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Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Binged the Podcast. Before we jump into the story, I just want to ask you guys for a favor. If you are watching on YouTube, can you please like and subscribe? It just tells the algorithm that you like the video and it helps me push it out to more people so that they can see it. And if you are listening on podcast and are able to, please leave a review. Again, it just is a way to support the show.
Okay, now jumping into the episode. If you think about it, you're always vulnerable to a degree. You're never truly safe. And when people like the young woman in today's story make fateful decisions, they're decisions that no one could have foreseen would be fateful. They're not decisions that were irresponsible, reckless, or risky. They're decisions that were
For instance, going to the convenience store for a bar of candy, this isn't a cautionary tale. There's nothing to be learned from that. What's the lesson? Stay home, never leave your house. But I've got news for you that's probably not news at all if you've ever listened to our podcast. People get murdered even in their homes. There's oftentimes no
nothing the victims in these stories could have, or more to the point, should have done differently. They're more often than not just living their lives when they're suddenly struck by what might as well have been a bolt of lightning. Except with a bolt of lightning, there's no one to blame. And with murder, there's always someone to blame. One person, the murderer.
So again, this isn't a cautionary story today. It's just a true crime case. Braylee Rae Henry was a 16 year old girl with a bright future almost guaranteed for her.
But keyword, almost. She was a sophomore at Velma Alma High School in the town of Velma, Oklahoma, which is a small rural farming community of about 650 people. The sort of town where everyone knows everyone else on a first, last, and even sometimes middle name basis.
And Braylee was one of those students whose yearbook photo captions are dense with superlatives. She was on the basketball team, the cross country team, the track team. She was president of the FFA. She was a 4-H team leader. She was a member of the beta club, the student council, and the academic team. And outside of school, she did volunteer work at the Jesus House Shelter and had just been approved to volunteer at the Oklahoma City Emergency Homeless Shelter.
And she had plans after high school to attend University of Oklahoma and study to become an ultrasound technician. So Braylee Henry seemed almost certain to go on to have a great life full of joy, success, and achievement. If only she hadn't crossed paths with the wrong stranger at the wrong place on the wrong night.
An innocent decision, of course, with fatal consequences for which she remains entirely blameless. Because the only person to blame is Miles Sterling Bench, a young man born with a bad brain that was gradually cracking apart at the seams.
Miles Bench was a 21-year-old who had struggled for much of his life, struggled to fit in in school where he was in special ed classes, struggled to get along with his family, and struggled to adapt to the Navy, which he up and deserted before stealing a car and getting arrested for vehicle theft. Now, he was living on his grandparents' ranch and seemingly going nowhere in life.
struggling with urges to hurt himself and hurt other people.
In May of 2012, Miles got a job working at a convenience store called the TP Totem. Since he didn't have a car and he lived 20 miles outside of Velma, his cousin Clayton, who lived with him and his grandparents, usually drove him to work and picked him up when his shift was over. After three weeks of training, the store's owners trusted Miles enough that they began allowing him to work alone and to close the store by himself.
Usually, Miles would be alone and the only one working behind the counter, and trouble began brewing almost immediately with this setup. Within his first month of working, two different women complained that Miles had touched them inappropriately at the convenience store. After touching one of them, he made the comment, Oh, I thought you were a high school girl. Nevertheless, Miles remained employed at the TP Totem.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, June 6th, 2012, Miles hung out with his cousin Clayton before work. Miles shared with Clayton his plans for the near future. He was going to save up money to move to California and become an MMA fighter. This is what he told his cousin. It seems like a pragmatic plan. After all, dream big, right? And Clayton also agreed to take Miles to get a tattoo the next day.
After hanging together for about two hours, it was time for Miles to go to work. He began to argue with his grandmother about whether or not he should see a doctor for his sore throat, which he decided he wasn't going to do. He then got into Clayton's truck and his cousin drove him to TP Totem, dropping him off in front at around 1.55 p.m., just in time for his two o'clock shift. Miles clocked in and began his workday.
About five hours later, not far away, Braylee Henry's sweet tooth was nagging at her, and she decided to go to the grocery store for a candy bar. And she had just gotten her car, which was the 16-year-old's first, only a few weeks earlier. So she had freedom and mobility that she'd never had before.
