October 14, 2024 • 47 mins
On the evening of March 22, 1987 a businessman and father were robbed and killed in Dallas, TX. Just a few days later, 22-year-old Benjamine Spencer, a newlywed with a child on the way, was arrested for the crime. A reward for any information on the killing would lead several eyewitnesses to fabricate a story implicating Ben. Despite the fact that he had an alibi and there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, Ben was sentenced to life in prison. He fought for the next 37 years to finally be declared an innocent man.
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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/677738/bringing-ben-home-by-barbara-bradley-hagerty/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
In twenty seventeen, Barbara Bradley Haggerty was a veteran journalist
looking for a story, so she called one of her
favorite sources, a guy named Jim McCluskey.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Jim McCluskey basically is a founder, the father of the
modern innocence movement. Back in eighty three, he started the
first organization that reinvestigated dubious convictions, way before the Innocence
Project was even thought of. And so I called up
Jim one day and looking for a story for The Atlantic,
And I said, Jim, you've gotten like sixty five people
(00:35):
out of prison. What's the story that haunts you? What
keeps you up at night? And Jim said, oh, well,
that's easy. Ben Spencer's story. There's not a day that
goes by that I don't think about Ben.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Ben Spencer was a young man who decades before, was
convicted of a homicide. He always maintained he did not commit.
Jim McCluskey and his team investigated Ben's case in the
early two thousands. They put in hundreds of hours of
work to find out if Ben was telling the truth.
So Barb decided she was going to do the same.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I just kind of put one foot in front of
the other, just like everyone else, and just followed the
next lead and kind of put little sands of evidence
in a little pile, and at some point it was
a pretty big mound, you know, it was. It was
pretty compelling.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Do you find yourself more than just a journalist?
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Now?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Do you think you're an activist?
Speaker 2 (01:44):
You know? I don't think, Okay, how do I put this?
I'm an activist for Ben because I think he's innocent
and I think the truth does need to come out.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
After years of research and door knocking, Barb feels like
she got to the truth of the matter.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
This guy could not have killed someone in cold blood.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And Barb thinks she knows who did, but it wasn't Ben.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
My name is Benjamin Spencer. I'm a native of Dallas,
and I was wrongfully incarcerated for thirty four years.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
This is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today, Ben Spencer.
Ben Spencer was born December twentieth, nineteen sixty four, to
Benjamin and Lucille Spencer in Dallas, Texas. He's one of
(02:41):
five kids, right in the middle, and he grew up
in a religious and strict household.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
My mother She was the disciplinarian in the family, and
so if we ever did something like didn't clean the
house like we was posed to, my dad would always
tell us he's going to tell our mom if we
didn't do it and we didn't want to. Uh, I guess,
be victims of her rat.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
What would that look like?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Ooh terrible. We used to get whoopings. I mean, we
wasn't a such thing as punishment or standing in the
corner or you don't get to go outside stuff. You
would probably get whooped and not get to go outside.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
So yeah, see, you guys were all pretty in line,
good kids. Still, Ben was a playful kid.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
I was just a middle child, and I guess I
was the one that always got into stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
I guess, but like, what does that mean? What kind
of stuff?
Speaker 3 (03:33):
I've never watched Mary Poppins, but I remember the scene
where she would come down with the umbrella. So I
would get to the highest point of our garage and
jump off with the umbrella one time and bust my head,
you know, stuff Like I was.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Adventurous like that, and he was curious.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
I used to like to know how things operated, like
if I got a toy or car or something. I
was always interested and curious as to how it was
put together, so I would take a loose and put
it back together.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
He was handy, and into his teens, Ben put those
skills to work at a cabinet factory, making five dollars
an hour.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
I put in a lot of overtime, so Wednesday, around
about eleven o'clock I would already have forty hours in.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
And Ben liked spending that overtime money on nice clothes, a.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Ralph Lawn, Polo, Georgia Omiani, stuff like that. So I
used to like to dress nice.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
He liked shopping at Neiman Marcus.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
And my moms used to get on me about the
money I would spend on one shirt. She was like,
you could buy several outfits for what you pay for
that one shirt. I'm like, well, whose money is this
miney yours?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Ben says he'd bring a change of clothes to the
club just in case anyone else had the same shirt on.
Decades later, sitting in front of me, I can tell
you this man is still a fashionista. He's soft spoken,
but his looks do the talking. He's wearing a plaid
suit in dark grays and.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Purples, white heel figure shirt and.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
The tie a paisley tie with hints of bronze and
a gold Michael Kore's watch on his left wrist. Did
you pick this up?
Speaker 3 (05:08):
I did?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
And on top of style. Ben Spencer is tall six ' four,
dark and handsome, and one day in nineteen eighty three,
while he was out for some pizza with friends, Ben's
good looks caught the attention of a girl.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
I'm sitting and eating a piece of waiting on my friend,
and this girl walks over to the table and she
tells me that her friend likes me and she wants
you to have a number.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
That friend was Deborah Child's also tall and pretty and good.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
I used to smoke weed, I used to drink And
one of the things I liked about Deborah she wasn't
doing any of the things I was doing. She came
from a good And what's strange is we grew up
around the corner from each other, I mean literally less
maybe a block away from each other, and we had
never met wow, up until we was eighteen years old.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
She was Ben's first real girlfriend, and she'd soon become
the mother of his child. And what did your mom
think about the pregnancy.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Oh, she was excited. Yeah, my mother really liked Deborah
a lot. My mother didn't allow you to have a
girlfriend or boyfriend living in her house while you weren't married.
And Deborah was the first. Actually, Deborah and I are
(06:34):
the only two who got away with that. My oldest
brother didn't get away with it. My oldest sister, younger sister,
youngest brother, none of them got away with that, but
we did.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And soon after, at twenty two years old, he asked
Deborah's dad for her hand in marriage.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Her dad used to be at this garage all the
time with this guy who fixed cars, and so I
went up there and I was like, ms, child, I
talk to you. He was like, yeah, what is it being.
I was like, you know, I would like to marry
your daughter, you know, if you would give me permission.
And he was like, oh, of course, being sure, you
(07:11):
can marry my daughter, no question. Yeah. He was like,
you're gonna take care of him, right? I said, yes, sir,
I'm going to take care of him. And so I
promised him I will take care of him.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
But Ben wouldn't be able to keep his promise.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
And that's one of the most unfortunate things is, we
got married, and of course I wasn't able to fulfill
what I had told him I would do.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Just two months after the wedding, their lives came crumbling down.
March twenty second, nineteen eighty seven started normal for Ben Spencer.
What do you remember that day?
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Pretty much the whole day, the entire day.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Early in the day, he and Deborah visited family, like
they did every weekend.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
That was our routine for Saturdays and Sundays. Her mother
and I were playing Domino's and cards, I think it was.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Cards, and like he often did, Ben teased Deborah's older sister, Sissy.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Sis and I had this relationship where we would tease.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Each other, but this time Ben may have taken it
too far and Deborah wasn't having it.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Deborah immediately just raised off the floor like she had
springs on and she was like, I'm ready to go,
and I'm like, you ready to go? She was like, yeah,
I'm ready to go. And I could tell she's upset
about something. I don't know what she's upset about, but
she's upset. And so she was like, you need to
come home before you get left. And so we get
halfway home and She was like, you didn't have to
(08:43):
say that to her. I was like, that's what you're
upset about. I said, you know, I'd be teasing playing
with Sissy.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But Deborah was mad, and after they got home, Ben
decided to let her cool off, so we left the
house in Deborah's red Thunderbird and went to see some friends.
Ben says it was still early in the afternoon and
he hung out all day playing chess and cards. Then
in the evening, Ben attempted to make his way home that.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I had stopped and got some chicken from both Deborah, but.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
His plans to go home got derailed when he ran
into some friends, including a track star and high school
senior named Christy. Christy had her eyes set on Ben,
tall and handsome, and Ben welcomed the attention from Christy,
so they hung out all evening and eventually got in
(09:30):
the red Thunderbird and drove to a nearby park, where
they stayed until after midnight, close to.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
One o'clock, and I noticed the time and I was like, well,
maybe I should take you home. I got to get
up in the morning take my wife to work, and
she said, well, yeah, I gotta go to school for
practice in the morning because he ran track.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
So he went home and that was that. Ben says
he'd been faithful to Deborah up until that point. He
says it was a one night stand. In the heat
of the argument, he'd have to work up the courage
to tell Deborah, and Ben went to bed, not knowing
that his problems would soon go far beyond cheating on
his wife. The next day, Ben was on his way
(10:16):
to work when a friend stopped him and.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
He was like, man, did you hear about what happened
last night? I was like, no, what's that? He said, Man,
it's police everywhere in the neighborhood last night. I said,
what happened? He said, they found some white guy out
there on Puget and they found two stolen cars in
the alley, one in this alley, one another alley. I
was like, okay, he said, oh, man, police was hot
last night. I said, well, nah, I heard anything about it.
