Ep 7 of 14: The Family
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This is Episode 7, The Family.

Ancestry records for Sandy Wag, Doug's widow, prove that her father's family, the Davises, were related to Martin County Sheriff Jerry Beach. Sandy's dad, Willie Davis Jr., had a great-aunt who married one of Jerry's first cousins. Now, before your head starts spinning trying to figure out what that means, I'll simplify it for you.

It means the distance between Jerry Beach and Sandy's dad is big enough that they may not have even known they were related. However, because the Davis and Beach families were both born and bred in Martin County, and they went to the same schools and lived near one another, it's just as likely that they did know they were related. Here's Melissa Lee, Dugwag's sister.

When you look on her dad's side of the family, on the Davis side of the family, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, great-great-great-grandparents all lived and died and had families in Williamston. If not Williamston, Martin County. For generations, her family is from there. I don't know how they wouldn't have known. As someone who grew up in a small town, it's not that surprising to me that Sandy and Jerry's relatives overlapped.

especially by marriage. That kind of thing happens all the time. But to Melissa's point, the fact that they were kin begs the question, did Jerry Beach choose to dismiss Doug's case the way he did because he was covering for relatives who might have been involved?

Initially, my gut feeling was to say no, because that feels like a stretch. But if there's one thing I know having done this kind of work for as long as I have now, it's that you can't assume anything. I had to at least investigate the possibility. And turns out, there's more than one reason why Sandy and her family might look suspicious to the outside world.

The first thing is that about a year and a half after Doug's death, Sandy's grandparents, the set on her dad's side, revealed they had a piece of human skull preserved in their freezer. And they claimed it was Doug's. Grandma wrapped it up in paper towel, put it in a Ziploc bag, kept it in her freezer. This was probably late, like right before Christmas in 92, right in 92, almost 93.

She asked me and Mama to come over to help her get ready for the holidays, so we were cleaning out the freezer. I was just doing what I was told, take everything out, you got to put the hot water in, thaw it out and all this. And then Grandma decided to give it to me. I didn't know how to accept it. I went outside, I cried and I cried and I cried, and Mama had to calm me down, and Grandma said, you need to have this.

According to Sandy, the piece of skull was about the size of the palm of your hand, so pretty substantial. Sandy says when she asked her grandparents where they got the bone fragment from, they told her they'd gone out walking on the railroad tracks shortly after Doug's death and stumbled upon it, and for reasons they didn't explain, just decided to keep it. I got so angry. I was so hurt. I did not know how to feel about all this.

How did your grandmother's husband know that a piece of skull on the railroad tracks... Because they went walking out there presumed it was his. But that must have been not long after July of 91. Like I said, I don't know when they got it and put it up. I have no clue. According to Sandy, no testing was ever done on the skull fragment to confirm if it really was Doug's. But the assumption was that it did belong to him.

She never asked any more questions about it. Today, the piece of skull is long gone. Sandy says she has no idea where it ended up. She doesn't have it, and she thinks her now deceased mother likely threw it away. But here's what's weird to me. Not that a portion of a skull in the freezer isn't already weird, but Andy Holloman told me that he collected pieces of Doug's skull from the railroad tracks himself just a few hours after Doug was killed.

Then he immediately handed that evidence over to Jerry Beach, who did nothing with it. I left it on his desk. I wasn't going to take it. I had no need for it. I left it on his desk. And, I mean, it was the property of the sheriff's office. It was their crime scene.

So either Andy missed a decent-sized piece of Doug's skull out there on the tracks, or what Sandy's grandparents told her is a lie. And the bone fragment mysteriously traveled from Jerry Beach's office to Sandy's grandparents' freezer.

I find the first option hard to believe because I know from reviewing Doug's autopsy report and photos that when his head was crushed by the train, it didn't explode into a bunch of little pieces. He had one large gash that was only a few inches wide that started on the top of his head and ran down to his forehead. The rest of his skull was still intact.

Andy completely missing a sizable piece of Doug's skull on the train tracks feels unlikely, but technically it is possible. A few years ago, Sandy told Melissa this story about the skull fragment in her family's freezer for the first time. And when Melissa heard it, she was, well, let's just say skeptical. I honestly don't know what to believe about what she says. Some of it just sounds really outrageous.

Since 2021, Melissa has had several one-on-one conversations with Sandy to try and get a better sense of what her family's relationship was like with Doug in 1991. Because to Melissa, so much of what Sandy has told her just doesn't add up. All her family's there, but yet the only thing that you do is drive up and down the road looking for him or the bike when you supposedly are getting phone calls saying he's doing weird stuff?

