Ben 00:01-00:04

Clay, welcome back to Crime Capsule. It's great to have you.

Clay 00:05-00:06

Enjoy it every time I come, brother.

Ben 00:09-00:48

1989, two years have gone by since Vieng Pho-Va-Sai has disappeared from southwest Georgia. She had gotten into this car with a fellow who was going to go allegedly help her fix her flat tire. That's the last time anybody saw her until a gentleman named Roy Leach shows up and can you describe for us what Roy Leach was doing in this very heavily forested area of southwest Georgia?

Clay 00:49-02:45

Roy Leach was a timber cruiser for Evergreen Timber out of Oak Lake, Alabama and they had a large track of land just outside of West Point, Georgia in Harris County in the Pine Lake region down there, area. And Mr. Leach was cruising timber. He was checking what the status was in the timber to see if it was ready to be cut or not and coming up with the value and this and that. And that's what he did for a living. He was a forester consultant. During that day, he came across what he saw to be a human skull laying on top of the ground. And of course he immediately backed away and went to summon help that he knew that something nefarious had probably happened there or somebody had just passed away, but there were some questions that needed to be answered. And Roy called the Harris County Sheriff's Office, Sheriff John Adams I think was at the time, He, when he found out that he was going to be looking for a, what could be a possible homicide, he immediately called the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and had them assign an agent to come over and go with him, meet with Leach and begin an investigation of what they were to find. And the case agent that was assigned that was, a friend of mine, Gary Roswell. And Gary was a excellent agent. He well educated, knew his business, pleasure to work with and be very dedicated to finding the truth. And in this case, he was the catalyst that put us where we needed to be.

Ben 02:47-03:13

Dog on a bone. Dog on a bone. You know, as I read your account of what happened just right when they found her and once Gary shows up, I mean, he attacked this case like just like nothing else. And I was wondering, can you tell us what condition was this body found in and how did the initial forensic investigation proceed once she'd been found?

Clay 03:14-07:36

Well, she was tied to a pine tree, a pine sapling, with strips of her own clothing that had been cut off. And her spinal column and so forth was at the base of the tree and her skull was, you know, animal activity had scattered some of it around. They immediately cordoned everything off contacted the medical examiner's office. Well, actually, the Georgia Crime Laboratory sent a technician to recover the remains. And during the initial identification, it took a few days because we're 50 miles away and two years away from being folicyte. And we're closer to Fort Benning. which has a very transient population, and a lot of those folks, you know, so that was the initial thought was maybe this was somebody that's missing out of the Columbus area. Well, it got to the point where one of the, within a few days, they had done a post-mortem on the skeletal remains with a skeletal autopsy, and they established the fact that this was, in fact, a oriental female. and she fell within the age range that Vianne Folder's side would have been. And a lady that worked in the Thomson office said, oh, I remember that Coweta County had a little oriental female that disappeared a couple of years ago, and that put them on that trail. And Gary Rothwell, did everything in the world that you could ask of anybody to do. In the end, they extracted, well, this was prior to the advent of DNA, but through some of the clothing remains that she had, she's had no dental work ever done. Her teeth were perfect. That was a blessing, but it didn't help the cause of the identity. But through clothing and some other things, they established the fact that it was, in fact, Vianne Fovassai. And as the case progressed, again, Gary Rothwell had done so much on the case that he literally worked it. You've got to remember, the GBI guys, they don't have a case. And I've always been able to take a case at a time with these old cases and work them to a conclusion or to whether they're an impasse. But they don't have that luxury. They got 25, 30 cases open, and they got to juggle them and do what they can do. But he took a special attachment to this case, I would say, simply because of everything that surrounded it. And he did an excellent job with it. And he just never was able to Actually, he got promoted and transferred after he'd worked on this case for nearly a year. And he presented it to grand juries in Muskogee County, and they kept saying, bring us more, bring us more. And at that time, they were involved in two capital cases that I think was the only reason that they didn't go ahead and indict the case is because they had so much of their resources working on those capital murder cases that were asked for the death penalty, that they were just trying to kick this can down the road to pick it up. But then Gary got transferred and promoted. And they handed it off to somebody else. And it went to the bottom of his stack. And by now, it's three years old. And there's no new leads and so forth to come forth. And it was presented again. And after that, they closed the case. pending new leads and information, and that never came.

