After a run of high-profile cases where I helped clear people falsely accused of serious violent crimes, I crossed paths with a man headed straight for death row. It was the fall of 1989. The crime was unspeakably cruel. He had not yet been convicted. He begged me to take his case and conduct a defense investigation.
The problem was simple and brutal. The evidence against him was overwhelming.
He already had a public defender and a full investigative team. His criminal history ran for pages. The media had branded him “The Devil.” That was not hyperbole. That was the headline.
He called me from the jail, and later from death row, at least two dozen times. I never treated the calls as an annoyance. I listened every time. My answer never changed. There was nothing to impeach. No loose thread. No unexplored lead. No alternate theory that survived contact with the evidence.
I watched his case climb the appellate ladder year after year. Nothing improved. In modern capital litigation, time stretches endlessly. Decades pass before the final outcome. In Spencer’s case, time was not his ally. He died on Arizona’s death row at age sixty from an MRSA infection.
This is the case he was convicted of.
On May 20, 1989, a passing motorist discovered the body of a young woman burned beyond recognition along a roadside. She was wearing white boots and nothing else from the waist down. Her arms were positioned behind her as if she had been bound. Dental records identified her as Shandora Johnson-Morrow, a twenty-year-old hair stylist and community college student.
She had been stabbed twice in the back. One wound was fatal. Blood was present in her mouth, nose, and airways, indicating she lived long enough to aspirate blood through a punctured lung. The medical examiner testified there was no carbon monoxide in her blood, meaning death may have preceded the burning. He could not rule out that she was alive when set on fire. Shallow breathing or the rapid combustion caused by an accelerant could explain the absence of carbon monoxide. Evidence showed an accelerant had been used. Semen was found in her vagina and had been deposited within six hours of death.
Johnson-Morrow left work at a Tempe beauty salon around 9:00 p.m. on May 19, 1989. She and a coworker planned to meet friends at a nightclub. They stopped at a convenience store so the coworker could use an ATM. When she returned, she saw Clinton Spencer talking to Johnson-Morrow, who was seated in her silver-gray 1982 Honda Accord. Spencer appeared to be asking for a ride. Johnson-Morrow unlocked the passenger door and let him in. She smiled and reassured her friend that everything was fine.
At the nightclub, Spencer stayed in the parking lot, claiming a friend had his car. When the coworker left around 11:30 p.m., Spencer was sitting on Johnson-Morrow’s car. He aggressively asked the coworker for a ride. She refused. As she drove away, he tried to open her locked passenger door. She escaped. Johnson-Morrow left the bar alone fifteen to twenty minutes later. No one ever saw her alive again.
ATM surveillance later showed Spencer using Johnson-Morrow’s bank card shortly before 1:00 a.m. He attempted to withdraw money. Another customer saw Spencer at the machine with a silver foreign car and a white female passenger inside. Moments later, surveillance photos captured Spencer forcing Johnson-Morrow to withdraw $140, the maximum allowed. The final image showed her handing him the cash.
Later that morning, Spencer contacted an undercover police officer and sold him Johnson-Morrow’s car for $180. The meeting was videotaped. Spencer was described as jovial. He openly discussed stealing the car from a young woman and referenced the convenience store, the bar, and another woman whose car alarm beeped. He had a cut on his left hand. Blood found in the victim’s car matched Spencer and not the victim.
When police connected the car to the murder, Spencer contacted the undercover officer again. He asked for money and a gun and said he needed to leave town. He was arrested.
After waiving his Miranda rights, Spencer gave multiple contradictory statements. He first claimed he was alone all weekend. Then he admitted stealing the car but blamed the undercover officer. Later, he told a reporter that he and the victim were secret lovers and that masked men armed with assault rifles abducted her.
Witnesses testified that months before the murder, Spencer had spoken about taking his own wife into the desert, raping her, stabbing her, and burning her body to destroy evidence.
He was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, theft, and trafficking in stolen property.
I have spent my career believing in wrongful convictions, police misconduct, and prosecutorial overreach. They exist. I have proven that. This case was different.
Some cases do not bend. Some evidence does not crack. And some defendants, no matter how many times they call, carry their guilt all the way to the grave.
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