On Sept. 9, 2023, a fatal shootout occurred on a country road in Horry County, S.C. On his drive home after drinking at a bar, brandishing a gun and driving erratically, Scott Spivey was shot and killed by Weldon Boyd, a prominent local businessman. Under the state’s stand-your-ground law, the police quickly concluded that the killing was justifiable, an unfortunate result of road rage. In this part of the country, shootings are not uncommon, and it received little news coverage.
Then, veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein received a tip. It led her to talk to the dead man’s sister, Jennifer Foley. As part of the discovery process in a civil lawsuit, Foley had found hours of recorded phone calls belonging to the shooter. The content of the calls were shocking, and cast doubt on Boyd’s claim that he was in fear for his life. Bauerlein reported on this story for the next two years, connecting with the Spivey family and reviewing hundreds of hours of video footage and audio recordings. Bauerlein explored how the law—one of dozens across the country—allowed a man to chase another man 9 miles down the highway, shoot him in the back, and then claim he was in fear for his life. (Boyd has denied wrongdoing and said that Spivey shot first.) The result was a sound-rich narrative podcast series published in The Journal feed.
The Journal is a daily news podcast, co-produced between The Wall Street Journal and Spotify Studios. Camp Swamp Road laid out everything that happened on the day of the shooting, asking bigger questions about what constitutes a justifiable homicide in America. It shows the intimate impact of a violent death on one family, the tenacious efforts of one sister seeking justice for her brother and a power structure that protected one man.
After the initial podcast release, the state Attorney General announced that he was reopening the Spivey case. In the last episode, months later, the reporting team returned to South Carolina to sit in on a civil hearing reexamining the case. They were there when the judge decided that the shooter would lose his immunity and that the state’s stand-your-ground law did not apply. This decision may eventually lead to criminal charges.
Every year, there are hundreds of stand-your-ground killings. Most of them fly under the radar, rarely making it to trial. But this shooting was different because of one man’s decision to record all of his phone calls, clear irregularities in police conduct and one sister’s determination to seek accountability. Camp Swamp Road brought urgent attention to a case that could have easily been overlooked, and could have happened anywhere these laws exist.