(10:40):
I said, well, let me go on and go cause
I got to get to work. So I left and
that was I mean, that was pretty much all I
had learned that they had found a white guy in
the neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
And it was just a few days later that you
were arrested, right. Did you have any inkling that was
going to happen?
Speaker 3 (10:55):
None?
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Can you tell me about the crime? What happened that night?
Who was jeff Young? So?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Jeffrey Young was thirty three years old, white, married to
his high school sweetheart, the father of three children under
ten years old.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
This is Barbara again, She goes by Barb.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I worked for NPR for nineteen years and ended up
doing a story about Ben Spencer for NPR but also
for The Atlantic, where I'm a contributing writer.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Like I said, Barb first heard of Ben in twenty seventeen,
and she has spent hundreds of hours working on and
interviewing key people in this case. Her journey is documented
in her latest book, Bringing Ben Home. In it, she
also tries to answer what happened to Jeffrey Young, the
man who was killed that night? In nineteen eighty seven, He.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Worked for a clothing import company. He was actually about
to become president, and on Sunday nights he would go
in to work because many of his clients see people
imported from were in Asia. So it was there Monday morning, Barb.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Says, Jeffrey was alone at the warehouse waiting to get
on his computer.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Back then, it was the ancient days of computers, and
so he had to basically ask permission to get on
his computer system. And he called up the guy who
handled the computer systems, and the guy said, we're doing
an update. You can't get on for another hour. I'll
call you when you can get on. So a few
minutes go by, an hour goes by, and the guy
(12:32):
calls Jeffrey Young, and it rings and rings and rings,
and he calls back several times. And what police now
believe is that was the time when Jeffrey Young was
being assaulted.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
The theory is that two people waited in the parking
lot where Jeffrey's BMW was parked and attacked him sometime
around ten pm.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
They hit him on the head with a blunt object,
cracking his skull in five places. They picked him up,
They walked to the BMW, they had the keys, They
opened the trunk, they put him in the BMW, slammed
the door, and then they drive. They drive across the
Trinity River into West Ellis and at some point somehow
(13:14):
Jeffrey Young there was a little latch in the trunk
and Jeffrey Young managed to get out and fall on
Puget Street, and the perpetrators looked back, saw he was
on the street, panicked, drove the BMW into the alley nearby,
and then ran away.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
They got away with his Sako watch, wedding ring, and
portable TV radio, and they left Jeffrey Young dying on
the street.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
And there he lay shaking, you know, bleeding, as a
small crowd gathered around him.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
When the paramedics arrived, Jeffrey Young was still alive. They
rushed him to the hospital and police questioned a few witnesses,
thinking they were just investigating a robbery. Barb says they
got a description of someone who looked like a guy
named Van Mitchell Spencer.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Unfortunately, they didn't get any names or phone numbers, so
they could never go back and find them as witnesses.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Then the case took a turn. Jeffrey Young succumbed to
his injuries and died in the hospital early the next morning,
and shortly after a powerful man named Ross Perrot stepped
in to help.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Ross Preaux at that point was probably one of the
most influential people in Texas. He was self made billionaire
about to run for president.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Good after Nan.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
The volunteers in all fifty states have asked made Iran
as candidate for Priends of the United States.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And one of his top executives was the father of
the victim. And suddenly, you know, this robbery investigation became
a murder investigation.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Perrot offered a twenty five one thousand dollars reward for
any information leading to the arrest and indictment of the
killer or killers.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
And people started coming out.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Of the woodwork, people like forty two year old Gladys Oliver.
She'd originally told police she hadn't seen anything, but a
few days later she called crime Stoppers, an organization that
offers rewards for information that leads to an arrest. Oliver
told them that from her bedroom window that night, she'd
(15:30):
seen two black men she knew from the neighborhood. One
was a shorter man by the name of Robert Mitchell,
the other was an acquaintance of her son's, Benjamin Spencer.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
She suggested that they talked to a couple of other
people and gave the name of Jimmy Cotton.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Jimmy Cotton described the same sequence of events as Gladys
Oliver did, but added that he'd seen Ben jump over
a fence and get into a red thunderbird. Jesse Brisino
was the lead detective, and just four days after Jeffrey
Young's killing, based on eyewitness testimony alone, Brisino was convinced
(16:09):
he had his purpse. On March twenty sixth, nineteen eighty seven,
Ben Spencer was home with a headache while waiting for
his friend Charles to swing by. He figured he'd take
some tyle and all and nap off the migraine.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
I hear this beating on the door, and when I
wake up, I noticed on the clock it's two thirty,
so I figured, oh, this must be Charles. But on
the way to the front door, I could see out
the front window that there was police cars out front.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Ben opens the door and sees an officer who asks.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Do you have any ID? I said sure, I'll put
reach in my pocket, put out my hand in my ID.
He said, turn turn on and put your hands on
the will you under wrist? I say, under rest? For what?
So he puts me in the car and turns over
and looks over the back of the seat and he said,
you know the white guy they found the street the
(17:08):
other day? I said, I heard about it. He said,
that's what you're under the rest for his murder. I said, man,
you're making a mistake.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Then was shocked, but he figured he'd cooperate and get
this all sorted out.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
And so I'm thinking that the truth is going to prevail,
and I'm telling him what I had did that day.
I mean, from morning to night, I'm telling him what
I did. Of course, I guess it fell on deaf
ears because I was arrested and charged with this crime.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
So you never left jail that day. Do you remember
the first time you spoke to Deborah after you were arresting.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
I called Deborah that evening to let her know I
was in jail, And of course my main concern was
telling her that I didn't commit this offense, and I
need to tell you something because you're going to find out.
And so I began to tell her about Christy. I said,
you know, I want to be the one to tell
you that because you're going to find out, because that's
(18:04):
why I was with the night this offense happened.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
What are the chances that you get arrested for something
you didn't do on a night that you have an alibi,
but it's for something not great.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Also, right at that time, my marriage was only two
months oh, and I definitely wasn't something I wanted to
have to share with her or.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Tell her, But he had to if he was going
to get out of this, he had to give an alibi,
and his alibi was Christie. Then figured the police would
do their job, talk to Christy, and everything would be
squared away.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
For some reason, they just ignored the fact that Christy
and I were together. It didn't fit into their scheme
of what they believe happened. So of course she was
ignored and no one wanted her.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
And by this investigation was a mess from start to finish.
They didn't preserve the crimes too or take photos. They
just drove the car off.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Police took Jeffrey Young's BMW to the police lot, but
that morning.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
They opened the police lot up to people who wanted
to buy abandoned cars. Oh my gosh, and so anyone
could have touched that.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Car, plus it had rained. Before they can do any
thorough fingerprinting. They were able to recover some finger and
palm prints, but none matched Ben or Robert Mitchell.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
I don't know what they were thinking, honestly. And then
the minute they got Gladys Oliver and a couple of
people to say they saw Ben Spencer. Essentially the investigation stopped.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
That was it. Twenty two year old Ben Spencer, as
soon to be father, with no history of violent crime,
was charged with murder. He went to trial just months later,
on October twenty sixth, nineteen eighty seven. Ben and Robert
Mitchell were tried separately. The prosecutor in Ben's case was
(20:07):
Jeffrey Hines. Since no evidence was found in the killing,
he relied on the witness testimony alone. Gladys Oliver and
Jimmy Cotton stuck to their stories, and the prosecution bolstered
their case with another star witness, a jailhouse snitch named
Danny Edwards, who swore that Ben told him he had
(20:31):
killed Jeffrey. Ben's attorney, Frank Jackson, relied almost entirely on
Ben's alibi on Christy, but the police tried to discredit her.
They had previously shown her a picture which she did
not identify as Ben.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
She says that the picture they showed her did not
look like me. She said it was a picture that
looked like it was taken real close where you couldn't
really make out who the person was because it was
so taken so close what the picture was, Yes, I
don't and we have not been able to find the picture.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
I went and talked to Christie about it and she said,
I know I was with Ben that night. I mean
he couldn't. The math is such that he could not
have gone and killed Jeffrey Young and come back and
spend any time with me.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
But the jury didn't believe her. Ben was convicted and
later sentenced to thirty five years for the murder of
Jeffrey Young, but that conviction would be thrown out.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
We can thank Bruce Anton, who was the co chair
with my attorney at the time, Frank Jackson, who discovered
that within the States file that they had hidden the
fact that gladys Oliver had called crime Stop and also
had received five hundred and eighty dollars At the time.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
The judge granted Ben a new trial, believing the jury
should have known that gladys Oliver had claimed for ward money.
