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This is episode three, The Damage. At 1:30 in the afternoon on July 8th, 1991, roughly 11 hours after Doug was hit on the railroad tracks, a forensic pathologist named Dr. Lawrence Harris conducted his autopsy. Dr. Harris is deceased now, but back in the 1990s, he was one of three forensic pathologists employed by the East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine.
That facility was located in Greenville, a city about 45 minutes west of Williamston. The other two pathologists on staff with Dr. Harris were Dr. Paige Hudson and Dr. Mary Gilliland. Mary is the only one of this trio who is still alive. M-G-F Gilliland, G-I-L-L-I-L- During her interview with me, Mary explained that she and her coworkers were not employees of the North Carolina office of the chief medical examiner.
Rather, they were subcontractors who offered autopsy services to the state. Andy Holliman, the Williamston police detective who'd poked around on the railroad tracks and found potential evidence of a crime, knew Dr. Gilliland and Dr. Harris well. That's where all of our bodies went for autopsies, and any traumatic death like that had to go for an autopsy.
Like I mentioned at the end of the last episode, Andy took it upon himself to get on the phone with Dr. Harris right after Sheriff Jerry Beach kicked him out of his office and rejected Andy's help.
Undeterred by the sheriff's actions, Andy called Dr. Harris to tell him about the strange things he'd discovered at the railroad tracks. Things he felt pointed to a possible murder and a plot to cover it up. He's the medical examiner. He's got to be an investigator, except he's taking all of his clues from the body.
Well, he relies on those investigators and those county coroners and all to give him all of the clues from the scene, all of those body clues to make his determination. And I knew he didn't have all of it. So I called him up, talked to him, told him where the evidence was at, if he wanted to see it. And he could call Sheriff Beach and ask for it, request it, subpoena it if he needed to.
To clear up any confusion, because you might hear the term "coroner" referenced by a few folks, in 1991, there was a county coroner in Martin County named Royce Ward. Royce also provided information to Dr. Harris after Doug's body was found. But much of what he told the pathologist was vanilla and incorrect. For example, Royce got the name of the town where Doug died wrong. Here's Andy Holloman again. I don't think Royce ever went to the scene.
And I'll tell you why. If you read the reports, Royce's report talks about the body being located just outside of Jamesville. He took information on the phone at 2.30 or 3 o'clock in the morning and didn't get it all right. He obviously was not at the scene or he'd have known it was a long way from Jamesville.
I can't know for sure if Royce Ward went to the railroad tracks or not, or where exactly his information came from, because he's now dead. But if I had to guess, I'd say whatever facts he was operating with likely came from Martin County Sheriff Jerry Beach. Because you see, Jerry and Royce weren't just professional acquaintances. They were tight. Like, you scratch my back, I scratch your back. Kind of tight.
Jerry Beach had been the county coroner when he was chief deputy of the Sheriff's Department. When that sheriff retired and Jerry was installed and then won the election, you can't hold two elected offices in North Carolina. So he had to give up that county coroner's position. So he chose a very nice man, Mr. Royce Ward, who was an insurance agent here in town.
to fill his unexpired term as county coroner and who then turned around and ran for coroner and won the election. He didn't have to have any medical experience. He didn't have to have any investigative experience. He relied on the investigator of the law enforcement agency basically to tell him, "You need to send this one on for further investigation or
I've already talked to the doctor or the coroner would talk to the doctor and say, okay, this is probably natural causes. As a doctor, it's called signed a death certificate. We'll release the body to the funeral home.
The coroner system has since been abolished in North Carolina for the very reason Andy just explained. Coroners and law enforcement were influencing one another way too much. Any direct work product of Royce Ward's is long gone, but I was able to get my hands on Doug's full autopsy report, death certificate, and autopsy investigative summary report from the medical examiner's office.
Those three documents explain everything you need to know about what Dr. Harris observed and concluded regarding Doug's death. For starters, Dr. Harris' big takeaway was that Doug's body had been horribly disfigured by the train. He used phrases like multiple fractures of the skull, trunk, and extremities, avulsion of the brain, lacerations of nearly all viscera. But despite all this trauma, Doug wasn't dismembered.
A fact that surprised me when I first read the autopsy report. Most of the time, train strikes are pretty awful. Gruesome, actually. There's typically not much left of a person. But Doug was mostly intact. And that's because of the way the train traveled over him after the initial strike. According to Dr. Harris's findings, after the train initially made contact with Doug's body, he sort of went under the engine. Then the rail cars traveled over him.