The kind where she could get into her own car and drive herself down to the store and buy herself a treat. So she went to the store, but they didn't have the candy that she liked. But she knew the TP totem was nearby and on her way back home. So she then headed there, first stopping at the gas pump outside the TP totem to put some gas in her tank.
When she was done, Braylee entered the store as Miles Bench stood behind the counter and watched her as she browsed the candy aisle.
Braylee was attractive to Miles. He never met her before or even seen her before, but she was high school age, which is how he liked him. And he wanted her. He wanted to possess her. And he also wanted to hurt her badly. And it was just the two of them alone in the store. It was a window of opportunity that Miles realized might be very narrow. So Miles decided to act and to act fast.
He watched Braylee closely as the girl, unaware how closely she was being watched, pulled an empty cup from the dispenser and placed it beneath the soda fountain, filling her cup with fizzy cola. With her back now turned and her hands full, Miles crept up behind Braylee and began to pounce on her, striking her in the head. Her drink spilled as she fell to the floor and Miles placed his arm around her throat and put her in a chokehold.
Now, Braylee wasn't a tiny girl. In fact, at six feet tall, she was taller than this man who had her in a chokehold. Miles was only 5'10". She tried to fight him off, but Miles had mad animal strength. He easily overpowered her as he then dragged her into the storeroom out of view of anyone who might pass by or enter the store.
Braylee was athletic, though. She played basketball, ran track, she was strong and agile, and she put up more of a fight than Miles was expecting from this high school-aged girl.
But as she fought back and tried to release herself from his control, it sent Miles' single-minded rage boiling over. He pounded his fists into her head, her face, her neck, her chest, dragging her across the storeroom floor, bumping her head along the way. He stomped on her, on her head, her neck, her limbs. He stomped on her like an object because two-mile bench? That's all Braylee was.
And scientifically, that's what Braylee soon became. An "it" rather than a "her." She was now a corpse. Once Braylee stopped moving and stopped breathing, the tempest inside Miles' bench calmed. And in his simplistic central processing, he realized he had created a very big problem for himself.
The sort of problem that, if anyone found out, would certainly throw off his dreams of becoming an MMA fighter and probably send him to prison for life, if not death row.
Once again, Miles had to think fast and act fast. Acting fast wasn't an issue for Miles, who was controlled by his impulses. But thinking fast was. So this is what he came up with. The best he could do now was he took a paper sack and tied it around Braylee's head, lifted her body up, and put it inside a shopping cart.
He then concealed her with cardboard boxes and pushed the cart outside to the only car in front of the store, which was Braylee's car. He could see the sky was getting dark. He took the girl's car keys, opened the back door of her car, and pushed her body inside her own back seat. But before leaving, he needed to gather up a survival kit for his upcoming road trip to California, which would now be happening sooner than planned.
He went back into the store and loaded up a shopping bag with peanut butter and sunflower seeds, a toothbrush, rubbing alcohol, and razors. He put all of this into Braylee's car before driving it away from the store. He began driving to his grandparents' property 20 minutes away, and when he got there, he drove to the far end of the property to one of its most remote parts.
a completely secluded patch of land where he could now work under a cover of darkness and hopefully be long gone from the area before it was realized a crime had even been committed.
He removed Braylee's body from her car, removed her pants completely, leaving her naked from the waist down, simply because he could. She was dead. She couldn't resist him. He pulled up her jacket, her tank top, and her sports bra, leaving her breasts exposed, and then dragged her to a mud path and covered her with dirt, debris, and tree branches.
Afterward, Miles returned to his grandparents' house and went to his bedroom to fetch a clean shirt, which he pulled over the one he was already wearing. He gathered up some boots, some clothing, some hydrogen peroxide, and his wallet. And while puttering through the house, Miles bumped into his grandfather, who knew that Miles' shift that night wasn't supposed to end until 10 p.m. And it wasn't even 9. So why was Miles home?
"Did you quit or were you fired?" his grandpa asked, to which Miles simply responded, "Yes." He then told his grandfather he was leaving. He stepped outside and found the hose where he washed his hands. He then poked his head back inside the house one last time. He said to his grandfather, "I love you." "I do you too," the old man said back. "Be careful out there and don't get hurt." And with that, Miles sped off in Braylee Henry's car.
