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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. It's March 12th, 1990, and a fax is coming through to police in Salem County, New Jersey. It's from the district attorney in Dare County, who signed off on the arrest of Clifton Eugene Spencer.
His charge? First-degree murder. Since February 4th, SBI agents in North Carolina, the Manteo Police Department, and the Dare County Sheriff's Office have had their sights set squarely on Clifton for Stacey's murder. For weeks, they've been investigating and re-interviewing some witnesses in the case, trying to figure out how Clifton could have committed the crime.
They took their case to the DA to get an arrest warrant once before, but the DA said no. There wasn't enough evidence to arrest Clifton. Now, a few weeks after that, the cops felt like they finally had enough. Several SBI agents had taken a crack at interrogating Clifton six times, one-on-one. He only had an attorney present three of those times.
The investigators' evidence was a combination of the statements Clifton had made while being interrogated and preliminary forensic results that had come back from the state crime lab in early March. And now that they had their arrest warrant signed, it was done. They'd gotten their man, even if they violated some of his rights to do it. You see, the pressure to arrest someone for Stacey's murder had been building every single day since February 3rd.
And it particularly put pressure on the DA. And the DA at the time was a man named H.P. Williams. He'd spent years as a lawyer in eastern North Carolina, and by 1982 had worked his way up to the elected head prosecutor seat. He knew there was a very small window of time to make a move and appease the white voters who'd put him in office. People in Manteo demanded answers.
So on April 2nd, 1990, a grand jury indicted Clifton for murder. And on June 1st, he had his first appearance in downtown at Dare County's only courthouse. During the month of February and the beginning of March, Clifton had been moved to New Jersey to face his drug violation charges there. Those were the ones for that open warrant that was out on him.
But when his arrest warrant for murder was signed in North Carolina, he was quickly transferred back to Dare County after a judge in New Jersey decided to drop the drug violation case against him. His arraignment in Dare County lasted 10 minutes. The only major thing to come out of it was that the DA announced he was seeking the death penalty against Clifton. Now in this courtroom, Clifton and his family, without a doubt, stuck out like a sore thumb.
The judge was white. The DA was white. The court staff were mostly white. The victim was white. And of course, the police officers who would testify against him were all white too.
During the hearing, the DA presented his theory. He said that Clifton had killed Stacey in a drug-fueled haze at her apartment because she'd rejected advances from him. And to back up this theory, he explained that in the weeks since the murder, the SBI had investigated, and they felt confident that Clifton was the only person responsible. On top of that, the preliminary lab results from the state crime lab showed Clifton's fingerprints were inside of Stacey's apartment.
The SBI analysis broke it down like this: Only 13 latent fingerprints of value were identified among those 81 that Dennis Honeycutt had collected. Seven of those prints were Clifton's, four were Stacey's, and two were Mike Brandon's, her ex-boyfriend. The DA argued that the fingerprints meant they could place Clifton at the crime scene, but he explained away Mike's prints being at the scene because he was a recent boyfriend.
In his court filings, H.P. Williams focused almost entirely on Clifton's statements from his interrogations, which included transcripts from his supposedly failed polygraph. Now, it's that part of the hearing that made Clifton look bad. Like, really bad.
Now, I know what you're thinking. What about the forensic evidence and all that stuff Dennis Honeycutt gathered at the crime scene? The hairs clutched in Stacey's hands, in her wounds, the pillowcase, the mattress she was found on, her clothing? Well, don't worry. We'll get back to that in this episode. But at the time of Clifton's first few hearings, the crime lab results for those items weren't in yet. They wouldn't be available for several more months.
So during that time, Clifton's family made sure he had some legal representation, someone who'd fight in his defense, someone who looked like him, a black man who would understand what Clifton was up against. The Spencer family hired a private attorney from Greensboro, North Carolina named Romalis Murphy. Romalis was a former college president, and he'd worked several capital murder trials in the state for the NAACP.
Those factors alone made Clifton's family feel like their son had a chance. But along with Romales' accolades came a hefty price tag. He asked the family for $20,000 up front, but by the time everything was said and done, they were only able to scrounge up about $6,000. Despite the lack of funds to pay him, Romales took on the case in late June of 1990.