Essentially, he'd gone from being draped across the rails to being turned parallel to them, and in a way, somewhat protected. After impact, Doug's body moved 50 to 75 yards down rail before coming to final rest. Nearly all of his internal organs had been damaged. His arms and legs were broken, and his skull had been crushed on one side by the train's steel wheel. That head injury forced his brain to dislodge from his skull.
At the time of the strike, Doug was fully clothed in a blue T-shirt, blue jeans, and underwear. However, after getting run over, his pants and underwear were noted as being torn, shredded, and tangled around his ankles. His shirt also had lots of tears in it. He had no shoes on his feet.
The question for Dr. Harris wasn't so much how Doug had died, it was how he'd come to be on the railroad tracks in the first place. Had any events preceded his death that the trauma from the train could have erased or made indistinguishable from his other injuries? If someone had put him there, still alive, intending for the train to kill him, that would be an act of murder.
If someone had killed him elsewhere and then dumped his corpse on the tracks hoping to cover up his death, that would have also been a crime. But if Doug had gotten there on his own, fallen asleep or decided to take his own life, well, that wasn't a criminal matter. Tragic, especially for his young family, but there would be no crime to investigate. To try and get clarity on the matter, Dr. Harris turned to Doug's toxicology results for more insight.
What he discovered is that Doug didn't have any alcohol in his system when he died. The only ethanol levels in his body were the result of early onstage decomposition, which meant he hadn't been drunk or passed out on the railroad tracks in the hours leading up to his death.
The lack of alcohol in his system caused Dr. Harris to shy away from calling what had happened to Doug an accident. But Doug did have trace amounts of cocaine in his system, indicating he'd used the drug at some point prior to his death. But exactly when was unclear. In the end, Dr. Harris didn't find the level of cocaine in Doug's system to be so high enough to really be noteworthy, much less render him incapacitated or kill him.
These conclusions left Dr. Harris in a predicament. He didn't have a clear understanding of what had happened to Doug. He knew he hadn't been stabbed or shot, but determining if Doug had gotten injured some other way and been unconscious on the tracks before being hit by the train, that was much harder to determine. Impossible, really. Dr. Harris didn't know for sure if Doug was alive or near death when the train hit him.
He found it extremely odd, though, that Doug did not move when the train's horn blared multiple times. So, stuck on what to do, Dr. Harris did what I hope most pathologists would do in this situation. He turned to one of his colleagues for input, Dr. Mary Gilliland.
He and I talked about this case at the time because it was something that we were going to call undetermined. Why so? Because we didn't have good information about what happened. Dr. Harris was not sure how the man came to be lying across the tracks, nor could he tell whether he was conscious, unconscious, or asleep. He and I were in agreement about that.
Ultimately, Dr. Harris ruled Doug's manner of death undetermined, which left the door open for it to possibly be changed down the road if any further information was discovered that explained how Doug ended up on the train tracks. That ruling meant it was still to be determined whether the train was the only factor that contributed to Doug's death.
As you all know, though, from listening to previous seasons of this show, an undetermined manner of death unspokenly releases law enforcement from their responsibility to investigate said incident as a crime. Which is what Martin County Sheriff's Office did. They just stopped investigating, much to the dismay of Doug's family. You know, our brother was a human being.
You know, no matter what he did to anybody at any time, he didn't deserve what he got. I think it was just negligence on their part or just stupidity or they just didn't care because he was from someplace else and they didn't know him. They just pretty much brushed it under the rug like he didn't matter. It hurts to have that undetermined because that to me says, again, we don't care.
At the end of Doug's autopsy report, Dr. Harris wrote several paragraphs explaining why the circumstances surrounding Doug's death were so peculiar and merited further investigation. Here's Andy Holloman reading an excerpt from the document. In considering this information from Detective Holloman and attempting to integrate it with prior information, I am unable to come to a clear reconstruction of my own as to what transpired at the scene of death.
It is, of course, possible that Wagg was physically assaulted at or about the scene where his body was subsequently struck by the moving train. Such a reconstruction could be built on the observed apparent discrepancies of distance between where spectacles and hair deposits were found as compared to the engineer's account of the site of the fatal impact.
