When I started my true crime podcast, Missing in the Carolinas, five years ago, I thought I would be focusing solely on missing persons cases in South Carolina. My creative muse had other ideas. Little did my muse know that scanning old newspaper archives would lead me to intriguing crimes from the past (many with no digital footprints) and inspire me to broaden the context of my storytelling.
I could give many examples of how this has happened, and by reading e-mails and reviews from listeners I know they appreciate the historical crimes and stories of missing people just as much as I do.
Most recently, I was researching a missing persons case from the 1980s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the story of Mary Kathryn Ennis, when I learned that her disappearance was solved when two prison inmates contacted the police with information. This was strange enough, but in one of the newspaper articles reporting the discovery of her body, I learned an enterprising young college student in the area had been murdered when he tried to enter the home of a family he didn’t know in the middle of the night. Of course, then I had to follow that rabbit hole to its conclusion. These were crimes I had never heard about, so I’ve documented them for my listeners in Episode 140: The Kidnapping and Murder of Mary Kathryn Ennis and the Death of William McMichael in North Carolina.
A few months ago, I decided to research serial killers in South Carolina, as I’ve already produced an episode on North Carolina serial killers and it received more downloads than my usual content on missing people. That’s when I discovered a man named Lee Roy Martin had terrorized a small community by kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and strangling young women in Gaffney, S.C. in 1968, and the media eventually dubbed him “The Gaffney Strangler.”
Martin called a local newspaper editor and anonymously confessed to his crimes before he was caught, and he even shared that he had murdered a woman whose husband was convicted of the crime and was sent to prison. This case was even more fascinating because two concerned citizens, driving around to search for one of the missing teenage girls, spotted Lee Roy trying to hide the body of one of his victims. If they hadn’t followed him and taken down his license plate, police might have had a harder time finding the killer. This story has been featured on numerous true crime documentaries, including “A Crime to Remember.”
Writing about true crime was never something I imagined myself doing, but I find myself drawn more and more to these old cases. I think I appreciate the challenge of finding the long-forgotten primary sources and making sense of them in a new timeline.
One of my listeners commented the following on a social media post about a 1972 crime:
I love that you report on so many crimes I’ve never even heard of! Than you for giving a voice to these victims.
When I first created my podcast, I never knew I’d had have the opportunity to share these stories in such great depth and even provide closure for family members who never knew the full details of these crimes.
Renee Roberson is an award-winning writer and host/creator of the true crime podcast, Missing in the Carolinas.
