cover of episode Episode 4: Bar Rats

Episode 4: Bar Rats

2020/9/24
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CounterClock

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Clifton Spencer's life and choices leading up to his conviction for the murder of Stacey Stanton are examined, highlighting his drug use and association with problematic individuals.

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Start a 30-day free trial at WalmartPlus.com. Paramount Plus is central plan only. Separate registration required. See Walmart Plus terms and conditions. Someone fatally stabbed Stacey Stanton inside her apartment on February 3rd. This was violent. It was brutal.

On February 3, 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 Counter Clock, the investigation into the murder of Stacey Stanton. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. After my interview with Gary Trawick and bizarre phone call with H.P. Williams, I started having some serious questions about the original investigation into Stacey's murder. The more people I interviewed, the more things just seemed off about pretty much everything. No one I'd spoken with up until this point believed Clifton was a killer.

And it wasn't just Clifton's friends who were expressing this. The people that now had second thoughts and maybe expressed doubt included a former Superior Court judge and the prior District Attorney. Obviously, Clifton denies he's guilty, despite taking the plea deal.

Because his interviews so far in this show have been on the phone, you may be thinking he's still incarcerated. But he's not. He was paroled in 2007 after serving 17 years of his life sentence. He's a free man now, 61 years old, and a convicted felon for second-degree murder.

Once he got out of prison, he sort of disappeared. And to find him, I searched prisoner databases for a long time. Welcome to the North Carolina Post-Release Supervision and Parole Commission. I also pestered the state's parole commission. I'm looking for an offender that would have been let out on parole in 2007. And so is there no documented history with your agency of that process?

I believe so. I mean, he was released on a life sentence in 2007, so I'm assuming it's a lifetime parole. When I finally got a telephone number for him, I called him earlier this year, and he agreed to speak with me when he learned how much research I'd done on this case.

Our interviews are recorded over the phone because Clifton's an interstate truck driver, and he's never in one place for very long. We've talked a lot during his stretches on the road. I've always liked to travel. I was a truck driver in the Army, so I decided to start driving truck again. Just being in this truck by myself, it really does gives me a whole lot of peace of mind. I think mostly what it does for me is...

it gives me a lot of peace just to be sometimes just have the privacy of my own self and what i mean by that is in the system you are never alone you know it's always someone around you 24 7. you see the other inmates or either the guards or whatever some people may say it's something like being a bit institutionalized but i look at it as a standpoint of

Being able to reflect on today, what's been going on in my life for that particular day. He has two ex-wives and an adult daughter who lives in Germany. To this day, he says they're still rebuilding their relationship. My daughter was three years old when I went in. She was 27. Let's see. When I saw her again, she was 23, 24. But I didn't think I was staying there as long as I did, by no means.

I was probably locked up around, probably about 17 years. And I spent most of that time probably in Lillington, North Carolina, at Hornet Correctional. What was the makeup of that prison? That prison, it was crowded. It has a huge sex offender population there as well because they have the schools for the sex offenders there.

Clifton says he's not a murderer, but admits that he made a lot of bad lifestyle choices in 1990, which made him an easy target to put the blame on. If I hadn't been strung out on drugs at that particular time and hanging around the people I did, I wouldn't have put myself in that position in the first place. What would you go back and tell yourself if you could speak to yourself in February of 1990?

Well, first and foremost, to keep my mouth shut, don't speak to anyone. Do not be put in a position where I'm alone with two officers that I don't know. Wait until I can get some good legal advice. From the time that I was arrested for this charge, I made a promise to myself and with God that all the things that transpired in my life to put me in this position.

I would never do them again, and I haven't. That means I stop drinking, using drugs, stop hanging out with people that do stuff like that, stop hanging out in clubs and bars. Every time we talk, one way or the other, we end up going through what he remembers from February 3, 1990. Nothing in his version of events has changed in the last 30 years.

I've compared what he's told me to the 1,700 pages of interrogation documents and transcripts in the case, and it's all the same. He never deviates.

