No Way Out, Part I

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Benjamin Spencer has spent decades in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit.

A decade ago, he convinced a judge that he's innocent, and now several of the people who originally sent him to prison agree, yet he's still behind bars.

His story punctuates one of the most pressing questions about America's system of justice.

When does it care about the truth?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

This week we're bringing you something a bit different.

The first installment of a three-part series, reported for The Atlantic by Barbara Bradley Haggerty.

If you listen to podcasts, and clearly you do, you've probably heard a story about someone who may have been wrongfully convicted of a heinous crime, and this story certainly fits that description.

But in the next few minutes, you're going to hear from a number of individuals who've seen lots and lots, I'm talking hundreds, of potential wrongful convictions up close, and this story still haunts them every day.

Because not only is Benjamin Spencer still in prison years after a judge declared him innocent, even if he is innocent, by the rules of our justice system, he may have no way out.

Barbara Bradley Haggerty takes it from here.

Passing through the front gates of the maximum security prison, you move from light to shadow, from a vast Texas sky to the windowless visiting room in the H.H.

Cofield unit.

What would it be like, I wonder, to awaken in this place every morning for 11,000 days?

What would it be like, I think, to be the man sitting across from me behind a plexiglass window?

My name is Benjamin John Spencer.

My number is 483713.

I've been incarcerated since March 26, 1987.

Benjamin Spencer looks professorial in his wire-rimmed glasses.

He's 52 now.

His hair is flecked with gray and deep lines are etched across his forehead.

He's tall and lanky and still handsome.

But the man who once favored snakeskin boots and designer shirts is now consigned to prison whites.

It's as sharp as I get now, this white uniform.

I don't even care.

I mean, I'm just at a point where I just,

I'm still hopeful,

but at the same time, it's just like I'm stuck in a system.

Spencer was convicted of killing a young white man and dumping his body on a street in the poor neighborhood of West Dallas.

30 years after the crime, people still remember the case.

And if my reporting is any guide, many think he's innocent.

Even today, Spencer's story haunts people.

The foreman of the jury that convicted him.

There's rarely a day that goes by where Ben doesn't cross my mind.

An eyewitness who testified against him.

I want him to get out.

That's a long time to be in prison for something you didn't do.

The judge who reconsidered the evidence against him.

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

Spencer was declared innocent more than a decade ago, but he could still die in prison.

This is a story of how that could be, how a tower of damning evidence can topple under scrutiny, and why that might not matter.

It's about how the mechanics of the justice system can, possibly, trump truth.

It's about this question.

Will a man found to be innocent spend the rest of his life in prison?

On March 22nd, 1987, Jeffrey Young stopped by the office to catch up on some work.

He was 33 years old, soon to become president of a clothing import company.

His oldest child, Jay, who was 12 at the time, says his dad often worked on the weekend, but his family came first.

Jeffrey Young was tall and slim with a bushy mustache.

He had a taste for practical jokes, a habit of always holding hands with his wife, a passion for immersing himself in his children's lives.

Indian guides, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts,

camp outs.

My parents were very involved in the school.

They did the carnival.

And like today, still to this day, they say it's the best one ever.

For me and my brother and sister, when he was there, he was there.

Until he wasn't.

On that Sunday night, his wife and three children were out of town for spring break, and he wanted to send some faxes to clients in Taiwan.

That's 1128.

I believe believe 1127 is this doorway in the middle.

Ben Spencer's current attorney, Cheryl Watley, pulls up to a nondescript gray metal door on Conveyor Lane in the warehouse district of Dallas.

Security records show that at 8.21 p.m., Young opened the door to the building.

25 minutes later, he called a friend whose company provided computer services to let him know he would be accessing the computer.

That friend, Troy Johnson, said the computers were down.

He'd call Young when they were available.

Watley says there were no security cameras to capture what happened next.

We theorize that it was around 9.30 at night when he was getting ready to leave.

We think he came to the door.

He was getting ready to walk down the steps where he was essentially jumped.

The robber, or robbers, pushed Young back into the office, grabbed his gold Seiko watch, his wedding ring, and a jam box, a sort of boom box with a portable TV.

Around that time, Troy Johnson called back, again and again.

This would turn out to be a critical detail.

Finally, he figured Young had gone home.

During this time, Troy Johnson had been calling and letting the phone ring and ring and ring.

We think it was at that time that Mr.

Young sustained the fatal blow to his skull.

His body then taken out of the office, down those steps, and put into his car, the BMW.

It was a vicious beating.

Young's skull was cracked in five places.

Then Young and his BMW crossed over the Trinity River to West Dallas.

This is where the body was dumped out.

We retrace the BMW's path two blocks.

The BMW pulls into the alley.

We don't know quite how far it pulls in, but it stops here.

Eventually, three people would tell police that they saw two men jump out of the car.

As for Jeffrey Young, he was pronounced dead at 3.05 a.m.

The man who loomed larger than life for his wife and preteen children, that man disappeared from their lives in an instant.

The sheer randomness of the crime rattled white communities in Dallas.

