When a narcotics lieutenant is shot execution-style in his own garage by a Dixie Mafia hitman who walks free, an innocent man is condemned to die in his place — and the prosecutor who put him there uses the conviction as a launchpad to a federal dynasty that spans five decades, two generations, and is still standing today. Now, as new evidence threatens to tear it all down, the parties who built their lives on the lie will do anything to protect it.
10-Part Audio Documentary Series · Audio First · Film & Television Development
An innocent man condemned to death. A hitman still free. A federal judge who built a dynasty on the conviction. And one man, now 68, still fighting — because the killer still lives in the hills.
MURDER, ETC. is a ten-part audio documentary series — cinematic in scope, novelistic in character, urgent in stakes. It is the true story of Charles Wakefield Jr.: a 21-year-old husband and father with no criminal record who was sentenced to die in the electric chair for a double murder he did not commit, and who has spent 47 years insisting on the truth of who he is and what happened to him.
The story moves in three acts. A professional execution in broad daylight — two men shot behind the left ear in what even the Sheriff declared a mob hit. The railroading of an innocent man by a prosecutor who needed a conviction, a Dixie Mafia network that needed a scapegoat, and a jury of twelve white men who delivered one. And the long, unfinished fight: new evidence surfacing now, a new trial petition filed, and the likely killer still breathing in the surrounding hills.
Designed from the ground up as the first chapter of a larger story, the series carries the archive, the access, and the dramatic architecture to become a feature documentary or a limited drama series. The audio is where the voices live. Everything else flows from there.
In 1975, Greenville, South Carolina was essentially lawless. Just a decade removed from Jim Crow and five years since its school system had been forcibly desegregated, the city was suspended between its past and its present — unable to escape one, unwilling to enter the other. The cotton mills that had been the lifeblood of the region had shuttered. Tens of thousands of workers, white and Black, were laid off. Storefronts emptied. The urban core hollowed out. The city was dying. In 1975, Greenville County held the highest murder rate in the state, earning it a nickname its civic leadership preferred not to hear: Little Chicago. Its police force was little help. They were themselves a tool of local organized crime.
The Hillbilly Mafia — the Dixie Mafia — had made Greenville its base of operations, infiltrating the police department and placing officers on its payroll. It did not avoid law enforcement. It purchased law enforcement. They robbed Table Rock Pharmaceutical Laboratories three times. The final heist netted a barrel of pure amphetamine worth one million dollars. To move product at that scale they needed protection — and had it: the Sheriff's own second-in-command, Chief Deputy Carl "Bub" Skelton, was their man inside. The operation required the county narcotics unit to stay blind. Lieutenant Frank Looper was not blind. He was getting close.
Looper was 35, recently promoted, methodical — a genuinely honest cop in a substantially compromised department. Warning shots had been fired at his parents' home a month before the murders. He didn't back off. He had hand-picked his narcotics squad, including Frank Walker, one of the first Black deputies in the county's history: Army-trained, sharp, and trusted. In December 1974, Walker was discovered to have ties to the Mafia's pharmaceutical operations and was fired. Six weeks before the murders.
Into this world stepped William "Billy" Wilkins — 32, youngest 13th Circuit Solicitor in state history, former legal aide to Senator Strom Thurmond: the man who filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 24 hours and 18 minutes, who voted against both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was Wilkins' first capital murder prosecution. Greenville was outraged, law enforcement was pushing hard, and the city's Black community had no political leverage to push back. He needed a conviction. He got one — no physical evidence, no murder weapon, an all-white jury, a defense attorney assigned 26 days before trial, two witnesses he manufactured and concealed. The case made his career. Wilkins ran Reagan's 1980 South Carolina campaign. Reagan made him his first federal judicial appointment. He rose to Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. His son Walter now holds his old seat — and may soon argue in court to uphold the conviction.
Charles Wakefield Jr. was not destroyed by one corrupt cop or one dishonest witness. He was destroyed by the entire architecture of a particular time and place — Jim Crow's residue, a collapsed economy, a criminal network that had made law enforcement its instrument, and a prosecutor who understood that convicting the right kind of man was more useful than finding the truth. The men who built their careers on that delivery are, in 2025, still collecting the dividends.
This case made careers and destroyed lives — and the same lie is responsible for both. That is what makes MURDER, ETC. something rarer than a wrongful conviction story: it is a story about what happens over the long sweep of a lifetime when injustice is allowed to operate in the dark. We watch it calcify. We watch the men who benefited from it ascend — to federal benches, to political dynasties, to the kind of institutional respectability that is its own protection. And we watch the man it buried try, for nearly five decades, to claw his way back into the light.