Ben 07:38-08:37

So it fell silent. Let me ask you a couple questions. So I want to at least examine a few aspects of Gary's reinvestigation in that window of time, but before I do that, Did you ever learn what the, someone had to tell Veeing's family, you know, conclusive identification, you know, we found her, it's her. There'd been a massive search for her, of course, after she disappeared and, you know, everybody was just sort of like, there's no way this girl could have just disappeared randomly, that wasn't, you know, her behavior at all. So everybody knew there was some kind of foul play, right? But did you ever hear, what was the reaction from her father and her sister, and when the news finally became solid that it was her?

Clay 08:39-10:10

He was so distraught at her disappearance that they didn't even tell him that she'd been found in the condition that she was found in. Because of their involvement in the church there, and the school teachers and so forth that had such a close relationship with the family when they were trying to get assimilated into the American culture, some of the clothing that she had on was identified by some of those folks as being hers. And then when they actually found the remains and they, just through an accumulation of different things, they decided, yes, this is, in fact, Vieng Phobosai. Later on now, we did exhume her body, and we extracted some mitochondrial DNA from her, which follows a maternal line to completely ensure, because, you know, the first thing in the defense is gonna be, how you gonna charge with murder of Vieng Phobosai when this might not be Vieng Phobosai? But we got that DNA extracted and tested one of her sisters, and they came from the same maternal line, so it was Vieng-Phobosi. But that was after we exhumed her body, after I got involved. There were so many things.

Ben 10:10-10:23

You know, it's funny, Clay, you mentioned divine intervention, and I very much lean in that direction myself, but I also lean in the direction of shoe leather, you know, and I really appreciate the way that you write about You know, the way that Gary approached this with such a methodical bent as he reopened the case once she'd been found. Now, there's a couple specific things that he did that I wanted to ask you about, because you write about them in detail in your book. Number one, he went and he did a bunch of interviews with Manley's exes, all the women that Manley had been involved in, and they began to divulge a little bit more information about Manley's personality and his behavior, and critically, his movements around that time of October 1987. Can you just tell us a little bit about how that testimony began to take shape?

Clay 12:29-14:40

Well, back to that same thing, if you want to know the dirt on some folks, you go with the ex-wives. And a lot of it started with his parole officer, Mike Spear, who knew his history and this and that. And it led Gary to the ex-wives. And there was one in particular that there was supposed to be a, one of the ex-wives gave some information about a crime that We couldn't find anything, and Gary couldn't either, other than the fact that there was supposed to have been a sexual assault that occurred in 1971 that occurred in rural Chambers County, Alabama. where he abducted or attempted to abduct a young lady at Knife Point, forced her boyfriend in the trunk of a car. And it ended up that she got out of his grasp. He couldn't catch her. But those were things that Gary's investigation uncovered. But he never could find anything about it. It was like it never existed. And there was no… When I got to Kex later on, I thought, well, you know, maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was… So we checked Harris, Troop, Meriwether, Chambers and Lee County, Alabama, Randolph County, Alabama. just to see if she had been wrong. And we couldn't find out anything about it. Like it never existed. And there were some things in the end that will come out about that, that I can't explain how it got where it was. But there's a lot of things about this case I can't explain how they turned out like they did. But this was one of those.

Ben 14:43-15:35

So one thing that was pretty significant that comes out when Gary starts looking into it, well, they find his car. You know, last week we were talking about that El Camino he used to drive, and I have to say, maybe I just need to ask you, Clay, you write in the book that He'd had this very, very beautiful automobile and custom styling and all this kind of, you know, detail work done on it and the color scheme and paint scheme and very distinctive, all this kind of stuff. What kind of idiot goes and just gets a spray, a black re-spray on the surface of the car without even taking it all the way down to the primer? I mean, it's just the weirdest thing, but y'all found the vehicle, didn't ya?

