Episode 2: Prime Suspect
43:56 Share

Want the same expert advice you get from the pros in the store while shopping online at DiscountTire.com? Meet Treadwell, your personal online tire guide that matches you with the perfect tire for your vehicle. Get your best match in one minute or less with Treadwell by Discount Tire. Let's get you taken care of.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average, plus auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Quote now at Progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.

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.

A more colorful life starts at an Ashley store. From earth tones to vibrant colors, Ashley stores have an array of eye-catching furniture for every room in fun and trending hues that will leave a lasting impression. So it's easier than ever to express your personal style and design a vibrant home that feels just like you. Your more colorful life starts at an Ashley store. Shop in-store or online at ashley.com.

Someone fatally stabbed Stacey Stanton inside her apartment on February 3rd. This was violent. It was brutal. On February 3rd, 1990, someone brutally murdered 28-year-old Stacey Stanton inside of her second-story apartment in North Carolina, then cleaned up and disappeared. Residents of Manteo have lived in fear.

For 30 years, Stanton's killer has had one face and one name. North Carolina investigators and Manteo police believe that someone is Clifton Spencer. But his prejudice. They absolutely had tunnel vision that it was the black man who killed the white woman. Keeping an innocent man convicted. They even know now some of them old skogies or them good old boys. They know this man didn't do that.

and covering up more than one crime. I feel bad for that guy. I just really seriously don't think he did that. This is CounterClock, the investigation into the murder of Stacey Stanton. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra.

Within hours of processing Stacey's apartment, the SBI forensic team, led by Dennis Honeycutt, bagged and tagged a lot of evidence. He dusted nearly every surface, lifting 81 fingerprints in total. Whether these prints belonged to just one person, a couple of people, or even 81 people, they didn't know that, but they knew there was potential that a lot of people had been in Stacey's small rental unit.

But this didn't really surprise police because as the SBI agents got to the scene and began talking with people, they realized pretty quickly that Stacey was a very social person. She had a lot of people in and out of her place on a regular basis. In addition to her job as a waitress, she cut hair in her apartment to make extra money on the side. So there were people coming and going from the unit all of the time.

According to the SBI's report, all of the fingerprints were retrieved from surfaces like door frames, tables, cups, stuff you would expect. And none of the prints were impressions made in blood. So with so many fingerprints to work with, they needed to figure out who each one belonged to. But it was complicated because some of the prints were only partials.

To start, they at least wanted to talk with people who would have had a reason to be at Stacey's, people that were close to her and were around the apartment on a regular basis, people who probably had touched a lot of surfaces in her house. They figured several prints were going to come back as being Stacey's, but they also had strong suspicions that some were going to belong to a man named Norman Brandon, Stacey's recent ex-boyfriend.

Now, everyone knew Norman as Mike, so from here on out, we're going to call Norman Mike Brandon. Investigators were really interested in Mike because they'd found mail addressed to him inside of Stacey's apartment. That mail was a clear sign that he'd lived temporarily with her at some point. Conveniently for the SBI, Mike had an extensive criminal history in North Carolina, and the State Department of Corrections already had his fingerprints on file.

The SBI planned to compare his prints to some of the 81 prints found at the scene. What's interesting, though, is that Mike actually beat them to the punch. At 3:30 in the afternoon on February 3rd, just an hour or so after Stacey was found dead, Mike came to the police. He said he wanted to help because he thought he might have information on who Stacey was with the night before.

He'd shown up at the crime scene and given a handwritten statement to Dare County Sheriff's Colonel Jasper Williams. Mike wrote that the night before, Friday, February 2nd, he was at a downtown bar called the Green Dolphin Pub. He said he saw Stacey there, but he wasn't with her. He was with his new girlfriend, Patty, who worked at the bar. Mike said everyone was drinking and Stacey became upset that he was with a new girl. Then she stormed off and left.

Right around that time she left, Mike says a friend of his named Clifton Spencer walked into the bar. Shortly after Clifton came inside, he began talking with Mike. Mike said Clifton was causing problems in the pub with some guys over money at the pool table going missing. And this interaction made Clifton eventually leave. But he returned a little while later to tell Mike that he'd been at Stacy's.

Clifton said that while he was there, Stacey asked him to go back to the bar and tell Mike to come see her. When Mike said he wasn't going to go see Stacey because he didn't care to, Clifton mentioned he was going back over to Stacey's to see if she was alright, because when he was there before, she'd been crying.