But before that trial took place, the prosecution offered a
deal for twenty years on a lesser charge, with parole
eligibility in less than five years. But Ben said no.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
I said well, whatever they're going to do, they're going
to have to do it, because I'm not going to
plead givety to something I didn't do.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
He was adamant that life on parole for a crime
he hadn't done wouldn't be true freedom.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
If I accepted the plea offer, went to prison may parole,
I would have X on my back. Now. I felt
that every time that they couldn't solve a crime and
they needed to suspect, I would become the escapegoat.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Ben says he refused to become polices go to suspect
every time they had an unsolved crime. So he went
to his second trial, charged with a lesser offense, aggravated robbery.
This time the prosecutor was Andy Beach.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
When I first met Andy Beach in twenty seventeen, he said,
you know, Gladys Oliver was basically the best witness I've
ever put on the stand.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
In the twenty five 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
get carried the day for us.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
There's no question.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
He described how she kind of rolled in in a wheelchair,
was eye level with the jury, had a little blanket
over her lap, that she was riveting.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
She was very confident in what she had seen and
her ability to communicate that to a jury.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
And she just took no guph from Ben's lawyer.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
There's no question that Gladys Oliver's testimony convicted Ben Spencer.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Danny Edwards, the snitch was also key. This time. He
added that Ben had told him his only regret was
that he hadn't finished the job at Young's office. He
said Ben told him quote, I should have killed bitch
right then and there. And then Ben took the stand.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
So I'm on the stand and the prosecutor he's doing
his cross examination, and he was like, when you hold
up your hands for me, and I hold up my
hands and I've got them. My fingers played out.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Beach asked Ben to hold his hands up. Remember Ben
is six foot four with large hands to match.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
I can't remember exact words, but he went to describe
how I could have used my hands to grab Jeffrey
Young by his throat and choke him.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
You just had a feeling that he wanted to evoke
in the midge of almost a really powerful I mean,
I'm gonna be offensive here, but like an ape, right,
like a really powerful, almost monster with these huge hands,
and those hands could just snap a neck, right, that was.
And the thing is that was seecial. That got across
(25:01):
because I talked to the jury foreman and he remembers that,
and he remembers thinking, wow, wow, no matter what, that
guy could have killed Jeffrey Young, no matter how, look
at those hands.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
So it worked again. Then was convicted, but this time
of aggravated robbery and sentenced to life in prison. He
remembers the night of the conviction and sentencing, sitting in
a cold cell.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
I've been convicted and sentenced to life, and I just
couldn't see the end of that. I was like, man,
the world will end before I have a sea freedom.
And so I literally wanted to die. I literally wanted
to take my own life that night, and I thought
about taking my tie and hanging myself in that cell.
(25:54):
But my faith, in my belief, was if I commit
the ultimate sin of taking my life, I can't RepA
I can't turn away from that. So I felt that
if I was to commit suicide, I would have gone
to hell. So that thought was the only thing kept
me from hanging myself in that sale that night.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And over the years, Ben kept his faith. How many
times did you read the Bible in prison?
Speaker 3 (26:16):
I couldn't count. I would say at least probably twenty
or thirty times from front to back. I mean, I
didn't think anybody could really read the Bible, and much
less I get an understanding of it. But the more
I rated it, and I say read, but I should
really say, the more I studied it, the more enlightenment
(26:37):
I received.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Part of that enlightenment was realizing that Deborah was on
the outside suffering too.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
I just wanted her to go on with her life
and hopefully find someone that would be as good to
her as I wanted to be.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Around nineteen ninety four or five, Deborah and Ben got divorced,
but Deborah never abandoned Ben, and.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
He continued just being in love with her, and she
was his most faithful friend.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
In two thousand and four, Ben filed post conviction relief
a Habeas Corpus. With the help of Jim McCluskey and
Centurion Ministries, they reinvestigated Ben's case, which included trying to
figure out what the eyewitnesses could have actually seen in
the dark that night in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
What Ben's legal team wanted to do was to show
how hard it would be would have been to identify
anyone on that night. It was ten o'clock at night,
it was cloudy, very few lights, and the witnesses were
all standing quite a distance away. So what they did
is say, got a forensic optomologist and brought him to
(27:52):
the crime scene on a similar night in March a
few years obviously, a few years later, twenty years later,
and he was able to measure the distances, and what
he knew from science is that in those conditions of lighting,
a person could not be further away than twenty five
(28:12):
feet to be able to identify a person's face. And
all of those people were alike, ninety three feet one
hundred and thirteen feet two hundred and eighty feet away.
There is absolutely no way that those people could have
identified even their brother.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Ben's defense team also interviewed dozens of witnesses poking holes
in the police investigation, and they pointed to a more
plausible suspect, though I'll tell you more about that later,
Barb says century ministries even invited Alan Ledbetter to the hearing.
He was the foreman of the jury that convicted Ben
(28:52):
in his second trial. And Ledbetter went and.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
It was racially divided. One side of the room all white,
all the friends of Jeffrey Young, the people who worked
for Ross Brow, that kind of thing, and behind Ben
all black, right, all of Ben's friends and family and
all that. And Alan Ledbetter started in the white section.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Is he a white guy?
Speaker 3 (29:16):
He's a white guy.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
He started in the white section, and after hearing evidence,
he moved over to the black section, and it was
the only white face in the black section. And he
became really convinced that they had done a terrible injustice.
In fact, when I interviewed him, he began to cry.
(29:39):
He said, I just think I have such a role
in this, and all I can think of is all
those years I took away from Ben.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Jim McCloskey presented all of this evidence in two thousand
and seven to Judge Rick Magnus.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
The judge ruled that he was actually innocent. Ben was
actually innocent. He could not release Ben.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Even though Judge Magnus ruled that Ben deserved a new trial,
quote on the grounds of actual innocence. The Court of
Criminal Appeals in Texas still had to approve, and the
judges denied Ben.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Here's a case where guy was declared innocent and he
still couldn't get out, Like, what does it take to
get out?
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Barb wanted to know, so she left DC and went
to Dallas with her microphone.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Thank you so much. How are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Pretty good? Yeah? Good good.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
When I met Ben a little bit, what struck me
was how gentle he was and how soft spoken.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
My name is Benjamin John Spencer. My number is forty
thirty seven thirteen.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
There was no pushing me, like, you know, I'm innocent,
You've got to get me out of here. There was
none of that. It was just explaining where he was.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
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 the system.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Prisonally for him was not It wasn't living, it was
just existing.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Yeah, it's a lot of things I could be doing.
My parents are getting older and more fragile. I could
be doing things for them. I could be doing a
lot of positive things for a lot of people. I'm
not the monster that they've tried to make me out
to be.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Barb was determined to find out what happened that night
in nineteen eighty seven. Did this man sitting in front
of her do it? Barb teamed up with private investigator
Darryl Parker and set out to do some real shoe
leather reporting.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Her and Daryl Parker together. I mean, that was a
duo that, you know, could only have been put together
by God, and an odd duo.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Barb is this tiny lady. Although she's a veteran, no
nonsense reporter, she comes across as sweet and adorable. Her
sidekick Darryl has the neck of a linebacker. He looks
like a former cop and marine, which he is. And
together they door knocked around Dallas.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
We went to every single house. I'll just tell you
this one story. This is why I had so much fun.
We're standing in front of this apartment. Darryl is about
to knock, and he looks over and he sees that
I'm standing directly in front of the door. And he
reaches over and he gently takes me by the shoulders
and moves me over like two feet and he goes.
(32:42):
Sometimes they shoot through the door. Now I had been washing.
I'd been a reporter for like thirty five years. I'd
never considered that someone might shoot me. Huh through the door.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
No one got shot, and they were able to track
down Jimmie Cotton, the witness, who added that he'd seen
Ben running from Jeffrey Young's car that night from ninety
three feet away.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I had kind of plotted out this really careful interview
journey right, not to spook him, right, just start gently
and all of that. Like, yeah, I didn't have to
do any of that. It's like it was a confessional.
It was like he'd been waiting for thirty years to
blurt out. I don't know if I saw him or not.
I didn't see his face. I just saw someone running away.
(33:31):
He was tall. I thought it might be like Ben,
but you know, and the police told me that they
were investigating Ben. So the police gave him that information.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Remember, the cops had talked to Cotton at the suggestion
of Gladys Oliver, the prosecution star witness.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
It all came out that gladys Oliver had told him,
just follow my lead, just say what I say, Just
say it was Ben, And that all came out.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
It was known from the first trial that Gladys was
interested in the reward money. However, now it was clear
that Jimmy Cotton also had motive to lie. It's unclear
if Cotton ever received any money. Here he is on
the podcast Radio Atlantic telling Barb how he feels about
Ben's conviction decades later.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
I feel bad. I'll hope. I want them to get out,
I really do. That's a long time to be in
prison for something you didn't do.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And the other person we tracked down was the jailhouse snitch,
Danny Edwards, and we're like, so, Danny, did Ben Spencer
ever confess to you. No, he didn't confess to me.
