Ep 9 of 14: The Witness
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National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary, discounts not available in all states and situations. Whose car was it? That's the question we all want answered. Whose car was Doug Wag driving when he got that traffic ticket in the middle of the night in June 1991?

All the mystery around that car helped me understand something critical about the inner workings of law enforcement in eastern North Carolina during the 1990s. Corruption was a problem. Just ask Wesley Liverman, the former commander of the Roanoke-Chowan Drug Task Force. He couldn't stand the fact that dirty cops were messing up his mojo. Wearing a badge just like I was. They needed to be in the penitentiary themselves.

Williamston Police Detective Andy Holliman knew this was an issue too. He even had an informant claim WPD's Chief Bucky Holliman and a chief of detectives for Martin County Sheriff's Office were getting kickbacks from drug dealers. You also heard my conversation with Ezekiel Brown, a man arrested multiple times for dealing drugs in Williamston in the 90s. And that conversation didn't go as I expected.

Ezekiel denied knowing Doug, but then curiously asked if police ever said how Doug was killed. Don't forget about Ezekiel. I'm going to be circling back to him. Oh, and for those of you keeping count, we're now up to three different Dugs in this story. Doug Wagg Sr., Doug's dad, Doug Wagg Jr., the victim, and Douglas Wagg III, Doug's son, who he never got to meet.

You also heard from Sandy again, Doug's widow. She had to account for some odd details about the dynamic between her family and Doug leading up to his death. She's a woman whose trustworthiness has been questioned for a lot of reasons, and it might have something to do with the fact that she claims her grandparents kept a piece of her dead husband's skull in their freezer for years. Yeah, that'll raise some eyebrows.

But maybe it's also because she's related to Sheriff Jerry Beach, the guy who dismissed an investigation into Doug's case. Finally, things took an interesting turn when I uncovered that one year after Doug's untimely death, the suspicious deaths of three black teenagers in Williamston were also quickly written off by law enforcement. The importance of Tremaine Howell, Nikki Wilson, and Joyce Jean Wilson's story cannot be overstated.

And the conclusions that pathologist Dr. Mary Gilliland holds fast to, to this day, have me wanting to pull my hair out. In case you forgot, she's the same pathologist who conferred with the doctor who ruled Doug Wagg's death as undetermined. Stellar. Okay, I think that's everything. Put your helmets on, folks, because these next episodes are going to be one hell of a ride. This is Episode 9, The Witness. ♪

In the days following the disappearance and deaths of Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean, Alex Brown, aka Spanky, was keeping a terrible secret. One that was eating him alive inside. One he couldn't share with just anyone. You won't hear directly from Spanky in this episode, but what you will hear are accounts of his story from four people he opened up to. These interviews detail what he claimed to witness on the night of August 3rd, 1992.

Initially, when I read through the missing persons reports for Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean, I was kind of suspicious of Spanky. I mean, he'd been the only person in his friend group who'd just conveniently decided at the last minute not to go to the Walmart and get sodas. As a result, he lived to see the morning of August 4th. So either he was the luckiest person in the world, or he purposely avoided the Walmart shopping plaza on that fateful night.

Was it truly a coincidence that he'd been spared from whatever scenario took the lives of his friends? Or was it something else? I thought long and hard about what retired Williamston police officer Mike Wells told me months earlier, that the Walmart in Williamston was a known hotspot for drug traffickers to do business. That intersection in Williamston stayed hot with drug traffic coming through there all the time. Where the Walmart was now, that was a meeting place.

That's where they would bring drugs down, they'd meet, give it all up, and then they'd walk us by the business. Was Spanky tied up in any of that? Is that why he didn't go to the Walmart on August 3rd? So he wouldn't bump into anyone he didn't want to see? Denise Howell, Tremaine's mother, sure thought so. She heard some not-so-great things about Spanky right after Tremaine died. Now I heard this. Spanky was selling drugs to...

Dummies, as in drugs cut with other substances that drastically dilute their potency. I don't dabble in the underworld of drug trafficking, but common sense tells me that ripping someone off with dummy drugs is probably grounds for retaliation.

