Crime Junkie - MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF: Douglas Wagg, Jr.

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Since the release of CounterClock Season 1, Delia has received hundreds of requests from families of victims of violent crime. In November 2022, one message in her inbox stood out from the rest. It was from a middle-aged woman asking for Delia's help investigating the mysterious death of her 27-year-old brother from 1991. The message stood out for one big reason. The man's mangled body was found in an all-too familiar place to Delia. Eastern North Carolina.Thirty-three years after Douglas Wagg, Jr. turned up on a lone stretch of railroad tracks in the middle of the night in rural Martin County and over a year since Delia took on the case the scope of what was really going on in the area during the 1990's has come into view. Who was Doug? How did he end up so far from home? Who was he last seen with? Was the train really what killed him? Why was his case never investigated?The journey to find the answers to those questions has revealed a web of small town secrets that feel like fiction, except they're not. Over the course of the Season 6 investigation Delia has interviewed more than 45 people, spoken with convicted murderers in prison, and traced the origins of a disturbing pattern of behavior within local law enforcement that may have resulted in a decades-long cover up of multiple deaths. The investigation into what happened to Doug Wagg appears to be just the tip of a very large, very complicated iceberg that someone has worked hard to keep hidden for more than three decades. For even more time with CounterClock, follow us on social media.Instagram: @counterclockpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @CounterClockPod | @audiochuckFacebook: /CounterClockPodcast | /audiochuckllc

Hi, crime junkies. I'm Ashley Flowers, and today I'm dropping into your feed to announce that right now, the first four episodes of the new season of Counter Clock are ready for you to listen to. And let me tell you, this is a wild case with more twists and turns than I can count. Counter Clock season six starts off with the one and only investigative journalist Delia D'Ambra probing into the suspicious death of Douglas Wagg Jr. after he was found on a stretch of railroad tracks days after leaving his home to run an errand. But her look into this one mysterious death led to so much more.

I'm not joking when I tell you that the rabbit holes Delia has gone down to look for the truth are deep. And what she's found is a whole pattern of suspicious deaths, a string of crimes and corruption, and a tangled web of small town secrets that has her questioning the very place she calls home. Now I'm gonna give you the first two episodes right here, right now, so you can get a taste of what I'm talking about. But there are two more episodes after that ready for you in the counter-clock feed right now.

And for those of you who just can't wait, because I know I couldn't, we are also giving you the entire season to binge in the Crime Junkie fan club right now. Check out the show notes to binge in the Crime Junkie fan club right now. Check out the show notes to see how you can sign up. But without further ado, here is the beginning of Counter Clock Season 6. Cold cases are not easy to investigate. If you haven't gathered that by now, I recommend you go back and listen to seasons one through five of Counterclockwise. Go ahead, I'll wait.

28 year old Stacey Stanton, a co-worker found her body in the dead woman's apartment Saturday. I did not hear anything. Five shotgun blasts killed four members of the Pelly family, Pastor Bob, his wife, gone. Her two daughters. The only motive to me is money and greed. 25-year-old me who didn't know what I was getting into when I first stumbled upon Denise Johnson's case back in 2018 can give you a crash course on the challenging nature of trying to reinvestigate an unsolved murder. Older, wiser me who plumbed the depths of New Orleans, Louisiana last year trying to find Bruce Kichera's killer, knows better than to think a person's life story has a simple linear path. The reality is unsolved deaths are unsolved for a reason.

There's never been a clear answer. Time has cracked and curved around the truth in these cases for so long that trying to pinpoint it is immensely complicated to do. The events I'm going to tell you about over the course of the next 14 episodes prove that. Season 6 is a living testament that there's rarely an easy explanation as to why some people end up dead and no one is brought to justice. And I say people because even though this investigation started out with me looking into one man's suspicious death, the body count kept climbing with every corner I turned. Far harder than investigating a cold case, though, is living with one. Carrying a loved one's unexplained death around with you like a weighted vest is something all the family members

I've interviewed for this show do on a daily basis. Just ask Helen Hough, John Wells' mom, or anyone close to the Pelley family. On a weekly basis, I receive dozens of messages from parents or siblings of murder victims who want me to tell the masses about what they're going through and use my skills as an investigative journalist to get them some answers.

I read nearly every message I get. I respond to as many emails and DMs as I can, but obviously I can't make a season of counter-clock for every case that comes my way. I wish that was possible, but the reality is, it's not. In the fall of 2022, while clicking through one of my inboxes, a message caught my eye. A woman named Melissa Lee had written to me asking if I'd look into her older brother's death from the summer of 1991. On its face, Melissa's note wasn't super detailed, just a few pictures of a brother Doug

accompanied by some quick facts about how he died at the age of 27. Something in Melissa's message got my attention. A specific place, actually. North Carolina. And not just any town in North Carolina. Williamston, North Carolina. A small rural city in the eastern part of the state that most people don't even know exists. Williamston is a town I'd grown up next to as a young child before my family moved to the Outer Banks. It's a town I'd made countless bus rides to with my high school sports teams.

A town that I'd drive by dozens of times in college on the way to visit my family. Yours truly even got a speeding ticket there once. Don't worry, it eventually got dropped. Williamston was more familiar to me than Melissa could have possibly known. A friend of mine that I work with had actually given me, she's really into podcasts. She listens to a lot of the cold caseay's podcast and she had given me a whole list of people that she listened to. And I found you on Facebook and reached out.