In our interviews, I knew I had to stay objective in them. That's why I kept referencing these old documents to see if Clifton changed his story. I read through his statements to police multiple times so I'd be prepared. Remember, I started out as a newcomer to this story. In my mind, there's always been a 50/50 chance that Clifton could be a murderer or he's completely innocent. As we've grown to know one another, I have no problem asking him direct questions.

If you didn't kill Stacey, who do you think did? Mike Brandon, Stacey's ex-boyfriend. He's Clifton's original connection to Stacey.

I flipped back through my notes and the State Lab paperwork and realized, other than fingerprinting him and having two interviews, authorities never looked at Mike in depth, at least not the way they looked at Clifton.

They didn't even retrieve Mike's hair or blood to compare it to what was found at the crime scene and what was found on Stacey's body. The lab only compared Clifton's DNA to the crime scene and victim. Nobody else. Clifton doesn't remember much about Mike, other than the fact that Mike dated Stacey and they did drugs together sometimes. But Wayne Morris remembers Mike very well. Mike, I never liked that cat. Every time I saw that cat, it was just something about this dude, you know.

And I know he had some racist, racism in him, because, you know, I've seen some guys getting ready to tighten him up plenty of times. When they first mentioned that this guy used to mess with Stacey, I said, "Man, that's who killed that girl." Wayne says Mike's crowd always hung out in the downtown Manny-O-Bars, where, Wayne says, those who were black just didn't go. Except Clifton. Clifton went wherever he wanted.

I didn't party with Cliff per se. He'd come by my house sometimes, we'd get high together, whatever. But going out to party with him, I didn't ever do. He always partied downtown. I wanted to learn more about Mike, so I circled back to the stack of documents that included his statements to investigators. I needed to get a clearer picture of what exactly happened at the Green Dolphin Pub in the hours before Stacy's murder, particularly between Mike, Stacy, and Clifton.

In the weeks between the murder and Clifton's arrest, the SBI and Manteo police took a lot of statements from different people who were in and out of the bar that night. And these witnesses were a cast of characters, to say the least. First, there was Stacy, who got there between 4:30 and 5:00. Then she left briefly to go to the diner next door and eventually returned to the bar between 5:30 and 6:00.

She was said to be drinking wine coolers and hanging out for another hour or two, but eventually left upset about Mike. As we know, Mike was there too, and he said he arrived between 5:30 and 6:00. Patti Roe, his new girlfriend, was already there and hung out with Mike when he arrived. Then there's a set of siblings, David and Joni Newman. Joni and David frequented the pub and knew pretty much everyone inside. Here's their memories of what transpired that night.

Clifton Spencer? Clifton Spencer. They were in the pool room standing up against the wall. I overheard them talking about

As the night went on, Joni and David knew that Mike, Patty, and Stacy, all being in the same place, was going to cause problems. Because it was well known that drama between the three of them in the small town had reached an entirely new level.

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Mike, Patty, and Stacy all being at the Green Dolphin Pub on February 2nd, 1990 was a bad mix. Tensions were high because word had gotten out about some salacious drama between the three of them. Patty was with Mike, and Mike was dating both of them at the time, and Patty was pregnant. He had just broken up with Stacy, I think maybe a couple days before that or the day before.

Why? Patty's pregnancy and the banter between her, Stacy, and Mike at the bar was something police already knew about.

Remember, Mike told police in his first statement that Patty was pregnant, but he said he wasn't sure if Stacey knew. Well, obviously Stacey found out at the pub, and according to Joni, that's what got her so upset. Joni says Stacey was still holding out hope that her and Mike would get back together. And it's not like Mike didn't feed into that. He said that just five days before the murder, he was still sleeping with Stacey, and they'd had sex several times while he was dating Patty.

But the pregnancy changed things for Mike. He had to finally make a choice. And Joanie says that night in the pub, he chose Patty. Another witness to all of this is a woman named Susan Corrington. Susan wasn't easy to find. I actually had to door knock an entire street in Manteo to finally locate her. And it was by absolute chance that she was even home. A few minutes before I got to her door, she'd been on a bike ride. And I could have missed her by seconds.