One minute a young businessman is sending a fax to Taiwan, the next he's beaten and left to die on an unfamiliar street.

In this crime, two Dallases collided.

There was West Dallas, a poor, largely black neighborhood, suffering through the peak of the crack epidemic.

And then there was a 1980s soap-opper Dallas.

A wealthy, glitzy Dallas, a city bursting with promise and a famous football team.

This was the Dallas of H.

Ross Perot, a self-made billionaire and entrepreneur.

Perot served on city commissions.

He contributed generously to the Dallas Police Association.

And eventually, he would run not once, but twice for president.

Good afternoon.

The volunteers in all 50 states have asked me to run as a candidate for president of the United States.

I mean despite his little squeaky voice and his little crew-cut haircut, he was a force in Dallas and a force to be reckoned with.

Veteran journalist Bob Ray Sanders.

Perot loomed large not only in the politics of the city and the nation, but also in Jeffrey Young's story.

You see, Perot was close to the victim's father, Harry Young.

Young served as one of the top executives at Perot's company, EDS.

In fact, Harry Young was traveling for work when his son was killed, and Perot sent his private plane to bring him back to Dallas.

Beyond that, Perot's company offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of Jeffrey Young's killer.

Bob Ray Sanders says that reward sent a message to the Dallas Police Department, find Jeffrey Young's killer, fast.

So just his name associated with the case would say it had to be done and should be done quickly.

But that was easier said than done because Jeffrey Young's body was found in the other Dallas, West Dallas.

Police would have to build a case in a neighborhood where they were strangers and viewed with mistrust.

Michael Phillips wrote a history of Dallas called White Metropolis.

He says the 1980s marked a low point in relations between police and residents of West Dallas.

When a crime occurred, he says any minority would do.

And the attitude was sort of like that character in the movie, Casablanca, round up the usual suspects.

The idea was that if we arrest black and brown people, they have to be guilty of something.

So even if they're not guilty of this specific crime, there's some other terrible deed they've committed.

So there's no loss if we toss them in jail.

And this creates a sense of total distrust between the black community and the white community and white law enforcement.

Law enforcement in this case was led by Detective Jesus or Jesse Braceno.

He recalls arriving early Monday morning and canvassing the neighborhood.

Some people wouldn't like I said give us the time of day

and then some others would and then you would have to

take that with a tongue-in-cheek whether you believe them or not.

He says Monday turned up no viable leads in his judgment anyway.

Nothing on Tuesday either.

Then on Wednesday the case broke wide open.

42-year-old Gladys Oliver identified the perpetrators.

Detective Braceno found her particularly credible.

She was an older person, not a young kid.

And I figured that she was trustworthy.

I didn't think that she had anything to lie or get out of at that point.

At first, Oliver told police that she hadn't seen anything.

But after she discovered there was a reward for information leading to the arrest of the assailants, she came forward.

The state built its case around Gladys Oliver, so here are a few details about her.

Oliver was a well-known figure in the intimate neighborhood of West Dallas.

She sold candy and barbecue chicken sandwiches on the weekends to earn some cash.

She was nearly crippled from polio, hadn't worked in four years, and survived on disability checks.

And she was nosy.

That's her word.

She passed the time keeping an eye on the neighbors.

Oliver's house overlooked the alley where Jeffrey Young's BMW was abandoned.

She told police that on that night she saw two of her neighbors, Benjamin Spencer and Robert Mitchell, get out of the car and rush away.

Then she pointed the detectives to two other possible eyewitnesses.

Two young men told police they happened to be looking at the alley at the same time and saw the same thing as Oliver from different vantage points and distances.

With that testimony in place, the case was a slam dunk.

Decades after the crime, Faith Johnson, the current district attorney and a former judge, a conservative Republican who relishes a good case, says this one was a prosecutor's dream.

You had three eyewitnesses.

And these were not eyewitnesses who were strangers, you know, strangers who all of a sudden had to pick somebody out of a lineup.

But these people knew Spencer.

And that's what's so exciting about this case.

We just don't get that every day in a trial.

We don't.

We don't know the details of Spencer's first trial from October 1987.

The transcript was inexplicably lost.

We do know that the three eyewitnesses identified Spencer and that Gladys Oliver turned in a killer performance.

We do know that a jailhouse informant swore that Spencer told him that he had killed Jeffrey Young.

We do know that Spencer's attorney relied almost exclusively on an alibi witness.

Four days later, the jury found Spencer guilty of murder and sentenced him to 35 years in prison.

Frank Jackson, Spencer's attorney in the first trial, was disappointed, but not surprised.

It's hard to overcome

a dead white guy who's killed by two black men in a black area of Dallas where you dump his body

out on the street.

You know, it's just hard to overcome

that kind of emotional case.

But there was one flaw with the state star witness, Gladys Oliver.

She lied on the stand.

Spencer's attorney discovered that Oliver had received $580 in exchange for information she gave to Crime Stoppers.

It wasn't much, but enough to merit a new trial.

In March of 1988, right before the second trial, prosecutors approached Spencer's attorney, Frank Jackson, with a deal.

