He Was Charged With a Shocking Murder. Now He’s Set to Become Sheriff. What Happened in Between Rocked an Arkansas Town.

The attractions at September’s Lonoke County Fair in central Arkansas felt, for the most part, typical. There was a Ferris wheel, spinning teacups, a livestock pavilion full of award-winning chickens, rabbits, goats, and pigs. For those seeking a slightly more obscure fair activity, there was “Mutton Bustin’,” a rodeo event where kids between the ages of 4 and 8 simulate bull-riding on top of pint-size sheep.

Then there was a more peculiar draw, stationed reliably at a table for local and state Republican candidates in this November’s midterm elections: Aaron Spencer, a 38-year-old Army veteran who is running for sheriff of Lonoke County. Spencer was one of the few candidates attending the fair in person, and everyone knew who he was. Even I recognized him from his interviews on CNN and local television, a rugged man with a thick dark beard and “FREEDOM” tattooed down his right forearm.

“Oh, it’s actually you!” a woman exclaimed as she approached, somewhat in awe. Spencer offered her and other visitors yard signs reading: “Aaron Spencer. Lonoke County Sheriff.
Together WE can build a safer and stronger Lonoke County.”

Unless you knew the backstory—and most everyone in Lonoke County does—there was nothing in the candidate’s outward appearance that would have suggested that just four months prior, Spencer had nearly been put on trial for murder.

One by one, fairgoers approached, shaking Spencer’s hand. “Bless you,” and “I prayed for you,” and “You’re my hero,” they said. Spencer handed out rows of stickers to the kids, and some people purchased pink campaign shirts.

Less than two years earlier, Spencer had been arrested for shooting a 67-year-old man 15 times after there were disturbing charges involving Spencer’s 13-year-old daughter. A shocking series of events had brought him here, standing in front of me a free man on the verge of possibly becoming an elected county official. I wanted to know why people here seemed intent on voting for him, despite it all.

When I visited, I learned there was a deeper reason for all of this love for Spencer that I had not yet grasped. Beyond the horror of Spencer’s personal tale, it turned out that Lonoke County had been home to one of the country’s most prolific child predators. And, now, here was Spencer, promising a new kind of lawman. The people liked what they heard.

Ask Spencer why he decided to run for sheriff, and he’ll jump straight to the dangers of child sexual abuse, specifically accused perpetrators who are let out on bail pending their trial. “Protecting our children was my big motivation to run,” he told me, explaining the many ways that the system had failed his family. “That’s why in the primary, my slogan was ‘Rape a child in Lonoke County, you can get out of jail for the price of a lawn mower.’ ”

The slogan may not have been catchy, but it was based in truth.

Here’s what happened.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2024, Sgt. John Ingram and Deputy Brian Duke from the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the Spencer property, a three-acre turkey farm in rural Arkansas about 30 miles from Little Rock. They came to the Spencer home to discuss a report they’d received: that Spencer’s 13-year-old daughter had allegedly been sexually abused by a man old enough to be her grandfather:  Michael Fosler.

Fosler did not appear to have a prior criminal record. He was a veteran, a former police officer in Indiana, a widower, and a truck driver. At the time, he was dating a family friend of the Spencers’; his daughter was also friends with the sheriff.

Spencer, a handgun tucked into the back of his pants, was displeased and accused the deputies of “creeping around.” His demeanor only worsened as police implied that they were concerned Spencer would take matters into his own hands. Fosler had allegedly met Spencer’s daughter at the home of that family friend, and they had regularly communicated online before the abuse began. This had apparently been going on for months; everyone else was just finding out on this day. Spencer had allegedly found out earlier that day, before the police arrived, and had been out seeking information about Fosler, which prompted the suspicion that he might act as a vigilante. It didn’t help that Spencer began the exchange by asking who had called the sheriff’s office.

