Ep 13 of 14: The Nexus
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Back in episode five, I brought up the name Derek Guy Spruill, also known as just Guy Spruill. At that point in my investigation, Guy was just someone who I'd learned was a well-known drug dealer with a bad reputation in Williamston during the early 1990s. Guy Spruill, if there was trouble anywhere around, he was in the middle of it. He had people everywhere that were selling for him.

I pulled court records for Guy, and they showed that he kept company with Ezekiel Brown and Kenneth Williams. The two men Sandy Wagg was once told might have been with her husband Doug in the days leading up to his death in July 1991.

A direct connection between Doug and these men has never been confirmed. However, it makes sense that he might have known them because they were well-known drug dealers. And just to remind you, though Doug had gotten clean at the start of 1991, it's possible, according to his widow Sandy and his siblings, that he could have relapsed back into substance use closer to the time of his death.

If we can believe Doug's autopsy report and the information about him being seen with known drug dealers on the Friday night before he was found on the railroad tracks, then finding out as much as possible about Guy Sproul, Ezekiel Brown, and Kenneth Williams felt like an important thread to tug on. Like I mentioned before, Kenneth died over a decade ago, and his ex-wife Linda and son Kenny Jr. couldn't tell me much because they'd severed ties with Kenneth in the early 90s.

So that left me with Ezekiel and Guy to check out. Ezekiel told me during our phone call that he didn't know Doug. But if you remember, he also asked a very specific question when we spoke about Doug's death, and it caught me off guard. Do you ever remember the story of a guy being found dead on the railroad tracks in Williamston? No. No, I don't. Nobody ever talked to you about that? Um,

Not that I recall, because, you know, it's been so long ago. My memory got kind of messed up since then. So I don't recall. Did they say how he was killed?

"No, that's kind of a difficult thing. There's the belief that he may have been…" Through various sources, I've learned more and more about Ezekiel. And a lot of the information I've found doesn't make me feel great about him. For one thing, court records show that in Martin County, Ezekiel has a rap sheet for arrests related to assault, resisting police, speeding, cocaine trafficking, drunk driving, and more.

I also found a traffic ticket for Ezekiel from July 8, 1991, the same day Doug's body was found. The citation states that Ezekiel was operating a motorcycle headed out of Martin County into Bertie County, and he didn't have a valid license. There's nothing else significant about this ticket, and it was later dropped, but the date caught my eye.

In addition to Ezekiel's criminal history, Larry Howell, Tremaine Howell's father, told me that Ezekiel began to act strange after Tremaine and the girls were found dead in the Roanoke River in August of 1992. He talked to me a lot, come to my house, he sat down and talked. And we were friends. We were friends for a long time until after my son got killed and he slowly, I didn't see him.

In 2023, Ezekiel called me from Larry's cousin's phone number, which clearly indicates he still hangs out with some of Larry's relatives. But for some reason, he intentionally avoids Larry, which to me feels odd. There's also the fact that Larry said Ezekiel was connected to a shadowy organized crime group in Martin County that Larry referred to as the Big Ten. He's out here what you call the Big Ten. And the Big Ten...

The more I researched Ezekiel and tried to probe into whatever this Big Ten group was, the more I kept seeing a common pattern. It goes like this: Ezekiel would get arrested for committing a crime. He'd spend the night or a few days in jail, but then the case against him would just disappear.

One time, in 1989 for example, Ezekiel was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, but less than a month later, the entire case was dismissed. Richard Smith, the inmate and former drug dealer from Williamston, who I interviewed last episode, told me that everyone in town knew who Ezekiel was. Zeke was the man. Zeke was the man. His uncle made sure he had all the supply that he needed.

But why was he never being caught? Why was he always getting cut breaks? When you got money like that, you don't go to prison.

Whatever the reason was, there's no denying Ezekiel was valuable to someone with power. Otherwise, he would have been prosecuted for the long list of crimes he was arrested for during the 1990s. A perfect example of this is a case from April 1993 involving Ezekiel and Guy Sproul. The pair was arrested by the Roanoke-Chowan Drug Task Force for conspiracy to traffic cocaine, a pretty serious offense.

Guy was convicted and sentenced to serve 50 years in prison for that crime, but Ezekiel never served any time. One has to wonder whether somebody wanted to make sure he stayed a free man. It makes you wonder if any of the folks who were pulling the strings in Ezekiel's favor were part of the so-called Big Ten organization.

For more information, I needed to find Guy Sproul. But I quickly ran into a problem. Guy wasn't sitting in prison like I thought he'd be. Turns out he'd been released early in June 2008, after spending 15 years behind bars. I looked up every possible phone number, address, and alias for him, but came up empty-handed. Then I uncovered something truly bizarre. Guy wasn't just hard to find. He was missing.