What this series reveals, episode by episode, is the full human web that a single lie requires to survive. A prosecutor who needed a verdict. A sheriff whose department was compromised. A Salvation Army volunteer who accepted a reward. A teenage boy who accepted his freedom. A television reporter who broadcast a story he hadn't fully read. A parole board that reversed itself under pressure. A federal judge who built a dynasty. Each of them — whether they understood it fully or not — became load-bearing walls in a structure designed to keep one man buried and one truth underground. Hate and love. Lies and forgiveness. White and Black. Criminal and innocent. Judge and hitman. All of these lives — in their full complexity, their self-justifications, their moments of courage and cowardice — are woven together by a deception so large, and so long-standing, that dismantling it threatens everything built on top of it.
The system it props up is not abstract. It has names and addresses. Billy Wilkins lives in Greenville. His son Walter holds his father's old prosecutorial seat. Frank Walker — the man most likely to have pulled the trigger — lives in the surrounding hills and recently left a voicemail that the production team has obtained. The star witness who may have sent Charles to death row died and left behind a gun that matches the murder weapon, hidden in a shoebox in her closet. Nothing has been resolved. Everything is still in motion.
MURDER, ETC. does not merely document this injustice. It pursues it. With 24 hours of original on-camera interviews — including the prosecutor himself, the victim's family, and Charles Wakefield Jr. speaking with the hard-won clarity of a man who has been preparing his testimony for fifty years — and 30 hours of archival audio that includes a jailhouse confession, recorded death threats, and a voicemail from the likely killer, this series has the material to do what the courts have so far refused: force the truth into the open.
Charles Wakefield Jr. is 68 years old. He has never stopped fighting, and he has never stopped telling the truth. This series exists to make sure that, finally, the truth is loud enough to matter — to bring justice to Charles Wakefield Jr. and to expose, once and for all, the lie that has protected the men who wronged him. The reckoning is overdue. The evidence is in hand. The people are talking. The only question left is whether anyone in power is listening.
A clear January morning. Vera Looper at her kitchen window. Her husband Rufus, 57, working in the garage. Their son Frank — a narcotics Lieutenant — still asleep upstairs in his slippers after a night shift. At 10 a.m., she sees a young Black man in a straw fedora pacing at the end of the driveway. He walks away. At 1:30 p.m., he's back.
Vera sends Frank to check on his father. The stranger sees him coming, turns, walks back in. Two shots — back to back, in the same breath. The stranger sprints down the street. Vera runs out to find both men bleeding from their heads, mortally wounded on the garage floor.
Both .32-caliber slugs placed behind the left ear. Execution-style. A professional job. Sheriff Williams doesn't wait for an investigation — he declares it a hit. He was right. He just didn't know the answer was inside his own department.
What Vera saw matters: a man 5'10", 160 lbs, short bushy hair, small straw fedora, platform shoes. Charles Wakefield Jr. stands 6'2" with a towering Afro. Vera never wavered. She said until the day she died: the man who killed my family is not the man they convicted.
Frank Walker was a cop. One of the first African American deputies in the Greenville County Sheriff's Department, he was hand-picked by Lieutenant Looper himself — Army-trained marksman, smart, ambitious. Looper felt lucky to have him.
In December 1974, Walker was fired for involvement in the Dixie Mafia's pharmacy burglaries. Six weeks before the murders. He was not happy about it.
Three weeks after the Looper murders, Walker carried out another contract killing for the Dixie Mafia. He confessed to that one. He served eleven years. Someone smoothed his path.
"Fast Eddie" Williamson — Dixie Mafia original, nothing left to protect — says Walker told him in a jailhouse conversation that he killed the Loopers. That Looper "deserved it" for getting him fired.
The physics alone tell the story. Looper walked into that garage armed. His service revolver was found unfired on the floor. He didn't draw it because he recognized the man who walked in. He turned his back. Frank Walker today lives in the remote hills surrounding Greenville. We have his voicemail. We intend to go find him.
At 10:30 on the night of the murders, police pound on the door of Mary Ann Wakefield's house. Her husband Charles is in bed, their three-year-old daughter asleep beside them. He is 21. He has no criminal record. He is arrested in his mother-in-law's blue cardigan sweater, on the basis of a single informant's tip: a man nicknamed "Wacky" Wakefield did it. That is the entirety of the case against him.
His hands test negative for gunpowder residue. He passes a state polygraph — the examiner is adamant: no knowledge whatsoever. He passes a sodium pentothal truth serum test. He was at the unemployment office that morning, passbook in hand. His physical description doesn't match Vera's by six inches and a five-inch Afro. None of it matters.
