Ep 1 of 14: The Stranger

Code cases are not easy to investigate. If you haven't gathered that by now, I recommend you go back and listen to seasons one through five of counter-clock. Go ahead. I'll wait. 28-year-old Stacey Stanton, a co-worker, founder, body in the Dead Woman's apartment Saturday. I did not hear anything. Five shotgun blasts killed four members of the Pele family, past Bob's wife, gone, her two daughters only motive to me as money and greed. 25-year-old me who didn't know what I was getting into when I first stumbled upon Denise Johnson's case back in 2018 can give you a crash course on the challenging nature of trying to reinvestigate an unsolved murder. Older, wiser me who plumbed the depths of New Orleans Louisiana last year trying to find Bruce Cachera's killer knows better than to think a person's life story has a simple linear path. The reality is unsolved deaths are unsolved for a reason. There's never been a clear answer. Time has cracked and curved around the truth in these cases for so long that trying to pinpoint it is immensely complicated to do. The events I'm going to tell you about over the course of the next 14 episodes prove that. Season 6 is a living testament that there's rarely an easy explanation as to why some people end up dead and no one is brought to justice. And I say people, because even though this investigation started out with me looking into one man's suspicious death, the body count kept climbing with every corner I turned. Far harder than investigating a cold case though is living with one. Carrying a loved one's unexplained death around with you like a weighted vest is something all the family members I've interviewed for this show do on a daily basis. Just ask Helen Huff, John Wells mom, or anyone close to the Pellee family. On a weekly basis, I receive dozens of messages from parents or siblings of murder victims who want me to tell the masses about what they're going through and use my skills as an investigative journalist to get them some answers. I read nearly every message I get. I respond to as many emails and DMs as I can, but obviously I can't make a season of counter-clock for every case that comes my way. I wish that was possible, but the reality is, it's not. In the fall of 2022, while clicking through one of my inboxes, a message caught my eye. A woman named Melissa Lee had written to me asking if I'd look into her older brother's death from the summer of 1991. On its face, Melissa's note wasn't super detailed, just a few pictures of a brother-dug accompanied by some quick facts about how he died at the age of 27. Something in Melissa's message got my attention. A specific place, actually. North Carolina, and not just any town in North Carolina, Williamston, North Carolina. A small rural city in the eastern part of the state that most people don't even know exists. Williamston is a town I'd grown up next to as a young child before my family moved to the outer banks. It's a town I'd made countless bus rides to with my high school sports teams, a town that I'd drive by dozens of times in college on the way to visit my family. Yours truly even got a speeding ticket there once. Don't worry, it eventually got dropped. Williamston was more familiar to me than Melissa could have possibly known. A friend of mine that I work with had actually given me she's really into podcast. She listens to a lot of the call case podcast and she had given me a whole list of people that she listened to. And I found you on Facebook and reached out. A week or so after she reached out, Melissa and I met over Zoom and by the end of the month she was uploading her own research into a shared Google Drive I'd set up for us. The investigation was off and running. I didn't know it then, but Melissa and I would eventually take many trips to Williamston together. We'd knock on doors, sit side by side skimming through old newspapers, and even climb into addicts of abandoned houses together searching for information about her brother Doug. I would become consumed not only with the circumstances surrounding his death, but a series of crimes during the early 1990s in Williamston that all overlap. This investigation has at times blurred the lines of my professional and personal lives and required me to read more autopsy reports than I ever thought I would. If I'd known back in the fall of 2022 what I know now, I may have scrolled my mouse across my computer screen a little slower before opening that message from Melissa. I would have warned myself, this is much bigger than you think. If the season 6 case has made me realize one thing, it's that despite thinking I already knew the depths of the problems, scandals, and issues with the criminal justice system in my home state, I couldn't have been more wrong. Turns out, even for as long as I've been doing this work, I've only ever seen the tip of the iceberg. The death of Douglas Wagg Jr. in the summer of 1991 has taken me beneath the surface of the place I know is home, and into the depths of a mystery so big, so bizarre, and so violent, it feels like fiction, except it's not. So let's turn back the clock 33 years to July 8, 1991. This is Counter-Clock, season 6, episode 1, The Stranger. I'm your host, Delia DeAmbra. The first thing that's important to know about Doug Wagg Jr. is that he wasn't from Eastern