Clifton Spencer’s Wrongful Conviction For The Murder Of Stacey Stanton
GoFundMeClifton Spencer now works as a truck driver following his release from prison after his wrongful conviction.
In February 1990, a small-town waitress named Stacey Stanton was brutally stabbed 16 times in her own apartment. When she was found dead on the floor, the scene was grisly. She was naked, with two slashes across her throat, and her chest and pelvic region were mutilated posthumously.
The murder came as a shock to the small town of Manteo, North Carolina, and local residents wanted to bring Stanton’s killer to justice as quickly as possible. Not long after that, authorities turned their eyes to the person who was last seen with Stanton — her Black friend Clifton Spencer. The two had been drinking vodka in her apartment when they both fell asleep, and when Spencer awoke, he said he left to crash at another friend’s house.
Spencer was, at the time, unemployed and known to use drugs. He was also a drifter, spending most nights at friends’ homes. Meanwhile, Stanton had just gotten out of a rocky relationship with a local man named Norman Judson “Mike” Brandon Jr., who she ran into earlier that night, along with his new girlfriend, Patty Roe. Reportedly, Stanton asked Spencer to try and convince Brandon to talk with her in her apartment, but Brandon refused.
When police searched Stanton’s apartment, they actually came across both Spencer’s prints and Brandon’s prints. As it turned out, Brandon and Stanton had rendezvoused about a week before she was killed, despite Brandon being with Roe — and Roe being pregnant.
CrimeJunkiePodcast/FacebookStacey Stanton’s murder remains unsolved, and the wrongful conviction of her friend added another layer to the tragedy.
Brandon soon implicated Spencer in the crime.
Though Spencer’s fingerprints were also found at Stanton’s apartment, there was no blood on Spencer’s clothing when he arrived at his friend’s house, and no blood was found at his friend’s house either. Given how grisly the murder was, this would be unlikely if he had actually committed it.
But when Spencer was questioned without a lawyer present and agreed to a polygraph test, he reportedly failed it and was soon indicted on first-degree murder charges. His lawyer, NAACP attorney Romallus O. Murphy, eventually urged him to plead no contest, telling Spencer’s mother that if they took his case to trial, it would likely end in him getting the death sentence. According to Spencer, Murphy told them, “A Black man accused of killing a white woman in a small, Southern town doesn’t have much chance.”
On January 9, 1991, Clifton Spencer pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. Just over a year later, he filed a 77-page petition arguing that his attorney had essentially forced him to take the plea deal, and he was given a new lawyer, Edgar Barnes, who was confident that Spencer was innocent. Unfortunately, Barnes’ requests for a reinvestigation into the murder were denied, and Judge Gary Trawick ruled that Spencer had pleaded no contest of his own volition.
Over a decade passed, while Spencer remained behind bars, before a new break in the case came. There had been a bloody washcloth left behind at the scene, and Spencer demanded that it should be submitted for DNA testing. It didn’t implicate anyone else in the crime, but it did show that none of Spencer’s DNA was on it — and with new lawyers and support from the Innocence Project, Spencer was released from prison in July 2007.
To this day, no one knows who really killed Stacey Stanton.
