Cops think they’ve solved an ear-biting cold case with the arrest of a Hubert man accused in another more recent chopping case. Read the news. The police press release. The victim’s ear:

George Hayden, convicted last year of the 1972 shooting death of Sgt. Bill Miller, was released by the N.C. Department of Correction shortly after the N.C. Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s argument against the Appeals Court overturning an Onslow County jury verdict. Hayden has been home for a few days. He has spent [...]

A triple-homicide remains unsolved because federal investigators believe they know who did it, but just can’t try him. Read the news. Carlton “Butch” Smith is the only person to ever be charged in the case. There were beard hairs found at the scene. Butch had no facial hair at the time. I am filing a Freedom [...]

A lot, I mean a lot, has happened in the last several days. Here is a run down of several loose ends and updates to stories and cases I have covered in the newspaper or on the blog: - A Sampson County man who killed his family will spend the rest of his life in prison now [...]

I remember when I was a child every Mother’s Day we wore a pink carnation corsage to church. Pink meant your mother was alive while white meant your mother had passed away. I don’t know whether the three children of murdered mother Irene Bennett are church goers, but if they are, they will have been wearing white [...]

In the first appeal out of Onslow County to be heard in oral argument in years, lawyers made their points in the George Hayden case in Raleigh on Monday. Hayden was convicted last year of first-degree murder in the 1972 shooting death of Marine Sgt. Bill Miller. Read the entire 50-plus page defendant appeals brief. [...]

Jeff Vavla, a convicted murderer suspected in at least one other homicide, was arrested this weekend and charged with stealing dogfood. I don’t know much about the guy arrested with Vavla, Archie Dale Lester, but he is well known to law enforcement. Vavla escaped justice in the death of Karen Sue Lanham - a woman who was [...]

Sheriff Ed Brown told me Saturday that while the location of the bodies of two children missing since 1962 remains a mystery, their souls have been in heaven since the moment they were murdered. I’d like to believe that. The man believed to have kidnapped the children told his wife he dumped them at the bottom of a mine [...]

Murder charges against Vickie Babbitt and Rodger Gill have been dropped. Read the news. Babbitt was having an extramarital affair with George Hayden in 1972. Gill was thier friend. Hayden used an M-16 to gun down Vickie’s husband, Camp Lejeune Marine Sgt. Bill Miller. Hayden escaped justice for 36 years. Then the stars aligned to bring his victim’s sister, who had [...]

The recent arrest in Craven County of a person central to the Jennifer Hamilton Morton case has renewed a lively discussion on this blog of the circumstances surrounding her tragic death. This case has been of interest to Mike McHugh and I since we first wrote about it. The recent comments have not been ignored [...]

David Morton, 42, a suspect in the 1996 bludgeoning death of his wife, was recently charged with DWI and other counts after crashing his vehicle near River Bend in Craven County. He was charged by the N.C. State Highway Patrol with driving while impaired, driving while license revoked, fictitious tag, improper inspection, no insurance, left of center and texting while [...]

Read the Doe Network file on the “Bear Creek Skeleton.”  Check out the very detailed NamUs web site with excellent details. Still waiting for DNA comparison with a Florida woman…. Read the news article here about Onslow County Sheriff’s detectives spending the week in Florida interviewing folks in the case of a female skeleton found in [...]

NCIS has an outstanding cold case unit - the first of its kind at the federal level. They have resolved some really complicated cases. I wish that would come true in the cases of Pam Bell and Katherine McFadden. Pam Bell: I drove down to Wilmington last year to speak to Pam Bell’s family. Her mother reminded me so [...]

Delayed by the holidays, vacation and a very busy return to work last week, I finally present the cold cases active in Onslow County. The news article from last Sunday is here, for your referencing convenience. As I said before, this is meant to wrap-up some cases for future reporters and hopefully the general public. Some of these [...]

Like I said a while back, the newspaper’s “Cold Case Homicide” series is drawing to a close. There are a few cases I still have to research, but for the most part, I have done all I can do as far as cold cases go in the newspaper. I will continue to examine cases on [...]

NCIS and two local sheriff’s departments never stopped looking for Stan Bosley who disappeared almost five years ago. At times the case was extremely frustrating because they knew – or at least had a hunch – that his body was in the Hampstead woods just out of reach. After a centuries-old ceremony to talk with the Holy [...]

