By Renee Roberson
Renee discusses origin stories from Carolina folklore, whether or not places can hold onto spiritual energy, and why so many universities seem to be haunted.
Episodes Mentioned:
Ep. 16-Ghostly Tales from the Carolinas
Ep. 22-Two True Tales from the Carolinas
Ep. 31-Where Are the Children?
In 2016, a South Carolina couple went missing and their families knew something was wrong, especially when their Facebook accounts seemed to remain active. With the use of their cell phone data,...
The Enchanted Oaks subdivision in Raleigh lived up to its name, with traditional-style homes, tree-lined streets with lampposts, and basketball hoops in driveways, like something you’d see out of...
51-year-old Dr. Joe Smith was a fixture around the Lancaster, South Carolina community for many years. He had a practice as a general practitioner, worked as the jail physician for Chester County...
The North Carolina mountains are a beautiful place to visit, but we’ve had many occurrences of people getting lost on hikes or getting injured or falling off treacherous spots or overlooks. In...
Today I want to discuss the case of a young woman who was murdered as she was trying to leave an abusive partner and the toxic environment he had created in their home. Like Mary Ann Willis’s...
Pulling from the catalogue, Renee discusses the cold cases of Nancy Morgan from Madison County, Beverly Sherman and Pamela Murray from Asheville, the solved murder of Denise Durham from East Flat...
In August of 1993, a woman vacationing on the Outer Banks made the fateful decision to spend an extra night at the beach. The next morning, her body was discovered in the sand within few hundred...
A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a listener named Ashley Hester. She said her father, Detective T.A. Hester, had worked for the Durham Police Department for 30 years. While Ashley’s...
Episode 151 pulls stories from the following episodes: Ep. 42: Missing, Murdered, and Mistaken Identity in the Carolinas Ep. 97: Chapel Hill/Carrboro Crimes from the 1980s Ep. 63: Hania Aguilar,...
In late 2010, two people went missing from Durham, North Carolina. Both were connected to one man, a 27-year-old who exerted a powerful influence over his friends and the women he brought into his...
In the fall of 2021, a 41-year-old veterinary technician and mom was found murdered at her residence in Greer, South Carolina, the crime scene covered in rose petals. As investigators learned more...
When I attended MurderCon, a conference designed for writers interested in crime, I began developing the concept for this podcast. I’m passionate about covering stories that are often left out of...
For this episode, I share an inspirational interview with Hope Andersen, the author of five books. You'll enjoy learning about her unique creative journey. Her latest release is suspense/thriller...
In the summer of 1967, a 19-year-old young woman named Brenda Holland was excited to take a job with the Lost Colony outdoor drama on the Outer Banks. But only a month after the Western Carolina...
North Carolina native and actor Andy Griffith got his start in The Lost Colony twenty years before 19-year-old Brenda Holland went missing, first playing a soldier, and then later the character of...
In episode 32, “Missing Teen Girls in North Carolina,” I shared the story a young woman named Sherri Lee Truesdale. Sherri’s story is another one of those cases that doesn’t have a lot of...
In the 1990s, Horry, Georgetown, and Marion counties experienced a rise in bank robberies. According to the Sun News, 16 bank robberies occurred in the area in 1997. Only about 18 percent of money...
In this podcast, we cover a lot of dark topics around missing people and other true crime. For this week, I wanted to do something a little more lighthearted. It still centers around a disappearance...
A few years ago, I was meeting with a few likeminded people in my community to discuss the details of Lue Cree Overcash Westmoreland’s still-unsolved murder from 1937. One of those people was...
In 1986, 28-year-old Mary Kathryn Ennis and her husband were separated, and she was living alone with her 7-year-old son, Andy in Hillsborough. Many of her neighbors described her as being a devoted...
In 1999, fresh out of Harvard University, Helen Zuman began seeking out a place where she could practice communal living and learn more about organic farming and homesteading. The place turned out...
On July 9, 1988, 30-year-old High Point, North Carolina resident Sandra Coulthard passed away at Duke University Medical Center. She’d been sick for about six months with vomiting, diarrhea,...