Dr. Harris concluded that he believed Doug was alive when he was hit by the train. How he got on the tracks, he didn't know. If Doug was conscious or unconscious before being hit, he didn't know. That was the police's job to find out. The doctor's final words were, quote, the reconstruction of injuries received just prior to death, if they existed in fact, and those received by the train at the time of death would be very difficult, end quote.
Dr. Mary Gilliland agrees with her former colleague's closing comments. I think the big question is, how did Doug Wagg end up on the tracks? Guess what? We can't tell you. What else could law enforcement have provided that may have made this determination a bit easier for Dr. Harris? Having a better idea how he ended up on the tracks.
All these years later, though, Mary still finds the circumstances surrounding Doug's death puzzling, especially considering the information Randy Jones, the train's engineer, provided about that fateful early morning in 1991. It was obvious that this individual was deceased for quite some time and had been placed there. Somebody went to a lot of effort to get it down here out of the middle of nowhere so nobody would see it.
If I'm a person that is laying or near the tracks on a railway, and I'm not moving, even with that loud of a horn blaring towards me... So it would be your opinion, then, that something has made the person unable to respond to that horn? Exactly. That position of what was described as the scene circumstances...
where the engineer could see him and the body did not move. That's fairly unusual for someone who is only asleep and for him to be so far off the beaten track. That sticks out? That really sticks out. If you had done this exam, would you have asked law enforcement?
Hey, what's going on with this? Are you going to look into the timeline? I probably would have. And whether I've gotten any farther than Dr. Harris is... I can't know. I can't know. A few days after the autopsy, Doug's family flew his body back home to Tennessee. We had to bring him back here. There was no way I was going to let him be buried in North Carolina.
While they made arrangements for his burial, the same nagging thoughts that had gripped Dr. Harris took hold of Doug's siblings and parents. Why had Doug been on that stretch of railroad tracks? Had someone put him there? Was this just Doug being Doug on another one of his benders? Or was it something else?
At the time, the family didn't have the toxicology results yet to tell them there was no alcohol and only trace amounts of cocaine in Doug's system. Still, everyone in his family internally mulled over their own theory. I felt like he may have done something to cause this, you know, just in the... And I feel horrible for saying that because it doesn't really matter what he did. It doesn't make it right.
Maybe he took something that didn't belong to him and somebody tried to teach him a lesson and maybe it went too far. I do believe it was probably drug-related. Maybe he owed somebody money. I don't really know. But I think he got mixed up with the wrong crowd and somebody wanted something from him that he didn't have and I think they killed him. And I always wonder, just before Doug died,
Out loud, something everyone agreed on was that Doug would have an open casket.
I remember my dad asking the funeral director after we had went and, you know, made arrangements and everything, asking the funeral director, well, can we see him? I wanted to see him, apologize to him for not being the best dad there was. It was strange for him to have been hit by a train, been run over by a train, but yet we had an open casket. I remember there being some blemish or something, you know, on his face, but I mean...
Other than that, he just looked normal. He just looked like a person that had passed away. He didn't look like a train had just ran him over by any means. It wasn't until 2021, decades after the final shovels of dirt were tossed onto Doug's grave, that Melissa began to think long and hard about what really could have happened to her older brother. She and her siblings lived their entire adult lives without clear answers.
It was after a talk with her mom and dad about Doug's case and not getting much information that Melissa started doing her own research. Her first stop? Obtaining and reading Doug's autopsy report and going to the Martin County Sheriff's Office. The more I found out about it, the more it didn't make sense.
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So what are these binders full of? These are pretty much my paper records of everything that I found. To say that Melissa and I are kindred spirits in many ways is an understatement. I tried to find out who his friends were, you know, got his marriage license called, you know, just contacted different people.
When she started her journey for Answers in 2021, one of the first people she connected with was Drew Robinson, the chief deputy of the Martin County Sheriff's Office.
Very nice, you know, welcomed us in, but he had no clue about the case. You could tell he didn't really want to come out and say, "I don't have anything," because I think he was kind of baffled about the fact that they didn't have anything. And at that point, I realized that, you know, he doesn't really have much. He didn't know my brother. You know, he was a child at the time, a teenager.
It's true. Drew was a young man in the early 1990s. A young man who was a protege of, wait for it, my dad. I'm Francis D'Ambra. Drew came to me at 16 as a cadet because we introduced a cadet program to try to get young people involved in that law enforcement role.
Do you hear that? That's the screeching sound of my life coming full circle. And also a squeaky door shutting somewhere in the background of Drew's interview.