Eight months after the murders, with no physical evidence, no weapon, no fingerprint, the prosecution gets its miracle: Mae McIntyre, an elderly Salvation Army volunteer, comes forward to say she was in the Loopers' driveway that day and passed Charles on his way in. A teenage armed-robber named Wyatt Earp Harper testifies he was Charles' lookout. Twenty-five years later, Harper will recant under oath: he never knew Charles, never witnessed anything, and was directed to lie by the detective and the prosecutor in exchange for leniency. After her death, Mae McIntyre's son finds a .32 Rossi revolver — the exact model and caliber of the murder weapon — hidden in a shoebox in her closet.
Billy Wilkins was 33 years old. He needed this case. He won it.
Wilkins — former aide to segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, youngest 13th Circuit Solicitor in state history — assigned defense counsel 26 days before trial, hid his star witness from the defense team, ignored the witnesses pointing toward organized crime, and explained away Vera Looper's contradicting description as the grief of a mother. Before an all-white jury, in less than two weeks, he won a death sentence.
"Held in confinement until April 26, 1976, when he is to be electrocuted. May God have mercy on your soul."
Charles Wakefield Jr. is 22 years old. He has no criminal record.
South Carolina's Central Correctional Institute was the oldest continuously operating prison in America. The violence was constant. Of the 282 people executed in its history, 208 were Black. As a convicted cop-killer, Charles was marked from arrival. He spent two years on death row watching the brick death house outside his cell window, memorizing each course of masonry, praying in its shadow.
In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled South Carolina's death penalty unconstitutional. His sentence was commuted. He moved into general population and survived The Tunnel — the quarter-mile corridor where men were knifed or beaten to death so often that blood dried on the floor before it could be cleaned. He walked it every day for thirty-five years. He taught himself law. He wrote thousands of letters. He kept his record clean.
In 2001, the parole board granted his release. Then a local TV reporter broadcast police objections — the detective calling it a miscarriage of justice — and the board reversed itself. Charles spent another decade in prison. The same reporter would spend the next twenty years of his life trying to undo what he had done.
Charles was finally paroled in 2009. He was 55. He had lost his marriage, most of his daughter's childhood, and his right to live in his hometown. He still cannot return to Greenville without written permission.
What lifts this story beyond wrongful conviction into something darker — something with the architecture of a great American crime novel — is what happened to Billy Wilkins after.
In 2020, his son Walter was elected 13th Circuit Solicitor — the same seat the father used to build his career. Walter may soon be required to appear in court to argue against Charles Wakefield's petition for a new trial. The son defending the conviction of the father. The dynasty completing its circle.
The most remarkable thing about Charles Wakefield Jr. is not what was done to him. It is what he did not become. He did not become violent. He did not stop believing. He taught himself law, wrote thousands of letters, maintained his prison record, and kept the interior life of a man who knows the truth about himself even when every institution insists otherwise.
This series is not looking backward at a closed case. It is documenting an open one.
Don McIntyre found a .32 Rossi revolver hidden in a shoebox in his mother's closet. Exact model and caliber of the murder weapon. FBI tested it at Quantico: inconclusive — they could not rule it out. A private ballistics lab is testing it now.
A former Sheriff's mistress wrote threatening to expose his role in a law enforcement cover-up. Found in a police locker, reported to City Council — we have that recording — leaked to the press, then vanished. The state investigation found nothing.
Frank Walker — the likely killer, still in the hills — has left a voicemail obtained by the production team. We are going to confront him in person.
Wyatt Earp Harper testified he never knew Charles, never witnessed anything, and was directed to lie by Wilkins and the lead detective. The judge ruled it insufficient. The court will be asked to rule again.
A former cop himself. His mother's account never varied in decades — not once. As an officer, he knows what that means: rehearsed, not remembered. He has the gun. He believes his mother sent an innocent man to die.
He entered this story at 21 as a husband, a father, a man looking for work. He has maintained his innocence for 47 years — through death row, The Tunnel, two wrongful parole denials, and the destruction of every relationship a normal life requires. He taught himself law. He paints. He is precise. In every interview frame he projects not victimhood but insistence — the particular, unbreakable insistence of a man who knows the truth about himself and will not stop until the world does too.
Hand-picked by the man he most likely killed. One of the first Black deputies in Greenville's Sheriff's Department. Army marksman. Fired for corruption six weeks before the murders. Convicted of a separate contract killing three weeks after them. Served eleven years. Still lives in the remote hills surrounding Greenville. His property only recently got running water. We have his voicemail.