A week or so after she reached out, Melissa and I met over Zoom. And by the end of the month, she was uploading her own research into a shared Google Drive I'd set up for us. The investigation was off and running. I didn't know it then, but Melissa and I would eventually take many trips to Williamston together. We'd knock on doors, sit side by side skimming through old newspapers, and even climb into attics of abandoned houses together searching for information about her brother Doug. I would become consumed not only with the circumstances surrounding his death, but a series of crimes during the early 1990s in Williamston that all overlap. This investigation has at times blurred the lines of my professional and personal lives

and required me to read more autopsy reports than I ever thought I would. If I'd known back in the fall of 2022 what I know now, I may have scrolled my mouse across my computer screen a little slower before opening that message from Melissa. I would have warned myself, this is much bigger than you think. If the Season 6 case has made me realize one thing, it's that despite thinking I already knew the depths of the problems, scandals, and issues with the criminal justice system in my home state, I couldn't have been more wrong. Turns out, even for as long as I've been doing this work, I've only ever seen the tip of the iceberg.

The death of Douglas Wagg Jr. in the summer of 1991 has taken me beneath the surface of the place I know as home, and into the depths of a mystery so big, so bizarre, and so violent, it feels like fiction, except it's not. So let's turn back the clock 33 years to July 8th, 1991. This is Counter Clock, season six, Episode 1, The Stranger. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. The first thing that's important to know about Doug Wagg, Jr.,

is that he wasn't from Eastern North Carolina. He'd only been living in the Williamston area for a few months before his body mysteriously turned up on a set of railroad tracks. Who he was and where he'd been prior to arriving in North Carolina is a really important part of his story, and in my opinion, vital to understanding the potential sequence of events that led to his death. For this first episode, I need to go back a little further than 1991. Doug was born at Cheneut Air Force Base in Illinois on March 26, 1964, to Shirley and Douglas Wags, Sr. Because he was named after his dad, Doug was usually called Dougie, sometimes Doug Jr., but most of the time, Dougie.

From the moment he entered the world, his mom Shirley adored him. And that's because he almost didn't make it. I didn't get to bond with him until he was a month old. He was too much premature and had a lot of medical problems. He weighed five-three, which they didn't expect he was going to be nearly that big. But he was. And he was born in a military hospital so I couldn't have him with me and because he was so small, he was in the incubator.

So it was a month before I could bring him home. He was a beautiful child. He was so sweet and just so loving. Not long after Doug's arrival, a slew of other siblings followed in quick succession, making him the eldest of five. After Doug, there's Michael, us, all seven of us. And Jessica. We were really close, like I got to go do things with him. He was like my cool older brother. With so many kids running around, things were often chaotic in the WAG household, but level-headed Doug was always there to keep the peace.

He was always good to his siblings. As he grew up, he was still just as sweet as he always was. And he was a good little boy. Loved to be outside, loved to play outside. We were very close when we were little. I remember, I can remember back when I was a little young, I was three years old, things, just wanting to get on the school bus

with my brothers going to school and things But yeah, we were we were tight little bunch During her interview with me angel Doug's closest sister in age showed me some pictures of their tight little bunch Yeah, I just love these That was the three of us at Christmas. That was me a 69 Doug had very very, very thick blonde hair. I mean, it was just thick. The pictures Angel and I were looking at are on the blog post for this episode at counterclockwisepodcast.com. You can go check them out if you want to follow along.

Every time a new child was born, Shirley and Doug Sr. moved their family to a different state. They didn't do this intentionally, it just happened that way. As the WAGs grew, their circle of friends did too. Some folks would move out of state, and to stay close with their community, the WAGs would move too. Here's Angel again. I don't remember what years we moved. We moved to Minnesota, then we moved to upstate New York, Tennessee in 79. Dougie was 15 years old by the time his family settled down for good in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee. Finishing out high school in a new city wasn't easy for him.

He was a stranger to his classmates, and he struggled to make friends because of how shy he was. He was very quiet, very passive, very compassionate. Some people are boisterous about thinking that Doug was just always calm across the board and whether he was laughing or crying or yelling or whatever, it was basically all the same kind of tone for him. The few close friends Doug did have were people like Kevin Gagne. Kevin was a childhood buddy who lived hours away in New York, but he and Doug often traveled to see one another. When they were teenagers, they did what a lot of young people did at the time. Doug and I used to like to party, but it was just smoking weed.

It was nothing really heavy back in, I mean, we're talking eighties. I grew up in the seventies smoking weed was just happening. It was just beer and weed. There was nothing outside of that. It was nothing really hard. Doug, once he got warmed up or he got a little buzz on, he'd start talking a little bit and be more friendly. He was definitely laid back.

He would interact if the right discussion came back, but he was like, if you were in a party, he would be the one sitting off to the side waiting for people to come and talk to him. The further Doug got in high school, the more his parents noticed he was changing. At first, it was subtle stuff. I can remember when he was in high school, all of a sudden his eyes seemed to be watery all the time and looking back I'm thinking he probably was taking some kind of drugs. Here's Doug's senior, Doug's dad. There were some things that were suspect,

you know, and I didn't, I didn't put my finger on it right away, but he tended to do things he shouldn't be doing. As he got older, it got worse and more serious stuff. Some of that more serious stuff included teenage Doug disappearing for days at a time. He'd be home for five minutes and then he'd be gone for a day, day and a half. And the more he did this, the more, the longer he would be gone. Until sometimes he'd be gone for a week or so, never knowing where he was. I remember one time we lived in Cairo, I guess he was in high school, and we were just driving around. He hadn't been home for a week or so, and he hadn't been, hadn't been heard from.

And we were just driving around and we spotted him on the street he got in the car and came home with us you know he just he just did his own thing. Once Doug even stole a bag of money from his employer. Here's Michael Wag, Doug's brother. He robbed the grocery store. I remember him coming home with the money but he walked into where the office was and the safe was open and he took a bag of money and he brought it home and he hid it in the bedroom. I knew where it was in the bedroom.

And did I get some of the money? Yes, I did. I spent some money. I remember us having to go to juvenile court. According to Michael, the sum of money was several thousand dollars. He used the money for acceptance. He bought the things that his friends had. He bought a guitar.

