-
The Murder of Karen Styles
It was Halloween of 1994. Karen was a 22-year-old recent graduate of Western Carolina University, which is located in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Due to its location in the Western North Carolina mountains, the school attracts thousands of students each year who love exploring all the area has to offer. Styles had probably run in wooded trails while in college numerous times without a second thought. But on this day in 1994, she never returned from her 8 a.m. run in the Pisgah National Forest, just a few miles away from where she had been staying at her parents home in nearby town of Candler. Her car was found later that evening in the…
-
Wrapped Up with a Bow
This letter originally appeared in the December edition of Lake Norman CURRENTS. This time of year always brings back a rush of memories from when I worked in the retail industry in my teens and early 20s and the oh-so valuable life lessons I learned. My first memory that stands out is my time working at Belk Department Store. Now, if you’re a woman and you’ve never worked at Belk or shopped there, you can’t really consider yourself southern, in my opinion. When I was in high school, our local store at The Asheville Mall interviewed a number of teenagers from the surrounding high schools and then selected a handful of us to…
-
How Visine Drops Contributed to Stacy Hunsucker’s Death
Most people wouldn’t think of Visine, a common over-the-counter eye drop product used to treat itchy and dry eyes as a murder weapon, but one Gaston County man awaiting trial is accused of using it as just that. On September 23, 2018, Stacy Robinson Hunsucker, a 32-year-old Charlotte preschool teacher and mother of two young daughters, passed away suddenly at the home she shared with her husband. Stacy had suffered from heart problems in the past and actually had a pacemaker implanted not long after the birth of the couple’s second daughter. Her husband, 35-year-old Jonathan Lee Hunsucker, refused to authorize an autopsy after her death, attributing his wife’s sudden passing to “myocardial…
-
Kevin Collins, the Original Face on the Milk Carton
The 1980s were a much different time for parents and children. Kids would spend hours playing outdoors with friends after school and it wasn’t unusual for them to be late for dinner. But on the night of Feb. 10, 1984, when 10-year-old Kevin Collins didn’t make it home from basketball practice in San Francisco, Ca., his mother knew something had to be wrong. Kevin was a shy fourth-grader who struggled a bit in school because he had dyslexia. He also came from a large Catholic family and was one of nine Collins children. On the day he disappeared, his older brother Gary would have normally accompanied him home from school, but he had…