Ingram appeared to anticipate how Spencer would react. He issued an ominous warning, an exchange which was recorded on his bodycam. “We still don’t live in a country where you can take the law into your own hands, OK?” he told Spencer. The sergeant then posed a “hypothetical” question about a father who might get arrested for vigilante violence. Spencer responded, “Well, hypothetically, maybe that rapist and that father can share a jail cell, and maybe that rapist could be that father’s fucking bitch.” Eventually, Spencer and his wife sat down with the two lawmen for an hour, and Spencer concluded by saying, “I know what I’m allowed and not allowed to do according to the law.”

Officers arrested Fosler a few days later, and the indictment listed 43 counts, including, among other things, sex with a child under 15 and multiple counts of possessing child sexual abuse material. Judge Barbara Elmore set his bail at $50,000. Fosler paid the typical 10 percent bond—or $5,000, the cost of a lawn mower—and was released with a vague order not to have contact with children. He received no ankle monitor or other restrictions.

Spencer’s fury was evident. On Aug. 11, the turkey farmer posted a disturbing Facebook meme, showing a pen of hogs with the caption: “FUN FACT: A PACK OF HOGS CAN CONSUME AN ENTIRE PEDOPHILE IN LESS THAN 10 MINUTES.”

Months passed with Fosler a free man. Spencer remained, as he told police later, “vigilant” because “nobody else is watching him.”

Then, on Oct. 8, Spencer woke up late in the night to the barking of his dog. He found his daughter’s bed empty. He suspected that she was with Fosler—it appears he had continued to contact the 13-year-old after bonding out of jail—and decided to go look for her on the country roads while his wife called 911.

What happened next, Spencer argued in court, was self-defense.

The following facts aren’t disputed: Spencer came upon Fosler’s white F-150 and rammed him, forcing him off the road. Fosler and Spencer had a confrontation in which Spencer fired 16 shots, hitting Fosler 15 times, and then pistol-whipped him in the head. Fosler fell and “rolled like a beach ball,” according to Spencer. His daughter had been in the F-150 throughout.

Spencer called 911 and said, “Michael Fosler is fucking dead on the side of the road for trying to kidnap my daughter. I had no choice.”

Fosler was actually still alive, however, when law enforcement responded to the scene. The first cops there were from the Lonoke Sheriff’s Office, including Sgt. Ingram, the same man who had gone to Spencer’s home a few months earlier. The officers arrested the now-unarmed Spencer at gunpoint, forcing him to lie on the ground. They cuffed him and put him into the back of the police cruiser with the heat cranked up to make him sweat.

Spencer told me that the arrest was particularly humiliating and painful due to a shoulder injury from military service. His first words once he was in the car were, “Fucking piece-of-shit pedophile.” He went on to describe the emergency care provided to Fosler as a “waste of money”: “Don’t waste your time. He’s a pedophile,” Spencer called to the paramedics. “You got the calls, you got the report, yet I’m the only one in handcuffs.”

Over the course of the next two hours, which were captured on video, Spencer prayed, complained about his foot and how the car felt “like a coffin,” and struggled against the cuffs.
At one point, he began to scream and kick the door. He demanded to see his daughter.

In bodycam footage, the officers appear extremely confused. Ingram insisted to officers on the scene that Spencer was “trained” and uniquely dangerous. Another deputy searched both Spencer’s daughter and his then-18-year-old son—who had arrived on the scene after the shooting—at gunpoint. “Please don’t shoot my dad,” his son cried.

Upon hearing that Fosler had died, Spencer told the officers, “Evil is hard to kill, but it’s not impossible.”

Spencer was charged with first-degree murder, at first, but was quickly released on bond.
In November, the district attorney revised the charges to second-degree murder.

From the beginning, Spencer’s case was a cause célèbre. People across the country flocked to donate to his defense. Gun Owners of Arkansas wrote about Spencer’s case on their website and fundraised for him, helping him secure an experienced defense attorney. “This incident is the newest example of ‘use of deadly force’ that we believe to be justified,” they wrote.

