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 journal at home. She lived in a residential neighborhood but was still apprehensive about jogging alone, so her husband bought her a can of Mace for her keychain. Around 6 a.m., a young man accosted her as she jogged down a local running trail on Estes...
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, Dorothy, said the two men had eaten lunch at their home and then planned to go back to the work site for a few hours before dinnertime. Curtis owned different properties in Orange County, which he worked on developing, and also managed several...
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 Samaritan’s Purse, also in Boone, for more than twenty-eight years. He was six years old when the Durham family, which lived two miles away from his own family, was murdered. From then on, Harmon was fascinated by the case, which eventually...
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 didn’t happen in the mountain town, home to Appalachian State University. Not only that, but the victims owned a successful business, and the murders left only one survivor who lived a few miles away. Within a few months, four men were arrested and...
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?” Most of the time, I’m familiar with the topics, and have usually covered them, but I know not everyone has listened to 100 plus episodes of this podcast. And even if they have, I started the show four years ago and a lot of content and crime has...
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 instances where a person is attacked, or in the most extreme cases, murdered by someone they had no idea was stalking them. This is what happened in the case of Raleigh resident Stephanie Bennett. In May 2002, residents at a North Raleigh apartment complex...
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 for bringing attention to the case, where 19-year-old Virginia Olson was brutally sexually assaulted and murdered. I dug into the news archives, took a trip back to campus, and produced Episode 94 on the case in April of last year. Little did I know...
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 producing new episodes after Thanksgiving to regroup and give myself a break to spend time with my family. I did still want to create an end-of-year wrap up for the podcast, so this will close out 2024. This episode is beneficial because it helps me take...
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 were shot to death and two others wounded Tuesday in what authorities called a “vicious massacre” in a home equipped with an altar for the practice of black magic. The murders occurred in a well-maintained white brick two-story house with yellow...
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 one called “Meet Me.” Pegram had been devastated after losing her boyfriend in a car accident a few months earlier, and was lonely and looking for someone to talk to online. She’d begun corresponding with a man named Edward Bonilla a few weeks...