After getting this statement from Mike, Jasper Williams began looking into it. He wasn't exactly clearing Mike of any connection to the crime just yet, but because Mike had been so forthcoming right away, Jasper believed that what he'd said was relevant. Not long after getting Mike's statement, the sheriff's office decided to run a records check on Clifton Spencer. Deputy Terry Williams is the one asked to do that.

Now, if you remember, Terry is the same woman who found Stacey's body earlier in the afternoon with Tina. When she's asked to run a check on Clifton, she switched gears from being a part-time diner hostess and is back in law enforcement mode. Terry told me that in between the time Jasper took Mike's statement at 3.30 in the afternoon and before the SBI even began processing Stacey's apartment, she was asked to look into Clifton Spencer.

She says she sat in on a conversation in Jasper Williams' office with an SBI agent joining them, and those men agreed that Clifton was already a suspect. It's at that point Jasper tells her to run an open warrant check on Clifton. Terry says she did, and after punching some parameters into a criminal records database, a result came back.

Clifton Spencer, a black male from Columbia, North Carolina, a town 30 minutes away from Maneo, had an outstanding warrant for drug charges. The state of New Jersey had put the warrant out on him, and technically, this meant he was a wanted man.

I dug through a pile of old documents and was actually able to find that exact warrant printout from February 3, 1990. The paper shows that at 6.04 p.m. on February 3, the printout landed on Jasper Williams' desk.

Now, this means that just a few hours into their investigation, before any physical proof was obtained showing Clifton even knew Stacey, investigators had him on their radar as someone of interest, but not because of any physical evidence that placed him at the scene, but because Mike Brandon had brought his name up.

SBI agents and the Manteo police chief decided to re-interview Mike again because so far he's the only one who brought up Clifton's name, and it was possible he might have known more about him. At 9:40 at night on February 3rd, the police and Mike meet at the Dare County Courthouse in downtown. Mike again recapped his story of being at the Green Dolphin Pub the previous night, and he mentioned that he saw Stacey and Clifton. But this time, Mike went into more detail.

He addressed right off the bat that he used to live with Stacey in her apartment, but said that he moved out just two months earlier, in December of 1989. To me, that's a good way to explain why his fingerprints might be inside, if investigators found any. Mike said after he and Stacey had broken up, he started seeing his new girlfriend, a woman named Patti Rowe.

Mike tells the agents that Patty found out she was pregnant with his child at the beginning of February, but he wasn't sure if Stacey knew that or not. He said when he got to the bar at 6 o'clock, he cashed his paycheck with the bartender and then met up with Patty. Stacey was inside near the jukebox drinking wine coolers, and to avoid direct contact with his ex, he started playing pool in another room. But Stacey kept making eye contact with him and eventually made her way over to him.

He said that she asked him how he was doing and if he was ready to come home. That comment upset Patty, and the closer Stacey got to Mike, the worse the situation became. Mike says at one point Stacey was rubbing on his arms and told him that she still loved him, and he said that he said the same thing back to her. Patty, his pregnant girlfriend who is right there, grew angrier and angrier with this drama, and finally Mike just told Stacey she should leave.

So she did, upset and crying. After that, Mike says that Clifton walked into the bar and asked Mike if he wanted to smoke crack together, and Mike tells Clifton no. Then, just like Mike had said in his original written statement, he says Clifton got into a verbal spat with some guys at the pool table over money going missing, and then Clifton left. He says Clifton returned about a half hour later and told Mike he'd gone walking and ran into Stacey in her driveway.

Clifton tells Mike that Stacey was still crying and had asked Clifton to go back to the bar and tell Mike to come over to her apartment. Mike told Clifton that he wasn't going to leave the bar and said he would catch up with Stacey later. Mike says Clifton then asked him for money to go buy cocaine, but Mike refused. Mike said that that night, Clifton was broke and wanted drugs badly. He'd gone around to a lot of people asking to bum off money.

Mike said he and Clifton weren't exactly friends and that they just knew each other from work. At the time, Mike worked in construction, and Clifton had once been a delivery driver for a building supply company in Manteo. They'd become friends and had a history of doing drugs together. Mike says that Clifton knew Stacey because he'd been to her apartment several times to do cocaine. Mike says when Clifton left the bar for the second time, it was around 11 o'clock at night, and that was the last time he saw him.

In his interview, Mike was very clear to establish his own alibi. He said that after a few hours of drinking, he and Patty left the bar with some friends and everyone went to that friend's home in Manteo to stay the night. He says he was there the entire night and those people could vouch for him. But before questioning Mike any further or confirming his alibi, the SBI immediately ran with what Mike had told them about Clifton.