But between then and December, he rarely met with Clifton, only traveled to Dare County a few times, and he never filed any motions for the case for things like change of venue, hiring a private investigator, or excluding the statements that Clifton made during those unrecorded interrogations. He never even visited the crime scene of Ananias Dare Street or attempted to interview any witnesses, people like Wayne Morris or Mike Brandon.
Wayne says he showed up a few times to some of Clifton's hearings, just in case he felt like he could be of some use. But Romalis ignored him. I mean, I remember Cliff's lawyer sitting there. I don't remember him getting up and talking for Cliff at all. I remember this guy talking to the prosecutor, I guess, saying how they found Stacy and blah, blah, blah, this and that. But I'm saying, yeah, they're going to call me and I'm going to tell them, man, you know, where Cliff was at, blah, blah. Never have them.
As summer of 1990 turned into fall, and eventually winter, Clifton says he rarely saw or heard from his attorney. What was your experience with Mr. Murphy as your defense attorney? He didn't care anything about the case.
And I could tell that, you know, I spent a little time with him. And I think he was going with two different stories. He would tell my family one thing and he would tell me another thing. Because I would tell him this and that about what happened and things like this. And he would go and tell my family he's just trying to save my life. That's all he's trying to do is save my life. Pretty much.
I felt that he really, he had no intentions of trying to defend me whatsoever. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, Clifton says Romales hadn't even discussed with him what their strategy was going to be at trial or when they were even going to trial.
When Clifton asked him why he hadn't done any digging or investigating of his own, Romales responded that he was still waiting for the prosecution to send over the discovery file, a compilation of everything the state planned to introduce at trial. When the DA did finally provide discovery on November 28th, it was clear the defense had a lot of catching up to do.
This file contained all of the forensic analysis that the State Crime Lab had processed from the items found at Stacy's crime scene. I got my hands on a copy of it, and what those pages reveal is a complete bombshell in this case.
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Lab reports from August 1990 determined that the hairs found clutched in Stacey's hands and in her wounds were described as direct, quote, not Negroid hairs, end quote, meaning there was no way they were Clifton's. The hairs were from a Caucasian person.
On top of that, the full lab analysis says there was zero evidence or hair or blood transfer between Stacey and Clifton. None of her blood was found underneath his fingernails and vice versa. All of his clothing tested negative for her blood and no material in the tapings taken from her body or her living room's carpet and couch matched Clifton.
The only things inside the apartment that came back to Clifton were his fingerprints and some saliva on a single cigarette butt in an ashtray. The paper towel from Stacy's kitchen that had a blood smudge on it contained too small of a sample for the lab to even test. And the blood from the washcloth in the street outside failed to give conclusive results, so those items didn't confirm or rule out Clifton.
Now, all of this information landed in the lap of Romalis Murphy, Clifton's attorney. But Clifton says he didn't tell him any of this. In fact, I'm not even sure how much of the discovery Romalis read. Based on court paperwork and my interview with Clifton, it doesn't appear Romalis ever reviewed the lab analysis thoroughly.
I say this with personal confidence because I had to navigate these documents for myself for the show, and it was not an easy task. It took me, someone who has a lot of experience with public documents, several hours to interpret the paperwork. It's tricky. Each piece of evidence was assigned a number. Then there's a legend for each of those numbers, sort of like a map.
When you read the paragraphs describing what the test results were for each item, you have to reference that legend every other word because it's talking about numbers instead of the item's actual name. The reason I believe Romales didn't dedicate a lot of time to do this is because he wasn't getting paid for it. And the district attorney laid a plea deal on his desk that looked way more appealing. Here's Clifton again. He got what they gave him initially, and that's what he went off of.
And he didn't question any of it. So when he didn't question it, then it just made me feel that, you know, like, this man is not going to do a single thing in this case. On December 7, 1990, just eight days after dumping thousands of pages of discovery files on the defense, H.P. Williams sent Romales an offer. He pledged to take the death penalty off of the table if Clifton would plead guilty to second-degree murder.
