Theodore Spencer, a 21-year-old man from Orange County VA, was visiting his mother in the hospital last month when he overheard doctors talking about her health.
His mother, he heard, had been sexually assaulted and had contracted an STD, which had caused her cancer to worsen.
Spencer, who was arrested on suspcion of first degree murder on Thursday, blamed his mother’s boyfriend, whom he had never liked.
That’s according to charging documents filed Thursday in DC Superior Court. Spencer, Terrell Wilson and Phillip Swan were arrested Thursday and each confessed to a roughly similar story of how, and why, Glenn Scarborough was killed.
After leaving the hospital, Spencer said, he drove with two friends, Wilson and Swan, both 19 years old, to Glenn Scarborough‘s house in Northeast DC. Once there, they put on hospital gloves. Spencer put on a mask. They knocked on the door and when 61-year-old Scarborough answered, they knocked him down and “began to kick and punch [Scarborough] about the head and body.”
In charging documents, investigators said that Scarborough was found bleeding on the floor of his basement apartment on June 19 and had been beaten, bound, gagged, stabbed and strangled.
An autopsy showed that he had died of strangulation and asphyxiation, but also had been severely beaten.
Spencer, Wilson and Swan all appeared in court Friday to be presented with the charges. Attorneys for Spencer and Swan did not dispute the government’s preliminary arguments, but Lauren Bernstein, on behalf of Wilson, argued that while the men told police they beat Scarborough in June, no date was ever proffered, leaving open the possibility that they could have beat him before June 19 in a crime unrelated to Scarborough’s eventual murder.
The men were ordered held on probable cause, however, pending their preliminary hearing in front of Judge Motley on July 28.