Around the same time, a woman named Tammy Wilkerson entered the teepee totem and, much to her unease, found the convenience store completely empty, like it had been abandoned. She called out, hello, and received no reply. Tammy looked around the store and then opened the storeroom door and stuck her head inside.
And what she saw shocked her. In the middle of the floor was a large pool of what appeared to be blood. A pool of blood so large it had had to have come from a human being. And if it did, it was unlikely that human being was still alive.
Tammy's hair stood completely up. She immediately called the Velma Police Department to report what she had stumbled upon. Then she called one of the other store clerks, Melissa Lynn, who happened to live close by. There was another person who had reached out to the police around the same time that all of this was happening.
And it was Braylee's mom, Renee Henson. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me. If you're wondering whether custom hair care is worth the hype, let me tell you it is. And that's why I'm obsessed with Proz.
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Use code DARK. All right, let's get back to the episode. Obviously, Braylee had been expected home more than half an hour ago, and Renee had gone out looking for her without success. Meanwhile, the Stevens County Sheriff's Department dispatched Deputy Michael Moore to the TP totem to investigate the absence of the clerk,
Miles Bench, who given the circumstances appeared as though he may have been the victim of a crime. Like the blood in the storeroom might be his.
Deputy Moore entered the store and took notes and photographs. He also took a sample of the still wet blood from the storeroom floor to run it for DNA testing. Shortly after, Deputy David Martin visited the home of Alberta and Stanley Bench, Miles' grandparents, to see if Miles was there. And that's when police learned that Miles had been to work that night, had come home early, and seemingly left for good.
Soon after, Lieutenant Chad Powell arrived on the scene with police dogs and following tire tracks that led away from the property, the canine cops led Powell to Braley's mostly nude body in the muddy field.
He called for backup. Meanwhile, deputies put out a Bolo alert for Braley's car. It was pretty obvious what had happened at this point. And unbeknownst to Miles, Braley's car was equipped with a GPS that was connected to OnStar navigation. So police were actually able to get in touch with OnStar and begin tracking the vehicle, which by this time was heading toward the town of Weatherford, more than two hours away from Velma.
Deputy Quentin Shore of the Custer County Sheriff's Department was traveling on Interstate 40 when he saw the car headed west on I-40, you know, probably toward California where Miles' MMA dreams awaited him.
Deputy Short immediately pulled the car over and approached the driver's side of the vehicle. I mean, this is now their number one suspect. As he walked up, he could see large amounts of blood in the backseat of the vehicle. Deputy Short commanded Miles Bench to exit the car. Miles complied, and once he was standing outside the car, he told the deputy, "'I wasn't driving the car.'"
Deputy Short was puzzled by this, and he countered with the only logical response, then who was? Miles then told the deputy, I think I effed up. I may have killed somebody. The blood all over Miles' clothing and shoes and the dirt on his face told Deputy Short that this was more than just crazy talk.
He put handcuffs on Miles' hands, which were red and swollen from all those punches he delivered while battering Braley, and transported him to the Custer County Jail on suspicion of murder. Upon running Bench's name through the system, he saw that Bench was on conditional discharge from a previous charge of possessing a stolen vehicle to which he'd pled guilty. At that time, he had been living at Great Lakes Naval Base when he went AWOL and deserted from the Navy.
While he was being booked and processed at the jail, Miles continued making incriminating statements. "I think I messed up," he told Kendall Brown, one of the detention officers. "I think I may have killed somebody." And then he said, "I think I might have blacked out." So Miles was clearly trying to separate himself from any real accountability by setting up the familiar trope of he blacked out and couldn't remember having committed the murder. He was concerned about his fate at this point.
as most murderers are once they've been apprehended. And he just wouldn't stop talking with the detention officer, trying to get some kind of read on the situation by asking questions about the differences between manslaughter and murder and making statements like, quote, I think Stevens County is going to come get me. And quote, if they believe that I don't know where I am at, they might believe I was crazy.
He asked Officer Brown, "Since I blacked out, do you think that I should go for an insanity plea or what?" Brown replied that he wasn't really qualified to dispense legal advice.