Now, Denise told me she didn't learn the rumors about Spanky being involved in drugs though until after Tremaine died. And when I checked Spanky's record in North Carolina, I discovered that he'd never been arrested for selling drugs. The only criminal history he had was for receiving stolen goods, a misdemeanor. But say for a moment what Denise heard was true. Leading up to August 3rd, Tremaine and Spanky hung out all the time together.

Spanky didn't have a car, so Tremaine would give him rides around town. Denise wondered if perhaps the people Spanky had allegedly wronged might have spotted Tremaine's truck at the Walmart the night he and the girls disappeared, assuming that Spanky was inside, like he normally would have been. But that particular night, he wasn't.

After law enforcement closed the teenager's case, a young woman who'd attended high school with Tremaine told Denise that she saw Spanky visiting Tremaine's grave, offering up an emotional confession of sorts.

What do you think that meant? Yeah.

Denise and I have tried several times to get in touch with the woman who claims she overheard Spanky apologizing, but she's yet to return our calls. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of Tremaine's death, Denise never got to have a one-on-one conversation with Spanky. She says he avoided her. But Larry Howell, Tremaine's dad, did speak with Spanky. And so did two other women, Lynette Brown and Brandi Bacode.

Lynette is Spanky's adoptive mother, and Brandy is her daughter. In 1992, Brandy was a young girl, but she remembers that her mom raised Spanky because his own mother had a substance use disorder and was unable to care for him. Brandy called Spanky her big brother. Oh, my God. His favorite meal was oodles and noodles with seasoned salt in it. We used to sit at the table, and he'd tell me something on the ground or something to steal my food off my plate. Stuff like that.

In August 1992, the house Spanky lived in with Lynette and Brandy was just a few blocks away from the Roanoke apartments. Collectively, here is what Lynette, Brandy, and Larry told me Spanky revealed to them about the night Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean died. When his friends didn't return from the Walmart, Spanky got annoyed they were taking so long, so he walked a short distance over to the shopping plaza.

Spanky then decided to go back to Joyce Jean's mother's apartment. But once three hours went by and midnight rolled around, Spanky decided to just walk home on his own.

That route required him to traverse across US 17 and walk on River Road, which passed right by the Roanoke River boat ramp. That's when Spanky said he saw something shocking. He said he seen drugs coming off the boat and the police was down there getting the drugs off the boat. Spanky's presence didn't go unnoticed and the police officers who saw him got a hold of him.

As he was being brought closer to the water, he saw Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean being held against their will. Tremaine's truck was parked nearby. Fearing he was going to die, Spanky made a break for him. He took off running. Him and Tremaine had got away, but the two girls didn't, and Tremaine went back to get the girls. He didn't go. He left. He kept going, but Tremaine went back to get the girls.

According to Brandy, Spanky didn't run home. He fled to her cousin's house across town, about five minutes away, but still within the Williamston city limit. I interviewed that cousin, and they preferred to remain anonymous. But they vividly remember the moment Spanky showed up at their house early in the morning on August 4th. He was not wet from being tossed in the water. It was a sweaty wet.

because he was not soaked to where you could, like, squeeze the water out, but he was wet and he was just sweating. It looked like he'd run all the way there. He was afraid. He's a man that was messed up. It was messed up what they done, what they done. A few days later, Lynette says Williamston police officers and special agents with the NCSBI came to her house, told her they needed to question Spanky, and whisked him away in a patrol car.

When they questioned him about the kids being missing, they wouldn't allow me to go in there because children are supposed to have somebody, a lawyer or somebody to represent them. They would not let me in there. They would not let me listen to what was going on. They would not allow him to have anyone to represent him.

According to Lynette, Spanky clammed up and wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement. She says he didn't know who he could trust, especially within the Williamston police force. After that, she began to feel the same way Spanky did, fearful. A few times a week, she'd notice a police cruiser park outside her home late at night.

They was trying to kill him.

