TX Observer: “Then, as her new book, Bringing Ben Home, describes, Spencer’s story also became her business. Hagerty plunged into a seven-year-long search for new evidence that could help free Spencer and for the deeper reasons behind his wrongful conviction. She began with an investigative piece for The Atlantic in 2018 that recounted how she’d helped a private detective interview previously unheard witnesses.
At one point, she stood on the doorstep of a modest Dallas home alongside that detective hoping to find a witness when he abruptly “placed his hands on my shoulders and silently moved me to the side,” she wrote. His experience, he told her, was that sometimes hostile witnesses shot through a door before answering. It was a precaution that as a door-knocking journalist she’d never previously considered. The evidence they uncovered, along with a review by a different Dallas DA, John Creuzot, ultimately led to Spencer’s release in March 2021.
But she kept thinking about Spencer long after that. For Hagerty, covering this case has been a transformative journey. As she shares in a related essay, “My reporting forced me to confront some bigger lessons about life, truth, and faith.”
The resulting book is a compelling page-turner both about Spencer, a hard-working married Texan who was unjustly convicted of murder, and about the causes of his wrongful conviction that include mishandled and lost crime scene evidence, flawed eyewitness testimony, discounted alibi witnesses, a lying jailhouse snitch, and the failure to investigate an alternative suspect—a violent serial robber from the same neighborhood.”