He bought some drums. He bought a motorcycle. Kevin Gagne's family back in New York even suspected at one point that Doug had stolen from them too while he'd been visiting. There's an incident my sister told me about where he went into town with a 10-speed bike and didn't come back. He came back but the bike didn't come back. The rumor or the thoughts are from my sister is that he used that to pay for drugs, the

10-speed. But he never got kicked out of my house. My parents said it was just something that happened and life went on. These repeated incidents of Doug acting out broke his mom's heart, mostly because she couldn't figure out why they were happening. Doug was not one. He didn't talk to me. He didn't talk to his dad. He didn't share anything with us. I was disappointed and embarrassed, and he was not raised that way at all. He knew right from wrong, but for some reason,

he just always seemed to make the wrong choices. Even though Doug Sr. never got to the bottom of what exactly was up with his oldest son, he had his suspicions. And with every new incident of delinquency, he grew angrier and angrier with Doug, which was a recipe for disaster because their relationship had never been good. He let other people influence him more than the people at home. I tried to figure it out, you know, get information from him, but I couldn't always do that. So sometimes I'd

get angrier than I should probably. Out of all the children, Doug Sr. channeled his anger toward Doug the most. Melissa and the rest of Doug's siblings all noticed this growing up. It was hard living at home. You know, Dad was, he yelled and screamed a lot. You know, I think my mom always kind of felt like Dad was kind of breaking him, you know, kind of breaking his spirit. He was strict on him. My mom said that she had told my dad one time

that if he didn't back off him and, like, let him do his thing, that, you know, he was gonna do bad things or he was gonna whatever. I don't think he knew what love was because I don't think he was gonna do bad things or he was gonna whatever. I don't think he knew what love was. Because I don't think he was getting a whole lot of love at home. I think that he was just looking for acceptance, looking to be loved. We all want that. And if you're not feeling it at home, you go somewhere else and you look for it.

After Doug graduated high school in 1982, he didn't look back and never repaired things with his dad. He worked a few odd jobs in and around Memphis, but eventually drifted away from his family. Throughout his early 20s, he bobbed around between Tennessee, Illinois, and Mississippi. The specific timeline of where Doug was and what he was doing during this part of his

life is a bit unclear, even to his own mother and siblings. It was concerning because I was always worried about him, but yet he was so independent and did his own thing that I may not have been as concerned about him as I should have been. And I was working and I had four other children. I think Doug was always afraid to come home. I think he had fun on his journey. I think he lived his life, but unfortunately he had a demon. Court records from Tennessee and Illinois, as well as personal letters Doug wrote to

his family during the 1980s, make it very apparent what his demons were. Cocaine and getting caught up with the wrong crowd. By 1987, he had a short criminal record and had spent some time in the Shelby County jail in Tennessee for stealing firearms from a friend, stealing more money and passing bad checks. A handful of times he'd visited his family for things like weddings, birthdays,

and maybe a holiday or two. Other than that, seeing Doug was few and far between. I just wondered where he was and, you know, always hoped that nothing happened to him. And he might be gone a month or two. He might be gone a year. And he'd just call or sometimes just show up. Doug's sisters and brother lost track of him during the late 1980s. However, they think he stayed away not because he disliked them, but because he preferred to deal with his struggles in private instead of in front of them.

Around that time, Shirley and Doug Sr. divorced, which only fractured the family more and deterred Doug from coming around. They didn't have a good marriage, in my opinion, at all. I don't remember any real good happy times with my mom and my dad. My parents were married, I've always said, for 25 years before they got divorced. They shouldn't have been married that long.

Now, I want to make it clear, everyone is responsible for their own choices in life, Doug included. His family's dynamics are not solely to blame for the bad choices he made or the crimes he committed, far from it. But that's not a reason to write Doug off. Think about the portion of the population he represents.

The uncles, brothers, nephews, sons or friends in your own life that struggle with the same things he did. These types of people may seem like strangers, but they weren't always strangers to us. I'd venture to say that every one of us has a person we know who has battled a substance use disorder or endured numerous setbacks that have prompted them to break the law. Doug Wagg might not be the kind of victim that would traditionally get his own TV special, for example, but he is someone whose situation is one that many of us can relate to.

By January of 1990, his parents, Shirley and Doug Sr., had both remarried. And things were on the upswing for Doug, too. He'd reached out from the fringes of his self-chosen exile to let his family know he had big plans to turn everything in his life around. On January 21st, 1990, Doug penned a letter to his aunt and uncle who were living in Champaign, Illinois. He asked them to pray for him and informed them that he was headed to a faith-based rehab program a few hours away from Memphis, just over the border in Huntsville, Alabama. The reason he wrote this specific aunt and uncle was because for a short time after graduating high school, he lived with them in Champaign, and at that time they'd encouraged him to go to church, which he did.

Here's a voice actor reading a portion of Doug's letter. Virginia, Woody, and family. Well, I hope that life treats you well. I have recently had a major change in my life and I had to write to you and tell you of the news. I was sitting at a friend's house in Mississippi doing things that I shouldn't have been doing. Out of the clear the Lord came to me and said I must change my life. I've got to do it now or never because if I were to wait it would be too late. I stood up and left not telling anyone where I was going or that I should not return. I called a man named John Davis of Decatur, Alabama, and he suggested I go to Outreach

Ministries of Alabama. It's located just outside of Huntsville, about 10 miles south of there. I called the pastor and went there that night. I couldn't wait till the next day. I got to Florence, and John Davis picked me up at the courthouse there and brought me to Outreach. I've only been this happy when I was living with you and the Lord was in my life. I look back upon that time with great fondness.

Doug then quoted some scripture from the Bible and continued, I've gotten rid of my old life and began a new life. I've begun a new life in Christ. I rebuke Satan and all his works. Please pray for me and that things will for once work out for me. I will be here for 13 months learning the Word of God. I am changing the entire aspect of my old life. I now have an entirely new life.