Because surely if Brown were to give Bench legal advice at this point, he'd have told him to shut his trap and stop talking. As every word Bench said was being recorded by the prison's audio monitoring system. But Miles just kept on talking, establishing that he was already calculating how to set himself up for an insanity plea. "'I did psych evaluations when I was in the military,' he said. "'The dude in the straight jacket is always the one who's screaming that he's not crazy.'"
Shortly after this unprompted blab fest, investigators with Stevens County showed up to execute a search warrant on Miles Bench's person, which means they were going to inspect his body for injuries consistent with a violent struggle.
And again, Miles, who by this point, it should be clear, is a dangerously impulsive person. Impulsive in a way that is not just dangerous to others, but also to himself, because as diabolical as he thought he was by contriving insanity, he couldn't help but repeatedly tip his hand. So he asked the Stevens County investigators if Oklahoma had the death penalty, which it does.
Every state in the American South does, with the exception of the Virginias. So Justin Scott, one of the investigators, advised Miles that under certain circumstances, Oklahoma does have the death penalty, which it's funny that he answered that way because under certain circumstances could be said for any state with the death penalty. Like being convicted of premeditated murder is one of those circumstances, while being convicted of shoplifting isn't.
So then Miles said, I either need death or I need to be locked away in the big house. It's anyone's guess what his angle was here, but my guess would be he was trying to appear unhinged as though he lacked total comprehension of his circumstances, which may have been true to a degree, but not in the way Miles was thinking because Miles knew that what he did was wrong enough to dump and hide the body and then skip town.
At this point, as the investigators were looking over Miles' body, a bite mark was observed on Miles' bench's elbow. The bite mark was photographed and Miles' shoes and clothing were then confiscated for DNA testing.
Within a day or two, lab results came back on blood found on the clothing and shoes, as well as in the storeroom of the TP totem, and all of it matched Braley. Bench was charged with first degree murder. At autopsy, it was confirmed that Braley died of blunt force trauma to the head.
The day following the murder, there was a candlelight vigil at Braley's High School. Counselors were on hand to help her classmates process what had happened. Braley's memorial service was held in the Velma Alma High School gymnasium, where she had played countless games with her high school basketball team. The gym was packed to capacity with 1,500 people, more than the town's entire population.
Pastor Cody Devers began the service by reading a short autobiography that Braylee had written for a school project. Each chapter was only a few sentences long, and much of it covered events in her future which she hadn't yet experienced. Graduating from college, getting married, having children, events she would now never get to experience.
Braley's casket was placed directly beneath the basketball goal where she had scored countless points for her team, and her team jacket was displayed right near her casket alongside blown-up photographs, flowers, and pictures of Braley and her friends.
Outside the gym, purple ribbons were tied to the parking lot fence. And for three whole miles leading into Velma on State Highway 7, purple ribbons were attached to posts in honor of Braley's memory. Purple ribbons appeared throughout town on signposts, trees, cars, and fire trucks.
In honor of Braylee's memory and all the time she spent at the Jesus House Emergency Shelters prayer room, her friends and family showed up there with new furniture and fresh coats of paint to give one of Braylee's favorite places a facelift. This is after it had sustained damage in a fire two months earlier. Braylee had truly cared about the disadvantaged and the unhoused, but that wasn't the only place where Braylee's memory was made permanent.
At her high school, a section of the trophy case was made into a memorial for her, and the gymnasium floor was painted with a mural depicting basketballs with turquoise wings because turquoise was Braley's favorite color.
And in downtown Velma, a street was renamed Braley's Way in her honor. All this for a woman whose life was cut short by a crime that seemed absolutely senseless and probably senseless to Miles Bench as well, who confessed the crime to a psychiatrist who interviewed him.
and whose public defenders were trying to lay the groundwork to call their client's mental competency into question, suggesting he may not be capable of understanding the proceedings and assisting in his own defense.
His defenders argued that Bench didn't seem to understand what they described as even the simplest discussion topics about his defense, and they pointed to his history of treatment for mental illness. A competency evaluation that concluded Bench competent to stand trial was met with protests from his defenders, who argued that the examination was not done by a qualified mental health professional.
But despite their efforts, a jury ultimately found Bench competent to stand trial and the state, in fact, chose to pursue the death penalty.
