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The Murder of Sandra Coulthard
On July 9, 1988, 30-year-old High Point, North Carolina resident Sandra Coulthard passed away at Duke University Medical Center. She’d been sick for about six months with vomiting, diarrhea, vomiting, and numbness of her feet and fingers. Doctors had diagnosed her with Guillain-Barre syndrome and had been treating her for it, but her symptoms never improved. Guillain-Barre syndrome is a rare neurological disorder that causes a person’s immune system to attack their nervous system. It often begins suddenly and as symptoms increase, can cause weakness and paralysis. While there is no cure for Guillain-Barre, treatments such as plasma exchange and intravenous immunoglobulin therapy can be administered for relief of symptoms. Sandy, a married…
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Updates on the Writing Life
I don’t want to discuss how this is probably the last summer we’ll have both of our young adults at home (they are entering their sophomore and senior years of college). Our time with them is winding down, and while I’m sad, I’m also grateful for their desire to live out in the world on their own and reach for their personal and professional goals while in college. I can’t wait to hear about what adventures lie ahead for them in the coming school year! I’m continuing to write, podcast, read books, exercise, immerse myself in foreign language, spend time with my husband, and anything else I can think to do to keep…
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Celebrating Five Years of Podcasting!
When I started my true crime podcast Missing in the Carolinas five years ago, I thought I would be focusing solely on missing persons cases in North and South Carolina. My creative muse had other ideas. Little did my muse know that scanning old newspaper archives would lead me to intriguing crimes from the past (many with no digital footprints) and inspire me to broaden the context of my storytelling. I’m not going to lie–it’s been a labor of love. I don’t have a team, other than a few family members (you know who you are!) and I don’t make a profit off the podcast. I believe that I could make money off…
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Who Murdered Wesley and Bonnie Mahaffey in Asheville, N.C.?
In 1986, a free vacation getaway turned into a nightmare for an Ohio couple visiting Asheville, North Carolina. Wesley and Bonnie Mahaffey, ages 33 and 29, respectively, had traveled to the area from Hanover Township, Ohio, after winning a three-day trip to Asheville through Wesley’s job. The couple had been staying at a nearby hotel, the Great Smokies Hilton, and a member of the maid service saw them come out of their room as they left for a day of sightseeing on May 18, 1986. Their bodies were found early the next morning by a group of teenage boys. They had both been shot multiple times with a .38-caliber handgun. Buzzard Rock is…
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Who Murdered Pamela Mitchell Hoy?
On July 25, 1990, 41-year-old Pamela Mitchell Hoy had dinner with her husband Fred Hoy at a Burlington restaurant, and then went home and packed her gray Dodge van with her clothes and grooming tables, exercise runs, and crates. Pam raised and showed Italian greyhounds and was preparing for a trip that would take her to South Carolina the next day to a competition. She had plans to take her 11-year-old daughter on that trip. She went back inside the house to give her oldest daughter a magazine before leaving. She was expected at her parents’ home later that evening around 10:30 p.m., but never arrived. Pam Hoy grew up in the Greensboro…
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The Unsolved Murders of Pamela Murray and Beverly Sherman
Thirty-eight years ago, a young woman baked cookies with her aunt and then headed off to a local mall, probably to pick up a gift for her fiancé for Valentine’s Day. The two had plans to celebrate with a dinner out later that evening. But that young woman never made it inside the mall. Instead, she was forced back inside her car by an unknown assailant and found murdered a few miles away just a short time later. Investigators eventually linked her murder with another homicide of a local 17-year-old girl who had a prostitution arrest on her record. While the two victims came from very different backgrounds, it appears only one man…
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Book Review: The Devil at His Elbow
I recently read the true crime book “The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty” by Valerie Bauerlein. I shared my thoughts in the video below.
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The Abduction and Murder of Hubbard Harris, Jr. in South Carolina
On December 23, 1933, a 15-year-old young man named Hubbard H. Harris, Jr. went missing from the Columbia, South Carolina area on his birthday The boy was the son of Hubbard Harris, Sr., vice president of Home Stores, Inc., a grocery chain. Forty-eight hours after he went missing, three residents of the Olympia mill village discovered a body in a deserted home about 11 miles outside of Columbia, underneath a dilapidated mattress. He had been beaten to death, and the murder weapon, a blood-spattered iron bar, was found nearby. Hubbard Jr.’s mother told officers a man had called their home several times to offer her son an employment opportunity. The last time he…
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The Drowning Death of Brenda Anderson in South Carolina
On the afternoon of June 19, 1965, a little girl playing on the shore of Folly Beach, South Carolina came across the deceased body of a woman wearing a two-piece bathing suit. Because there were no personal belongings found on the beach, authorities began questioning nearby residents to see if anyone could identify the young woman. When 24-year-old John Paul Anderson, a Polaris Submarine crewman from Massachusetts, returned home from running errands early that evening, he was unable to locate his wife, 20-year-old Brenda Lee Minton Anderson, who lived with him on Folly Beach. That’s when neighbors told him about the woman who had been found on the beach and he was able…
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What Happened to Jeremy Grice from Aiken, South Carolina?
On November 22, 1984, a four-year-old little boy vanished in the rain from his parents’ home. Jeremy Grice lived with his mother and step-father, Donna and Nick Arrington, and his 10-month-old sister Christy. His step-father put Jeremy to bed the night before while his mom worked second shift at a local manufacturing plant that made thermostats. She arrived home from her shift around 1 a.m. and went to sleep. Her husband Nick got up around 7 a.m. to go to work. Around 10 a.m., Jeremy’s infant sister woke her mother up. Donna was surprised her son hadn’t woken her up already by that time. She searched their mobile home and the bedroom Jeremy…