I think you've moved out of state and it was just odd that our paths have crossed again in this way. Odd indeed. Unfortunately, Melissa discovered pretty quickly that she wasn't going to be able to glean any new information about Doug's case from MCSO. Drew just didn't have anything to give her, except some directions. I think they wanted to come to the location where the accident occurred and...
Just put up a little memorial, spend some time, reflect. I was able to locate a pretty good location of where it happened at. And we made arrangements, set a date for them to come down, and I took them out to the location that I, based on the reports, that I believe that the accident took place. ♪
The report he's referring to is Doug's autopsy report. There's a brief section in the document that gives a loose description of where the train strike occurred. And because Drew grew up in Martin County, he knew exactly where to take Melissa. The trip to the tracks was a kind gesture, but for Melissa, it wasn't enough. She wanted more from MCSO.
In that conversation, he also told me, too, that he was only going to be able to really work on it like 25% of the time. And I thought, you know, that's not enough. He's only got 25% of his time to do it, and I can understand that, right? Resources, I get it. People are still committing murders. There's still crimes out there. But guess what? I'm single. You know, I have the time. I work from home. I mean, I just, I literally dug in. I worked full-time, full-time.
During the day, and I did this at night, on the weekends, I mean, as much as I could. When she got Doug's medical records and photos of his body post-mortem from the ME's office, she immediately had questions about Dr. Harris' pathology findings. There were many things that didn't add up to her. It says, states in there that there was not enough blood at the scene. You know, there wasn't a whole lot of blood at the scene.
I mean, how is that even possible? If he knows 100% for sure that he was still alive, why is that? I don't see anything in any of this that clearly says he was alive. For the last few years, the more Melissa has dug around and learned, the more disturbed she and her family have become by little details. Like the fact that Dr. Harris, back in 1991, was unable to draw much blood from Doug's corpse.
The family interpreted the lack of blood in Doug's cardiovascular system and a lack of blood on the railroad ties meant he had to have been killed elsewhere, then was dumped on the railroad tracks. Andy Holliman, the Williamston police detective who first raised alarm bells about Doug's case to Dr. Harris, was also convinced that's what had happened. That was always troubling to me, was why there was so little blood. There was not a tremendous amount of damage done to his body.
He was pretty much intact. So where did all the blood go? Somewhere there was a pile of blood that we didn't know where it was at. To help unpack this issue and better understand other things about the damage to Doug's body, I brought in a professional. It's Dr. Kent Harshbarger. Some of you listening might recognize Kent's voice. He's the forensic pathologist who reviewed the John Wells case for me a few years ago when I was producing Counter Clock Season 4 in Arcadia, Florida.
John's case was another undetermined death that many people believe was a murder cover-up. Kent is someone I trust, and he's also great at what he does. I had him take a look at everything in Doug's case file, including photos of Doug's body post-mortem at the railroad tracks, before he was transported to Dr. Harris for an autopsy. Kent is trained to see what no one else can, and he has a great way of explaining why some things aren't as suspicious as they may seem to a layperson.
He says the blood that should have been in Doug's arteries, heart and veins wasn't left behind at some unknown crime scene somewhere. It was actually still in Doug's body, just not in the places it should have been. The blood is still retained in very small vessels versus larger vessels. And then there's no pressure. But because it's in the small vessels and there's no pressure, it's not going anywhere.
Basically, the moment Doug's brain was a bulge from his skull, he died. Then a phenomenon took place that occurs in everyone who sustains a catastrophic head injury. The blood tends to immediately pool in soft tissue areas. So a lot of the severe head injury cases are relatively mild.
less bloody. Even at autopsy, we don't see the bleeding because there's such a dilation throughout the body that blood pools in small soft tissue areas. So it's not contained within a vascular structure.
In other words, there was no reason for blood to be outside of Doug's body, splayed on the tracks. He'd really only suffered that large gash in his head and some other cuts and tears. But because he was no longer alive when he sustained those smaller wounds, they didn't bleed. And thus, the railroad tracks weren't covered in his blood.
As soon as that brain injury, the skull fractures, the brain's removed from inside the skull, the vessels dilate, so there's not a lot of pressure left to cause bleeding. Something else Melissa wondered about was why her brother's clothing was so severely shredded when he was found. His jeans and underwear were pulled down around his ankles, exposing his thighs, genitals, and torso. His shirt was nearly gone too, just pieces of it were hanging around his neck and arms.
