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...
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 Veterans Affairs, approximately 21,000 veterans still await burials, some dating all the way back to the Civil War. In 2007, a nonprofit called the Missing in America Project began working to provide those burials. There are numerous remains that end up...
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 Street near her home. Mary was on her way home from eating dinner at the Fort Sumter Hotel with friends. Thinking the woman had been the victim of a hit-and-run accident, the two young woman who discovered her hailed a man driving by so they could...
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 two elderly mothers. The Scotts lived in a double wide mobile home and Amy and her husband Ross lived on the same property in a single-wide. Amy entered the home to find a horrifying scene. 58-year-old Mike Scott, 60-year-old Cathy Scott, 80-year-old...
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 kids for more than 20 years, and when the opportunity to take over Ghosts of Davidson fell into their laps, they took it. Ghosts of Davidson is a 90-minute stroll through downtown Davidson, a small and charming town that is full of local legends,...
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. I’ve discussed several cases tied to domestic violence in this podcast, including Nancy Cooper, from Episode 18, Missing runners in North Carolina, Patty Jo Pulley from Episode 45, Across State Lines, Maryann and Elaine Boczkowski in Episode 48,...
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...