Their top priority from that point forward was finding and questioning Clifton because they believed he was the last person to see Stacy alive.

Do you want to set your child up for success? IXL Learning is an online learning program for kids covering math, language arts, science, and social studies. IXL is designed to help them really understand and master topics in a fun way. Powered by advanced algorithms, IXL gives the right help to each kid no matter the age or personality. IXL is used in 95 of the top 100 school districts in the US.

There's one site for all the kids in your home, pre-K to 12th grade. Kids can even access IXL on the go through the app or on your phone or tablet. No more trying to figure out how to explain math equations or grammar rules yourself. IXL has built-in explanation videos.

And look, my son is only two and a half right now, but I can already tell by the time he is in school, he is going to appreciate having someone explain why something is the way it is. He doesn't like just to be told. So those explanation videos are going to be super helpful. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now. And CounterClock listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash clock.

Visit iXL.com slash clock to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

This message is sponsored by Greenlight. A new school year is starting soon, and if you're a parent, you want to make this school year an opportunity for your kids to learn important life skills and continue building independence. For that, there's Greenlight. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely, and parents can keep an eye on kids' new money habits.

There's even Greenlight's Infinity Plan, which includes the same access to financial literacy education that makes Greenlight a valuable resource for millions of parents and kids. Plus, built-in safety to give you peace of mind. My son is only two and a half, but already he knows what a card is and what it does. He actually took it up to a vending machine the other day, swiped it, and, well, let's just say he's going to be a spender when he's older.

And so Greenlight is the perfect thing for him. There's even a chores feature that lets you reward your kids for honoring their responsibilities around the house. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for Greenlight today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com slash counterclock. That's greenlight.com slash counterclock to try Greenlight for free. greenlight.com slash counterclock.

SBI agents working Stacey's case were able to track down Clifton in the small town of Columbia, North Carolina. Columbia is a 30-minute drive inland from Manteo. You have to pass through it if you're going to the Outer Banks from cities like Raleigh or Charlotte. It's just over the Dare County line in Terrell County. Less than 1,000 people live there, and in a stark contrast to Manteo, most of the residents in Terrell County are African American. Clifton has called Columbia home since he was born.

I was just like any young man that grew up in the 60s. You know, we, my friends, we all played a lot of sports, you know. Every day we'll play basketball or something, and the summers we played a lot of sports. He graduated from Columbia High School and was well-known in the small community by the time he turned 18. His family, like everyone else there, was poor and Black, but that didn't bother him.

My dad worked very hard to provide for the family. My mother was a homemaker. And I think that, you know, I just had, to me, a normal small-town upbringing.

What did wear on him and other Black families in Columbia was the town's claim to fame, the historic Somerset Plantation, a.k.a. an old rich white family's home where 300 Black slaves lived and worked before the American Civil War. The biggest thing down there in that area is that plantation that everybody wanted to go and see. It's a historic marker, but the history is not a good history for anyone.

This site is a nationally recognized tourist attraction, and its roots of racism run deep in the small town. There was lynchings all over the place. In Terrell County in the 20s and 30s, Washington County, I'm sure Dara County had theirs as well. And it was almost like, it's like a town hall meeting or something like that when they lynch somebody.

The railroad tracks that Clifton grew up playing around aren't far from Somerset. The railway was essential back in the day for transporting goods from the plantation. And it's along those same tracks on Sunday, February 4th, 1990, that the Terrell County Sheriff pulls over his cruiser. He sees 31-year-old Clifton Spencer walking alone. Here's Clifton's memory of that moment. He came up there and he said that, uh,

He needed to talk to me. I came over there and he asked to say, "I need for you to go. Come with me down to the Sheriff's office. I need to talk to you about something." I said, "Okay." So I rode down there with him. When I got there, I think I spoke with, it was an SBI agent. I think the sheriff or deputy sheriff from Darryl County.

Clifton spent the next two hours willingly talking with Manny O's police chief, Steve Day, and an SBI agent named Kent Insko. They asked me questions about Stacy. It was the last time I saw her, and I said, I saw her last night. Clifton explained to the men that he'd been in Manny O at the Green Dolphin Pub on Friday, February 2nd. He had no idea Stacy had been murdered until they broke the news to him in a very bizarre way.

I was in the office down there in the jail, you know, and they walked out and they left. They had me sitting at a desk, I think it was the sheriff's desk. It was two big pictures laying face down on the desk before I got there. I didn't really notice that they were dead when they told me this. They directed me to sit right here.