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 1 in 5 people experience mental illness each year. Their website states: A mental health condition isn’t the result of one event. Research...
I have one of those journals I got as a gift with a positive affirmation stamped on the front cover in cursive. It tells me how beautiful, smart, and talented I am and says I am going to do amazing...
In 1968, the town of Gaffney was much smaller, quieter, in the midst of integrating black students into schools that had been predominantly white up until that point. Lyndon B. Johnson was the...
The case of Jock and Jane Doe was featured on “Unsolved Mysteries” on January 20, 1995. The couple was discovered in August of 1976 in Sumter, South Carolina on a rural road by a trucker passing...
On the morning of July 15, 1993, 26-year-old Chapel Hill resident Kristin Lodge-Miller left her apartment for her daily run. Kristin was an avid runner who kept a log of her routes and times in a...
On July 10, 1985, Curtis Bane, age 55, and Thaddeus Hayes, age 24, failed to return home after working on a fence on Curtis’s property on N.C. 10, about five miles west of Durham. Curtis’s wife,...
Terry Harmon is a native and lifelong resident of Watauga County and has a deep interest in genealogy and local history. He is a graduate of Appalachian State University in Boone and has worked at...
On a snowy night in February of 1972, the small, quiet town of Boone, North Carolina was the site of a shocking triple homicide. This horrific crime stunned the community—things like this just...
This episode features something a bit different. I share my award-winning short story, "The Polaroid," which was inspired by the Tara Calico disappearance from New Mexico in 1988. It received first...
When people find out I have a true crime podcast, it often sparks discussions of related cold cases and serial killers. I’m asked, “have you written about this, or done a podcast about that?”...
On February 12, 1971, a young couple went missing in the Durham area after attending a dance at a local nursing school together. Patricia Ann Mann, age 20, was a junior at the Watts School of...
In Episode 73, I compiled several different stories that featured missing persons from the Carolinas that involved Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. This included 68-year-old Young Chang, who went...
January is National Stalking Awareness Month, and while the majority of victims know their stalker personally, whether it’s an ex-partner, friend, family member or colleague, there are also...
Several years ago, I heard about an unsolved murder that took place on my college campus back in 1973. I wrote a blog post about it and was surprised when I received messages from people thanking me...
True crime has always been a popular genre in nonfiction books, and with the rise of independent presses and self-publishing options, the publication of true crime books has only risen in recent...
Well, if you’re like me you no longer no what day it is during this holiday season. This past year has been a hectic one, and due to a lot of different factors, I decided to take a break from...
On September 29, 1981, a gruesome murder scene greeted law enforcement officers off Knightner Road in Columbia, South Carolina. The headline in “The Morning News” that day read, “Four people...
This past Monday our country celebrated Veterans Day, which is the federal holiday created to honor military veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces. A sad note is that according to the Department of...
On Nov. 1, 1933, around 10 p.m., the city of Charleston, S.C. was stunned when two passersby discovered a 64-year-old woman named Mary Ravenel gravely injured on Meeting Street, just north of Water...
On the afternoon of Nov. 2 2015, Amy Vilardi left her home on Refuge Road in Pendleton, South Carolina and went to visit her mom and stepfather, Cathy and Mike Scott, who lived next door with their...
Rachel Workman owns Ghosts of Davidson, a ghost tour located in Davidson, North Carolina, just a few miles outside of Lake Norman. She’s lived in the area with her husband Chris and their three...
October is the designated month for bringing awareness to Domestic Violence, but it is a topic I believe we should be talking about year round, as it still remains a prevalent issue in our society....
On April 4, 2015, 28-year-old Ashley Pegram, who was the mother of three small children, went missing after making plans to spend the evening with a man she’d met on a dating app, specifically on...
In February of 2008, the roommate of 52-year-old Bonnie Lou Irvine, a Cornelius resident, reported the woman missing. Investigators with the Cornelius Police Department looked at her phone and...
