Part 8: Speaking from the Grave

For some, including some of Jim Duncan's friends, the past is better left in the past. But for others, there could never be closure with so many open questions; and the chance to find answers is worth the pain of asking one last time. Late in our reporting, we learned that a legal team in New York could begin an independent investigation of this case, in the search for even more answers. To continue supporting work like this, visit heraldonline.com/podcasts and consider a digital subscription. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Long Shot is a production of McClatchy Studios and I
Heart Radio. Previously on Return Man Today. I think that
people might suggest that there's something ill will directed towards
him by the police, but there was nothing that we
could prove. No work at the newspaper in Rockyhill, South Carolina.

(00:23):
Was your dad, Russell Henson, the police officer from Lancaster.
That what somethingbody do? And I can imagine that, you know,
football nationwide black but you know we come back home?
You know what at home song. If Jim Duncan, who
is used to even a degree of hero worship in Baltimore,

(00:43):
comes down to South Carolina, the potential for explosive conflict
is pretty obvious. Joes Thompson spears, It's a bright January

(01:09):
day when I pulled into the Salem A. M. E.
Zion Church Cemetery in Heath Springs, South Carolina, not far
from Lancaster Areas Series on the day he died. I'm
confident Jim Duncan's finances were a mess and his marriage
wasn't much better. Jim's NFL career seemed pretty much over,

(01:29):
and he'd moved back into the house he'd bought for
his mother. Everything around Jim was a reminder of where
he had once been and what his life had become.
But there are so many things I still can't say
for sure. Linda, this is brought McCormick. How are you
including where Jim was actually laid to rest? I'm good.

(01:51):
I'm standing in the middle of a cemetery. I was
looking for a butcher's grave. Um does this ring a bell?
It's Salem A M. E. Zion, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay.
This church outside Lancaster is the one Jim's mother, Ellari,
grew up in. This cemetery is the one Jim's widow
hasn't been back to in decades. Elroy and Linda haven't

(02:13):
come back here either, not since the day Jim was buried.
Do you remember was he buried by a tree? I
don't know if you would remember that? Okay, I know
this is so long ago and it's hard to even visualize.
Those closest to Jim have believed for decades that he
never would have killed himself. But if they're right, how

(02:35):
did things go so wrong for the former star athlete
Inside that Lancaster police station. Could any other scenario be
more plausible than Jim simply taking his own life. Do
you remember that? Like when he was buried, he had
a he had like a headstone. But I didn't know
at the time was that in that small town and
well beyond. Word of my reporting was getting around. I

(02:57):
need to call you back later too, because I had
something weird happened over Christmas. Somebody that knows that I'm
working on this story called me and told me they've
found Suddenly maybe Jim's case wasn't closed just yet. From
the Herald, McClatchy Studios and I Heart Radio. This is
return man. I'm Brett McCormick, and this is part eight

(03:18):
speaking from the grave. M Do you have anything to remember?
But like, um, I have some magazines and some pictures
that my wife has gotten over the years, and I

(03:40):
have a painting. I'll show it you. I have it
actually up in Moral, United Clyburne is showing me around
his house outside Charlotte. Elroy said that every member of
the family had been offered a scholarship seven for seven. Yeah, initially,
world was reluctant to speak with me. Initially, many of

(04:03):
the people close to this story were your kids ever
asking about him? I mean did you ever have a conference? So,
I mean, my daughter knows who that is on the
picture upstairs. She's pretty much where you know, her uncle
playing football for the Colts, and you know, the broadest
story of the year. You know, as she gets a
little older, I'm sure she may ask some questions. All

(04:29):
more Coals champs to the American Conference a Dallas Cowboys
champs to the National Conference. Over the past few years,
I've been asked by Jim's friends and family, by my
editors and people I've interviewed, how I think Jim died.
The answer is, I'm not sure. Jim was elusive in
life as a kick returner, as a brother, a husband,

(04:53):
and a friend, and it should be a simple question
to answer what happened in that police station. But I
can't prove anything. George Lloyd so he's the only one alive.
That's no surprise to Morrow. So George Lloyd had been
at the Langster Police Department for two weeks. He was
working the desk and he told me that Butch walked

