Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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The lack of a thorough investigation by the Martin County Sheriff's Office in 1991 and Sheriff Jerry Beach quickly dismissing the possible physical evidence Andy Holloman brought to him directly contributed to Doug's case being difficult to solve now. That's an undisputed fact. They're the reason why we can't go any further now. So it's not because the information isn't there, it's because their own department didn't keep the information.
A few months into investigating her brother's case, Melissa began to struggle with reconciling the reason for this reality. Since I've been investigating, she's grown increasingly skeptical of law enforcement's motives back in 1991. I don't know why Sheriff Beach chose to make the decisions that he did.
But, you know, did those decisions go even further than him? Was there something that he was telling somebody else to say? You know, like...
When you have one big thing, it makes you question everything. To me, it leaves the door so wide open to a lot of different things, and none of them are good. You know, there's a reason why he chose to treat this case the way he did. It's one thing to choose not to investigate it, but it's a whole other situation to choose not even to write a report about it. That tells me that you didn't want anybody coming back and finding any paperwork later. Her siblings echo the same belief.
Maybe they got wind that he knew something that would incriminate them, the law enforcement. And they're like, you know what, we're not going to have this. And he's a druggie, nobody's going to miss him. He doesn't matter, his life doesn't matter. Death doesn't matter either. It's almost like somebody's trying to throw you off track from what might have really happened. I found myself wondering the same thing at times.
What if the information about the vague alleged sightings of Doug around Williamston aren't even true? What if those tidbits were planted in his autopsy report or given to Dr. Harris on purpose with the intent of creating a damning narrative that would easily and quickly explain why Doug's death wasn't worth probing into? What if the information about him drinking and being seen with drug dealers is just made up?
Something I haven't been able to shake from my mind is that wild conversation I had with Bob Wright. He's the North Carolina Highway Patrol trooper who said he was never at Doug's death scene. Remember him?
Yet, somehow his name is repeatedly mentioned in the only paperwork that was conveniently preserved in Doug's case. 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. I wasn't there. I don't know. I don't know how my name got attached to it. Bob denying that he was ever involved tells me someone who wrote down information provided to the medical examiner's office was lying.
But why? And were they just lying about Bob? Or everything? Something else that feels off is an ominous story Doug Wagg Sr. mentioned to me during his interview. He said at one point in July 1991, he'd wanted to go to North Carolina and investigate what happened to his son for himself. But at the last minute, he learned something that made him decide not to. The first thing that I wanted to do was go out there
and find out for myself. But I had a family to look out after. If something happened to me, if somebody, you know, because I had heard rumors about the mafia out there or whatever it was, I was pretty close to going until I figured, well, what happens if something happens to me and then these guys don't have a daddy either?
The risk that you thought was involved with going out there, do you think that it was people in the community that could have been dangerous? Was it the law enforcement that you thought was dangerous? Well, I don't know. I had heard at first that the police department was corrupt.
If this is starting to sound conspiratorial, trust me, I get it. It isn't my desire to ever be the person who says, hey, maybe it's not just police incompetence. Maybe the investigators were just corrupt. But I also can't deny the evidence could support that theory. What's harder to accept, though, is the logic of it.
If whatever Doug knew possibly involved police corruption, then why did he say in his note to Sandy that he wanted to turn some people into the police? That doesn't make any sense. On the flip side though, if the information he knew about involved people who were already working with or for corrupt cops, and Doug didn't know that, then going to the police would have made him a liability to two enemies, not one.
But in an investigation like this, if you suspect something like police corruption, you can't just bust down the doors and scream it from the rooftops. You have to work on it quietly. I knew in order to continue my reporting on this topic, I was going to have to find people who worked in law enforcement in eastern North Carolina during the 1990s. People who were willing to talk to me.
My first stop was interviewing a man I felt with a high level of certainty was someone I could trust. I'm Francis D'Ambra, and I'm your dad.
In 1992, my father became police chief in the tiny town of Bethel, North Carolina, which is where I lived for the first few years of my life before moving to the Outer Banks. Bethel is 25 minutes west of Williamston in nearby Pitt County. In the early 90s, it had a very small police department with only a handful of officers. So, due to lack of resources, my dad would regularly work with neighboring agencies.
Pitt County Sheriff's Office, Martin County Sheriff's Office, Robersonville Police Department. We would help each other out. We would back each other up. We would work mutual checkpoints and things like that. Not long after becoming Bethel's chief, though, my dad heard some concerning chatter that prompted him to start distancing his department from the adjacent ones. It was just...
I don't know, I just want to call it homespun kind of good old boy stuff going on in the rural areas of North Carolina at that time. And whether I was just oblivious to it, having come from the city of Raleigh with a little bit more experience
Urban sophistication, maybe I didn't see it, but it certainly was a lot of, you know, looking back on it in retrospect, there's a lot of weird stuff that went on that always had some local person tied to it. Maybe let someone know when the cops are going to be surveilling or doing something like that and getting paid.
