By Michael Hall
It had been two years since Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the award-winning religion journalist and writer, retired from her 19-year tenure with NPR. Working as a freelancer now, she was looking for her next project and called up her old friend Jim McCloskey in New Jersey. She’d used McCloskey as a source several times for stories on wrongful convictions. Through his work with Centurion Ministries, McCloskey was an expert on the subject; over the previous 35 years he had helped free 63 wrongly convicted men and women from prison. What was the one case, Hagerty asked McCloskey, that still haunted him after all these years?
“Oh, that’s easy,” he replied. “Ben Spencer’s case. There’s probably not a day that goes by that I don’t think of Ben.”
In her long career, Hagerty had written two books and hundreds of articles, but she’d never seen a story like Spencer’s. Soon she shared McCloskey’s obsession, spending months in Dallas researching Spencer’s life and conviction, and finally writing two stories about him for the Atlantic. After the second story—and with the influence of an invigorated Dallas and Fort Worth defense team and a new district attorney—Spencer was released. Now, eight years after that phone call to McCloskey, Hagerty has a new book, Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice, set to be published August 6. And Spencer is awaiting full exoneration—in no small part because of a woman who found the most important story of her life.
Spencer’s case goes all the way back to the Reagan administration, to March 22, 1987, when a young Dallas businessman named Jeffrey Young was robbed, beaten, and thrown into his BMW, which was driven to west Dallas, where it pulled into an alley. Young crawled out and collapsed, dying soon thereafter.
Spencer was arrested after three neighbors said they had seen him and another man, Robert Mitchell, fleeing the car. Spencer, who was 22 at the time, denied it all. He was tall—six-foot-four—and thin, married, with a son on the way. He had an alibi, though it was awkward one: he said he was with a young woman he had just met that day, after he and his wife had had a fight. Though there was no physical evidence against him, he was put on trial for murder in October 1987 and convicted by a jury. While the jury was deliberating on a sentence, Spencer’s lawyers came across evidence that the main witness had received $580 from CrimeStoppers after pointing the finger at Spencer—a fact she initially denied. The judge threw out the verdict and granted Spencer a new trial, this time for aggravated robbery. Spencer turned down a plea deal because, he later said, he refused to admit to something he didn’t do. At this trial, Spencer was found guilty and sentenced to prison for life.
When he got to the Coffield Unit near Palestine in East Texas, he spent much of his free time in the prison library researching the law, and he wrote various groups for help, including Centurion Ministries. In 2001 McCloskey visited Spencer and he and his team spent several years interviewing people and poring over documents. They found a new witness who had seen a man exit the vehicle and swore in an affidavit it wasn’t Spencer or Mitchell. They talked to a jailhouse snitch who testified against Spencer in his first trial; he now retracted his claim that Spencer had confessed. They also talked to a forensic scientist, who went to the crime scene and found it “physically impossible” for the witnesses to have seen Spencer’s face from that far away on a moonless night.
After gathering all this new information, in 2004 Centurion filed a habeas writ, trying to get his conviction thrown out. Four years later, a judge ruled in Spencer’s favor, saying he deserved a new trial “on the grounds of actual innocence.” Spencer thought he was finally going home. But in a rare move, the law-and-order Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal tribunal in the state, overruled the judge, dismissing his conclusions and saying they didn’t establish Spencer’s innocence. Crushed, Spencer resigned himself to dying in prison. For the next decade he called McCloskey almost every Saturday and the two would talk like the old friends they had become.
After Hagerty’s 2017 phone call to McCloskey, Spencer got a new ally. Hagerty and a Dallas private investigator began knocking on doors, interviewing surviving witnesses, looking for new ones. They found the snitch, who admitted on tape for the first time that Spencer had never confessed to killing Young. “He didn’t say that,” the informant said. “He didn’t even know the guy.” They interviewed a surviving witness, who recanted again, as well as a friend of the dead witness, who said the man had told him he had lied for the reward money. They discovered another alibi witness for Spencer—a minor whose mother hadn’t let him testify at the trial. They found the main witness, Gladys Oliver, who had always stuck by her story but now claimed she had dementia and couldn’t remember anything.
When Hagerty visited Spencer in prison, she liked him immediately. He was 52, still tall and lanky, working as a clerk in the prison’s Education Department. “He looks professorial in his wire-rimmed glasses,” she wrote in a story for the Atlantic’s January/February 2018 issue, “his hair flecked with gray, a few lines etched in his forehead.” Spencer told her in his soft drawl, “This is not living. It’s existing.”