(05:14):
in the police lieutenant was going through the mail, and
that he said, can I help you? And then he
pulled a gun and stepped back and shot him. The
story has been set for a long time. I mean,
no one's changing that story. I guess you said you
can't dispute people that were there. But at the same time,
still some of this stuff goes on. So what have

(05:35):
we done? And forty six years? So why bother? That's
the follow up question I always get, Why does it
matter that a little known former football player died in
his hometown police station and we're not really sure how
Why put Jim's family and others involved through all of it? Again?

(05:56):
I think really, like, you know, multiple people had asked me,
mostly white people have asked me, what are you going
into this sport? And like why are you bringing it
back up? Alice and I talked a lot about that.
A lot of people will have said over and over, man,
if this happened nowadays, like it would have been so different,
you know, and and that's kind of upsetting to me.

(06:17):
Alice declined to lend her voice to this podcast, but
we spoke for nearly four hours, the first time Alice
has ever spoken at length about the man she ultimately
knew for just a little over a year, or about
the tension with Jim's family that she thinks kept them
all from demanding answers together. The interesting thing to me,
nobody had ever talked to you that reported on this story.

(06:40):
The first reason I think this story is important is that,
regardless of how Jim died, his life is worth celebrating.
I was surprised and honored in a way that through
my research I was able to share things with Jim's
family that they've never known about him. Oh that's about
ready to gain the second half underway the public gold
this Zone YouTube m I was able to show Moral

(07:02):
highlights of his brother's NFL career that he hadn't seen
until we sat down together, Like he just looks so
much faster than everybody. Nor had he heard many of
these stories from Jim's teammates. Grant told me a lot
of stuff. Was a professional friend or we knew a
lot about him. People in Lancaster remember the man who

(07:27):
wrote a hit song Ranquility. Babe, here the ankle has
landed in their hometown. Astronaut rocket points Tranquility. We caught
the on the ground. You got a bunch of guys
about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.
But Moral's very name is one of the only reminders
that this former milltown also produced a Super Bowl champ.

(07:48):
This is the Orange Bowl. It will be Jam eighty
thousand fans to day Super Bowl Day. Do you feel
like he's been forgotten in nicest year from what you
know generation would come through from it's just old Tim.
Floyd White was one of Jim's coaches at bar Street
High School. He told me there was once a corner

(08:08):
store in the black part of town that had a
painting of gem on it. But that store was demolished
long ago and the mural went with it. We had
like up Gay Street down and when you down now

(08:30):
today there's a small history museum in the basement of
that same courthouse where Jim was married and where the
inquest announced how he died. There says we're about to
go on. A volunteer was working at the museum when
I visited. We're doing a video in a podcast and

(08:50):
a story on Jim Duncan. Do you know Jim Duncan. Yeah.
The museum has exhibits about Confederate soldiers and plays for
local Vietnam FETs, and memorabilia from Lancaster's past. Yeah, yeah, okay,

(09:11):
but there's nothing at all there about the man who
rose from a shotgun house in the poorest part of
that town to celebrate an NFL title. Mac Botimart the
right quarterback give Dunk of number thirty five, who was
the pop cook offer turned mad in the America Cop.
We may never truly know how or why Jim died,

(09:33):
but his life should be remembered. When I look back
now and I'm like, Okay, we'll see this professional player
came out of the college fast, and You're like, man,
you never know where that could have gone. Here's moral again. Yeah,
So when when did you start learning about but You's death?
I would say I hadn't really learned about his death.

