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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2399 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Knowledge of a string of 25-year-old robberies that bear no resemblance to what the prosecutor is alleging have nothing to do with the case.

Allegedly he was also on charges for resisting arrest and drug possession, had a drug debt of $13,000, and was going to be fired from the job anyway. So that gives him more motive to skip out, and maybe hustle a naive co-worker into helping him with the ends of "get this guy to give me money by a sob story". If he semi-truthfully told him "Man, I'm in a bind, I'm gonna get fired and I owe a ton of money to bad guys who will put me in the hospital, any way you can help me out with a temporary loan?" he might have been able to talk him into driving him to the meet to pay off some of the bad guys. Stark meets his drug dealer, persuades him that they can get some or all of the money out of this pigeon, and the three of them head off together to take out the $500 and Branning ends up dead however it happens.

Both were seen working there on Oct. 15, Weintraub said. Later that night, a security camera at a local BB&T Bank branch recorded Branning withdrawing $500 from an ATM, with another person visible in the back seat. Cell-phone data from Branning’s phone, as well as toll information, showed his 2002 Lexus sedan traveling into New Jersey, and later Cape May, according to Weintraub. That was the last trace of Branning that investigators found.

...Weintraub noted that there is a bench warrant out for Stark’s arrest in Monroe County — about two hours north of Philadelphia — for failing to show up in court on charges of resisting arrest and drug possession and he will be extradited if taken into custody anywhere else.

It's true that it can't be established how Branning met his death or that Stark had anything to do with it, but there's a lot of blank space in between that needs explanation. I agree that he was convicted on circumstantial evidence and suspicion, so the quashing of the verdict is correct, but there is something that went on that has not been adequately explained; for instance, why would Branning drive off to New Jersey with this guy and never contact his family? Maybe he did have a dark secret life that his family never knew about, but the cops would have been looking for something like that to explain what happened to him, and nothing seems to have turned up:

Attorney Craig Penglase, who represented Stark in his 2024 trial, called the wording in the superior court opinion significant, especially involving the lack of cause or manner of death for Branning, and describing the state's murder case as "entirely circumstantial, even speculative."

...During the five day jury trial in 2024, Penglase contended investigators immediately targeted Stark, who maintains his innocence, as the only suspect based, in part, on old criminal convictions.

...The Lexus was found abandoned without its license plate in Virginia in December 2021 with Branning's driver's license, credit and bank cards inside. His body was discovered in a ditch a half-hour outside Baltimore, Maryland a month earlier, but he was not positively identified through dental records until April 2023.

At trial the prosecution did not offer a motive for the murder, but revealed that Stark was $13,000 in debt, addicted to crack cocaine and about to lose his job programming machines at Enchlor.

Authorities did not find any detectible injuries to Branning, and also never established his cause of death, or how he ended up in Maryland.

But prosecutors argued that cellphone records, surveillance video, DNA and other evidence provided a clear timeline of events that strongly implicated Stark in Branning's disappearance and murder.

Penglase did not dispute that Stark and Branning traveled to New Jersey together on Oct. 15, 2021, but he suggested the two parted ways in Philadelphia later the same night.

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