He said they said he did it. He didn't even
(34:51):
know the guy. He didn't even go over there. No,
I didn't confess to me.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Danny told Barb that the police told him that Ben
said Danny did it. So Dan and he said Ben
did it.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
And then he says to me, you know, that's the
way the game is played in prison.
Speaker 5 (35:06):
That's in jail. In prison, the better liar, better fighter wing.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Here's Edwards talking to Barb for the podcast Radio Atlantic, and.
Speaker 5 (35:14):
They were forcing us saying you kidded him. He's saying
you kid him. You know that's different. But that shit
goo with Can I ask.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
You, do you think Ben Spencer's innocent?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, he didn't do it.
Speaker 5 (35:26):
In my heart, he didn't do it, you know, just
he lied on me and I lied on him.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
That's what it is, what it is, you know.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Danny Edwards was facing a twenty five year prison sentence
for arson aggravated robbery and he walked out two months
after he testified against Ben. So he was in prison
for better or he was in jail for about a year.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Do you think he felt guilty about it?
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Oh yeah. So we're sitting they were kind of wrapping
up the interview and we're sitting outside and he goes, so,
how is Ben anyway? And I said, Danny, Ben's in prison.
He goes, oh, I thought he was out. I said no,
he's been imprisoned for thirty years. And Daryl says, so,
(36:16):
how does that make you feel? And Danny says, like shit.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Barb even built a rapport with Andy Beach, the prosecutor
who got a conviction at Ben's second trial.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
So the last time I talked to him for sitting
in the jury room and I'm not even seated yet,
and I've turned out the tape recorder, not even seated yet.
And he goes, you know, I have serious doubts about
Ben Spencer's guilt.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
But even with Beach's doubts and Barb's reporting, Ben Spencer
remained in prison. Getting him out, Barb says, would take
some luck and new district attorney. In November twenty eighteen,
(37:11):
John Cruseau, a progressive Black Democrat, was now elected as
the District Attorney of Dallas County. Barb says, now there
was hope.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
The four previous das had refused to look at his case.
They said, no, it's open and shut. And so a
new DA comes along, and because we had gotten new
evidence that he could consider since a trial, he was
open minded and he put his really good prosecutor on
it to investigate it.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
His conviction review unit, headed by Cynthia Garza, started reviewing
the case. They had Barb's reporting and all the evidence
previously compiled by Centurion Ministries, and they also uncovered more
evidence that the prosecution's key witness, Gladys Oliver lied. He
received five thousand to ten thousand dollars in reward money
(38:04):
on top of the money she got from crime stoppers,
and she had lied about that in the second trial
to investigator Cynthia Garza believed the prosecution knew about the
incentive to lie, which qualifies as a Brady violation. So
with all this evidence pointing towards Ben's innocence, Barb started thinking,
(38:26):
if Ben Spencer didn't do this, who did.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
In eighty seven, right around the time of the Jeffrey
Young killing, there was a man named Michael Hubbard who
was about the same age as as Ben, lived in
West Dallas.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Hubbard was a known criminal who worked with two friends
to stick up and rob restaurants. The night of jeff
Young's assault, Michael Hubbard spoke to some friends at a park.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
He had a really terrible coke habit. He really needed
money and his friends if they would come help them
to rob a restaurant, and they're like, no, man, there
are too many police around and we're not doing that.
So he was desperate, so he goes off and he
comes back a few hours later and he has a
Sakah watch in a wedding ring and a jam box.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Hubbard asks his friend to help him sell it, so
they do. Then they score drugs and get high with
some other friends. While they're getting high, Michael tells them
where the items came from.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
And after he said this, all four of them were silent,
and they're like, Michael, you really can't You can't tell
anyone that you shouldn't have told this to us. So
what happened is a few months later, the two friends
got kind of a conscience when they realized that Ben
and Robert were going we're going to be tried for this,
(39:54):
and they went to the police, and the police ignored it.
They didn't even interview Michael Hubbard because they already had
Ben Spencer.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Hubbard wound up going to prison for a robbery.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
He gets out around ninety two and he starts the
spree of what are called the Batman assaults, where he
would wait outside of an office building with a high
end car in it, right in the parking lot, and
wait for the executive to come out, and then he
(40:31):
would hit him over the head and take his jewelry
and his cash, but not the credit cards, just the
way it happened with Jeffrey Young. And he was finally
convicted of these Batman robberies. Ten people seriously hurt with
the same very same mL. So it's quite plausible that
(40:58):
Michael Hubbard the Batman, actually killed Jeffrey Young.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
In early twenty twenty one, the Dallas County District Attorney
decided Ben's conviction should be vacated.
Speaker 6 (41:16):
Okay, good afternoon, everyone, that's good.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
On March twelfth, twenty twenty one, Ben stood in front
of Judge Layla Lawrence Mays remotely because of COVID, all right, I.
Speaker 6 (41:31):
Want everybody to know that we are live streaming on
YouTube through the two eighty third District Courts.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
YouTube, and Judge Mays agreed to release Ben on his
personal recognissance.
Speaker 6 (41:41):
So, because of everything that I have read, because of
what I think is fair to mister Spencer, I have
decided to go ahead and grant a PR bond.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
I would say, within forty five minutes of this judge
telling me she's going to release me on a PR bond,
I was walking out the front door, and I mean
I didn't expect it to happen that fast. I happened
so quickly. A lot of the jailers were even saying, man,
that's the quickest release I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Barb was outside of the courthouse that day, live streaming
the hearing with a crowd of people, including strangers, supporting Ben.
There was this cheer.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
People didn't even know Ben, but like because Ben had
become this symbol of both the kind of calcification of
the system, but also one of those rare instances when
can we broke through?
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Right?
Speaker 2 (42:34):
And so people were cheering and we all everyone went
rushing down to the outside of the jail to wait
for Ben to come out. There were probably two hundred
people in there, kind of talking excitedly and all of that.
And from the end of the room it comes from
around the corner. Ben and Deborah appear and stop and
(42:56):
they just look at this crowd of people, and Deborah
looks slightly freaked out, and Ben looked really happy, and
they walked like this royal couple through, you know, through
the crowds, and everyone's like high fiving Ben and everyone's
just thrilled.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Deborah was right there next to him. After all of
these years, I.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
Read through twenty five hundred pages of his letters to her.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Letters he wrote to Deborah from prison.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
He's a really kind of very smart, clinical, like dispassionate person.
But when you read those letters, what you see is
he was wildly in love with her.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Ben and Deborah got married again in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
It would have been our thirty fifth wind anniversary. The
remarried on her Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Ben looks back and reflects on everything that went down.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
I've never harbored any ill will for anyone, not then,
not now. And I'm just a kind, loving person who
believes who believed in the system at that time. Still
believe the system has the potential to work. But it
(44:23):
requires us to keep an open mind, and we have
to realize that just because a person is behind the
table on the defense end, that that person is not
guilty just because he's there.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Ben says he wants to help others like him, but
mostly he's just happy to be a dad to Benjamin Jr.
And husband to deb like he wanted all those years ago.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
I thank Deborah and him for having my back fall
those years, for loving me for those years. It just
means a lot to me. Need to have them in
my life now and hopefully to this life ends.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
The day after Ben got out, Barb went to see
him at home.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
It's beautiful spring day, March thirteenth, and you hear lawnmowers,
you hear kind of all the normal sounds of spring, right.
You hear birds, you hear and this is stuff he
hasn't heard for thirty four years. And I said, Ben,
how does that feel? And he says, it just feels normal.
(45:39):
Feels like this is a life I was supposed to
be living and now I'm living it.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
That's how I feel normal. Still feels normal. I have
to recall the fact that I was incarcerated. Wow, it's
like the thirty four years that I did in prison
just kind of vanished, and it's like I woke up
out of a coma and resume my life on that side.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
After our interview, Ben Spencer was officially exonerated on August
twenty ninth of this year. Thank you for listening to
Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence
organizations and go to the links in the episode description
(46:37):
and see how you can help. You'll also see a
link to Barb's book and her three part story for
The Atlantic. Thank you to Barb for letting us use
her recordings, and to Ethan Goldman and Sam Devaney at
Anchor Entertainment for the extra tape. This episode was written
by me Maggie Freeling, with story editing and sound designed
by senior producer Rebecca Ibarra. Our producer is Kathleen Fink.
(46:59):
Our researcher is Hallie Dolce, with mixing by Josh Allen.