The FBI is trying to solve civil rights-era murders in Mississippi and is asking the public’s help in tracking down potential witnesses. Read this excellent AP story about it. AP file photo of reputed Ku Klux Klansman James Ford Seale who received three life prison terms for his role in the 1964 abduction and murder of two black teenagers [...]

Never give up. A woman buried as a Jane Doe 55 years ago in Colorado has been identified. The pain of not knowing what happened to Dorothy Gay Howard saddened an Arizona family for more than half a century. “It was just complete and utter shock,” the just-identified woman’s sister, Marlene Howard Ashman told The [...]

Here’s another case of a wife and mother who lived on the edge and died young. 32-year-old Bernice Cleo Naughton liked to frequent Court Street nightclubs and would often stay gone from home, her husband and three kids for days at a time. She drove away from her Hubert home in February 1985 and was [...]

Onslow Memorial Park is six miles from where the body of Jennifer Hamilton Morton was found in October 1996. Her grave is situated near the water, a peaceful spot: One wonders, though, whether Jennifer knows peace with her homicide unresolved:

How does a beautiful young woman like this? Who lived in a house like this? End up dead and discarded in a place like this? I spoke to a retired detective this week who worked Jennifer’s case. He said her death was a tragedy years in the making. He equated her death to a jet [...]

Read JHM’s autopsy

Mike and I spent this afternoon talking to someone who knew Jennifer Hamilton Morton. That person spoke to her the night she died – 13 years ago tonight. I will have an article in the newspaper Sunday about what that person told us and some other information about Jennifer’s death. Tomorrow I will post her [...]

Jennifer Hamilton Morton was killed in October 1996. The Daily News articles from that month exist only in microfilm. I am working on getting them scanned. Basically the three articles boil down to this: Oct. 23, 1996: an unidentified woman’s body found Oct.24, 1996: Jennifer Hamilton Morton identified Oct. 29, 1996: JPD still looking for [...]

I wrote about the death of Jennifer Hamilton Morton for Sunday’s newspaper. Already, the Hamiltons have called to tell me they were not happy with what I quoted Sefton Padgett and David Morton saying. I told the Hamiltons repeatedly when interviewing them for the article that I would tell both sides to the story… I [...]

Daily News reporter Jannette Pippin has an article online about a truck and a skeleton being pulled from the ocean Tuesday. Read her excellent, very informative news article here. Carteret County authorities believe the skeleton is George Edward Quinn, who has been missing since Feb. 5, 2005. Of course we have to wait for official [...]

Authorities continue to investigate the circumstances behind how a Navy Corpsman ended up dead in the Sneads Ferry woods in 1982. Read the news article here. The article is part of a project I began more than a year ago to look into unsolved homicides in Onslow County, Jacksonville and Camp Lejeune. There have been [...]

John Gould will spent the next 18 to 22 years in a different sort of cage fight than he is used to. Read news here. Gould used a hammer to crack his pregnant wife’s skull because he wanted to go it alone again. He likes being alone – prosecutors said something today about him building [...]

Y’all know I love cold cases. Here’s one that WNCT featured recently. It looks pretty solvable to me if the right person comes forward. Like I’ve said before, homicides don’t happen in a vacuum. In most cases there is someone who knows something. Video of WNCT’s Parul Joshi interviewing the victim’s family. The complete story is [...]

“Bushwhacking” Bill Gerrans strikes again! Seriously, lawyers are supposed to jealously defend their clients and I think Gerrans has certainly shown his skill in this case. He was able to get Gill’s bond lowered and then found a bondsman to work with him. Of course, I think Gerrans has something in a defendants a lot of [...]

Rodger Gill’s bond has been reduced. He is not out of jail yet. I will have more later tonight. UPDATE: The information I was going to put on here ended up strong enough for a follow-up article, so I will have it tomorrow…

This Op/Ed piece ran in Tuesday’s Daily News. I like it because it has my name in it. Since the first cold-case squads were formally established back in the 1970s, criminal justice agencies nationwide have embraced the concept. Many branches of law enforcement have divisions that specialize in cases that remain unsolved. Others, hindered by [...]

The wife of a cold case homicide suspect is asking the public for donations to help bail him out of jail. Read news here. I know there are a lot of strong emotions in this case. I also know that bail is not supposed to be form a punishment. Bond amounts are to ensure a [...]

The newspaper has posted my Cold Case: Homicide article about Larry Toler. Read the news here. As I have posted on the blog many times, there are many different kinds of cold cases. Some have a lot of information in the public record, some have a lot of case file info not in the public [...]

