January 26, 2023 • 41 mins
Phil finds himself stepping into the private detective position vacated by the killing of Clay Williams. Questions remain about Clay, his murder and Intercept agency- leading Phil to wonder whether the men he’s working for- and their biggest client- could be tied to much more than just routine investigations.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio previously on
Murder in Miami.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Miami had become the murder capital of the United States.
I would categorize it as the wild wild West. Every
day somebody was getting shot, murdered, robbed.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Does anybody that crossed the cartails and any white that
gets killed? Everybody that was home down at the end.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Of the bar.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
There's this guy nds me. His card says Clay Williams.
Intercept Detective Agency.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
About two weeks.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Later, got a call from Bob Adams, he's president of Intercept,
and he said they found Clay. And so I go
down Miami Dade Sheriff's office. At a certain point, they
start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams's body, polaroids taken
out in the Everglades and he's just he's a skeleton.
And I tell him I think I might be responsible
(00:59):
for the death. They said, look, you're involved with some
dangerous people here. And I report back to Bob. I
call and tell them what I found out. They said,
good work, good work, and so that was sort of
my first job.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
For Intercept as a private detective.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
As a newspaper reporter, slash private detective.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yes, it's October of nineteen eighty one, and Phil Stamford
is basically moved into the job. Clay Williams murder has vacated,
a murder he still believes he may have caused. As
a result, Stanford's compelled to pay his respects by attending
the deceased man's memorial service. All in all, it's an
(01:40):
awkward situation.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
It was a strange funeral anyway, in a large sort
of double wide trailer alongside Dixie Highway, and I got
the feeling that some sort of fly by night preacher
was conducting the ceremony. Boy, I wish I had a
record of the ceremony, because it was all about the
(02:02):
preacher wondering how God could allow something like this as
awful as this to happen. And standing in the back
end of the trailer were about four or five very
big guys, obviously detectives from the Sheriff's officer Miami Police.
Big guys, I mean like six ' five sixty six,
(02:22):
two hundred and fifty pounds or more, wearing sports coats
and suits and sort of smiling. They were there to
send a message.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
I'm Lauren Bright, Pacheco and this is murder in Miami.
(02:57):
So at this point are you still working for the newspaper?
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well sort of, but remember I was expecting to get
fired about this time, and after my visit with the detectives,
Bob said he might have something for me. So yeah,
it must have been shortly after the funeral that I
sort of stopped going into the paper.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
Ruth and I broke up. We were still.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Friends, though, I think, and I moved to Miami Beach,
which wasn't anything like it is today. I mean at
the time it was all pensioners and Mary Alita's completely
run down. Tourists just didn't go there anymore. I got
a room at the Cardozo, which was on Ocean Drive
right across from the beach, one hundred and ninety dollars
a month.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Wow, that's a good deal.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I doubt that you could find a place for one
night in Miami Beach at those rates anymore.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Situated at thirteenth in Ocean Drive in South Beach's Art
Deco district, Today, the Cordoza Hotel has been updated to
surpass even its former glory, but at the time Stamford
was staying there, it was a shabby she hipster hangout
for artists, writers, and other creative sorts, many of whom
sparred with witty banter on its legendary porch, hoping to
(04:10):
make and leave their marks. Stanford already had access to
the scene through an artsy and intellectual Bohemian couple by
the last name of Rothchild.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Oh Yeah, John and Susan Rothchild. They were friends of
friends in DC. John was a writer and very sharp guy,
and Susan, a beautiful woman, was a former New York socialite.
Her father had owned the twenty one Club in New
York City and turned hippie, and she and John had
(04:42):
taken up together shortly before they landed in Miami Beach.
They had a nice place in Miami Beach. They became
good friends, and I saw a lot.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Of them too.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
John Rothchild passed away a few years back, leaving behind
an impressive array of books and compelling magazine articles. His
New York Times obituary cited him as a prolific journalist
who used humor to turn books about personal finance into
engaging reads. His widow, Susan shares that with here's her
(05:15):
outgoing voicemail message, Hi.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
If I'm not answering the phone right now. It's because
I can't find my phone, and as soon as I
find it, I'll call you back bye.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
When we connected, I passed along Phil's praise of both
her intellect and stunning beauty.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Well, I was, anyway, at eighty three out of us. Dummy,
I am unless I hit someone over the head to stumble.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
But anyway, here's her take on Phil during his Cordoza
Porch days.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
It wasn't actually my type, but he was attractive looking
and smart. I would say I found it very simpatico.
He was slightly brash, but he was very also involved.
He had two adorable children, and it was very good
with them. He was a very good single father.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
I think Phil's boys would visit from Oregon when their
school breaks permitted.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
They were sort of our kids' age, and so we
all hung out together. It was very easy.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I recently read an article that Jack McClintock had written
about life on the Porch of the Cordoza Cardozo. Yes,
and it kind of glamorized the circle of writers, including
your husband and Phil.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Yes, they had fun and they were very involved in
peripheral daring do.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
The article I'm referring to originally appeared in Marquee magazine
and described the Cordoza as a place where that daring
do rose to the most random of rivalries, including one
for ugliest Hawaiian shirt. The author Jack McClintock thought he'd
won that competition until he wrote.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Phil Stanford, who was a surfer in Hawaii for a
couple of years before he began writing for the New
York Times magazine and being a political activist and the
private detective and country songwriter and all the other things
he was. Stanford started showing up wearing an entire series
of sleazy Hawaiian print shirts, for which he claimed to
(07:19):
have paid exactly a dollar seventy nine.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Apiece For the record, Phil denies the country music allegation.
McClintock goes on to write.
Speaker 5 (07:28):
Stanford thought he'd won hands down, and would have if
it hadn't been for John Rothschild. John's nonfiction about Florida
is as wise and wry as John D. McDonald's fiction
about the same subject.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
According to his wife, Susan. For a time, John Rothschild
focused on the more dangerous aspects of Miami, including drug
smuggling and organized crime. When we talk about the lawlessness
the wild West feel, Phil mentioned that there was at
the time there was a traffic incident and one guy
got out and started shooting, and the other guy got
(08:04):
out of his car and started shooting. Was that a
part of your reality there?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, yes, we were driving There's an Italian restaurant named
Austria Osteria Deloso.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
We were with.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Sasha, who must have been nine or ten, in the car,
and there were police outside. I said, oh, look, they
must be shooting a movie. She said, no, they're not
shooting a movie. That's a crime scene. And she was
right because in the next day in the papers, to
turn out the chef had been killed in that restaurant.
Now how that nine year old knew, you know, growing
up on Miami Beach.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Back to Phil and his days at the Cordoza.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
And then there was my cop friend JD, who I'd
met while I was still working at the News. He'd
stopped by in street close of course, because he usually
worked undercover, park his motorcycle out front and come up
on the porch and talk.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
What was he like, JD?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
He was a tough boy, ex Special Forces in Vietna,
and his job with Miami Dade Sheriff's Office was felony Warrens,
which means he had to bring in the guys who
were running from the law, who jumped bail, and.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Usually pretty dangerous people.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
So he'd go into the roughest parts of Miami, put
a gun to the fugitive head, and bring them out
by himself. He said that if he worked alone, because
if you worked with a partner, you might get yourself killed.
