Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them. Geesy Bundy Dahmer The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 1: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 2: Good Evening. On April fifteenth, nineteen seventy three, two high
Speaker 2: school students discovered Virginia Marie Olson's body near the campus
Speaker 2: of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Olson's murder
Speaker 2: was horrifically violent. She had been bound, raped, and stabbed,
Speaker 2: the death leaving the Ashville community in shock. The cold
Speaker 2: case that followed would span over fifty years, involving three
Speaker 2: generations of detectives and the Ashville Police Department and North
Speaker 2: Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation as they work tirelessly to
Speaker 2: uncover the truth. Authors Brian and Cameron Santana discuss law
Speaker 2: enforcement's dramatic efforts to find Olson's killer, facing numerous obstacles
Speaker 2: along the way, from the abduction of another University of
Speaker 2: North Carolina student in nineteen seventy four to a rape
Speaker 2: and murder victim's body discovered near Olson's crime scene in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy eight. Whispers about the killer's identity have circulated
Speaker 2: for decades, with theories ranging from an escaped mental patient
Speaker 2: to one of North Carolina's most notorious serial killers. Until now.
Speaker 2: Their book, A Murder on Campus is the first to
Speaker 2: tell the gripping story of this unsolved crime and the
Speaker 2: surprising twists that led to the author's startling revelation of
Speaker 2: the killer's identity. This is the fascinating story of how
Speaker 2: two brothers, Brian, an English professor, and Cameron, a cop,
Speaker 2: tag team as authors to solve North Carolina's most notorious
Speaker 2: cold case. The book that we are featuring this evening
Speaker 2: is A Murder on Campus, The Professor, the Cop, and
Speaker 2: North Carolina's most notorious cold Case, with my special guests,
Speaker 2: professor and author Brian Santana and police officer and author
Speaker 2: Cameron Santana. Welcome to the program and thank you very
Speaker 2: much for this interview Brian and Cameron Santana.
Speaker 3: Thanks Dan, thank for having us on today.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, and congratulations on your book, A
Speaker 2: Murder on Campus, The Professor, the Cop, and North Carolina's
Speaker 2: most notorious cold case.
Speaker 3: Thank you. We're happy to be here to talk about it.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Now let's start off with you, Brian.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the genesis of this book, but also
Speaker 2: about your very important background involved in all of this
Speaker 2: before we introduce your brother, Cameron and co author and
Speaker 2: his background.
Speaker 4: Sure, So, the genesis of this book traces back to
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety nine. So in nineteen ninety nine, I was
Speaker 4: a freshman at the University of North Carolina Asheville. I
Speaker 4: was a new drama major at the time, and I was,
Speaker 4: like many freshmen each year, kind of I'd arrived at
Speaker 4: college at this new place and was trying to kind
Speaker 4: of get my bearings and and I didn't have my
Speaker 4: friend group or circle yet. And so I was attending
Speaker 4: my first drama class, which was held at the university's
Speaker 4: main theater, and as I was standing in the lobby, says,
Speaker 4: I didn't really know too many people yet. I was
Speaker 4: just kind of making my way around, trying to busy
Speaker 4: myself and looking at different portraits that were hanging. And
Speaker 4: I found myself looking at this picture that looked like
Speaker 4: it was from the sixties or seventies to me, at
Speaker 4: the time and of a young woman painting scenery in
Speaker 4: the theater, and it was the picture it's on the
Speaker 4: cover of our book. And another student came up to
Speaker 4: me and said, Hey, that's Virginia Olsen, and you know
Speaker 4: she died here a long time ago, and it was
Speaker 4: a really sad story. I didn't really think too much
Speaker 4: about it anymore after that, except that later in that
Speaker 4: semester another student came up to me when I was
Speaker 4: in the lobby happened to be staying in front of
Speaker 4: this picture again, and said, that's Virginia Olson. You know
Speaker 4: she was raped and murdered in the theater here many
Speaker 4: years ago. And I mean that creeping out for a
Speaker 4: little bit. I was when I would be working at
Speaker 4: the theater late at night. I thought that was a
Speaker 4: very eerie kind of remark. And that was the kind
Speaker 4: of story that many of my peers kind of had
Speaker 4: for a while. But then before I graduated, other people said, no.
Speaker 3: They had it wrong.
Speaker 4: She didn't actually die in the theater. She was raped
Speaker 4: and murdered in the gardens that were adjacent to the campus,
Speaker 4: the botanical gardens, to build more botanical gardens.
Speaker 3: And so that was kind of my kind of entrance
Speaker 3: that first year.
Speaker 4: This case made a very deep impression on me because,
Speaker 4: like many college students, I was away from home for
Speaker 4: the first time, and I was trying to figure out,
Speaker 4: you know, who I was and what I wanted to
Speaker 4: do in my life.
Speaker 3: And this story.
Speaker 4: You know, when you're when you're eighteen, you don't you
Speaker 4: have that sense of your kind of sense of immortality.
Speaker 4: And I didn't really give much thought to the fact
Speaker 4: that circumstances could arise where you know, I.
Speaker 3: Wasn't able to pursue a kind of future.
Speaker 4: And hearing about this other student who was nineteen years
Speaker 4: old like me and was also a drama major and
Speaker 4: didn't have that future, it made a really deep impact
Speaker 4: on me. And so it was one of these the
Speaker 4: cases that I heard about, and because of the conflicting information,
Speaker 4: I was always really curious about it, and I started
Speaker 4: informally researching it. I would keep track of when I
Speaker 4: went into graduate school after college. I would keep track
Speaker 4: of media coverage from the nineteen seventies and kind of
Speaker 4: later of it, and I would periodically check in and
Speaker 4: see if there had been any new developments or any
Speaker 4: use coverage, and most of the time there wasn't there
Speaker 4: was very If any of your listeners kind of google
Speaker 4: Virginia Olsen, you'll see that there's they won't find very much.
Speaker 4: And kind of fast forward, and I finished graduate school.
Speaker 4: I became an English professor at a university, and I
Speaker 4: found myself teaching true crime seminars, and so I was
Speaker 4: teaching students how to research and kind of write about
Speaker 4: crime and culture.
Speaker 3: And I always tell my students to choose cases that they.
Speaker 4: Kind of that they care about, and I noticed that,
Speaker 4: you know, some of my students would were increase asking
Speaker 4: me to tell stories about cases that I cared about,
Speaker 4: and I always found myself kind of drifting back to
Speaker 4: this Virginia Olsen's story that I had first learned about
Speaker 4: in college. And so I decided that maybe I should
Speaker 4: do something with this and do something with this, all
Speaker 4: of this kind of thought and this early research I
Speaker 4: had done, and so I reached out to Cameron. And
Speaker 4: then this was around two years ago, and I reached
Speaker 4: out to Cameron, and that was when there were things
Speaker 4: happening in his life that kind of opened up that
Speaker 4: he can speak to and we found ourselves kind of
Speaker 4: teaming up for what we thought was maybe going to
Speaker 4: be an article, and then we very quickly realized that
Speaker 4: this was a book.
Speaker 3: It was going to be too long.
Speaker 5: For an article.
Speaker 2: Now, Cameron, tell us about your background, and also this
Speaker 2: your background much different than your brothers, offering a far
Speaker 2: different perspective as a co author in this project.
Speaker 5: So I joined the Raleigh Police Academy in Raleigh, North
Speaker 5: Carolina in two thousand and five, and I was with
Speaker 5: the Raleigh Police Department for sixteen and a half years.
Speaker 5: And during that time I really enjoyed it, but like
Speaker 5: a lot of police officers, started to have families and
Speaker 5: the balance of work life and family life became an issue,
Speaker 5: especially when I had my second child that has or
Speaker 5: had some medical issues and she's also autistic, So working
Speaker 5: shifts and being called in and doing the extra assignments
Speaker 5: on your time off became more of a hassle, and
Speaker 5: so I started to look at some smaller departments I
Speaker 5: could work for and still be a cop. So I
Speaker 5: did that, but it really wasn't the same as when
Speaker 5: you're working for a larger department. And I was only
Speaker 5: doing it part time, so I had a lot of
Speaker 5: time on my hands, and my brother had been teaching
Speaker 5: the true crimes class, like you'll tell you, and he
Speaker 5: would tell me about these cases, and naturally I would
Speaker 5: start to research, and then that turned into kind of
Speaker 5: like a nightly phone call with us, where we'd start
Speaker 5: to discussing these cases and what we had learned about
Speaker 5: them throughout the day. And then one day you called
Speaker 5: me and said, you know, I've got this case that
Speaker 5: I would like us to do, and I'm thinking that
Speaker 5: maybe it'll be an article we can probably at least
Speaker 5: get into the Asheville Paper, but you never know, if
Speaker 5: we've really dig up some, you know, some new things,
Speaker 5: and we may be able to make this into a book.
