My brush with an accused murderer

In May 2012, I walked into the In-N-Out Burger in Hollywood, CA. The place was packed and there were only three seats available. I walked over to the empty seats where a black gentleman, late 40s, was sitting at a table. I sat across from this man and we began chatting. It turned out that he was a retired boxer by the name of Exum Speight. I looked up his record on my phone and saw that he retired with a record of 9-39-2 and had been in the ring, but defeated by champions such as Wladimir Klitschko, Chris Byrd, John Ruiz, Shannon Briggs, Vassiliy Jirov, Nate Miller, Imamu Mayfield and Jeff Lampkin. For some reason, I felt a strong connection with Speight from the start. A week after we met, I interviewed him for a boxing book that I was writing. I’ve stayed in touch with him since that time, though it had been a few months since I’ve heard from him. Just this morning, I read an article and learned that he had been arrested for allegedly killing a man back in 1987.

Douglas Stumler, age 30 at the time of his death, worked at the LA County Housing Authorities. On the side, he managed several boxers, including Speight. On March 29, 1987, Stumler was murdered at his apartment on South La Cienega Blvd in the West LA area. The cause of death was stabbing and strangulation. This murder remained unsolved until a recent forensics test linked Speight’s DNA to the scene of the crime. Yesterday (Wednesday, September 25, 2013), members of the FBI-LAPD Fugitive Task Force arrested Speight at his apartment in San Fernando, CA.

When I heard the news, naturally, I was shocked. Speight has only been charged and he has yet to go to trial, so I’m doing my best to keep an open mind as to whether or not he committed this crime. Legally, he is presumed innocent.  But ever since I read this, I can’t help but look back at my experiences with Speight and see if I could identify a side of his personality that would allow him to commit such a horrendous act.

The circumstances under which I met Speight were quite unusual. After all, it was a coincidence that we happened to sit next to each other at a burger joint-- a retired boxer in a chance encounter with someone who writes about boxing. But was this encounter merely a coincidence? In March of 2011, I began writing a book that is a collection of interviews with various people in the boxing world. While writing this book, I experienced several “coincidences” similar to the meeting of Exum Speight.

Throughout the process, I would have it in my mind that I wanted to interview certain people. Before I knew it, I would bump into the right person or receive a random e-mail and these people’s contact information would magically “fall into my lap”.

Around the time I met Speight, I had already interviewed a number of boxing greats, including “Sugar” Ray Leonard and Roy Jones, Jr. For my next interview, I wanted to speak with someone who nobody has heard of – someone with a losing record who has seen a side of boxing that is seldom discussed. When I met Speight and learned of his history, it didn’t yet occur to me that he fit the profile of the kind of person I had wanted to speak with. However, Speight seemed to pick up on the “invisible connection”, as he asked me for my phone number and called me about thirty minutes after I left the restaurant.

A couple days later, I met Speight near the Kodak Theater on Hollywood Blvd for a preliminary interview. Being that he had a record of 9-39-2, I was worried that because of the punishment that he likely suffered throughout his years as a boxer, he might not be capable of telling a story. However, Speight is exceptionally clear and articulate, and remembers almost every detail of every fight he has been in – the year it happened, the venue, the advice his corner gave him, etc. He also has a rare talent for being able to pick up on different languages and learn them very quickly. He speaks Cherokee, Patwa, German, and, amazingly, Yiddish, a language spoken in past generations by European Jews but rarely used today. A few days after our meeting near the Kodak Theater, I met with Speight once again. This time, I brought my recorder. We went to Ono Hawaiian BBQ on Sunset Blvd, sat down at a booth, and discussed his experiences in boxing.

Born and raised on a farm in Whitakers, North Carolina, Exum Speight is a Cherokee-Jamaican-Guyana-American who fought professionally from 1986 to 2001. He is one of seventeen children, all by the same mother and father. At age sixteen, Speight walked into a boxing gym in Rochester, NY and began competing as an amateur, winning about half of his fights. From there, he moved out to California to pursue his professional career. Throughout his career, Speight was often mismatched and used as an opponent to pad the records of up-and-coming fighters. As Speight put it, “I’m just a country boy they tried to take advantage of.” Speight was well aware of how he was perceived by the boxing world, but he continued with his career because he wanted to prove people wrong.

I don’t know what Exum Speight was like twenty-seven years ago when that horrible crime took place, but the guy I met is a good person. Over the past year and a half, I have received a number of texts and voice mails from Speight merely saying, “God is still in charge.” Even though Speight had a rough life in and out of the ring, he never expressed anything but gratitude. He is a very spiritual person and he said something in our interview that has stuck with me ever since. He said, “God made me, so there must be something about me that’s just like Him. Even though I’m in the flesh, there’s a spirit about me and everyone else. We’re all the same, we just look different.” I’m not a religious person, but I have always believed the same thing. There’s a connection that exists with all people. With everyone we meet, we can see a part of ourselves in them.

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