Episode 9: New Evidence
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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 is 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. After last week's episode, now that we all know where the other characters in this story were in the late 90s, today I want to focus on what was going on with Clifton throughout the entire decade. ♪

Clifton was incarcerated at Harnett Correctional Institution in Lillington, North Carolina. Lillington is nowhere special. It's not somewhere you'd go to vacation. On a map, the city sits just off of Interstate 95, just north of Fayetteville. The prison is surrounded by woods and fields on three sides.

Across the street from the entrance, there are a few old homes, what looks like some government or industrial properties, and eventually everything drops off into thick woods along the Cape Fear River. Really, it's a good place for a prison. Water on one side, woods and a small amount of homes on the other. There's not much for miles in either of those directions. The prison compound itself takes up 30 acres and houses a medium security facility for adult men.

This is where Clifton says he served most of his life sentence before being paroled. I didn't think I was staying there as long as I did, by no means. My dad used to come visit me often, and my father, he had a real...

What was the makeup of that prison?

They were, they pretty much, it was crowded. It has a huge sex offender population there as well because they have the schools for the sex offenders there. So while in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit, Clifton was stuck passing his time with sex offenders. But this didn't defeat him. He was still fighting to get a new trial, a chance to show the state of North Carolina that he was innocent.

In 1997 and 1998, Letitia Echols from the Prisoner Legal Services nonprofit law firm was working hard to prepare for another motion for appropriate relief hearing for Clifton. This would be his second MAR hearing since 1993. It got to the point where, how could we not be able to make this case?

Letitia's task was to find new arguments to get a new trial for Clifton, arguments that were different from the ones Edgar Barnes had brought up in the 1993 MAR hearing. Basically, post-conviction law states that if you file for another MAR, you can't argue the same points you did in a previous motion. You have to show some new evidence has come to light or there's something different from the case you made before.

Like I've explained, these types of hearings don't look at a defendant's guilt or innocence like a regular trial jury would. Leticia would have to show that the court procedurally violated Clifton's right to due process, or there was some kind of error in the court's process that resulted in his conviction. A good example of that would be, for example, if the prosecution in 1990 withheld evidence from Clifton's first defense attorney.

By 1998, Letitia says she'd gathered what she felt like were solid arguments to where she was confident in filing a motion to ask for another MAR hearing. She said by that point, even Stacey Stanton's family members didn't believe Clifton was the person who murdered Stacey. They didn't believe that Clifton killed their daughter. Her parents were saying Clifton didn't kill her.

you know, that should speak volumes, but it didn't. In March of 1998, a judge in Dare County's Superior Court granted Letitia's motion and Clifton got another hearing. Letitia argued that while Clifton had been in prison and when he was arrested, evidence existed that implied someone else was guilty of the crime.

This is the exact example I gave you a few minutes ago. The argument accuses the prosecutor in 1990, H.P. Williams, of withholding what's called exculpatory evidence. The evidence Letitia said was withheld from Clifton and his first defense attorney was sworn testimony from two women who were inside of the Green Dolphin Pub on February 2nd, 1990.

And these are women we actually already know: Dawn Beauchamp and Barbara McGinnis. Letitia had tracked these women down and gotten them to sign affidavits. Barbara's statement said that Mike Brandon and Patti Roe had motive in 1990 to want to harm Stacey. And Mike's family members were protecting the couple.

Barbara swore that the couple had verbally fought with Stacey in the bar and that in the years after the murder, Mike's sister Tina, the person who'd originally found Stacey's body, yeah, Tina had threatened Barbara to keep quiet about the argument. Barbara said that Tina told her that if she talked about the threats Patty made to Stacey, quote, it would not be safe for her in Naneo, end quote.

Barbara told the court that she didn't feel comfortable coming forward with this information about Tina threatening her until after she moved away from the Outer Banks. The second witness, Don Beachum, swore that she heard Patty threatened to kill Stacey that night in the bar.

Parts of these women's statements in 1998 were reflected in their original interviews with investigators in 1990, but Letitia argued their original interview transcripts were never provided to Clifton's first defense attorney.