Speaker 5: And honestly, I really didn't think that much into it.
Speaker 5: I just thought, Okay, maybe this would be a weekend's
Speaker 5: worth of work. You know, this is just something that
Speaker 5: we'll be doing for fun. And then the next day
Speaker 5: or two my brother called me and said, hey, by
Speaker 5: the way, we've got a book contract and we need
Speaker 5: to start discussing some deadlines. So that's kind of the
Speaker 5: point that it really sunk in that this was not
Speaker 5: just going to be a little side project. This is
Speaker 5: actually going to be a real kind of side job.
Speaker 5: And we've gone from that to growing it into making
Speaker 5: some sales lists i Amazon and doing these podcasts, and
Speaker 5: so we're just going from there.
Speaker 2: Rian, Let's get back to who was Virginia Marie Olson
Speaker 2: tell us about her.
Speaker 4: Sure, so, Virginia Brielson was born. She was born just
Speaker 4: outside of Washington, d C. And her father worked for
Speaker 4: the Department of Agriculture. She had two siblings. She spent
Speaker 4: most of her early life in Northern Virginia, aside from
Speaker 4: a short period of time when her family relocated to
Speaker 4: Kansas for elementary school. Most of her formative years and
Speaker 4: most of the classmates we interviewed were from her time
Speaker 4: in Northern Virginia, though. She went to McClain High School,
Speaker 4: and she was known in high school as someone who
Speaker 4: was very both introverted on one hand and deeply spiritual
Speaker 4: and religious, but also someone who had kind of something
Speaker 4: very kind of intoxicating and very gregarious about her that
Speaker 4: the people found very attractive. You know, we interviewed around
Speaker 4: thirty two people I think it totally knew her in
Speaker 4: high school, and that was they all have these very strong,
Speaker 4: kind of distinct memories of her, and her death deeply
Speaker 4: impacted them. But her father was transferred to when she
Speaker 4: finished she was finishing up high school.
Speaker 3: This would have been she was in the class.
Speaker 4: Of nineteen seventy one of McLain High School and her
Speaker 4: father was relocated as part of our rural development project
Speaker 4: to Lexington, North Carolina, so about one hundred and forty
Speaker 4: four miles from Ashville, North Carolina, and she ultimately decided
Speaker 4: to apply to unc Ashville. Unc Asheville at that time
Speaker 4: was kind of a it's not the it wasn't the
Speaker 4: cultural hub in nineteen seventy three that it is today
Speaker 4: that most people kind of think of.
Speaker 3: It had about half the population.
Speaker 4: Around fifty thousand people or so, but it had kind
Speaker 4: of long developed as a kind of reputation as a
Speaker 4: kind of a space that was attractive to kind of
Speaker 4: freethinkers and artistic types. And that was kind of how
Speaker 4: Olsen saw herself at this moment her life. And so
Speaker 4: that made you UNCA really attractive. And she had gotten
Speaker 4: into drama and theater and participated in some six competitions
Speaker 4: in high school, some awards, and it started to think
Speaker 4: about this idea herself as a is not only a
Speaker 4: kind of as an actress, but also as a writer
Speaker 4: and poet and lots of different things.
Speaker 3: And so she went to.
Speaker 4: Unc Asheville and was maintained a very close relationship with
Speaker 4: her with her family and her friends back at home.
Speaker 4: Wanted to think the facts of this case that will
Speaker 4: kind of come back, We think to kind of hang
Speaker 4: over this investigation is the fact that she was a.
Speaker 3: Prolific letter writer.
Speaker 4: She wrote near weekly letters to some of her closest
Speaker 4: friends back home the entire time she was in college.
Speaker 4: She was tragically murdered on April fifteenth, nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 4: just as she was finishing up about to in her
Speaker 4: final exams during her sophomore year at unc Ashow. She
Speaker 4: was a drama major and part of the first class
Speaker 4: of drama students when the major was established in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 4: so she was part of that one of those first groups,
Speaker 4: and she died at a moment when she was just
Speaker 4: kind of starting to sort things out and come into
Speaker 4: her own. She had developed several close romantic relationships. One
Speaker 4: of those individuals we spent a live time interviewing for
Speaker 4: this book her boyfriend at the time, and she was
Speaker 4: also starting to kind of sort out kind of what
Speaker 4: she wanted to do with her life. At the moment
Speaker 4: that she lost it, she was contemplaying a transfer to
Speaker 4: UNC Greensboro to be closer to her family, but she
Speaker 4: was also kind of honing in on this idea of
Speaker 4: being an actress and was really pursuing different avenues that
Speaker 4: would allow her to work in the summer and kind
Speaker 4: of beyond in that capacity. And so she's murdered on
Speaker 4: April fifteenth, nineteen seventy three, and that is where kind
Speaker 4: of the actual kind of investigation starts. And something in
Speaker 4: a case that was that many imagined would be solved
Speaker 4: very quickly. Fifty one years later, we are still here.
Speaker 2: You mentioned, well, you're writing in the book about her
Speaker 2: religiosity and also her not her proximity to botanical gardens,
Speaker 2: but the importance of the botanical gardens to her.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the botanical garden.
Speaker 4: So her her boyfriend at the time was a would
Speaker 4: go on to become a fairly prominent kind of botanist
Speaker 4: and working and also working in the field of biology.
Speaker 4: But they were both very much into the outdoors, and
Speaker 4: so they would Virginia was very spiritual, and she carried
Speaker 4: around the Spiritual Journal with her and this is something
Speaker 4: that some of her drama department colleagues kind of impressed
Speaker 4: upon us. She was always carrying it to just record
Speaker 4: just different spiritual musings during the day. And one of
Speaker 4: what was very common is her roommate has stated, and
Speaker 4: we talk about in the book, when she was studying
Speaker 4: or just wanted to just kind of organize her thoughts,
Speaker 4: she was very fond of going into the botanical garden.
Speaker 4: So this was something that was fairly common for her
Speaker 4: to do. And the botanical gardens were directly adjacent to
Speaker 4: the university, in a very short walk from her dorms,
Speaker 4: and that's where that's where her murder occurred. So it
Speaker 4: was technically the murder was on university land and grounds.
Speaker 4: The medical examiner is going to write UNCA campus as
Speaker 4: on her actual death certificate we include, but this idea
Speaker 4: of the location and its connection to university will also
Speaker 4: be something that very early on becomes a point of contention.
Speaker 2: Now you say April fifteenth, nineteen seventy three, she's killed, Cameron,
Speaker 2: tell us what witnesses find that There's two young boys
Speaker 2: that discover her on the trail and then run yelling
Speaker 2: for police, and police arrived. What is the crime scene
Speaker 2: that police find when they arrived.
Speaker 5: So that's a really interesting question. So a lot of
Speaker 5: what is out there is that she was sitting on
Speaker 5: a rock, like a large rock that was near a trail,
Speaker 5: and that's actually where the witnesses to this case saw her.
Speaker 5: But her body was discovered about thirty feet off that rock.
Speaker 5: In that we received that information from interviewing the current
Speaker 5: cold case detective Kevin Taylor, because that was one of
Speaker 5: the questions I had was if this occurred in broad daylight,
Speaker 5: which it did. And we also have a witness saying
Speaker 5: that during the investigation that he witnessed some books flapping
Speaker 5: when he passed by for the second time. So what
Speaker 5: these boys saw is they saw Virgin Yeah, and her
Speaker 5: pants were pulled down and she was The suspect used
Speaker 5: a knife to cut her shirt into rags and then
Speaker 5: use those rags to bind her arms and her legs.
Speaker 5: And we also know that she was stabbed in the chest,
Speaker 5: which is what killed her. And there's a massive amount
Speaker 5: of blood. I believe those estimated about two leaders were
Speaker 5: around the crime scene. And then we know the suspects
Speaker 5: slit her throat after she had died.
Speaker 2: That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now,
Speaker 2: you talked about that laceration on her neck, so soon
Speaker 2: it's determined by the medical examiner. I believe you right
Speaker 2: that this laceration is likely post mortem. It happened after
Speaker 2: her death, and the cause of the death is the
Speaker 2: stab wound to her heart. Tell us how police proceed
Speaker 2: with this investigation.