An additional production help by Jeff Clyburn. Executive producers are
Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wortis. The music is
by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Make sure
to follow us on all social media platforms at Lava
for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow
(47:21):
me on all platforms at Maggie Freeling. Wrongful Conviction with
Maggie Freeling is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number one. A note to listeners,
a previous version of this episode named Faith Johnson as
the prosecutor in Ben's first trial. It was actually Jeffrey Hines.
In twenty seventeen, Barbara Bradley Haggerty was a veteran journalist
looking for a story, so she called one of her
favorite sources, a guy named Jim McCluskey.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Jim McCluskey basically is a founder, the father of the
modern innocence movement. Back in eighty three, he started the
first organization that reinvestigated dubious convictions, way before the Innocence
Project was even thought of. And so I called up
Jim one day and looking for a story for The Atlantic,
And I said, Jim, you've gotten like sixty five people
(00:35):
out of prison. What's the story that haunts you? What
keeps you up at night? And Jim said, oh, well,
that's easy. Ben Spencer's story. There's not a day that
goes by that I don't think about Ben.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Ben Spencer was a young man who decades before, was
convicted of a homicide. He always maintained he did not commit.
Jim McCluskey and his team investigated Ben's case in the
early two thousands. They put in hundreds of hours of
work to find out if Ben was telling the truth.
So Barb decided she was going to do the same.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I just kind of put one foot in front of
the other, just like everyone else, and just followed the
next lead and kind of put little sands of evidence
in a little pile, and at some point it was
a pretty big mound, you know, it was. It was
pretty compelling.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Do you find yourself more than just a journalist?
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Now?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Do you think you're an activist?
Speaker 2 (01:44):
You know? I don't think, Okay, how do I put this?
I'm an activist for Ben because I think he's innocent
and I think the truth does need to come out.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
After years of research and door knocking, Barb feels like
she got to the truth of the matter.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
This guy could not have killed someone in cold blood.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And Barb thinks she knows who did, but it wasn't Ben.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
My name is Benjamin Spencer. I'm a native of Dallas,
and I was wrongfully incarcerated for thirty four years.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
This is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today, Ben Spencer.
Ben Spencer was born December twentieth, nineteen sixty four, to
Benjamin and Lucille Spencer in Dallas, Texas. He's one of
(02:41):
five kids, right in the middle, and he grew up
in a religious and strict household.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
My mother She was the disciplinarian in the family, and
so if we ever did something like didn't clean the
house like we was posed to, my dad would always
tell us he's going to tell our mom if we
didn't do it and we didn't want to. Uh, I guess,
be victims of her rat.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
What would that look like?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Ooh terrible. We used to get whoopings. I mean, we
wasn't a such thing as punishment or standing in the
corner or you don't get to go outside stuff. You
would probably get whooped and not get to go outside.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
So yeah, see, you guys were all pretty in line,
good kids. Still, Ben was a playful kid.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
I was just a middle child, and I guess I
was the one that always got into stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
I guess, but like, what does that mean? What kind
of stuff?
Speaker 3 (03:33):
I've never watched Mary Poppins, but I remember the scene
where she would come down with the umbrella. So I
would get to the highest point of our garage and
jump off with the umbrella one time and bust my head,
you know, stuff Like I was.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Adventurous like that, and he was curious.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
I used to like to know how things operated, like
if I got a toy or car or something. I
was always interested and curious as to how it was
put together, so I would take a loose and put
it back together.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
He was handy, and into his teens, Ben put those
skills to work at a cabinet factory, making five dollars
an hour.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
I put in a lot of overtime, so Wednesday, around
about eleven o'clock I would already have forty hours in.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
And Ben liked spending that overtime money on nice clothes, a.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Ralph Lawn, Polo, Georgia Omiani, stuff like that. So I
used to like to dress nice.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
He liked shopping at Neiman Marcus.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
And my moms used to get on me about the
money I would spend on one shirt. She was like,
you could buy several outfits for what you pay for
that one shirt. I'm like, well, whose money is this
miney yours?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Ben says he'd bring a change of clothes to the
club just in case anyone else had the same shirt on.
Decades later, sitting in front of me, I can tell
you this man is still a fashionista. He's soft spoken,
but his looks do the talking. He's wearing a plaid
suit in dark grays and.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Purples, white heel figure shirt and.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
The tie a paisley tie with hints of bronze and
a gold Michael Kore's watch on his left wrist. Did
you pick this up?
Speaker 3 (05:08):
I did?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
And on top of style. Ben Spencer is tall six ' four,
dark and handsome, and one day in nineteen eighty three,
while he was out for some pizza with friends, Ben's
good looks caught the attention of a girl.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
I'm sitting and eating a piece of waiting on my friend,
and this girl walks over to the table and she
tells me that her friend likes me and she wants
you to have a number.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
That friend was Deborah Child's also tall and pretty and good.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
I used to smoke weed, I used to drink And
one of the things I liked about Deborah she wasn't
doing any of the things I was doing. She came
from a good And what's strange is we grew up
around the corner from each other, I mean literally less
maybe a block away from each other, and we had
never met wow, up until we was eighteen years old.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
She was Ben's first real girlfriend, and she'd soon become
the mother of his child. And what did your mom
think about the pregnancy.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Oh, she was excited. Yeah, my mother really liked Deborah
a lot. My mother didn't allow you to have a
girlfriend or boyfriend living in her house while you weren't married.
And Deborah was the first. Actually, Deborah and I are
(06:34):
the only two who got away with that. My oldest
brother didn't get away with it. My oldest sister, younger sister,
youngest brother, none of them got away with that, but
we did.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And soon after, at twenty two years old, he asked
Deborah's dad for her hand in marriage.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Her dad used to be at this garage all the
time with this guy who fixed cars, and so I
went up there and I was like, ms, child, I
talk to you. He was like, yeah, what is it being.
I was like, you know, I would like to marry
your daughter, you know, if you would give me permission.
And he was like, oh, of course, being sure, you
(07:11):
can marry my daughter, no question. Yeah. He was like,
you're gonna take care of him, right? I said, yes, sir,
I'm going to take care of him. And so I
promised him I will take care of him.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
But Ben wouldn't be able to keep his promise.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
And that's one of the most unfortunate things is, we
got married, and of course I wasn't able to fulfill
what I had told him I would do.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Just two months after the wedding, their lives came crumbling down.
March twenty second, nineteen eighty seven started normal for Ben Spencer.
What do you remember that day?
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Pretty much the whole day, the entire day.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Early in the day, he and Deborah visited family, like
they did every weekend.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
That was our routine for Saturdays and Sundays. Her mother
and I were playing Domino's and cards, I think it was.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Cards, and like he often did, Ben teased Deborah's older sister, Sissy.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Sis and I had this relationship where we would tease.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Each other, but this time Ben may have taken it
too far and Deborah wasn't having it.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Deborah immediately just raised off the floor like she had
springs on and she was like, I'm ready to go,
and I'm like, you ready to go? She was like, yeah,
I'm ready to go. And I could tell she's upset
about something. I don't know what she's upset about, but
she's upset. And so she was like, you need to
come home before you get left. And so we get
halfway home and She was like, you didn't have to
(08:43):
say that to her. I was like, that's what you're
upset about. I said, you know, I'd be teasing playing
with Sissy.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But Deborah was mad, and after they got home, Ben
decided to let her cool off, so we left the
house in Deborah's red Thunderbird and went to see some friends.
Ben says it was still early in the afternoon and
he hung out all day playing chess and cards. Then
in the evening, Ben attempted to make his way home that.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I had stopped and got some chicken from both Deborah, but.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
His plans to go home got derailed when he ran
into some friends, including a track star and high school
senior named Christy. Christy had her eyes set on Ben,
tall and handsome, and Ben welcomed the attention from Christy,
so they hung out all evening and eventually got in
(09:30):
the red Thunderbird and drove to a nearby park, where
they stayed until after midnight, close to.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
One o'clock, and I noticed the time and I was like, well,
maybe I should take you home. I got to get
up in the morning take my wife to work, and
she said, well, yeah, I gotta go to school for
practice in the morning because he ran track.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
So he went home and that was that. Ben says
he'd been faithful to Deborah up until that point. He
says it was a one night stand. In the heat
of the argument, he'd have to work up the courage
to tell Deborah, and Ben went to bed, not knowing
that his problems would soon go far beyond cheating on
his wife. The next day, Ben was on his way
(10:16):
to work when a friend stopped him and.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
He was like, man, did you hear about what happened
last night? I was like, no, what's that? He said, Man,
it's police everywhere in the neighborhood last night. I said,
what happened? He said, they found some white guy out
there on Puget and they found two stolen cars in
the alley, one in this alley, one another alley. I
was like, okay, he said, oh, man, police was hot
last night. I said, well, nah, I heard anything about it.
