Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Stacey Stanton

Episode Date: September 7, 2020

After three decades of rumors, secrets and one man’s conviction...the question remains, who really killed Stacey Stanton?Be sure to tune into CounterClock Season 2 starting September 10th on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.And check out the website to the show www.counterclockpodcast.com.

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm Ashley Flowers, and today there is no grit. That's because we were supposed to take the holiday week off, but I know you True Crime Junkies well enough to know that I have to give you a little something. So today I'm actually joined by someone special, Delia D'Ambra, who some of you might recognize as the host of another Audio Chuck True Crime podcast called Counter Clock. Hey guys, I am so happy to be here and ready to talk all things counter clock, but I do want to let those of you know that have listened to season one of counter clock. I am still actively working the Denise Johnson unsolved homicide. So it's something I'll always be doing, but as I waited for leads to pan out and law enforcement to do their job,

I started investigating another murder and it has been taking up my life for the last year or so. Yeah. So we've got season two actually coming out this week on September 10th. And I mean seriously, season two of Counter Clock is such a banana's case. So to fill all you Crime Junkies out there in season two is actually on a 30 year old homicide, which I don't know how you keep doing this, but somehow takes place back in your hometown of Manio, North Carolina. So we're back in the Outer Banks where the Denise Johnson case also happened, which is just kind of crazy. Yeah. So I am back home. I cannot seem to get away from the Outer Banks in North Carolina. It is a crazy case that a lot of people for 30 years have thought was closed and a man was convicted in 1991. So it's

kind of like open and shut for a lot of people, but there is so much more to this story. I know. I'm so excited to tell everyone. So let's fill in all of our Crime Junkies on the story of Stacy Stanton. So our story begins on February 3rd, 1990. It's 1.45 in the afternoon, and there's this waitress named Tina, who's just been informed by the hostess of the diner that she works at in downtown Manio, North Carolina, that her coworker, 28 year old Stacy Stanton, is late for her afternoon waitressing shift. So the hostess tells Tina that Stacy should have been there by now. She's getting kind of worried about why she's late, but I mean, not worried enough like thinking

something happened, just thinking maybe she slept in, maybe she had too much fun the night before, which was a Friday night. So Tina decides, you know what, like she's only a few blocks away. I'm going to go check on her at her apartment. And when I say a few blocks away, like her house was just a couple of streets away, which is literally like a five minute walk from the diner. So when Tina arrives, she sees a newspaper on the top of the staircase to Stacy's second story apartment, and she picks it up. And she has to go inside this small, like outdoor enclosed porch. And then from there enters both the porch door and the actual front door of Stacy's apartment. And you've actually seen the crime scene photos, you've seen reports on this

case. What did Tina walk into? Yeah, so when Tina walks inside of this like super small apartment, it is two bedrooms, but its orientation is really small. So she walks in and she goes down a small hallway and then goes to the left and passes a very small living room. And she's calling out for Stacy this entire time. Like, Stacy, where are you, you know, just waiting for some sort of response. So while she's walking past the living room, Tina drops the newspaper that she picked up in its plastic bag. She says she dropped that in a chair in the living room. And she makes her way towards like the back of the apartment where there are two bedrooms thinking like maybe she's asleep. Right. So she's going towards the bedrooms. And she's looking around. And so she kind of ends

up there. But then she doesn't see Stacy, like there's no reply. Stacy's not in the apartment. So Tina says she kind of walks back, makes her way to the living room area. And that's when she discovers Stacy's body sprawled out in her small living room space, just blood everywhere. So this is something that's tripped me up for a while now. Like, I don't understand. She had to walk through the living room to even get to the back bedrooms. How did she do that? Put the newspaper down, but not even register Stacy because it's not again, she's not like covered up by something. She's not like in a corner. I mean, you said sprawled out. Yeah. So that's a very good question. And it's a question that I think every listener and anyone who like knows and learns about this