On April 30, 1992 Joseph Mannino, a fourth-year medical student at the University of North Carolina living in northwest Raleigh, called 911 to report one of his roommates, 23-year-old Michael...
This week marks National Suicide Prevention Week, which is an annual campaign designed to educate the general public about suicide prevention and the warning signs of suicide. This is a topic that...
Located in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Appalachian State University is a four-year-college that also has a satellite campus in Hickory. The school was founded 125 years ago when Dr. B.B....
A listener recently e-mailed me an article link about a cold case out of Catawba County. When I started reading about the unsolved murder of 13-year-old Isis Dee Dee Dawkins, I realized there was a...
In the 1980s, an evangelical couple named Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were literally everywhere, preaching the gospel through their own broadcasting network, living a lavish lifestyle, and building a...
Around 4 a.m. on May 31, 2003, 21-year-old rookie police officer Jeff Postell was making a second run patrolling the area behind the Valley Village shopping center in the town of Murphy, which at...
On July 27, 1996, a bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the Summer Olympic Games. Alice Hawthorne, a 44-year-old businesswoman and resident of Albany, Georgia, had decided at...
In 1980, a memoir titled “Michelle Remembers” chronicled a woman’s experience of childhood torture inflicted by a satanic cult. Canadian resident Michelle Smith recovered these memories, which...
My family recently returned from a vacation in the High Country area of North Carolina. The High Country includes a wide array of places such as Beech Mountain, Boone, Blowing Rock, Linville Falls,...
I discussed wilderness therapy camps and Trails Carolina in Lake Toxaway specifically in Episode 88. Trails Carolina was founded in 2008, with the belief that a wilderness setting enhances the...
Doris Duke was born into an extreme amount of wealth. Her grandfather, Washington Duke, helped establish a thriving tobacco business in North Carolina with other farmers following the Civil...
On July 25,1990, 41-year-old Pamela Hoy had dinner with her husband Fred Hoy at a Burlington restaurant, and then went home and packed her gray Dodge van with her clothes and grooming tables,...
Last month, the trial of 62-year-old Christopher Palmiter, the stepfather of missing Cornelius girl Madalina Cojocari, began. He was charged with failing to report eleven-year-old Madalina missing....
Today marks a monumental day in the life of this podcast. Missing in the Carolinas officially has 100 episodes! Sometimes I still find it hard to believe I’ve been able to keep it going for so...
It’s no secret that children and young people are a vulnerable sector of the population when it comes to crime and missing persons cases. We’ve profiled several different children on “Missing...
The murder of Rachel Crook is one of the oldest cold cases in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, if not the oldest. Rachel was a 71-year old-woman who originated from Alabama, and the daughter of Rev....
Carrie Wikerson and Jean Fewel On February 22, 1984, 7-year-old Carrie Wilkerson failed to report to school at Frank Porter Graham Elementary in Carrboro. That morning, firefighters investigating a...
Twenty-three-year-old Andy Sigmon was last seen on April 5, 2016, and while his family knows he is probably not still alive, they remain determined to bring their son home. Here is what we know...
Over the years, there have been several different murders that have taken place involving students and staff at the University of North Carolina. In January of 1995, Wendell Williamson, a student at...
On the morning of Sunday, April 15, 1973, Virginia Olson, known as “Ginger” to her friends, awoke on a chilly morning in the Craig Dormitory, located on the campus of UNCA, nestled in the...
Forty years ago, Sharon Beatrice Jones was murdered on the campus of Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina over spring break. Despite the police interviewing numerous suspects and...
In September of 1988, 21-year-old Brian “Neil” Hooks went missing from the Florence area of South Carolina. According to an article that ran in the Florence Morning News, his sister Amy Turner...
On November 22, 1984, a four-year-old little boy vanished in the rain from his parents’ home. Jeremy Grice lived with his mother and step-father, Donna and Nick Arrington, and his 10-month-old...
Since 2017, the DNA Doe Project has worked on more than 200 cases of unidentified remains. With the work of their leadership, countless volunteers, advances in technology, the organization was able...
