Confessions of a Journalist

This story is adapted from the new book Murder in Manteo: Seeking Justice for Stacey Stanton, which is published by The History Press and available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores in Dare County.

In 1992, I was the special projects reporter for The High Point Enterprise newspaper. I needed money following a divorce, so I wrote articles for true-crime magazines in my off hours. One of those stories was about the case of Clifton Eugene Spencer, convicted in January 1991 of fatally stabbing 28-year-old Stacey Stanton and of slashing her right breast and vagina on February 3, 1990.

Stanton was killed in Manteo, in Dare County, where I have spent much of my life. I thought I could trust the law enforcement officers there.

The true-crime magazines, also called “detective magazines,” were pro-law enforcement. They didn’t encourage their writers to reach out to defendants and their lawyers for their side. Reaching out to all sides was a basic practice in my newspaper work. But for the magazines I went by their standard, basing my Stanton article on interviews with investigators and newspaper clippings.

I wrote the story and mailed it in. The magazine sent me a check for about $300, which I used to pay bills. The magazine published the story a few months later, giving it sensational play on the cover, with a photo of a scantily clad blonde model and a headline of “Savage Slayer Slashed Stacey’s Breast.” I cringed at the cover, for which I was not given prior review, but told myself that the bestselling true-crime author Ann Rule, famous for her book on serial murderer Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, started by writing for detective magazines.

My byline on the magazine story was a pseudonym, as was the norm for those stories by me and many other writers. I was comfortable with that because I never asked my newspaper bosses whether I could freelance for detective magazines, realizing they’d probably tell me no. 

In doing so, I was carrying on a long tradition in journalism: Instead of asking for permission, it’s better just to do it and beg for forgiveness later, if needed. I remain comfortable with that tradition. The rest, not so much.

Because, unfortunately for Spencer, I wasn’t the only person who went for the convenient truth. We journalists make mistakes, and most of us try to correct them. But when mistakes by police officers, lawyers, and judges go uncorrected, they expose people of limited resources like Spencer to execution or long prison sentences.

The Murder

Stacey Stanton had moved from her South Jersey home to Manteo in the late 1980s. Her father was close friends with Boyd Midgett, a Manteo town commissioner. That gave her entrance to Manteo’s insular culture. She did the rest with her warm and welcoming nature. She cut hair and waited tables at downtown Manteo’s Duchess of Dare restaurant, an iconic spot. 

Stanton charmed the locals, but she had an explosive relationship with Norman Judson “Mike” Brandon Jr., who had a long criminal record. Tall, and handsome in his own way, he could be charming to women until he wasn’t, sometimes beating them. 

Brandon broke up with Stanton in December 1989, jilting her for another woman. In the last week of Stanton’s life, she rendezvoused with Brandon in her apartment, which she had shared with him. That same week came revelations that Brandon’s new girlfriend was pregnant with his child. Still, Stanton wanted Brandon back.

It all came to a head on the night of Friday, February 2, 1990, in the Green Dolphin Pub in downtown Manteo. The Dolphin was fun as hell, with favorite songs like “Red Red Wine” by the band UB40 and Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out (For Summer)” rocking the jukebox. 

The clientele included commercial fishermen, bulk-headers, carpenters, and waitresses, along with Coast Guard workers, who loved their adrenaline-rushed work in one of the country’s most challenging spots, the Graveyard of the Atlantic. There were also lawyers, politicians, hard workers, and pikers, some with “papers” hanging over them, charges for crimes ranging from assault to drunken driving.

Manteo resident Andy Griffith, who started his acting career on the island in The Lost Colony outdoor drama, had staged scenes in the bar for an episode of his TV series Matlock. One Dolphin regular was Andy’s friend Marc Basnight of Manteo, who would become the most powerful majority leader of the state Senate in modern history. 

On the last Friday night of her life, Stanton, Brandon, and his new girlfriend were all glowering at each other at the Dolphin. Spencer, who was friends with Stanton and Brandon, stumbled into the middle of it. Stanton went back to her nearby apartment on the second floor of a three-story building. Spencer dropped by to see her there, unwittingly joining a deadly drama, with Stanton repeatedly telling him to go back to the Dolphin and tell Brandon she wanted to see him.

The next afternoon, Stanton was found slain in her apartment. With Manteo in the midst of revitalization and tourist season coming on, town officials pushed for the killer to be quickly caught. Brandon implicated Spencer, who was soon charged after investigators repeatedly interrogated him. Racial tensions figured in. Stanton was white, as was Brandon, who was racist and often used the N-word; Spencer is Black. One of my local friends, a white man who was in the Dolphin on Stanton’s last night there, told me he had stopped talking to Brandon long before because Brandon often talked of “cutting n——.”

District Attorney H.P. Williams brought a first-degree murder charge against Spencer and sought the death penalty. Spencer’s family, not trusting the local court-appointed list, raised their own funds and retained Romallus Murphy, a respected NAACP lawyer from Greensboro. Murphy, after doing scant work on the case, pushed Spencer to make a plea bargain; he told him that if he went to trial in a Southern town, he’d be executed for the slaying of a white woman. In January 1991, less than a year after Stanton’s death, Spencer pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. 

Stanton’s mother didn’t buy it. Soon after she lost her daughter, she said Brandon killed her. Brandon died in 2010.  

Seeking Redemption

Some local lawyers who heard Williams summarize the case against Spencer as he entered his plea were astonished. There was no physical evidence against him, other than his fingerprints found in Stanton’s apartment. And he’d told investigators those prints would be there, as he had visited her in the apartment in the hours before she was killed. 

