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About 4 pm on July 25, 1953, Lester Woodward, a 30-year-old truck driver, was found shot to death in the cab of his car carrier parked beside the Pennsylvania Turnpike about a mile west of the Irwin Interchange. His empty wallet was found on the floor of the cab. Police theorized Woodward had pulled over… Read more: Who Was the Phantom Killer of the Pennsylvania Turnpike?

Revenue officers knew there was a still near Hester & Thompson’s mill, in the northern part of Wake County, along the banks of the Neuse River in an immense cane break known as the “Harricanes,” a three-by-five-mile area covered by a dense growth of cane from seven to 10 feet high. They’d been searching for… Read more: Through the Mill to a Moonshine Still

It was a rainy Friday night in February 1901 in the village of Emma, NC, three miles west of Asheville. Five men were on a collision course. Three would leave with gunshot wounds. Two would die. Sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 pm, Samuel Alexander closed D.J. McClelland’s store, which also housed the Emma Post Office,… Read more: The NC Store Burglary That Ended in a Gun Battle

As you know, I spend a bit of time scouring Appalachian history books in search of extraordinary crime stories and often try to separate the facts from the legends. I’ve pulled stories from Western North Carolina: A History (1730-1913) (1914) by John Preston Arthur, A History of Buncombe County, North Carolina (1930) by F. A.… Read more: Larkin Liles, Man of Honor and Mayhem: Fact or Fiction

The September 29, 1882, New York Times carried the following item on the front page: NOVEL CAPTURE OF A MOONSHINER DRIVEN FROM HIS HIDING PLACE BY RATTLESNAKES “DALLAS, N.C., Sept. 28.–An old moonshiner named Charles Folias, for whom the revenue officers have been searching for a long time, was captured in the northern part of… Read more: Charles Folias, Whiskey Caveman: Fact or Fiction

I’ve been working on a quiz for a while now. The struggle is where you start and where you stop, both timewise and geographically. This one starts in 1836 and goes to 2009, and at least nine states are involved. The topics covered include embezzlement (fancy theft), murder, prison breaks, executions, bank robbery, hijacking, and… Read more: Appalachian True Crime Quiz

Were the 1909 Virginia murders a robbery or the work of a madman? Late on the night of September 21, 1909, someone murdered six members of the Meadows family, and set their log cabin on fire. The crime took place near Hurley, a tiny village in Buchanan County, VA, about 100 miles (160 km) south… Read more: Death Rides A Fast Train: The Laurel Creek Murders

On Tuesday, August 21, 1934, Raban County Sheriff Luther Rickman was getting a haircut at Roy Mize’s barber shop when he heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. He ran out the door and discovered that across the street, five men were robbing the Bank of Clayton. The gang had parked in front of the bank.… Read more: A Twisted Road to Justice: The Great Clayton, GA, Bank Heist

Two Ghost Stories Reveal Hidden Crimes. The most famous ghost story in Australia is Fisher’s Ghost; the most famous in West Virginia is the Greenbrier Ghost. Legend has it that each returned from the grave to bring their killers to justice. Although the two murders happened half a world away and 70 years apart, they… Read more: The Greenbrier Ghost: Did An Australian Ghost Story Solve A West Virginia Murder?

In September 1985, the Blue Ridge region witnessed one of the most bizarre and quintessentially 80s crimes ever committed. On the morning of Thursday, September 12, Fred Meyers, an 85-year-old retired engineer, looked out his bathroom window while shaving and saw a dead body in his gravel driveway. The body was wearing a parachute, had… Read more: The Cocaine Freefall: Guns, Gold, and Gucci Loafers

A riveting new book, Blood on the Blue Ridge: Historic Appalachian True Crime Stories 1808-2004, promises to captivate readers with a collection of true crime tales spanning nearly two centuries in the Appalachian Highlands. The book opens in 1808 with the story of The Nearly Fatal Footprint. A man is sentenced to hang based entirely… Read more: Blood on the Blue Ridge: Historic Appalachian True Crime Stories 1808-2004

