• True Crime

    The Deaths at Trails Carolina

    On Nov. 10, 2014, a 17-year-old young man named Alec Lansing went missing after he left a group from Trails Carolina, an organization in Western North Carolina that offers wilderness therapy for young adults and children. At the time, Lansing, who was from Atlanta, Georgia, had been camping with a group off NC 107 in the forest near Heady Mountain Church Road. A search for Lansing involved the U.S. Forest Service, the North Carolina Highway Patrol, the local sheriff’s office, the Glenville-Cashiers Rescue Squad, Jackson County Emergency Management and Cashiers Fire Department. Authorities had received reports that Lansing was seen at a gas station in Cashiers on the evening he went missing from…

  • True Crime

    What Happened to the Dorchester Three in South Carolina?

    On April 3, 1987, Linda McCord, age 33 and her friend Sarah Boyd, age 32 drove to a gospel concert in Waltersboro, South Carolina. They were traveling in a blue Lincoln owned by Linda’s husband and also took Sarah’s 2 ½-year-old daughter Kimberly along with them. Around midnight, Sarah’s husband returned home from work and was surprised that his wife and daughter weren’t back home yet, but he assumed they had stayed over at Linda’s house and would be back the next morning. When they didn’t return, he filed a missing persons report with the police. Linda’s husband found the car abandoned in Dorchester County two days later. Upon further examination, he discovered…

  • Creative Writing,  podcasts,  True Crime,  writing inspiration

    Year-End Review of My Writing, Podcasting, and Freelance Projects

    Every year I try to take an inventory of my writing productivity and progress. It helps me stay motivated in reaching my writing goals and gives me ideas for future content. This past year has seen me writing daily, whether I’m working on copy, podcast scripts, book reviews, or revisions on my suspense/thriller novel. Yesterday I sat down and crunched some numbers to see what I accomplished in 2023, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. Here’s a look at what I worked on this past year: For my true crime podcast, Missing in the Carolinas: I made the decision this fall to go from a bi-weekly production schedule to a weekly…

  • True Crime

    Did Jeffrey MacDonald Murder His Family?

    One of the most intriguing cases from North Carolina involves a man named Jeffrey MacDonald. MacDonald had attended Princeton University on a scholarship and then Northwestern University for medical school. He married his high school sweetheart, a woman named Collette Stevenson, before becoming a surgeon in the 6th Special Forces Group in the United States Army stationed at Fort Bragg in 1969. On the night of February 17, 1970, MacDonald, who was 26 at the time, awakened to a real-life nightmare. As he later told the military police, around 2 or 3 a.m., he woke up from where he was sleeping on the living room couch to the sound of screams. There, he…

  • True Crime

    What Happened to Angela Hamby of Wilkesboro, N.C.?

    What happened to a young woman named Angela Hamby, who went missing from Wilkesboro, North Carolina on October 29, 1982, remains a mystery. By all accounts, Angela was a homebody. She had graduated from West Wilkes High School in 1980, and was living at home with her parents and working at a job in data processing at the local NCNB Bank. She was also enrolled at Wilkes Community College, with the hopes of eventually transferring to Appalachian State University. On the day she went missing, Angela had errands planned for the morning, and then she and her mother and sister were going to drive to nearby Elkin to do some shopping. She left…

  • True Crime

    The Craft of Writing on the Strange and Sinister

    In addition to writing about true crime here, I’ve also shared my story of honing the craft over at WOW! Women on Writing. Here are a just a few of the posts I’ve written on the topic, and it’s fun to see my progression go from just a spark to a fully-developed project or idea. How to Write Compelling True Crime. In this post I share how I came up with the idea to start up Missing in the Carolinas, and how it evolved from being just a missing persons podcast to one that mixes in solved cases and reviews of other true crime shows and books. I also used this content to…

  • Creative Writing,  podcasts

    How I Started a Podcast

    This article appears this month in the June 2020 issue of Lake Norman CURRENTS. It was while interviewing Davidson resident Stacey Simms about her Diabetes Connections podcast for CURRENTS several years ago that I first learned about podcasts. For anyone unfamiliar, a podcast is an episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device for easy listening. There are now more than 800,000 active podcasts available worldwide, if that tells you anything about their popularity. When a friend started telling me about some true crime podcasts a few years ago, I started wading my way into the podcast waters. I loved studying the different formats,…