North Carolina. He'd only been living in the Williamston area for a few months before his body mysteriously turned up on a set of railroad tracks. Who he was, and where he'd been prior to arriving in North Carolina, is a really important part of his story, and in my opinion vital to understanding the potential sequence of events that led to his death. For this first episode, I need to go back a little further than 1991. Doug was born at Chinute Air Force Base in Illinois on March 26, 1964, to Shirley and Douglas Wagg Sr. Because he was named after his dad, Doug was usually called Dougie, sometimes Doug Jr., but most of the time, Dougie. From the moment he entered the world, his mom Shirley adored him, and that's because he almost didn't make it. I didn't get to bond with him until he was a month old. He was two months premature, and had a lot of medical problems. He weighed five, three, which they didn't expect he was going to be nearly that big, but he was, and he was born in a military hospital, so I couldn't have him with me, and because he was so small, he was an incubator, so it was a month before I could bring him home. He was a beautiful child, he was so sweet and just so loving. Not long after Doug's arrival, a slew of other siblings followed in quick succession, making him the eldest of five. After Doug, there's Michael. I have some memories of, you know, what's phasing? Angel. Mike was born July 65, and I was born December 66, so I'm the first girl. Melissa, this is the only picture I have of all of us, all seven of us. And Jessica, we were really close, like I got to go do things with him. He was like my cool older brother. With so many kids running around, things were often chaotic in the wag household, but level headed Doug was always there to keep the peace. He was always good to his siblings. As he grew up, he was, you know, he was still just as sweet as he always was, and he was a good little boy, loved to be outside, loved to play outside. We were very close when we were little. I remember, I can remember back when I was the youngest three years old, things, I wanted to get on school bus with my brothers going to school and things, but yeah, we were tight a little bunch. During her interview with me, Angel, Doug's closest sister in age, showed me some pictures of their tight little bunch. Yeah, I just love these. That was the three of us at Christmas, that was me at 69. Doug had very, very, very, very thick blonde hair, I mean, it was just thick. The pictures Angel and I we're looking at are on the blog post for this episode at CounterClockPodcast.com, you can go check them out if you want to follow along. Every time a new child was born, Shirley and Doug's senior moved their family to a different state. They didn't do this intentionally, it just happened that way. As the wags grew, their circle of friends did too. Some folks would move out of state, and to stay close with their community, the wags would move too. Here's Angel again. I don't remember what years we moved. We moved to Minnesota, then we moved to upstate New York, Tennessee, in 79. Dougie was 15 years old by the time his family settled down for good in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee. Finishing out high school in a new city wasn't easy for him. He was a stranger to his classmates, and he struggled to make friends because of how shy he was. He was very quiet, very passive, very compassionate. You know, some people are boisterous about they, and he would dug, would just always come cost of board and whether he was laughing or crying or yelling or whatever it was basically all the same kind of tone for him. The few close friends Doug did have were people like Kevin Gagne. Kevin was a childhood buddy who lived hours away in New York but he and Doug often traveled to see one another. When they were teenagers they did what a lot of young people did at the time. Doug and I used to like the party but it was just smoking weed it was nothing really heavy back. I mean we're talking eighties. I grew up in the 70s smoking weed was just happening. It was just beer and weed. There was nothing outside of that. It was nothing really hard. Doug once he got warmed up or he got a little buzz on he'd start talking a little bit and be more friendly. He was definitely laid back. He would interact if the right discussion came back but he was like if you were in a party you would be the one sitting off the decide waiting for people to come and talk to. The further Doug got in high school the more his parents noticed he was changing. At first it was subtle stuff. I can remember when he was in high school all of a sudden his eyes seemed to be watery all the time and looking back I'm thinking he probably was taking some kind of drugs. Here's Doug Sr. Doug's dad. There were some things that were suspect you know and I didn't I didn't put my finger on it right away but he tended to do things he shouldn't be doing as he got older it got worse and more serious stuff. Some of that more serious stuff included teenage Doug disappearing for days at a time. He'd be home for five minutes and then he'd be gone for a day day and a half and the more he did this the more the longer he would be going until sometimes he'd be gone for a week or so. Never known where he was. I remember one time we lived in Cairo. I