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The Murder of Foy Dixon Cooper
Author David Aaron Moore shared the story of Foy Dixon Cooper in his book Charlotte: Murder, Mystery and Mayhem. At around 5 p.m. on Sunday, September 20, 1959, a group of young boys gathered in the Elmwood Cemetery in Charlotte to play and chase squirrels and chipmunks like they often did. Playing in a cemetery could involve quite a bit of creative role playing for energetic children, so when one boy, Dale Jackson, dared Ronnie McCauley to enter a nearby crypt so he could meet Dracula, the youngster didn’t back down. McCauley stuck his hand and then his head into the opening of the crypt, screaming, “Hey, there’s a real dead woman in…
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Who is William Dathan Holbert?
He was known to his friends as “Wild Bill Cortez” on the small islands of Bocas del Toro, a Caribbean enclave in Panama popular with tourists and expats. But what no one knew was that “Wild Bill” was actually a fugitive from North Carolina who had found the perfect paradise to fund a lifestyle he felt he deserved. In reality, the man was named William Dathan Holbert and he grew up in Hendersonville, N.C., where he played football at North Henderson High School, started up his own landscaping business after graduation, got married and fathered three children. In 2004, while working at a fitness chain in the Asheville area called The Body Shop,…
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An Update in the Kristin Smart Case
In January of last year I wrote about the podcast, Your Own Backyard, which Chris Lambert created and produced. Smart’s disappearance has always been a sad mystery to me, because she went missing from her university in California at the same time I was attending college in North Carolina. She was a 19-year old student at Cal Polytechnic State University attending an off-campus party when she became intoxicated and walked home with two classmates, one being a young man named Paul Flores who was questioned after she went missing. I always had a sinking feeling harm came to Smart and because she was inebriated, she was unable to defend herself properly (FYI–Paul Flores…
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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…
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What Happened to Bruce Ruffin of Charlotte, N.C.?
The murder of Bruce Ruffin remains an open cold case for Mecklenburg County in North Carolina. Although he went missing on April 19, 1986, investigators assumed pretty early on that the 50-year-old had met with foul play. Ruffin was a resident of Midland, North Carolina, a suburb of Charlotte. At the time of his disappearance he was a married father of four who owned Dart Enterprise, a real estate firm located in uptown Charlotte. Ruffin had moved to Charlotte from Greensboro in the mid 1960s. He was a graduate of North Carolina A&T State University and had started out his career running a construction company with his brothers. While he was in college,…
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The 5 Minutes of True Crime Series
I’ll be perfectly honest. I have a hard time watching myself on video. Is that really what I look like talking to people in person? You don’t want to know the thoughts that race through my head when I see myself on camera! But I also know so many people who are trying to promote themselves or a product they’ve created venture into places like IGTV and YouTube with videos designed to raise awareness for their work. With deep trepidation, I began this process slowly. First, I created a YouTube channel but only put one teaser trailer video on it. Then I began realizing how much content I write that people may never…
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The Murder of Realtor Margo Dilemon
Margo Dilemon was a 39-year-old real estate agent living in Clearwater, Fla. when she mysteriously vanished on the job. She had an appointment to show some prospective homes to buyers on Oct. 3, 1981. But when the couple came into the real estate office where she worked, her colleagues hadn’t see her, even though her car was still in the parking lot. Dilemon was estranged from her husband Bob at the time and had a teenage daughter who lived with her grandparents in Texas. Her co-workers made a few calls and discovered Bob was out of town in New York and he had last spoken to her the night before she went missing…
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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…
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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…
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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…