Speaker 5: So that's the really interesting thing about this is we've
Speaker 5: got take in mind that this is nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 5: and in nineteen seventy three, training and Standards for North Carolina,
Speaker 5: which is the governing agency that oversees all the training
Speaker 5: for law enforcement, had just started. So these officers that
Speaker 5: arrived on scene had not had a lot of formal training.
Speaker 5: And this is a small department in a quiet town,
Speaker 5: so I'm sure they don't have the experience in dealing
Speaker 5: with a crime like this. We also know that when
Speaker 5: we're looking back at some of the issues that arise
Speaker 5: fifty years later, we know that the crime scene was
Speaker 5: not properly secured. We know that people are milling around
Speaker 5: taking photos, which is how we have the photos today.
Speaker 5: We know that the lease officers get her out of
Speaker 5: the crime scene fairly quickly. When we look at the
Speaker 5: timetable that we were able to construct, which is also
Speaker 5: in our book, we've noticed that it's about a four
Speaker 5: hour timeframe from when her body was discovered to when
Speaker 5: she's on the medical examiner's table for the exam. So
Speaker 5: that's really not a lot of time at all. The
Speaker 5: other thing that we noticed, which becomes an issue today,
Speaker 5: is that the officers are not wearing any gloves. We
Speaker 5: can see that in some of the photos, and we
Speaker 5: see that even when they're carrying her body out that
Speaker 5: again people are approaching her. Another thing that we know
Speaker 5: is that her roommate was actually when she heard about
Speaker 5: what had happened, she felt concerned that it may have
Speaker 5: been Virgini. So she actually took a picture of Virginia
Speaker 5: down to the crime scene and was able to show
Speaker 5: that to an officer. And we've got the fact that
Speaker 5: this is a fifty acre wooded property that this crime occurred,
Speaker 5: and even though it's close to the botanical garden, still
Speaker 5: you've got the just the logistical aspect of being to
Speaker 5: lock that down you would need a lot of officers,
Speaker 5: which again Asheville does not have, so we've you know,
Speaker 5: they did the best that they could with the training
Speaker 5: and experience and equipment that they had, but I believe
Speaker 5: it was definitely very chaotic.
Speaker 2: What were the agencies you mentioned SBI? What is that
Speaker 2: agency along that worked along with the Asheville Police Department.
Speaker 5: So in North Carolina we have there's local law enforcement
Speaker 5: officers and we also have of course share deputies, and
Speaker 5: then at a state level, we've got the North Carolina SBI.
Speaker 5: So State Bureau Investigations is what it stands for, and
Speaker 5: their main job is to help these smaller agencies that
Speaker 5: don't have the resources to be able to investigate high
Speaker 5: profile crimes. And they also with larger agencies, they are
Speaker 5: the entity that will do officer invall shootings. That way,
Speaker 5: a department isn't investigating their own officer for those But
Speaker 5: during that time in seventy three, that was one of
Speaker 5: the few agencies besides the FBI, that actually had a
Speaker 5: training facility and an academy that officers would go to.
Speaker 5: So they had the most experience by far. And we
Speaker 5: can get into this later, but the agents that work
Speaker 5: this case, especially Charles Chambers who wrote the search warrant
Speaker 5: for this case, get a massive amount of experience with
Speaker 5: really complex crimes, so that would be the But the
Speaker 5: issue with this agency is, of course they are not
Speaker 5: there day one. They have to be requested from Asheville.
Speaker 5: So you know, that creates some logistical issues as well.
Speaker 4: And I would also add that something that's important for
Speaker 4: your listeners to keep in mind too. One of the
Speaker 4: other kind of complicating factors early on was today, when
Speaker 4: there are crimes that take place on university property, university
Speaker 4: owned property, most universities have campus police force that actually
Speaker 4: have certified law enforcement officers or even their own police
Speaker 4: station kind of there. In nineteen seventy three, Ashville did
Speaker 4: not have that. Ashville, in fact, was the only university
Speaker 4: and the University of North Carolina system did not have
Speaker 4: an actual police force. They had kind of non deputized
Speaker 4: or non certified security officers who didn't have the authority
Speaker 4: to actually make arrest and so in fact, one of
Speaker 4: the things that the campus had always prided itself on,
Speaker 4: particularly in the midst of this like you know, tumultuous
Speaker 4: kind of you know, civil rights and unrest with Vietnam
Speaker 4: and other things, this is a campus is fairly progressive politically,
Speaker 4: both then and now, and there was a lot of
Speaker 4: deep skepticism towards the idea of having a kind of
Speaker 4: campus law enforcement, and they didn't see it as something
Speaker 4: that was necessary and they wouldn't actually have. It was
Speaker 4: actually this murder that causes them to go back to
Speaker 4: the state legislature and decide that having a you, a
Speaker 4: formal campus police force would be a good idea, and
Speaker 4: they have that the following year, starting the next fall
Speaker 4: after this murder. But building on what camera was saying
Speaker 4: about the SBI as well, you know, this case does
Speaker 4: very early on started attracting a fairly high profile within
Speaker 4: the state. It's the only murder to date this ever
Speaker 4: taking place on the grounds of unc Asheville. As far
Speaker 4: as a student that was murdered, there's been other individuals
Speaker 4: that we'll talk about, but as far as student deaths,
Speaker 4: this was the only one in the school's history, And
Speaker 4: so very quickly this case does get prioritized Governor Holshauser,
Speaker 4: who was the governor of North Carolina at the time.
Speaker 4: He was the first Republican governor elected since reconstruction, and
Speaker 4: he was very much a kind of Nixon law and
Speaker 4: order guy, and he really directs the SBI to get
Speaker 4: increasingly more involved as time is passing and a resolution
Speaker 4: does not develop. Something we talk about in the book
Speaker 4: is that this case was imagined as one that would
Speaker 4: be resolved fairly swiftly Chancellor high Smith, William high Smith,
Speaker 4: who was the chancellor of unc Asheville at the time.
Speaker 4: When we were looking through the administrative minutes that UNCAA
Speaker 4: has kept to this day, one of the things we
Speaker 4: realized was, you know, he calls this emergency meet faculty
Speaker 4: and department chairs and deans, and he tells them, look
Speaker 4: after this is within forty eight hours after the murder.
Speaker 4: He says, no productive learning is going to take place
Speaker 4: on the campus here. Let's send everyone home for a week.
Speaker 4: And you know, essentially that things like this don't happen,
Speaker 4: things like this murder don't happen in a place like this,
Speaker 4: that it should be obvious who did it. And he
Speaker 4: says that when we come back after a week, the
Speaker 4: authorities likely would have resolved this. And then kind of,
Speaker 4: you know, more time passes and the SBI about eight
Speaker 4: months into it, when we get into nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 4: is going to really escalate their involvement to the point
Speaker 4: that two agents won with twelve years experience, a guy
Speaker 4: named James Thomas Maxi, and another who's a new officer
Speaker 4: or a new agent with just two years experience named
Speaker 4: Bill Matthews are going to be assigned to work this
Speaker 4: case full time. And at the time this was fairly
Speaker 4: controversial because there are sixteen counties in western North Carolina.
Speaker 4: There was under seventy agents that were responsible for covering
Speaker 4: and supporting all of this departments in that area, and
Speaker 4: there was at least some public outcry in the media
Speaker 4: about like, why are we devoting two agents to the
Speaker 4: single case. But their job, at least early on, was
Speaker 4: to try to help bring a quick resolution to this,
Speaker 4: and for lots of reasons we discussed that's just something
Speaker 4: that didn't happen.
Speaker 2: You talk about the medical examiner's report, which sparks outrage
Speaker 2: and fear at the campus in the community, but we
Speaker 2: haven't really focused on some of the details about the
Speaker 2: rape that are really concerned the campus in the community.