Despite this cruel way of telling him Stacey was dead, Clifton still cooperated with investigators. He told them everything he remembered about that night.

He said he started hitchhiking around 6:30 at night, and two white guys he knew had given him a ride from Columbia to Manteo, and then those men dropped him off at the Green Dolphin Pub around 7 o'clock. When I first entered that bar, when I got there, I just walked up there, and at that particular time, people of color really didn't go and spend a lot of time at that pub at night. But from time to time, I had been in there during the day.

I did see Stacey when I came in. And apparently, once I came in, she was pretty much having some kind of disagreement with her boyfriend. So she took off and ran out. Clifton got some bad vibes from two white guys at the bar who worked for the Coast Guard. He says he got the impression that he wasn't welcome there because he was Black. He says those guys accused him of stealing coins off of the pool table, which he denied.

At that point, Clifton says he's over all of the tension and decided to just leave. He had plans to go to his friend Wayne Morris' house anyway, and it was only about a 15-minute walk from the bar. And I was headed to my friend's house, and I actually was walking past the apartment that Stacey was living in at that particular time.

And she had been drinking, but she saw me, she hollered at me, and I went to see what she wanted. So from there, you know, she pretty much asked me if I didn't mind to go back and ask her boyfriend to come by the house. I went by and asked, and pretty much that's when he decided to decline to go.

After Mike said he didn't care to catch up with Stacey, Clifton went back to Stacey's to tell her Mike wasn't coming by. This was around 11 o'clock at night, according to Clifton. He said after that second trip to Stacey's apartment, he and Stacey shared a few drinks of vodka together inside of her kitchen and living room, and she continued to lament over Mike. After a while, Stacey decided she wanted to smoke crack.

Now, Clifton was down for this because at the time, he admits he was a full-blown drug addict who didn't have a steady job and nowhere to be since at the moment he was technically homeless. I think about a lot that had transpired up to that point before that particular date. I was at a point in my life where I wasn't in a good space at all. I had started using drugs and I think that, you know, from that point on, I just...

I become a drug addict. You know, I was just out there running around. I was a functioning drug addict, of course. I was working every day, but yet I would go out and use drugs. And I say up to that day, I used to just chase, go find people that wanted to go get high, and I just hang with them. A lot of the people that I come in contact with, those from Manny, was people that used drugs.

At this point, it's important to note that along with Stacey and Clifton at her apartment, there was another man who came by briefly. His name is Richard Fugate, and he's a guy who'd been at the Green Dolphin Pub. On both trips Clifton made to Stacey's apartment to and from the bar, he tells investigators that he, Richard, and Stacey were inside the apartment together, but then eventually Richard left. We'll get more into Richard's story in a future episode, but for now, just keep that in the back of your mind.

Clifton says after Richard leaves, it's just him and Stacey, and it's at that point that they decide they're going to smoke crack. Stacey has a little bit inside of a pipe in her bedroom, but by the time Clifton goes to get it and comes back to see Stacey, she's changed her mind and didn't want any. So Clifton takes a hit by himself and uses it all up. A few minutes later, Stacey walks into the room and asks for some. Apparently she changed her mind again, but after Clifton took the hit, there wasn't any left for her.

Clifton says Stacy hands him $35 to $40 in cash and asks him to go out and buy some more, which he does. And this is the point where Clifton says his memory gets really, really fuzzy, both during his interrogation with investigators in 1990 and still to this day. He says he knows he left Stacy's apartment and went to some areas around town where he thought he could score, but he never got any drugs.

The details of how long that took him or any specific people he came across, he can't remember. He says his memory is so bad because his brain was in a fog from drinking most of the night and being high. According to the SBI agent's paperwork on this case, they wrote down that Clifton said that at one point before he left to get drugs, he and Stacey had laid down in her living room together on her mattress.

The agent's paperwork says that Clifton said he remembered at one point Stacey changed out of the miniskirt that she'd been wearing at the pub and put on gray sweatpants. The SBI agents also wrote that Clifton said that he thought he may have tried to be intimate with Stacey laying down together, but he knew nothing had really happened because he had not been able to become aroused.

But that's according to the SBI agent's reports. Clifton says he doesn't remember saying any of this. One thing he does know for sure is that after wandering in search of drugs for a bit, he returned to Stacey's apartment to give her her money back. But by the time he returned, her door was locked.