That's right, eight months after leaving prison and returning to Williamston, Guy disappeared off the face of the earth.

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That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com/counterclock today. On February 22, 2009, a Williamston police officer responded to a 911 call from a close relative of Guy Sproul's. The caller wanted to inform police that Guy wasn't answering his phone and he hadn't been seen in over 24 hours.

I'm choosing not to say this family member's name or delineate their relationship to Guy because they agreed to speak with me on the record so long as I kept their identity anonymous. They provided police with Guy's information, even down to the make and model car he was known to drive, a 2001 black Infiniti four-door sedan. Police opened a missing persons case, but it quickly stalled. Search and search and they couldn't have him come up with nothing.

I asked, how could a person be missing in a car too? Months turned into years until finally, on the afternoon of January 13th, 2011, two years after Guy vanished, a clue turned up. Deep in a patch of woods just off Wildcat Road, a group of teenagers found a burned up car with human bones inside of it. The teens were in the remote area because they'd previously discovered the abandoned car and planned to steal the rims off of it.

And you're not gonna believe this, but the group actually played with the bones for a while before calling the Martin County Sheriff's Office to report what they'd found. Awful, I know. But Martin County Chief Deputy Drew Robinson responded to the scene the day of the discovery, and right away, he called the Medical Examiner's Office.

That afternoon, an investigator from that agency came out and collected the skeletal remains, which weren't much. Only a few ribs, a partial femur, one half of a skull, a few vertebrae, five teeth, and some foot bones were left. When the sheriff's office towed the vehicle to a warehouse and ran the VIN number, it came back as a 2001 Infiniti four-door sedan.

the same vehicle that had belonged to Guy Sproul. And since he was listed as a missing person, Drew put two and two together and assumed the remains that had been found inside were likely Guy's. Drew linked up with Williamston PD as well as Guy's family, and together the authorities showed the burned car to Guy's relatives. It didn't look like a car. It was a hot fire.

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But to be sure the remains were actually Guy, the medical examiner's office conducted an autopsy on the bone fragments. However, they hit a bit of a snag. All of the bones and teeth were so severely burned that the pathologist couldn't determine much, including who the person was, when they died, or how they'd been killed.

Additional forensic testing was done on marrow from the partial femur bone, but those DNA results didn't confirm 100% that the skeletal remains belonged to Guy. The Sheriff's Office and the Medical Examiner's Office forged ahead anyway, though. And so did Guy's family. Just a note: During my interview with Guy's relative, we flip-flopped back and forth between calling Guy by his nickname and his real first name, which is Derek.

Did you guys ever get any sort of official confirmation that it was Derek whose remains were found? Do you believe 100% that that is Derek who was in the car? The state of North Carolina declared Guy dead not long after the burned bones were examined.

The government even had a death certificate issued for him, which caused his name to be removed from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons system. According to Drew Robinson, even though the case is still technically open, no one has ever been charged with Guy's murder or the alleged arson of his corpse, much to the dismay of Guy's surviving family members, who feel they know exactly who murdered Guy. And that person is Anthony Mays Jr.,

Now, I know you're all probably wondering, who the heck is Anthony Mays Jr.? Well, I'll go into much more detail in a second. But essentially, Anthony was a known rival of Guy's around the time Guy got out of prison and returned to Williamston. So the family tried to tell law enforcement, we think it's potentially Anthony Mays Jr. who carried out this crime, but they didn't want to listen to you guys? Why do you think that was?

Anthony Mays Jr. was a major drug supplier from eastern New York in the early 2000s, who had an arm of his family's drug business deeply rooted in, of all places, Williamston, North Carolina.

Whenever he was down south, he went by the fake name Gus Rasco. Together, Anthony and his brother Antoine trafficked drugs, oftentimes between New York and North Carolina. Anthony even carried out a few murders in both states during the late 1990s and early 2000s. They were bad guys through and through.

When Guy Sproul got out of prison in 2008, his family says he immediately went back to his old ways and started selling drugs in Williamston. Then he began messing around with Anthony's girlfriend whenever Anthony was in New York. One thing led to another, and Guy's family believes Anthony put out a hit on Guy, resulting in his kidnapping and murder.

Martin County Sheriff Chief Deputy Drew Robinson actually believes this theory too, he just can't prove it. He told me as much during some of our conversations about Guy Sproul. But Richard Smith, Guy's former friend and drug dealing buddy, isn't convinced.

I don't think he did. I think the police got him here somewhere. But then I heard he was in the witness protection program also because he was sniffing on a lot of big people. What kinds of operations would Guy have known about to sniff about? Like, why would he have been a valuable person to put into witness protection or to silence? Because he was buying a lot of weight from people. He knew all the major drug dealers.