The deal was good for one month. It expired on January 7, 1991. Clifton says the next two times Romales spoke with him or his family, they didn't go through any forensic reports from the state lab or talk about any trial strategy. The only thing he heard about was the opportunity of that plea deal. By the second time that he came to visit me, he kept trying to say I can get a plea. It was always a plea.
Clifton says through the end of December 1990, Romales just kept on about this plea deal. He kept reminding his client of one thing, that he was black and Stacey was white, and forensic evidence didn't matter because he'd never get a fair trial as a black man in Dare County. Clifton says Romales explained that it was too risky to go to trial and possibly lose, but by taking the plea deal, Clifton would for sure avoid death row.
Now, here's the critical part in this story. Clifton says that the back and forth between him and Romales got very confusing due to Romales' lack of clear communication. Adding to the pressure was the approaching expiration date of the plea deal on January 7th. Clifton says Romales explained that if he accepted the deal, he would likely only spend 10 to 15 years in prison before he'd be eligible for parole. At least, that's how Clifton understood it.
He said, "10 years, you'll probably be out about five or six years." You know, he said, "You won't be in there 10, that's the most that you're gonna do. They'll let you out." In reality, second-degree murder in the state of North Carolina carries the maximum sentence of life in prison. Clifton says in early January, right before the deal's expiration date, he made up his mind not to take the deal.
Clifton says Romales was frustrated, but on January 7th, he went to Dare County to finally file all of his pretrial motions. He was filing motions for things like change of venue, and he wanted the release of the SBI's information about other suspects.
And court documents show that on January 7th, Romales formally demanded the police turn over to the defense everything that was part of their investigation. Many files with witness interview transcripts had been conveniently excluded from the discovery. Less than 24 hours after doing this, though, news breaks that Clifton has agreed to take the plea deal.
On the afternoon of January 8th, Romales had once again gone to Clifton and attempted to convince him to take the deal. Clifton says he was at a low point when they had that conversation, and he just caved. He says the day before he had been on the phone with family and felt his situation was becoming a drain on everyone around him. He was afraid that the justice system was working against him, and he'd be convicted at trial. So he took the deal.
And that's exactly right. When you plea no contest to a criminal charge, basically you're telling the court that you're not confessing guilt to a crime, but you agree to give up your right to contest the charges. The justice system views a no contest plea the same as a conviction.
On January 9, 1991, the judge accepted Clifton's plea and sentenced him to life in prison. He was now a convicted murderer, and any hope that he'd have a chance of getting out sooner, like Romales had told him, was quickly dashed. Once I got into the system, and I spoke with a lot of guys that was in the system, he said, man, he said that you could be here for the rest of your life. They ain't gonna let you go no time soon.
One year after his conviction, in April 1992, Clifton penned a 77-page letter to the resident Superior Court judge in Dare County. The letter was requesting a hearing for what's called a Motion for Appropriate Relief, or an MAR. Clifton had spent over a year researching case law at his prison's library, learning about MARs and if he qualified for one. Turns out, he did.
An MAR is a legal means to correct errors made during a criminal trial or proceeding. It allows convicted criminals to challenge the legitimacy of their conviction, even if they took a plea deal. Clifton's request brought up three distinct claims as to why mistakes and police misconduct influenced his decision to take the plea deal.
First, he argued his right-to-do process was violated by the SBI agents and their tactics. Second, his conviction was obtained by using statements taken from him that violated his Fifth Amendment rights. And third, he had ineffective assistance of counsel. In other words, he claimed Romalis Murphy wasn't a competent defense attorney and withheld key information from him.
If Clifton had known everything he needed to, he would never have taken the plea deal. On May 19, 1991, a judge in Dare County granted Clifton's request, but only on the third point, that he had ineffective assistance of counsel. The first two points, the judge denied and banned them from being considered at a future hearing. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Because Clifton was incarcerated at the time, he needed help and access to outside resources to prepare for this MAR hearing. The court assigned a rookie public defender named Edgar Barnes to help him. Getting to know Edgar Barnes, he did so much for me. He showed me a lot of stuff that I didn't even know. He did the things that if Mr. Murphy had actually done some of them things, I probably would have never been in that situation in the first place.