Essentially, Leticia argued that because the prosecution withheld these women's statements from Clifton's trial attorney, prosecutors violated Clifton's rights. It's called withholding exculpatory evidence, also known as a Brady Rule violation.

In legal proceedings, the Brady Rule states that a prosecutor is required to disclose any evidence favorable to the accused. In other words, any evidence that goes towards negating a defendant's guilt and would be something that would reduce their potential sentence.

Letitia argued, if Clifton had been aware of what these women said, it would have greatly affected his decision of whether or not to take a no contest plea, and he would never have agreed to it. Unfortunately, in the end, the judge disagreed.

He determined that Barbara's statements in 1998 were different in many respects from what she'd told the SBI agents in 1990. Essentially, he said this discredited her because her stories had changed. He said the same thing about Dawn. On top of that, he determined that even if the women's original interview transcripts from 1990 had been provided to Clifton's first defense attorney, they would quote,

The judge ended his ruling by saying nothing these women said would have affected the voluntariness of Clifton accepting a plea deal. The judge said that Clifton made his decision on his own free will and that he knew what he was doing. He denied the motion for appropriate relief.

Clifton says based on his experience up until that point in the criminal justice system, he wasn't surprised by the judge's ruling against him. I don't have a lot of confidence in our American judicial system. And you start to get more and more over the years, you start to see more and more how it doesn't work.

Right after Clifton's second MAR was denied, the North Carolina Court of Appeals declined to review his case.

All of this was a huge blow to Clifton, but there was one positive that emerged. And that was that Letitia had been successful in making sure physical evidence in Stacey's case was preserved. You see, while preparing for the MAR hearing, Letitia had filed a motion to stop any entity from destroying the case evidence, and a judge granted it. This one action would prove to be pivotal for the next phase of Clifton's fight.

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After Letitia Echols reviewed Clifton's case file and what little information she'd received from the SBI, she realized that the DNA from the hair samples found on Stacey's body was never compared to Mike, Patty, or any other potential suspects in the case. She wanted to make sure that that evidence was never destroyed.

The court ruled in her favor and ordered the Dare County Sheriff's Office, Manteo Police, and the SBI to preserve the samples until DNA testing improved. Letitia's hope in '98 was that the evidence would one day be able to clear Clifton entirely. While that forensic effort was put on hold, waiting for science to catch up, Clifton tried one last time to convince higher courts to give him a new trial.

In January 1999, he took his fight to the next level and filed a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court of Eastern North Carolina. The habeas motion argued that Clifton's detention in prison was unlawful. It's a common legal move for people seeking relief from their conviction. But due to some confusion and miscommunication, Clifton missed the deadline to file his motion by one day. Just one day.

Because of that, the court deemed his petition untimely and they rejected it. In 2001, the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the untimeliness ruling. Now, Clifton didn't know this at the time, but that same year, 2001, Mike Brandon was paroled from state prison after serving three years of what was supposed to be a 10-year sentence.

Mike's prison sentence was determined when he pled guilty to all of those burglary charges from the early 90s, but for some reason, he was let out early. According to all of the Department of Correction records I was able to find, Mike never went back into the prison system in North Carolina. He remained a free man until his death in 2010.

According to his friends and obituary, he died alone in a single room he was renting at an inn in downtown Manteo, two streets away from Ananias Dare Street. Susan Corrington, one of Mike's friends and a woman who was in the Green Dolphin Pub the night before Stacey's murder, told me that Mike's body was so eaten up with hepatitis and cirrhosis after years of substance abuse that she had to become a sort of caretaker for him.

In his last moments, Susan says that Mike was pitiful. I haven't gone after Mike for comment for this show, obviously because I can't. We'll never know what secrets may have died with him regarding information he could have known about Stacey. Or if you think about what I talked about in the last episode, what Mike could have possibly known about Denise Johnson's murder.

What my attention is now focused on is figuring out if what was done to Clifton can be remedied and figure out what can still be done to get to the truth of who really murdered Stacey. And it's really the year 2002 that the biggest changes happen regarding Stacey's case and Clifton's legal post-conviction fight. That year, the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence received an application from Clifton.