20 years in prison, and Spencer would be eligible for parole in less than five.

If it were me knowing the parole law at that time,

I would have probably taken it and run with it.

Jackson told Spencer it was a good deal.

Remember, Spencer had already been convicted once, but Spencer thought he could clear his name.

I said, I didn't do anything.

He was saying, well, you know, if you take it to trial, they're going to try to give you a life sentence and they're likely to get it.

And so I'm like, well, I don't care what they're likely to get.

I said, I'm not going to plead guilty to some I didn't do.

The prosecutor left the district attorney's office after the first trial.

He declined to talk with me.

His replacement, Andy Beach, was given less than six months to prepare for the retrial, but he had an ace in the hole, Gladys Oliver.

There's no question that Gladys Oliver's testimony convicted Ben Spencer.

Oliver rolled into the courtroom in a wheelchair.

She sat eye-level with the jury, a shawl covering her lap.

She gave her account in vivid, succinct detail.

She was awakened at 10.30 p.m.

by the dogs barking next door.

She looked out her bedroom window and saw Benjamin Spencer climb out of the passenger seat.

She insisted that even though it was a moonless night, she could see his face because of a nearby streetlight and the light from her neighbor's porch.

Oliver said she then put on a dress, peered out the front door, and spotted Spencer walking up her driveway.

Oliver was feisty, witty.

She didn't lie on the stand this time.

When Spencer's attorney asked if she wanted to collect the reward money, she said, hell, if they want to give me some, it's fine with me.

Beach says she owned that courtroom.

In the 25 years I tried criminal cases, she was one of the top three or four eyewitnesses of all time.

Just her physical presence and

her ability to clearly answer questions and to stand up to cross-examination, it carried the day for us, there's no question.

The jury loved her.

She reminded the foreman, William Alan Ledbetter, of his grandmother, the neighborhood busybody.

I mean, I still remember saying, I peeped out my window.

And I mean, it just sounded so much like my grandmother.

And just

keeping an eye on the neighbors, and particularly the neighbors who my grandmother thought were up to no good at all times.

Now, the prosecution had a problem.

No physical evidence connected Spencer to the assault of Jeffrey Young.

The police never found a murder weapon or any stolen property.

The fingerprints lifted from Jeffrey Young's car and office did not match those of Spencer or Mitchell.

Enter a jailhouse informant, Danny Edwards.

Edwards had shared a cell with Spencer right after he was arrested.

He told the jury that Spencer admitted to killing Young.

He added that Spencer's only regret was that he didn't finish the job at the office.

He told the jury, Spencer said, quote, I should have killed the bitch right then and there.

Cheryl Watley, Spencer's current attorney, says Danny Edwards' testimony played a crucial role.

The only story, the only testimony that you have about Ben

having contact with Jeffrey Young comes from the mouth of Danny Edwards.

On the stand, Edwards' flamboyant testimony often conflicted with the facts and even the prosecution's theory.

Edwards said Spencer grabbed the victim by the tie and choked him, but Young was wearing jogging clothes, no tie.

Edwards claimed that Spencer's accomplice was a fellow named Van Mitchell Spencer.

The prosecution said it was Robert Mitchell.

Most memorably, Edwards stated that Spencer was not worried about police finding his fingerprints at the office or in the car because he had rubbed his fingers on the pavement and scoured off his prints.

Spencer's fingerprints were intact.

District Attorney Faith Johnson says these discrepancies did not matter.

We can talk all day long about

the jailhouse snitch.

We can just say, so what?

He got confused, or he missed it, or what have you.

But we still got our credible witnesses.

And that's what we're basing our case on.

For its part, the defense case was built almost entirely around one alibi witness.

And here's an irony.

The witness testified to the most important hours of Benjamin Spencer's life, the hours when Jeffrey Young was murdered.

But these hours were also the most shameful of his life.

At 22, Spencer was working the overnight shift, unloading trucks.

He had just gotten married.

Deborah and I, we were expecting expecting our first child.

I think she was like seven months pregnant when I got arrested.

So we were just, you know, I was trying to get myself together

both financially and mentally and physically, you know, so we can move on with our lives.

Were you happy then?

Yes and no.

For some reason, Deborah and I, we was like,

we would have good days, we would have bad days.

Sometimes we would have more bad days than good days.

The Sunday of Jeffrey Young's murder was a bad day.

The couple argued.

Deborah went to bed early.

Spencer went to see another woman.

Christy Williams lived across the street.

She was an 18-year-old high school senior, a track star, headed to college on a scholarship, an acquaintance, a temptation.

Williams testified that they hung out in her house from around 7.30 p.m.

to 9.30 or 10 when her younger brothers came home from playing street football.

She and Spencer left then and drove to the park, where they remained past midnight.

I asked Williams if Spencer had slipped away for an hour and come back.

In other words, could he have robbed and killed Jeffrey Young?

Not in the timeframe that they're saying, because I know for a fact that we were together at the time that they were saying that it happened.

So I'm like, no, it couldn't have happened.

In the absence of physical evidence, the jury had to decide which witnesses to believe and which to discount.