He prosecuted Charles with no physical evidence, hid his star witness from the defense, and won a death sentence that launched a career. Reagan's first federal judicial appointment. Chief Justice of the Fourth Circuit. His son now holds his old prosecutorial seat and may soon argue against Charles' new trial. He has agreed to be interviewed. He is eloquent, composed, and entirely certain of himself — which, in the face of everything that has since emerged, is the series' most chilling element.
For nearly two decades she has fought for the wrongly convicted. Her analysis of Charles' case found every textbook red flag: Black defendant, no physical evidence, purchased testimony, all-white jury, recently desegregated Southern city. She has filed a motion for a new trial. She is methodical, brilliant, and deeply personal about the stakes.
He robbed banks, stole cars, and shot people who got in his way. He grew up with Frank Looper — on opposite sides of the law their whole lives, with a persistent, peculiar fondness for the cop who was once his childhood friend. He claims Walker told him in a jailhouse conversation that he killed the Loopers. He has nothing left to protect and no apparent reason to lie.
In 2001, his broadcast of police objections to Charles' parole triggered the public outcry that reversed the parole board. Charles spent nearly another decade in prison because of Willis' story. Willis read the full file. He spent the next twenty years of his life trying to correct it — gathering the archival materials now at the center of the new trial petition.
A former officer himself. His mother Mae told the same story, in the same words, with the same details, every single time for decades — and as a cop, he recognized that as rehearsed, not remembered. He found the Rossi .32 in her closet. His position is almost unbearably poignant: the son of the woman who may have sent an innocent man to die, now the primary source of the evidence that might set him free.
He installed the burglar alarms meant to protect Greenville's businesses. He started finding cops robbing the same businesses. He watched Sheriff's Deputy Carl "Bub" Skelton pick up a stealing officer and a bag of stolen goods from the bushes one night. He ran for Sheriff. Skelton called his house and threatened his wife and children. Brown recorded the call. His audio archive — including death threats on tape — is one of the series' most explosive materials.
January 31, 1975. A clear morning. Vera Looper at the window. Two shots. We hear the story the way she heard it: suddenly, without warning, and then forever.
Who is Charles Wakefield Jr.? We trace his life in West Greenville — the mills, the marriage, the night he was arrested in his pajamas. No evidence. No match. A CI named him, and the city needed a name.
The leads police chose not to follow: the escaped murderer bragging about killing a cop, the Dixie Mafia trail, the word before the murders that a hitman was in town.
The full architecture of Greenville's corruption — the Mafia, the pharmacy heists, the compromised Sheriff's department, and Frank Walker's firing — the motive the prosecution never mentioned.
Mae McIntyre arrives. Wyatt Earp Harper testifies. We hear what Lynn West saw before the trial. We ask what it means that both witnesses were eventually exposed.
The trial. No evidence. No weapon. An all-white jury. A defense attorney assigned 26 days before. Star witness hidden. A death sentence.
Two years on death row. The 1978 Supreme Court ruling. And then thirty-five years of The Tunnel — Charles on what survival required, what it cost, and what it protected.
2001. Harper names Wilkins — now Chief Justice of the Fourth Circuit — and Bridges, now Police Chief. The judge rules it insufficient. The machine keeps turning.
The new evidence. The Rossi .32 in the shoebox. The FBI results. The blackmail letter found and then vanished. Frank Walker's voicemail. We go to the hills.
A new trial petition filed. Walter Wilkins in his father's seat. Charles at 68, still on parole, still banned from his hometown. The question is not whether Charles is innocent. The question is whether the truth, after 47 years, has any power left.
This is not a pitch for a story we hope to tell. It is a pitch for a story we already have the material to tell — completely, cinematically, with the primary source depth of the great documentary works of the last decade.
The audio series is the first and truest telling — the version where the voices themselves carry the weight that no actor can replicate. It is also the foundational document for everything that follows.
The archive is theatrical documentary-ready: on-camera access to every principal, original case photographs, ongoing legal proceedings, and the live confrontation with Frank Walker. The feature uses the audio series as its scaffold and focuses on Charles today, the new evidence, and whether justice actually arrives.
Two timelines — 1975 Greenville and the present day — intercut across ten episodes. Charles as protagonist across five decades. Wilkins as the antagonist whose arc from young prosecutor to federal dynasty never fully resolves. Walker haunting the frame, never caught. Closer to When They See Us than O.J. — but with one thing neither had: the story is still live.
Charles Wakefield Jr. is 68 years old.
The witnesses are aging. The killer is alive but not forever. The physical evidence is in a laboratory right now. A new trial has been filed for.
This is not a cold case. This is a living injustice.
Marabella Productions · Audio Up Media
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