This organization works to identify and investigate credible claims of innocence. Their staff members and attorneys work to educate policymakers, the public, and law enforcement about factors that contribute to wrongful convictions. After vetting his application at length, the center agreed to take on Clifton's case. The attorney who started working with him right away was Christine Mumma.

- Clifton applied with us in 2002, end of 2002.

I think we got his, we have a pretty lengthy questionnaire, which is somewhat of a screening tool because some people who are guilty just won't take the time to fill that out. Cliff returned his right away. You have to give a release so that we have permission to access any files he has from prior attorneys. And I think Clifton's case was like one of the first that

I really got into the meat of the case and became pretty captivated with Cliff's case early on. And I'll just start out by telling you that I'm completely biased and I think he's innocent.

After just one phone interview with Christine, I learned so much about the investigation and Clifton. I decided to fly up to North Carolina and speak with her in person. The first things we talked about were some of the problems she saw in the initial investigation into Stacey's murder that led to Clifton's conviction. Well, the huge red flag was, I mean, I think there's no question there was ineffective assistance at counsel. There's several names that come up

over and over again in cases that we see. And several of the people who were investigators from the SBI, their names come up in a number of cases. Romulus Murphy is another name that comes up a lot. There was no investigation by the defense. Then you can't have confidence in anything that was done by anybody because it's never been really looked at.

Christine says she met with Clifton frequently to discuss the case. She knew they were up against tough odds because the case had already been through so many post-conviction legal proceedings. Those tries and fails before could work against them. When we get a case that's already gone through post-conviction filings, we're really limited because the post-conviction law is very strict and the entire court system is based on finality.

So the rules for post-conviction are if you've raised an issue before, you can't raise it again. And if something was available at the time you raised those issues, then you're barred from raising it. So there's a lot of procedural bars. So we knew Cliff's case was procedurally barred and we were going to basically have to solve the crime and identify the true perpetrator to exonerate him.

So that's what she set out to do. Starting with the crime scene, Christine reviewed the reports about what evidence had been collected. She had a lot of questions about the accuracy of the SBI's documentation of their investigation. She, along with some experts, reviewed the crime scene photos that were available, as well as the SBI lab reports in the case. They established some basic facts about what the evidence really showed happened and how Stacey's killer had struck.

That crime scene, you know, whoever was there, they were covered in blood. That was personal. That was a personal attack. The post-mortem slices of her breast and her vaginal area, that is very personal. It was clear that she was attacked while she was standing there.

And her shoes were on because of the way the blood had dropped onto the shoes. So somebody took her clothes off and left their skin cells there.

on the clothing. She didn't take her own clothes off. It started with her standing because the drop is directly down on her sneaker. So the way the drop of blood fell and had gravity working against it, it wasn't a splatter. It was a drop. So that's what leads me to believe that she was standing at the time.

Certainly the way the clothes were removed and they had blood on them. There were smears. Whoever was removing the clothing was bloody. The blood is likely all her blood. You know, she may have fought back. The paper towel was particularly interesting to us because once she was attacked, she didn't move. I mean, she was in that living room. So whoever put that paper towel in the kitchen...

That's them wiping their hands, and that's a great source for skin cells. Studying pictures of the crime scene wasn't enough, though. Christine wanted a forensic testing lab to get their hands on the actual evidence. So, for months in 2003, she wrote letters and coordinated with the Dare County Sheriff's Office and District Attorney Frank Parrish to locate the evidence.

Frank passed away in 2013, but from 1994 until his death, he was the acting district attorney in Dare County. Frank worked under H.P. Williams as an assistant DA during Clifton's arrest and conviction, so he was familiar with the case. Christine wanted Frank to give her access to the SBI's full file, as well as the evidence that was supposed to be in storage.

After a few months of emailing back and forth, Frank agreed, and in January 2004, a judge approved a request for more DNA testing to be done. Christine was the only person who'd come this far. She was closer than ever to getting some scientific answers.

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According to documents, in early 2004, the sheriff's office was able to locate and unearth the physical evidence that had been tucked away in storage.

Christine was eager to have a lab compare DNA from the items of evidence at the crime scene to other persons of interest in the case. She asked the DA to request search warrants to retrieve DNA samples from Mike Brandon and Patty Rowe. Christine felt the fact that this hadn't already been done was inexcusable.