story is going to ask, but will sort of be answered in the show. But really, I mean, her story is when I was going in, like I wasn't expecting to see a dead body, like in the dimmer lit area of the living room sprawled out. So she caught it on the way back. So it's questionable, but that's her story. So she obviously discovers Stacy and I assume then calls 911. Right. But she does not call 911 from Stacy's phone in the apartment. Tina actually goes back to the diner. So she leaves the death scene, right? She goes back to the diner a couple blocks away and tells the hostess, Hey, I went to Stacy's apartment and I think Stacy fell or she's been hurt. There's blood everywhere. Like Tina's kind of hysterical because she doesn't know what happened. So she goes back

and talks to the hostess and is like, you need to call 911 because lo and behold, the hostess is Monday through Friday, a sheriff's deputy in Dare County. But on the weekend, she's like hostess of a diner. So Tina's thinking, you're a deputy, call for backup. And that's what happens. So the 911 call gets placed from the diner to the manual police department and then like the greater jurisdiction of Dare County. So you're thinking the reason she went back to the diner because that doesn't make sense in my mind. Like if I see someone and you said it's a bloody scene. So you also said maybe she fell or something like that doesn't make sense to me if it's such a bloody scene. So part of me can see like, okay, I want to get out of here. I don't want to make

this call from this apartment. Even if I think it's an accident, there's not someone else in there. But like, does it make sense that she goes all the way back to the diner? Is that the best place to make the 911 call? Or because she knew the hostess was a deputy? I think it's both of those things. So we're also talking about 1990. So it's landlines. She certainly could have used Stacey's landline. I mean, given that it was in service, which we don't know, but I would imagine that would be. But so she doesn't use Stacey's landline. So she goes back to the diner where there's a landline. And I think her reasoning is I knew that my hostess and friend was a sheriff's deputy. And maybe she could, you know, figure it out. But what's super interesting is when Tina goes back

to the diner and the 911 call is placed, the hostess and Tina go back to the apartment together. And there's no police there. There's no first responders. And it's at that point that the hostess, aka sheriff's deputy, goes inside and actually goes in and stands over Stacey's body, says that she doesn't touch her, but she stands over the body. And at that point, again, there's no law enforcement there. But like within a minute or two of those two women returning to the scene, law enforcement shows up and then the whole, you know, scene unfolds. Well, in the scene, you actually detail the crime scene pretty extensively in the first, like episode, I believe, of season two. But what I think is really interesting to me is,

I mean, there's so much located at that scene. I mean, everything from like the position of Stacey's body, the way it was like sprawled out in her living room is really interesting and raises a lot of questions. The blood spatter. The blood spatter. I mean, things that were physically found there. But what I find also really fascinating is, I mean, you mentioned you're back in your hometown, we actually get some of the same characters back because the same state Bureau of Investigation Forensic Tech that processed Stacey Stanton's scene, is the same man who in 1997 would process the homicide scene of Denise Johnson, right? Right. So again, like small town, small space, you know, major crimes in that area,

you're going to get some overlap of law enforcement characters just period. So Dennis Honeycutt is the SBI tech who inspects Stacey Stanton's crime scene. And so, you know, if you haven't listened to season one, I really, you know, can't encourage people enough to go back and binge season one, because when you listen, you'll hear his name and so many other names of people that are involved in both of these cases in terms of like, you know, local jurisdictions and, you know, state Bureau of Investigation agents. And so that familiarity, I think, is really going to help people kind of navigate the story and all of the characters. Yeah. I mean, like you said, there are a lot of the same players and not just like forensic

techs and maybe some investigators, but even the people who process Stacey's body and do her autopsy would in later years be the same people who work on Denise Johnson and do her autopsy. And one of the things like when you first told me about this case before you like were even starting your investigation, one of the things that blew my mind was the fact that, you know, we had already covered Denise Johnson. And you told me, you know, Stacey Stanton was brutally stabbed and attacked inside her apartment. She was a waitress. She's a waitress. Police weren't able to determine what kind of motive that there would be because she seemingly was murdered for no reason. Nothing was taken from her apartment. And she wasn't sexually assaulted, which again,