He told investigators he believed this was around 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning. He couldn't be sure. And he thought it was weird that the apartment's inside door was locked because Stacey was expecting him to come back with drugs. When he couldn't get in and no one answered the door, he just decided to keep the money and then he headed to his friend Wayne's house. Clifton made the short walk to Wayne's, but he says when he got there, Wayne wasn't home.

After making a few laps around his neighborhood and stumbling through a nearby convenience store parking lot, he returned to Wayne's between 4 and 5 in the morning, knocked again, and this time Wayne answered. Clifton says Wayne let him inside and within a few minutes he fell asleep on a recliner in his living room. The next morning he said he hitchhiked on US 64 in Manteo and a white male pulled over and offered him a ride back to Columbia.

As Chief Day and the SBI agent are listening to Clifton's version of events, they realize he's just given them a ton of information. There were several people they needed to verify his story with. But first they asked him if he'd agree to take a polygraph the next day, and Clifton said yes. Just to make sure that Clifton couldn't go anywhere, the police acted on that outstanding warrant from New Jersey and arrested him. Clifton was locked down, for the time being in Terrell County.

The next morning, a few more SBI agents, their supervisor, Chief Day, and Jasper Williams from the Sheriff's Office in Dare County, arrived to the Sheriff's Office in Terrell County. They prepare Clifton for his polygraph and ask him to sign a release form. But at that point, he's not really feeling it anymore.

Clifton had sobered up after spending the night in jail, and he's thinking clearer now. He tells the investigators he doesn't want to take the test without speaking to an attorney or to his father first. By 1 o'clock that afternoon, both of Clifton's parents had come to the jail and spoken with him, and after that, Clifton decided he would take the test. He said speaking with his parents convinced him that because he had nothing to hide, he should use this as a chance to prove he wasn't involved.

They had me sitting there and the machine was making a whole lot of noise. Anytime I say something, it just makes a lot of noise. So every time it makes noise, I look at it, you know, or something like that. So it was getting another accurate reading or give a reading that maybe I'm not actually being truthful or whatever.

For three and a half hours, an SBI agent grilled Clifton about his version of events and everything he said happened between him and Stacey. I got a hold of some public documents that detail this interrogation by the SBI. And when you look at them, you can see that really a lot of the agents' questions weren't really questions at all. They were more suggestive statements to Clifton to see if he would agree. They're putting these things together and they're making...

a story out of nothing. The SBI, they didn't completely lie. What they did was they made a scenario with some things that I did say to make it seem like this is possible, this is what happened.

At the very end of the polygraph, they finally ask Clifton three direct questions. Did you cut Stacey? Did you cut Stacey in the apartment? And were you there when Stacey was cut? Two of the SBI agents doing the interrogation grade the results, and they gave Clifton a score of negative 12, which according to them meant he'd failed.

Now, at this point, Clifton is starting to figure out what's really going on. He is a murder suspect, and there was no way he's going to continue to talk with them. But they keep after him, and that night, the pressure only got worse.

By 10 o'clock, the SBI had gotten a judge to sign off on a search warrant, which allowed the SBI to seize blood, hair, and clothing from Clifton. He told them that the shirt he was wearing when they arrested him was the same one he'd worn on Friday night at the bar, so they took that too.

The warrant also allowed the SBI to compare Clifton's fingerprints to the ones collected from the crime scene. But Clifton already told them he'd been inside Stacey's apartment, so his prints were probably going to be on a lot of surfaces. I knew that, you know, whatever they took from me, you know, like the fingerprints, I knew my fingerprints because I was there.

Around midnight, Clifton was taken to Chowan Hospital, just outside of Columbia. A doctor there plucked out his hair and drew his blood, and right away it went to Dennis Honeycutt. February 6th and 7th go by with Clifton still sitting in jail. But on Thursday the 8th, two SBI agents returned and interrogate him once again.

This time they confront him head on, and they suggest that he tried to put the moves on Stacey while they were alone in her apartment, and she rejected him. Things got ugly, and she'd come at him with a knife, and that's why he killed her. Clifton denied all of that. He said that he couldn't remember a lot of what had happened that night because he was high and drunk, but he knew he didn't kill anyone.

He said he vaguely remembered laying down on the mattress next to Stacey for a bit and maybe engaging in heavy petting, but he's adamant they didn't have sex. After hours of telling the SBI the same story over and over again, Clifton was exhausted and mentally drained. What they were doing was, they were actually putting me in a setting and then filling in the blanks. Like one of the agents said,

He did that, and then he wrote a statement and said that I meant to clean it, wash it up before I left.