Fortunately, that didn't happen, and when I explained what I was investigating, she agreed to do an interview. What do you remember for sure seeing or hearing in the bar that night? I had heard that Patty was pregnant, and Mike was still messing around with Stacy, and there was a lot of back and forth, and Stacy left upset. It seems like I remember Patty getting in Stacy's face, and that's why Stacy left.

Susan, Joni and David say they never expected that the next time they heard about Stacey, it would be the news that she'd been murdered. When you found out the way Stacey had been killed, what did you think?

Well, it had to be extremely personal. It did seem like for you to have that much rage on someone that you wouldn't just do that randomly. That would be something that, you know, you had to have a lot of heart in it to spend the time and the effort that was involved in killing her the way she was.

Probably one of the best witnesses in the bar on the night of February 2nd is a woman named Barbara Jean McGinnis. SBI agents and Chief Steve Day interviewed her on February 6th, the Tuesday after the murder. Now, Barbara's story is pretty lengthy. At this point in my investigation, I haven't been able to track her down, but a lot of the records I've found and some testimony from sources tells me that she's likely dead.

But I'll go through her statement that I located within the case file because it's important to hear. According to Barbara's statement from February 6th, 1990, she says she got to the bar around 7 o'clock and noticed Joni and Patty going outside together. And it looked like Patty was upset. Barbara walks over to Mike to ask him what's up with Patty and why he's two-timing both her and Stacey.

Barbara comes across to me as a really direct person in these transcripts. She wasn't afraid to tell men when they sucked. The only thing Mike said to her when she confronted him was that he could care less about Stacey. So Barbara's like, whatever, and goes to talk with Stacey at the jukebox. And right away it's clear to her that Stacey is upset because she grabs her arm and leads Barbara to the bathroom to vent.

Barbara says in between tears and drunk sentences, Stacey just goes on and on about Mike leaving her for Patty. Once again, Barbara is blunt, and she tells Stacey to forget Mike. He's a cheater and not worth her time. But Stacey just keeps on about Mike and how much she loves him, despite the fact that she says Mike hits her sometimes.

Now, this really gets Barbara fired up, and she tells Stacy again to forget Mike. He's trash, and she deserves better. The two of them go back out into the bar, and the next thing Barbara knows, Stacy is grabbing her case of wine coolers and leaving. That's when Barbara says she started hollering at Mike and most of the men in the bar for letting Stacy take off in such a vulnerable state, not even caring if she drove drunk.

One of those men getting Barbara's verbal wrath is a guy named Richard Fugate. Now, Richard is the man who I mentioned earlier this season. He actually left the bar shortly after Stacey, and he's the guy Clifton remembers being at Stacey's apartment when he was there. To be sure I did my due diligence, I attempted to contact Richard multiple times for the podcast, but he hasn't responded.

He's currently a convicted felon who was released from prison in 2017 for kidnapping and violent assault. I felt for my own safety it wasn't wise to go to his home. Either way, I have his full statement from his interview with police from February 4th, 1990, the day after the murder. Here's a voice actor to read what he provided investigators. I got to the pub around 6.30 and talked with Stacey for a bit.

She asked how my girlfriend was. Then she started talking about her problems with her ex, Mike. I shared a little more about me and my girlfriend. Then Stacey and I parted ways. Around 8:30, maybe it was 9 o'clock, she left. I kept drinking at the bar until 9:30, then left for a walk and ended up at her apartment. We talked some more, and she kept on about how upset she was with Mike.

We made our way inside, had a mixed drink in her place, and she asked me if I would go back to the bar and convince Mike to come over. I told her no. A few minutes later, a tall black guy showed up and introduced himself as Carter Suggs from Tarboro. But I'm from Tarboro and knew that this guy wasn't Carter. I think he was lying. This black guy was wearing a jacket and a collared shirt and had short hair.