Things only got worse. Here's Brandi Bacode. He was scared. He didn't know who to trust. He only trusted us. They were searching for him to get rid of him, to get rid of that last piece. He was a living testimony, and they needed him gone to complete with killing everybody involved in that day that knew what they did. He knew his time was borrowed. He knew it.

because of what he knew. - Who exactly Spanky was afraid of is hard to know. Brandy and Lynette told me the corrupt officers Spanky claimed to have seen at the river wore Williamston PD uniforms, not Martin County Sheriff's Office colors. Larry Howell mentioned the same thing, but he also said Spanky claimed to have seen other people at the river that night too, a handful of local men. And it was these guys who were helping police move the drugs.

That claim lined up with a conversation Larry already had with an acquaintance who'd been at the Williamston Walmart around the time his son disappeared. They said that the police picked Jermaine up, him and the girl up there at Walmart. And when they were leaving Walmart, the police stopped and somebody else drove the truck. People said they saw the truck being driven, but it was a white boy driving the truck.

When Larry asked Spanky to give him the names of the other men who were with the crooked cops, Spanky wouldn't. I said, who was it? The hell, y'all. He wouldn't say. I said, well, Spanky, let me tell you. As long as you have assets to them, they might let you live. But when you become a problem to them, they're going to kill you.

A friend Larry turned to who'd been a reliable source of information for him in the past was Ezekiel Brown. Remember him? "What, you work for a news organization or something? You make money off of doing news." According to Larry, Ezekiel was a frequent face on his front porch. "He used to talk to me a lot, come to my house, he'd sit down and talk. And we were friends.

That is, until Larry and Denise started asking questions about the circumstances surrounding Tremaine's death. We were friends for a long time until after my son got killed and he slowly, I didn't see him.

Larry says early on, before Ezekiel dipped out of his life, he asked him what he thought about what happened to Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean. Larry knew Ezekiel had a direct line to the drug underworld and figured with so many rumors flying around that drug activity was somehow connected to the suspicious deaths, Ezekiel might have something to offer. Zeke used to be a big time drug dealer.

He dealt with the big ones. He didn't deal with his street level. He dealt with the big ones. He knew the whites who were here in town, the big people in Williamson who were hooked up in the drug. He knew all of them that were hooked in, the drugs, numbers, all the corruption. He had what you call the big team. And the big team controlled everything.

Do you think Ezekiel Brown was one of those?

I'd never heard of this Big Ten group Larry talked about, but it sounded sketchy.

You want to know something else kind of strange? The phone number Ezekiel contacted me on that one and only time came up on my caller ID as belonging to an Edward Howell Jr., who just so happens to be Larry Howell's cousin living in Martin County. Which means when Ezekiel was speaking with me that day on the phone, he was probably just a few miles away using someone's phone who was directly related to Tremaine Howell.

What Larry said to me during his interview validated a suspicion I'd had about Ezekiel Brown for a long time, that it was possible he and other men known for selling drugs in Williamston were working both sides of the law back in the 1990s. So was Ezekiel one of those other men at the boat ramp in August 1992 that Spanky said he saw? I don't know. I don't think we'll ever know the identities of those men.

For a while, Spanky took Larry's warning to heart. He kept what he knew to himself. But then Brandy says Spanky contemplated going to someone he believed he could trust. And you're not going to believe this, but that person was none other than Martin County Sheriff Jerry Beach.

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I know what many of you are probably thinking. Why in the world would Spanky trust Jerry Beach with his secret?

Well, according to Brandy Bacote, Spanky believed he could trust Jerry because he'd heard that Jerry had a good reputation for being a no-BS type of sheriff. And unlike the Williamston Police Department, which was led by Chief Bucky Holloman, the Martin County Sheriff's Office wasn't involved in the official investigation into Tremaine, Nikki, and Joyce Jean's deaths. MCSO was neutral in that matter.

He knew from my mother's relationship with certain ones and different people that he could connect with him and tell him what really happened because he was honest about his job. And he believed in him. Do you know if Spanky ever revealed the information he knew to Sheriff Beach? I can't say because he didn't tell me.

But it was told to me through family that he had told it and that he knew really what happened and he was against what the other police officers was doing. When I heard this, I had to pause because the impression Brandy said Spanky had of Jerry just didn't align with what I'd been told about him, at least not by anyone who'd been involved in Doug Wagg's case.