Speaker 2: And also that you write that the coroner saves samples
Speaker 2: smears from the vagina, And also we just talk about
Speaker 2: you write about the state of forensic technology at that
Speaker 2: time and the officers and police not knowing what they
Speaker 2: needed to do in terms of the sample retention, in
Speaker 2: terms of anything that they could foresee in the future
Speaker 2: about DNA collection and technology.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so one of the things that as we kind
Speaker 4: of talk about in the book, I mean, Cameron mentioned,
Speaker 4: the speed in which they get also into the actual
Speaker 4: autopsy is pretty remarkable even by today's standards. Really, like
Speaker 4: from the time the first officers on the scene to
Speaker 4: the time that John McLeod, the coroner who performs the
Speaker 4: actual examination begins work and notes the starting works four
Speaker 4: hours in total that have elapsed. In fact, they've started
Speaker 4: on the autopsy within about an hour and forty five
Speaker 4: minutes for parents being notified, And so they moved with
Speaker 4: kind of remarkable speed kind of early on. And a
Speaker 4: lot of the medical examiner's report, which we include in
Speaker 4: the book consist of a lot of the physical examination
Speaker 4: that confirmed some of the original details. So the coroner
Speaker 4: does come to the collusion that the laceration to the
Speaker 4: throat likely occurred post mortem, which is why the original
Speaker 4: officers had noted that there didn't seem to be much
Speaker 4: much blood imitating from her neck, but just primarily from
Speaker 4: her chest. And as in the Quarner notes, that rigor
Speaker 4: mortis is not set in yet and he does see
Speaker 4: an abundance of semen. He says he was able to
Speaker 4: collect an abundance of sperm, and he was able to
Speaker 4: plait it, and he looks at it under a microscope
Speaker 4: beyond the physical examination and says that the sperm is
Speaker 4: still motal. So the sperm itself, you know, which has
Speaker 4: a window of four to five hours or so, the
Speaker 4: pit like in the kinds of conditions that we would
Speaker 4: expect with this kind of crime scene, like this was
Speaker 4: very very kind of recent and likely attached to the murder.
Speaker 4: There's also a pubic hare that's recovered that he determines
Speaker 4: not to be associated with olsen. But but yeah, so
Speaker 4: one of the things at the time, it's important to
Speaker 4: keep in mind with the actual forensics in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 4: they could confirm the presence of semen, and they would
Speaker 4: also use semen to confirm things.
Speaker 3: Like blood type. They had what was called a secret test.
Speaker 4: And where they could use a certain percentage of the
Speaker 4: population population in fluids like sweat or Semen carries identifying
Speaker 4: markers that are typically found in red blood sales, and
Speaker 4: so police could use semen to identify the blood type
Speaker 4: of victims, but blood type of perpetrators, and this could
Speaker 4: be used as a contributing way to solidify some of
Speaker 4: their conclusions. But at the same time, the method of
Speaker 4: collection and what value that semen had beyond confirming the
Speaker 4: rape occurred and possibly the blood type status was a
Speaker 4: little bit murky at the time. They couldn't have anticipated
Speaker 4: that by the time we're getting to the late eighties
Speaker 4: and certainly by the nineteen nineties that with the advent
Speaker 4: of DNA technology that this would provide potentially many routes
Speaker 4: to kind of identifying suspects and so both in the
Speaker 4: collection and the storage of samples, but also the materials
Speaker 4: as well that we're associated with the crime scene. There
Speaker 4: would have been in which Cameron could kind of speak
Speaker 4: to about what maybe crime scene like evidence gathering would
Speaker 4: look like today, particularly with the bloody clothes that the
Speaker 4: investigators still send off every five or seven years to
Speaker 4: kind of get retested.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I think that's one of the things that
Speaker 5: we need to point out is what wasn't at the
Speaker 5: medical Examiner's office, And the main thing was that number one,
Speaker 5: her underwear wasn't there. So we don't know if the
Speaker 5: suspect took that, if she just wasn't wearing any or
Speaker 5: was that left at the crime scene, or it got
Speaker 5: packaged and put in some men's patrol car and it
Speaker 5: just disappeared. But the other really concerning one that we
Speaker 5: will have loved to have had today is that we
Speaker 5: spoke with a medical examiner investigator, a friend of mine,
Speaker 5: and he said that he would have loved to have
Speaker 5: had the bindings because he said, even today, that would
Speaker 5: be something that they could test for because there would
Speaker 5: have been a lot of skin cells which they use
Speaker 5: for touch DNA to be able to get from those
Speaker 5: bindings when you're making the actual not so anytime you're
Speaker 5: making a not you know you've got to grab the
Speaker 5: material and put some torque behind it, and that whole
Speaker 5: process would have left some very good evidence. The problem
Speaker 5: is that the officers or someone unseen thought it was
Speaker 5: going to be a good idea to remove those from
Speaker 5: Virginia's body, which we absolutely would not have done today.
Speaker 5: And so those bindings never even made it to the
Speaker 5: theme's office, and we really don't know what happened with them.
Speaker 4: And this was something that will come up dan in
Speaker 4: other cases of this are too. It's not unique to
Speaker 4: the Olsin case. In particular. We do kind of touch
Speaker 4: very briefly on the book on the Nancy Morgan case,
Speaker 4: which occurs three years before, a young federal worker who
Speaker 4: had been raped and murdered, not connected to this. That
Speaker 4: particular case was not connected to this one, but a
Speaker 4: similarity is that the medical examiner the autopsy was for
Speaker 4: that one was also done in Nashville at Memorial Mission Hospital,
Speaker 4: and the medical examiner in that case expressed frustration because,
Speaker 4: like Cameron said, when we're thinking about the bindings, Nancy
Speaker 4: Morgan was also bound and when he starts the medical
Speaker 4: examination he realizes. He asked where the actual the bindings
Speaker 4: are and they said, well, we're not really sure. I
Speaker 4: think it's in one of the officers patrol cars. We'll
Speaker 4: have to call them and see if we can get
Speaker 4: him over here, and they couldn't find them. And there's
Speaker 4: another book of a called Meta on the Mountain that
Speaker 4: talks about this, but they basically the actual crime scene
Speaker 4: materials have been kind of left in someone's car and
Speaker 4: they were had to find which car.
Speaker 3: It was in.
Speaker 4: And it was this whole kind of event that I
Speaker 4: think speaks to maybe the lack of kind of procedures
Speaker 4: that were that weren't yet codified that Cameron talked about,
Speaker 4: but also those things that when we're looking at it
Speaker 4: fifty years removed and now attempting to do forensic test,
Speaker 4: that's going to make things quite a bit more complicated.
Speaker 2: That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: You're right that there's no developments in the case for
Speaker 2: eight months, but to the SBI agents assigned to work
Speaker 2: the case full time, which was announced February sixteenth, nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy four, special agents James Thomas Mexi and Billy C. Matthews.
Speaker 2: You say that they were in many ways, the SBI
Speaker 2: was ahead of its time in some regards. But this
Speaker 2: was a lead in Florida, a second suspect, while early
Speaker 2: suspect was easily eliminated, had little droplets of blood on
Speaker 2: his shoes. But this one is you write Glenn Allen Carlson.
Speaker 2: So tell us about Glenn Allen Carlson and these two
Speaker 2: and these two special agents that brought this case to
Speaker 2: the attention of the Ashville Police and the SBI itself.
Speaker 4: So Glenn Allen Carlson was. He was a guy that
Speaker 4: was a former UNCA student. He was a student at
Speaker 4: UNCA in nineteen sixty nine. He didn't graduate from UNCA,
Speaker 4: we know that, but he did stay in the area
Speaker 4: and at the for for a long time after. I
Speaker 4: think it was about two years after he graduated, or
Speaker 4: not after he graduated. After he left UNCA, he was
Speaker 4: living in an apartment that was around a mile away
Speaker 4: from the crime scene. And so the SBI agents Maxie
Speaker 4: and Matthew has become really interested in him for a
Speaker 4: few reasons. One, he had a kind of a history
Speaker 4: of crimes that had started to escalate a little bit
Speaker 4: in the area, but most of the crimes were still
Speaker 4: related to burglaries. He had been rested a number of
Speaker 4: times in Buncom County. But the SBI, as I mentioned,
Speaker 4: was kind of ahead of their time, and we want
Speaker 4: to stress that as well. They had a thing called
Speaker 4: the Police Information System where they were really working to
Speaker 4: create a kind of network where they could communicate with
Speaker 4: other agencies both within the state but also law enforcement
Speaker 4: outside of the state. And so when we think about
Speaker 4: the nineteen seventies, many of your listeners are probably familiar
Speaker 4: with cases like Ted Bundy and others, and they know
Speaker 4: that some of the things that made those cases complicated
Speaker 4: was you move from one state to another or even
Speaker 4: moved to a different area of the same state, and
Speaker 4: law enforcement or not necessarily, they don't have a centralized
Speaker 4: streamline information system for easily and quickly sharing and so
Speaker 4: people can fly under the radar and the same thing
Speaker 4: is happening here a bit. And so there was a
Speaker 4: guy who was picked up, Glenn Allen Carlson. He is
Speaker 4: arrested in Florida, and Maxi and Matthews find out about this,
Speaker 4: and they'd get really interested because they know that when
Speaker 4: they were kind of taking inventory of the people who
Speaker 4: lived around Ashville who had criminal records, they know that
Speaker 4: this is a guy who formerly he's arrested in Florida
Speaker 4: on rape initially, and that catches their attention, and they
Speaker 4: know that he also lived formerly near the crime scene.