guess he was in high school and we were just driving around. He hadn't been home for a week or so and he hadn't been hadn't been heard from and we were just driving around and we spotted him on the street. He got in the car and came home with us. You know he just he just did his own thing. Once Doug even stole a bag of money from his employer. Here's Michael Wagg Doug's brother. He robbed the grocery store. I remember him coming home with the money but he walked in to where the office was and the safe was open and he took a bag of money and he brought it home and he hit it in the bedroom. I knew where it was in the bedroom and did I get some of the money? Yes I did. I spent some money. I remember us having to go to juvenile court. According to Michael the sum of money was several thousand dollars. He used the money for acceptance. He bought the things that that his friends had. He bought a guitar. He bought some drums. He bought a motorcycle. Kevin Gagne's family back in New York even suspected at one point that Doug had stolen from them too while he'd been visiting. There's an incident my sister told me about where he went into town with a 10-speed bike and didn't come back. He came back but the bike didn't come back. The rumor or the thoughts are for my sisters is that he used that to pay for drugs to 10-speed but he never got kicked out of my house. My parents said it was just something that happened and life went on. These repeated incidents of Doug acting out broke his mom's heart mostly because she couldn't figure out why they were happening. Doug was not one. He didn't talk to me. He didn't talk to his dad. He didn't share anything with us. I was disappointed and embarrassed and he was not raised that way at all. He knew right from wrong but for some reason he just always seemed to make the wrong choices. Even though Doug senior never got to the bottom of what exactly was up with his oldest son he had his suspicions and with every new incident of delinquency he grew angrier and angrier with Doug which was a recipe for disaster because their relationship had never been good. He let other people influence more than the people at home. I tried to figure it out. You don't get information from him but I couldn't always do that so sometimes I'd get angerier than I should probably. Out of all the children Doug Senior channeled his anger toward Doug the most. Melissa and the rest of Doug siblings all noticed this growing up. It was hard living at home. You know dad was yelled and screamed a lot. You know I think my mom always kind of felt like dad was kind of breaking him you know kind of breaking his spirit. He was strict on him. My mom said that she had told my dad one time that if he didn't back off him and like let him do his thing that we know he was going to do bad things or he was going to whatever. I don't think he knew what love was because I don't think he was getting a whole lot of love at home. I think that he was just looking for acceptance looking to be loved. We all want that and if you're not feeling at home you go somewhere else and you look for it. After Doug graduated high school in 1982 he didn't look back and never repair things with his dad. He worked a few odd jobs in an around Memphis but eventually drifted away from his family. Throughout his early 20s he bobbed around between Tennessee, Illinois and Mississippi. The specific timeline of where Doug was and what he was doing during this part of his life is a bit unclear. Even to his own mother and siblings. It was concerning because I was always worried about him but yet he was so independent and did his own thing that I may not have been as concerned about him as I should have been but and I was working and I had four other children. I think Doug was always afraid to come home. I think he had fun on his journey you know I think he lived his life but unfortunately he had a demon. Court record from Tennessee and Illinois as well as personal letters Doug wrote to his family during the 1980s make it very apparent what his demons were cocaine and getting caught up with the wrong crowd. By 1987 he had a short criminal record and had spent some time in the Shelby County jail in Tennessee for stealing firearms from a friend stealing more money and passing bad checks. A handful of times he'd visited his family for things like weddings birthdays and maybe a holiday or two. Other than that seeing Doug was few and far between. I was wondered where he was and you know always hopes that nothing happened to him and he might be gone a month or two he might be gone a year and he could just call or sometimes just show up. Doug's sisters and brother lost track of him during the late 1980s however they think he stayed away not because he disliked them but because he preferred to deal with his struggles in private instead of in front of them. Around that time Shirley and Doug senior divorced which only fractured the family more and deterred Doug from coming around. They didn't have a good marriage in my opinion at all I don't I don't remember any real good happy times as my mom and my dad. My parents were married I've always said for 25 years before they got divorced. They shouldn't have been married that long. Now I want to make it clear everyone is responsible for their own choices in life. Doug included his family's dynamics