Eddie Barnes wouldn't participate in a recorded interview for this podcast because he's now a chief district court judge in North Carolina. The judge's canon of ethics dictates that he can't comment publicly on cases, even if the case is one he was an attorney on prior to becoming a judge.
I've consulted him several times in my investigation, but I'm choosing not to directly quote him in the show. My conversations with him, combined with all of the court transcripts available on the case, are extremely helpful in this next part of the story. Right away in 1992, Eddie dug in on this case. He saw red flags about Clifton's arrest, his interrogations, and all of the things Romalis Murphy didn't do.
Eddie believed that there were obvious alternate suspects that should have been investigated, people like Mike Brandon and Patti Rowe. But the problem was, the MAR hearing wasn't about determining whether Clifton was guilty or innocent. It was solely focused on determining if his rights had been violated by the court. Those two things are very different. So Eddie had to prove that Romalis Murphy was a bad attorney, unable to give Clifton sound, competent representation.
And by December of 1992, Eddie had been able to get the first two points of Clifton's original motion back in play. And now we would argue Clifton's Fifth Amendment and due process rights were violated as well.
On April 20, 1993, Eddie presented his side of the case for two days. He called 16 witnesses to the stand, including the SBI agents Romalis Murphy, Clifton, and Wayne Morris. H.P. Williams didn't call anyone to testify. All the trials I'd seen on TV, I'd never seen a trial like this one. I said he took a plea to something he didn't do, man.
Some of them people that were in the legal system knew this boy Cliff. They didn't have no evidence that he did it. He just admitted that he did it, man. Oppression. They tell me his lawyer told him, said, hey, man, listen, you better take a plea. He said, because this is a white girl. They're going to send you to the chamber. You're going to get the death penalty. That's why Cliff took that plea.
570 pages of testimony came out of the hearing. And sitting in a back row, soaking it all in, was former Virginian pilot newspaper reporter, Lane DeGregory. I remember thinking, "Wow, this court-appointed attorney is really putting himself on the line for this guy." Like, there must be—I hadn't come across an attorney who was so willing to defend a convicted murderer on, you know— not because the family was paying him a bazillion dollars, but because he believed in him that strongly.
Edgar Bynes knew something that made him want to stick with this case. In court, Lane was playing catch-up on the story. She didn't work for the newspaper when the murder happened, but during the two days of testimony she heard, she learned the basic facts quickly.
It felt, I think it felt very personal. You know, it wasn't like out in the middle of nowhere. It was right in the middle of this little town where everybody hung out and lived and worked and justice was supposed to be taking place across the street, you know. And those stories did not go on the North Carolina section front. They went on the front page. So they were up there with other, you know, Virginia Beach, Norfolk crime. That's kind of how unusual it was. I think even then I was struck by the racial component of it because there just really weren't very many African Americans on the Outer Banks back then. And I thought,
Who are that guy's people or allies, or is he just the outsider? So it just seemed like this proverbial outsider being not even accused by that time, convicted of this crime. It was also intriguing that he pled no contest. I haven't seen many murders end in a trial like that, in a no contest plea like that. Either you take it to trial or you take your guilty plea and move on. So I thought that was interesting too because a lot of the investigation that would have happened for a trial never happened.
Right? So that was interesting as a reporter, too. Like, what else is there that we don't know? I think once they felt like they had him, I don't know if trapped is the right word, but they had him in a place that he felt like he didn't have a choice of what to do, it absolved them from doing some of the investigation that maybe they could have. Lane was most surprised by the DA's lack of physical evidence against Clifton.
I remember going to the house to kind of get a feel for what it looked like and thinking, like, how much did they actually do in that apartment? But I think there was something also about...
a hair or hairs that were found on her that weren't from an African American person. And that stuck out a lot because I know that was early, early era of DNA testing, early era of forensic discovery. But so it's someone else's hair. I mean, clearly that was not his hair. They could tell that. And yet that evidence didn't get examined. You know, like whose hair was it then?