After April 8th, I can receive mail and would really like to hear from you. You will always be in my thoughts and prayers. Love in Christ, Doug Jr. John Davis, the man Doug said took him to rehab, remembers this specific moment in January 1990 well. I tracked John down and he explained that he and Doug actually ended up being roommates for a few days before John dropped Doug off at the rehab facility. up being roommates for a few days before John dropped Doug off at the rehab facility. Somebody called me, I can't remember who it was, and I drove to Florence and picked Doug up. And he actually came to stay at my house for a couple of days, probably a week. I was living

in a house on the river, a little small house on the river in between Decatur and Florence. He was nice, he was easy going, he was funny. I liked him. Most drug addicts are, most drug addicts and alcoholics are some of the nicest people in the world. They just can't figure out how to live. He was trying to figure out how to get sober. And he really wanted to. I mean, I wouldn't have fooled with him if he didn't. The outreach ministry, as I remember it,

was not a go in there and sit around on the bunk and everything, it was you paid your way. You did work, you cleaned up, you helped to cook, you did all, you were working as part of this. There's one that didn't require a lot of money, that you could just go and it was Christian based. Shirley, Doug's mom, was over the moon when she learned from her sister and brother-in-law

in Illinois that her oldest son was seeking help. And I was happy because he needed some peace in his life. I think that's why he ran all the time and he went every place and maybe just trying to get away from whatever he was trying to escape from. I found the people who were running outreach ministries of Alabama back in the early 90s. A man named Ken Pounders is the director now, and he told me the program doesn't have participant records from that far back. However, from what he remembers from working there in 1990, he believes Doug did enroll.

When Doug would have been here, the entire year was pretty intensive. Generally speaking, what I would consider to be the most critical points of the ministry is the first two or three days, the first two or three weeks, and the first couple of months. Generally, if a guy makes it past three days, his likelihood of staying and completing the program goes way up. If he makes it past the first two weeks, it goes even higher. Once a guy's past two months, very rarely do we see them leave after that. If a guy's not going to stick it out,

that happens pretty quickly. Unfortunately, that was the case for Doug. It didn't take long before he dropped out of the program. And according to an entry in his mother's daily journal dated on his birthday in March of 1990, Doug was no longer there at that time. He'd taken a job as a roofer somewhere in nearby Decatur, Alabama. Around that time, he crossed paths with a young woman named Sandy Davis. No relation to John Davis.

He was walking on the side of the road in Alabama, and I was going home. I had just gone and moved down there with a friend. And I saw this guy on a torrential downpour, you know, and I felt bad, so I slowed down and picked him up. And I took him where he needed to go. I don't know, just something kind of clicked, and I thought, man, I've lost my mind. I picked up to go. I don't know, just something kinda clicked

and I thought, man, I've lost my mind. I picked up a hitchhiker, you know, that kinda thing. Well, ironically, one of his friends was working with me and my friend at the Hardee's in Decatur, Alabama. So he's like, well, let's go on a double date. So we all met at the local mall. They had an arcade, walked in, and I guess it's crazy as it sounds, I guess the easiest way to say it's a zing moment.

He and I saw each other and it was just like, you just knew. Doug and Sandy spent the next few months together, living with friends in Alabama, and grew close. He was 26 and she was 21. He was mature and he knew what he liked and you know I was like okay and we always had the best conversations. We would talk until the Sun came up that's that's something I always treasured. He was just good to me. He really was. We became best friends, and it just built from there. During the fall of 1990, Sandy started to get homesick. So she and her new boyfriend packed up

and moved to where her mom and dad lived in Jamesville, North Carolina, a tiny town in Martin County just a few miles outside the city limits of Williamston. The specific date they moved is unclear. Sandy has said she thought it was around Father's Day of 1990, but in other conversations with Melissa, Doug's sister, Sandy said they moved to North Carolina closer to Thanksgiving or Christmas of 1990. Either way, by January of 1991, Sandy and Doug were living in Jamesville with her parents.

The couple worked on and off for a regional carnival. Then Doug took a more consistent job bailing pine straw for a friend of Sandy's family. And making money was a high priority. Because you see, by March of 1991, right around Doug's 27th birthday, Sandy got some unexpected news. She was pregnant. I went and got the test and went and checked it out and freaked out a little bit then went to the health department found that out and I said hey we gotta talk. What did how was his reaction? He was so happy oh my gosh he was ecstatic

and he told me he said now if this's a boy, he can't be named after me. I said, really? Let's see. As fate would have it, Sandy was carrying a little boy, and she was determined to name him Douglas Wagg III. After getting over the shock of finding out they were going to be new parents, the couple made things official. He went to the local jewelers and got it and everything.

We picked out a wedding set. I mean, he was bound to marry me. And I was bound and determined I was gonna keep him too. Their wedding day was May 10th, 1991 at the courthouse in nearby Beaufort County. We went up there and we couldn't find two witnesses. And then a girl I knew happened to walk in, her and her mama were our witnesses which was crazy. The magistrate said, all right you got one minute. And he literally went through it so fast and he looked at Doug and he said, ten bucks she's yours.

Sure. Signed a paper. Oh my gosh that was so funny. He was already trying to find us a house not far from my mom. We had it picked out the whole thing. And so he was working to save up money to do that. But what did Bliss and Happily Ever After wasn't to be. Because less than a year after moving to North Carolina and three months away from laying eyes on his newborn son, Doug Jr.'s mangled body showed up on a lone stretch of railroad tracks in Williamston the weekend just after 4th of July. Exactly how he died and why he was found so far from where he lived are two questions no one, including law enforcement, has ever been able to answer. There were so many strange things that come out of it,

and the autopsies and all that stuff. It was really hard to understand what was fact and what wasn't. As you'll soon learn, everything surrounding what happened to Doug is not as it seems. Why didn't somebody say something that this isn't right? Why was everybody okay with just letting it go? It was the last thing he ever wrote to me to not go looking for answers. I totally, 100% feel that there was foul play from day one.