When I tell JD about Intercept, he sort of smiles
and says it sounds kind of hinky to him, which
was cop talk at the time for suspicious or illegal.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Naturally, I think this is very cool, perhaps a bit
enamored by the danger and the sense of adventure. Stanford
was all too willing to dive into the new role
of private investigator by tackling the next assignment Intercept, and
Bob Adams tossed his way.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
The first job was a surveillance job.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
He wanted me to follow a doctor who's getting divorced.
The wife had hired them for some reason, it never
clear to me. She wanted to know what he was doing.
Bob had me do this, he said, the doctor's going
to be picking up the two little boys must have
been at the mother's house at this address tomorrow night.
(10:16):
Just follow and see where they go. Why the wife
would have wanted to know this, I have no idea,
but the house was sort of at the bottom of
a hill. I parked up the hill, looking down towards
the house. It's already dark, and lights came on in
the front porch. A man and two little boys came
out in the lights, walked towards his car and started
(10:40):
to get in, and I started to get nervous they
get away before I wouldn't be able to keep up
with them. So I started the car, which turned on
the lights right away and sort of blasted them with light.
And one of the kids said, Daddy, Daddy, someone's following us.
(11:00):
That was my first job, and I was an utter
failure at it. I was discovered by eight year old
I just sort of slunk off, let the car roll down,
turned off the first left I could, and that was that.
The next morning went into Bob and I told him
what had happened. I said, Bob, I'm sorry. He said, oh,
don't worry about it. Don't worry about it, and laughed,
(11:23):
he has had this giggle. And he pulled out a
roll of bills turned out to be hundreds, all hundreds,
and he started peeling them off for me. I think
I peeled off five hundreds, and he said, good work.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
I'll let you know what. I have another job for you.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
If being handsomely rewarded for his ineptitude did strike Stamford
his odd, he didn't let it keep him from taking
on another job with Intercept.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Days later he had another job. It was the same
doctor again, and this time I was smarter. I followed
the doctor. He had a sports car. I think they
had a Porsche. A decent interval to an apartment building.
A young lady came out of the apartment building, got
in his car, followed them to a motel, sort of
(12:21):
a CD motel on the outskirts of Miami. And after
they parked. It was late in the afternoon, almost dusk.
I pulled into the same parking lot at the other
end of the parking lot and waited.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
And waited, and.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Next thing I know, someone is tapping on my window
with a coin or something, shouting, wake up, asshole.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So you fell asleep on the job.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah, And when I look out the windshield. The doctor's
car has gone and there is JD grinning at me.
He says, don't worry, I'm not going to get you fire.
So we go to an all night diner and he
clues me in, and what he tells me is the
best he can figure out. I'm just there to handle
the stuff that comes in from the Yellow Pages so
(13:12):
the rest of the guys can tend to the real business,
which is making the real money, which was the drug business.
Of course, this is Miami, and so I go in
the next morning to apologize, and Bob does the same
thing as before. It says, don't worry about it. The
main thing is we can tell his old lady that
her husband and his girlfriend went to the motel. That's
(13:35):
all she cares about, just wants something to be pissed
off about. And then he peels off another five one
hundred dollar belts, at which point I say, hey, Bob,
now that's really generous of you, but just so you know,
I do understand what my job here is, and that's
to handle the stuff that comes in from the yellow pages,
because you guys are too busy with other matters, right,
(13:56):
And he looks at me does sort of a double take,
and then he laughs and peels off another couple hundred
or so, says, let's go get a couple of drinks,
and this time you're buying, And just like that, I'm
one of the guys.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
What was going through your head? So obviously your first
two assignments weren't exactly home runs. Yet you're making a
ton of money, a ton of money given the time,
particularly cash.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
Yeah. I thought it was a great job.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
I mean, no matter what I did, I got paid
very well, and I got to hang around talking with
these guys who had great stories.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
They'd talk about their adventures and so take me into that.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
On top of being an investigation firm, it was staffed
with some really charismatic, intriguing guys. Just tell me a
little bit about stepping into that world.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
That was the payoff for me. I didn't that much
about the money. They were willing to talk, and the
people who've lived lives like that really have a lot
of stories and they want to talk about other people
don't understand how unusual their lives are.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Sometimes, especially it would seem the head of Intercept, Bob Adams.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Bob loved to talk and since I was no longer
in the journalism business. A boy did have some stories
to tell. It turns out all the top guys that
intercept had been in military intelligence or the CIA.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Bob had been with.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
A military intelligence unit in Frankfurt, Germany that he said
provided logistical support for professional assassins working for the United States.
Another guy on the board had been the CIA station
chief in Miami during the Bay of Pigs time.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
So what was the tie between the Central Intelligence Agency
and Miami, Cuba, and in particular the CIA's secret war
to outs Fidel Castro. In fact, the CIA's largest outpost
in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies was the infamous
JM wave station at the University of Miami campus. The
(16:13):
operation left many former agents in the region with some
pretty interesting resumes in the nineteen eighties. Did Williams have
a military background too or intelligence?
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Yeah, they said that Clay Williams, whose spot I guess
you could say I took the detective Agency, had been
with military intelligence.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
If you were involved with the front end stuff, the
sort of business they get from calls on the Yellow Pages.
What were the military intelligence guys doing with anything that
had to do with drugs For the most part.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
That was really above my pay grade.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
But Bob did tell me one story about the time
he and a couple of the guys had to go
up to Georgia to clean.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
Some moldy money.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Not launder money, but clean some money that had been
stored underground so long that it.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Was getting moldy.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Bob said he cleaned it mostly in a washer dryer,
and that he got one tenth of all they were
able to salvage.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
What was in Georgia. Why did he have to go
to Georgia to clean money?
Speaker 4 (17:20):
Oh? Yeah, sure, That's where Lamar was, Lamar Chester.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
And it was no big secret at all that their
biggest client at the time was this dashing dope pilot
by the name of Lamar Chester.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
So who was Lamar Chester to interceptor Bob Adams.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
To Bob, Lamar was a legend among dope pilots, one
of the first to start flying marijuana directly from Colombia.
He had an island in the Bahamas that was sort
of a motel six for dope pilots making the run
from South America. Lamar gotten into the business in Miami,
but his home base was now a chicken ranch up
(18:00):
in northern Georgia.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
That's where he was flying into.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Now, in such an infamous era of drug smuggling, what
made Chester stand out?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Bob was fascinated by Lamore. He said his nickname was
Captain America. He thought he looked like the Marlborough Man,
and he said when you saw him, he usually had
a girl on each arm.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
So, if Chester was involved with drug smuggling, an intercept
was involved with Chester. Did you ever stop to think
that that might have played a role in Clay Williams murder?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
If I did, I didn't spend too much time thinking
about it. It was a place I didn't really really
want to.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Go, I guess, or maybe it was intentionally rationalized.
Speaker 6 (18:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Well, the way Bob explained it to me was that
Clay was sort of a facilitator. He'd hang out of
the Prime Pub and used the payphone on the wall.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Remember this was.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Well before the day of cell phones, and he'd connect
suppliers with pilots, or say, set up pilots with offload cruise.
The way Bob explained it, just about every bar in
Miami catered to a particular level of the drug trade,
and the Prime Pub for example, was sort of mid level,
but exactly what Clay Williams was doing they got him.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
Killed, If that's what it was. Bob never told me
and I never asked.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
But didn't you think it was odd that here you
are working for a private investigation firm and they didn't
seem too interested in figuring out who had killed one
of their employees or why? I mean, did you ever
stop to think that maybe you could end up dead too?
Speaker 4 (19:38):
I was it a.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Place in my life where I really didn't care about this.