He accused me of not liking black people and I started feeling real uncomfortable. So I left like five minutes after he got there. I felt weird about it though, like maybe I shouldn't have left. When I got back to the pub around 10:30, my girl had called wanting to know if I needed a ride home. I told her no and waited until the bar closed. The bartender, Don, gave me a ride home.

What's interesting to me is that Richard's statement gives him a pretty solid alibi. And just like Mike did, he threw Clifton in the spotlight for being the last person with Stacy. But if you look at it closely, Richard actually corroborates Clifton's memory. Clifton said in his interrogation that he was inside Stacy's apartment drinking with her and a white guy. This is accurate because Richard says the same thing.

Richard also states that when he left, Clifton and Stacey would have been alone for a period of time in her apartment, which again matches Clifton's version of events. So there's nothing about what Richard says that makes Clifton look like a liar about the sequence of events. What I don't know is why, according to Richard, Clifton said he was this guy named Carter Suggs and lied when he introduced himself to Richard at Stacey's.

The only thing I could find that may explain this is that maybe Clifton knew Richard knew the real Carter Suggs and was just trying to pull a prank on Richard. I honestly do not know. And nowadays, Clifton doesn't even remember this fake name thing even happening. Someone who can further back up both men's timelines of when they left the bar is Joni Newman. She remembers both Richard and Clifton leaving shortly after Stacey did.

She's also able to fill in gaps in Mike's statements about what he did after he left the bar that night. Joni says her, Mike, Patty, and two other people left the pub around 11:30 and everyone came to her house, which just so happened to be one block over from Stacey's apartment.

The distance between these two locations, Stacey's apartment and Joni Newman's house, is much easier to understand in person. There's a video tour of it on our website, counterclockpodcast.com. But basically, if you're standing outside the front door at the top of the stairs to Stacey's porch, and you walk down to ground level and go straight, maybe 200 yards to the next street over, you'd be at Joni's back door. It is super close.

According to Joni, after leaving the bar with Mike and Patty and two other people, another hour went by and everyone was at her house sitting around drinking beer. Eventually, she goes to bed and Mike and Patty fall asleep on her couch. But a few hours later, she says she woke up to loud noises. They woke me up like at two in the morning or something sometime in the morning. Mike and Patty woke me up because they were arguing loud.

And I remember hearing Mike tell her he bashed that baby's head up against the wall. Eventually, I went back to bed. Do you remember anything other than them waking you up in the middle of the night? And when you said they were arguing, what exactly were they arguing about that you can recall? I guess because she was pregnant and he didn't really want to have a baby with her. I don't know. I guess that was the reason because he wasn't very happy about it.

According to Joni, this kind of fight was typical for the couple. Mike and Patty's relationship was volatile, and everyone who knew them knew it. Mike had a very good tendency to have anger issues. I mean, he grew up mostly in prison, so that was how he was. It wasn't a good relationship. It was violent. I mean, I know that they fought, so it wasn't a good relationship.

She drank, and if she was out drinking and somebody said something she didn't like or whatever, she would fight. She wouldn't hesitate to not. She wouldn't walk away. Here's Susan Corrington again. She was an extremely volatile person, and getting physical with people was her method of dealing with that. And I knew that from the past and after that. I saw it happen kind of regularly.

She was somebody that went after drinking a lot and whatever other things she had going on, she like had a switch that would flip. What's interesting is that both Susan and Joni say that they remember the public fights like this between Mike and Patty dropped off after Stacey's murder. It seemed like, to them at least, that Mike and Patty were conscious not to draw attention to themselves. What was Patty like through all of this?

Quiet. Patty was quiet. But the couple didn't quite go into hiding either. They actually attended a police press conference the Monday after the murder. I was able to find old news footage of the presser from WAVY-TV. Several neighbors and friends decided to attend Monday's briefing. And wouldn't you know it, front and center are Mike, Patty, and Joni.

They and a few others, including the pub's owner, are crowded into Manteo Town Hall's small conference room. Joni even spoke on camera with the reporter about the police investigation that was going on. I just don't think they're telling everything they know. And I understand they have to, I guess, keep it closed on everything, but it's just hard. I asked Joni if she remembered that interview. What led you to go and be there at that press conference?