In November 2018, a new DA was elected in Dallas, a progressive former judge named John Creuzot, who knew all about the city’s reputation for sending innocent men to prison. Creuzot had been an assistant DA back in 1988, when the groundbreaking documentary The Thin Blue Line was released, the film that showed how Dallas prosecutors and police sent an innocent man, Randall Dale Adams, to death row. After Adams was freed, Creuzot quit his job and served as a judge for 21 years. Not long after his election as DA, Spencer’s lawyer Cheryl Wattley and attorney Gary Udashen, a longtime board member of the Innocence Project of Texas, filed a new habeas writ, alleging the trial was unfair and asking for a new one.
Creuzot tasked his office’s conviction integrity unit with investigating. Along with scientific evidence that the witnesses couldn’t have identified Spencer that night, the team found documents showing that Oliver had received between $5,000 and $10,000 from a reward fund set up by Texas businessman and onetime presidential nominee Ross Perot (who was close friends with the victim’s father), money she had always denied receiving. Oliver’s testimony had been the last leg of the prosecution’s case against Spencer, and now it was gone.
On January 21, 2021, Creuzot’s office announced that Spencer had not received a fair trial. Seven weeks later, Spencer was released on a personal recognizance bond and walked out of the jail, smiling and towering over members of the crowd that greeted him. “Everybody that stood behind me, I just appreciate you all,” he said. “I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate and I thank you all for this. I’m thankful to finally have made it to this point in my life.”
And on May 15 of this year, the CCA reversed its 2011 stance and threw out Spencer’s verdict. “Spencer did not receive a constitutionally fair trial,” the court found.
But there’s one more step in Spencer’s journey to be found officially innocent once and for all. The CCA sent the case back to Dallas, where the DA, Creuzot, can now simply dismiss the charges—or dismiss them with the finding that Spencer is “actually innocent.” If Creuzot puts those words in an affidavit or motion and files it with the trial court, Spencer will be officially exonerated and eligible for a lump sum of $2.7 million, as well as a monthly annuity payment, in compensation from the state.
There have been so many wrongful conviction stories over the past couple of decades, I said to Hagerty, that it’s hard to get people to sit down and read about them anymore. Why write a book about one? She laughed. “It’s a good question, Why did you write another wrongful conviction book? But when people get to know a person like Ben Spencer, when they see life through his eyes, they might think differently about wrongful convictions. I felt like this is a really compelling narrative. And people will think differently about the system as they think about Ben Spencer’s story.”
How could so many good people send an innocent man to prison? It was easy, it turns out, and Bringing Ben Home is a detailed deep dive into how it happened. For example, Hagerty shows how simple it was for neighborhood tipsters to lie to get some reward money. As she writes, flyers showed up in west Dallas a day after the murder offering a $1,000 reward from CrimeStoppers—while rumors of a larger reward spread through the neighborhood. In fact, the victim’s company put up $10,000 while Perot put up another $25,000. At that point Oliver, a poor woman on welfare who had initially said she hadn’t seen anything, went to the police station and called out Spencer. She wasn’t alone; “there was a stampede of tips,” Hagerty writes.
Hagerty spends much of the book taking a step back and viewing Spencer’s case through the entire criminal justice system to show how overworked, ambitious cops and prosecutors send innocent people away, using mistakened eyewitnesses, jailhouse snitches, and junky forensic science. All of them had a part to play in Spencer’s conviction.
Hagerty writes about the birth of the radical modern idea that the system can make terrible mistakes and juries can convict innocent people—an idea pushed along by The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’s groundbreaking 1988 documentary. “I was a 29-year-old reporter when I saw it,” she said, “and back then, reporters weren’t reinvestigating cases very much. Morris started the genre. He changed my life. I thought, that’s the kind of thing I wanted to do.”
So in 2021 she reached out to Morris, told him about the case, sent him her story, and said there was a company working on a documentary about Spencer’s case. Morris loved the idea of helping and said he would even let the film company use his Dallas archives, which contain hundreds of hours of interviews with players in the Dallas law enforcement scene from the late eighties, just before Spencer was arrested. In October 2022, Morris announced that he was executive-producing a film based on Hagerty’s reporting. “Benjamine Spencer’s story picks up where The Thin Blue Line left off,” Morris said. “As Randall Adams was walking out of prison, Spencer was being sentenced to life by the same people who helped ensure Adams’s conviction. Both men were innocent.” Hagerty isn’t sure what role Morris will have in any documentary, but she’s hopeful he will join up.
All the stars seem to finally be aligning for Spencer—and for Hagerty and Bringing Ben Home.
“What I have to come back to,” she said, “and I really do come back to this, is that there are at least a few people whose lives are different as a result of Jim McCloskey and me getting involved. So there’s real satisfaction in that. This is the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice
By Barbara Bradley Hagerty
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