Clifton never had a lawyer with him during any of these interrogations. On top of that, none of the conversations between him and the SBI were ever recorded. There was no recordings of any of those conversations that I had with them. Not a single one. If there had been, then people would see that I didn't say any of the things that they said I said. Every conversation he had with police was slowly becoming his word against theirs.

As they wore him down, Clifton said he felt like he had no choice but to cooperate. The more he resisted, the more they'd point the finger at him and put words in his mouth. Finally, he felt the only way to clear his name was to do what they asked. At 8 o'clock that night, February 8th, SBI agents asked Clifton to go with them to Manteo. They wanted him to show them the exact route he said he took from Stacey's apartment to Wayne's trailer.

According to their own reports, the SBI agents transported Clifton from Columbia and drove him to Manteo. Now, this is wrong for one huge reason. They didn't have the authority to do that.

The sheriff of Terrell County never signed off on a prisoner transport order for Clifton, meaning the SBI couldn't just take a Terrell County prisoner and move him into another jurisdiction for an investigation that had nothing to do with the drug charges Clifton was facing. Technically, Clifton was a prisoner of Terrell County waiting to be extradited back to New Jersey.

So by removing him from Columbia and taking him to Dare County for the murder investigation, that violated protocol and it violated the law. But these FBI agents aren't following what you'd call standard procedure at this point. I mean, they've already interrogated the man multiple times without letting him contact an attorney, and they're not recording any of the interviews they've had with him. Now they're taking him on a ride 30 minutes away to isolate him.

Clifton says that car ride made him nervous because he didn't know these SBI agents or what they were going to do. Even though he had a criminal history in Terrell County, he at least knew the sheriff there and there was familiarity. Up until this point, he said the sheriff in Columbia had been really cool with him at the jail and made sure that he was comfortable and treated him like a normal person, not a murder suspect.

As the car pulls out of Columbia, Clifton is headed away from any law enforcement he knows, and he's going to Dare County to try and convince the SBI agents that he's innocent. Once they arrive in Manteo, he rides along with the SBI and shows them the path that he took on foot from the pub to Stacy's apartment and then to his friend Wayne's. I wanted to see this path for myself, so I took a trip up to Manteo. Turn left onto Queen Elizabeth Avenue, then turn left onto Ananias Dare Street.

In a quarter mile, your destination will be on the left. It was important I retrace Clifton's steps so I could understand exactly what he told investigators. What I found was that the walk from the Green Dolphin Pub to Stacy's would have taken him only a few minutes, seven at most. The walk from Stacy's to Wayne's would have been longer, more like 15 minutes. The locations aren't super far apart, but it was easier for me to just drive there. Let's plug in the...

Address to Wayne Morris' house from here. So Wayne lived exactly .7 miles from Stacy's apartment on Ananias Stair Street over down just a little bit. A two minute drive. It says 13 minute walk.

Clifton told the SBI that as he walked to Wayne's, he crossed over US 64. Head west on Ananias Dare Street toward US 64 East, then turn right onto US 64 West. Then he cut behind the Elizabethan Inn Hotel, went through some trees, and ended up at the back of Wayne's trailer. The Elizabethan Inn is still operating today, and the property looks almost exactly the same as it did in 1990.

So if he cut through the back of the Elizabethan Inn, he could have gotten to Wayne's actually faster than the route we're taking to drive because we're taking the roads. But if you're on foot, you could have cut back behind the inn and then through like a small little stretch of woods and Clifton would have come right up to Wayne's trailer.

So Wayne says his trailer was trailer 62 on Jackson Street, which this is all... You've arrived. This is all like a trailer park neighborhood. So trailer 62, trailer 62, there it is.

A new family lives in Wayne's old trailer now, but seeing where it was located really was helpful for me. The area was right next to my old high school and a mile from my parents' house. It's somewhere I'd driven probably hundreds of times. So I started to think, what had the SBI agents in Clifton done at this point, 30 years prior to me standing there? What was their next move?

If it were me, I'd have taken Clifton back to Columbia and seen what other leads I could follow up on. But that wasn't what happened. Instead, the agents took Clifton to a trailer a little ways up the road. It was an old building Dare County used as an off-site drug investigations bureau. Inside the dingy trailer were a few chairs, a table, and more SBI agents.