During the trial, some of the witnesses testifying for the defense included friends, family friends, and teachers and administrators from his school where he was in the special education program. A picture was painted of Miles at trial as a respectful, polite kid, a slow learner, determined to work his way out of special education, but lacked parental guidance and had a difficult time grasping even the rules of various sports that he participated in.
And his intellectual disabilities had made him an easy target for bullying. He was often picked on while riding the school bus, and former classmates remembered often hearing his stepfather yelling at him. Sometimes after a particularly long day, I love to play games on my phone to get my
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Multiple witnesses at trial also agreed that Miles' personality changed around the time he went AWOL from the Navy, that he seemingly became a different person, and his behavior became weird and delusional. But the jury didn't buy that Miles was mentally incompetent and ultimately believed he should be held fully accountable. And in February 2015, Miles Bench was found guilty of first-degree murder.
During the penalty phase of the trial, the prosecution sought to establish that Bench was a threat to society and had been working toward murder that was probably sexually motivated. There were instances in Bench's recent past in which he had exposed himself and yelled inappropriate comments at a woman. And of course, those two incidents in which he inappropriately touched women at the teepee totem where he worked.
It's a wonder he continued working there after those incidents. And it should come as no surprise that the parents of Braylee Henry sued the store's owners for not doing a background check before hiring Miles Bench. In their suit against the owners of the TP totem, they sought $75,000 in damages, and they also sued Bench's family for wrongful death. Though I couldn't find any record of what the outcomes of those lawsuits were.
During the prosecution's argument, they also highlighted an incident where Bench had hit his stepfather and another incident in which Bench had broken free of his restraints while in jail, which he tried to escape.
The defense team fought for Miles' life to be spared, calling to the witness stand members of his family who remembered how, even as a young boy, Miles seemed to have severe mental health issues. He would wash his hands until they were raw, and he once told a family member that all he could ever think about was climbing to the top of a tall building and leaping to his death.
But the jury was unmoved by these testimonies. In May 2015, Miles Bench was sentenced to death. However, in May 2021, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Miles Bench's murder charge and conviction as a result of a Supreme Court ruling titled McGirt v. Oklahoma.
The gist of it is the land on which Miles Bench killed Braley Henry, as well as where he dumped her, falls within Native American reservation boundaries, meaning that it's tribal land, not state land, thus making it a federal crime.
Furthermore, Miles Bench was Indian blood and was an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. So that's when the federal government stepped in and charged Bench with kidnapping resulting in death.
But the reversal of Bench's conviction re-traumatized the Henry family, who were devastated at the thought of having to once again live through the emotional hardship of a trial. So this was a twist no one saw coming. And it's hard because McGirt v. Oklahoma resulted in the reversal of countless other convictions in the state of Oklahoma, many for crimes no less violent than Braley's murder.
And the federal charges against Bench would likely not carry the possibility of a death penalty verdict. And this is because the Choctaw tribe did not provide their consent to allow their tribal members to be executed by the federal government.
But then there was another twist. Three months after the conviction was overturned, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reinstated it, much to the relief of the Henry family and the prosecutors who tried the case, which took three years to move through the system to a conviction. So Miles Bench once again sits on Oklahoma's death row and as of late 2021 was expected to file another appeal. Why do you think some murderers
murderers get the death penalty while others don't. And do all murderers deserve the death penalty? Do none of them? Should there even be a death penalty in America? When there's no consistency from one case to the next, and it often all comes down to variables such as money, resources, power, and the quality of one's legal team, Miles Bench committed a brutal act, and he knew what he was doing. He knew it was wrong. He's a dangerous person.
But also, to act with that level of impulsiveness at his job, committing a crime that no one could have gotten away with, it does seem to say something about his intellectual and mental capacities.
So even someone as dangerous as Miles Bench, who did something as horrible as what he did to Braylee Henry, he's clearly operating from a diminished capacity. There's something wrong with his brain. And the death penalty might be what Braylee's family wanted him to be punished with, which is completely understandable. But do you think it's an appropriate punishment?
Next week, we'll look at a very similar case with a few key differences, and maybe we'll revisit that question at the end of it. Until then, binge on, bingers. I'll see you.