Speaker 4: Now early on the question, in their mind, they didn't
Speaker 4: know when he relocated to Florida, so there was some
Speaker 4: confusion about what the timeline was about when he left
Speaker 4: North Carolina and moved to Florida, or if he was
Speaker 4: even still.
Speaker 3: In the area.
Speaker 4: So they end up going down to Florida to interview him,
Speaker 4: and ultimately he will be excluded. He's in Florida, he's
Speaker 4: charged with raping and it's up to forty women for
Speaker 4: zero today and so they and he will spend the
Speaker 4: rest of his life in a mental institution in Florida.
Speaker 4: But we think this is an example, even though this
Speaker 4: lead doesn't fully work out, they are kind of person
Speaker 4: suing potential leads in Florida and Georgia and Alabama in
Speaker 4: different places, and so we think that this isn't evidence
Speaker 4: of people kind of not doing their job. But at
Speaker 4: the time when resources in that communication was very difficult,
Speaker 4: they are looking really really hard for any possible connection
Speaker 4: that people have to UNCA or the areas surrounding that
Speaker 4: have these criminal records that might make them persons of interest.
Speaker 2: You talk about the right about the seventy four nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy four disappearance of the University of North Carolina student
Speaker 2: Karen McDonald eerily on the anniversary of Virginia Olson's murder.
Speaker 2: Tell us about that.
Speaker 4: So Karen McDonald is this. She is a nineteen year
Speaker 4: old student at UNCA from from Grand Island, New York,
Speaker 4: which is just outside of Buffalo and her her parents.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry her.
Speaker 4: She has family that live out from Ashville and near
Speaker 4: an area called Brevard, and she is has a very
Speaker 4: strict routine. And so on the anniversary of Olsen's disappear
Speaker 4: or anniversary of Olson's murder, the campus is really a
Speaker 4: lot has changed. Everyone in the entire campus community has
Speaker 4: been through a lot. They have a new police chief
Speaker 4: named Eugene L. Ray, their first campus police force. The
Speaker 4: university is publicly proclaiming that the campus is now safe
Speaker 4: and that they're using this one year anniversary as an
Speaker 4: opportunity to both mourn the passing of Virginia Olsen, but
Speaker 4: also celebrate the way that they have kind of pulled
Speaker 4: together and the fact that this crime, in one like it,
Speaker 4: is not as likely to happen in the future. And
Speaker 4: while they are actually preparing for a book sale in
Speaker 4: other campus events, police start descending on campus and these
Speaker 4: news breaks that a UNCA students they believe has been
Speaker 4: abducted and her name was Karen McDonald. And telling I
Speaker 4: think for us is that one of the first things
Speaker 4: that the police do is they send officers down to
Speaker 4: the botanical gardens. Now there's never any evidence that Karen
Speaker 4: McDonald was ever anywhere near.
Speaker 3: The potanical gardens. We know what happened to her.
Speaker 4: But the fact that they sent officers down there, we
Speaker 4: think is kind of indicative of just the fact that
Speaker 4: they are working to create a narrative and story and
Speaker 4: looking for possible connections at this moment. But Karen McDonald
Speaker 4: was abducted by a twenty five year old man and
Speaker 4: a seventeen year old girl under pretenses of did they
Speaker 4: wanted to take pictures of her for a magazine. They
Speaker 4: lure her to their brownstone apartment downtown. She had been
Speaker 4: en route to shop at a woolworst downtown in Nashville,
Speaker 4: and they hold her hostage there for several days and
Speaker 4: take turns raping her, and she has a very dramatic
Speaker 4: escape that we talk about where she stabs one with
Speaker 4: a fork and kind of flees naked, bruised and battered
Speaker 4: into a construction zone that happening near the Civic Center,
Speaker 4: and the police are called and she ends up surviving
Speaker 4: and she leaves you unca the next year. But one
Speaker 4: of the things that is interesting at this moment is
Speaker 4: during this period from the time she disappears to the
Speaker 4: time that she pops back up again, the Ashvillsys and
Speaker 4: Times runs a headline that says, a frightening coincidence, and
Speaker 4: it has a picture of Virginia Olsen and it has
Speaker 4: a large picture of Karen McDonald and the two pictures
Speaker 4: are side by side, inviting people to make a comparison.
Speaker 4: And so to us, this is again I can think
Speaker 4: further proof to just what the community climate was during
Speaker 4: this time that, beyond just the police kind of potentially
Speaker 4: suspecting this Virginia Olson of these ties to some of
Speaker 4: these other crimes that will continue to kind of pop
Speaker 4: up throughout this investigation, had a really kind of profound
Speaker 4: effect on how investigators were trying to kind of understand
Speaker 4: what was happening.
Speaker 2: You that although the mcdonnald case proved unrelated to the
Speaker 2: Olson investigation, the unsuccessful resolution or part of me the
Speaker 2: successful resolution, reminded people that the Olson case was still unsolved.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think that when the case wasn't
Speaker 4: solved immediately, I think there was this kind of move.
Speaker 4: While the nineteen seventy four is one of the peak
Speaker 4: years for kind of the investigative push really up until
Speaker 4: the nineteen eighties, again, there's another stop that we talk
Speaker 4: about with the task forces in seventy seven, which Cameron
Speaker 4: could probably speak to business task forces looking to try
Speaker 4: to find a correlation put potential correlations between Olson's murder
Speaker 4: and also other unsolved murders that were happening around North Carolina.
Speaker 4: But yeah, this reminded people. I think there was Olsen
Speaker 4: early on in these In these years, whenever one of
Speaker 4: these crimes would occur, it was almost like the community
Speaker 4: was starting to move on. It is, something would pop
Speaker 4: up and maybe this is connected, and it kind of
Speaker 4: reopens this wound again and again. And the McDonald's case
Speaker 4: was particularly so because al since friends and colleagues, unlike
Speaker 4: the later one that will occur in seventy eight, they
Speaker 4: were still students at UNCA at the time, so this
Speaker 4: was a very frightening scenario for them.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. So Cameron tell us about the December nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy seven the task force. It leaks some details to
Speaker 2: the general public that were held with were withheld from
Speaker 2: the press in nineteen seventy three. So tell us what
Speaker 2: you find out and what the general public finds out
Speaker 2: about nineteen seventy three and a suspect.
Speaker 5: One of the things that the task force did is
Speaker 5: they looked at some of the murders in North Carolina
Speaker 5: that had some the same similarities. And one of the
Speaker 5: the ones I believe is very similar occurred also on
Speaker 5: a college campus at UNC Chapel Hill, which is about
Speaker 5: four hours from Asheville, give or take. It occurred in
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty five, and it was suell and Evans, and
Speaker 5: Suellen was walking from one of her classes through the
Speaker 5: arboretum on their campus. And again this is in the
Speaker 5: middle of the day, just like the Virginia case, and
Speaker 5: the suspect snatched her from the trail that she was
Speaker 5: walking down into some bushes and tries to rape her.
Speaker 5: The suspect was being unsuccessful because Swellen was fighting back
Speaker 5: and she starts screaming for help, at which time he
Speaker 5: took his knife that he had and he stabbed her
Speaker 5: in the chest, just like virgin And then after he
Speaker 5: stabbed her and she had led out, he did the
Speaker 5: same thing that happened in the Virginia case where he
Speaker 5: flits her throat and then flees, and in that case,
Speaker 5: It's very interesting to read about just how much effort
Speaker 5: the local police department put behind it, and they did
Speaker 5: a really good job. They got officers on scene right away,
Speaker 5: They did the best that they could to lock down
Speaker 5: the area of campus where the incident occurred. They even
Speaker 5: bring a dog to run a canine track. They were unsuccessful,
Speaker 5: just like with the Virginia case. But you know, just
Speaker 5: seeing those eerie similarities is I think, what just caught
Speaker 5: that task force eye right away? And then we also,
Speaker 5: you know, Brian, you can speak more about this, but
Speaker 5: they also looked at some other cases that had similarities.
