In the area I live in there’s a lake, also known as the largest man-made, freshwater lake in North Carolina. But before it became Lake Norman, the area was a village containing textile mills, homes, and family farms called Long Island. According to the Visit Mooresville website, in the early 1900s, James Buchanan Duke and his successors at Duke Power began purchasing land from farmers around the Catawba and Wateree Rivers in preparation for a...
When I was a teenager growing up in a small town about 20 minutes outside of Asheville, the Asheville Mall was my home away from home. I spent many weekends there wandering in and out of the stores and snacking at Corn Dog 7 and Sbarro. I later went on to work both at the mall and the movie theater across the street. At the time, I had no idea a 23-year-old woman named Pamela Murray had been abducted from the mall in the late 1980s and murdered...
Thirty-five years ago, a Durham woman called 911 in the pre-dawn hours to report that she’d accidentally shot her husband with a gun he was keeping underneath his pillow. While police thought it was strange that someone was sleeping with a loaded weapon, the wife’s explanation seemed plausible. After all, she was a gainfully employed woman who attended church regularly with her husband and two sons. It wasn’t until they learned that 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 by the next morning. Lue Cree’s husband, Herman Westmoreland, lived in an apartment during the week so he could be close to his job at Cascade Mills in Mooresville. Lue Cree was staying at the family home in the Amity Hill area of Iredell County....
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 America’s first female serial killers, but have the misdeeds of Mrs. Fisher been greatly embellished over time? If you take a tour of Charleston’s Old City Jail, you can be sure to hear tales of the time period during which Lavinia Fisher and her...
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 class sizes afforded me the ability to work closely with other students and talented professors who wanted me to succeed. For three years I worked on the campus newspaper, The Blue Banner, honing my reporting skills, interviewing students and...