(09:56):
We didn't really have talks about this. This is literally
something that we didn't talk about at the end of
the day. Is it something for comfort or is it
going to actually make a difference Someone somewhere either died
with it or is going to die with it. Um.
And I think that's kind of the gist that you know,

(10:17):
I've gotten over the years that you're never gonna get
anything out of it. And I don't mean that to
deter you from doing what you're doing, but I mean
when you have that oh, I'm sure I'm not. I'm
based on your list. I won't be the last. We'll
be back in a moment just before game time. And

(10:44):
believe me, it's been a tough ticket for this game.
They've been scoffing then for over a hundred dollars in
the hotel lobbies and around Miami. Historians in Lancaster may
Or may not reclaim Jim's past, but other see Jim's
life as a lesson for the present and guidance for
the future. That's the second reason I think this story

(11:06):
is so important. Bollamar will kick off from here. Ride
Dallas will be saving Ellerie Duncan lived in the house
at Isom Street for decades after her eldest son's death.
Once she died in two thousand one, a few distant
cousins lived there on and off, but then the house
set empty for years until recently being sold. One summer

(11:29):
day in one of our producers, Davin Coburn, drove past
the house and he saw a car on the driveway,
so he rang the doorbell. The guy's name is Jim
Duncan and talked with the new owner about the man
who used to live there. He played for the Baltimore Colts,
and he actually died in the Lancaster police station. Camelia

(11:52):
Funderberg had never heard of Jim, and she declined to
appear in this podcast, but she knew instantly what she
thought of the official account of his death. She said, quote,
they're saying he walked into the police station and took
a revolver and committed suicide. I don't believe that. For
a former officer like Seth Stowton, who is now professor

(12:14):
of law at the University of South Carolina, that kind
of reaction stops him cold. I asked her if she
knew anything about this case, and I would like to
just play you her reaction. In fact, it did stop
him cold. We played the conversation for him and asked
for his thoughts. Yeah, that's she had never heard the

(12:37):
story before. That some total of her knowledge about this
was you outlining the facts for And it's fascinating, isn't it,
And a little frightening that her immediate conclusion is, I
don't believe that it's not completely crazy right, like people
absolutely have in the course of American his story, walked

(13:01):
up to officers and attempted to wrestle their gun out
of their holsters, So why not believe it? I would
hazard a guess it's because either she doesn't trust police now,
which may be part of the story, or she thinks
about what policing was like at the time in the
nineteen sixties and says there's no way that I'm going
to trust that institution. For Stoughton, and he hopes the

(13:25):
law enforcement community as a whole, the importance of rebuilding
that trust is a lesson we should all learn from
Jim's death. There were few, if any, verified facts that
we could use to believe either story, so why would
a substantial portion of the community believe one story not
the other? In Stoton gave a ted X talk about

(13:45):
that specific issue in policing. Lack of trust had primed
the community to believe the most negative version of events
related in media reports, largely because of an adversarial agency
culture that emphasized aggressive enforcement oriented approach to policing. But
he wasn't talking about Lancaster. He was talking about Michael Brown.

(14:09):
Almost forty five years after Jim's death, there is growing
outrage tonight after an unarmed African American teenager were shot
and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.
Stowton told us the fact that we wouldn't have known
the difference is exactly why stories like Jim's matter. My
initial reaction was, if we changed the date, we could

(14:30):
be having a conversation about the Jim Duggan shooting from
a year ago. There are questions about transparency and accountability.
There are questions about whether there was a sufficient investigation.
The issues that it raises are exactly the same as
a lot of the issues that we see and a
lot of the concerns that are brought to a head

(14:51):
by the Walter Scott shooting in North Charleston, or the
Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, or the timor Rice shooting
in Cleveland and so on. There are even more modern
parallels to Jim's story. Did anything. We're gonna be in
tonight with the NFL stand on players who choose not to. Today,

(15:16):
some of the most visible and polarizing protesters of systemic
racism and law enforcement are NFL players. Following the lead
of quarterback Colin Kaepernick, NFL players began to kneel during
the anthem to protest police brutality and racism in America.
Four years of systemic oppression, that slavery, Jim Crow, new Gym,

(15:37):
Crow mass and castration. I just felt the need to
say something. The butt. Eric Reid is an NFL veteran.
He's a defensive back, one of the same positions Jim
played back when Reid was with the San Francisco forty Niners.
He was the first player to kneel alongside Colin Kaepernick.