And they took me to this office that I guess the undercover drug enforcement from the Sheriff's Department used to use out there on the airport road. They took me in that office and the agents that was there, I didn't know them, never saw them before. And they just sent me in there and just kept talking about this and going to say this and say I said that or, you know, whatever I was saying.

they would actually kind of add something to it. And then the agents left me in the room. You know, I didn't have my handcuffs on. And there was a rifle sitting right beside me. I don't know if it had bullets in it or what. I just felt that those people were trying to set me up or something here. And I told them I wanted to go back to Columbia.

But Clifton didn't go back to Columbia. He sat in that office and endured another interrogation that lasted four hours. The SBI pushed him hard, even bringing up his criminal history from when he served in the Army. You see, Clifton had been charged and convicted of assaulting one of his former girlfriends while stationed in Germany many years earlier. In that attack, he admitted to using a pair of scissors.

The SBI hammered him about this detail, and they suggested that he had attacked Stacy in a similar way, except this time he used a knife. Again, Clifton denied that, but the pressure was becoming overwhelming and he had nothing left.

The agent kept asking me the same question over and over again. I said, man, I don't tell you. Did I kill her? I said, I kept telling him. I kept telling him. He had asked me that same question probably about the 10th or 11th time. I just, I didn't say anything. I just took a deep breath and just held my head down. The agent said I shook my head yes. The other agent said that he saw me. Apparently he must have seen through the wall.

The FBI agents wrote in their report that Clifton's slumping his head in exhaustion was confirmation to them that he had nodded yes to what they were accusing him of. And that was as good as a confession.

That's when they wrap up the interrogation and transport him back to Columbia around midnight. Finally, on February 9th, Clifton's father shows up to the jail with a local attorney from Columbia. This attorney, a man by the name of Charles Ogletree, talks with Clifton for a while and shuts down any more one-on-one interrogations with the SBI. But at that point, the damage had already been done.

The SBI and Manteo police had a lot of damning information against Clifton. Information that they used to request an arrest warrant for first-degree murder.

They went to the district attorney on February 9th and explained their case so far. But the DA said no way. He said there was not enough sufficient evidence to arrest Clifton for the crime. And he pushed back saying that the SBI needed to dig further and do actual detective work to prove their case, not just keep interrogating Clifton.

But while they had to wait for forensic evidence to be processed, the pressure to make an arrest was mounting. And this is where the SBI and local investigators really dug their heels in. They wanted to find anything that supported Clifton was their man. Instead of going back and talking with witnesses like Terry Williams and Tina and Mike Brandon, they visit Wayne Morris.

The one man who is supposedly Clifton's alibi, or at least someone who would have had direct contact with Clifton shortly after the murder. I found Wayne earlier this year, and he still lives in a trailer in Maneo, but just not the same one as he did in 1990. And what he told me as we sat in his living room blew my mind.

I've learned three languages in my life: English, Spanish, and French. And I can tell you the most difficult part for me at times was when I was doing the classroom work. And even though I was having conversations with people in those languages, it wasn't the same as being immersed in that language. But with Rosetta Stone, I get the best of both worlds.

Rosetta Stone is the most trusted language learning program, and it's available on desktop or can be used on an app on your phone or tablet. The big thing for me when it comes to learning a language or sprucing up on one I already know is to have that immersive experience, like I said, and really naturally try and pick up the language, first with words, then phrases, and then sentences. And something that's been really helpful with that is Rosetta Stone's True Accent feature. You get feedback on how well you're pronouncing words.

It's like having a personal trainer for your accent. Don't put off learning that language. There's no better time than right now to get started. For a very limited time, CounterClock listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit rosettastone.com slash counterclock.

That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com slash counterclock today. All right, so for a long time, I was completely unaware of like what was good wine and what was bad wine. In fact, I don't know.

I usually just didn't even buy it because I was worried I was gonna take too much of a risk. And when I did, I usually let myself down. But now that's completely changed thanks to First Leaf. It's a wine club that's not your average wine club. It's better.

With each shipment, you get a personalized selection of wines from all over the world, handpicked just for you. First Leaf has this great questionnaire on their website that helps me a lot because it asks me questions like what kinds of foods do I like? Sweet or salty or nutty or oaky?

And all of those things created results that had wines paired perfectly for me. You can tailor your membership to your needs and you can choose between six or 12 bottles, decide how many reds or whites you want and select a shipping window that works for your schedule. So get wines to sip and share all summer long with First Leaf. Go to tryfirstleaf.com slash counterclock to sign up and you'll get your first

six hand-picked bottles for just $44.95. That's T-R-Y-F-I-R-S-T-L-E-A-F dot com slash counterclock. Tryfirstleaf.com slash counterclock. Wayne Morris was the first person to see Clifton Spencer after he left Stacey's apartment. The SBI visited Wayne when they realized they needed more evidence in order for the DA to give them an arrest warrant for Clifton.