In the footage, Mike Brandon also gives a quick soundbite to the reporter. Stacey loved everybody. Stacey, she never met an enemy.

There was also one other guy included in the news footage, and his name is Ray. I knew that because in the video he's wearing a mechanic's shirt with a name tag on the left breast pocket that says Ray. Here's what he said to the news. I just feel like I have my few words to say in all this. It came across like he knew Stacey, but what he said wasn't very personal. He said, quote, I just feel like I have my few words to say in all of this, end quote.

But what did that mean? I showed Ray's picture to Susan Corrington, and she identified him as Patty's younger brother. That's Patty's little brother? Ray, yes. That's when I pumped the brakes. Why in the world was the group of people at this press conference made up of Stacy's ex-boyfriend, his new pregnant girlfriend, his new pregnant girlfriend's brother, and a bar owner? That didn't seem like a group of people you'd typically see gathered in a setting like that.

Normally, you'd expect to see Stacey's grieving family or close friends at a press conference like this, not people she had serious problems with. What's even more crazy is the longer I stared at this footage, playing it forwards and backwards on repeat, I couldn't help but notice something strange about Mike, something that just seemed completely not right.

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In the clips, Mike is sitting with his arm around the owner of the Green Dolphin Pub, comforting her. He's hunched over in obvious grief and keeps burying his face into her shoulder. What's extremely weird about this to me is that just a few seats away, sitting alone with almost no expression on her pale white face, is Mike's pregnant girlfriend, Patty Roe. She looks absolutely terrified.

Susan Corrington says an interaction she had with Mike after the press conference was unusual.

I ran into him on the sidewalk between the Green Dolphin and the Manio booksellers. And we talked about it briefly. Stacy had been found at that point. It might have even been the next day. And we were just talking about it. I asked him how he was doing. And he said, Sue, every time I close my eyes, I can see her.

And he didn't elaborate. And at the time, I didn't ask anymore. And, you know, I don't have any—it was not a conversation. It was a statement. I remember him telling me how he couldn't close his eyes for her. He would see her. It seemed natural for Mike to be grieving Stacey. But Susan says in all the time she knew him, she just felt that that kind of public display of sadness was nothing she'd ever seen from Mike before.

I asked Joni how she remembered Mike or Patty behaving after the crime. Did Patty or Mike ever talk about this again after? Not really. I mean, he always said he didn't have anything to do with it, but he didn't really discuss it a whole lot in depth. You know, it was just a strange time. Do you remember ever being interviewed by the police after the crime? I remember the...

The guy was taking me to the police station, which was on Airport Road at the time. And it was the chief of police at the time. And he said to me that he wished he'd have done certain things that he didn't do. And I was thinking, well, it's your freaking job to know what to do, you know? And that's when Joni said something to me she remembered from the morning of February 3rd. Something she doesn't think the police asked her about back in 1990.

Mike wasn't there when I got up. The potty was. Mike ended up calling my house, and he was downtown at the restaurant that was downtown at that time, and wanted to borrow my truck that day. You know, he was trying to get me awake because he knew that I had to drive for my brother-in-law that day. And I think that's what he did was call me to make sure I was awake and to see if he could borrow the truck.

And when I got up the next morning, Patty had the same clothes on. And she was not bloody or nothing like that, you know? What about Mike? Mike, I don't think he had the same hoodie on. I thought he had a different shirt on.

the next morning. Yeah, because when I got up, like I said, he was gone already. And he came back after, I don't know, after I woke up and talked to him, he come back and got the truck. What Joni remembers Mike said he did at Stacy's before calling her that morning changed everything I thought I knew about the timeline of this case.

How was that?

Next time on Counter Clock, I'll break down a completely new sequence of events leading up to Stacy's murder and explain why Mike Brandon suddenly became someone I wanted to know more about. Mike called down there and he said, come by and see me. And I was like, all right, whatever, you know. And he said, if you don't, I'll do to you what I did to her.

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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