I think I was the only one I knew at
that time. He didn't carry a gun, which is probably
why no one shot at me. But I remember one
time going into Bob Adams and I said, Bob, I
got a threat. He said, oh, don't worry about the
ones you hear. And I was happy for the job.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Okay. But back to Clay Williams, there was no further
attempt to find out who killed him.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah, other than the initial dog and pony show of
driving me around after Clay was killed.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
So it didn't concern you at all that your new
place of employment seemed caught up in sketchy, dangerous drug
related activities.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
No, and to tell the truth, I actually thought it
was kind of cool, just what I was looking for
when I came to Miami. But I've got to say
that even at the time, dumb as I was, I
was at least smart enough to know that there's some
things you don't ask questions about, and Clay Williams's death
was probably one of them.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
What about now and now?
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, it's certainly one of the things about this story
I'd like to get to the bottom of.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
When I started scouring newspaper archives for any mention of
Williams either missing or being found, there was nothing which
immediately struck me as odd, especially if he were former
military intelligence. Since Phil had what he believed was his
full name.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Clay had slightly unusual names. It was Baines Clayton Williams.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
His date of birth, and that he was originally from
North Carolina. I'd put in a formal request for any
existing records with the Miami Dade Police Department on January
fifth of twenty twenty two, explaining I was hoping to
track down the police report on the murdered private investigator
from Miami whose body was found in the Everglades in
(21:38):
October of nineteen eighty one. In the meantime, Phil searched
the archives of old newspapers.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
The one thing I was able to find was an
obituary for Clay's mother, who died in twenty eleven in Charlotte,
North Carolina, and it listed her living sons and her
predeceased son, Baines Clayton Williams. And what turned out to
be really important because the surviving children of her deceased
(22:09):
son and their names were listed there.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
How many children did he have?
Speaker 4 (22:14):
He had had four kids.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Next, we tracked down Clay's wedding announcement to a woman
named Sandra.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
They were both young, a short announcement from the Charlotte paper.
They were married in nineteen sixty one June of nineteen
sixty one, and Clay was working at some electrical company.
She was working at a store. Very pretty girl. They
must have been a handsome couple.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Using the names of the couple's children, I was able
to do a reverse search of known relatives. After a
series of dead ends and disconnected numbers, I called Phil
with an update. I think I actually found Sandra. I
ended up calling the house that had her name listed. Also,
(22:58):
the man who I believe was her second husband, and
he answered and unfortunately she passed away five years ago.
But he was very open to my questions. He explained
that it really remains a cold case as far as
the family's concerned, that they never had any true answers
(23:22):
as to who murdered Clay or why. But he was
willing to link me with one of Clay's daughters, and
she ended up returning my phone call, and so I
spoke to her, and she also mentioned the large guys
at the funeral that you mentioned seeing, who you believe
(23:46):
were detectives.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
How old was she then?
Speaker 1 (23:48):
She would have been eight when her father passed. There
were four kids. Her older sister was twelve. She has
a twin sister who was also eight, and then there
was the youngest child. Her little brother was just two
months old when his father disappeared and ended up murdered.
Speaker 6 (24:09):
I have a.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Vague recollection of the mother holding that baby at a funeral.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah. She also says that her father's car was found
shortly after he disappeared in Texas, and that the car
was found laden with drugs. Had you heard of that?
Speaker 4 (24:33):
No, that's news to me. What conclusions did she draw
from that, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
She was very pragmatic about it. She said that she
didn't think that her father was linked to what they
found in the car, but then again, this was the
nineteen eighties and Miami.
Speaker 6 (24:53):
Indeed it was.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Eventually, Clay's daughter linked me with her elder sister, who
was also willing to speak with me, but not to
be interviewed. She did, though, suggest I reach out to
a couple named Ted and Roseanne, who were close friends
of her parents. Here's Ted.
Speaker 6 (25:23):
How I met Clay was through an associate of mine
at work who knew Clay from the military, introduced me
to Clay. I don't know how Clay got to be
to Miami, but I think he was looking for a
place to raise his children. He had three girls, and
he wanted to start a new life.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
And Clay made an immediate impression, just as he had
on Phil and Ruth in that bar in Parne when
he handed them his card.
Speaker 6 (25:54):
He was good looking, tall, he was taller than six feet.
He was lanky, very charming, nice smile, quick to laugh,
always good humored, very much a family man.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Family was what instantly connected the two men.
Speaker 6 (26:11):
We used together together with Clay and his family and
He was a very family oriented person, easy spoken and
charming to be around. We had a lot of fun
together whenever we were together for barbecues, help each other
around the house. We all had homes needed to repair,
(26:32):
one type or another. I remember working on Clay's house
one time, painting it, and we just got to know
the families and we're just associated in that way. Just
pure family relationships. Very handsome family, pretty wife.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Their wives also became very close friends, and though Ted
had an important job with the government employment agency, they
didn't spend too much time talking about their professional lives.
Speaker 6 (27:02):
Never talked to any business. Really. I knew what Clay did.
I knew he was a private investigator, and that's as
far as I went in terms of knowing what kind
of work he did.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Did you ever get the chance to visit Clay at Intercept,
the agency in Parne where he worked as a private investigator.
Speaker 6 (27:23):
Yeah. I was on an errand with Clay. He asked
me to ride with him someplace I don't pick up something,
maybe for the house, I don't remember right now, but
he said I have to stop offer at the office.
You want to come up?
Speaker 4 (27:37):
I said sure.
Speaker 6 (27:38):
He introduced me to Bob Adams and another fellow there.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
And I had.
Speaker 6 (27:44):
Understood from Clay that these were former intelligence people from
the federal government, whether it's CIA, army intelligence, they were
all associated. I think that's how Clay got to know
these people through the army and intelligence contacts. And I
was up there for a few minutes, looked around, and
(28:06):
it was a nice office, and they had what I
thought was an awfully large computer set up. You know,
it wasn't at that time anything that I've ever seen
in a small office. These weren't laptops us like what
today would be described as service in other words, that's
where all the main memory was contained. And no more
(28:30):
than that.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
You worked for a government agency, how would you compare
the technology of that computer compared to what you had
at your office.
Speaker 6 (28:42):
Most government offices have a desktop and a little serve
on the bottom. But this thing was, I mean to
describe it close to Xerox machine at that time, you know,
one of these heavy duty office machines. It was that
kind of setup. Clay said, this was their computer system.
(29:05):
I just was impressed that such a small office would
have such a an enormous setup for computers.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
And at the time because of the size of the
computer that would be directly in keeping with its capability,
so it would have been advanced and expensive at the time.
Speaker 6 (29:24):
I would imagine him. You know, you usually see those
in movies today where they could access almost anything as
they do in the movies. I don't know what these
guys accessed on that computer, but I'm sure it was
more than what a citizen could attain on a home
computer or an office computer.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
The computer capabilities of the agency stuck out to ted,
but there was nothing that stuck out as odd in
terms of Clay's job. Did he ever give you any
indication that he was worried about his safety or involved
with people who could be dangerous, No intercept.
Speaker 6 (30:05):
With their backgrounds. Were probably doing very sophisticated investigations on
the side for the government. That was my impression. Not
that they were involved in any of the local drug
business that was rampant in Miami at the time.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
I never suspected that, and if that were the case,
Clay probably wouldn't have brought you to his place of work.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
Well. I was quite happy with his employers over there.