On Wednesday evening, January 14, 1942, David “Herman” Allen, his wife, Ruth Lee Massengill Allen, Leon Allen, and Lettie Ballinger were having a night out in Benson, N.C., a small town about 35 miles south of Raleigh. After visiting a number of places, they drove to Bill Benson’s filling station, arriving there at about 1:00… Read more: A Jealous Man, a Triple Murder, a Night of Terror

1927 was remarkable for technological firsts. Charles Lindbergh made the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic TV image. Warner Bros released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film with synchronized sound. On the crime front, Paul Jaworski and the Flathead Gang advanced the science… Read more: The Flathead Gang’s Daring Armored Car Heist in 1927

Shortly before 6:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 25, 1917, Mr. C.C. Beaver, foreman for the street car barns and shops of the North Carolina Public Service Company in Salisbury, NC, walked into work and found a nightmare. The safe containing the money from the previous day’s fares was broken open and empty. On further investigation,… Read more: A Life for a Leg: Baxter Cain’s Deadly Bargain

In 1871, Phillip Arnold and John Slack entered the Bank of California in San Francisco. They were clad in worn clothing and covered in a generous layer of dirt and grime. One of them clutched a leather bag. They wanted to deposit it for safekeeping. The teller summoned a manager who told the pair that… Read more: Glittering Deception: The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872

In part one, we met Garrett Hedden and his brothers, Bill, Joe, and Riley. All of them were moonshiners who followed in the footsteps of their father, John. Garrett had killed multiple men, including his brother, Bill, in 1898, and in 1900, he fought a party of seven revenue agents to a standstill in a… Read more: The Meanest Moonshiner in Tennessee Part 2

In 1900, Garrett Hedden was the most feared man in mountainous Polk County, Tennessee, a rural district in the southeast corner of the state. He was a well-known moonshiner who the local newspapers labeled a desperado and credited with killing eight men. One killing, in particular, made citizens, marshals, and revenue men reluctant to cross… Read more: The Meanest Moonshiner in Tennessee

Picture it like the movie Ocean’s Eleven went country: A down-to-earth, Southern-style heist. Instead of Danny Ocean and his crew of con men, explosive and electronics specialists, and an acrobat, we have David Ghantt, his married girlfriend, her petty criminal friend from high school, that guy’s cousin, one of his high school buddies, and a… Read more: The Gang that Couldn’t Think Straight

Before Bonnie and Clyde, there was Irene and Glen. On Friday, December 27, 1929, Corporal Brady Paul and Patrolman Ernest Moore of the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol left New Castle, PA, heading east on Butler Road. Paul operated the SHP motorcycle, and Moore rode in the sidecar. Walter “Glenn” Dague, Irene Schroeder, her brother, Tom Crawford,… Read more: Iron Irene’s Bold Heists and Daring Escapes

On December 9, 1921, John W. Oliver, a farmer, mail carrier, and Primitive Baptist preacher in Cades Cove, Tennessee, had finished supper and was getting ready for bed when he looked out the window and discovered his barn was on fire. There were five horses in there. Oliver swiftly rescued three of the horses from… Read more: Moonshiner’s December 1921 Cades Cove Crime Spree

An unknown NC moonshiner became the subject of books, manhunts, and buckshot battles. “Major” Lewis Redmond had many titles: moonshiner, bootlegger, killer, and most impressively, King of the Moonshiners. Playwright Gary Carden may have given Redmond his most colorful moniker, the Prince of Dark Corners, which is the title of his play based on the… Read more: How Lewis Redmond Became the Moonshine King of the Carolinas

A disastrous break-in and shoot-out in a small town leads to a daring escape attempt from “The Rock.” John “Paul” Scott shocked prison authorities and perhaps the entire world on Sunday, December 16, 1962, when he became as Rich Jordan writing for the San Francisco Examiner put it “the only man known for certain to… Read more: Kentucky Bank Robber Becomes First Alcatraz Inmate to Reach Shore