In other words, who had a more credible story?

The middle-aged busybody, Gladys Oliver, or the teenage track star, Christy Williams?

They chose Oliver.

The jury convicted Spencer of aggravated robbery and sentenced him to life in prison.

A few days later, in a separate trial that Gladys Oliver also dominated, Robert Mitchell was found guilty as well.

The night of the verdict, Spencer returned to the county jail.

It was late.

I was the only one on the floor at the time.

I was the only one in the holdover.

And cold.

And to be honest, I really want to die.

I thought about committing suicide while I was in the holdover.

And

I started thinking about, I mean, I have my faith, I have my belief.

And I was like, well, if I die, if I kill myself, I can't go to heaven, you know.

And so

that was the only hope I had, was I didn't want to go to hell.

Surely, he thought, the biblical promise will prevail.

The truth will set you free.

The 12 men and women on the jury had heard a coherent story and reached a rational verdict.

But there was another story to be told.

In a moment, Barbara will tell us that story and how Benjamin Spencer helped uncover it while he was behind bars.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Soon after the trial, Benjamin Spencer moved into the Cofield Maximum Security Prison south of Dallas.

He exchanged his designer shirts and snakeskin boots for prison whites and sneakers.

Then he settled into the chrysalis years.

From outside the prison walls, his case seemed to stagnate, but from within, Spencer was working, methodically gathering evidence to prove his innocence.

First, he needed help on the outside.

At that time, I was writing any and everybody I could think of that I thought might be able to help me.

Of course, the only ones who stayed consistent in responding was Centurion Ministries.

Centurion Ministries predated the Innocence Project, and at that time, it was the only national group that re-investigated cases of prisoners who claimed to be innocent.

Jim McCluskey, the founder of Centurion Ministries, shows me a wall of photos of inmates he has helped free, images of lives lost, then found.

Danny Brown, Toledo, Ohio, 19 years.

Matt Connor, Philadelphia, 11 years.

This is David Milgard, a Canadian.

We free two Canadians.

This is his mother, Julie.

In each, the man or woman is grinning or crying, standing on the courthouse steps after years of wrongful incarceration.

McCluskey smiles as he ticks off the names of people who were exonerated because of centurion ministries.

61 of them so far.

This is Curry Max Cook, 22 years on Texas death row.

This is Mark Shannon out of Springfield, Massachusetts, 27 years.

This is literally when he took his first step into freedom.

He jumped on you.

Yeah, oh yeah,

first thing he did.

It was great.

McCluskey received Benjamin Spencer's first letter in January 1990, just a few years after he founded Centurion Ministries.

The organization began as a spiritual calling for McCluskey.

In 1979, after years as a naval officer in the Vietnam War and later in business, McCluskey sensed an existential void.

I felt I was living a superficial, selfish, self-centered life.

McCluskey entered Princeton Theological Seminary when he was 37.

As part of his training, he served as a volunteer chaplain at Trenton State Prison.

There, he met a former heroin addict who had been convicted of murder and sentenced to life.

Every time they talked, the inmate insisted that he had been wrongly convicted.

McCluskey found that hard to believe.

I couldn't imagine that the police or the prosecutors would ever bring to the Bar of Justice anything but credible and compelling evidence of guilt.

Or that police would lie or that prosecutors would hide evidence of innocence.

That was foreign to me, alien concept.

McCluskey agreed to read through the inmate's trial transcripts over Thanksgiving break, and he came to believe he was innocent.

He said, what are you going to do?

Do you believe I'm innocent?

I I said, well, his nickname was Chiefy.

I said, yeah, I guess I'm kind of there now.

He said, well, what are you going to do to help me?

I said, Chiefy, what can I do?

I don't know anything about the criminal justice system.

I've been a businessman, for God's sake.

He said, you can't just go back to the seminary in

your safe little dormitory room and pray for me.

That's not going to get me out.

He said, God works through human beings, and you're the only human being I have.

McCluskey deferred seminary classes classes for a year and reinvestigated the case.

He discovered that an eyewitness had lied and the state knew that its star witness, a jailhouse informant, had perjured himself.

McCluskey recruited a pro bono lawyer and soon after that, Chiefy walked out of prison, exonerated.

McCluskey realized his call was not to the pulpit, but to freeing the wrongly convicted.

With almost no money, he launched Centurion Ministries out of his bedroom in Princeton, one he occupied rent-free in exchange for running errands for his elderly landlady.

And I named it Centurion after the centurion at the foot of the cross in the Gospel of Luke, who looked up at the crucified Christ and said, surely this one was innocent.

That's where the name comes from.

For the first few years, McCluskey worked with a handful of volunteers in relative obscurity.

Then, in 1986, Centurion won freedom for a man who had been convicted of rape and kidnapping.

The New York Times covered the story.

60 minutes followed with a profile of McCluskey.

Letters began to pour into his landlady's house.

So here's this woman, 85 years old.

Letters are coming in from convicted murderers and rapists all over the country.

And she said, Jim, who are these people?

Are they going to come and get us?

Oh, the poor lady.