They seem to have a good ripport. When I went
up to the office, and there was nothing sinister about
the place at all.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
But Intercept was a fairly new job for Clay. Correct.
Speaker 6 (30:48):
Yeah, he lived in Carolinas and he came into Miami.
He would have I don't know where he would have
known them from outside of Miami.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
And there was nothing about Clay's lifestyle that would suggest
he was enjoying the lucrative benefits and a legal source
of income would afford. Remember, the group of friends rotated
home maintenance projects to save money, and that lack of
money was also apparent when Clay's widow was left with
four kids, one of them a newborn.
Speaker 6 (31:17):
There was no money. She went to work. She had
to go to work. I mean, they depended on Clay's
income for everything, and.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
So they weren't stockpiling money anywhere.
Speaker 6 (31:30):
God No, Sandra had to go back to work as
soon as she could. She worked as a legal secretary.
She needed to support to support her family. I believe
she got some benefits from Social Security as a widows
with children or something like that, but that was certain
(31:50):
that didn't cover her expenses at the house and kids
in school and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
So Clay wasn't making a notable income at the time
immediately before his death, which was also unnotable, at least
in terms of the media coverage. There wasn't press attention
to his disappearance.
Speaker 6 (32:10):
No, no, there was nothing in the press. Why well,
I guess there were other stories. He had to remember.
Miami at that time was a wild town, and we
never saw anything in the press about it. I don't
even think there was an obituary column about Clay.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Do you remember where you were or how you first
learned that Clay's body had been found.
Speaker 6 (32:35):
Yeah, we were sitting with Sondra and maybe that's when
the police came in and informed her they found the
remains in the Everglades and suspected it was Clay, and
then they did some forensic work on the remains and
confirmed that it was Clay. But at that time I said, oh,
(32:56):
that can't be right. I always felt now, but he's
going to walk in because this is who Clay is.
He's very family oriented and half the time when you
Sandra had to go to work and the kids went
to school, and it was it was something that I
had to accept that he wasn't coming back.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Clay didn't return, although his car did show up as
his daughter mentioned in the Lone Star State.
Speaker 6 (33:25):
I don't know how it ever got to Texas. Anyways,
they found the car, Customs I believe was the agency
that contacted the family about the car.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Were law enforcement helpful to her at the time, I
don't think so.
Speaker 6 (33:40):
They wanted information from her, but they wouldn't give her
any information. That was that kind of relationship. It was
their investigation and you had no right to ask questions
about it.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Looking back now, do you have any theories as to
what had happened?
Speaker 6 (34:00):
Yeah, it pretty much confirms my suspicions that he was
on to something and that whoever he was on to
found out about it and he had him killed. I
thought it was more a high end gangster killing than
it was a drug related.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Thing like Phil and Clay's daughter. Ted also recalls a
very prominent police presence at Clay's memorial service.
Speaker 6 (34:25):
What I thought would be just family turned out to
be a parade of suits. I remember them lining up
against the wall standing and it just struck me as
so many of these law enforcement types, including the people
from Intercept, and it was unusual for that kind of
(34:45):
group to be at a funeral. And if anybody watches
enough police TV. They always noticed that the police are
always there at a suspected death funeral, but this was
unusually law group. There must have been about a dozen
of them in a small reception room at a memorial
(35:07):
funeral place. It was crowded, you know, for a small
room with these guys standing around. It's the only way
I could describe it. It wasn't a massive room, but
these guys were filling up the space.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
So they were hard to ignore. He couldn't take Nor
did you get the feeling at the time that they
were there to send a message.
Speaker 6 (35:29):
No. I kind of suspected that they were there because
they had some interest in Clay, not a message, just
wanted to pay their respects to a colleague.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
But funeral guests aside who would have killed Clay and
why his children were left without a father and without
answers to questions that have remained for more than forty years.
Ted still struggles with the senselessness, just as he did
after Clay's death, Even after.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
They found body and we had the memorial service. I
just couldn't believe that Clay wouldn't be walking in the
door one day. But it never happened, just carrying around
his cremains in the car until they were disposed of
by our friend. It typrovided what was the remaining of
(36:19):
Clay because the cremains were in a box like a
three by five box, an index card box that's about
the size of it, and normally cremains go in a
larger container, but there wasn't much of him to dispose
of it, and our friend, usual friend took his ashes
(36:43):
out to the ocean and put him in the water,
which was a very sad experience because the girls were there.
That pretty much ended the story of Clayton a little
box of ashes dispersed at seen a very good friend.
It was a trauma that the family lived through for
(37:06):
many years. They never really had closure.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
So why didn't the police or intercept ever get to
the bottom of who killed Clay Williams Back to Phil Stanford.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, that's a big question that's still hanging out there.
One explanation, one possible explanation is that somehow.
Speaker 4 (37:27):
They were involved.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
I mean, there was a lot of corruption in the
Sheriff's department at that time. In fact, half of the
homicide squad twenty eight to fifty six were either under
suspension or under indictment. They've been taking money off of
dead bodies and undoubtedly involved in the drug trade, so
it's possible they had some sort of deal with Clay,
(37:50):
which would explain why they've lost the records.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
For God's sake, another possibility is that he was working
with them as some kind of an formant, and maybe
Intercept had something to do with his death.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
I certainly didn't think so at the time, but the
more we look into it, the more possible it seems,
at least that Intercept connections had something to do with them.
I know that Clay's friend had the idea that he
was working for the government at that time. If he
was working for the government, it was because he'd been
caught by law enforcement and turned into an informant.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Unless Devil's Advocate he was there undercover.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
That's so unusual that at this level to have an
undercover cop posing as.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
A drug dealer.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
But how would you also explain the fact that his
family had no money. I mean, the friend group were
taking turns and helping one another on house projects because
they didn't have money to hire outside contractors. And also
she had to go to work immediately after Clay's death, if.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
He had been working for the government in any sort
of official capacity, they would have had money. And so
the lack of money I think is more than likely
evidence that he Remember he just started an intercept they
were making the major part of their money from drugs,
(39:17):
and hadn't been there long enough. Let's suppose to cash.
Speaker 6 (39:21):
In on that.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
One of the major incentives for getting into some risky
business like drug dealing is that you don't have money
and you want to get it as much and as
fast as possible. And so you can turn that lack
of money around one hundred and eighty degrees and make
it an argument why he would have been involved, perhaps
in some sort of drug deal. And so for me,
(39:44):
the question is whose side was he on? Very likely
or there was a double cross, whether he double cross
someone or someone doublecross him and.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
He got killed and dumped in the everplage.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yeah, but why and by whom?
Speaker 4 (39:59):
Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (40:00):
And it's still an open murder case in Miami Dade
and they can't find the papers.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
Makes you wonder, doesn't.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
On the next murder of Miami, Phil Stamford returns to Washington.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
So I got in touch with a radical peace and
justice organization.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Leading him back to Miami with a dangerous new mission.
You're lucky you didn't get yourself killed.
Speaker 4 (40:29):
Yeah, I suppose so.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Before accepting a life altering invitation.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Lamour wants to meet me at the Mutiny, the hangout
for all the premier drugs monsters in Miami.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Murder of Miami is a production of iHeart Radio. Executive
producers are Lauren Wright Pachecko, Taylor Chicoine, and Phil Stamford.
