Bringing Home the Story of Ben Spencer

Barbara Bradley Hagerty is an eclectic journalist: In her working life at NPR and later at The Atlantic, she has relentlessly pursued stories that somehow connect the divergent tent poles of religion and criminal justice. Forced to leave her 19-year-long radio career by a paralyzed vocal cord in 2014, Hagerty began to rethink her life. In 2016, her search for deeper stories—and for answers about life’s meaning—brought her to Jim McCloskey, who years before had abandoned his studies at Princeton Theological Seminary to “reinvestigate the case of a prisoner he believed was wrongly convicted and persuaded a judge that the man was innocent.”

It was McCloskey, the founder of Centurion Ministries, a man who at that point had already helped exonerate 54 people, who told her about an imprisoned Texan whose story haunted him: Ben Spencer, a “Black man convicted of robbing and killing a white man in Dallas in 1987.” 

Locked up on a life sentence for decades, Spencer was McCloskey’s “unfinished business, his heartbreak,” Hagerty writes. Despite Herculean efforts, Centurion Ministries had been unable to win Spencer’s release.

Then, as her new book, Bringing Ben Home, describes, Spencer’s story also became her business. Hagerty plunged into a seven-year-long search for new evidence that could help free Spencer and for the deeper reasons behind his wrongful conviction. She began with an investigative piece for The Atlantic in 2018 that recounted how he’d helped a private detective interview previously unheard witnesses.

At one point, she stood on the doorstep of a modest Dallas home alongside that detective hoping to find a witness when he abruptly “placed his hands on my shoulders and silently moved me to the side,” she wrote. His experience, he told her, was that sometimes hostile witnesses shot through a door before answering. It was a precaution that as a door-knocking journalist she’d never previously considered. The evidence they uncovered, along with a review by a different Dallas DA, John Creuzot, ultimately led to Spencer’s release in March 2021.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty (Michelle Pitcher)

But she kept thinking about Spencer long after that. For Hagerty, covering this case has been a transformative journey. As she shares in a related essay, “My reporting forced me to confront some bigger lessons about life, truth, and faith.”

The resulting book is a compelling page-turner both about Spencer, a hard-working married Texan who was unjustly convicted of murder, and about the causes of his wrongful conviction that include mishandled and lost crime scene evidence, flawed eyewitness testimony, discounted alibi witnesses, a lying jailhouse snitch, and the failure to investigate an alternative suspect—a violent serial robber from the same neighborhood.

Somehow, Hagerty managed to deftly dissect nearly all of America’s principal sources of unjust and flawed convictions as revealed in the National Registry of Exonerations, a growing list of more than 3,500 people that spans 35 years. Indeed, she briefly describes myriad other cases, even as she deeply reveals the life and motivations of Spencer himself. Her book includes an encyclopedic review of nationwide exonerations of the innocent that led to new revelations and research about flaws in America’s criminal justice system.

Hagerty’s book deploys a mantra, repeatedly describing Spencer as one of the “luckiest of unlucky men,” deftly repurposing a battle survivors’ trope to describe an innocent man unjustly sentenced to prison for life who is ultimately, and against all odds, finally freed.

A lyrical writer and a gifted radio storyteller, Hagerty is a skilled collector of compelling anecdotes and quotes that contribute to making this book of more than 400 pages both informative and a pleasure to read. Early on, she shares a family story about Spencer, a boy so idealistic that after watching Mary Poppins he jumped off the roof with an umbrella, expecting to fly. “And the umbrella flipped up, and he came crashing down!” his younger sister Juanita recalled, chuckling. But as Hagerty recounts, “Nothing was hurt except his ego. … Ben Spencer thought he could defy gravity.” 

Much of her material comes from Spencer himself, including lines from 2,500 pages of letters he wrote from prison. She opens the book with his words from a September 2016 missive: “My fervent prayer is that I will not fail in my objective by pointing out the serious wrong that has been imposed upon me, my family and the family of the victim, Jeffrey Young. My prayer is that after reading about the details in this particular case, that you can find it in your heart to come up with a solution to this problem of injustice.”

The trouble is that Spencer is an innocent man unable to be exonerated through incontrovertible DNA or fingerprint evidence. The man he was convicted of killing, Young, a father of three and a successful businessman, was robbed and locked into the trunk of his BMW by his assailant in March 1987. Young then apparently fought his way out of the trunk, ending up on the street, initially still alive. Therefore, no homicide detectives arrived to collect evidence at the scene. Prints later lifted from the BMW were lost. 

Spencer was one of only several suspects named by witnesses—and perhaps the least likely of the bunch. He had a good job, wife and a baby on the way, and only one prior: He’d pled guilty to joy riding after being stopped inside a car stolen by a friend. 

Ben Spencer and his wife Debra Spencer (Michelle Pitcher)

You know from the beginning of this story that ultimately Spencer will be released. And yet this is a suspenseful tale with myriad twists and turns. There are so many moments when, as a reader, you think surely now he’ll be freed as more witnesses come forward, as more lawyers and a private detective and a reporter turn up to help, and as a series of progressive Dallas DAs and an open-minded judge review his innocence claims.

But what makes the story most compelling is Spencer himself—a man who took solace in prison in his own spirituality as a leader of religion and education programs. At first, Ben takes such pride in his appearance and has such hopes for release that he crisply presses his uniform by putting it under his mattress. Over time, Ben pushes away his wife, encouraging her to divorce him and remarry after he loses appeals and almost loses hope. 

Yet year after year, he never stops declaring his innocence or his love for her. Time after time, he turns down probation deals that require him to admit his guilt, and at one point he helps exonerate another innocent man by connecting him with McCloskey, of Centurion Ministries.

In the end, this book delivers a truly happy ending—34 years in the making. And yet, this true crime tale haunts the reader, just as McCloskey was once haunted by Spencer’s story. Even now, the criminal justice system’s many flaws remain unaddressed and other unlucky innocent men remain behind bars. As Hagerty writes: “Yes for now, Ben Spencer is lucky. But in America, should one’s freedom depend on luck?” 

Editor’s Note: Observer Staff Writer Michelle Pitcher assisted Barbara Bradley Hagerty with fact checking for the book reviewed here.

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