Judge Elmore, the same judge who had presided over Fosler’s case, was initially assigned to Spencer’s case and implemented a gag order barring anyone from speaking to the press. The case was moved to a different judge, Special Circuit Court Judge Ralph Wilson, and the gag order was lifted. This was around the time Spencer began his campaign for sheriff. Arkansas does not allow people with felony convictions to become sheriff, but Spencer could run for office pending trial. Spencer won the Republican primary for sheriff with over 53 percent of the vote in March. The looming trial of a candidate for sheriff threatened to be a spectacle with little precedent.

Then something stunning happened: In June, the entire case was dismissed with prejudice. It turned out that the same sheriff’s office Spencer was seeking to lead had botched the investigation of his case so badly that it was unsalvageable. In a scathing order, Judge Wilson blamed the office for a series of errors, either intentional or incredibly stupid, writing that the misconduct was “so egregious” there was no option other than to dismiss the case.

Now, here Spencer was, no pending trial, in the midst of a general election campaign at the county fair.

“Why are we not having this accountability within our judicial system in order to protect the community?” he asked me, again alluding to his case. “One of the things they tried in the beginning was saying I was a vigilante. I ‘went out and murdered this guy,’ and this and that. And it was more I got stuck in a self-defense situation because the system had failed to do their appropriate job in protecting the community.”

Whether or not you believe the former, the latter seems undoubtedly true.

At his table, as more people streamed through, the candidate opened bags of candy and poured them into a bowl.

“This is a safe place for kids to get candy,” he told one parent. We all chuckled awkwardly.

If everyone, even Spencer’s detractors, agreed on something, it was that John Staley, the outgoing sheriff, who has been in office since 2012, had ruined the department.

A few people I spoke with mentioned the 2021 shooting death of a teenager named Hunter Brittain, who was test-driving a pickup truck he had been fixing up when Deputy Michael Davis pulled him over and shot him in the neck. (Davis claimed it appeared that Brittain was reaching for a rifle.) Brittain’s death became national news, and his family hired lawyers Devon Jacob and Benjamin Crump, who had previously represented the family of George Floyd. Davis was convicted of negligent homicide and was sentenced to a year in jail.

The sheriff has also been accused of fostering an environment in which deputies in the jail sexually assaulted women detainees as a regular practice, and then retaliated against women who complained. According to a civil complaint, women were routinely sexually assaulted and asked to perform sexual favors in exchange for better treatment in the jail. In one chilling anecdote from the lawsuit, a deputy sexually assaulted a woman and then broadcast the audio over the intercom system. Three deputies were fired and two were convicted of felonies in 2024, and they received probation and community service, no prison time.

Through both controversies, the sheriff remained in office.

The final nail in the coffin for Staley appears to have been the misconduct in Spencer’s case. On the night of the shooting, Fosler had a dashcam in his truck that, according to Spencer’s attorneys, would have recorded the final moments before the shooting. But, in a strange twist, the SIM card from the dashcam was not properly logged into evidence and went missing. It was never found. This was the proximate cause for the prosecution’s dismissal. (Multiple attempts to contact the sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices for comment went unreturned.)

Spencer’s opponent in the sheriff’s race, Larry Benhke, a certified yoga instructor and former Little Rock police sergeant, was in a booth on the other side of room at the county fair. He has been running as an independent, and his signs and T-shirts carried the slogan “Proven Leader. Real Solutions.” Benhke and Spencer studiously avoided each other like divorced parents at a wedding.

But even Benhke had nothing good to say about Staley. “One of the reasons I ran for sheriff was because [that investigation] was not properly conducted. The sheriff’s office does not have the resources and the training to conduct a homicide investigation.” He pointed out that the sheriff’s investigators may have thought the case was a “slam dunk”—Spencer had confessed to shooting Fosler on the scene—and failed to acknowledge that they were not trained to properly process evidence in this kind of case, where justified self-defense was a plausible possibility under Arkansas law depending on what that missing dashcam footage showed.

“I will tell you this: Nobody’s ever going to know what happened because they bungled the investigation,” Benhke said.

After Spencer’s case ended, county prosecutor Chuck Graham gave an interview and asked rhetorically, “Do you really want to live in a society where people just go and kill somebody like the Old West?”