I didn't feel right, you know. I knew there was more to the story. Turns out there is more to this story. Much more. So let's start at the place where Doug Wagg's clock violently stopped, the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Williamston. I saw what looked like either an individual or debris from a storm or something. This was not supposed to be there. Because it's on those railroad tracks that the truth of what really happened to Doug lies. Something caught my eye and I said, I got hair underneath the spike. There was disturbed gravel. There was blood.

That's coming up in episode two, The Tracks. Listen right now. This is episode two, The Tracks. Fourth of July in 1991 fell on a Thursday, but most people's celebrations started the next day, Friday July 5th through Sunday July 7th. Cities across America were buzzing with fireworks, cookouts, and parades, and Williamston was no different. Citizens did all the things you'd expect a tiny town to do, eat, drink, and be merry. People moseyed from one neighbor's yard to another, picked at barbecue plates, and drank to their hearts content. It was

business as usual for local law enforcement too. Fourth of July weekend is always a busy weekend, always high call volume, a lot of alcohol related offenses, and by that I mean back then DUI and fights and that sort of thing. This is Andy Holliman, a retired Williamston police detective who worked for the city back in 1991. I don't remember anything specific about that weekend other than it was busy as always. He and a handful of other officers who worked for WPD patrolled Main Street and the neighborhoods throughout town, while their counterparts with the Martin County Sheriff's Office handled calls that came in from beyond the city limits. Think of Williamston as a small bubble sitting inside of a larger bubble.

The larger bubble is Martin County. Even though the Sheriff's Office was the bigger agency back then, it was only bigger by a little. We're talking eight to 10 deputies tops. They were smaller departments. Everyone had a lot more responsibility. It was not nearly as specialized as it tends to be now. The jurisdictions of the two agencies

were separated by, well, nothing really. It's just an imaginary line drawn on a piece of paper. The one unambiguous part of the map that did clearly define where the city stopped and the county's jurisdiction began was a stretch of CSX-owned railroad tracks. These tracks have been around for decades and are still operational today. Martin County is known as a Tier 1 county, meaning very rural and poor. But the one thing it had going for it in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was a thriving textile industry. If you drive a mile or so from Williamston City Center, you're likely to pass an old yarn mill

or paper plant. Most of these businesses are shuttered now, but back in 1991 they were thriving, and their operators mainly used the railroad to transport goods or buy products out of the area. Back then, the frequency of trains was only one train a day, going down and coming in the middle of the night. That's Randy Jones, a retired CSX engineer who worked for CSX for 41 years. He operated the overnight train that cut through Martin County. Before retiring in 2013, Randy knew his Williamston-Martin County route like the back of his hand.

It consisted of one engineer, me, the brakeman, a flagman, and a conductor. We were the ones who carried wood chips and fibers and the necessary ingredients to make paper down to the paper mill at Plymouth. That varied every night, but I wanted to go out about 40, 40 to 50 cars. At around 2.15 in the morning on Monday, July 8, 1991, Randy and his crew were operating their train like usual. He was in the front engine and the rest of the guys were in the back car, known as the caboose. The locomotive was puffing along at a safe speed, headed eastbound through Martin County,

slowly climbing in elevation as it made its way up a slight incline. It had a few hundred yards in front of it before it was going to pass through a designated railroad crossing at Wildcat Road, a long winding street that was partly in the city and partly in the county. There was nothing but woods, there was no houses, there was no pathways. It was an endless beast of the country right there. The trees and fields that zipped past Randy as he operated the train were blurs of black

and green. There were no light sources, except for the headlamp on the train. It does light up the area significantly within safe, where you can actually see or pinpoint anything with any accuracy out to about maybe, I'm guessing about maybe 30 yards at most, where you can see something clearly. At 2 20 a.m. in the dim beam of his train's headlight, Randy saw something concerning laying across the tracks in front of him. I saw what looked like either an individual or debris from a storm or something. I did not see anything move.

There was no movement at all of what was sitting there. It looked like the form of an individual, but at the same time, was it mannequins or was it a bunch of trash to be made, looked like it was a human. It was impossible for Randy to tell, which wasn't good because he was running out of time. By the time you see it, you cannot,

you know, you're not gonna stop this thing. As the train quickly approached the mass draped over the rails, Randy blew the engine's horn four times to warn whatever was there that it needed to get out of the way. That horn is easily being able to be heard for more than a mile. If you can't hear that horn in a half a mile, something's wrong. Something was wrong. Despite the loud burst from the train's horn, the object in front of Randy remained motionless.

And before he knew it, the worst had happened. It was all of a sudden, here it is, it's in front of me. There's no way that I'm gonna stop for it. And I shot the brakes on the train for fear of not knowing what it was. Right as Randy's engine and rail cars barreled over the object, he realized the mass he'd been watching for the past few moments wasn't trash. It was a man's body. He'd caught a small glimpse of it at the very last second. He was laying between the rails. It looked like his head was propped up on one side, his feet were propped up on the other. It was turned away from me. I could not see a face. I could not actually see shoes or feet.

Randy estimated that after hitting the man, the train traveled roughly half a mile to three-quarters of a mile down the tracks before coming to a full stop. That's pretty typical for that large of a train, by the way. I checked. After coming to a stop, Randy communicated to the men working with him that they'd hit something. And then... We contacted these authorities and everybody came running down there to check it out. Randy remembers deputies with the Martin County Sheriff's Office and a trooper from the North Carolina Highway Patrol arrived on scene pretty quickly. According to the fire department's records, emergency responders were on scene at 2 32 a.m.