But this theory is one Guy's family rejects with a lot of certainty. Do you think it would have been possible Guy could have ever been an informant? No. I knew he wouldn't have been. He didn't like police in no way. Richard Smith's belief that Guy is hidden away somewhere with a new life and identity is hard for me to buy.

I mean, yeah, it's possible, especially since no official ID of the body in the burned-up car has ever been made, and law enforcement didn't do much to make a big deal of Guy's disappearance. But even if that were the case, it's kind of a moot point, because in 2010, Anthony Mays Jr. and his brother Antoine were federally indicted in New York for a slew of drug trafficking, racketeering, and murder charges unrelated to Guy's death.

The brothers were convicted in 2014 and remain in prison to this day. In addition to drug crimes, Anthony was convicted of orchestrating the murders of two young men from the Williamston area in 2003 and 2004. He shot one of his victims twice in the back and dumped his body in a river. The other man he killed and tossed in a ditch in rural Martin County. Guy's case remains unsolved and I didn't get the sense from Martin County Sheriff's Office that it will ever be seriously pursued.

What's interesting to me about all this, though, is one, the location where Guy's car was torched was in a patch of woods just off Wildcat Road, which I realized after looking up the address is a five-minute drive away from the spot where Doug Wagg was found dead back in 1991. I made a map showing the distance between these two locations. You can check it out for yourself on the blog post for this episode at counterclockpodcast.com or in the app if that's where you're listening now.

Two, just like in Doug's case, Guy's death involved circumstances that made it impossible for a pathologist to determine a true manner of death. So whoever killed him, if in fact he is dead, put a lot of effort into making sure he'd never be found or identified.

And three, Anthony Mays Jr. was the ringleader of a well-organized drug cartel that trafficked cocaine between New York and Williamston. I found that fact extremely unique. Federal agents who arrested Anthony and his brother in 2010 believed that his family's enterprise had been active in eastern North Carolina for decades, which lines up perfectly with what some of my sources all told me. A lot of drugs.

A lot of drugs. Oodles of it coming in from outside the area. I mean, they was getting there from New York. You know what I'm saying? We had a lot of traffic from New York to Florida. Heroin coming in from New York. Primarily, it was coming in from Texas and New York. That intersection in Williamston stayed hot with drug traffic coming through there all the time.

Anthony Mays Jr. would have been a child in the early 1990s, so too young to pay off corrupt cops or carry out killings or be involved in Doug Wag's death. But that doesn't mean people from his family's cartel, who came before him, couldn't have.

According to Richard Smith, a lot of people who were hired by drug dealers to move kilos of cocaine from one location to another were common citizens, usually folks who had substance use disorders. Most people, if they bring back some weight, a lot of weight, they ain't going to be in the car with the person. They might be driving behind that person to make sure that the drug gets...

get to the location where it's supposed to be at. Do you think it's possible that people who weren't necessarily selling drugs, or maybe were, but people that would just be used to move cars from one place to another to transport drugs? Is that something that would have happened? In the drug game, yeah, you would get awkward people. You might get an old man, an old lady. I mean, anybody that might be strung out on drugs or whatever would do anything to

Having deja vu yet certainly made me think of this clip from back in episode five. You ran the license plate number that I provided you from the citation and you didn't find any record that it exists with the state of North Carolina. Whose car is it? Sandy says they didn't have a car. Somebody close enough to let them drive their car.

And this one, also from episode five. I can't help but wonder if enterprises like the one the Mays were running might have crossed paths with Doug Wagg in 1991.

Did this drug cartel thrive for so many years because they were being helped, and therefore any deaths that could be linked back to them were ignored by law enforcement? The good old boy syndrome back then was running wild, okay? There's a lot of weird stuff that went on that always had some local person tied to it and getting paid. I'm pretty sure everybody had somebody working for them, you know what I'm saying? Or a snitch, what you call them, what you call a snitch.

All of the questions I have found myself asking in this investigation and all the secrets that seem to be buried have convinced me there are people out there who want to keep dark truths hidden. They might even be listening to this show and are actively against it.

I just got off the phone with Denise Howell, Tremaine Howell's mom, and she goes pretty regularly to the laundromat, the Rogers laundromat there in town, and she told me that somebody has taken down Doug's flyer. Somebody's rattled by it.

But even with everything I've found, it's just the beginning. Because the family who started this whole journey has big plans to get answers once and for all. An exhumation is a way to do further investigating. It's really the only thing as far as I'm concerned that is left to do to determine exactly what happened. We just want the truth.

I want to know what happened. I want the truth no matter, no matter what. That's coming up next in the season finale of CounterClock, episode 14, The Next Move. Listen right now.

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