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 president of the United States and daily headlines reported on the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. People in the community thought nothing of leaving their doors unlocked or traveling by foot to get from one place to another. In fact, many people...
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 through. They had both been shot multiple times. They both appeared to be in their 20s, with the man measuring six feet tall and the woman about five feet five inches. The man had extensive dental work and was wearing an expensive watch and a ring...
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...
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 Nursing, and Jesse Allen McBane, 19, was then a freshman at North Carolina State University studying textile technology. They had met while they were still in high school—Patricia was from Sanford and Jesse from Pittsboro. Patricia stood around five feet...
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 missing from the Mount Pisgah Care Home in Candler, North Carolina in 2004. He had only just moved into the home from Atlanta, Georgia when he left the facility on foot, and he has never been found. Heddie Dawkins was an 81-year-old woman who left...
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...