Randy stayed inside the train's engine to ensure it wouldn't move and spoke with a member of law enforcement standing below him outside of the train's small front window. He said it was human. Did it move? I said, not that I could tell. And that was about eight steel-armoreds. The man Randy told me he spoke with was a North Carolina Highway Patrol trooper named Bob Wright. On several pieces of paperwork, Bob is specifically listed as one of the first responding officers to the scene. However, when I spoke with Bob last year, he informed me somebody had made a big mistake. I have no idea how my name got on that report. I didn't do it.

I wasn't there. I know nothing about it. You did not respond to the railroad tracks. Do you know any other officers or troopers who worked with you that could have been mistaken for you? Yeah, there's one, but I talked to him and he said he didn't know nothing about it. How is it possible that this kind of error was made on a report like this

saying that NCHP was involved and personnel were involved, yet it's not true? You're from Bethel. Correct. You know the law enforcement around Bethel? Well, my dad was the chief there for a number of years, from 93 to 97. And you know he didn't have the money to hire rocket scientists? Correct. Okay.

You get non-rocket scientists out in the road, they're tired, they worked all day, anything can happen. I just, you know, it's just, it's unfortunate that rural counties have to, as you well know, they can't afford to most brilliant folks around. Yeah, it's just interesting to me, like, to the extent that your name is brought up by individuals and in documentation, and that NCHP's involvement is brought up, I honestly have to question whether it was really a mistake or whether it was put in there just to be put in there. Like I don't

want to accuse anyone of anything but it's odd to me that you have that much mention of NTSB. I do not know. I cannot say anyway but I never heard any of those. I was a senior trooper here. I mean I'm 91 I was the one with who had been here the longest. I never heard anybody say anything about any of those are being hit by a train that we went to. I don't think we would even bothered with it. It might be one of those facts that one of us drove up, looked around and drove off and somebody said, Hey, that was Bob. It was such a strange discrepancy. It reeks of incompetence. Randy Jones wasn't all that impressed either

with the cop's investigation on the ground. He said after about an hour or so, MCSO cleared him to leave the scene, and he drove the train to its intended destination. He was never spoken to again after that. Has anyone other than me contacted you about this in the last 30 plus years? No. They did not seem to be very pinpoint.

Digging into the facts, more or less, I just reported to them that whatever this was, it was on the track. I ran over it. It was determined it was human. We called you. And that was about the track. I ran over it. It was determined it was human. We called you. And that was about the extent of it. It was in a very desolate spot on that railroad track. There was no houses around it.

It was way down at the track. And I think the law enforcement had to walk along with EMS a substantial distance from that road crossing. And it was like, okay, this, what in the world is he doing out here? I can't tell you if Martin County investigators tried to answer that question or if they did any kind of investigation at the death scene other than collect the body. And that's because no one knows what happened during those crucial early morning hours on July 8th, 1991. Not even the Martin County Sheriff's Office.

1991, no computers, everything's done by hand, handwritten reports. That's True Robinson, the current chief deputy of the department. We do have a large amount of paperwork, old reports that are boxed up, maintained in storage, and there have been multiple hours spent going through those boxes trying to locate a report that ties back to this particular incident. The only thing that we were ever able to locate was a log where report numbers are issued out. And the date of the incident, the description of the incident was, I believe it said, subject hit by a train and it had the name of a responding officer.

But as far as a report, we can't find a report on that. MCSO's reports, if there ever were any, are no longer around. So I don't have a nice, neat narrative that describes everything deputies did post train strike. The most obvious being how they even identified Doug Wagg as the victim. Yet shortly after Martin County investigators were said to have arrived on scene, the phone rang at Doug's in-law's house in nearby Jamesville, where he was living with Sandy,

who was seven months pregnant with their son. The phone rang. I answered the phone. Yes, I need to speak to someone who knew him. That didn't sit well with me at all. I said, well, I'm his wife. Where is he at? And they wouldn't tell me squat.

So I had to go wake my mom and my daddy up. They knew it wasn't good. Mama knew in her gut it wasn't good. I had no clue. I was totally oblivious because I'm thinking, nah. I don't know, maybe he just got hurt. I'm thinking, we're still going to be okay. According to Sandy, her dad Willie spoke with deputies on the phone and then a few minutes

later left the house with her younger brother, Eddie. I think my dad had been inside the body. He was white as a sheet when he came out of there. I think I had to drive home. I remember my dad saying he wished I never had to go through anything like that. There's really no way to word it how you feel when you lose somebody you're thinking you're going to spend the rest of your life with. And all I could think about was this baby and you know that's all I could think about. But how the authorities even knew to contact

the Davis family in the first place is what no one can explain. They knew to call your family's residents because Doug Wagg was who had been found. How did they know? I don't know. Did Doug have ID on him? Uh-uh. Was that at the house with you guys? Uh-uh. I don't know where his ID went to. There was no ID on him, but they had him ID'd pretty quickly. And I don't know where his ID went to. There was no ID on him, but they had him ID pretty quickly.

And I don't know how. Melissa, Doug's sister, as well as his other siblings, told me they were told in 1991 that Doug had a piece of paper in his pocket with his name written on it. And that's how the cops knew who he was. But even in that scenario, how or why deputies ended up contacting the Davis family is still strange. And full disclosure, I have no idea where that tidbit of information about a piece of paper being in Doug's pocket with his name on it originated from. It's not mentioned in any documentation I've been able to retrieve related to his

case, and Melissa and her siblings aren't sure who first mentioned that detail back in 1991 it was just something that they remember hearing but the only thing that makes any sense to me Absent a scrap of paper with his name on it Is that someone in law enforcement at the railroad tracks looking at Doug's mangled body? Had to have recognized who he was in order to know to call Sandy's parents. I mean, think about it. They had to have known Doug was somehow associated with Sandy and her family.