We were both struck by the fact that in the photographs of Doug's mangled body on the railroad tracks, he's barefoot. However, in his autopsy report, it states that he arrived at the morgue wearing white Reebok tennis shoes on both of his feet. Kent and I were stumped by this glaring discrepancy.
It makes you wonder, did somebody put the shoes back on the feet? They went to enough detail to describe the color and the brand of the shoes, which makes you think that's more detail than it's just a mistake. So the shoes, to me, I wouldn't do that unless they were actually there. I could see you confusing tennis shoes, but you went to the color and the brand on both feet and they're not in the scene. So something is, I can't make sense of that.
Unfortunately, because Dr. Harris is dead now, I'll never be able to get to the bottom of this shoe issue. Dr. Mary Gilliland couldn't remember anything about this shoe situation either. Like Kent mentioned, though, it makes you wonder if Doug's shoes were originally on his feet, but then got blown off by the train and were collected by Martin County Sheriff's Office later, who then, for some unknown reason, put them back on his feet while transporting his body to Greenville.
If that is what happened, then file that as just another thing not to do when handling evidence at a death investigation scene. Anyway, the detail about the condition of Doug's tattered clothing stood out to me too, so much so that I spent a lot of time on it during my interview with Kent. He explained that clothing evisceration is actually really common with train strikes, especially ones where the victim is dragged for a while.
It's a representation of the movement that's going on between the body and the structures around it. But the only way this can happen is the clothes are being caught different. So different than skin, the fabric will buckle and turn and can get tied up on different structures, ground, the wood, the train pieces. While it is dramatic,
So is the train impact. And for 75 yards that's going on and pulling and turning and twisting. So they're just getting dragged and ripped and then pulled. Kent conceded, though, that the clothing's condition could also be evidence that Doug was beaten up prior to the train strike. But whether Doug was knocked unconscious in some kind of scuffle before his death, then left to die, is a leap Kent can't make, at least not with the information available to him.
Well, that's partly true.
There was one detail that strongly convinced Kent Doug might have been assaulted prior to his death. A bruise, several inches wide, stretched across Doug's chest. The chest, to me, looks like bruising. That purple, dark color is an area of injury.
does a body bruise if at this point he's dead? Like, I guess I'm trying to think because I just don't know how that works. Yeah, it wouldn't. That's an excellent observation. So if he's already dead on the tracks, you shouldn't
have that bruise, but that could be a stomp, right? So you could have, it is awfully large, but that could be an implement that caused a bruise in the assault as well. If you were interpreting this as pre-mortem, one of the unique things is sort of as you go up towards the shoulder area, it turns from that purple to a brownish yellow. And a bruise doesn't do that unless it's what? Healing. So, you know, a bruise will start a purple-brown and then over time it's a green color and then it becomes a more yellowish-brown color as it's fading.
As you get more to the yellow tones, it has taken longer time. If we were going down that route, that bruise looks like it's long premortem to the point of hours because of that brownish-yellow change. It's a puzzling detail. To Kent's point, if the bruise on Doug's chest got there sometime before his death, that means something or someone had to have put it there.
There was also something else in Doug's autopsy report that jumped out at Melissa, something no one in the Wag family had ever known before 2021. Here's a voice actor reading the document.
This man is reported to have been seen on the night of Friday, July 5th, 1991, in the company of two local black men who are reported to be in the drug trade. He was seen on Saturday, July 6th, 1991, by officers in Williamston and again from 3 o'clock to 5 o'clock Sunday, July 7th, 1991, by patrons of a local store, drinking at that time, the last reported time he was seen alive.
The body was identified by the father-in-law of the deceased, in part on the basis of a tattoo present on the right forearm. In interviews with him, he did not event surprise when drugs were mentioned. If he was hanging out with drug dealers, where was he hanging out at? What were they doing? Those are great questions. Questions that everyone close to this case has. Where are the people? Why didn't they list the names of the people who saw him?
Trying to reconstruct Doug Wag's last hours on Earth wasn't going to be easy. I needed a one-way ticket back home to North Carolina. Is this similar to how it looked in 91? It hasn't changed any since then. And a lot more time with the one woman who could help fill in some big holes, Sandy. Why was he there? None of this is making sense. He didn't know the area. That's coming up next in Episode 4, The Timeline.
Listen right now.
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