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Review of “Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty”
“Blood on Their Hands” is a memoir that journalist and podcaster Mandy Matney wrote after four years of reporting on Alex Murdaugh, his family, and their numerous related crimes. It details how she first became aware of the Murdaughs after Mallory Beach went missing as a result of the boat crash on Archers Creek, the mysterious death of Stephen Smith that many people felt was connected to the Murdaughs, the death of the Murdaughs’ housekeeper, and finally, the deaths of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh. With dogged reporting, Mandy Matney and a few other diligent South Carolina reporters would realize how everything led to the fact that Alex Murdaugh had been abusing narcotics and…
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The Unsolved Murder of Virginia Olson in North Carolina
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 administrators, working late nights at the office with only my jumbled notes and a miniature coffeepot to keep me company. I eventually became the features editor and then the news editor, assigning stories to reporters and perfecting my copy editing…
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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…
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Ghosts of Davidson is a Tour Steeped in History
This article originally ran in Lake Norman CURRENTS. As a true crime fan and person who is intrigued by ghost tours, I love checking them out whenever I’m traveling. Several years ago, I got the chance to stay at the Omni Grove Park Inn, where the mysterious story of “The Pink Lady” is shared by the staff. I’ve also taken ghost tours in Asheville and in Charleston, S.C., where I’m pretty sure I captured some paranormal activity in one photo of a church. The LKN area is also home to rich history, so when I heard about Ghosts of Davidson, I reached out to the student who owns the tour company to learn…
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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…
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The Murder of Nikki McPhatter
Nikki McPhatter’s story caught my attention after seeing it featured on the Investigation Discovery show “Web of Lies.” She was a 30-year-old woman working in Charlotte at the time of her disappearance. A goal-oriented person who always seemed to know what that next step was, she joined the Navy shortly after graduating from high school. After her time in the military, she took a job as a ticket agent for U.S. Airways at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport. She was an adventurous young woman who, according to her older sister LaToya, also enjoyed skydiving in her downtime. She turned to online dating hoping to find companionship. It was on a website called Tagged.com…
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The Murder of Sherry Hart in North Carolina
This case was featured on “Unsolved Mysteries” on December 1, 1995. Hart was a recently divorced 24-year-old young mother who had moved back to live with her parents in West Jefferson, N.C. when she went missing after an evening out in January of 1984. For months her family wondered what had happened to her, and then her body was found on December 10, 1984, at the base of a cliff near an area called Jumpinoff Rock. Investigators received some tips about Hart’s murder after a $5,000 reward was publicized. They discovered two local men named Richard Bare and Jeffrey Burgess had met up with Hart the night she went missing, and talked her…
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Five True Crime Podcast Episodes for Halloween
If you’re an avid podcast listener like me, you’re always on the hunt for good shows to listen to. Several podcasts in my feed put out Halloween-related episodes recently, so I thought I’d share those with you. The first two cases I had never heard of before, so I’m curious to see if they are new to you as well. Of course, I couldn’t resist adding in my own ghostly episode of Missing in the Carolinas I created last year into this mix. Enjoy! Dateline: The Night Before Halloween If you’re a true crime junkie like me, you enjoy watching “Dateline” but may not always have the time to watch the episodes when…
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What Happened to Jamie Fraley?
Jamie Fraley was a young 22-year-old from Gastonia who had lived most of her life with bipolar disorder and anxiety, but according to friends and family, she was on a medication that was working for her and excited about the future. She was taking classes at Gaston Community College and living in a nearby apartment. She was also engaged at the time to a young man named Ricky Simonds Junior. They had been living together until he was arrested and charged with theft. Despite his arrest, Fraley was supportive of Ricky Junior and stood by him while he served out his sentence. She was living alone at the apartment, but Ricky’s father, Ricky…
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The N.C. Murders of Viktor Gunnarsson and Catherine Miller
North Carolina isn’t exactly the place where one would expect to find a man suspected of being involved with the assassination of the Prime Minister of Sweden hiding out. Nor would they expect the man would be murdered as the result of a love triangle and not his troubles abroad. But that’s what happened to Viktor Gunnarsson in December 1993. On Feb. 28, 1986, Prime Minister Olof Palme was exiting a movie theater on a busy street in Stockholm when he was shot and killed. His wife, Lisbet, sustained injuries during the attack but survived. Because Gunnarsson, known to be a staunch right-wing extremist at the time, was spouting off hate speech about…
