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TRUE CRIME
Wrong Place, Wrong Time: The Murder of Nicholas Stein
Even at 28 years old, Carl Spencer was so soft-spoken and polite, he whispered the words “suck my dick” during his last tell-all interview with police. As if the cops might not be used to profanity. As if he didn’t normally say words like that.
As if his mom was in the next room. Which she was.
The interview was a condition of his plea deal. He’d get 11 years in exchange for singing like a (very quiet) canary about the murder of Nicholas Stein at the hands of Bryan Gentry.
Going back over early stories about the murder, it’s amazing how wrong they all were.
The press immediately fingered Spencer as the murderer, stating that he lived with Gentry and was involved in a love triangle that revolved around 28-year-old Kristen Lain.
He didn’t, and he wasn’t. The third side of the triangle was in fact the victim, Nicholas Stein, who lived with Lain and Gentry in Massillon, Ohio.
The press initially said that Spencer killed Stein by pushing him down the basement stairs, then shoving his body in a plastic container and burying it in concrete in the backyard.
Yes, there were a lot of drugs involved, but the real problem with criminals tends to be a matter of IQ.
Carl Spencer and Bryan Gentry were just two guys who got together sometimes to work on cars and smoke meth, staying up all night to enjoy their mutual love of automobile mechanics and hard drugs.
Gentry actually joined the military, went away for a while, came back, and started smoking meth again with his buddy Carl.
During the interview, Spencer told detectives that he had only met Nicholas Stein once or twice, the second time being the night of Stein’s death.
The question was always, who did the actual killing?
If Spencer is to be believed, it wasn’t a “we” that killed Nicholas Stein, it was a “he”, Bryan Gentry, who became so enraged that Stein had asked Kristen Lain to “suck his dick” (because of course Lain…