As word spread about the plea, whites and Blacks who knew Spencer were also perplexed, knowing Spencer as a basically good guy who struggled with crack abuse. The locals, like the lawyers, had serious doubts about the law enforcement interrogations of Spencer.

Spencer had talked at length to investigators. He was just trying to help the lawmen find Stacey’s killer, one of his lawyers said. We all know from countless TV shows that Spencer should have kept his mouth shut, but that wasn’t in his kind nature. As it was, investigators used leading questions and twisted his words in interviews that were never videotaped nor audiotaped. 

In prison, Spencer studied worn legal books from a prison library and hand-wrote a powerful 77-page motion for appropriate relief (MAR). Edgar Barnes, a young Manteo lawyer appointed to the case in 1992, fought hard to get Spencer the trial he had forgone with his no-contest plea. But after two lengthy MAR hearings by Barnes and another lawyer, after hearing extensive evidence about how Murphy failed Spencer, judges essentially ruled that Murphy’s representation had been adequate. 

Chris Mumma, the director of the Durham-based North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, entered the case in 2003 at the request of one of Spencer’s sisters. Mumma followed up on the work of the appellate lawyers and did her own strong work. She obtained a recantation from Brandon’s alibi witness, got DNA testing, and persuaded the new district attorney, Frank Parrish, to write a letter in 2004 supporting Spencer’s parole. Parrish wrote that because of the irregularities in the case, Spencer should be paroled–a courageous and unusual act for an elected DA. Finally, after more pushing by Mumma, Spencer was released in 2007 after spending 17 years behind bars.

I studied press accounts of the case, and came to believe that Spencer had been wrongly convicted and that I had conformed with the flawed system that sought to seal that wrongful conviction. I decided to do my part in setting Spencer’s case right, and to make my argument about who really killed Stanton, by writing a book that might help Mumma get Spencer exonerated.

I resolved to work on the book with Spencer and to share a percentage of the proceeds with him, as I would be telling his very personal and painful story. Spencer and I had phone conversations toward that end. As we came to an agreement, I knew I had to tell him about that magazine story I wrote back in 1992. I revealed that to him in a cell phone call in late 2022.

He was on the job at the time, driving his tractor-trailer. When I told him I wrote the magazine story, he was silent for a moment. When he read that story in prison, he told me, it made him mad. The defendant conveyed in that story wasn’t who he really was, he said. Then he thanked me for my honesty. He agreed to work with me on the book, the start of many conversations with Spencer and Mumma. 

With Spencer’s permission, Mumma shared with me her file on the case that included many letters he wrote to her. In one from 2004, he wrote that reading the detective story helped lead him to write his motion for appropriate relief:

The details of Stacey’s murder weren’t pretty and it made me sick reading that story, that story should make anyone feel nothing but contempt for the person that thought so little of life. I shut down for 3 or 4 months after that, “but” when I decided to try and do something about it the story made me angry.

Spencer and I talked about that letter. I told him that I hoped the book would give me some measure of redemption for my conformity, in writing the magazine story, with North Carolina’s flawed justice system. We began our shared hunt for the truth in his case.

For me, the holy grail in the case is a March 7, 1990 letter from SBI forensic scientist D.T. Hamlin to Lt. Col. Jasper Williams of the Dare County Sheriff’s Office, one of the lead investigators on the case. Hamlin wrote that none of the hairs found in Stacey’s mouth, on her chest, in her hands or “in her pubic area” were “negroid hairs” based on the hair samplings SBI Agent Dennis Honeycutt had submitted. He also wrote that “per communication with [SBI Agent Kent] Inscoe the remainder of the evidence need not be examined for a hair transfer.” 

The next day, the district attorney authorized a warrant for first-degree murder to be sworn out against Spencer.

Others who have studied the case also don’t think Spencer killed Stanton. 

Delia D’Ambra grew up in Manteo. Her podcast, CounterClock, which re-investigated the Stanton case and generated wide interest when it was released in 2020, recently told me, “I came into this story with an open mind, as I do with all my stories. But I have come to determine, based on the facts I uncovered in the Stanton case after nearly two years of investigation, that Clifton Spencer is an innocent man.”

Barnes, Spencer’s former lawyer who is now the chief district court judge in the area, continues to believe Spencer is innocent. He told me last year that he really wanted to win Spencer the trial he never had. He, or any decent lawyer for that matter, could have won an acquittal given the state’s weak evidence, he said. “It would have been a heck of a trial,” Barnes said.

Asking Questions

Investigative journalism can be a contact sport. Like many of my sisters and brothers in our field, I’ve received numerous threats, most recently before a May event in Manteo about my book about this case. 

They chill us at times, but we try to laugh them off. We talk about going to jail before we’d answer a court order to reveal a source, and most of us would do that. But the threats are nothing compared to what Spencer and others have endured, years spent in the dead end of prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

Spencer often tells me to be careful out there in seeking out witnesses, that I’m not young anymore. He’s right. I am 63, still fighting away in a young person’s game. I hope I’ve gotten wiser. Spencer sure has.

I conformed and went for the easy resolution with that 1992 magazine story. I have learned. I now believe that another man, not Clifton Spencer, killed Stacey Stanton; I make the case for that near the end of the book. And if I’m proven wrong about my theory, I will freely admit that. No law enforcement officers ever have made such admissions in this case, where they got tunnel vision aggravated by race. 

Spencer was the target at the end of the tunnel, as Mumma has said, the only target for investigators. Truth was the first casualty, and the most enduring and harmful one. Everything else wrong in the case was rooted in that casualty. 

Casualties of truth continue in criminal cases today, and will continue as long as we conform and don’t ask questions. I try to keep learning. I keep pursuing the truth, which can be as elusive and as beautifully powerful as dust on the wings of butterflies.