You know, Texas state prison,

San Quentin prison.

They would pour in

to her home at 72 Library Place.

So when Spencer sent his first letter, Centurion was receiving more than a thousand requests a year.

They sent back a boilerplate response, informing Spencer that they were swamped, but they invited him to write back.

And so I was like, man, they'll probably never get around my case.

But the people, the volunteers who would write back to me, you know,

it was kind of a glimmer of hope.

Maybe, maybe.

It was a long shot.

The group could handle only a handful of investigations at a time.

McCluskey says that's because most of Centurion's cases do not involve untested DNA evidence, that forensic magic bullet that can exclude and exonerate one person and point decisively to another perpetrator.

This was a non-DNA case, and I knew from the get-go that there was a lot of work to be done.

If they accepted Spencer as a client, Centurion investigators would have to start from scratch, knocking on doors, tracking down new witnesses and old ones, trying to find exculpatory forensic evidence, hiring lawyers, and asking a judge to look at the new evidence.

All this took time and money, usually more than $100,000 per case.

So, to concentrate on the most deserving and winnable cases, McCluskey had developed a rigorous screening process.

First of all, we start corresponding with the inmate, and we put the inmate to work answering a lot of questions.

Spencer's 14-page autobiography, penned in small, precise handwriting, details a modest but stable childhood revolving around family and the Church of Christ.

His mother cleaned houses and ran the youth ministry at their church.

His father worked on the assembly line at General Motors and preached when the pastor was away.

Spencer thought he'd follow in his footsteps.

I had a thing about truck driving.

I like big rigs and I always thought I might become a truck driver one day and even also become a minister.

I didn't make it to any one of those.

Spencer doesn't like to talk about ministry.

It's a cliché.

All prisoners want to be preachers, right?

But I've seen his notebooks filled with Bible class homework.

His sister told me that as a child, he'd preside over the funeral of pets, preaching a eulogy for their late dog or cat and serving juice and crackers as communion.

In the middle of 11th grade, Spencer's parents divorced and his mother and four siblings moved from the Oak Cliff neighborhood to West Dallas, which he said had a bad reputation.

I was pretty much a loner, Spencer wrote in one of a half-dozen long letters he sent to me over the summer.

He graduated from high school.

He didn't join a gang, didn't use drugs.

His life revolved around cars.

In fact, cars figured in Spencer's only three brushes with the law, twice for driving with a suspended license, and once for joyriding in a car that his best friend stole.

On his 18th birthday, Spencer's mother gave him the keys to a 1973 Ford Grand Torino.

He fell instantly in love.

As I'm sitting here typing this letter, he wrote, I have my headphones on and I'm listening to this song that became my theme song way back then.

You know very well

what you are.

You're my sugarcane,

my chocolate star.

Juicy Fruit by M.

Toume, he wrote.

Yeah, those were the days.

But you're the only love

that gives me good advantage.

I envisioned Spencer in his cell, humming to the rhythm, singing a few words, transported briefly to those days of freedom.

As a young man, Spencer never settled into a career, but moved through a series of jobs, washing cars, light maintenance work, serving at fast food restaurants.

Wendy's is one of the best jobs I ever had, he wrote me.

Girls flirted with him.

He was polite and handsome, always meticulously dressed with a fresh haircut every Friday.

But in the back of his mind, he always remembered his mother's warning.

I think one of the things my mother used to always tell us, well, you know, as boys, well, if you mess with a girl and you get her pregnant,

you're going to get a job and you're going to take care of this child.

You're not just going to be running around saying you're a daddy, you know.

And so when Spencer's first serious girlfriend, Deborah Childs, became pregnant, he married her.

Before his son was born, though, Spencer had been arrested for murder.

During that first decade inside prison, Spencer's world moved glacially.

He cut hair as a prison barber and worked as a clerk in the education department.

Meanwhile, the world outside sped by the milestones.

His wife gave birth to their baby boy, Benjamin John Spencer.

She was promoted and moved away from West Dallas.

Whenever she could, Deborah brought B.J.

BJ down to the prison.

The baby first saw his father through a plexiglass window.

Eventually they were permitted contact visits.

You know, I stand them on the table and

they play and talk and carry on like that, but

it's still totally ridiculous to me.

Room full of people, people talking, you can't hardly hear each other and

you know, you got a baby sitting here in a room full of

just everybody and germs, and

it was horrible.

After a few years, Spencer urged her to file for divorce.

Well,

I mean, I'm in here.

She's out there.

Just because my life had been taken from me, I feel like she didn't deserve what she was going through.

In fact, I wasn't,

although I wasn't

all the way unfaithful, I wasn't very faithful.

And so I just felt felt that she deserved to be happy.

And I knew that being in a relationship with a husband that wasn't present, she couldn't be too happy like that.

I mean, that just, to me, that wasn't a life for anybody.

Eventually, Deborah did file for divorce.

She kept the Spencer name.

For 10 years, from 1990 to 2000, Spencer lived for mail delivery, eager for the next letter from Centurion Ministries.

He was in limbo, not yet a client.

Whether they took my case or not,

this was my lifeline.