Clay 15:36-17:15

We did. And actually, Gary did that before I was ever involved in the case. What had happened was when she initially got gone, there was a description this car gave out on local news channels. And he immediately took that classic vehicle and had it sprayed with flat black paint, right, just dead up over all the striping, everything. And as quick as he could, he sold it. And Gary found out where the car was and the folks that had painted the car and so forth. I mean, to me, it was, he had done enough at the time to, for God, you could have indicted the Pope in this case, but they, Muscogee County District Attorney's Office just didn't, they wanted more. And like I said, I think it was just a time thing with them. But then, because of the situation with Gary leaving and going to another part of the state, time ran out. And it went from 1989, 1990 to 2000. I guess about five when I got the case. It was actually kind of heartbreaking. And nobody's heart was broken any more than Gary Rothwell's.

Ben 17:17-17:27

Well, take us to that moment. I mean, how was it that you ended up coming on to this case almost 20 years after it had begun?

Clay 17:30-18:32

We were actually trying a case in Harris County where a young man was beaten to death and thrown out in 1990 of a vehicle to make it look like he'd fallen out of a vehicle. And that case had fallen cold. And some friends of mine with the GBI called me and said, hey, this is a case that we think you might have some luck with. And so I started with the case, and one of the people that did some initial investigation on the case was Gary Roffle. Of course, I knew Gary, Gary knew me. And we were sitting at the, actually in the defense had called Gary, and what their hope was, their hope was that 20 years later when I was investigating the case, there'd be some conflict in something that they found out and things that I found out that they could use to put reasonable doubt in the case. That didn't work out for him.

Ben 18:32-18:33

Yeah, drive a wedge.

Clay 18:33-20:15

Anyway, we were sitting on a bench in front of the courthouse in Hamilton, Georgia. And Gary said, Clay, how'd y'all get down here doing this? I said, well, the case started in the Colorado Circuit, which is who I was working in the DA's office for. And we came to find out that the murder actually happened in Harris County, and a body was moved. Because of that, our district attorney, Pete Scandalakis, and the Chattahoochee Circuit district attorney, a guy named Gray Conger, they collaborated and allowed us to come down and try the case, because we had the information on it and were most familiar with it, and the best chance of us getting a conviction was us doing it. So we were trying the McKean case. And I explained that to Gary, how that came about, and he said, Well, let me tell you about a case that I lay sleep over to this day. And he told me about the Yankovici. And he said, if there's any way in the world that y'all could pick this up and look at it, Clay, he said, this is a solvable case. And with his information, and I went back and reworked the case and found all these old witnesses and found new crimes and found some old ones that ain't nobody know anything about either. And we were able to come to a successful conclusion. I've never been any prouder of a piece of work of mine and somebody else's than in this case. These people, they deserve some answers. And we were able to give them some.

I'm going to have to annoy our beloved listeners terribly here and say that on July 12, 2005, you put handcuffs on Charles Manley and you arrested him for the murder of Vieng Phovisai. But to learn exactly how you got to that point, they are going to have to read this book, and I absolutely urge everybody to do so because it is such an incredible story. But I have a question for you, Clay, and it's a question which goes back to one of the themes that you have written about several times across your body of work. And you just alluded to it a moment ago again. which is this question of divine intervention, of luck, of coincidence. There's a lot of things we can call it. But whatever you want to call it, sometimes the universe just hands you something that you could never have found on your own, and it does so at the exact right time in the most powerful and dramatic ways. And I'm just going to ask you to tell us about Betty Moore, who is one of the key threads tying this whole thing together.

