providing me the photograph of Tremaine with his central maxillary incisors, clearly in place. At the time, I stated that no injuries of the lips or gums was identified. As I reflect on this discrepancy, I believe it is more likely that mud and debris filled in the gaps where the teeth were missing. This would give the appearance of healing.
So that's where Mary stands regarding Tremaine's teeth. She does not think they were knocked out before he died.
She thinks they were dislodged after his death, and then mud and debris from the river filled in the holes in his gums, which according to her, gave the appearance that he lost his teeth long ago, which is why she initially told me that. But it's not just this issue regarding Tremaine's teeth that's concerning.
There are other discrepancies in Nikki and Joyce Jean's autopsies too. For example, Denise Howell told me that in 1992, the girl's parents told her their daughter's bodies had cuts and bruises on them that looked like they'd been tortured before they died. These injuries were said to be on their breasts and torsos.
Nikki's autopsy specifically says there were traces of blood on her panties. There's no mention of blood on any of her other clothing. Now, whether that blood was inside the garment or sitting on the outside, I don't know because Mary Gilliland didn't specify in her report. It's possible the blood could have been related to Nikki being on her period at the time of her death. However, there's no mention of that anywhere in her autopsy. So I don't know if the blood is menstrual blood or not.
If it's not, then that's a huge red flag. Because if Nikki died from drowning, then how in the world would blood have gotten on or in her underwear and nowhere else? When I pressed Mary on this topic, she stood by her original conclusions and rejected the suggestion that the girls had been tortured before they died. You did not find any signs of trauma or torturing injuries on these young women? That's correct.
It doesn't look like they've been beaten. To me, it's just an ordinary decomposed drowning. She said the same thing about Tremaine. However, according to Denise Howell, when Tremaine's clothes were returned to her by the medical examiner's office, she made what she calls a horrific discovery. We digged his clothes. He had on shorts. We're in his shorts. I saw obstacles in there.
Yeah, you heard Denise correctly. She said Tremaine's severed testicles were still sitting in his shorts when she went through his clothing. I asked Mary Gilliland how something like this could have happened, if in fact it did happen. In an autopsy of this kind, would it be at all possible that you would, or any pathologist would remove genitalia like that upon examination?
To my knowledge, pathologists don't remove them and then place them in the collection of clothing intentionally. A good deal of the superficial skin that was sloughed off would have come off with the clothing, and no one would have gone through the clothing and peeled out the
sloughed skin, what sloughed skin can look like is quite variable. And I don't know that she didn't see something that looked to her like his testicles.
Basically, what Mary is saying is that she doesn't think what Denise saw was Tremaine's actual testicles. She thinks Denise likely saw a clump of skin that had slipped off Tremaine's partially decomposing body and got stuck in the crotch of his shorts. Then Denise assumed it was his testicles. What the truth actually is depends on who you believe.
"I tried many times in many ways to speak with or locate Nikki and Joyce Jean's relatives for an interview, but I was unsuccessful." To Mary Gilliland's credit, she willingly agreed to review her prior work on these cases and met me in person for an interview. She endured a lot of my tough questions politely and professionally. From an emotional standpoint, she understands why the families question her work and might view her as a villain in this.
But as a forensic pathologist, she stands by her initial conclusions. This whole thing is sad. The kids didn't come home. These youngsters died as the result of submersion in the river, in the truck. They were able to escape from the truck, but they drowned. And how they got into the river in the truck seems more likely to me to be sad.
an action that was accidental and had no other parties involved. When I find that what I've stated isn't clear to people, I see if what they are concerned about can be addressed in different terms that are still true, but not, oh, yeah, you must be right. He must have been beaten about the face and his teeth knocked out and, and, and, and, and, and. That's, that's,
not true, so I can't say it. Even though, oddly, it seems like that would be comforting. And there was no pressure on you from law enforcement to rule these as drownings simply to just do it and be done with it? No, not at all. That sort of thing has happened. I've been involved in a case where law enforcement wanted
a particular answer, and so they gave it to me. That isn't what happened in this situation. But Mary's certainty that no one harmed Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean prior to their deaths, as well as law enforcement's theory that the trio brought this on themselves, had one major problem. There was a witness passing by the Roanoke River boat ramp on the night of August 3rd, 1992.
And what he saw refutes everything officials were telling the public. Spanker told me him and Tremaine had got away, but the two girls didn't, and Tremaine went back to get the girls. That's next time on CounterClock, Episode 9, The Witness. Have you met All Modern? All Modern brings you the best of modern furniture and decor, and they deliver it for free in days. You heard that right.
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