(10:40):
I said, well, let me go on and go cause
I got to get to work. So I left and
that was I mean, that was pretty much all I
had learned that they had found a white guy in
the neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
And it was just a few days later that you
were arrested, right. Did you have any inkling that was
going to happen?
Speaker 3 (10:55):
None?
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Can you tell me about the crime? What happened that night?
Who was jeff Young? So?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Jeffrey Young was thirty three years old, white, married to
his high school sweetheart, the father of three children under
ten years old.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
This is Barbara again, She goes by Barb.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I worked for NPR for nineteen years and ended up
doing a story about Ben Spencer for NPR but also
for The Atlantic, where I'm a contributing writer.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Like I said, Barb first heard of Ben in twenty seventeen,
and she has spent hundreds of hours working on and
interviewing key people in this case. Her journey is documented
in her latest book, Bringing Ben Home. In it, she
also tries to answer what happened to Jeffrey Young, the
man who was killed that night? In nineteen eighty seven, He.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Worked for a clothing import company. He was actually about
to become president, and on Sunday nights he would go
in to work because many of his clients see people
imported from were in Asia. So it was there Monday morning, Barb.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Says, Jeffrey was alone at the warehouse waiting to get
on his computer.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Back then, it was the ancient days of computers, and
so he had to basically ask permission to get on
his computer system. And he called up the guy who
handled the computer systems, and the guy said, we're doing
an update. You can't get on for another hour. I'll
call you when you can get on. So a few
minutes go by, an hour goes by, and the guy
(12:32):
calls Jeffrey Young, and it rings and rings and rings,
and he calls back several times. And what police now
believe is that was the time when Jeffrey Young was
being assaulted.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
The theory is that two people waited in the parking
lot where Jeffrey's BMW was parked and attacked him sometime
around ten pm.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
They hit him on the head with a blunt object,
cracking his skull in five places. They picked him up,
They walked to the BMW, they had the keys, They
opened the trunk, they put him in the BMW, slammed
the door, and then they drive. They drive across the
Trinity River into West Ellis and at some point somehow
(13:14):
Jeffrey Young there was a little latch in the trunk
and Jeffrey Young managed to get out and fall on
Puget Street, and the perpetrators looked back, saw he was
on the street, panicked, drove the BMW into the alley nearby,
and then ran away.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
They got away with his Sako watch, wedding ring, and
portable TV radio, and they left Jeffrey Young dying on
the street.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
And there he lay shaking, you know, bleeding, as a
small crowd gathered around him.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
When the paramedics arrived, Jeffrey Young was still alive. They
rushed him to the hospital and police questioned a few witnesses,
thinking they were just investigating a robbery. Barb says they
got a description of someone who looked like a guy
named Van Mitchell Spencer.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Unfortunately, they didn't get any names or phone numbers, so
they could never go back and find them as witnesses.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Then the case took a turn. Jeffrey Young succumbed to
his injuries and died in the hospital early the next morning,
and shortly after a powerful man named Ross Perrot stepped
in to help.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Ross Preaux at that point was probably one of the
most influential people in Texas. He was self made billionaire
about to run for president.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Good after Nan.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
The volunteers in all fifty states have asked made Iran
as candidate for Priends of the United States.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And one of his top executives was the father of
the victim. And suddenly, you know, this robbery investigation became
a murder investigation.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Perrot offered a twenty five one thousand dollars reward for
any information leading to the arrest and indictment of the
killer or killers.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
And people started coming out.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Of the woodwork, people like forty two year old Gladys Oliver.
She'd originally told police she hadn't seen anything, but a
few days later she called crime Stoppers, an organization that
offers rewards for information that leads to an arrest. Oliver
told them that from her bedroom window that night, she'd
(15:30):
seen two black men she knew from the neighborhood. One
was a shorter man by the name of Robert Mitchell,
the other was an acquaintance of her son's, Benjamin Spencer.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
She suggested that they talked to a couple of other
people and gave the name of Jimmy Cotton.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Jimmy Cotton described the same sequence of events as Gladys
Oliver did, but added that he'd seen Ben jump over
a fence and get into a red thunderbird. Jesse Brisino
was the lead detective, and just four days after Jeffrey
Young's killing, based on eyewitness testimony alone, Brisino was convinced
(16:09):
he had his purpse. On March twenty sixth, nineteen eighty seven,
Ben Spencer was home with a headache while waiting for
his friend Charles to swing by. He figured he'd take
some tyle and all and nap off the migraine.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
I hear this beating on the door, and when I
wake up, I noticed on the clock it's two thirty,
so I figured, oh, this must be Charles. But on
the way to the front door, I could see out
the front window that there was police cars out front.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Ben opens the door and sees an officer who asks.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Do you have any ID? I said sure, I'll put
reach in my pocket, put out my hand in my ID.
He said, turn turn on and put your hands on
the will you under wrist? I say, under rest? For what?
So he puts me in the car and turns over
and looks over the back of the seat and he said,
you know the white guy they found the street the
(17:08):
other day? I said, I heard about it. He said,
that's what you're under the rest for his murder. I said, man,
you're making a mistake.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Then was shocked, but he figured he'd cooperate and get
this all sorted out.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
And so I'm thinking that the truth is going to prevail,
and I'm telling him what I had did that day.
I mean, from morning to night, I'm telling him what
I did. Of course, I guess it fell on deaf
ears because I was arrested and charged with this crime.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
So you never left jail that day. Do you remember
the first time you spoke to Deborah after you were arresting.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
I called Deborah that evening to let her know I
was in jail, And of course my main concern was
telling her that I didn't commit this offense, and I
need to tell you something because you're going to find out.
And so I began to tell her about Christy. I said,
you know, I want to be the one to tell
you that because you're going to find out, because that's
(18:04):
why I was with the night this offense happened.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
What are the chances that you get arrested for something
you didn't do on a night that you have an alibi,
but it's for something not great.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Also, right at that time, my marriage was only two
months oh, and I definitely wasn't something I wanted to
have to share with her or.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Tell her, But he had to if he was going
to get out of this, he had to give an alibi,
and his alibi was Christie. Then figured the police would
do their job, talk to Christy, and everything would be
squared away.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
For some reason, they just ignored the fact that Christy
and I were together. It didn't fit into their scheme
of what they believe happened. So of course she was
ignored and no one wanted her.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
And by this investigation was a mess from start to finish.
They didn't preserve the crimes too or take photos. They
just drove the car off.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Police took Jeffrey Young's BMW to the police lot, but
that morning.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
They opened the police lot up to people who wanted
to buy abandoned cars. Oh my gosh, and so anyone
could have touched that.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Car, plus it had rained. Before they can do any
thorough fingerprinting. They were able to recover some finger and
palm prints, but none matched Ben or Robert Mitchell.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
I don't know what they were thinking, honestly. And then
the minute they got Gladys Oliver and a couple of
people to say they saw Ben Spencer. Essentially the investigation stopped.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
That was it. Twenty two year old Ben Spencer, as
soon to be father, with no history of violent crime,
was charged with murder. He went to trial just months later,
on October twenty sixth, nineteen eighty seven. Ben and Robert
Mitchell were tried separately. The prosecutor in Ben's case was
(20:07):
Jeffrey Hines. Since no evidence was found in the killing,
he relied on the witness testimony alone. Gladys Oliver and
Jimmy Cotton stuck to their stories, and the prosecution bolstered
their case with another star witness, a jailhouse snitch named
Danny Edwards, who swore that Ben told him he had
(20:31):
killed Jeffrey. Ben's attorney, Frank Jackson, relied almost entirely on
Ben's alibi on Christy, but the police tried to discredit her.
They had previously shown her a picture which she did
not identify as Ben.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
She says that the picture they showed her did not
look like me. She said it was a picture that
looked like it was taken real close where you couldn't
really make out who the person was because it was
so taken so close what the picture was, Yes, I
don't and we have not been able to find the picture.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
I went and talked to Christie about it and she said,
I know I was with Ben that night. I mean
he couldn't. The math is such that he could not
have gone and killed Jeffrey Young and come back and
spend any time with me.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
But the jury didn't believe her. Ben was convicted and
later sentenced to thirty five years for the murder of
Jeffrey Young, but that conviction would be thrown out.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
We can thank Bruce Anton, who was the co chair
with my attorney at the time, Frank Jackson, who discovered
that within the States file that they had hidden the
fact that gladys Oliver had called crime Stop and also
had received five hundred and eighty dollars At the time.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
The judge granted Ben a new trial, believing the jury
should have known that gladys Oliver had claimed for ward money.