Speaker 5: But I really believe that when you look at the
Speaker 5: Swelling case in Virginia case, besides the year, I mean,
Speaker 5: the other kind of eerie fact about this case is
Speaker 5: Virginia was living in around Lexington, North Carolina, toime or
Speaker 5: her family home was at the time, so Swelling Evans
Speaker 5: her family home was from Monroe, North Carolina. So they're
Speaker 5: both around that Charlotte area as well.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about this forty five year old man and
Speaker 2: why investigators and why you write both of you that
Speaker 2: this is a primary prime suspect, and why tell us
Speaker 2: about some of the incriminating and coincidental and circumstantial evidence
Speaker 2: surrounding this man.
Speaker 4: I'll like Cameron talk about the actual contents of the
Speaker 4: church warrant. I will I'll just briefly touch on the
Speaker 4: seventy seven task force, which you had referenced before. They
Speaker 4: do release some new details about this man, so we
Speaker 4: find out for the first time there are witnesses that
Speaker 4: described the clothes that he is wearing, a kind of
Speaker 4: scarf thing around his neck, some combat style boots, some
Speaker 4: kind of camouflage, kind of fatigue jacket that was popular
Speaker 4: during the time, a kind of mod hairstyle. There was
Speaker 4: some of that was released. But one of the other
Speaker 4: kind of startling details was that around an hour after
Speaker 4: the murder that this individual that the police executed a
Speaker 4: search warrant on had approached a neighbor and in the
Speaker 4: apartment complex where near where he lived and asked her
Speaker 4: to pray with him, and seemed very incoherent and was
Speaker 4: muttering all sorts of kinds of things about that to
Speaker 4: her at the time were disturbing in the context of
Speaker 4: hearing about Olsen's murder the next day, and that kind
Speaker 4: of how he popped up on police's radar. But one
Speaker 4: of the fascinating things that for us about this individual
Speaker 4: was that he was The police and the Task Force
Speaker 4: in seventy seven released all these details surrounding this individual.
Speaker 4: They don't name him, and so there's this kind of
Speaker 4: curious kind of back and forth where when Glenn Allen
Speaker 4: Carlson is being considered, they openly say they're looking at
Speaker 4: this guy, Glenn Allen Carlson that may or may not
Speaker 4: be connected, and we're going down there to Florida to
Speaker 4: talk to him. When they publish stories about the two
Speaker 4: boys age fourteen to seventeen that find Olsim's body, they say, well,
Speaker 4: they go to the South French Broad School, they live
Speaker 4: at this address. Here's the names of their parents. They
Speaker 4: give a lot of information. So very early on for us,
Speaker 4: we were very interested because the Task Force confirmed that
Speaker 4: this individual was someone that police had looked at all
Speaker 4: along both the AshEL Police and the North Carolina State
Speaker 4: Bureau of Investigation, and also that a search warrant had
Speaker 4: been executed for his personage and also his place of
Speaker 4: residence on April twenty ninth, nineteen seventy three, so this
Speaker 4: is fourteen days after the murder. We learned that this
Speaker 4: individual had fled shortly after the murder to the Murtle Beach,
Speaker 4: South Kena, and investigators essentially were waiting for him near
Speaker 4: his apartment and when they came back, when he came back,
Speaker 4: they detained him, went down to the district court and
Speaker 4: a search warrant was obtained at ten pm, around ten
Speaker 4: pm on the night of April twenty ninth, and that's
Speaker 4: when their interest in him really becomes formalized. This is
Speaker 4: seventy three, two weeks after the murder, and Kimer can
Speaker 4: speak to the search warrant in terms of what the
Speaker 4: logic of the early investigators were, why they care about
Speaker 4: this guy at all.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So one of the interesting things that we found
Speaker 5: with the search warrant too is that he wasn't by
Speaker 5: himself that day. I think that that's one of the
Speaker 5: when we first heard about this suspect. He kept on.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of articles where he's described, but again
Speaker 5: his name is never produced. And it took us about
Speaker 5: or it took me about four months to actually get
Speaker 5: that search warrant, which search warn't for public record. So
Speaker 5: that should be an easy thing to do. You should
Speaker 5: just be able to go to the clerk of court
Speaker 5: where the search want was filed and ask them for
Speaker 5: a copy, and they have to give you a copy.
Speaker 5: It's a public record. There's some limited circumstances where they
Speaker 5: can redact parts of it, or they can hold it
Speaker 5: for a short period of time, but for the most part,
Speaker 5: you should be able to get the document with no problem.
Speaker 5: When I called about the search warrant, the person that
Speaker 5: I spoke with told me that he couldn't find it.
Speaker 5: I provided the address, the date, the victim's name, all
Speaker 5: the information that normally you would need. I kept on
Speaker 5: calling back. He would tell me that, oh, it's in
Speaker 5: the state archives, or it's when this other entity. This
Speaker 5: one on for about four months until we finally got it.
Speaker 5: And when we got it, I was expecting to see, Okay,
Speaker 5: we finally have this person's name in front of us.
Speaker 5: Now we can really do our research with him and
Speaker 5: really wrap this book up. But was really surprising is
Speaker 5: when I was reading it, Charles Chambers quotes the guy
Speaker 5: that he was with James Gore, and James Gore refers
Speaker 5: to actually being with the suspect and pointing Virginia out
Speaker 5: to the suspect, which I thought was really odd. And
Speaker 5: then the other odd and interesting thing about that search,
Speaker 5: one which I think really stands out, is the comment
Speaker 5: that Agent Chambers makes that there's no way that you
Speaker 5: were going to be able to stand in the location
Speaker 5: of the gardens and be able to see Virginia. So
Speaker 5: these two would have had to have walked down the
Speaker 5: trail to actually be able to see Virginia, and I
Speaker 5: think that that really is a very big piece of
Speaker 5: this investigation. The other really interesting fact about these two
Speaker 5: is when you go down rabbit holes and you start
Speaker 5: to look at about rumors of the investigation and who
Speaker 5: people believe was responsible. Is there's a rumor floating around
Speaker 5: that the suspect was in Highlands Hills Hospital, a mental institution,
Speaker 5: and that he broke out because he's from this prominent family,
Speaker 5: so he's able to kind of ribe the doctors and
Speaker 5: the guards to be able to go outside, and that
Speaker 5: he murdered Virginia and he went back to the hospital
Speaker 5: and dumped his bloody clothes in a dumpster. And then
Speaker 5: the doctors even knew about this murder, but they refused
Speaker 5: to name, you know, his name because of his family's connections.
Speaker 5: And then when we started to actually, once we got
Speaker 5: his name and we started to dig into it, some
Speaker 5: of that's actually true. He really is from While I
Speaker 5: don't think that he broke out of a mental institution,
Speaker 5: he is from a very prominent family.
Speaker 4: And he was in Nashville being tribute for mental health
Speaker 4: disorder too. Yeah, so right right, and he spent a
Speaker 4: lot of his life in mental health hospitals, so we
Speaker 4: do know what that's correct now. Of course people take
Speaker 4: it to the extreams. But the guy that he was with,
Speaker 4: the really crazy thing about him is he's got a
Speaker 4: place that's still open in Black Mountain, North Carolina, called
Speaker 4: the Light Center, and it's kind of like a quasi
Speaker 4: religion where.
Speaker 5: They believe that the that light can give you these
Speaker 5: powers and people can dive into that if they want to.
Speaker 5: There's some videos online. But this guy was us on
Speaker 5: Ronald Reagan's prayer team. So we've really cannot find what
Speaker 5: the connection was between the two. But I really I
Speaker 5: think people discount too much that there was two people
Speaker 5: there that day and not just one.
Speaker 4: And at least early on kind of building what Cameron
Speaker 4: was just mentioning that, you know, Agent Chambers is deeply
Speaker 4: suspicious because there's two different witnesses that place an individual
Speaker 4: who matches. John Revis Junior is a man's name, but
Speaker 4: John Revis Junior's description the matches description that the statement
Speaker 4: from Judy Needle, one of the other witnesses, who describes
Speaker 4: him being very agitated about an hour after the murder
Speaker 4: and coming to him and asking to pray with him,
Speaker 4: combined with the fact that by their own admission, we
Speaker 4: have a fairly short window. We include in DEPENDIX of
Speaker 4: our book an actual timeline that Detective Taylor, who's the
Speaker 4: current cold case detective, confirmed was kind of accurate by
Speaker 4: their own kind of metrics. And so according to that timeline,
Speaker 4: we only have around a thirty minute window when did
Speaker 4: this murder likely occurred between one point fifteen and one
Speaker 4: five most likely, And so Agent Chambers knows that John
Speaker 4: Revis and James Gore have placed themselves close to the
Speaker 4: crime scene around the time that the murder takes place,
Speaker 4: and we have a fairly short wind though, and he
Speaker 4: also does his Cameron saying that they're not being entirely
Speaker 4: truthful with him. Now, we don't have the entire case
Speaker 4: file for that portion. I you know, I would love
Speaker 4: to know what the rest of that conversation was we
Speaker 4: know that James Gore quote pointed out the girl to him.
