Historical true crimes from U.S. Civil war to WWII in the Blue Ridge Mountain Region including but not limited to moonshining, murder, robbery, fraud, and rape. We reserve the right to go outside these confines but only for a really good story.
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 […]
Who Was the Phantom Killer of the Pennsylvania Turnpike? Read More »
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
Through the Mill to a Moonshine Still Read More »
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,
The NC Store Burglary That Ended in a Gun Battle Read More »
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.
Larkin Liles, Man of Honor and Mayhem: Fact or Fiction Read More »
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
Charles Folias, Whiskey Caveman: Fact or Fiction Read More »
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
Death Rides A Fast Train: The Laurel Creek Murders Read More »
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.
A Twisted Road to Justice: The Great Clayton, GA, Bank Heist Read More »
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
The Greenbrier Ghost: Did An Australian Ghost Story Solve A West Virginia Murder? Read More »
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
The Cocaine Freefall: Guns, Gold, and Gucci Loafers Read More »
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
Blood on the Blue Ridge: Historic Appalachian True Crime Stories 1808-2004 Read More »