Written by Phil Stamford and Lauren Bright Pacheco, Audio editing
and sound design by Nicholas Harder, Van Tyer and Taylor Show,
featuring music by Evan Tyre, Bill Mayer, John Murchison and
(41:05):
Taylor Chackoigne. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get the stories that matter
to you
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio previously on
Murder in Miami.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Miami had become the murder capital of the United States.
I would categorize it as the wild wild West. Every
day somebody was getting shot, murdered, robbed.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Does anybody that crossed the cartails and any white that
gets killed? Everybody that was home down at the end.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Of the bar.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
There's this guy nds me. His card says Clay Williams.
Intercept Detective Agency.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
About two weeks.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Later, got a call from Bob Adams, he's president of Intercept,
and he said they found Clay. And so I go
down Miami Dade Sheriff's office. At a certain point, they
start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams's body, polaroids taken
out in the Everglades and he's just he's a skeleton.
And I tell him I think I might be responsible
(00:59):
for the death. They said, look, you're involved with some
dangerous people here. And I report back to Bob. I
call and tell them what I found out. They said,
good work, good work, and so that was sort of
my first job.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
For Intercept as a private detective.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
As a newspaper reporter, slash private detective.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yes, it's October of nineteen eighty one, and Phil Stamford
is basically moved into the job. Clay Williams murder has vacated,
a murder he still believes he may have caused. As
a result, Stanford's compelled to pay his respects by attending
the deceased man's memorial service. All in all, it's an
(01:40):
awkward situation.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
It was a strange funeral anyway, in a large sort
of double wide trailer alongside Dixie Highway, and I got
the feeling that some sort of fly by night preacher
was conducting the ceremony. Boy, I wish I had a
record of the ceremony, because it was all about the
(02:02):
preacher wondering how God could allow something like this as
awful as this to happen. And standing in the back
end of the trailer were about four or five very
big guys, obviously detectives from the Sheriff's officer Miami Police.
Big guys, I mean like six ' five sixty six,
(02:22):
two hundred and fifty pounds or more, wearing sports coats
and suits and sort of smiling. They were there to
send a message.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
I'm Lauren Bright, Pacheco and this is murder in Miami.
(02:57):
So at this point are you still working for the newspaper?
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well sort of, but remember I was expecting to get
fired about this time, and after my visit with the detectives,
Bob said he might have something for me. So yeah,
it must have been shortly after the funeral that I
sort of stopped going into the paper.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
Ruth and I broke up. We were still.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Friends, though, I think, and I moved to Miami Beach,
which wasn't anything like it is today. I mean at
the time it was all pensioners and Mary Alita's completely
run down. Tourists just didn't go there anymore. I got
a room at the Cardozo, which was on Ocean Drive
right across from the beach, one hundred and ninety dollars
a month.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Wow, that's a good deal.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I doubt that you could find a place for one
night in Miami Beach at those rates anymore.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Situated at thirteenth in Ocean Drive in South Beach's Art
Deco district, Today, the Cordoza Hotel has been updated to
surpass even its former glory, but at the time Stamford
was staying there, it was a shabby she hipster hangout
for artists, writers, and other creative sorts, many of whom
sparred with witty banter on its legendary porch, hoping to
(04:10):
make and leave their marks. Stanford already had access to
the scene through an artsy and intellectual Bohemian couple by
the last name of Rothchild.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Oh Yeah, John and Susan Rothchild. They were friends of
friends in DC. John was a writer and very sharp guy,
and Susan, a beautiful woman, was a former New York socialite.
Her father had owned the twenty one Club in New
York City and turned hippie, and she and John had
(04:42):
taken up together shortly before they landed in Miami Beach.
They had a nice place in Miami Beach. They became
good friends, and I saw a lot.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Of them too.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
John Rothchild passed away a few years back, leaving behind
an impressive array of books and compelling magazine articles. His
New York Times obituary cited him as a prolific journalist
who used humor to turn books about personal finance into
engaging reads. His widow, Susan shares that with here's her
(05:15):
outgoing voicemail message, Hi.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
If I'm not answering the phone right now. It's because
I can't find my phone, and as soon as I
find it, I'll call you back bye.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
When we connected, I passed along Phil's praise of both
her intellect and stunning beauty.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Well, I was, anyway, at eighty three out of us. Dummy,
I am unless I hit someone over the head to stumble.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
But anyway, here's her take on Phil during his Cordoza
Porch days.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
It wasn't actually my type, but he was attractive looking
and smart. I would say I found it very simpatico.
He was slightly brash, but he was very also involved.
He had two adorable children, and it was very good
with them. He was a very good single father.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
I think Phil's boys would visit from Oregon when their
school breaks permitted.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
They were sort of our kids' age, and so we
all hung out together. It was very easy.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I recently read an article that Jack McClintock had written
about life on the Porch of the Cordoza Cardozo. Yes,
and it kind of glamorized the circle of writers, including
your husband and Phil.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Yes, they had fun and they were very involved in
peripheral daring do.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
The article I'm referring to originally appeared in Marquee magazine
and described the Cordoza as a place where that daring
do rose to the most random of rivalries, including one
for ugliest Hawaiian shirt. The author Jack McClintock thought he'd
won that competition until he wrote.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Phil Stanford, who was a surfer in Hawaii for a
couple of years before he began writing for the New
York Times magazine and being a political activist and the
private detective and country songwriter and all the other things
he was. Stanford started showing up wearing an entire series
of sleazy Hawaiian print shirts, for which he claimed to
(07:19):
have paid exactly a dollar seventy nine.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Apiece For the record, Phil denies the country music allegation.
McClintock goes on to write.
Speaker 5 (07:28):
Stanford thought he'd won hands down, and would have if
it hadn't been for John Rothschild. John's nonfiction about Florida
is as wise and wry as John D. McDonald's fiction
about the same subject.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
According to his wife, Susan. For a time, John Rothschild
focused on the more dangerous aspects of Miami, including drug
smuggling and organized crime. When we talk about the lawlessness
the wild West feel, Phil mentioned that there was at
the time there was a traffic incident and one guy
got out and started shooting, and the other guy got
(08:04):
out of his car and started shooting. Was that a
part of your reality there?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, yes, we were driving There's an Italian restaurant named
Austria Osteria Deloso.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
We were with.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Sasha, who must have been nine or ten, in the car,
and there were police outside. I said, oh, look, they
must be shooting a movie. She said, no, they're not
shooting a movie. That's a crime scene. And she was
right because in the next day in the papers, to
turn out the chef had been killed in that restaurant.
Now how that nine year old knew, you know, growing
up on Miami Beach.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Back to Phil and his days at the Cordoza.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
And then there was my cop friend JD, who I'd
met while I was still working at the News. He'd
stopped by in street close of course, because he usually
worked undercover, park his motorcycle out front and come up
on the porch and talk.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
What was he like, JD?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
He was a tough boy, ex Special Forces in Vietna,
and his job with Miami Dade Sheriff's Office was felony Warrens,
which means he had to bring in the guys who
were running from the law, who jumped bail, and.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Usually pretty dangerous people.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
So he'd go into the roughest parts of Miami, put
a gun to the fugitive head, and bring them out
by himself. He said that if he worked alone, because
if you worked with a partner, you might get yourself killed.
When I tell JD about Intercept, he sort of smiles
and says it sounds kind of hinky to him, which
was cop talk at the time for suspicious or illegal.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Naturally, I think this is very cool, perhaps a bit
enamored by the danger and the sense of adventure. Stanford
was all too willing to dive into the new role
of private investigator by tackling the next assignment Intercept, and
Bob Adams tossed his way.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
The first job was a surveillance job.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
He wanted me to follow a doctor who's getting divorced.