She believes the investigators from the SBI and local agencies in 1990 purposefully targeted Clifton as a suspect because he was black. The forensic analysis, the one that really sticks in my mind is the hairs, right? So you have hairs in her hands, hairs on her body, and...

Clifton Spencer is their suspect, so he's African-American. So if the hairs don't look African-American, well, there's no reason to test them because that's not what we're looking for. So it's the perfect example of tunnel vision in an investigation where if the evidence, they didn't want to test anything that was going to destroy their case against Cliff, and they absolutely had tunnel vision there.

that it was the black man who killed the white woman. It was a racist approach to investigation that then led to tunnel vision in the investigation. But there was no changing the past. Christine knew that this go-around, the science had to get it right, and hopefully it would. She was so eager to get Mike's DNA sample that while she waited for the search warrants to be approved for his cheek swabs, she went dumpster diving. You know, when you take...

trash to your driveway, you know, it's not considered your property anymore. So went through some bags of his garbage, looking for anything that might have DNA on it. And

You know, the thing is, you don't know who came over and had beer. And so it's a lot easier to go through a DA and say, yeah, let's get a cheek swab so we know exactly where that DNA has kind of come from. But that didn't happen, so you had to go do it yourself. It eventually happened. I dumpster dove before Frank Parrish agreed to do the DNA testing. ♪

According to Christine, it took a considerable amount of time to coordinate and locate the physical evidence. And the time it had taken to get a judge to agree more testing should be done, to then executing search warrants for Mike and Patty's DNA, it was January 2005. And Christine had been working with Clifton for nearly three years.

During that time, Clifton went before the state parole board twice, once in March 2001 and again in March 2003. Each time, the board denied him parole. In March 2004, Frank Parrish wrote a letter to the board members specifically addressing Clifton's case. In it, he wrote, quote,

"My familiarity with this case persuades me to the conclusions that it would have been extraordinarily difficult to convince 12 jurors beyond a reasonable doubt of Mr. Spencer's guilt because the quality and quantity of evidence available to the state were not particularly strong. I understand that Mr. Spencer has sedulously complied with inmate rules and regulations and received no infractions in the last 10 years.

End quote.

That letter alone spoke volumes. Having an active DA write to the parole board stating that a convicted murderer who took a plea deal would likely have never been found guilty by a jury if he'd actually gone to trial and therefore should be paroled is not something that happens often.

But even after the North Carolina Parole Board got this letter, they continued to deny Clifton's release. He remained incarcerated and his case dragged on. It wasn't stalling, though. In fact, by early 2005, Christine and Frank Parrish finally began seeing the fruits of their search warrants for Mike and Patty's DNA. ♪

According to the probable cause statements for these searches that were signed in January 2005, Patty had actually been talking months before authorities in North Carolina came to her door wanting her DNA. The probable cause statement says that in August 2004, Patty had actually provided information about Stacey Stanton's murder. Patty told authorities in August 2004 that she believed Mike killed Stacey.

In 2004, Patty had been divorced from Mike for five years. She remarried one of Mike's old coworkers, a guy named Ernest Moore, and they were living away from the Outer Banks. Patty said she, her teenage son Mike Jr., and Ernest were currently hiding from Mike because they feared for their lives.

Remember, at the time, Mike hadn't died yet. He wouldn't die until 2010. So Patty, in 2004, very well may have still had a reason to fear him. Patty stated there had been one time during their relationship that she actually accused Mike of killing Stacey and he beat her for it.

She went on to recant her 1990 statements and instead now said that on the morning Stacey could have been killed, Mike left Joni Newman's house at 5.30 in the morning, not 7 in the morning. She said that he told her he was going to the downtown diner. But Patty said Mike was gone for several hours and she didn't know where he was.

She said that the information she initially gave to the SBI in 1990 about Mike being at Joni's until 7 in the morning was untrue. She lied for Mike. Patty said she would be willing to swear to this new information in an affidavit, but only if the police arrested Mike and put him into custody.