In the early 1990s, a string of rapes and murders occurred in East Charlotte. Because the killer used different methods and cleaned up crime scenes, investigators had no idea the murders were...
On November 10, 2014, a 17-year-old young man named Alec Lansing went missing after he left a group from Trails Carolina, an organization in Western North Carolina that offers wilderness therapy for...
Mike O'Boyle On the morning of Tuesday, May 27, 1980, 20-year-old Eugene Carmichael “Mike” O’Boyle left his home in West Columbia and drove to the Shandon area of town to pick up a friend who...
Today I’m talking about a few different true crime documentaries and series that I think fans of this podcast would enjoy. I tried to make selections from a few different streaming services, since...
Pamela Denise Durham, known as Denise to her friends, was a 16-year-old high school student at East Henderson High School. She lived in East Flat Rock, North Carolina. According to an article that...
What is a body broker and how do they operate? According to an investigative series by the news organization Reuters, body brokers are also known as non-tissue transplant banks. These banks are...
A man from Fayetteville gets a ride from a co-worker and is never seen again, until a religious awakening with a murderer brings the secrets to light. Another young man from Florida takes a job out...
A young boy dies at the home of his adoptive parents in what is later found to be the result of swaddling. The boy was only four years old, and his parents had been attempting a controversial...
January is National Stalking Awareness Month. In January 2003, Debbie Riddle learned her sister Peggy had been murdered by her ex-boyfriend after years of controlling behavior and incidents of...
On January 13, 2021, an incident of workplace violence at a manufacturing plant in Hickory, North Carolina resulted in the shooting death of a 51-year-old woman. The shooter, also a female, then...
I wanted to do feature an end-of-year analysis this year, because our production schedule has changed and we’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth since December 2021. In this episode I’ll...
A young man shows signs of violence against women at a young age and is sent to a detention center. There he charms an employee who does not realize how dangerous he will later become. This man will...
November is Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month, so for this episode I wanted to focus on cases that involve senior citizens. Alzheimer’s is a progressive, deadly brain disease for which there...
When I was researching upcoming book releases on NetGalley this past summer, I noticed Mandy Matney had a memoir coming out about her involvement with the Alex Murdaugh case. I immediately requested...
In 2021 I discussed several cold cases involving indigenous women and girls, including the murder of 5-year-old Brittany Locklear, who was kidnapped and later found murdered in Hoke County. If...
Listen to an interview with Chris Stonestreet, a North Carolina author and historian who has researched the Lue Cree Overcash Westmoreland cold case extensively.
In 2004, the President of the United States and Congress have dedicated this month for the public and private sectors to work together to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity....
For many years, before streaming services became the norm, made-for-tv movies were the bread and butter of network television’s advertising revenue. Those networks often relied on true crime books...
If you’ll remember, in Episode 29, I discussed the unsolved murders of three different women in Lumberton, North Carolina. These were not isolated incidents, unfortunately. In 2018, the community...
Last week a graduate student entered an academic lab on the University of North Carolina campus, shooting and killing a respected professor, resulting in an hours-long lockdown of the campus. The...
When 20-year-old Lue Cree Overcash Westmoreland retired for the evening at the home of her husband’s family on Jan. 19, 1937, no one expected the young bride of only two months would be murdered...
Christina Maria Matos Christina Maria Matos was just trying to help out a friend, but the generosity she was so well known for likely caused her death. Matos had just turned 20 and was living in an...
Did you know Mecklenburg County in North Carolina has a cold case featuring an unidentified deceased woman whose loved ones may be missing her? Investigators with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police...
She was young, beautiful, beguiling and liked to poison the guests at her boarding house in Charleston, S.C. with oleander tea. For centuries, legend had it that Lavinia Fisher was one of...
As a parent, it’s an unimaginable scenario. You send your children out to play in the front yard of your rural home in the country, and they are never seen again. Because you are poor with no...
Virginia Olson The University of North Carolina at Asheville will always have a special place in my heart, because it was at that small college that I came into my own as a journalist. The small...