But before that trial took place, the prosecution offered a
deal for twenty years on a lesser charge, with parole
eligibility in less than five years. But Ben said no.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
I said well, whatever they're going to do, they're going
to have to do it, because I'm not going to
plead givety to something I didn't do.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
He was adamant that life on parole for a crime
he hadn't done wouldn't be true freedom.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
If I accepted the plea offer, went to prison may parole,
I would have X on my back. Now. I felt
that every time that they couldn't solve a crime and
they needed to suspect, I would become the escapegoat.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Ben says he refused to become polices go to suspect
every time they had an unsolved crime. So he went
to his second trial, charged with a lesser offense, aggravated robbery.
This time the prosecutor was Andy Beach.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
When I first met Andy Beach in twenty seventeen, he said,
you know, Gladys Oliver was basically the best witness I've
ever put on the stand.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
In the twenty five 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
get carried the day for us.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
There's no question.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
He described how she kind of rolled in in a wheelchair,
was eye level with the jury, had a little blanket
over her lap, that she was riveting.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
She was very confident in what she had seen and
her ability to communicate that to a jury.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
And she just took no guph from Ben's lawyer.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
There's no question that Gladys Oliver's testimony convicted Ben Spencer.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Danny Edwards, the snitch was also key. This time. He
added that Ben had told him his only regret was
that he hadn't finished the job at Young's office. He
said Ben told him quote, I should have killed bitch
right then and there. And then Ben took the stand.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
So I'm on the stand and the prosecutor he's doing
his cross examination, and he was like, when you hold
up your hands for me, and I hold up my
hands and I've got them. My fingers played out.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Beach asked Ben to hold his hands up. Remember Ben
is six foot four with large hands to match.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
I can't remember exact words, but he went to describe
how I could have used my hands to grab Jeffrey
Young by his throat and choke him.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
You just had a feeling that he wanted to evoke
in the midge of almost a really powerful I mean,
I'm gonna be offensive here, but like an ape, right,
like a really powerful, almost monster with these huge hands,
and those hands could just snap a neck, right, that was.
And the thing is that was seecial. That got across
(25:01):
because I talked to the jury foreman and he remembers that,
and he remembers thinking, wow, wow, no matter what, that
guy could have killed Jeffrey Young, no matter how, look
at those hands.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
So it worked again. Then was convicted, but this time
of aggravated robbery and sentenced to life in prison. He
remembers the night of the conviction and sentencing, sitting in
a cold cell.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
I've been convicted and sentenced to life, and I just
couldn't see the end of that. I was like, man,
the world will end before I have a sea freedom.
And so I literally wanted to die. I literally wanted
to take my own life that night, and I thought
about taking my tie and hanging myself in that cell.
(25:54):
But my faith, in my belief, was if I commit
the ultimate sin of taking my life, I can't RepA
I can't turn away from that. So I felt that
if I was to commit suicide, I would have gone
to hell. So that thought was the only thing kept
me from hanging myself in that sale that night.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And over the years, Ben kept his faith. How many
times did you read the Bible in prison?
Speaker 3 (26:16):
I couldn't count. I would say at least probably twenty
or thirty times from front to back. I mean, I
didn't think anybody could really read the Bible, and much
less I get an understanding of it. But the more
I rated it, and I say read, but I should
really say, the more I studied it, the more enlightenment
(26:37):
I received.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Part of that enlightenment was realizing that Deborah was on
the outside suffering too.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
I just wanted her to go on with her life
and hopefully find someone that would be as good to
her as I wanted to be.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Around nineteen ninety four or five, Deborah and Ben got divorced,
but Deborah never abandoned Ben, and.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
He continued just being in love with her, and she
was his most faithful friend.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
In two thousand and four, Ben filed post conviction relief
a Habeas Corpus. With the help of Jim McCluskey and
Centurion Ministries, they reinvestigated Ben's case, which included trying to
figure out what the eyewitnesses could have actually seen in
the dark that night in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
What Ben's legal team wanted to do was to show
how hard it would be would have been to identify
anyone on that night. It was ten o'clock at night,
it was cloudy, very few lights, and the witnesses were
all standing quite a distance away. So what they did
is say, got a forensic optomologist and brought him to
(27:52):
the crime scene on a similar night in March a
few years obviously, a few years later, twenty years later,
and he was able to measure the distances, and what
he knew from science is that in those conditions of lighting,
a person could not be further away than twenty five
(28:12):
feet to be able to identify a person's face. And
all of those people were alike, ninety three feet one
hundred and thirteen feet two hundred and eighty feet away.
There is absolutely no way that those people could have
identified even their brother.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Ben's defense team also interviewed dozens of witnesses poking holes
in the police investigation, and they pointed to a more
plausible suspect, though I'll tell you more about that later,
Barb says century ministries even invited Alan Ledbetter to the hearing.
He was the foreman of the jury that convicted Ben
(28:52):
in his second trial. And Ledbetter went and.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
It was racially divided. One side of the room all white,
all the friends of Jeffrey Young, the people who worked
for Ross Brow, that kind of thing, and behind Ben
all black, right, all of Ben's friends and family and
all that. And Alan Ledbetter started in the white section.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Is he a white guy?
Speaker 3 (29:16):
He's a white guy.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
He started in the white section, and after hearing evidence,
he moved over to the black section, and it was
the only white face in the black section. And he
became really convinced that they had done a terrible injustice.
In fact, when I interviewed him, he began to cry.
(29:39):
He said, I just think I have such a role
in this, and all I can think of is all
those years I took away from Ben.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Jim McCloskey presented all of this evidence in two thousand
and seven to Judge Rick Magnus.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
The judge ruled that he was actually innocent. Ben was
actually innocent. He could not release Ben.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Even though Judge Magnus ruled that Ben deserved a new trial,
quote on the grounds of actual innocence. The Court of
Criminal Appeals in Texas still had to approve, and the
judges denied Ben.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Here's a case where guy was declared innocent and he
still couldn't get out, Like, what does it take to
get out?
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Barb wanted to know, so she left DC and went
to Dallas with her microphone.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Thank you so much. How are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Pretty good? Yeah? Good good.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
When I met Ben a little bit, what struck me
was how gentle he was and how soft spoken.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
My name is Benjamin John Spencer. My number is forty
thirty seven thirteen.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
There was no pushing me, like, you know, I'm innocent,
You've got to get me out of here. There was
none of that. It was just explaining where he was.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
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 the system.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Prisonally for him was not It wasn't living, it was
just existing.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Yeah, it's a lot of things I could be doing.
My parents are getting older and more fragile. I could
be doing things for them. I could be doing a
lot of positive things for a lot of people. I'm
not the monster that they've tried to make me out
to be.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Barb was determined to find out what happened that night
in nineteen eighty seven. Did this man sitting in front
of her do it? Barb teamed up with private investigator
Darryl Parker and set out to do some real shoe
leather reporting.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Her and Daryl Parker together. I mean, that was a
duo that, you know, could only have been put together
by God, and an odd duo.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Barb is this tiny lady. Although she's a veteran, no
nonsense reporter, she comes across as sweet and adorable. Her
sidekick Darryl has the neck of a linebacker. He looks
like a former cop and marine, which he is. And
together they door knocked around Dallas.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
We went to every single house. I'll just tell you
this one story. This is why I had so much fun.
We're standing in front of this apartment. Darryl is about
to knock, and he looks over and he sees that
I'm standing directly in front of the door. And he
reaches over and he gently takes me by the shoulders
and moves me over like two feet and he goes.
(32:42):
Sometimes they shoot through the door. Now I had been washing.
I'd been a reporter for like thirty five years. I'd
never considered that someone might shoot me. Huh through the door.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
No one got shot, and they were able to track
down Jimmie Cotton, the witness, who added that he'd seen
Ben running from Jeffrey Young's car that night from ninety
three feet away.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I had kind of plotted out this really careful interview
journey right, not to spook him, right, just start gently
and all of that. Like, yeah, I didn't have to
do any of that. It's like it was a confessional.
It was like he'd been waiting for thirty years to
blurt out. I don't know if I saw him or not.
I didn't see his face. I just saw someone running away.
(33:31):
He was tall. I thought it might be like Ben,
but you know, and the police told me that they
were investigating Ben. So the police gave him that information.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Remember, the cops had talked to Cotton at the suggestion
of Gladys Oliver, the prosecution star witness.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
It all came out that gladys Oliver had told him,
just follow my lead, just say what I say, Just
say it was Ben, And that all came out.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
It was known from the first trial that Gladys was
interested in the reward money. However, now it was clear
that Jimmy Cotton also had motive to lie. It's unclear
if Cotton ever received any money. Here he is on
the podcast Radio Atlantic telling Barb how he feels about
Ben's conviction decades later.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
I feel bad. I'll hope. I want them to get out,
I really do. That's a long time to be in
prison for something you didn't do.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And the other person we tracked down was the jailhouse snitch,
Danny Edwards, and we're like, so, Danny, did Ben Spencer
ever confess to you. No, he didn't confess to me.