are not solely to blame for the bad choices he made or the crimes he committed far from it but that's not a reason to write Doug off. Think about the portion of the population he represents. The uncles, brothers, nephews, sons or friends in your own life that struggle with the same things he did. These types of people may seem like strangers but they weren't always strangers to us. I'd venture to say that every one of us has a person we know who has battled a substance use disorder or endured numerous setbacks that have prompted them to break the law. Doug Wagg might not be the kind of victim that would traditionally get his own TV special for example but he is someone whose situation is one that many of us can relate to. By January of 1990 his parents Shirley and Doug senior had both remarried and things were on the upswing for Doug too. He'd reached out from the fringes of his self-chosen exile to let his family know he had big plans to turn everything in his life around. On January 21st 1990 Doug penned a letter to his aunt and uncle who were living in Champagne, Illinois. He asked them to pray for him and form them that he was headed to a faith-based rehab program a few hours away from Memphis just over the border in Huntsville, Alabama. The reason he wrote this specific aunt and uncle was because for a short time after graduating high school he lived with them in Champagne and at that time they'd encouraged him to go to church which he did. Here's a voice actor reading a portion of Doug's letter. Virginia, Woody, and family. Well I hope that life treats you well. I have recently had a major change in my life and I had to write to you and tell you of the news. I was sitting at a friend's house in Mississippi doing things that I shouldn't have been doing. Out of the clear the Lord came to me and said I must change my life. I've got to do it now or never, because if I were to wait, it would be too late. I stood up and left not telling anyone where I was going, or that I should not return. I called a man named John Davis of Decatur, Alabama, and he suggested I go to outreach ministries of Alabama. It's located just outside of Huntsville, about ten miles south of there. I called the pastor and went there that night. I couldn't wait till the next day. I got the Florence and John Davis picked me up at the courthouse there and brought me to outreach. I've only been this happy when I was living with you and the Lord was in my life. I look back upon that time with great fondness. Doug then quoted some scripture from the Bible and continued. "I've gotten rid of my old life and began a new life. I've begun a new life in Christ. I rebuke Satan and all his works. Please pray for me and that things will for once work out for me. I will be here for thirteen months learning the word of God. I am changing the entire aspect of my old life. I now have an entirely new life. After April 8th, I can receive mail and would really like to hear from you. You will always be in my thoughts and prayers. Love in Christ. Doug Jr." John Davis, the man Doug said, took him to rehab. Remember this specific moment in January 1990, well. I tracked John down and he explained that he and Doug actually ended up being roommates for a few days before John dropped Doug off at the rehab facility. "Somebody called me, I can't remember what was, and I drove to Florence and picked Doug up. And he actually came to stay at my house for a couple of three days, probably a week. I was living in a house in the river, the small house of the river in between the cater of Florence. He was nice. He was easygoing. He was funny. I liked him. Most drug addicts are. Most drug addicts are alcoholic, so some of them aren't just people in the world. They just keep figuring out how to live. He was trying to figure out how to get sober. And he really wanted to. I mean, I wouldn't have filled with him if he did. The outreach ministry, as I remember it, was not a go in there and sit around on the bunk and everything. It was to page your way, you did work, you cleaned up, you helped the cook, you did all. You were working as part of this. There's one that didn't require a lot of money, that you could just go, and it was questionable. Shirley Doug's mom was over the moon when she learned from her sister and brother-in-law in Illinois that her oldest son was seeking help. And I was happy because he needed some peace in his life. I think that's why he ran all the time and he went every place and maybe just trying to get away from whatever he was trying to escape from. I found the people who were running outreach ministries of Alabama back in the early 90s. A man named Ken Pounders is the director now, and he told me the program doesn't have participant records from that far back. However, from what he remembers from working there in 1990, he believes Doug did enroll. When Doug would have been here, the entire year was pretty intensive. Generally speaking, what I would consider to be the most critical points of the ministry is the first two or three days, the first two or three weeks, and the first couple of months. Generally, if a guy makes it past three days, his likelihood of staying and completing the program goes way out. If he makes it past the first two weeks, it goes even higher. Once a guy has passed two months, very rarely do we