And when Romalis Murphy took the stand, the details of how the DA had presented the plea deal to the defense back in 1990 felt shady to Lane. There was probably pressure to just get it done. You know, just wipe this one off the books and let's move on. They wanted a suspect. You know what I mean? They wanted a suspect first.
And the Outer Banks community was kind of demanding, like, "We're scared. Who did this? This is frightening all of us in this little safe waterfront town, this little idyllic community. We want answers." And so I think they were under pressure to bring a name, to bring a suspect, and even if all the evidence wasn't there, just to say to people, "We caught the guy."
When everything was said and done, Clifton and Eddie felt like they'd made a solid case proving gross errors were made. But ultimately the decision on whether Clifton would get a new trial was in the hands of one man, Judge Gary Trawick. He reviewed the entire case and everything that was presented at the hearing and chose to deny the motion. So I tracked Gary down earlier this year to ask him why.
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If I did what they wanted me to do, I'm overturning. You know, a fellow who has gone in, put his hand on the Bible and sworn that he knew that he was pleading guilty, he knew what he was going to get, he understood all of the circumstances. And so the only way that I have of legally of doing anything to overturn that is I've got to have some factual basis to hang my hat on.
Romales' poor performance as an attorney was the point of the case that Gary was really torn on. He was an experienced lawyer, had tried death penalty cases, had practiced law for a long time.
And one of the things that particularly struck me was that he conferred with the family. My problem with the case is I don't have anything of any real lack there that shows that he was talked into it against his will or, you know, undue pressure was put on him. Remember, on a no contest plea, you're evaluating the case personally.
not on just guilt or innocence. You're evaluating the case on the basis of how likely would it be with the evidence that you know you got, that the state has, that they could find you guilty. Until you know what the state has, you really don't know how to investigate it. And you don't want to be wasting your resources of sending investigators out two or three times when you get the discovery.
I asked him what he thought about the DA offering Clifton that plea deal so quickly after handing over the discovery file. In your experience, is that how quickly it can often happen? Or is that maybe atypical? I would say there's not a typical situation in that kind of thing. You go there, and of course, as a defense lawyer, he's got an obligation to tell him about the plea deal.
And he's got an obligation to tell him, you know, this won't expire in a week or whenever it was. Judge Small explained to him what he was getting. I'm sure that if I had been the lawyer, I would have told him when he would have been eligible for parole if he took the plea. That's kind of a critical part of taking it or not. Oh, yeah. You know, as to when you might get out. You know, that you might not serve the whole sentence.
Gary admitted the obvious optics of Clifton's case weren't just whether he got a fair shot the first time around. It was much simpler than that. Clifton was a Black man on trial for a white woman's murder, period. The battle was going to be uphill simply because of that. Think about it. You're Black. You're going into a courtroom where you've got white officers, white prosecutors, white judges, white clerks, and...
In Darragh County, most of the jurors are white. Certainly you've got to think about race. I mean, you've got to. That's one of the things you would have to consider. And if I were black, can you imagine what that would... I can see that that could certainly influence your thinking as to whether or not you would get a fair trial. So, I mean, race definitely is a factor. But I generally find in things like this that the state's still got to have the evidence.
I don't think that they're going to convict. Generally, a jury convicts if they've got reasonable doubt just because somebody is of a different race.
It's in transcript that Mr. Murphy said multiple times to his client, this is a black-white issue that has to be addressed. The fact that the victim was a white female, the defendant was a black male. As you looked at this case and as you've seen other cases in your career, do you think that was a issue as to whether Mr. Spencer knew if he could get a fair trial or not in Dare County? Even today, yes.
It's one of those things that you, as a defense lawyer and as a judge, that I worry about. I mean, when I see, you know, a black-on-white college, obviously it goes through your mind as to whether or not we can say what we want to in this world today, but there's still a lot of racists out there.
With that in mind about Dereck County, Gary remembers it was definitely striking to see Eddie Barnes, a white lawyer, fighting so hard for Clifton in an all-white courtroom. I remember Edgar Barnes being real, I can't tell you anything specifically said or anything like that, but I can remember him being very passionate about it. I mean, it was something that, you know, that I felt like that he really believed in, you know, that he believed in.
