Who Killed Jeffrey Young? (No Way Out, Part II)

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At the trial that sent him to prison for most of his life, four people provided the key testimony against Benjamin Spencer.

In part one of this series, we heard two of those four backtrack or recant their testimony on tape.

The foreman of the jury that found Spencer guilty now believes he's innocent.

But if that's true, it raises a question.

Who might have killed Jeffrey Young?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic, back with part two of our series, No Way Out.

If you haven't listened to part one, I recommend you go back and do that before you proceed with this series.

In that episode, we heard about the robbing and killing of a man named Jeffrey Young in Dallas in 1987, and we heard about the trials that led to Benjamin Spencer spending most of his life in prison for the crime.

He's still there, but much of the evidence that got him there has crumbled under scrutiny, owing in large part to work Spencer did on his own case while he's been behind bars.

Now, you'll hear about an alternate theory of the crime that Spencer and his team were able to construct, and how that theory came to convince a Texas judge that Spencer was innocent.

Here's Barbara Bradley Haggerty with more.

In the waning days of March 1987, the police were racing against time.

Remember, H.

Ross Perot, one of the most prominent men in Dallas, had made clear to the Dallas Police Department that he was invested in this case.

Whoever was responsible for the death of Jeffrey Young needed to be brought to justice fast.

You can sense this when reading the investigator notes, which detail an all-out sprint for four days until they arrested Spencer and Mitchell.

They continued to interview witnesses, but it feels like a cool-down lap.

I think what happened is classic tunnel vision.

Private investigator Darrell Parker.

Investigators and police are so driven to catch the person that just did this heinous crime that they

find someone, they focus on them to the exclusion of all others.

And then they start making the evidence fit their theory instead of making their theory fit the evidence.

But right there, a month into Detective Braceno's notes, there's a name of an alternative suspect.

That name was someone that Benjamin Spencer had heard about in prison.

McCluskey and Watley ran with the lead.

It took them down an entirely different trail, right to two witnesses who swore that the man who killed Jeffrey Young was not Benjamin Spencer, but a friend of theirs.

Michael Hubbard.

Mike was responsible for Mr.

Young's death.

The man who makes this accusation is an old friend of Michael Hubbard's.

His name is Farrell Scott.

The two men have been friends since as long as Scott can remember.

They went to school together, played basketball together, became budding criminals together.

Farrell Scott specialized in selling drugs and fencing stolen property, while Hubbard waded into more dangerous crimes, robbing restaurants at gunpoint with another friend, Kelvin Johnson.

According to Scott, on the night that Jeffrey Young was killed, he, Hubbard, and some other guys were hanging out at the neighborhood park.

Hubbard, who was already an accomplished thief at 22, wanted money for some crack.

He walked off and returned a few hours later.

Hubbard told his friends that he had gotten lucky, Scott said.

He was walking past the warehouse district and saw Jeffrey Young coming out of the building.

He pushed him back in the office.

As he put it, that was the lick he was going to hit, that is, his chance to steal money and valuables.

The story that Scott told me tracks perfectly with what we know about that night.

We know what was stolen from Jeffrey Young, a silver jam box and a gold Seco watch.

We also know that the phone was ringing as a friend tried to call Jeffrey Young again and again.

Scott says when that phone rang, that's when Hubbard panicked.

He was just rushing, you know, grabbing what he could get right there, what he saw.

And let me ask you, do you recall what he grabbed?

A radio?

Like a jam box?

You mentioned jewelry, too, right?

Yeah, the watch.

Well, he had the watch on his arm.

Oh, he did?

Yeah.

Do you remember what kind it was?

Oh, it was a Seiko watch.

Just a Seiko watch that kind of looked like a

Rolex.

But it was a gold Seiko.

Scott says he took Hubbard to a drug dealer who exchanged the jam box and watch for crack.

Hubbard told Scott how he had put the victim in the car trunk and driven over the river to West Dallas.

Young's body somehow fell out of the trunk, Hubbard said, and he ditched the BMW in an alley a couple of blocks away.

A few days later, Hubbard, Scott, and their friend Kelvin Johnson, the one Hubbard robbed restaurants with, were hanging out at Johnson's apartment.

Hubbard began to detail exactly what happened that night, including his boast that he had gotten away with the crime.

And he said,

Yeah, they got somebody on there.

Bill Spencer.

At this time, I didn't know Bill,

you know, personally.

I see him in the neighborhood, but Ben, I was blown away because Ben is not that type of guy.

He don't look like it.

Clean-cut,

nice-dressing dude.

He just didn't look like that type of guy.

Within West Dallas, to people like Calvin Johnson, there's a meaningful distinction between a stylish guy like Ben Spencer and a hoodlum like Michael Hubbard.

But maybe inside the other Dallas in the 1980s, they're just two black guys.