My father's department was too small to really be in the know. Aside from hearing about corruption in other agencies, my dad never witnessed it firsthand. But someone who did was a man named Mike Wells. Mike was a Williamston City Police officer in 1990 and then went to work for the Martin County Sheriff's Office in 1998.
At different points in time, he was coworkers with both Andy Holloman and Tim Hines. Mike spent most of the '90s investigating drug trafficking operations in Martin County as part of a drug task force called the Roanoke-Chowan Narcotics Task Force. That team was comprised of fewer than a dozen men who came from various local law enforcement agencies as well as the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, or NCSBI.
The main place Mike conducted surveillance operations and drug buys was in the Walmart parking lot in the middle of Williamston, just off US Highway 17. We got a lot of traffic. 17, we had a lot of traffic from New York to Florida. That intersection in Williamston stayed hot with drug traffic coming through there all the time. And a lot of times where the Walmart was now, that was a meeting place. That's where they would bring drugs down, they'd meet.
Andy Holloman remembers drug busts frequently happening in this part of town, too. A lot of drugs, a lot of drugs, a lot of heroin, a lot of cocaine coming in, a lot of cocaine coming all the way out of Columbia and heroin coming in from New York. A lot of it was meeting right here in Little Martin County.
The Roanoke-Chowan Drug Task Force formed in 1989 as a means to combat the growing crack cocaine epidemic in eastern North Carolina counties, which included Martin County. In 1989 and 1990, the unit was praised for being a massive success. But right around that time, Mike Wells noticed things began to shift. I kept noticing that when we go after these folks, we had information we were going to go bust them, and they would know we were coming.
And I said, y'all, something's going on. That something was greed. The first red flag came when Mike noticed a Williamston City police officer who regularly assisted the task force always scurried off to call his wife before teams would deploy for drug raids. Mike eventually suspected that officer was feeding sensitive information to his wife, who would then relay it to the targets of their drug investigations. He was calling me.
In that instance, Mike says the officer was kicked off the task force, but never prosecuted. Another time, Mike suspected one of his best friends was working both sides of the law. He and this man both did the same job, but lived very differently.
It eventually got to the point where other members of the drug task force suspected Mike's friend was getting paid to tip off drug dealers too. A behind-closed-doors investigation ensued.
I'm choosing not to say the man's name Mike is talking about because he was never found guilty of any wrongdoing as it relates to police corruption. To Mike, though, this guy was certainly guilty of ruining their friendship. Me and him were just like that. We were friends.
And to this day, I still believe he called that bastard and told him we were coming. There's not an agency around here that people in those agencies, you can 100% trust. When I interviewed Tim Hines, I asked him if he'd ever witnessed any police corruption while working for the city police force or the sheriff's office. And unsurprisingly, Tim kept his response short. If you ever heard of the good old boy syndrome,
I was just livin' it that. The good old boy syndrome back then was runnin' wild, okay? I also got in touch with the former police chief of Robersonville Police Department. That was a neighboring agency to Martin County and an area where the Drug Task Force operated. Darrell Knox was the chief of that agency in the '90s, and before becoming chief, he worked as a deputy in Martin County.
About 20 minutes into my conversation with Daryl, I brought up the task force and allegations that local cops who worked with it were rumored to be corrupt. In response, he blurted out the following. I've been accused of all kinds of things. You've been accused personally of, you know... Being a drug dealer, being a... By the way, and being a liberal, and then being too conservative, being a...
The reason I drive a nice, decent truck, or I'm rich, or I'm gross, Ku Klux Klan, Grand Dragon of Martin County, I've been accused of all kinds of stuff. In case you missed that, Darrell said because of the positions he held in law enforcement in Martin County, he was personally accused of being a corrupt cop and being in the hierarchy of the Ku Klux Klan. Why would people accuse you of being in the KKK? I don't know.
- Why would they accuse you of being a drug dealer? - Darryl's response is difficult to hear in the recording, but in a roundabout way, he did finally answer my question.
He said during his time on the Roanoke-Chowan Drug Task Force, he was accused of arresting drug dealers just so he could steal their drugs and pocket the profit himself. When I continued to ask him if those allegations were true and why anyone would make something like that up, our chat didn't last much longer. Daryl grew frustrated and defensive.
I spent several weeks trying to get in touch with other men who I'd read in news articles or seen in court documents made arrests with the Roanoke-Chowan Drug Task Force. Drew Robinson mentioned to me during his interview that he happened to be on it toward the end of its lifespan in the early 2000s. When I was doing it, you know, we were doing undercover operations where we would bring in undercover officers and actually send undercovers out and buy drugs from people
those people who had been targeted in those narcotics investigations. At the end of the day, we're all looking at one common goal, and that's to identify the people who are bringing in and distributing drugs and do our best to build a case against them and forward that information and have them prosecuted.
Besides Drew, though, most of the guys I'd identified as having worked on the task force hadn't returned my calls. One now works for the federal government, another didn't want to go on record, and several others are dead. The only person I got a hold of who was willing to talk was a guy named Wesley Liverman. He's the former commander of the task force who ran it for over a decade, and from the moment I started his interview, Wesley didn't hold back any punches.