And so I wanted them to know everything I knew.

And what I didn't know, I wanted them to try to find out.

He sent them his trial record, annotated in his microscopic handwriting, pointing out errors or inconsistencies in testimony.

He identified people who could corroborate his alibi, who were never called by the defense or even tracked down.

He found evidence that another man had committed the crime and located two men who insisted they had given statements to that effect to the police.

From inside the prison walls, Benjamin Spencer pieced together a story that had never been told.

In essence, he drafted a blueprint for Centurion's investigation.

Finally, in 2000, McCluskey visited him in prison to tell him they were taking the case.

And I was really impressed with him, and I walked away thinking,

we can't leave this man behind.

Over the next four years, McCluskey and the attorney he hired, Cheryl Watley, unearthed a narrative entirely different from the one Spencer's jury had heard.

They discovered that the police had botched the crime scene.

They learned that investigators never found a single thing to connect Spencer to the assault.

Not a murder weapon, not stolen property, not fingerprints.

Reading the police investigative notes, they saw that the detectives had ignored every witness who didn't fit their story.

A teenager who claimed she saw the perpetrator close up and swore it was not Spencer, and two men who implicated a different, viable suspect.

Why?

Detective Briseno believed he had found the men responsible for the crime, but McCluskey speculates that the detective already had what he needed to convince a jury, three eyewitnesses to identify Spencer, and a jailhouse informant to connect him to the assault.

And after that, he stopped short of seeking the truth.

No other reason to make any kind of investigation.

Once all that was developed within a week of the murder, the case was cleared and he was the hero.

Over the summer of 2017, I attempted to reinvestigate the case.

I largely retrace the steps that McCluskey and Watley had trod 15 years ago.

I start with the most pivotal question, the one they pondered.

What could the eyewitnesses actually see on the night of March 22nd, 1987?

Just past 10 p.m.

on a sweltering June night, Cheryl Watley and I have positioned ourselves in Gladys Oliver's yard.

You'll remember she was the government star witness.

We're peering at the alley where the BMW had been parked.

It's a moonless night, the alley lit by the same street light and porch light as 30 years ago.

So you can see the little side window there?

Right.

That's what Gladys had looking out from this side towards

the alley.

It looks pretty dark back there.

Yeah.

I mean, was it that dark before?

Yeah.

I can't see anything back there.

Okay.

So, by the way, Daryl, do me a favor, go stand under that streetlight.

Darrell Parker, a private investigator who's helping with the case, strides toward the light.

We know from police sketches that Oliver's bedroom window was 123 feet away from the BMW in the alley.

Parker reaches the streetlight and turns around.

Who is it?

You can't see anything.

You can see no figures.

You You can see a silhouette of a man.

Parker surveys the crime scene.

He's five feet, eight inches tall, blonde and athletic as he enters middle age.

He worked as an investigator in the Marines and a local police department and still has that military bearing.

He says no matter how precisely we study the crime scene, we cannot overcome a serious problem, one the police created 30 years ago.

A crime scene is supposed to be documented, primarily through photographs, video, and there's a certain way that's supposed to be done.

Well, that wasn't done at all in this case.

The BMW was towed to a police lot, where it sat overnight in the rain.

Police lifted fingerprints from the car the next morning, but they didn't match anyone, not even Jeffrey Young, who owned the car.

No one took photographs of where the car was parked in the alley.

In fact, no one took photos of the crime scene for six months just before the trial.

And then, during the daytime, when the lighting was different, there were new structures and the foliage had changed.

Police even failed to draw sketches of the BMW's location until six months later from memory.

These mistakes would come to haunt the defense.

Spencer's attorney could not challenge the account of the star witness, Gladys Oliver.

For example, a parked trailer blocked most of Oliver's view of the alley, but the defense had no photos to prove it.

As Detective Broseno admitted to me off tape, quote, the crime scene was screwed up from the start.

Parker had also asked Broseno about the lapse.

lapse.

When I asked the detective, why didn't we take crime scene photographs?

And the investigator said, well, because he hadn't died at that time.

So we thought he was going to be okay.

And to that, I responded, well, it was still a crime.

He'd still been beaten savagely.

He was still assaulted.

It's still a crime scene.

Yeah, but we didn't think it was going to be that big of a deal.

It was just sloppy, unprofessional work.

It's easy to see why the detectives would build a narrative around the eyewitnesses.

But suppose just for a moment that Spencer was not the person in the alley.

Why would these three people swear they saw him?

He was an unlikely candidate.

He wasn't in a gang, didn't do drugs, had no violence in his background.

So why Spencer?

One rumor was that Gladys Oliver was trying to protect someone, a friend whose last name was Spencer.

Police were looking at him as a possible suspect.

Some believed she wanted to divert the focus from her friend to Benjamin Spencer, whom she had seen earlier that that night.

The other, almost universal, rumor, was that Oliver wanted the reward money, and having selected Ben Spencer, she persuaded the two young men to back her up.

There were three eyewitnesses that night.

We tracked down Gladys Oliver, but she became agitated when I tried to interview her.