Johnson and Hubbard were arrested a few days later for robbing a restaurant.

Johnson felt bad for Spencer.

They had the wrong guy.

And so on April 19th, less than a month after the murder, Johnson met with Detective Briseno.

He wrote a detailed affidavit, but didn't sign it, so police couldn't use it.

Even so, Johnson was able to give police details that had never been made public.

Meanwhile, Farrell Scott was arrested on other charges and put in a holding tank with Ben Spencer.

Spencer said he was accused of killing a white man and dumping his body in West Dallas.

Scott responded, man, I know who did that.

He said when he got out, he'd tell the police about Hubbard's confession.

Scott says he talked to two detectives, but there is no record of the conversation.

There is an anonymous Crime Stoppers report that matches Scott's account.

Scott says he never thought Spencer would be convicted.

Because Ben never,

never done anything.

I mean, he never done nothing.

And you don't graduate to murder

from not doing nothing.

You know what I mean?

Since then, Kelvin Johnson has found Jesus and left prison, started a new family, and flourished in his work at Home Depot.

Farrell Scott is in federal prison in Pennsylvania, serving a life sentence for a drug charge.

I find myself asking for the second time, why should I believe a convicted felon?

Well,

I might be a convicted felon,

you know, but I'm not a liar.

You don't make up stuff like this to tell

on one friend to try and get another person out that you don't even really consider a friend.

It's just that it eats at him, this idea of Spencer in prison.

Man, I feel so, so bad for Ben.

Ben.

And

I'm in jail right now for a life sentence for something that I did, right?

And I don't want to be here.

And I could only imagine how he feels

being somewhere with that type of time for something he didn't even do.

For his part, Detective Briseno did consider Michael Hubbard as a suspect, briefly.

We ran his fingerprints, and of course there was no match on any of the prints found at the scene.

And when we found out he was in jail, we went up there and tried to talk to him, and he wouldn't give us the time of day.

Couldn't he force Hubbard to talk?

Well, you can't.

Once he says he doesn't want to talk to you, that's all you can do.

Unfortunately, that's the way the law is.

But presumably, you've had suspects before who said they didn't want to talk to you, but they were killed.

They're not all the time.

That's nothing unusual.

So you have to find other evidence against them.

Yes.

But by that time, Benjamin Spencer's trial preparation was in full swing, and they had their man.

For his part, Spencer's attorney, Frank Jackson, opted not to present an alternative suspect in his defense.

He said Hubbard's accusers would be ripped apart in cross-examination.

Quote, these guys were just hoodlums.

Here's something else you need to know about Michael Hubbard.

After Hubbard was released from prison in 1992, this would be four years into Spencer's life sentence, a string of violent robberies terrorized Dallas.

In particular, the part of the city where Jeffrey Young had worked.

The assailant would wait outside an isolated industrial park, always at night or on a holiday.

When a businessman left the office, he would beat him viciously in the head with a bat.

They were dubbed the Batman robberies.

In one case, the victim needed 170 stitches.

He still suffers seizures.

Another victim had to have part of his frontal lobe removed, and now the former executive can only find part-time work bagging groceries.

Kelvin Johnson recalls when he was about to be paroled in 1995, he was in the prison library with some other inmates reading the Dallas Morning News.

And I'm reading this article about

this Batman robbery.

So I tell the fellow, I said, well, that sure sounds like Michael Hubble.

They said, why do you say that?

I said, man, all that stuff that took place in 87, that sure sounds like it's the same MO.

So,

a few weeks later, we down there reading the newspaper again.

They got Michael Eugene Hubbard for the Batman robber.

Everybody said, Big home, you said that.

I said, I knew it.

Because it's the same exact way that the man got killed in 1987.

It's the same MO.

Michael Hubbard was convicted for one of the Batman assaults, which stopped soon after his arrest.

He's serving life in prison.

He declined an interview.

Now, Hubbard has said that he did not kill Jeffrey Young.

He just as adamantly insists that he was not the Batman robber.

But let's look at this one more time.

Two friends placed Michael Hubbard at Jeffrey Young's office the night he was murdered with a motive to rob him.

Hubbard went to prison soon after that for robbing restaurants.

After Hubbard was paroled in 1992, Dallas saw a pattern of robberies and assaults eerily similar to the attack on Jeffrey Young.

At that time, Benjamin Spencer, a man with no prior record of violent behavior, was serving his sentence for murder in a maximum security prison.

What Benjamin Spencer did while he was in prison is a remarkable story of its own.

From behind bars, he was able to point to enough evidence and witnesses to undermine the prosecution's case against him.

Then, with the exhaustive help of Jim McCluskey and Cheryl Watley, the team was able to persuade a trial judge that Spencer had nothing to do with the crime.

In 2007, Benjamin Spencer had served two decades, almost half his life, but now his case had momentum.