Clay 22:26-26:40

Every time I talk about this, I literally get chills. There's no way to explain this. That's the case in 1971. Betty Moore was attacked by Charles Travis Manley. And her boyfriend was forced into the trunk. She had a knife to her throat. And she was able to get away from him. And of course he couldn't catch her and he threatens him and says, you know, y'all don't say anything about this or else I'm gonna come back and I'll kill you. And of course they immediately went to the sheriff's office and the guy was charged with aggravated assault with intent to rape in Chambers County, Alabama. Well, he I checked. Chambers County, Alabama, there's never such a charge there. And he was taken in. He pled guilty, was able to come back in, withdraw the plea, plead to a lesser sentence outside the victims. And I don't understand how that took place, but it did. But because of that, there was no trace of the crime. During my investigation, my wife worked for the Troop County District Attorney's, I'm sorry, the clerk of the court. She was a clerk in the Troop County Criminal Superior Court. And she called me one afternoon and said, Clay, we are, myself and the girls, we're gonna go out to a local place called Locos and have, maybe get a drink and get something to eat. Do you wanna meet us out there? And I said, sure. Sounded like wings and beer to me, you know. So I went out there. There's five or six of the ladies there, and all of them knew me. And one of the ladies that I had doing some research on Manley about XYs, she at the table says, Clay, I have that information that you wanted on Charles Manley. If you'll come by the office tomorrow, I have it printed and it'll be ready for you. Well, one of the ladies, The other ladies that worked in the office, she had brought her sister-in-law with her. I'd never seen this woman before in my life. Didn't even know her name. She was introduced to me when I got to the table. But after Melanie said that, I walked off and was talking to some folks, local folks. I know everybody. And as I was walking back to the table, this lady comes up to me and says, Mr. Bryant, You mentioned somebody's name back there, you and that lady. And I said, Charles Manley? And she said, yes. And she said, why are we all talking about him? I said, well, he committed what I believe to be a very serious crime I'm working on. She looked me straight in the face and said, he assaulted me in 1971. I was standing there with a victim of a crime. crime that I could not find anything about in five counties big that I'd never seen or heard of before. And again, like I say, every hair on my arms is standing up right now. There's no explaining that other than it was God's providence that put that woman in my face. And she testified for us as a circumstance witness indication. And it's just unbelievable. And sometimes there have been three or four instances like that that I just can't explain. But through the grace of God, you can call it luck, providence, you know, I don't know. Divine intervention is the only thing I can say.

Ben 26:43-27:00

I just want to let that story stand for itself, but I also got to say one other thing. There's another lesson here, Clay, which I think we can both rally around for sure, which is that when your wife asks you out on a date, you accept, as a general rule of thumb.

Clay 27:02-27:05

Especially when you suspect, like I said, beer and wings have something to do with it.

Ben 27:07-27:10

Well, there you go. That's just bonus. That's just bonus.

Clay 27:11-28:02

That's right. That's right. But no, it's, I've been blessed. I've been able to, these cases, the highlight of my professional career. I've got another book that's in the works right now, and I'm working on a case beyond that. It's unbelievable. It's, it rates right there with the story of Yeng Fovasi. the backstory. And we have already made an arrest in it. And I think the case is being tried in Fulton County, but it's a it's a tremendous story. So, well, tell us tell us right now is the one that when Gary and I started talking at Harris County, it's about the case that we were working on that day.

Ben 28:05-28:11

It all comes together, doesn't it, Clay? It all seems to come together somehow. It does.

Clay 28:11-28:13

It all makes a circle.

Ben 28:15-28:23

I love it. I love it. Well, let me ask you this. Where can folks get a hold of your new book? What's the best way for them to do so?

Clay 28:24-29:01

You can get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, I think CVS carries some as well. And there are several places local to us over here, probably outside of your listening area. And that's one thing I do need to do. I need to publicize some of the, about your, people that listen to True Crime are just, they're enamored by it. And from all the ones that I've been involved with, your podcast is as interesting and as good as any that I've heard. And I'd like to see you build you up our audience over this way.

Ben 29:03-29:28

Well, you're very kind to say so. Everything we do is far downstream of the kind of work that you have done over the course of your career, Clay, and we're just so grateful for it. It really is a privilege to talk to you and to hear firsthand about the kinds of things that you've been able to do and the justice that you've been able to bring to the Fovassi family, among so many others. So we are just so very grateful. Thank you.

Clay 29:29-29:42

I've been blessed, brother. And thank you for It afforded me a platform for people to hear about it. It's most kind, and I appreciate it more than you know. All right.