This past week I experienced a full circle moment. From 1996 to 1998, I worked at my campus newspaper, The Blue Banner, at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, starting out as a staff writer, and then later moving up to a features editor and then the news editor. Most of the time I was covering current events on campus, writing about pop culture, and assigning stories to other staff writers. I was not writing about true crime. Sure, it was something I had always been interested in reading, but there wasn’t really a crime beat on our newspaper. In fact, I didn’t even know about an unsolved murder on our campus from 1973 until just a few years ago.
I’m not even sure how I found out about the case, where a 19-year-old young woman was sexually assaulted and murder on a Sunday afternoon while studying alone in the botanical gardens adjacent to the campus. I just know that I read an article that the student newspaper published in 2021 and was shocked.
My next step was to learn as much as I could about the case, and unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of information out there. I was surprised when a blog post I wrote garnered some attention, especially from a retired law enforcement officer who lived in the area when Virginia "Ginger" Olson was murdered. We exchanged phone calls and he shared memories of the event, which stayed with him throughout the years because he was in elementary school when it happened. He even knew who the two people were that discovered Ginger after the murder, two teenage boys who lived nearby.
I knew I wanted to pursue the project further, but didn’t know where to begin. I dug into the newspaper articles and put together a timeline of all published reports. I could tell police had zeroed in on one suspect, but never released his name. I followed rumors in the town of Asheville about different suspects, and as it turned out, that was quite a rabbit hole. I requested a meeting with a cold case detective in charge of the case, but didn’t learn a lot of new information, other than that the primary suspect, who he still didn’t name, was deceased, and it had been for many years.
I released a podcast episode based on what I knew, hoping to stir some new interest in the case.
Then I got a message from another UNC-Asheville alumni, now a college professor in West Virginia, who was also interested in the cold case. We exchanged information and he had uncovered a lot more than me. He and his co-author and brother put together a book proposal and pitched it to a small press. It was immediately accepted, and they only had a few months to write and edit the book for publication. It was a whirlwind.
A few weeks ago I interviewed Brian and Cameron Santana on my podcast.
The case is finally receiving more media attention, and they have named the primary suspect in the murder. I was flattered that they thanked me in the acknowledgements of the book!
And on Friday, in my full-circle moment, a reporter with The Blue Banner interviewed me about my interest and work on the case. I never imagined as a young, inexperienced news reporter in 1998 that I would one day be writing and researching true crime and being quoted in the newspaper that gave me my start.
Never put limits on what you can accomplish. And if you get the chance, check out A Murder on Campus: The Professor, The Cop, and North Carolina’s Most Notorious Cold Case.
Renee Roberson is an award-winning writer and the host/creator of the Missing in the Carolinas podcast. She is currently seeking representation for her novel about, what else, a podcaster trying to solve a disappearance!
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