The wife had hired them for some reason, it never
clear to me. She wanted to know what he was doing.
Bob had me do this, he said, the doctor's going
to be picking up the two little boys must have
been at the mother's house at this address tomorrow night.
(10:16):
Just follow and see where they go. Why the wife
would have wanted to know this, I have no idea,
but the house was sort of at the bottom of
a hill. I parked up the hill, looking down towards
the house. It's already dark, and lights came on in
the front porch. A man and two little boys came
out in the lights, walked towards his car and started
(10:40):
to get in, and I started to get nervous they
get away before I wouldn't be able to keep up
with them. So I started the car, which turned on
the lights right away and sort of blasted them with light.
And one of the kids said, Daddy, Daddy, someone's following us.
(11:00):
That was my first job, and I was an utter
failure at it. I was discovered by eight year old
I just sort of slunk off, let the car roll down,
turned off the first left I could, and that was that.
The next morning went into Bob and I told him
what had happened. I said, Bob, I'm sorry. He said, oh,
don't worry about it. Don't worry about it, and laughed,
(11:23):
he has had this giggle. And he pulled out a
roll of bills turned out to be hundreds, all hundreds,
and he started peeling them off for me. I think
I peeled off five hundreds, and he said, good work.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
I'll let you know what. I have another job for you.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
If being handsomely rewarded for his ineptitude did strike Stamford
his odd, he didn't let it keep him from taking
on another job with Intercept.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Days later he had another job. It was the same
doctor again, and this time I was smarter. I followed
the doctor. He had a sports car. I think they
had a Porsche. A decent interval to an apartment building.
A young lady came out of the apartment building, got
in his car, followed them to a motel, sort of
(12:21):
a CD motel on the outskirts of Miami. And after
they parked. It was late in the afternoon, almost dusk.
I pulled into the same parking lot at the other
end of the parking lot and waited.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
And waited, and.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Next thing I know, someone is tapping on my window
with a coin or something, shouting, wake up, asshole.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So you fell asleep on the job.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah, And when I look out the windshield. The doctor's
car has gone and there is JD grinning at me.
He says, don't worry, I'm not going to get you fire.
So we go to an all night diner and he
clues me in, and what he tells me is the
best he can figure out. I'm just there to handle
the stuff that comes in from the Yellow Pages so
(13:12):
the rest of the guys can tend to the real business,
which is making the real money, which was the drug business.
Of course, this is Miami, and so I go in
the next morning to apologize, and Bob does the same
thing as before. It says, don't worry about it. The
main thing is we can tell his old lady that
her husband and his girlfriend went to the motel. That's
(13:35):
all she cares about, just wants something to be pissed
off about. And then he peels off another five one
hundred dollar belts, at which point I say, hey, Bob,
now that's really generous of you, but just so you know,
I do understand what my job here is, and that's
to handle the stuff that comes in from the yellow pages,
because you guys are too busy with other matters, right,
(13:56):
And he looks at me does sort of a double take,
and then he laughs and peels off another couple hundred
or so, says, let's go get a couple of drinks,
and this time you're buying, And just like that, I'm
one of the guys.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
What was going through your head? So obviously your first
two assignments weren't exactly home runs. Yet you're making a
ton of money, a ton of money given the time,
particularly cash.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
Yeah. I thought it was a great job.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
I mean, no matter what I did, I got paid
very well, and I got to hang around talking with
these guys who had great stories.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
They'd talk about their adventures and so take me into that.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
On top of being an investigation firm, it was staffed
with some really charismatic, intriguing guys. Just tell me a
little bit about stepping into that world.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
That was the payoff for me. I didn't that much
about the money. They were willing to talk, and the
people who've lived lives like that really have a lot
of stories and they want to talk about other people
don't understand how unusual their lives are.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Sometimes, especially it would seem the head of Intercept, Bob Adams.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Bob loved to talk and since I was no longer
in the journalism business. A boy did have some stories
to tell. It turns out all the top guys that
intercept had been in military intelligence or the CIA.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Bob had been with.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
A military intelligence unit in Frankfurt, Germany that he said
provided logistical support for professional assassins working for the United States.
Another guy on the board had been the CIA station
chief in Miami during the Bay of Pigs time.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
So what was the tie between the Central Intelligence Agency
and Miami, Cuba, and in particular the CIA's secret war
to outs Fidel Castro. In fact, the CIA's largest outpost
in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies was the infamous
JM wave station at the University of Miami campus. The
(16:13):
operation left many former agents in the region with some
pretty interesting resumes in the nineteen eighties. Did Williams have
a military background too or intelligence?
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Yeah, they said that Clay Williams, whose spot I guess
you could say I took the detective Agency, had been
with military intelligence.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
If you were involved with the front end stuff, the
sort of business they get from calls on the Yellow Pages.
What were the military intelligence guys doing with anything that
had to do with drugs For the most part.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
That was really above my pay grade.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
But Bob did tell me one story about the time
he and a couple of the guys had to go
up to Georgia to clean.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
Some moldy money.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Not launder money, but clean some money that had been
stored underground so long that it.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Was getting moldy.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Bob said he cleaned it mostly in a washer dryer,
and that he got one tenth of all they were
able to salvage.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
What was in Georgia. Why did he have to go
to Georgia to clean money?
Speaker 4 (17:20):
Oh? Yeah, sure, That's where Lamar was, Lamar Chester.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
And it was no big secret at all that their
biggest client at the time was this dashing dope pilot
by the name of Lamar Chester.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
So who was Lamar Chester to interceptor Bob Adams.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
To Bob, Lamar was a legend among dope pilots, one
of the first to start flying marijuana directly from Colombia.
He had an island in the Bahamas that was sort
of a motel six for dope pilots making the run
from South America. Lamar gotten into the business in Miami,
but his home base was now a chicken ranch up
(18:00):
in northern Georgia.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
That's where he was flying into.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Now, in such an infamous era of drug smuggling, what
made Chester stand out?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Bob was fascinated by Lamore. He said his nickname was
Captain America. He thought he looked like the Marlborough Man,
and he said when you saw him, he usually had
a girl on each arm.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
So, if Chester was involved with drug smuggling, an intercept
was involved with Chester. Did you ever stop to think
that that might have played a role in Clay Williams murder?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
If I did, I didn't spend too much time thinking
about it. It was a place I didn't really really
want to.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Go, I guess, or maybe it was intentionally rationalized.
Speaker 6 (18:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Well, the way Bob explained it to me was that
Clay was sort of a facilitator. He'd hang out of
the Prime Pub and used the payphone on the wall.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Remember this was.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Well before the day of cell phones, and he'd connect
suppliers with pilots, or say, set up pilots with offload cruise.
The way Bob explained it, just about every bar in
Miami catered to a particular level of the drug trade,
and the Prime Pub for example, was sort of mid level,
but exactly what Clay Williams was doing they got him.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
Killed, If that's what it was. Bob never told me
and I never asked.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
But didn't you think it was odd that here you
are working for a private investigation firm and they didn't
seem too interested in figuring out who had killed one
of their employees or why? I mean, did you ever
stop to think that maybe you could end up dead too?
Speaker 4 (19:38):
I was it a.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Place in my life where I really didn't care about this.