(16:00):
Read played for the Carolina Panthers in nineteen not far
from Lancaster. My colleagues at the Charlotte Observer asked him
about being one of the faces of a modern civil
rights movement. As we said when we started, Colin and I,
nothing will change unless you talk about it. So we're
gonna continue to talk about it. We're gonna continue to
hold America to the standard that it says on paper

(16:22):
that we're all created equal, because it's not that we
run now. I'm a black man in America. I grew
up black in America. You can't tell me that what
I've experienced and what I've seen is not true. Those
shadows of the past can loom especially large for black

(16:44):
men who grew up in South Carolina. Somebody's got to
have some sense and as well, and a lot of
right folk have demonstrated eloquently that they don't have no sense,
and Roy should we be that way? Martin Luther King Jr.
Gave this speech in Charles Austin in nineteen seven, reading
I'm not gonna preach a doctrine of black supremacy is

(17:05):
because I'm fall sick and todd a white supremacy. I
still feel that the sixties, in the seventies and eighties
and civil rights, it's not a historical event, It's an
ongoing event. Rosie Gilliam is the bar Street alum whose
father coached Jim in high school and then college. He's

(17:27):
remained connected to Lancaster's black community for decades. I don't
think Lawyer is anything unusual about Lancaster. If you took
away the date and time, could you imagine that happening today?
And the answer is yes, you can. There is, of course,

(17:56):
the ultimate reason to tell this story. All right, my
name is it. I work at the newspaper in rock Hill,
the Search for Closure. I'm doing a story that I
came across your name. Maybe that's confirmation of the official
narrative or a different sort of justice. At the very least,
I hoped it would mean a fuller understanding for everyone

(18:18):
of why Jim's life came to an end and laid
in my work on this podcast, I learned I wasn't
alone in that mission. My name is Policy Johnson. I
am Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law.
I am also the director of the Cold Case Justice
Initiative at Turkus University College of Law. Our work is

(18:42):
to assist families and speaking information and justice and accountability
for racially motivated killings of their loved ones that have
not been solved and no one has been held to
answer for those crimes. We reached out to the Cold
Case Justice Initiative or c c j I after one

(19:03):
of my conversations with Elroy, you know, the Dollar contact us. Yeah,
wanted to reopen the case. I don't think we need
to put her through that. So it was when she
was a laft so other than the nineties. Yea, a
spokesman for the Lancashire chapter of the n double A CP,

(19:25):
told us they never launched any sort of formal investigation
into Jim's death. But I thought they might not have
been the only organization to try. Some of you may
be familiar with the Emmett Till case. Any of you
familiar with at least the name Emmett Till. They're in Syracuse.
A rotating team of about two dozen law school students
each semester has allowed c c j I to research

(19:48):
hundreds of possible Civil Rights era crimes, particularly murders where
there's no statute of limitations. If someone is responsible for
taking someone else life or for propagating a story that
is not accurate, you know, if they are shielding other
people who participated and so are responsible. The families deserve

(20:11):
to know that. Whole communities deserve to know that. You know,
those things were done as messages to entire Black community,
and so the closure sold to speak goes beyond any
particular family member, any particular community. This is a demand
for justice for the entire American society. Johnson told us

(20:36):
the answer was no. C c j I had not
looked into Jim's death, well, not yet, anyway, His mother
made me till Mobley had insisted that his casket remained open. Now,
let me tell you that the next slide is very graphic.
Um the coronavirus disrupted everything, including campus life at Syracuse.

(20:58):
But having read the few public news reports of Jim's death,
Johnson told me that as c c j I adapts
workflows moving forward, Jim's case could become a real focus
for her team. It was very interesting to see the
different accounts about what was going on, you know, for
Mr Duncan with respect to drugs, and that needn't be

(21:20):
you know, really here. No, they're as opposed to the
most pivotal part of this, and that is when he
goes into the police station. I mean, it's really curious
to me, for instance, that he walked in there and
didn't say anything to anyone. It just doesn't quite made
sense to me. It has always been the families who