His new attorney, Cheryl Watley, was petitioning the court to reconsider his case.

Jim McCluskey and colleagues at Centurion Ministries had tracked down more than 100 witnesses and other experts and, they believed, discovered new and exculpatory evidence.

We were very confident that we had strong and almost really irrefutable evidence that went to every aspect, every element of the case upon which the conviction was based.

Despite its tough-on-crime reputation, Texas offered surprisingly fertile ground to nurture their appeal.

It's one of a handful of states that allows an inmate a new trial based on evidence that he or she might be innocent, even if there were not constitutional errors at trial, such as a slipshod defense attorney or a prosecutor who hid evidence.

Then, in 2006, Dallas elected Craig Watkins, a Democrat and African-American, to serve as district attorney.

Watkins set up the Conviction Integrity Unit.

It's a group of prosecutors within the office who re-investigate claims of innocence.

Early on, though, Watkins made a strategic decision.

When we started the Conviction Integrity Unit, we started basically looking at cases where there were DNA.

It was safe.

There was no question.

But there was no DNA in Jeffrey Young's car or office, or at least none that they knew of.

That is the missing element in Spencer's case.

That is the thing that distinguished him from most of the three dozen other inmates who were freed and exonerated in Dallas in the past few years.

So Spencer and his team had to craft a case on evidence that did not include DNA.

Ironically, the absence of physical evidence would help to doom him.

There was no DNA to convict him, but no DNA to exonerate him either.

Again, here's Watkins.

I'm building credibility.

Now,

I'm not going to take a chance on a person that's been convicted of murder or someone's died.

I'm not going to take a chance on that.

I need positive evidence.

As a result, his office fought every petition by Spencer's team.

Still, all those filings landed in the chambers of Rick Magnus in 2007.

Magnus had just been elected judge of the 283rd District in Dallas County after 17 years as a public defender.

It's pretty rare for a judge to grant an interview, but Magnus is a visiting judge now, and he cares about this case.

When I first started to look at it, I was wary of it.

Judges in Texas receive a lot of petitions from inmates claiming innocence.

The successful ones generally involve DNA.

Even though the holy grail of DNA eluded them, Spencer's team built its case on other evidence, evidence that Judge Magnus found more and more persuasive.

Actually, at one point I realized there was so much information to go through that I had to shut down my court and I reviewed everything for a week.

Magnus took another unusual step.

He visited the neighborhood where the victim's body was dumped and his car was abandoned so he could imagine what the eyewitnesses saw.

And he agreed to hold an evidentiary hearing to consider whether Spencer should get a new trial.

The hearing began on July 24, 2007.

The heart of Spencer's case centered on two arguments.

The first, that the eyewitnesses were lying.

It didn't matter that the state star witness, Gladys Oliver, held her ground.

It didn't even matter that the other living eyewitness, Jimmy Cotton, admitted that he had never seen the perpetrator's face.

Rather, Jim McCluskey says, these witnesses could not have identified their own mothers that night.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out.

that it was impossible for them or any human being to have seen Ben and Mitchell except the victim's car.

Humanly impossible.

And they called an expert to prove it.

Dr.

Paul Michael, a forensic visual scientist and optometrist, had visited the alley at 10 p.m.

on March 25th, 2003, when the lighting conditions were nearly identical to those 16 years earlier.

He said a person would need to be no farther than 25 feet away to make out the details of a face, and then only if the person was standing still.

But by all accounts, Spencer's attorney Cheryl Watley, says, the man was running away.

You know, so you have distance, darkness, and movement, and it makes it impossible to make the identification.

Judge Magnus suggested that the state find a rebuttal witness, but the only expert they could find agreed with Dr.

Michael with a minor quibble.

One needs to be within 49 feet, he said.

Jimmy Cotton was the closest.

He was nearly twice that far away.

Judge Magnus.

And when you have two that say none of these three witnesses could have seen what they said they saw,

and the state was unable to find anyone to testify differently,

I felt that that was very, very compelling.

When Judge Magnus considered the eyewitnesses, their testimony and demeanor, in other words, the entirety of the state's case.

I didn't find them believable.

Jimmy Cotton actually backpedaled on the stand.

And then the other witness, Gladys Oliver, just seemed to be motivated a lot by two factors, really.

One, that this is her 15 minutes of fame, and the other that there was a reward involved.

Next, Spencer's lawyer argued that the police ignored a more plausible suspect, Michael Hubbard.

Watley set the stage by calling Sandra Brackens.

You may remember, Brackens, who is 14 years old the night of the crime, never testified in Spencer's trials.

She said she saw the perpetrator run right in front of her, closer than any of the other witnesses, and she swore it was not Ben Spencer.

Then Michael Hubbard's friends, Kelvin Johnson and Farrell Scott, took the stand.

They laid out the details of the assault, the ringing telephone, the stolen jam box, the Seiko watch.