Speaker 4: What does that mean? You know, that's something this may
Speaker 4: be opened that. Does that point to a level of
Speaker 4: familiarity did they have with the victim that's maybe tied
Speaker 4: with religion in some ways? Does it mean something? Does
Speaker 4: it mean something entirely different from that? But but agent
Speaker 4: Chambers regardless does directly point out that they are not
Speaker 4: being truthful with him. There's no other commentary offering a
Speaker 4: search for it on that, and so we could we
Speaker 4: could kind of speculate what was going through his head.
Speaker 4: But at least those are red flax for investigators very
Speaker 4: early on.
Speaker 5: You know, I just want to add to that too
Speaker 5: that one of the theories that's floating around is two
Speaker 5: people committed this murder or when was the lookout and
Speaker 5: that was the reason that they were able to successfully
Speaker 5: rape and murder her without being seen. Because you've got
Speaker 5: to take in mind we know that from looking like
Speaker 5: Brian was saying, if you look at the timeline, people
Speaker 5: are walking around and that's why we're getting a witness
Speaker 5: like every fifteen to thirty minutes. So I think that
Speaker 5: that gives it some credibility that either a this guy
Speaker 5: felt really lucky or felt comfortable in you know, committing
Speaker 5: this rape and murder and he thought that the being
Speaker 5: off the rock was secluded enough that's the possibility. Or
Speaker 5: I don't think that you can rule out that another
Speaker 5: person could have been there as a lookout or some
Speaker 5: type of accomplice.
Speaker 4: And this was up like Camra said, this is there's
Speaker 4: roughly one hundred people in the botanical gardens that day,
Speaker 4: you know, and it grounds it around what fifty acres earlier,
Speaker 4: So this is, uh, there's it's midday, there's people that
Speaker 4: are that are out and about, and by really any metric,
Speaker 4: this is in this murder takes place in an area
Speaker 4: that officers described as a place that whyinos or also
Speaker 4: a lover's laying place, but just because it was slightly
Speaker 4: more secluded and off the beaten path. But it's not,
Speaker 4: it's not it's not obscure, and and we see that
Speaker 4: from just different witnesses that see people kind of moving
Speaker 4: in that direction. There's people out and about. So really,
Speaker 4: by any standard, it is a very bold crime that
Speaker 4: the person engages in a high risk crime.
Speaker 2: In your research, you write that or do you discover
Speaker 2: the actual background of the of John Revis Junior's father
Speaker 2: in terms of being in an attorney. We know that
Speaker 2: he was wealthy, an influential family, but was he an attorney,
Speaker 2: which would explain yes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we so we tried to be careful with not
Speaker 4: you know, some members his father is deceased and he's
Speaker 4: deceased as well. There are members of his family that
Speaker 4: are still alive, so we try to tread carefully with that.
Speaker 4: But yes, his father was an attorney. They were all
Speaker 4: Ivy League educated and he even studied Sorbonne in Paris
Speaker 4: for an advanced degree. He was a Korean Army Korean
Speaker 4: War Army veteran. We tried to get his army personnel records,
Speaker 4: but those had been.
Speaker 3: Destroyed years ago.
Speaker 4: Actually, something that the SBI confirmed for us was that
Speaker 4: they've never been able to get his military personnel records either.
Speaker 4: There was a big fire in the same thing we
Speaker 4: navigated with the Medical Examiner's office. We're getting those records
Speaker 4: that destroyed. The records for many Army service personnel that
Speaker 4: were active duty between nineteen twelve and nineteen fifty nine
Speaker 4: with last names from H to Z. His last name
Speaker 4: was Revus. His were included in that and then also
Speaker 4: the San Francisco Police Department, we know he had a
Speaker 4: former voyeurism arrest in charge. The San Francisco Police Department
Speaker 4: was able to confirmed that detail for me, but they
Speaker 4: said due to their retention schedules, the original incident reports
Speaker 4: that were taking were all were destroyed, so they no
Speaker 4: longer exist. So we have these little fragments. But yes,
Speaker 4: he was educated. He was divorced at the time of
Speaker 4: his death. He did have one child who's still alive today,
Speaker 4: and his father was a prominent attorney and members of
Speaker 4: his family actually helped direct a mental hospital that was
Speaker 4: based near Boston, Massachusetts. And so after the search warrant
Speaker 4: is executed on April twenty ninth, he is going to
Speaker 4: flee to Boston, and depending on who you ask or
Speaker 4: depending on the coverage, he is either staying there for
Speaker 4: treatment or seeking refuge from the scrutiny of the Asheville
Speaker 4: Police Department. He will eventually make his way three years
Speaker 4: later to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he will spend
Speaker 4: the rest of his life and where investigators in the
Speaker 4: nineteen eighties will make one final push traveling out to
Speaker 4: Santa Fe, New Mexico to try to get a confession
Speaker 4: and extradite him back to North Carolina.
Speaker 5: I think it's awesome important to add that he also
Speaker 5: had a background and documentary film which you can see
Speaker 5: those films for open sources. And he also was an
Speaker 5: advertising which pops up later as being a possible motive
Speaker 5: or connection between him and Virginia.
Speaker 2: In your investigation. On that thread you talk about the
Speaker 2: background of John Reavis Junior and advertising, but to get
Speaker 2: a revelation from one of her friends about other aspirations
Speaker 2: she has and a meeting she has with a photographer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this was one of the things that was
Speaker 4: surprising to us that came up towards the end of
Speaker 4: our research. We had interviewed a number of her friends
Speaker 4: and as closest to her by and I'm not referring
Speaker 4: to just friends that were in her circle, but some
Speaker 4: of her closest friends in the world and who she
Speaker 4: the type of friends she would write to on a
Speaker 4: weekly basis. And there were a few things that surprised us.
Speaker 4: The first was, you know, by her what her friends
Speaker 4: told us, and if we take what they say to
Speaker 4: be true, what they told us was that the Asheville
Speaker 4: Police have never reviewed the letters that she sent them,
Speaker 4: including the ones that were sent and postmarked one day
Speaker 4: before she died. We think this goes to the larger
Speaker 4: kind of victimology of her and understanding what her life
Speaker 4: looked like at this time. Both of these individuals have
Speaker 4: kept these letters to this day. In fact, we reached
Speaker 4: out to the current cold case detectives and kind of
Speaker 4: advised them of this and they might want to kind
Speaker 4: of look into this, and we never heard anything back
Speaker 4: from them.
Speaker 3: There's that issue.
Speaker 4: But also one of the things that popped up from
Speaker 4: two of her friends was they told us that in
Speaker 4: the last months of her life, they had received some
Speaker 4: pictures in the mail from her, and they were not
Speaker 4: risk a pictures by today's standards. They described them as
Speaker 4: photos that were equivalent of a bikini photo. And one
Speaker 4: of the people close to her remark that they thought
Speaker 4: it was strange, given her kind of religious nature and
Speaker 4: also given that she could be a little bit more
Speaker 4: kind of a conservative, that she was taking those pictures.
Speaker 4: But they said they didn't want to say anything to
Speaker 4: her at the time because she seemed incredibly proud. She
Speaker 4: had talked about the fact that there was an individual
Speaker 4: who had connecting connections to the advertising world and they
Speaker 4: believed that, and she thought that this could potentially lead
Speaker 4: to some work in print advertising. She was in the
Speaker 4: moment she was killed, she was trying to decide whether
Speaker 4: she was going to spend another summer working at the
Speaker 4: pool in her parents' neighborhood near Lexington, North Carolina, like
Speaker 4: she had the previous summer, whether she was going to
Speaker 4: do summer stock with theater, or whether there was other
Speaker 4: opportunities to do, like print advertising work that she was exploring.
Speaker 4: And so that's not a definite connection. We do think
Speaker 4: that given the fact that the police were pretty good
Speaker 4: about interviewing the people on campus that were a part
Speaker 4: of Olsen's orbit, we think a potential oversight is the
Speaker 4: fact that many of her closest lifelong friends were not
Speaker 4: at unc Asheville. She was only there a year and
Speaker 4: a half at the time of her death, but she
Speaker 4: continued to travel back to Virginia, and she continued to
Speaker 4: write on a weekly basis to many of these individuals
Speaker 4: from high school. And the fact that a lot of
Speaker 4: these letters have never been reviewed, we think there is
Speaker 4: potentially evidence that could be of use to investigators, even
Speaker 4: to confirm some existing theories.