for people who listen to season one, this is a really familiar story. Yeah, the circumstances are very similar in terms of like the crimes and how they were committed. But the forensic side of this case is really I think what a lot of people and myself will find extremely intriguing. So yeah, you said the motive is very murky and that's pretty much what police kind of came out with. They can't really pinpoint it to anything. But what's super interesting is that just days into the investigation, police actually had two suspects in their sights, one of which whose name was on items found in Stacey's apartment, but he was pretty quickly ruled out, which is interesting. Well, it's interesting because he was only quickly ruled out. But honestly, before they could even

really vet him and he's ruled out because like he basically like comes to them in the first couple hours of the investigation, gives them this alibi and points police in the direction of a guy like who was last known to be with Stacey. So basically, he just comes to them was like, hey, no need to look at me. I was doing something. Go look at this guy. Yeah. And it just so happens that the guy that he points to is a black man from a small world town about 30 minutes from Manio called Columbia. And the guy he points to was a known drug user and he had been acquaintances with Stacey. So he wasn't like a complete stranger to Stacey. Pretty much right off the bat, the white police officers and detectives from the state Bureau of Investigation,

they took interest in this guy from Columbia and put all of their eggs in one basket and pursued him as their prime suspect. And this was like within five hours of Stacey's body being found. So very, very quickly that all that came together. Yeah. And what I think is so fascinating about this case is that if anyone were to look up newspaper articles or even Google Stacey Stanton's case or lived in town in 1990, that's the story that they know. She was murdered within hours they had their guy story over. Like, I mean, they pinpoint him within hours, within days they have him arrested. Ultimately, he's convicted like they convicted this black man of murdering this beautiful white woman. And that's been the end of the story. It's been done. But that's not

the end of the story. Right. That is literally just the beginning of the case. And as I dug deeper, I found out there are so many twists and turns and really revelations that have come forward in the 30 years since that I think turn all of what the Outer Banks of North Carolina has known about this case like completely on its head. Yeah. I mean, your year long deep dive into this case. I mean, to me, the biggest thing is that you found that the forensic evidence used against this man to get a conviction does not match up. Yeah. So as I looked really closely, there's everything from hair fibers to eyewitness statements that contradicts everything that the authorities like hung the whole case on as to how and why this man committed the murder.

But like none of it adds up. And when I started taking my deep dive, so many people came forward and I was able to track down so many people, including prominent legal players in the original case from 1990, who say they no longer feel that this case is solved and that like a wrongful conviction took place. And these are critical people that like have done a 180. Right. And when you say prominent legal figures, you're not saying like, you know, this guy's defense attorney. It's people who were on the other side of the table who in 1990 were rooting for his conviction. Now in in 2020 are like, yeah, maybe we got it wrong. And people in the community who made statements back then, whether out of fear or like just foggy drunken memories who now are like,

no, nothing. What I said was true, which ultimately could mean that the real killer got away with it. And it's possible that maybe a killer still out there. Yeah. And that's exactly what I've been trying to get to the bottom of. And like to be honest with you, by the end of the season, I think we'll all be able to make up our minds as to what the truth really is. You're giving me goosebumps. So all of our listeners can go listen to the first two episodes of counter clock season two, which start this week on September 10. And in episodes one and two, Delia really goes deep into the details of the crime scene itself. But one of the things that I think makes this season so special is that you actually got in touch with and have been

able to talk to multiple times the man who was convicted of this and who is still convicted of this. And he actually walks you through his side of the story. And it's a story that I don't even think our listeners or anyone would even believe. Yeah, I think you really have to hear this story from the people who lived it to actually believe it just because it is so, so hard to like process and understand. Definitely go follow counterclock on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. And I really, I don't want to give too much away, but I can't stress enough how important it is to binge season one before Thursday, because this is the first time you're hearing Stacy Stanton's name. But I can tell you, it is not the last time that you will hear Denise Johnson's name.

Don't forget to go follow counterclock on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. And visit counterclockpodcast.com. When the first two episodes of season two drop, we're also going to have pictures that go along with them. And you can find all of that information on the website. Again, that's counterclockpodcast.com. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?