Now, though this information came directly from the probable cause statement, I wanted to hear this story from Patty herself. So once again, I tried to find her. I traveled back to North Carolina in person and this time set out to visit several addresses that came up for her. They were all located in the same small town in the central part of the state. The first house my husband and I checked out was the elderly parents of one of Patty's recent ex-boyfriends.

We pulled into the gravel driveway and saw an unkempt home with a tarp flapping on the roof. There were tools, bits of trash scattered, all in the front yard, and several inoperable vehicles parked wherever there was space. Do not go outside, okay? Okay. This address didn't look promising, but all of my research pointed to it being tied to Patty. I walked up a makeshift metal ramp that looked like it had been installed for wheelchair access. I was looking for, um, or Patricia...

I didn't know if they live here or temporarily have lived here. This is an address that came up for them. The old woman that answered the door was in bad health and was hooked up to a rolling oxygen tank. A cat zoomed by the bottom of the hose where it connected to the tank, and in that moment, I felt a lot of compassion for her. In between her coughs and mumbled words, the only thing she could tell me was that her son and Patty weren't really together anymore, but Patty still came around.

In fact, she said Patty had been by the house the day before. I asked her where I could find Patty now, and she directed me to a convenience store less than a mile away where Patty worked as a clerk. So I quickly got back into our car and we drove to the store.

Hi, I was wondering if Patricia was working today. Patty. No. No? Okay, cool. I've been trying to talk with her. You've been trying to what? I've been trying to talk with her, get a hold of her. I can get a message to her. Yeah, okay. I'm going to leave this for her. Okay. If you would, that would be really great. Probably by 2, 2.30 I'll talk to her. Thanks. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Bye.

All I could do now was wait. And I hope that Patty, if you're out there listening to this, you give me a call. In addition to the information about Mike that Patty provided in 2004, Christine and DA Frank Parrish also had testimony from one of Stacey's sisters. This sister declined to participate in the podcast, but what she said in 2004 was that she believed Mike was Stacey's murderer too.

She said that the surviving members of the Stanton family were so convinced that Clifton was innocent that they fully supported a reinvestigation of the case. So throughout 2005, Christine and the Center on Actual Innocence had the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Lab, as well as LabCorp's services, perform additional DNA comparison tests on the physical evidence that still existed.

But a big problem was that by that point, the evidence was in really bad shape. According to documents, when the boxes from storage were opened, items of evidence were mislabeled and had deteriorated. It was determined a few critical items like Stacy's bloody sweatpants and underwear were actually missing. They were just inexplicably gone.

Some of the plastic bags containing evidence had holes in them, and one bag and two boxes had been destroyed before Letitia Echols' motion to preserve the evidence was granted in 1998. Here's Christine to explain more. A lot of the evidence that we tested, we did not get complete results because the evidence was not stored properly.

So we had contamination and degradation from the storage process. It's not just what you collect, it's how you keep it afterwards. So how it's packaged,

where it's kept and what the temperature is where it's kept. Clearly, they didn't do a very good job of tracking where the evidence was because there was things that were missing. It was a plea case. So the advantage of a plea case is all the evidence should be together with law enforcement, right? If you get a trial and some of it's admitted into evidence at trial, then some of it's going to the clerk's office and then it has to go back to law enforcement. You have more

movement of the evidence, which increases the chances of something being lost. In this case, he pled guilty. Everything that was collected should have been together in one place. But it wasn't. It wasn't. Despite this, Christine carried on, and the labs ran a number of DNA tests. What they were about to find would answer some questions. The paper towel also was a partial. It was a mixture that had a partial that did not exclude Patty Rowe.

and create entirely new ones. I lost almost 20 years of my life, and this ain't no game. We'll break it all down next week on the season finale of CounterClock. Don't miss next week's episode because I'll unveil an update that involves you, the listener, and some of the highest politicians in North Carolina. The advantage of a podcast is word gets out.

Somebody is out there that knows more than they've said, and maybe that will happen with us. Plus, I'll explain why after 30 years, the state of North Carolina is still trying to take away a big part of Clifton's life. I'm not the only one, and I definitely won't be the last, because the state does, if they ever get in your pocket, they try to stay in your pocket.

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. Voters know that bad weather, like storms, lightning, and wind, can turn a fun day on the water into a challenge.

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