(21:44):
have insisted that the world, that government officials, that the
entities and the apparatus of society and law enforcement take
notice of these events, that the lives of their loved ones,
of their children matter. Johnson co founded c c j
I in two thousand and eight along with Syracuse professor

(22:04):
America Janice McDonald. The Herald has not collaborated on this
research with c c j I, but Johnson said this
reporting could be a new jumping off point for their
legal investigation, and that teams like hers can sometimes unearth
information news organizations cannot. There can be parallels, but you know,

(22:25):
sometimes our training as lawyers may lead us to find
that something raises an issue for us that journalists may
not pick up on. Now, you know, we ourselves are
not prosecutors, and so what we try to do is
put that information in some kind of reports, and if

(22:45):
it looks as though there was something, you know, criminal involved,
then we present that to the relevant authorities. They may
be local prosecutors, they may be federals or state prosecutors,
you know, but as attorneys we kind of speak that
language and understand what kinds of things would be important
for them to take that and say maybe we'll convene

(23:08):
a grand jury or take this at that point. At
the same time, some of the people I spoke with
for this story are not pushing to reinvestigate Jim's death
or pursue any sort of legal action. The past has
to become the past at some point at a lesson
base that includes some of Jim's good friends like Bob Grant.

(23:31):
Speedies death is suspect. It's a very sad event, but
we have to let go at some point. If we
dwell too long on some of the bad history, we're
going to end up having a bad future. So clearly,
for some the past really is better left alone see it.

(23:56):
But others told me they agreed to be interviewed because
they will never find clue sure with so many open questions,
and that the chance for answers, whatever they may be,
was worth the pain of asking one last time. Well,
it took him a while because I never would have said, Okay,
do you I met with Elroy and Linda Duncan on

(24:19):
several occasions. The final time Elroy cried from the first
question to the last, which was a great and he
was on twenty six here I am just turned seventy
years old to the day. I still don't believe that

(24:40):
he killed us. So I don't believe it. We'll be
right back, Eli Williams. It looked for what's happens back

(25:05):
at the Salem A. M. E. Zion Church cemetery. I've
searched for Jim's grave for more than half an hour,
but it's Duncan in the neighborhood. Maybe some of the
headstones are pressure washed with finely etched names and lifespans,
but some of the graves are marked only with a
piece of stone. We're a bit of concrete sticking out

(25:25):
of the ground. A lot of these don't really have
names on the Eventually I call Linda, Linda, this is
brought McCormick. How are you, How are you? I'm good,
I'm good. I'm standing in the middle of a cemetery.
I update her on my research, as I do whenever
we talk, and I tell her that apparently word had

(25:46):
gotten around about my work. Somebody that knows that I'm
working on this story called me and told me they
found some stuff at an antique shop in Lexington, South Carolina.
It was like an autograph picture of butch Um, I guess,
signed by himself. For three years, this search has been
a tale of new leads that work at the newspaper
in Rocky of South Carolina, and then trails that go cold. Unfortunately,

(26:10):
the year that you're looking for, along with many other years,
is missing, just tally missing. But the antique store is
a valuable lead, if only because Jim's family has almost
no physical reminders of him. The guy that owned the
antique store thought he had more stuff from Butch. I
think somehow he had acquired it. So there's the painting
of Jim and Moral's home and a few old news

(26:33):
clips they've collected, but no one knows where jim super
Bowl ring is now, and Elroy and Linda lost their
family photos in a house fire years ago. All right, well,
I'll get in touch with you later. Thanks again, all
right bye. Listeners of this podcast may have also noticed
that we've never heard from Jim himself. That's because I've

(26:54):
never heard his voice, and yep on a great way
by da. As many times times as I've asked NFL
teams and radio stations and TV networks if they have
historical footage of him, there was a kick bob, but
dark one running up bottom, if you have duck him
a great gip bob breaker and heard for the third
eight and as many hours as I've spent looking through

(27:15):
news archives, I haven't found anything with his voice. I
finally just asked Floyd White if he could describe it.
Did he have like a like, any distinctive accent, just
normal voice and being from broken home, you know, I
was from broken home. I could read things in them,