Similarly, if less provocatively, Benhke, who is running as the coolheaded, experienced lawman, emphasized the need to discourage vigilante violence and educate residents about how policing works, or ought to work. Due process, in other words. This was not what had happened in Fosler’s case. “I hear it all the time: Dead pedophiles don’t reoffend,” he said. “That’s not a plan.”

There is, in fact, a huge rift in the community about whether Spencer is qualified or emotionally stable enough to run an office as troubled as the sheriff’s.

One of his detractors is a man named Dean Davis, the second chair of the Lonoke GOP. Davis readily admitted that he did not vote for Spencer in the primary and did not think he was qualified. “Aaron’s a good man. Aaron likes guns. This is not a training.
That’s not a sheriff,” he said.

On Saturday evening the weekend of the fair, a community group tried to organize a debate between Behnke and Spencer, but Spencer declined. Instead, Behnke answered questions for two hours in a small fire station. I saw Davis there, sitting stone-faced in the back.

Behnke made a compelling case for better policing, but the people I met who supported Spencer wanted something different.

“People get involved and they get attached to the emotion and the personality and the aura and whatever,” Behnke said when I ran into him at the fair. “That’s just, I guess, politics.”

The man next to me at the debate grumbled that he thought it was unfair for Spencer not to show his face at a public event. Spencer has been selective with his campaign events. He spoke to the local gun-rights group. He did an interview with Chris Hansen, of To Catch a Predator infamy, for Hansen’s YouTube channel. My emails to Spencer’s campaign went unanswered; eventually his lawyer emailed me saying Spencer had “other commitments.”

But when I spoke to Spencer over the course of standing around his table at the fair for an hour, he did have reasonable answers to questions about how he would run the office. I asked how he would respond to critiques of being inexperienced. “I don’t feel concerned at all,” he said. He opposes Flock cameras. “They used it in Australia during COVID. They were putting people in, I think they call them ‘safety camps,’ ” he said, referring that country’s heavily surveilled quarantine compounds.

I asked Spencer what most people wanted to know when they come up to him at events. “What happened,” he said. “I don’t even get questions. They just make statements.”

“You’re a hero,” a candidate sitting nearby interjected. “I’d have done what you done.”

The events leading up to Fosler’s killing—or “what happened,” as Spencer framed it—hang over the entire election, even though both candidates say that they do not want to talk about it. Yet it’s impossible to avoid.

And, as Spencer pointed out to me, it was very personal to many people. “I think there’s a lot of teenagers and kids that have that: ‘I hope my dad is willing to save me if something like that happens,’ ” he said. “And ‘What’s going to happen to my dad if he has to?’ ”

Evenings at the county fair are for rodeo. First, everyone stood for a very long prayer as well as a somewhat embellished tale of how Francis Scott Key came to write the national anthem. Rodeo queens—contestants in a pageant focused on horsemanship—were introduced, galloping around the ring in a blur of red, white, and blue sparkles. Afterward, the contestants walking among the crowd handing out little American flags and bubbles to the many children who had come to watch. Little girls stared agog at all the glitter.

Then the rest of the entertainment commenced—bull-riding, roping, and other horseback tricks. Men tumbled to the ground, and then got up again. The announcer asked us to applaud for everyone, even those who didn’t perform very well; you could not predict what animals might do. A young girl near me clung to the fence in excitement, wearing pink fringed cowboy boots.

In the course of talking to Spencer, I met Walt Lanehart, a self-described “country redneck” running for justice of the peace on the GOP ticket. “I like to go out and blow stuff up in the backyard for fun,” Lanehart told me. In Arkansas, a justice of the peace is akin to a city council member in other jurisdictions. Lanehart is a fireman.

“I support everything that Aaron did,” he said. “I mean, I don’t have any kids or a wife, but I’d have done the same thing. I’ve got nieces and nephews. I’d done it for them too. I told Aaron, I said, ‘You didn’t do anything.’ ”

But he had to admit there had to be a toll on Spencer’s mental and emotional health. “I know it messed him up a little bit,” Lanehart said. “You’re executing a human being, and that’s not normal.”