He said they said he did it. He didn't even
(34:51):
know the guy. He didn't even go over there. No,
I didn't confess to me.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Danny told Barb that the police told him that Ben
said Danny did it. So Dan and he said Ben
did it.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
And then he says to me, you know, that's the
way the game is played in prison.
Speaker 5 (35:06):
That's in jail. In prison, the better liar, better fighter wing.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Here's Edwards talking to Barb for the podcast Radio Atlantic, and.
Speaker 5 (35:14):
They were forcing us saying you kidded him. He's saying
you kid him. You know that's different. But that shit
goo with Can I ask.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
You, do you think Ben Spencer's innocent?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, he didn't do it.
Speaker 5 (35:26):
In my heart, he didn't do it, you know, just
he lied on me and I lied on him.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
That's what it is, what it is, you know.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Danny Edwards was facing a twenty five year prison sentence
for arson aggravated robbery and he walked out two months
after he testified against Ben. So he was in prison
for better or he was in jail for about a year.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Do you think he felt guilty about it?
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Oh yeah. So we're sitting they were kind of wrapping
up the interview and we're sitting outside and he goes, so,
how is Ben anyway? And I said, Danny, Ben's in prison.
He goes, oh, I thought he was out. I said no,
he's been imprisoned for thirty years. And Daryl says, so,
(36:16):
how does that make you feel? And Danny says, like shit.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Barb even built a rapport with Andy Beach, the prosecutor
who got a conviction at Ben's second trial.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
So the last time I talked to him for sitting
in the jury room and I'm not even seated yet,
and I've turned out the tape recorder, not even seated yet.
And he goes, you know, I have serious doubts about
Ben Spencer's guilt.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
But even with Beach's doubts and Barb's reporting, Ben Spencer
remained in prison. Getting him out, Barb says, would take
some luck and new district attorney. In November twenty eighteen,
(37:11):
John Cruseau, a progressive Black Democrat, was now elected as
the District Attorney of Dallas County. Barb says, now there
was hope.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
The four previous das had refused to look at his case.
They said, no, it's open and shut. And so a
new DA comes along, and because we had gotten new
evidence that he could consider since a trial, he was
open minded and he put his really good prosecutor on
it to investigate it.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
His conviction review unit, headed by Cynthia Garza, started reviewing
the case. They had Barb's reporting and all the evidence
previously compiled by Centurion Ministries, and they also uncovered more
evidence that the prosecution's key witness, Gladys Oliver lied. He
received five thousand to ten thousand dollars in reward money
(38:04):
on top of the money she got from crime stoppers,
and she had lied about that in the second trial
to investigator Cynthia Garza believed the prosecution knew about the
incentive to lie, which qualifies as a Brady violation. So
with all this evidence pointing towards Ben's innocence, Barb started thinking,
(38:26):
if Ben Spencer didn't do this, who did.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
In eighty seven, right around the time of the Jeffrey
Young killing, there was a man named Michael Hubbard who
was about the same age as as Ben, lived in
West Dallas.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Hubbard was a known criminal who worked with two friends
to stick up and rob restaurants. The night of jeff
Young's assault, Michael Hubbard spoke to some friends at a park.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
He had a really terrible coke habit. He really needed
money and his friends if they would come help them
to rob a restaurant, and they're like, no, man, there
are too many police around and we're not doing that.
So he was desperate, so he goes off and he
comes back a few hours later and he has a
Sakah watch in a wedding ring and a jam box.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Hubbard asks his friend to help him sell it, so
they do. Then they score drugs and get high with
some other friends. While they're getting high, Michael tells them
where the items came from.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
And after he said this, all four of them were silent,
and they're like, Michael, you really can't You can't tell
anyone that you shouldn't have told this to us. So
what happened is a few months later, the two friends
got kind of a conscience when they realized that Ben
and Robert were going we're going to be tried for this,
(39:54):
and they went to the police, and the police ignored it.
They didn't even interview Michael Hubbard because they already had
Ben Spencer.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Hubbard wound up going to prison for a robbery.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
He gets out around ninety two and he starts the
spree of what are called the Batman assaults, where he
would wait outside of an office building with a high
end car in it, right in the parking lot, and
wait for the executive to come out, and then he
(40:31):
would hit him over the head and take his jewelry
and his cash, but not the credit cards, just the
way it happened with Jeffrey Young. And he was finally
convicted of these Batman robberies. Ten people seriously hurt with
the same very same mL. So it's quite plausible that
(40:58):
Michael Hubbard the Batman, actually killed Jeffrey Young.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
In early twenty twenty one, the Dallas County District Attorney
decided Ben's conviction should be vacated.
Speaker 6 (41:16):
Okay, good afternoon, everyone, that's good.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
On March twelfth, twenty twenty one, Ben stood in front
of Judge Layla Lawrence Mays remotely because of COVID, all right, I.
Speaker 6 (41:31):
Want everybody to know that we are live streaming on
YouTube through the two eighty third District Courts.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
YouTube, and Judge Mays agreed to release Ben on his
personal recognissance.
Speaker 6 (41:41):
So, because of everything that I have read, because of
what I think is fair to mister Spencer, I have
decided to go ahead and grant a PR bond.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
I would say, within forty five minutes of this judge
telling me she's going to release me on a PR bond,
I was walking out the front door, and I mean
I didn't expect it to happen that fast. I happened
so quickly. A lot of the jailers were even saying, man,
that's the quickest release I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Barb was outside of the courthouse that day, live streaming
the hearing with a crowd of people, including strangers, supporting Ben.
There was this cheer.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
People didn't even know Ben, but like because Ben had
become this symbol of both the kind of calcification of
the system, but also one of those rare instances when
can we broke through?
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Right?
Speaker 2 (42:34):
And so people were cheering and we all everyone went
rushing down to the outside of the jail to wait
for Ben to come out. There were probably two hundred
people in there, kind of talking excitedly and all of that.
And from the end of the room it comes from
around the corner. Ben and Deborah appear and stop and
(42:56):
they just look at this crowd of people, and Deborah
looks slightly freaked out, and Ben looked really happy, and
they walked like this royal couple through, you know, through
the crowds, and everyone's like high fiving Ben and everyone's
just thrilled.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Deborah was right there next to him. After all of
these years, I.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
Read through twenty five hundred pages of his letters to her.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Letters he wrote to Deborah from prison.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
He's a really kind of very smart, clinical, like dispassionate person.
But when you read those letters, what you see is
he was wildly in love with her.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Ben and Deborah got married again in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
It would have been our thirty fifth wind anniversary. The
remarried on her Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Ben looks back and reflects on everything that went down.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
I've never harbored any ill will for anyone, not then,
not now. And I'm just a kind, loving person who
believes who believed in the system at that time. Still
believe the system has the potential to work. But it
(44:23):
requires us to keep an open mind, and we have
to realize that just because a person is behind the
table on the defense end, that that person is not
guilty just because he's there.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Ben says he wants to help others like him, but
mostly he's just happy to be a dad to Benjamin Jr.
And husband to deb like he wanted all those years ago.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
I thank Deborah and him for having my back fall
those years, for loving me for those years. It just
means a lot to me. Need to have them in
my life now and hopefully to this life ends.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
The day after Ben got out, Barb went to see
him at home.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
It's beautiful spring day, March thirteenth, and you hear lawnmowers,
you hear kind of all the normal sounds of spring, right.
You hear birds, you hear and this is stuff he
hasn't heard for thirty four years. And I said, Ben,
how does that feel? And he says, it just feels normal.
(45:39):
Feels like this is a life I was supposed to
be living and now I'm living it.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
That's how I feel normal. Still feels normal. I have
to recall the fact that I was incarcerated. Wow, it's
like the thirty four years that I did in prison
just kind of vanished, and it's like I woke up
out of a coma and resume my life on that side.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
After our interview, Ben Spencer was officially exonerated on August
twenty ninth of this year. Thank you for listening to
Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence
organizations and go to the links in the episode description
(46:37):
and see how you can help. You'll also see a
link to Barb's book and her three part story for
The Atlantic. Thank you to Barb for letting us use
her recordings, and to Ethan Goldman and Sam Devaney at
Anchor Entertainment for the extra tape. This episode was written
by me Maggie Freeling, with story editing and sound designed
by senior producer Rebecca Ibarra. Our producer is Kathleen Fink.
(46:59):
Our researcher is Hallie Dolce, with mixing by Josh Allen.
An additional production help by Jeff Clyburn. Executive producers are
Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wortis. The music is
by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Make sure
to follow us on all social media platforms at Lava
for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow
(47:21):
me on all platforms at Maggie Freeling. Wrongful Conviction with
Maggie Freeling is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number one. A note to listeners,
a previous version of this episode named Faith Johnson as
the prosecutor in Ben's first trial. It was actually Jeffrey Hines.
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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