But how they knew that is what I can't figure out. Remember, Doug wasn't from Martin County. He'd only lived there for a matter of months before his death. So it wasn't like he was a hometown face that deputies would have seen over and over again. He'd also never been arrested by either the city or the county. So he wasn't a frequent flyer at the county jail or anything like that. What's frustrating is I can't ask the first responding deputy on scene if he recognized Doug because that deputy is now dead.

I can't ask Sandy's parents either because they're also dead. According to a corporate spokeswoman for CSX who I emailed back and forth with last year, CSX purges train strike incident records after seven years so it has nothing on this investigation either. But you know the deal by now. No way I was giving up there. I went a little higher up the food chain and contacted the Federal Railroad Administration, the government agency that, among other things,

documents and records all locomotive accidents in the United States. And there, in the depths of the FRA's archives, I found some interesting information. Information that is both really good and really bad. Whenever a train strikes something that's not supposed to be on a railway, the company that owns the train tracks is required by federal law to file what's referred to as a Railroad Injury and Illness Summary Form.

It's technically called a 6180-55A form. That document has a bunch of different boxes on it for things like time of the incident, date of a crash, the location, a narrative of events, et cetera. However, when the FRA sent me the 55A form that CSX filed related to Doug's death, it was shocking to read. Most of the boxes were blank. In 1991, CSX failed to include the day of the incident, the time, the county, the latitude

and longitude of the strike, or any information about their employees. The section of the form where the narrative of events was supposed to be was also empty. But according to the FRA, narratives weren't technically required on 55A forms until 1997, so I guess CSX is off the hook there. Still, everything else that was supposed to be on the form wasn't. Here's Melissa, one of Doug's younger sisters. Just as basic as anything.

This is horrible to say, but they had hit an animal on the tracks or something. There was no extra effort or even minimum effort put into filling out that form and making sure that all of the boxes are checked. For them not to have followed through with what they were required to do, to me is negligence. And just to emphasize Melissa's point a little more, I did some digging into the FRA's data and discovered that in 1991 in North Carolina, there were a total of 72 incidents on CSX-owned railroads. Of those 72 incidents, 10 of them were categorized as trespasser incidents, resulting in serious harm or death. Doug was one of those 10 trespasser incidents. So it's not like CSX was filing 55A forms for cases like his left and right,

or were too busy to take the time to fill his form out sufficiently. They should have done better, and they didn't. That's all I can say about that. At the time, though, no one in Doug's family in Tennessee knew what was going on in North Carolina. By sunrise on July 8th, Sandy's parents had called Doug's parents to tell them he was dead. But after that, Shirley and Doug Sr. were left to wait on law enforcement to fill them

in on the details. And that never happened on July 8th, or the day after. I remember sitting on the floor and trying to figure out what's going on, you know. Nobody can explain losing a child. I don't care if it's a car accident, if it's on the tracks or what it is. I don't remember ever talking to anybody in law enforcement. I didn't know who to contact. I had no idea. I wasn't even sure where he was killed.

While they waited to get more information, Shirley called all of her children to let them know the terrible news. Angel, the oldest girl in the family, remembers this moment vividly. My mom called me. It was early morning and I was in bed and my mom called and when I picked it up and she told me. It was like, wait, what? And I'm like, wait, what happened?

You know, he was hit by a train. What? So immediately things go in your head, you think, when you hear that and it's like, you know, Doug's been killed. He was, you know, hit by a train. So you think, oh, he was in a car, he was crossing the tracks, trying to beat the train or something like that. And then when you really find out, you know, it was his body on the tracks and it was a

whole other ball game. Despite CSX not sending its own investigators to work in conjunction with local law enforcement and the Sheriff's Office not putting much effort into processing the death scene, there was one person who took a curious interest in the case, Andy Holloman. As a Williamston City police detective, he had no jurisdiction on the railroad. That didn't mean he couldn't at least go check things out. There is a thing called extraterritorial jurisdiction, and it can extend up to three miles. This was only a few yards in our ATJ outside the actual city limit boundary. We all knew it was a sheriff's office case, but it was right there.

And if we could go out and offer any assistance and probably be a little nosy too, that's cops, the cops are naturally nosy, then why not? I probably got to work between seven and 7.30. I've always been an early bird. And Tim came in, Tim Hines, who worked for me in the detective division,

Tim came in a little before eight and said, hey, did you hear we had a train wreck last night? And I immediately thought vehicle versus train or whatever. And I said, no, I didn't hear anything about it. And he said, yeah. He said, boy got killed. I said, struck a car? He said, no, he was on the tracks. I said, okay. He said, you

want to ride out there? I said, sure, why not? Let's ride out there. It took Andy and Tim just a few minutes to make their way from the Williamston police station to the railroad tracks outside of town. When they arrived around 10 a.m., Doug's body had already been removed and transported 45 minutes away to the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina State University in Greenville for an autopsy. Personnel from the sheriff's office had left the scene too. They were all gone. There was no one there. Andy and Tim parked their cruiser on a dead-end road called Belcher Road,

which sits perpendicular to the railroad tracks. Then they walked through a small stretch of grass and trees before emerging onto the railway. To get up to the actual railroad ties, they had to step down several feet into a ditch filled with granite rocks, then step up several feet to be on the railroad tracks. Some of the first responders may have accessed the scene this way in the middle of the night. But based on what the train's engineer Randy Jones told me, it's more likely any deputies or EMS units who responded parked their cars near where the tracks intersected with Wildcat Road at the actual railroad crossing. From there, they would have had an easier walk level with the railroad tracks to get to Doug's body.