(27:37):
you know, things like that. It's possible. We might never
get concrete answers. Oh do you know her? His wife
her a couple of times when I was infant, But
in talking to Moral, I wondered if there might at
least be a chance for reconnection. I drove to Greenville

(27:57):
and met her and talked to her for a couple
of hours. Because that was a pretty as much as
Jim's family and I talked about him these past few years,
I found myself telling them almost as much about each other.
Apparently she and Elary did not get along super well.
I told Moral stories about Alice. She was like twenty
years old when they got married, and she was basically

(28:18):
a kid. Then I told Alice stories about Moral. It
would have been very interesting for you to hear how
he looked at it, because he's fourteen years younger than
any of the other siblings. I was like, well, people
ask you where your name comes from, and he's like, yeah,
that's the main time that I think about him. Alice
was most excited to hear about Moral's daughter, the youngest

(28:38):
addition to the family she was once part of, and
the girl who would have been her niece. Oh, his
daughter is eleven. I guess her middle name is I
forgot about this ella. In the years since Jim's death,

(28:58):
his family suffered their tragedies. Two more of his siblings
died before reaching old age, and those who are still alive,
who are all tremendous athletes, at one point, haven't been
able to outrun time. Was at Mariland State now that
John but we never did get to player against each other.

(29:19):
Elroy was a star quarterback at Johnson C. Smith University
in Charlotte. He took some big hits and games too.
It's hard ful menar room on the last day, other
than that he was killed and the way that he
was killed. These days, when Elroy loses a thought, Linda
lovingly calls him CTE and then gently steers him back

(29:42):
to the conversation. Horner thing he left his car park
in front of the Lancaster News. That's news, but how
us still lives near Greenville. She went on to have

(30:02):
three children, and we were joined in our conversations by
her second husband, Bobby Casting. She found some relief in
our talk about CTE and the idea that a fundamental
disconnect between Jim's mind and body could have driven some
of his behavior. That the things she saw weren't a
true reflection of the man she loved. Outside Salem A M. E.

(30:27):
Zion Church, there are headstones and markers from mc olwain's
and black Men's and Thompson's, but nothing for James Edward Duncan. MH.
I thought back to that poem Alice told me about
let others cheer the winning man. There's one I hold worthwhile,
tis he who does the best he can, then loses

(30:48):
with a smile. From my research, it appears that the
poem is called The Cheerful Loser, was written by a
man named Arthur W. Beer. It seems to have been
first published in nine eleven in a magazine called The Nautilus.
There's a verse that follows the one Alice remembers, It
goes beaten he is, but not to stay down with

(31:10):
the rank and file. That man will win some other
day who loses with a smile. Later, I was told
by Elroy that Jim was buried without a headstone because
back in ninety two the family couldn't afford one. Or
that's about ready to get the second half underway, date
public called Jim Duncan. So in the end I probably

(31:32):
did stand next to Jim Duncan's final resting place. Duncan
up to the fifteen, the plenty, the outside, but even there,
in a graveyard on the outskirts of a small town
in South Carolina, the Return Man is elusive once more.

(31:57):
I'm Brett McCormick. This has been long shot Season one
Return Man. It's a production of The Herald, McClatchy Studios
and I Heart Radio. Return End was produced by Matt Walsh,
Karat Taber Kata Stevens, Rachel Wise, and executive producer Davin Coburn.
The executive producer for I Heart Radio is Sean Titone.

(32:21):
Cliff Harrington is the executive editor of The Herald. Cynthia
Dubos is mcclatchy's managing editor for audience Engagement. McClatchy Studios
was created by Jonathan Forsyth and special thanks to Gena Smith, J. Pilgreen,
Eddie Alvarez, Gabby Garner, and Sherry chisen All. For lots
more on this story, go to Harold online dot com

(32:43):
slash return Man. If you have any additional information about
Jim Duncan's life or death, email us at return Man
at Harold online dot com to continue supporting this kind
of work, visit Harold Online dot com, slash podcasts and
can consider a digital subscription. And for more podcasts from
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(33:08):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H