These were details of the crime, Spencer's lawyer argued, that were not yet public.

Watley recalls how, on the stand, Farrell Scott described Hubbard returning to the park late that night, the two of them taking the Seiko watch to a dealer and exchanging it for rocks of crack.

It was one of the most chilling moments I've I've ever seen in a courtroom.

He looked directly at the family and he says, I know because I was there.

We handed over the watch.

Michael Hubbard was called to testify.

He refused, claiming his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Next came Danny Edwards, the jailhouse informant.

Under the judge's close questioning, a belligerent Edwards admitted that Spencer did not tell him he had killed Jeffrey Young.

He said he only heard that from someone else.

That made Edwards' original testimony at trial inadmissible hearsay.

It wasn't quite the total recantation he gave me ten years later, but still.

Sitting in the courtroom was Jay Young, the victim's oldest son, then 32 years old.

He says he thought the whole procedure was a sham, refereed by a liberal judge.

Nothing persuaded me or changed my mind.

I think if anything, it made me believe stronger that the right person's in prison.

A few feet away, the foreman of the jury that convicted Spencer was reaching a different conclusion.

Alan Ledbetter took a week of vacation to attend.

He had been contacted by Centurion Ministries and wanted to hear their case in court.

Today, Ledbetter is in his 50s, with a deliberate manner and a neat goatee.

He remembers as the hearing unfolded and the state's case seemed to fall apart, a feeling washed over him.

Just that overwhelming sense of

poor Ben.

I mean, his life has been taken away from him.

He said if the jury had had the evidence that Judge Magnus did, it would have been, these are his words, very difficult to convict.

Listening to him now, I'm struck by this moment, by the burden he's carried for more than a decade.

There's a bit of personal

culpability that one takes on and says, okay, I had a I played a role in this.

And my role

was to

sort

through the evidence and reach a reasonable conclusion.

And it's like it's clear

that

we worked with what we had, but we were very wrong.

And

so there's an element of

guilt and grief that I carry for

whatever role I may have played in robbing so much of his life from him.

Initially, Ledbetter sat behind the government attorneys and the Young family.

But as the hearing progressed, he moved to the other side of the courtroom, sitting among Spencer's family and supporters.

The hearing ended.

Spencer was left to wait in excruciating suspense while Judge Magnus reflected on the case.

Eight months later, Judge Magnus issued his findings.

The state's eyewitnesses were, quote, not worthy of belief, he wrote.

None of Danny Edwards' jailhouse testimony was credible.

Calvin Johnson's account implicating Michael Hubbard was, quote, more consistent with the actual facts of the murder and therefore more credible.

My finding was that he was innocent and that he should have a new trial.

Or be exonerated.

Magnus adds, Spencer's case is hardly unique.

So what it boils down to, in my mind, and this is personal, this is Rick Magnus, not the judge of the 283rd speaking, what we have is another African-American male that was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that got caught up in the criminal justice system and is now in prison for something that anyone who was in the area could have done.

Under Texas law, Judge Magnus could not grant a new trial.

He could only recommend that the Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, allow a new trial to proceed.

It's rare for an appellate court to disregard a trial judge's recommendation.

Spencer and his family thought it would be a matter of days, perhaps weeks, before they'd get word of a new trial, or better yet, the district attorney would support his exoneration and he'd leave prison a free man.

His mother and siblings, and especially Deborah, who's remained close and loyal to him these 30 years, all of them were thrilled, so thrilled, they went shopping.

Deborah has a friend who used to be our supervisor working, and I'm talking to Deborah on the phone, and she's talking to her on the three-way.

And she was like, Well, what does Ben want?

You know, and what does he like to wear?

You know, so she's out buying these clothes, and both her and Deborah are different places buying clothes because they think I'm coming home.

So, I was very hopeful.

I thought that this is it.

I'm going home.

Benjamin Spencer is 53 years old now.

He's lived more than half of his life behind bars.

He was declared innocent a decade ago.

So why is he still in prison?

And can he ever get out?

On the next Radio Atlantic, you'll hear the conclusion of this story, part three of our No Way Out series.

In that episode, Barbara will walk us through why, despite everything you've heard, Spencer remains in prison and why his chances of leaving are slim.

We'll also be joined by my esteemed co-hosts, Alex Wagner and Jeffrey Goldberg, to talk with Barbara about the larger ramifications of this story, what it says about justice, and what it says about America.

Don't miss it.

This series was reported by Barbara Bradley Haggerty, produced by Kevin Townsend, and edited by Libby Lewis, Kevin Townsend, and myself, Matt Thompson.

No Way Out is adapted from a story that first ran in the January-February 2018 issue of The Atlantic.

That story was edited by John Swansberg and Denise Wills.

Thanks, as always, for listening.

We'll see you next time.

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