Like, why didn't you go to Williamston? You know, your husband's missing and then you're getting phone calls saying that there's some weird stuff going on and all you do is drive up and down the road and look for the dang bike he was on. I mean, I know I hadn't done anything right and that's fine because I did the best I could with what I could. But they were there.

But something about Sandy's explanation of living in fear hasn't made sense, even to her own son.

If all that was true, then why would you name me directly after my father? If it was such a big thing and people were after you and everything, why name me after him? That's a, you know, if someone's looking for that name, they're going to find me instantly. If it was such a big deal, then why stay in the area? If you were feared for your life and your child's life, why not leave and go somewhere else?

Today, Douglas and his mom have a relationship. They see one another often, are on speaking terms, and they generally get along. But he still wonders why he has such a hard time getting straight answers from her about important things.

I would say at this point in my life that I've kind of got it down to not an art, but to a form of I know how she is. I know how she talks and how she responds certain ways. So I just adjust myself accordingly. I like to believe I can believe everything she says. But at the same time, she, like I said, changes up a lot. So it's hard for me to believe anything anymore.

to a certain degree. Have you ever seen your mom or heard your mom express genuine sadness and frustration about what happened to your father? I would say sadness at times, yes. I would never, like, catch her crying or to herself or anything really like that. But frustration, I've never really felt that at all. Not the frustration, not the part of her that I would feel...

That if I were in the same shoes, that I would stop at nothing to figure out what happened. I never got that from her. Did you ever get the sense from your mother that she was running from anything or afraid of anything related to Williamston, you know, Jamesville? No, I never got that feeling at all. She's not afraid of too much. She kept his last name. She named her son the third. It's not like she would be that difficult to find.

In 2021, Douglas met up with Melissa and her siblings for the first time, or really the first time he remembers. Prior to that, he'd only been to Memphis once when he was a newborn. They shared some of the same frustrations around Sandy's perceived disinterest in finding answers for her late husband.

And Douglas shared a concerning secret with his aunt Melissa. He said that for most of his childhood, Sandy told him that her long-term boyfriend, a man named David, was his dad. I grew up thinking he was my father because that's what I was told. It wasn't until Douglas became a teenager and confronted his mom about having a different last name than her partner's that he finally learned the truth. Sandy maintains that Douglas' recollection of this is incorrect.

In his mind, he thought I said that the person I was with was his dad. I never told him that. I've always told him that his daddy had died. I never wanted to lie about it. I've never tried to say somebody else was your dad. I think the confusion came in because the person I was with, I had two children with. They called him dad. And I think that's, you know, growing up, that's

kind of confuse him. And I never meant for it to confuse him. She says she regularly showed Douglas pictures of Doug and made sure he knew who he was named after. David, Sandy's boyfriend after Doug died, did not return my calls. Despite Sandy's explanations though, Melissa and the rest of Doug's siblings remain wary of her. They're unsure if they can trust her.

"I don't trust her as far as I could throw her. And that's not from hearsay, that's just her, from her, you know, from the way she is." I wondered if anyone else who knew the Davis family back in 1991 felt the same way. Like, were the wags just being too harsh? Was their personal bias getting in the way? The person who I thought might be able to answer those questions was just a phone call away.

Right.

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In July 1991, Doug and Sandy were living with her parents and younger brother in an old one-story farmhouse in Jamesville, North Carolina. That home was one of several buildings on a piece of property owned by longtime Martin County residents Leo and Avis Wainwright.

The Wainwrights rented the house to Sandy's parents starting in the 1980s, and the Davises were the only tenants they ever leased to until 2019. That's when Sandy's mother passed away and the house became abandoned. No one else has lived in it since. The address is roughly 16 miles southeast of the railroad tracks where Doug died, a good 25-minute drive.

I made a map for reference, which you can find on the blog post for this episode or in the Crime Junkie Fan Club app if that's where you're listening. It's popped up on your screen. I called Avis Wainwright last year to learn about the Davis family. She didn't remember Doug, but did remember Sandy for all the wrong reasons. Let me see if I can say this in a professional way. Oh, no.

Right.

Avis told me that over the years, as she got to know Sandy, and Sandy's mother was still living in the farmhouse alone, she'd catch Sandy in lies about, well, a lot of things. Avis also taught one of Sandy's other children in high school. And there were multiple times where Sandy would tell Avis outlandish stories about why her children were late to school, why their grades were struggling, things like that.

Avis explained that her late husband, Leo, handled the rental relationship with the Davis family in 1991. Even back then, she remembers there were always problems when it came to paying rent on time, and usually some kind of drama swirling between Sandy and her parents. Is the house that the Davises lived in on your property, is that house still there? Yes, it is.