This cop come by my house and said he needed to talk to me. I said, "Talk to me about what?" He said, "Uh, you know Clifton? Say Clif's name." And I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, was he by your house at such and such a time?" And I said, "Yes, he came by, you know, a total of one time." These cops came in the house, two of them.

As I recall, and they talked to me for not long. The guy asked me, did I mind him walking around my house? I said, no. He walked around the house and he found this old knife, old rusty knife I had laying out there. I had found it. I was going to clean it up. And he showed me. I said, man, that knife has been out there for, shit, probably a year maybe. I mean, it's just been laying up on my trailer. He said, OK, he gave it to me. And I put it back where it was at. The agents came inside and asked Wayne if he'd tell them what he remembered when Clifton came by. So he did.

Cliff knocked on my back door and I said, "Oh man, who is this?" He said, "Hey man, it's me, Cliff." I said, "Oh man, where you been? You been somewhere all geeked up?" He said, "Man, let me crash it, man." Yeah, go ahead and set it all in the trailer like you usually do. 'Cause every now and then Cliff would drop by to see me and he'd crash. He had been out all night partying and he wanted to go to Columbia. So he asked me could he crash that 'til his ride got ready. I said, "Yeah, I'm ready to go to work." When Clifton showed up,

Did he have any blood on him? No, he was just high as hell. Excuse me. I mean, he was just, you know, he was gone, man. No, he had no blood on him. He was sitting in my recliner, asleep when I left. And you think I want to see some blood? This guy still had his nice little shirt and his jeans on, man. That's what I remember.

So clearly, Wayne still feels the same way as he did back then. When I compared what he told me in our interview with transcripts from the conversation he had with the SBI 30 years ago, his story hasn't changed. It's almost word for word the same. He remembers clearly that Clifton got to his house between 4 and 5 in the morning, and he also remembers clearly what the SBI asked him to do after agents came to his trailer.

Asked me would I be willing to take a lie detector test, and I said sure. And I took one at the Duke of Darius Clothesline, but I took a lie detector test there. And it seemed like I could remember I took a lie detector test twice. That's right. The SBI had Wayne go to a motel in Manio, a place that's a dilapidated rat trap now, and they wanted him to undergo a polygraph.

And I just took that test to let them know, man, what I got in life? Well, I don't even know this girl. Didn't know Cliff knew the girl. All I knew, Cliff always partied down there. See, I think they just wanted me to take that test because they thought I was going to, I was trying to hide something for Cliff maybe, but I just told them like it was, man.

They got me taking this test because they think I'm going to try to lie for him. But I just told them plain out, hey, man, the guy came by and crashed at my house like he does all the time. Wayne passed his polygraph with flying colors. The SBI found no signs of deception in anything that he'd said. And the fact that he'd been so open to talking with me about the case makes me believe he's telling the truth.

I mentioned to him I'd found an SBI agent's report in my research that claimed forensic techs had sprayed luminol in his living room and on his recliner to look for blood. I wanted to know if Wayne remembered that, but his answer wasn't what I expected at all. They looked at the chair, and that was it. And they were coming out and did no, you know, forensic—nothing, man.

That was a direct contradiction to what I read with my own eyes in the SBI's documents. So either Wayne isn't remembering it right, or the NCSBI fudged this detail. But why? Why would they lie about that? Something so critical. And why hadn't they looked at anyone else but Clifton? Because there was another person I thought was on the radar that was never really vetted. You know what I mean?

The answers are next week on CounterClock. All the trials I've seen on TV, I've never seen a trial like this one. Be sure to follow CounterClock on social media and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. CounterClock is an AudioChuck original show. Ashley Flowers is the executive producer. And all reporting and hosting is done by me, Delia D'Ambra.

Want the same expert advice you get from the pros in the store while shopping online at DiscountTire.com? Meet Treadwell, your personal online tire guide that matches you with the perfect tire for your vehicle. Get your best match in one minute or less with Treadwell by Discount Tire. Let's get you taken care of.

A more colorful life starts at an Ashley store. From earth tones to vibrant colors, Ashley stores have an array of eye-catching furniture for every room in fun and trending hues that will leave a lasting impression. So it's easier than ever to express your personal style and design a vibrant home that feels just like you. Your more colorful life starts at an Ashley store. Shop in-store or online at ashley.com.