She refused to talk to me.

The second eyewitness, Charles Stewart, died two decades ago in a drug deal gone bad.

The third was Jimmy Cotton.

Jimmy Cotton was 18 years old on the night of the crime.

Now, at 48, he seems a little nervous as I pull out my microphone and begin asking questions.

Initially, he repeats his trial testimony, that he had been fixing a late dinner, looked out his kitchen window, and spotted Spencer get out of the BMW and run away.

Cotton had the best view of any of the witnesses, and he was the closest, but, and this is important, he was still 93 feet away, and it was nighttime.

I asked Cotton what the person looked like.

He was just tall.

He kind of looked like, I don't know, I ain't gonna say that was him, I ain't gonna say it ain't him, because it was dark.

With that, the interview becomes a confessional as Cotton dismantles his testimony from 30 years back.

He saw only one man, not two.

The man was rushing away from him.

He never actually saw his face.

According to Cotton, it was the detectives who first named Ben Spencer.

The police were saying saying they had Benjamin under investigation for this murder and all this.

I just said, well, I told him what I did.

I said, it looked like him, the one that got out the car.

I said, maybe it was him.

And they went on it from that.

We'll revisit Cotton's account later.

But for now, I ask him, on a scale of 1 to 100, what are the chances that the man he saw was Spencer?

I'd say about 30% team.

Cotton asks if anyone collected the $25,000 reward.

We say there's no evidence anyone got the money.

He asks if Spencer is okay.

We tell him he's in prison for life.

I ask how he feels about that.

I feel bad about him.

I want him to get out.

I really do.

That's a long time to be in prison for something you didn't do.

After this brief message, we'll tell you about what Benjamin Spencer's jury didn't hear about what happened that night in 1987.

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In the courtroom, a jury sees through a glass darkly.

That portion of the evidence that tells one coherent story.

Early on, the detectives began to shape the state's narrative.

They believed anyone who supported the case against Ben Spencer and seemed to ignore anyone who didn't.

One witness they ignored was Sandra Brackens, then 14 years old, whose house abutted the alley.

According to the police reports, Brackens talked to detectives just hours after Jeffrey Young died.

She gave one of the most detailed descriptions of the perpetrator, the same account she tells me today, three decades later.

Brackens says she was sitting on the porch around 10.30 that night, talking on the phone, when she saw a man run by.

He came running right here.

He cut across here, and he went down that way, and then he...

Went up the street.

So at one point...

So you were about 20, maybe 20 feet away from him?

Is that 20 feet?

I don't know how many.

What do you think?

That's close.

Yeah.

Don't you think that's close?

Yes.

We sit down inside her house.

She says she didn't recognize the man, but she recalls details about him.

He had on

dark pants, like a dark jacket.

It almost sounded like he had on

like, I'm going to say church shoes.

Only because of the sound when you know when he was running.

And he had the jam box.

he had this big silver jam box that fact which he told police that first day had not yet been made public brackens didn't see the man's face but as he ran under the streetlight she saw he had a dark complexion she knew benjamin spencer he has light skin he don't he wasn't even as

didn't appear to be as tall as being he didn't appear to be as thin as being

wasn't being

you're sure positive 100% positive it was not Benjamin.

Brackens says she told all this to Detective Briseno the first day, but Briseno didn't believe her.

He told Daryl Parker that she might have been, quote, one of those crack whores.

When I tell her that, Brackens has to fight back tears.

The comment galls her, as does the assumption by those in the other Dallas that she, or any teenage girl in West Dallas, would probably be a crack whore.

Brackens says she's never taken drugs.

She doesn't even take Tylenol.

And when she was a 14-year-old student in junior high, she was taking high school classes.

More puzzling still, Spencer's defense attorney never called Brackens as a witness.

Frank Jackson remembers the girl as being hostile, but Brackens says that she offered to testify.

In fact, she testified in the trial of Spencer's co-defendant, Robert Mitchell.

Whatever the reason, the jury never heard her story.

Brackens knew all three eyewitnesses, and she recalls confronting Charles Stewart, the one who's dead, about why he accused Spencer.

That man told me, he told me that they lied.

He told me that.

Because later on,

and I asked,

why y'all lying on them people?

He was like, man, we was trying to come up.

So basically,

for reward money.

He told me that.

What did you think when he said that to you?

I was teed off.

It's like, again, that's somebody's lives that y'all.

For a few dollars, really?

The jury didn't hear this next part either.

A few minutes after the man ran by, she, her brother, and Robert Mitchell heard that there was a car in the alley and went over to see it.

She says she knows exactly where the car was parked.

The car was actually right here.

It's like right here.

Right here, where these bushes are.

Yes.

But it was parked in the alley right there.

Do you think that Gladys could have seen the car?

I don't.

Not from a window.

Not from.

Unless she was standing in the backyard.

I think it would have been hard to see there.

But the police never asked her about any of this.

A critical detail that would have been helpful to the defense.

Now, let's stop for a minute to consider the choices the detectives made as they built their narrative.