I mean, yeah, Jerry was a well-known and well-liked man in Martin County in the early 1990s, but that's kind of par for the course with most sheriffs. However, I also knew that what he'd done in Doug's case, dismissing it so carelessly, was not an admirable quality. If anything, it was kind of suspicious. But then I had a thought. What if Jerry Beach had only behaved the way he did with Doug's case because of what his underlings told him about Doug?

Like, what if Jerry really didn't have all the facts in Doug's case, and so he just listened to the people who were around him? And what if those people weren't good cops? The more I learned about Jerry, the more this theory made sense. When Jerry became sheriff in 1990, he'd gotten right to work restructuring his department. By the end of 1991, the former chief of detectives he'd inherited, Ronnie Wynn, had resigned.

Additional positions were created, and Jerry had hooked up with the Roanoke-Chowan Drug Task Force to try and eradicate drugs from Martin County. As the new sheriff, he'd made it his mission to take a strong stance against drug traffickers. I tried to get Tim Hines to tell me more about what it was like working for Jerry during this time. But I got the sense from Tim that Jerry's new agenda, well, it didn't go over so well with everyone in the sheriff's office.

The working relationship I had with Jerry was good. I've heard good about it. I've heard bad about it. I don't know. I wasn't around him. The only time I was around him was when he became sheriff and he hired me. And he basically stayed in his office and we got out and per se done the grunt work because that's what we were paid for. What were any negative things that you heard about Jerry? It's just things that happened many years ago.

Per usual, Tim didn't want to go into detail. Someone who was willing to tell me about who Jerry Beach was as a person was a woman named Sarah Stahls. Sarah was a longtime reporter in Williamston who grew up with Jerry's daughter. He was an officer here in a time where it was hard to be an officer with racial rioting and things, but he never gave up and he never let that stop him.

He knew the law, and he knew it well, and he had no problem standing behind it. He was definitely tough, and he didn't play, but he was a fair, community-minded man. I'd heard the same thing from Martin County historian Wayne Peel. Wayne considered Jerry to be a friend, and despite the fact that Jerry held an elected position that traditionally was viewed as purely political, Wayne says Jerry was sincere. I knew Jerry. He was a very likable person.

A lot of fun to be around. He was a talker. He was in an elected position. But he really did seem to enjoy people. I mean, I think he enjoyed people. And he enjoyed being known. And I don't say that in a derogatory way at all.

So, though I disagree with how Jerry Beach dismissed Doug Wagg's case, I can't help but wonder if maybe he isn't the bad guy in all this. What if he was the upstanding person many people considered him to be? A dedicated sheriff who was just trying to clean up his department, a man who wanted to keep drugs out of Martin County, and a guy who was determined to hold law enforcement officers accountable for suspected corruption.

All of those things could be the reason why Spanky, a young man who ordinarily would never have had a reason to trust law enforcement, felt that he could trust Jerry. He was an honest man and he came up against these bad officers. There's a big part of me at this point that's inclined to believe Spanky did have a conversation with Jerry Beach about what he allegedly saw that fateful night at the Roanoke River boat ramp.

Because on a Friday in early October 1992, two months after Tremaine and the girls died, Larry Howell got a phone call from Jerry out of the blue. Larry was kind of confused by Jerry's request because the Martin County Sheriff's Office hadn't been involved in his son's case. So Jerry wanting to meet with Larry to discuss the matter was really unexpected.

Larry agreed to meet with the sheriff on Monday, October 12th. But after they hung up, Jerry called Larry back with a slight change of plans. I said, okay, then he turned around and changed it. Monday morning, I'd be busy. He had to go somewhere out of town where he would meet with me Tuesday morning. So me and him were supposed to have a meeting Tuesday morning. That Monday morning, I hear...

A bank robbery that would change the course of everything. We heard this, and Jerry turned just as white as cotton. This was the first link in a violent chain of events no one was prepared for. I can still hear them guns when they were shooting. This major flash, I assumed that they had blew the bank up, literally.

It's all coming up on the next episode of CounterClock, The Worst Day, which starts right now.

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