Gary stands by his ruling, though, and still doesn't believe there was enough proof to show Romales was an incompetent lawyer. But for three decades, he hasn't felt good about any of it. I didn't like it. I can remember having an uneasy feeling about it. But I couldn't find anything that I felt was concrete that I could say, "Murphy did this wrong."
And this fella didn't do, would never have entered this plea if Murphy had given him adequate representation. His uneasy feeling first began the afternoon he filed his final ruling. Let me tell you something that's a little bit interesting that may be for your, for what you're doing. For some reason, I remember very distinctly going after we had finished, after I'd made my ruling, I typically went to lunch up there when I was in Mantejo.
with the court reporter and the clerk. And I remember them telling me, there's a lot of conversation in the community, and a lot of people think that someone else did it. And so there was, even then, a lot of talk. I think that's what makes me remember the thing a little bit, was they said,
You know, there's been a lot of talk in the community. I don't remember which one of them said it or what. There's a lot of people who think that it's more to this or there was more people involved or somebody else may have done it. Gary telling me this was sort of astonishing, that after all this time, he still remembers people telling him Clifton might not have been the right guy, but it was too late. He'd already made his decision, and he's had to live with that.
After speaking with Gary, I was desperate to talk to Ramales Murphy, but unfortunately that isn't possible because he died in 2011. After Clifton, he went on to represent many clients in North Carolina, most of whom were black. In 1991, 1996, and 2000, the state bar found him guilty of misconduct in at least three cases.
These reports say he was specifically reprimanded for not communicating with his clients about critical information in their cases and failing to file motions in a timely manner. Each time he was found guilty, the state bar fined him just $50 and allowed him to continue practicing. Because Ramales is dead and I had gotten as much as I could out of Gary, the only person left to talk with was H.P. Williams.
He retired as Dare County's DA in the mid-90s, but he still practices federal law in eastern North Carolina. I called him on February 3rd, 2020, 30 years to the day of Stacy's murder. When he picked up, I invited him to participate in a recorded interview, but he turned me down.
Instead, he just told me he didn't have recent knowledge on the case and didn't have the case file. He wasn't sure if he should say anything about it at that point. And he did tell me that he had personal opinions about it, about Clifton, that he wasn't sure if he should share. He did tell me that what he had to say would be in Clifton's favor, but he didn't think it was appropriate to share it right now.
Our conversation only lasted a few minutes, and so for months I've been trying to reach out again via phone and email to follow up. I even went by his office in person, but he's never responded. What he told me stuck with me, though. That he now feels differently. That what he has to say would be in Clifton's favor, but he isn't sure if he should share it?
I followed up with Gary Trawick to tell him about my conversation with H.P. And Gary's reaction was the same as mine. If H.P. knows something today that he didn't know then, think about that. Just think about that. If that is in fact correct, have I got somebody who was a district attorney at the time saying, I was putting a man on death row that I didn't really think was guilty? What has he found out since that has changed his mind?
That's what I want to know. That's what I'd like to know as well. And if he has, I mean, something ought to be done about him. When I informed Clifton about my conversation with HP, he felt even more frustrated. So when you hear that, how do you react? With anger. I just feel that my life went past me when people just wanted to keep their mouth shut if they feel something ain't right.
I don't know if the FBI agents that were on that case would actually come forth and just be straightforward about what they did and what they didn't or what they made fabricated or whatever. I guess that, you know, the only other person that's got direct knowledge of all what happened is H.P. Williams. The more I looked, the more people I realized felt the same way as the old D.A. I said, man, he ain't guilty.
And I can't think of this guy's name. Mike Brandon? Mike. I never liked that cat. Every time I saw that cat, it was just something about this dude, you know. They just needed someone to tell their stories to. There was another person I thought was on the radar that was never really vetted. He was mentioned by name, you know, in some of those early stories. But it always just said that we had an alibi. But it never said what his alibi was. That's next time on CounterClock.
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.
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