see him leave after that. If a guy is not going to stick it out, that happens pretty quickly. Unfortunately, that was the case for Doug. It didn't take long before he dropped out of the program, and according to an entry in his mother's daily journal dated on his birthday in March of 1990, Doug was no longer there at that time. He'd taken a job as a rougher, somewhere in nearby Decatur, Alabama. Around that time, he crossed paths with a young woman named Sandy Davis, no relation to John Davis. He was walking on the side of the road in Alabama, and I was going home. I had just gone, moved down there with a friend, and I saw this guy in a torrential downpour you know, and I felt bad so I slowed down and picked him up, and I took him where he needed to go. I don't know, just something kind of clicked, and I thought, man, I've lost my mind, I picked up a hitchhiker, you know that kind of thing. Well, ironically, one of his friends was working with me and my friend at the Hardies in Decatur, Alabama, so he's like, well, let's go on a double date. So we all met at the local mall, they had an arcade, walked in, and I guess it's crazy to sound, I guess, the easiest way to say it's a zing moment. He and I saw each other and it was just like, you just knew. Doug and Sandy spent the next few months together, living with friends in Alabama and grew close. He was 26, and she was 21. She was mature and he knew what he liked and, you know, I was like, okay, and we always had the best conversations. We would talk until the sun came up, that's something I always treasured. He was just good to me. He really was, he um, we became best friends and it just built from there. During the fall of 1990, Sandy started to get homesick, so she and her new boyfriend packed up and moved to where her mom and dad lived in Jamesville, North Carolina. A tiny town in Martin County just a few miles outside the city limits of Williamston. The specific date they moved is unclear. Sandy has said she thought it was around Father's Day of 1990, but in other conversations with Melissa, Doug's sister, Sandy said they moved to North Carolina closer to Thanksgiving or Christmas of 1990. Either way, by January of 1991, Sandy and Doug were living in Jamesville with her parents. The couple worked on and off for a regional carnival, then Doug took a more consistent job bailing Pine Straw for a friend of Sandy's family. And making money was a high priority, because you see by March of 1991, right around Doug's 27th birthday, Sandy got some unexpected news. She was pregnant. I went and got the test and went and checked it out and freaked out a little bit, then went to the health department, found that out, and I said, hey, we got a talk. What did, how was his reaction? He was so happy. Oh my gosh, he was ecstatic, and he told me he said, now, if this child's a boy, he can't be named after me. I said, really, let's see. As fate would have it, Sandy was carrying a little boy, and she was determined to name him Dougless Wag the third. After getting over the shock of finding out there were going to be new parents, the couple made things official. He went to the local jewelers and got it and everything. We picked out a wedding set. I mean, he was bad term, and he was going to marry me. And I was bad and determined I was going to keep him too. Their wedding day was May 10th, 1991, at the courthouse in nearby Beaufort County. We went up there and we couldn't find two witnesses, and then a girl I knew happened to walk in, so her and her mama were our witnesses, which was crazy. The magistrate said, all right, you got one minute. And he literally went through it so fast, and he looked at Doug and he said, ten bucks, she's yours. Sure. Signed a paper. Oh my gosh, that was so funny. He was already trying to find us a house, not far from my mom. We had to pick out the whole thing, and so he was working to save up money to do that. But wedded bliss and happily ever after wasn't to be. Because less than a year after moving to North Carolina, and three months away from laying eyes on his newborn son, Doug Jr.'s mangled body showed up on a lone stretch of railroad tracks in Williamston, the weekend just after 4 July. Exactly how he died, and why he was found so far from where he lived, are two questions that no one, including law enforcement, has ever been able to answer. There was so many strange things that come out of it in the old times, he's not let stuff. It was really hard to understand what was fact and what wasn't. As you'll soon learn, everything surrounding what happened to Doug is not as it seems. Why didn't somebody say something that this isn't right? Why was everybody okay with just letting it go? It was the last thing he ever wrote to me to not go looking for answers. I totally 100% feel that there was foul play from day one, and it didn't feel right, you know? I knew there was more to the story. Turns out there is more to this story, much more. So let's start at the place where Doug Wag's clock violently stopped. The railroad tracks on the outskirts of Williamston. Because it's on those railroad tracks that the truth of what really happened to Doug lies. Something called my eye and I said, I got hair underneath the spot. was. was disturbed gravel, there was blood. - That's coming up in episode two, The Tracks. Listen right now.