They discarded the testimony of Sandra Brackens, who says she saw the perpetrator close up, and credited Jimmy Cotton and Gladys Oliver, who were much farther away.

They also didn't believe Christy Williams, the alibi witness who insisted Spencer could not have assaulted Jeffrey Young.

Instead, they leaned on the word of a career criminal, Danny Edwards, the jailhouse informant who said he heard Spencer confess.

Daryl Parker and I pull in front of a pink boarding house in West Dallas, the last known address of Danny Edwards.

Edwards had recently been released from prison.

He's been in and out of jail for half his life.

Edwards shared a cell with Benjamin Spencer right after he was arrested.

As you'll recall, Edwards swore in court that Spencer had admitted to the crime, and that testimony was the only thing that connected Spencer to the assault.

Now Edwards tells us the backstory to that testimony.

Here's his account.

That Jesse Braceno and some other detectives took him to a room in the basement of the jail.

That the police had heard that he had confessed to Jeffrey Young's murder and that Spencer was the one who had given him up.

No, Edwards countered.

Spencer confessed to me.

I just went off the handle.

I said, well, it's okay.

This way it is.

Something happened, like we whooped somebody on the tank.

Okay, my word against yours.

You say I did it, you did it.

That's how it started out.

But when I realized it wasn't even like that, he didn't do it.

And I saw the seriousness of it,

I checked it, but it was too late.

Edwards says that's how the game is played.

You accuse your cellmates of a crime to win a lower sentence sentence for yourself.

That's in jail and prison.

The better liar, a better fighter win.

In this case, he was facing 25 years in prison for aggravated robbery.

His sentence was reduced and he walked out of jail in just over a year.

Edwards says he pieced together what happened to Young by picking up on the questions the detectives asked him.

He's telling me what to really say.

He filling in the blanks.

So you were just kind of making up details.

Yeah, making up what they throw out to me.

I can make it up.

You can say anything to me, I can take it and make it better than what you said.

I point out that he's told lies before under oath.

Why should we believe this story?

Frankly, I'm going to be honest.

I don't care, man.

I'm just, you ask me a question, I give it to you.

If I was going to lie to you, I wouldn't even talk to you.

It'd be senseless.

And it was different when I was young.

They were forcing us, saying, you killed him.

He's saying, you killed him, you know.

That's different, but that shit's over with.

Can I ask you, do you think Ben Spencer's innocent?

Yeah.

He didn't do it.

In my heart, he didn't do it.

You know, he lied on me and I lied on him.

That's what it is, what it is, you know?

The math is getting interesting.

Of the four people whose testimony put Spencer in prison, two, Cotton and Edwards, have backtracked or recanted entirely on tape.

Charles Stewart is dead.

Only one, Gladys Oliver, has stuck to her story, or so I assume, since she wouldn't talk.

I wondered how Jesse Berseno, the lead detective who retired years ago, would view these developments.

It takes takes us three visits to his home to finally buttonhole him.

Here he is.

How you doing, Ms.

Perseno?

Perseno, a trim man with thick white hair, gives my microphone a wary glance and shoots Parker, a fellow investigator, a look of betrayal.

He says he felt no pressure to close the case quickly, and they investigated thoroughly.

Was it police practice, I ask, to tell a potential witness the name of the suspect and details about the investigation.

Well, it all depends on where you are with the investigation and the person you're talking to.

You don't want to lead them into making this false statement, so no, you don't really tell them that.

A couple of people, Danny Edwards and

Jimmy Cotton, thought that

the police had given them the information and they just kind of signed the affidavit after the police had given them the information about them.

We don't work that way.

Yes, there you go again.

Lice.

It's lies.

We don't give them the information.

We ask them the information.

Anyway, Briseno says, why would you want to believe them now?

He's right, of course.

Investigators tend to believe contemporaneous testimony before a person has a chance to rework his story.

Perhaps Jimmy Cotton was not suffering pangs of guilt.

Perhaps he looked at Parker with his military haircut and me with my microphone and felt corralled into giving a false recantation.

Or Danny Edwards, who spins lies as easily as he breathes.

Maybe he was just messing with us.

But a fundamental principle of cold cases is this.

Time is both the enemy of truth and its friend.

True, memories fade and details disappear over the years, but time can reveal truth as well, just as a Polaroid snapshot slowly reveals the details of a picture.

Over time, relationships can change and loyalties dissolve.

Conscience eats away at one's sleep.

A person no longer has a reason to lie.

In the frantic days after Jeffrey Young's murder, the police had one mandate, to ask questions, make sense of conflicting statements, and tune out the white noise to discern the truth.

If people lied, Perseno says, that's on their conscience, not his.

We ask him, you know, are you being honest?

Is this true and blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, yeah,

what else can you do?

You run with the most cogent story you have.

And yet, if the evidence seems to indicate that Ben Spencer did not kill Jeffrey Young, the question is: who did?

That's it for part one of this story, but there is a lot more.

In part two of this series, Barbara investigates another theory, one that Benjamin Spencer's jury never heard about who might have murdered Jeffrey Young.

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 Wells.

Thanks as always for listening.

Till next time.