I think I was the only one I knew at
that time. He didn't carry a gun, which is probably
why no one shot at me. But I remember one
time going into Bob Adams and I said, Bob, I
got a threat. He said, oh, don't worry about the
ones you hear. And I was happy for the job.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Okay. But back to Clay Williams, there was no further
attempt to find out who killed him.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah, other than the initial dog and pony show of
driving me around after Clay was killed.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
So it didn't concern you at all that your new
place of employment seemed caught up in sketchy, dangerous drug
related activities.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
No, and to tell the truth, I actually thought it
was kind of cool, just what I was looking for
when I came to Miami. But I've got to say
that even at the time, dumb as I was, I
was at least smart enough to know that there's some
things you don't ask questions about, and Clay Williams's death
was probably one of them.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
What about now and now?
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, it's certainly one of the things about this story
I'd like to get to the bottom of.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
When I started scouring newspaper archives for any mention of
Williams either missing or being found, there was nothing which
immediately struck me as odd, especially if he were former
military intelligence. Since Phil had what he believed was his
full name.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Clay had slightly unusual names. It was Baines Clayton Williams.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
His date of birth, and that he was originally from
North Carolina. I'd put in a formal request for any
existing records with the Miami Dade Police Department on January
fifth of twenty twenty two, explaining I was hoping to
track down the police report on the murdered private investigator
from Miami whose body was found in the Everglades in
(21:38):
October of nineteen eighty one. In the meantime, Phil searched
the archives of old newspapers.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
The one thing I was able to find was an
obituary for Clay's mother, who died in twenty eleven in Charlotte,
North Carolina, and it listed her living sons and her
predeceased son, Baines Clayton Williams. And what turned out to
be really important because the surviving children of her deceased
(22:09):
son and their names were listed there.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
How many children did he have?
Speaker 4 (22:14):
He had had four kids.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Next, we tracked down Clay's wedding announcement to a woman
named Sandra.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
They were both young, a short announcement from the Charlotte paper.
They were married in nineteen sixty one June of nineteen
sixty one, and Clay was working at some electrical company.
She was working at a store. Very pretty girl. They
must have been a handsome couple.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Using the names of the couple's children, I was able
to do a reverse search of known relatives. After a
series of dead ends and disconnected numbers, I called Phil
with an update. I think I actually found Sandra. I
ended up calling the house that had her name listed. Also,
(22:58):
the man who I believe was her second husband, and
he answered and unfortunately she passed away five years ago.
But he was very open to my questions. He explained
that it really remains a cold case as far as
the family's concerned, that they never had any true answers
(23:22):
as to who murdered Clay or why. But he was
willing to link me with one of Clay's daughters, and
she ended up returning my phone call, and so I
spoke to her, and she also mentioned the large guys
at the funeral that you mentioned seeing, who you believe
(23:46):
were detectives.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
How old was she then?
Speaker 1 (23:48):
She would have been eight when her father passed. There
were four kids. Her older sister was twelve. She has
a twin sister who was also eight, and then there
was the youngest child. Her little brother was just two
months old when his father disappeared and ended up murdered.
Speaker 6 (24:09):
I have a.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Vague recollection of the mother holding that baby at a funeral.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah. She also says that her father's car was found
shortly after he disappeared in Texas, and that the car
was found laden with drugs. Had you heard of that?
Speaker 4 (24:33):
No, that's news to me. What conclusions did she draw
from that, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
She was very pragmatic about it. She said that she
didn't think that her father was linked to what they
found in the car, but then again, this was the
nineteen eighties and Miami.
Speaker 6 (24:53):
Indeed it was.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Eventually, Clay's daughter linked me with her elder sister, who
was also willing to speak with me, but not to
be interviewed. She did, though, suggest I reach out to
a couple named Ted and Roseanne, who were close friends
of her parents. Here's Ted.
Speaker 6 (25:23):
How I met Clay was through an associate of mine
at work who knew Clay from the military, introduced me
to Clay. I don't know how Clay got to be
to Miami, but I think he was looking for a
place to raise his children. He had three girls, and
he wanted to start a new life.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
And Clay made an immediate impression, just as he had
on Phil and Ruth in that bar in Parne when
he handed them his card.
Speaker 6 (25:54):
He was good looking, tall, he was taller than six feet.
He was lanky, very charming, nice smile, quick to laugh,
always good humored, very much a family man.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Family was what instantly connected the two men.
Speaker 6 (26:11):
We used together together with Clay and his family and
He was a very family oriented person, easy spoken and
charming to be around. We had a lot of fun
together whenever we were together for barbecues, help each other
around the house. We all had homes needed to repair,
(26:32):
one type or another. I remember working on Clay's house
one time, painting it, and we just got to know
the families and we're just associated in that way. Just
pure family relationships. Very handsome family, pretty wife.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Their wives also became very close friends, and though Ted
had an important job with the government employment agency, they
didn't spend too much time talking about their professional lives.
Speaker 6 (27:02):
Never talked to any business. Really. I knew what Clay did.
I knew he was a private investigator, and that's as
far as I went in terms of knowing what kind
of work he did.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Did you ever get the chance to visit Clay at Intercept,
the agency in Parne where he worked as a private investigator.
Speaker 6 (27:23):
Yeah. I was on an errand with Clay. He asked
me to ride with him someplace I don't pick up something,
maybe for the house, I don't remember right now, but
he said I have to stop offer at the office.
You want to come up?
Speaker 4 (27:37):
I said sure.
Speaker 6 (27:38):
He introduced me to Bob Adams and another fellow there.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
And I had.
Speaker 6 (27:44):
Understood from Clay that these were former intelligence people from
the federal government, whether it's CIA, army intelligence, they were
all associated. I think that's how Clay got to know
these people through the army and intelligence contacts. And I
was up there for a few minutes, looked around, and
(28:06):
it was a nice office, and they had what I
thought was an awfully large computer set up. You know,
it wasn't at that time anything that I've ever seen
in a small office. These weren't laptops us like what
today would be described as service in other words, that's
where all the main memory was contained. And no more
(28:30):
than that.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
You worked for a government agency, how would you compare
the technology of that computer compared to what you had
at your office.
Speaker 6 (28:42):
Most government offices have a desktop and a little serve
on the bottom. But this thing was, I mean to
describe it close to Xerox machine at that time, you know,
one of these heavy duty office machines. It was that
kind of setup. Clay said, this was their computer system.
(29:05):
I just was impressed that such a small office would
have such a an enormous setup for computers.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
And at the time because of the size of the
computer that would be directly in keeping with its capability,
so it would have been advanced and expensive at the time.
Speaker 6 (29:24):
I would imagine him. You know, you usually see those
in movies today where they could access almost anything as
they do in the movies. I don't know what these
guys accessed on that computer, but I'm sure it was
more than what a citizen could attain on a home
computer or an office computer.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
The computer capabilities of the agency stuck out to ted,
but there was nothing that stuck out as odd in
terms of Clay's job. Did he ever give you any
indication that he was worried about his safety or involved
with people who could be dangerous, No intercept.
Speaker 6 (30:05):
With their backgrounds. Were probably doing very sophisticated investigations on
the side for the government. That was my impression. Not
that they were involved in any of the local drug
business that was rampant in Miami at the time.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
I never suspected that, and if that were the case,
Clay probably wouldn't have brought you to his place of work.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
Well. I was quite happy with his employers over there.
They seem to have a good ripport. When I went
up to the office, and there was nothing sinister about
the place at all.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
But Intercept was a fairly new job for Clay. Correct.