After his case was dismissed and ended for good, with the district attorney declining to appeal, Spencer issued a statement about “getting back to a normal life.” It’s not clear, however, that this has been possible. A few people I spoke with wondered why he chose to run for sheriff at this moment, rather than wait.

Most of the Spencer supporters appeared to identify with his family on a deep, emotional level. I would have done the same thing, or a similar sentiment, was the most common refrain I heard. Implicit in those words, however, is also the acknowledgement of shared trauma.

Behnke’s wife, Julie Eckert, a retired sex crimes detective with a pixie cut and funky glasses, told me that dealing with the fallout of a major child abuse scandal is, tragically, not new for this community.

Lonoke was home to Jack Walls, one of the worst abusers connected to the Boy Scouts of America. He was, per the local news, a pillar of the community, Lonoke’s “Man of the Year” multiple times, and a Boy Scout troop leader who groomed his victims for two decades and abused an estimated 150 boys. Walls took the boys camping and shooting, plied them with booze and pornography, and abused them. He owned many, many guns, something all his victims knew. He was finally arrested in 1997 after his teenage nephew and victim, Wade Knox, confronted him at gunpoint. A court convicted Walls in 1998 of six counts of rape and he received three life sentences. A full accounting of his victims has never occurred. Walls died in prison last year.

Years later, Knox killed himself, and his family opened the Wade Knox Child Advocacy Center in Lonoke. This is now where victims of child sexual abuse, like Spencer’s daughter, are interviewed.

Another of Walls’ victims, Heath Stocks, is currently serving three consecutive life sentences for killing his parents and sister. Just a few days before the murders in 1997, Stocks had told his mother that Walls had been raping him for years. Stocks then told Walls about the conversation with his mother, and the Scout leader encouraged the scout to “kill” the problem. He did. At Stocks’ trial, the decades of abuse he endured was not considered adequately. Courts have refused to reconsider his sentence, and the governor has rejected clemency. He remains in prison without much hope of release even though he had been abused by Walls for over a decade, beginning at the age of 9.

This history is what led Eckert to suggest that the entire community is genuinely in the thrall of intergenerational trauma. It’s only been magnified by a feeling that law enforcement—the judges, the district attorney, the sheriff—were protecting the wrong people while children were harmed.

A middle-aged woman with cropped hair took multiple yard signs from Spencer’s table and told me that she was a former employee of the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office. When I asked why she supported Spencer, she said, “More people should stand up for their children, to get sex predators. That’s the main reason why. And he was unjustly treated in Lonoke County, as are a lot of other people.” She continued, “He didn’t do anything any other parent wouldn’t do.”

Another woman, who arrived with her daughters and granddaughters, all with the same round faces and wide eyes, told me, “If I was him, I would have shot that motherfucker, too.”

One of the most haunting conversations I had was with a teen with long hair and face piercings who told me they supported Spencer. “He does not agree with child predators,” they told me hesitantly, going on to explain that the community continued to have a real problem. “Plenty of my friends have their stories. There are literally apps, and there are child predators all over the county. It’s horrible, and people just need to be stricter on it.” They told me that the deep sense of corruption in the current sheriff’s office made victims fearful of reporting.

I asked Eckert what she thought about the people who supported Spencer. She said she understood, but thought there had to be a better way. “You can’t shoot them all,” she said. “It’s not a good strategy.”

When I spoke to Spencer, he mentioned the people who approached him with their own stories of sexual abuse and their feelings of not being taken seriously. “Some places don’t have somebody who’s standing up and bringing it to everyone’s attention,” he said. And, then, as if reflecting on his own experience, he added, “And then what kind of society are we creating when we can’t trust our police to call them out, to help them?”

The election on Nov. 3 will determine whether Lonoke County will put a very different kind of sheriff in office. Perhaps such a change would uncover more cases of abuse here. What would happen after is a question no one could answer.