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...
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 Hunter, was deceased in his bedroom. Mannino at first told police that he gave Hunter an injection of Benadryl and Vistaril—both antihistimines—for help with a migraine. But when the medical examiner took a close look at the whole picture, a puzzling...
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. Dougherty, his brother D.D. Dougherty, and D.D.’s wife, Lillie began dreaming of a way to help children in the state participate in educational opportunities in the heart of the mountains. App State began as Watauga Academy, progressed to the...
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 connected story about a series of murders and suspicious deaths that took place during the summer of 1992, and it resulted in one man residing in a bus at a local junkyard being convicted of murder, and another local man being convicted of two...
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 the time had under 2,000 residents, when he noticed a man ducking behind some milk crates at the Sav-A-Lot. Postell took a closer look because he thought he had interrupted a burglary in progress. When he noticed the man had a black object in his hand,...
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 the last-minute to take her 14-year-old daughter Fallon to the celebration. She loved Atlanta and often traveled there to shop and attend events. She died as a result of injuries from multiple penetrating metal fragments from the bomb. Her daughter...
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 allegedly occurred over a 14-month period when she was five years old, while working with her psychiatrist Larry Pazder. Michelle and Larry did an extensive media and book tour where they talked about the memories Michelle had uncovered after hours...
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, West Jefferson, Sparta, Wilkesboro. We had a fantastic time and made sure to fill our days with outdoor activities. We did a relaxing trip down the New River on inner tubes, visited Grandfather Mountain, and hiked several different local trails. My...
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, exercise runs, and crates. Pam raised and showed Italian greyhounds and was preparing for a trip that would take her to South Carolina the next day to a competition. Pam had plans to take her 11-year-old daughter on that trip. She went back inside the...