Two weeks later, on a cold afternoon last March, I texted Avis to let her know Melissa, Jessica, and I were walking onto her property.

The old farmhouse in front of us was dilapidated and surrounded by tall pine trees. The landscaping had not been done, and most of the windows were busted out. To our surprise, the front door was open, so we ducked inside. As I stood in the tiny front room that Doug and Sandy shared for only a few short months, I realized just how easy it would have been for tensions to get high in the Davis household. That whole roof is caved in. Oh, that floorboard's real, real weak.

There was nowhere to have any personal space. But hanging out inside the creepy house speculating wasn't going to get me anywhere. The walls couldn't talk. Only Sandy could. If she's lying, then she's lying about a lot. It would have taken a concerted effort for her family to do something to Doug, drive him 16 miles across the county, dump him, and then never tell a soul. It's a secret her parents, brother, and her would have had to keep.

Sandy understands, though, why some folks might see her or her family as potential suspects. But to this day, she maintains that her family was not involved in Doug's death. Whether you choose to believe her or not is up to you. It's a reality Melissa has wrestled with. I pray one day that we will be able to know, you know, the difference in her lies and the truth. But right now, it's really hard to tell.

According to Sandy, shortly after Doug died, while she was in Tennessee attending his funeral and visiting with his family, thieves broke into her family's farmhouse while her parents were at work. Ransacked our room and took stuff. They threw Douglas's clothes everywhere, the little baby clothes that had been given to me.

Sandy said her parents reported this incident to the Martin County Sheriff's Office, but no investigation was done because technically nothing of value was stolen. However, a week or so later, the same thing happened again, except this time something was taken. A ledger that Sandy says she and her mom had been keeping on Doug's case. Mom have kept a notebook. It was a big yellow notebook that

We wrote down everything that happened, everybody we spoke to, time of day, the whole nine. How long the phone call lasted or the conversation. I mean, we were very vigilant about it. We wanted to make sure it was verbatim, who said what, how they said it. Who would have known that you were keeping that, though? Oh, anybody we talked to knew that. Law enforcement, everybody.

After the second burglary, Sandy says her parents decided not to call MCSO. Mama said, I'm not going to call them again because they didn't do nothing the first time. They didn't come out and take fingerprints. They didn't do squat. Sandy says these break-ins were the first in a series of strange things. A few months after Doug's death, right when little Douglas was born, she had an eerie encounter with a man who showed up to her job at the Walmart in Williamston. I had this tall black guy

come and flash a badge at me, tell me he was SBI and need to talk to me. Okay, yes, sir. So we went to the break room and talked. He asked me certain questions, some of the similar stuff I'd already heard from the county people. Right after that conversation... Something told me to call SBI, so I did. And I got a hold of the right department, and I started asking questions. And at that point, I remembered the guy's name.

to some degree, something similar to it. And I said, well, it was about my late husband. And I gave his name and birthday, you know, the whole thing. Man, we don't have no records of that. And it just chilled me to the bone. Whoever this guy was was sent in to see what I knew. This story about a man possibly impersonating an SBI agent coming to Sandy's work to find out what she knew or at a minimum intimidate her normally would feel too far-fetched to believe.

If I wasn't already this deep in. But I am deep in. And everything I'd gathered so far in my investigation, from the way Doug died, to him ending up on the train tracks, to him driving that mystery car a month before his death, to MCSO's total disregard for his death, that bruise on his chest, all of it pointed to something else. Something bigger.

When I added everything up, I couldn't help but feel like Doug was just a small piece of a much greater puzzle. The longer I worked and the more I uncovered, the stronger that feeling got.

Because turns out, he wasn't the only person in Martin County in the early 1990s who died under suspicious circumstances. And by letting his case be pushed aside by law enforcement and forgotten by the media, I think it may have allowed a chain of events to unfold the following summer that involved the deaths of six more people, starting with three young teens. So here are these families that have missing kids,

When they went to get the sodas, they never returned. And fair warning, this is the part of the season where you're going to want to buckle up. The rumor was that Bucky and Jerry Beach were down there doing a drug deal.

at the river and the kids come up on them. The police was down there getting the drugs off the boat. Shady. They were shady cops back then. It's always shut it away. And then people whispers about, they whispering about it just like this story. You scared to tell different people what happened. I don't trust. I don't like them. I fear them. I was taught to fear Martin County Police.

It all starts on the next episode of Counter Clock, Episode 8: The Trio.

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