Speaker 6 (30:48):
Yeah, he lived in Carolinas and he came into Miami.
He would have I don't know where he would have
known them from outside of Miami.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
And there was nothing about Clay's lifestyle that would suggest
he was enjoying the lucrative benefits and a legal source
of income would afford. Remember, the group of friends rotated
home maintenance projects to save money, and that lack of
money was also apparent when Clay's widow was left with
four kids, one of them a newborn.
Speaker 6 (31:17):
There was no money. She went to work. She had
to go to work. I mean, they depended on Clay's
income for everything, and.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
So they weren't stockpiling money anywhere.
Speaker 6 (31:30):
God No, Sandra had to go back to work as
soon as she could. She worked as a legal secretary.
She needed to support to support her family. I believe
she got some benefits from Social Security as a widows
with children or something like that, but that was certain
(31:50):
that didn't cover her expenses at the house and kids
in school and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
So Clay wasn't making a notable income at the time
immediately before his death, which was also unnotable, at least
in terms of the media coverage. There wasn't press attention
to his disappearance.
Speaker 6 (32:10):
No, no, there was nothing in the press. Why well,
I guess there were other stories. He had to remember.
Miami at that time was a wild town, and we
never saw anything in the press about it. I don't
even think there was an obituary column about Clay.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Do you remember where you were or how you first
learned that Clay's body had been found.
Speaker 6 (32:35):
Yeah, we were sitting with Sondra and maybe that's when
the police came in and informed her they found the
remains in the Everglades and suspected it was Clay, and
then they did some forensic work on the remains and
confirmed that it was Clay. But at that time I said, oh,
(32:56):
that can't be right. I always felt now, but he's
going to walk in because this is who Clay is.
He's very family oriented and half the time when you
Sandra had to go to work and the kids went
to school, and it was it was something that I
had to accept that he wasn't coming back.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Clay didn't return, although his car did show up as
his daughter mentioned in the Lone Star State.
Speaker 6 (33:25):
I don't know how it ever got to Texas. Anyways,
they found the car, Customs I believe was the agency
that contacted the family about the car.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Were law enforcement helpful to her at the time, I
don't think so.
Speaker 6 (33:40):
They wanted information from her, but they wouldn't give her
any information. That was that kind of relationship. It was
their investigation and you had no right to ask questions
about it.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Looking back now, do you have any theories as to
what had happened?
Speaker 6 (34:00):
Yeah, it pretty much confirms my suspicions that he was
on to something and that whoever he was on to
found out about it and he had him killed. I
thought it was more a high end gangster killing than
it was a drug related.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Thing like Phil and Clay's daughter. Ted also recalls a
very prominent police presence at Clay's memorial service.
Speaker 6 (34:25):
What I thought would be just family turned out to
be a parade of suits. I remember them lining up
against the wall standing and it just struck me as
so many of these law enforcement types, including the people
from Intercept, and it was unusual for that kind of
(34:45):
group to be at a funeral. And if anybody watches
enough police TV. They always noticed that the police are
always there at a suspected death funeral, but this was
unusually law group. There must have been about a dozen
of them in a small reception room at a memorial
(35:07):
funeral place. It was crowded, you know, for a small
room with these guys standing around. It's the only way
I could describe it. It wasn't a massive room, but
these guys were filling up the space.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
So they were hard to ignore. He couldn't take Nor
did you get the feeling at the time that they
were there to send a message.
Speaker 6 (35:29):
No. I kind of suspected that they were there because
they had some interest in Clay, not a message, just
wanted to pay their respects to a colleague.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
But funeral guests aside who would have killed Clay and
why his children were left without a father and without
answers to questions that have remained for more than forty years.
Ted still struggles with the senselessness, just as he did
after Clay's death, Even after.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
They found body and we had the memorial service. I
just couldn't believe that Clay wouldn't be walking in the
door one day. But it never happened, just carrying around
his cremains in the car until they were disposed of
by our friend. It typrovided what was the remaining of
(36:19):
Clay because the cremains were in a box like a
three by five box, an index card box that's about
the size of it, and normally cremains go in a
larger container, but there wasn't much of him to dispose
of it, and our friend, usual friend took his ashes
(36:43):
out to the ocean and put him in the water,
which was a very sad experience because the girls were there.
That pretty much ended the story of Clayton a little
box of ashes dispersed at seen a very good friend.
It was a trauma that the family lived through for
(37:06):
many years. They never really had closure.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
So why didn't the police or intercept ever get to
the bottom of who killed Clay Williams Back to Phil Stanford.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, that's a big question that's still hanging out there.
One explanation, one possible explanation is that somehow.
Speaker 4 (37:27):
They were involved.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
I mean, there was a lot of corruption in the
Sheriff's department at that time. In fact, half of the
homicide squad twenty eight to fifty six were either under
suspension or under indictment. They've been taking money off of
dead bodies and undoubtedly involved in the drug trade, so
it's possible they had some sort of deal with Clay,
(37:50):
which would explain why they've lost the records.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
For God's sake, another possibility is that he was working
with them as some kind of an formant, and maybe
Intercept had something to do with his death.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
I certainly didn't think so at the time, but the
more we look into it, the more possible it seems,
at least that Intercept connections had something to do with them.
I know that Clay's friend had the idea that he
was working for the government at that time. If he
was working for the government, it was because he'd been
caught by law enforcement and turned into an informant.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Unless Devil's Advocate he was there undercover.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
That's so unusual that at this level to have an
undercover cop posing as.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
A drug dealer.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
But how would you also explain the fact that his
family had no money. I mean, the friend group were
taking turns and helping one another on house projects because
they didn't have money to hire outside contractors. And also
she had to go to work immediately after Clay's death, if.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
He had been working for the government in any sort
of official capacity, they would have had money. And so
the lack of money I think is more than likely
evidence that he Remember he just started an intercept they
were making the major part of their money from drugs,
(39:17):
and hadn't been there long enough. Let's suppose to cash.
Speaker 6 (39:21):
In on that.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
One of the major incentives for getting into some risky
business like drug dealing is that you don't have money
and you want to get it as much and as
fast as possible. And so you can turn that lack
of money around one hundred and eighty degrees and make
it an argument why he would have been involved, perhaps
in some sort of drug deal. And so for me,
(39:44):
the question is whose side was he on? Very likely
or there was a double cross, whether he double cross
someone or someone doublecross him and.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
He got killed and dumped in the everplage.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yeah, but why and by whom?
Speaker 4 (39:59):
Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (40:00):
And it's still an open murder case in Miami Dade
and they can't find the papers.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
Makes you wonder, doesn't.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
On the next murder of Miami, Phil Stamford returns to Washington.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
So I got in touch with a radical peace and
justice organization.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Leading him back to Miami with a dangerous new mission.
You're lucky you didn't get yourself killed.
Speaker 4 (40:29):
Yeah, I suppose so.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Before accepting a life altering invitation.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Lamour wants to meet me at the Mutiny, the hangout
for all the premier drugs monsters in Miami.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Murder of Miami is a production of iHeart Radio. Executive
producers are Lauren Wright Pachecko, Taylor Chicoine, and Phil Stamford.
Written by Phil Stamford and Lauren Bright Pacheco, Audio editing
and sound design by Nicholas Harder, Van Tyer and Taylor Show,
featuring music by Evan Tyre, Bill Mayer, John Murchison and
(41:05):
Taylor Chackoigne. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get the stories that matter
to you
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