Speaker 2: Now, many of these suspects share these incredible similarities in
Speaker 2: terms of the crime and method of operandi. They have
Speaker 2: been cleared officially by police and none some of those
Speaker 2: people are no longer suspects officially. Let's get to da
Speaker 2: the state of DNA technology today and then that SEMEN
Speaker 2: that was collected at the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I think that that's one of the issues
Speaker 5: again we're looking at now, is that in regards to
Speaker 5: the SEMEN sample that we know is taken, It's well
Speaker 5: documented in theemy's report. I am of the belief that
Speaker 5: I do not believe that the Asheville Police Department or
Speaker 5: SBI still has that sample. And the reason for that
Speaker 5: is that when we were interviewing Detective Taylor, who's the
Speaker 5: cold case detective currently assigned, that's one of the questions
Speaker 5: I asked him was do you have DNA in this case?
Speaker 5: He's like yes, And again, we knew about the SEMEN sample,
Speaker 5: so we said, well, do you have DNA from the
Speaker 5: SEMEN sample? No or sorry? He didn't say no, he
Speaker 5: said We've got DNA, and I thought that that was
Speaker 5: really odd that We kept on pressing him about the
Speaker 5: Semen sample, and the response was either this is, you know,
Speaker 5: still an open investigation, or it would be some type
Speaker 5: of diversion, like we have DNA in this case. And
Speaker 5: you know that's such a an open response too. I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm sure they have someone's DNA on that close. But
Speaker 5: I think that when you look back at how the
Speaker 5: crime scene was managed, how things were packaged that day,
Speaker 5: the two things that we can be sure that are
Speaker 5: the suspects or at least the highest probability is the
Speaker 5: semen sample and the PUBA care And if those things
Speaker 5: aren't present, then I really think that DNA technology is
Speaker 5: going to be really hard to use today.
Speaker 4: And I think building on that, you know, the student newspaper,
Speaker 4: which is one of the only the Blue Banner, which
Speaker 4: is one of the only other groups that has kind
Speaker 4: of consistently written about this today. The faculty member who
Speaker 4: leads the Blue Banner was a student in the nineteen
Speaker 4: eighties and has always been interested in this case like ourselves,
Speaker 4: and has encouraged students to continue to write about it.
Speaker 4: But one of their students, I believe this was in
Speaker 4: twenty seventeen, had interviewed Captain Silverman, who's the head of
Speaker 4: CID with Ashville, and I think kind of building what
Speaker 4: Kimer was saying, there's a really interesting moment that interviewed
Speaker 4: with the student is pressing him about the actual whether
Speaker 4: there was a rape kit done, and Captain Silverman conceeds, well,
Speaker 4: there wasn't a rape kid done. Rape kits weren't really
Speaker 4: in common use, and all of that is true. But
Speaker 4: the student said, well, you know, okay, so rape kits
Speaker 4: weren't being used like with this seamen sample, are you
Speaker 4: interested in pursuing kind of any of the ancestry or
Speaker 4: kind of some of the genetic technologies that are being
Speaker 4: used now in a lot of other cold cases. And
Speaker 4: the response that the student quotes and attributes to Captain
Speaker 4: Silverman is that there are certain considerations, is what Captain
Speaker 4: Summons said that make genetic testing impractical in the Olsen case.
Speaker 4: So to my mind, that opens up a few different possibilities.
Speaker 4: And so we're speculating now. But it can be impractical
Speaker 4: because it doesn't exist. It can be impractical because the
Speaker 4: original collection and storage over the years has caused the
Speaker 4: original DNA to degrade to the point that a full
Speaker 4: profile cannot be extracted. And the third possibility, which I
Speaker 4: think is the least likely to be honest, is that
Speaker 4: they just simply aren't interested in investing the time and
Speaker 4: resources to do a series of one to one comparisons
Speaker 4: between the semen sample and the other individuals that have
Speaker 4: been considered over the years, many of them are now deceased.
Speaker 4: I do think that last possibility is the least likely,
Speaker 4: and I think, like Cameron said that a lot of
Speaker 4: the materials but they will typically tell you is we
Speaker 4: have more materials in this case than we do in
Speaker 4: most cases of this area, and that's a very careful wording.
Speaker 4: But when they're talking about materials, they're typically referring to
Speaker 4: the they have Virginia Olsen's clothes, her bloody clothes, and
Speaker 4: and different in the eighties and nineties when this case
Speaker 4: is mentioned, they often talk about sending her clothes to
Speaker 4: the lap, and in that we think that due to
Speaker 4: both storage and other kinds of factors that the camer
Speaker 4: could probably talk about, those clothes are really unlikely to
Speaker 4: produce any kind of evidence, given the kind of nature
Speaker 4: of the compliance that we saw from her and the
Speaker 4: lack of defensive wounds that the medical examiner did not
Speaker 4: find in his autopsy, and so we think that if
Speaker 4: you're looking at this forensically, this really only gets solved
Speaker 4: with the with the DNA that's going to come from
Speaker 4: semen because of the original kind of crime scene. But
Speaker 4: we do think there's potential with enough coverage that while
Speaker 4: the case is unlikely to be closed, we think there
Speaker 4: could still be for all intensive purposes, it could be solved.
Speaker 2: Yes, before I let you go, Cameron, tell us about
Speaker 2: what other avenues in terms of DNA testing possibly, and
Speaker 2: then just the goal of this book project in furthering
Speaker 2: this investigation.
Speaker 5: In all honesty, I think that the DNA are using
Speaker 5: DNA in this case is probably really slim unless someone
Speaker 5: finds the semen sample. And one of the things we
Speaker 5: talked about in this book is other cases where evidence
Speaker 5: and semen samples are lost in cases. So this isn't
Speaker 5: the first time that it will have happened. And to
Speaker 5: be clear, we're not blaming the current investigators for this.
Speaker 5: I think they're doing the best that they can with
Speaker 5: what they have. I think that going forward with this case,
Speaker 5: one of the missing pieces that really intrigue me is
Speaker 5: what are in these letters that Virginia wrote, especially days
Speaker 5: before she passed away or was murdered, And I think
Speaker 5: that things like who was this guy that was taking
Speaker 5: pictures of her are really important in my and I
Speaker 5: know that logistically that would be really hard because you've
Speaker 5: got to think that the people that we would be
Speaker 5: getting these letters from today, which are her friends, and
Speaker 5: I know that some of them are going to come
Speaker 5: to our event in March. But just logistically getting in
Speaker 5: touch with those people and then getting copies and be
Speaker 5: able to review them, I'm sure that that's really hard.
Speaker 5: But I think either that or a if you want
Speaker 5: to call it a deathbed confession, or someone just coming
Speaker 5: forward with a memory that they have that they didn't
Speaker 5: seem significant, whether it's the saw someone leaving the woods
Speaker 5: that day that had blood on them, or they had
Speaker 5: a family member that was acting really strange that day
Speaker 5: and may have had some ties to Virginia. Whatever that is,
Speaker 5: I think that the human source is probably our most
Speaker 5: likely avenue to solve in this, and that's why I
Speaker 5: think it's so important for us to do these podcasts
Speaker 5: and get the word out and ask people to come
Speaker 5: forward and provide us with any information they have no
Speaker 5: matter of how small it is.
Speaker 2: I'm going to thank you both very much for coming
Speaker 2: on and talking about your extraordinary book, A Murder on Campus,
Speaker 2: The Professor, the Cop, and North Carolina's most notorious cold Case.
Speaker 2: For people that might want to find out more about
Speaker 2: this Wild Blue Press book release, can you tell us
Speaker 2: about a website or any social media that you do.
Speaker 5: Sure well, you can always go the Wild Blue Press
Speaker 5: and our book is on there if you want some information.
Speaker 5: We've also got some social media accounts that you can
Speaker 5: reach out to us. My brother Brian has an account
Speaker 5: on x or Twitter. His name is Brian Santana b
Speaker 5: R I A. N. Santana. We've also got Instagram account
Speaker 5: Santana Brothers True Crime.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Brian and Cameron Santana. A Murder
Speaker 2: on Campus, the Professor, the Cop, and North Carolina's most
Speaker 2: Notorious gold Case. Thank you so much for this interview
Speaker 2: and you have both have a great evening. Good night,
Speaker 2: Thank you, thanks for having me. Thank you,