To get a better sense of what I'm referring to, check out the blog post for this episode on our website, counterclockwisepodcast.com. An aerial map I created will help you visualize and orient things much better. After a few minutes of looking around and not seeing much, Andy started asking himself the obvious questions. Why was he down here? This is kind of the middle of nowhere. Where would he have been coming from

or going to to be down here? He and his partner discovered a spot on the railroad ties that appeared to be the strike point. There was disturbed gravel. There was blood. A little ways up rail from that, they found a pair of mangled eyeglasses and something else very unexpected.

Something caught my eye and I said, Tim, I got hair. And he said, no, you don't. I got hair underneath the spike. Tim ran back to the car and got a handful of evidence bags and came back and we started following that trail of hair and it went all the way back probably 25 or 30 yards. The hair was up rail, meaning it's in the opposite direction the train was moving. Finding clumps of hair stuck beneath the railroad spikes so far up rail from the strike point

felt strange to Andy. It meant that Doug had been there and lost hair there, but then he'd been physically hurt further down rail. Even stranger, the last place Andy and Tim found hair as they worked backwards was immediately next to a spot where someone could have accessed the railway if they were willing to fight through some thick brush. When Andy looked closely at that spot, he saw what he believed were tire tracks in a matted section of the thick grass. But that wasn't even the most alarming thing. There was what appeared to me to be a drag mark, and it led right back to the railroad

tracks. In that moment, it was clear to Andy, an experienced detective, what he was looking at. A crime scene. It was obvious which way the train was headed and which way the body was drug was before the point of impact, in the opposite direction of the direction that the body was drugged. He was drugged down the tracks and placed on the tracks. Drag down the tracks by someone well before the train had ever arrived. It was a horrific thought and one that Andy couldn't keep to himself. After dropping Tim off at WPD,

Andy headed straight to the Martin County Sheriff's Office to tell the then-Sheriff, Jerry Beach, what he'd found. He hand-delivered the physical evidence bags he and Tim had collected, but Andy didn't get the reaction from Jerry Beach that he expected. Walked into the sheriff's office and I said, Sheriff, this fatality he had this morning. He said, yeah, what about it?

I said, well, Tim and I rode out there and just had a little look around and he kind of went high into the right ballistic, he didn't like it at all. And I said, but Sheriff, I said, I said, who you got working on it? Because they didn't really have a detective's and investigators division then. And he said, well, I'm working on it. I said, okay.

I said, well, I've got this evidence here. And I laid it on his desk and he really got mad. He said, I don't know what you think you're doing in my county working my crime scene, but this was a accident. And I said, but Sheriff, I really believe this was a homicide. And he let me know pretty quick,

he didn't care what I thought. And the best thing I could do was stay out of his jurisdiction and do my job and not worry about his. Don't worry about it. Andy's one of us and that response did not set well with him. Mainly I was just pissed off at being dismissed like I was. Somebody was going to get away with murder because I felt like there was a homicide that was going to go and was not being investigated.

Similar to Jerry Beach, Andy's boss, Williamston Police Chief Bucky Holloman, no relation to Andy, chewed Andy out for what he'd done at the railroad tracks. He told me that I didn't work for the sheriff's office. I worked for the town and not to cause trouble for him and stay my ass in the city limits. At that time, tensions were high between the Martin County Sheriff's Office and the city police department. I don't know why Jerry and Bucky didn't like each other.

It was a known, it was a given. They didn't like each other. So anything that you did, you didn't tell them what you were doing. You didn't call Bucky. And if a deputy was out in the county and screaming for help, you didn't call the police chief and say, hey, is it OK if I go out there? You just went. You might get sued out for it later, but right that minute, a brother needed help,

and you were going to help him. Tim Hines, Andy's partner in 1991, also remembers a visceral riff between MCSO and WPD. We were three blocks down from each other. Sheriff's department was here and police department was down there. And it was two different worlds. It ain't politics. It's just small town, good old boys syndrome. During my interview with Tim,

he was unable to remember any details about the morning he went to the train tracks with Andy. He didn't deny he was there. We went out there, I don't know, eight, nine, we got to work at eight. But he couldn't recall picking up evidence. I don't remember that because like I said, if you know anything about law enforcement,

once you touch evidence, you got to follow that chain. And I don't remember doing that. Do you remember seeing a significant amount of blood or anything like that? I don't recall, but I don't think so. Cause that would have stood out to you, right? Yes. Why do you think Because that would have stood out to you, right? Yes. Why do you think Jerry Beach would have told Andy,

don't worry about this? I wish I could answer that. I can't. Because when I went to work with the Sheriff's Department, I basically took Jerry's place as an investigator. And if I had something like that, I always called in the SBI. Did you catch that? as an investigator. If I had something like that, I always called in the SBI. Did you catch that? Yep. Tim Hines was not only a former Williamston police officer, he also worked for Martin County Sheriff's Office too. He became a deputy and changed

departments within weeks of Doug's death because he says the pay was better. Tim claims that when he took his new position with MCSO, he was a grunt. He didn't hear or know anything about Doug's case. Personally, at the time, it was something that happened. I had no, yes, it was this, or yes, I think it was this. It was just, oh my God, look what happened in Martin County. I never really got involved in it. And what I mean involved in it, I didn't ever ask no questions.

Why the county didn't do anything, I don't know. I can't explain why, why they won't document it. Thankfully, Andy Holliman was the polar opposite of his former partner. He took it upon himself to be a thorn in everyone's side, to make sure the forensic pathologist who was going to be conducting Doug's autopsy had every scrap of information possible.

The medical examiner in the state of North Carolina is a very powerful individual. And I knew the EME who was working the case. I called him and talked to him. Just told him what I knew, told who was working the case. I called him and talked to him. Just told him what I knew, told him what I had found. Andy didn't know it in 1991, but his determination would prove to be critical for so many reasons. If he had not gone and talked to the coroner and put that in the report, I don't think any of that would have been in there. And I honestly don't think that we would be here right now. It's all coming up in the next episode of Counter Clock, episode three, The Damage.