I’ve been on vacation this week (and thus haven’t posted,) but I thought y’all would want to see this right away.
I received the toxicology report for Jessy Lauer-Richardson today from the N.C. State Medical Examiner’s Office. The autopsy should be released soon.
Authorities say Jessy Lauer-Richardson was strangled by her U.S. Marine husband last month.
The […]

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 […]

The U.S. Marshals Service was in Onslow County this week rounding up probation absconders in Operation AWOL.
Read the news here.
To the best of my ability, I have gathered the names of those picked up by authorities. I have 23 of the 24. Federal authorities didn’t have one name by close of business. When Marshals […]

WCTI-TV has a video interview online with the guardian of the baby whose toes were chewed off by a pit bull puppy.
Watch it here.
The video shows the baby’s foot, which is healed now, but the toes are obviously missing. It was good to see the baby acting normal and making baby sounds. And I think […]

Read JHM’s autopsy

I covered a meeting Tuesday night where an Onslow County-hired consultant spoke to firefighters about funding full time employees.
At one point the consultant said that the county needed to develop a way to map all of the area emergencies so troubled spots could be identified.
A firefighter told him, “All you have to do is go […]

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 autopsy here […]

The Onslow Shrine Club is paying for the hospital care of the baby who had his toes gnawed to the bone and them some by a pit bull puppy.
Read news here.
The baby’s parents are due in court Monday, but I don’t think anything will go down just yet…

A Hubert man has been charged with a slew of sex charges.
Read news here.
Read Sheriff’s Department press release.

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 leads and interviewing suspects
I have […]

Here is a press release from Rep. Mike Turner who is continuing his campaign to strengthen protections for military personnel who claim sexual assault. Remember, Turner has been vocal about this since Maria Lauterbach was found dead and it became public that she had previously accused the man suspected of killing her of rape.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) - U.S. Rep. […]

I have banned Ragu / Ghost Recon again.The reason is a little selfish, I admit. The guy is just plain annoying.
I have given him several chances, but it doesn’t do any good.
I showed a former college professor of mine some comments by Ragu and he said the way Ragu begins every comment with “I know […]

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 was told […]

A Raleigh teenager convicted of armed robbery Wednesday in Duplin County was sentenced to four to five and a half years in prison, but walked away from the jail the same day.
How? N.C. Superior Court Judge Russell J. Lanier Jr. gave 18-year-old Jamar Marquez Goodman bond until his appeal. According to the N.C. Department of […]

It has been a busy day for me. I haven’t had a lot of time to twitter or blog. And it is now the weekend and I want to spend time with my family so I have tossed all of this together.
First, Daily News Content Editor Amanda Hickey has come up with something really cool […]

Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown has said that several people are in custody for break-ins in the Sneads Ferry area.
Brown anticipates it to be a very large theft ring with stolen goods totalling in the thousands.
Several agencies have been called in to help acquire the stolen goods.
Further information is not yet available.

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 identification, but the […]

Letter from ACLU about jail reading material.
Local lawyers told me yesterday that Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown avoided legal entanglements by changing his policy on reading materials in the jail.
Read that news here. 
Today, we have a clearer picture of the “imminent litigation” Brown faced.
The N.C. ACLU took an interest in the situation after reading an article I wrote […]

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 […]

The victim in last week’s fatal stabbing in Hubert was a resident alien and not an illegal.
Read the news here.
I reported he was an illegal based on incorrect information from law enforcement. A lot - I MEAN A LOT - of people called and e-mailed to say they were sure he was a citizen or […]

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 a barricade around […]

I did a little research, checked on a few things I’ve been told and this is what I have come up with. John Gould’s Iraq War injury was a flesh wound through the soft tissue of his shoulder. The veracity of his war wound was investigated at the time of the incident by the Marines and […]

After listening to attempted murder suspect Johnathan Gould describe the stab wounds he received the night his wife was attacked with a hammer - prosecutors say Gould hit her and stabbed himself - I got to thinking about his war injury in Iraq.
Something in the way Gould referred to his gunshot wound in describing his stab wounds […]

A woman and her son - both illegals - have been charged with murder in Friday’s stabbing death of another illegal. Read news here. 
Authorities had a hard time finding the next of kin of the victim because of his illegal status. 
See Friday’s story here.

If you have been following the Jonathan Gould trial on TV then you know how well each station has been covering the trial. But there is a lot of hard work that goes into the news before it hits the airwaves.
N.C. Superior Court Judge Jay D. Hockenbury limited the number of television cameras allowed in the courtroom […]

Onslow County Sheriff’s Capt. Pat Garvey was qualified by the court as an expert fingerprint witness for the first time Thursday in the attempted murder trial of Jonathan Gould.
Read news story here.
Of course, this isn’t Garvey’s first rodeo. He has been a crime scene investigator for eight years, processed hundreds of crime scenes for physical […]

SBI forensic experts testified in Jonathan Gould’s trial that no latent fingerprints were found on hammers or knife. There was DNA though.
More on that later…

A woman was sexually assaulted and killed just down the road from where I used to live in Hampstead, according to several media outlets in Wilmington.
I know the Hampstead area, it is quiet and peaceful; but has a few hotspots of drug activity.
Beverly Ennis Moore, 52, was found dead in her bathroom Sunday night at 2634 Sloop Point Road.

Moore […]

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 there […]