Wearing a badge just like I was. They needed to be in the penitentiary themselves.
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When we started, we started from scratch. We had nothing, no equipment, no office, no cars, no guns, no nothing. Fast forward to 1991, and the days of having no resources were behind Wesley Liverman and his small team of Drug Task Force officers.
The operation, which was based out of his hometown of Ahoskie, North Carolina, about 45 minutes north of Williamston, got 75% of its funding from the federal government, and the remaining 25% came from a handful of counties who pulled their money together. Wesley was handpicked to form and lead the task force because of his experience. I worked a lot of narcotics, and I had been to narcotic schools, and I graduated from the
FBI Academy in 85, and I had a lot of folks that I knew that already worked narcotics in adjoining areas with a lot of knowledge and had close ties with the SBI. He says the success the task force had in its first few years was a result of two things, having a vast network of informants and keeping the details of investigations under lock and key.
You had people that were wanting to give you information and in exchange for that information, they were wanting money. And the payments depended on what kind of information and what kind of arrest were the end result. Some of them were making more money as informants than I was making. We negotiated with some of the individuals that we caught to climb the ladder a little higher. We wouldn't dismiss the charges.
but we would get the cases continued. And the district attorney worked with us very well because he knew what we were doing, and we were very secretive about who we used. The only ones that would have access to the informants and all were the agents in that office and the secretary. By 1991, though, Wesley picked up on the same thing Mike Wells had noticed. The criminals the task force tried to take down always seemed to be one step ahead.
Some of the personnel that were on the local sheriff's departments and police departments, we found out would pass on information. If we were going to do a roundup or we were going to do a raid, the bad guy would receive a call from some of those individuals. So we got very discreet about who knew what we were going to do and when we were going to do it. So you're almost battling two things. That's right. That's exactly right.
Wesley told me that every time he suspected a crooked cop was undermining the task force and getting a kickback from drug dealers, he'd report them to the top brass of the local agency they worked for. But he never saw any of them go to jail. He said a few lost their jobs, but then a month or so later, they'd get hired at another department. It infuriated Wesley, but there was nothing he could do. His job was to catch drug dealers, not investigate internal affairs.
The frustrating reality was exactly what Tim Hines described, a good old boy system running wild. My granddaddy was in law enforcement. My daddy was in law enforcement for 36 years right here in this county. And straight as an arrow, he always told me to be fair and honest and treat people like you'd like to be treated. And that always worked for me. And he did not like crooks like...
and he didn't like crooked law enforcement wearing a badge just like I was. They needed to be in the penitentiary themselves.
Wesley told me that if the task force seized drugs and money during raids, that evidence would eventually get destroyed in front of the clerk of court in a Hoski. But if busts happened in cities or counties separate from the task force, then by law, the local law enforcement agencies in those jurisdictions would handle and keep all the evidence.
He could never prove it, but Wesley believes there were numerous times local police and sheriff's offices would use information developed by the task force, then prematurely make busts, ensuring any drugs or cash would remain in their possession and out of the reach of the task force. He suspected some of that evidence was being pocketed or funneled back to drug traffickers. And honestly, when you think about that, it's a seriously disturbing allegation.
But a few weeks after my interview with Wesley, I called Andy Holliman to ask what he knew about corruption within the Williamston Police Department or Martin County Sheriff's Office. According to him, in 1991, his boss Bucky Holliman, no relation, and the head of detectives for the Martin County Sheriff's Office, a guy named Ronnie Wynn, did fraternize with drug dealers. I suspected that they were both getting kickbacks.
Both Ronnie and Bucky are now dead. The informant who provided Andy with the information you just heard is also dead. So I'm not able to verify Andy's claims.
But something that is worth noting is that on September 25th, 1991, two and a half months after Doug Wagg's death, Ronnie Wynn abruptly resigned from the Martin County Sheriff's Office and provided no explanation as to why. By 1993, Bucky had turned in his badge as chief of police in Williamston, also without comment. If everything my dad, Mike Wells, Wesley Liverman, and Andy told me is true,
then the reality is there's evidence to support there were a number of corrupt cops working in Martin County colluding with drug traffickers in the early and mid-1990s. At this point, I don't find it coincidental that Doug's death happened amidst this activity. If he was killed because of something he knew, it's possible, and in my mind, probable, it was related to this.
In the time it had taken me to go down the rabbit hole investigating allegations of police corruption, I'd also been chasing another lead, one that was much more obvious. What was Doug's relationship like with the Davis family? Did he know who they were? Really? For generations, her family is from there. I don't know how they wouldn't have known. Jerry Beech's first cousin married Sandy's great-aunt.
So Jerry Beach's family is connected through marriage to Sandy's extended family. Yes. I had to pause and consider. Did whatever happened to Doug start much closer to home? Do you think that in any way
your mother's family could be involved in what happened to your dad? I honestly don't know. I like to believe I can believe everything she says, but at the same time, it's hard for me to believe anything. That's coming up next in CounterClock, Episode 7, The Family.
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