An Onslow County jury found Michael Wolfe guilty of first-degree murder in the drowning death of his girlfriend. Read the news. ADA Kelly Neal presented a good case. I couldn’t sit through the entire week-long trial, but I popped in and out and listened to both closing arguments Tuesday. At times Neal seemed outmatched by Wolfe’s attorney Dick [...]

All three codefendants in the 1972 William Miller homicide case entered a plea of “not guilty” Tuesday during their arraignments. Read news. Vickie Babbit’s sister-in-law spoke to reporters after the hearings. You can probably watch video of what she said on the Web sites for WITN or WNCT. Rodger Gill’s attorney, Kinston lawyer Bill Gerrans gave [...]

Like many “unsolved homicides,” the case of Irene Bennett is not as much mystery as frustration. Sheriff’s detectives have a suspect. They have zeroed in on him. Sheriff Ed Brown himself said the DNA evidence is good. So let’s get the ball rolling already! Read the latest Cold Case Homicide report on Bennett here. There [...]

It’s official. Prosecutors filed Rule 24 motions today stating that they cannot seek the death penalty for the codefendants in the 1972 homicide of William Miller. Read news here.

Dateline this Friday will feature the unsolved disappearance and deaths of two women in Wilmington, N.C. The show promises to take the viewer inside an investigation like never before. And I beleive it, because I know one of the investigators. Marc Benson, a private investigator hired by the Allison Foy family, is scheduled to be on the show. Benson’s brother [...]

The Onslow County Grand Jury was busy today. George Hayden and Vickie Babbitt were both indicted today on first-degree murder and conspiracy charges. Read news here. Babbitt’s attorney has come out fighting. I plan to track down Hayden’s lawyer in the next couple of days and see if he will comment. Attorneys are funny about the news [...]

Ernie Linn was the type of guy who would do anything for a friend. Recently retired from the Marine Corps, he went to work at a local convenience store just because a friend couldn’t find anyone to hire. Linn (right front) at his retirement ceremony in April, 1994: Linn worked there for only a few weeks [...]

Read news here. Gill’s first appearance is scheduled for Friday morning, which means it will be Friday afternoon. I am interested to see if the state allows him to keep Bill Gerrans as an attorney.

A Illinois man indicted in Onslow County for murder will soon be on his way back to stand trial. Read news here. Rodger Gill was at the scene on Western Boulvard in 1972 when Bill Miller was gunned down with an M-16, according to his former fiance. She confieded that information to law enforcement after holding it [...]

In the latest example of the benefits of law enforcement sharing information, a car the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department has been looking for was recovered when they passed that info along to the news media to help spread the word. Read about it here and the earlier report here. I know some information has to [...]

Dateline was gracious to me, and I appreciate that. There was one aspect missing from the show, though. While it may have seemed Bill Miller’s murder had been forgotten, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service spent years investigating the case. In fact, it was the long hours NCIS put into the case and the file generated [...]

Throughout my work on this case, I have gathered statements from various members of Marine Sgt. William Miller’s family. This in thier own words, is what Bill Miller meant to them. Georgia, Billy’s sister: The most important thing for people to know is that Billy was loved very much: as a son, as a brother, [...]

The Capital Defender’s Office in Raleigh has appointed Kinston lawyer Bill Gerrans as Rodger Gill’s attorney. Gill is still in Illinois. Gerrans is a top-notch defense attorney. You might remember him as the guy who took the District Attorney to task over the Hartley case. So let’s see: Vickie Babbitt has Scott Jack; George Hayden [...]

I never bought into the Warren Commission Report’s magic bullet theory. But the strange homicide case of Cleo “Possum” Jordan makes me wonder… Jordan went out like he wanted to – dancing and drinking. But that doesn’t make his death any less tragic. Actually, once you study the amazing route the bullet that killed him [...]

Two people set out to have a good time on a Friday night in early January 1992. One went to a nightclub and the other was apparently riding around in a car popping shots. Their good times came to a bloody halt when one of those random shots hit the person in the club. Read news [...]

The third suspect in the 1972 shooting death of a Camp Lejeune Marine received a $5 million bond at his first appearance Tuesday. Rodger Gill is fighting extradition and has a probable cause hearing scheduled for March 24, according to family members. Read news article here. Illinois newspaper, The News-Gazette has an article Online about N.C. [...]