May 7, 2025 • 44 mins
In Today's episode, I am joined by veteran investigative journalist Mark Pinsky to unpack the decades-old mystery of Nancy Morgan, a young VISTA volunteer found brutally murdered in Madison County, North Carolina in 1970. Mark walks me through the corrupt local politics, suppressed leads, and the lingering questions that keep this cold case unsolved more than 50 years later. He also reflects on his storied career in crime reporting, including his explosive jailhouse interview with serial killer Ted Bundy. This is an interview you don't want to miss.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Every story has a beginning, but not everyone has an ending.
In the shadows of headlines and buried police reports lay
the voices of the missing, the murdered, and the forgotten,
waiting to be heard and have their stories told. This
is The Book of the Dead, a true crime podcast
(00:21):
where we remember forgotten victims of heinous crimes, reopen cold cases,
ree visit haunting disappearances, and uncover the truths buried beneath
the years of silence. I'm your host, Courtney Liso, and
every week we turn to another chapter, one victim, one mystery,
(00:43):
one step closer to justice. Brought to you by Dark
Cast Network indie Podcasts with a Twist. Hello, Hello, Welcome
(01:11):
to the next chapter in the Book of the Dead.
With me today I have a very special guest. Mark
Pinski is a journalist of over fifty years working for
countless publications and newspapers like The Orlando Sentinel, The New
York and LA Times, and USA Today, covering everything from religion, politics,
(01:33):
racial issues, and explosive true crime cases that include Ted Bundy.
He is also an author, writing six nonfiction books, like
The Gospel according to the Simpsons and The Gospel according
to Disney Mark is with me today to discuss the
case that has followed him for the last fifty years,
so much so that he wrote the book on it,
(01:56):
Met Around the Mountain, The Murder of Nancy Morgan's spans
Mark his own investigation into the murder of twenty four
year old Vista worker Nancy Morgan, who was found raped
and murdered in June of nineteen seventy in Madison County,
North Carolina, hindered by a less than competent investigation, confusion
on jurisdiction, as well as political corruption. Nancy Morgan's murder
(02:20):
was a crime that North Carolina tried for decades to forget. Mark,
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Thanks for having me, Courtney.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I want to start at the beginning. What was it
about Nancy's case that drew you in while you were
a young journalist at Duke University and what kept you
so dedicated to that investigation for five decades.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Well, in nineteen seventy I was working for the Duke
University Chronicle. I had a column called The Readable Radical.
I was very much politically involved in what was happening
in the late sixties and then into the early seventies.
When I opened the newspaper that day and June and
saw that Nancy Morgan's body had been discovered up in
the mountains, it struck me personally. The more I read
(03:08):
about her, the more I felt she was like me
in some senses, and many of my friends in other senses.
She was a federal anti poverty worker working for an
organization called VISTA, which stood for Volunteers in Service to America,
and as it happened, not surprisingly, several of my friends,
maybe half a dozen of them at the time of
(03:29):
the killing, were already in VISTA. So I took it
personally as an individual, but I also took it personally
because my friends were in similar situations doing what she
was doing, and in some cases somewhat risky. When you
challenge the status quo, you run a certain risk. Usually
it's minor, but sometimes it's not mine. In her case,
(03:51):
it wasn't minor, and so I ripped out the article
about her body being found, a long takeout on her life,
and started to file and just said Nancy Morgan on it.
And I didn't know at that time. I was only,
you know, a college newspaper guy, and I didn't know
where it would end, but it just grabbed hold of me.
And the years that followed, whenever there was a development,
(04:14):
I would add that to my file. And I hadn't
reached any status at that point as a journalist, so
I didn't know where I would take it. And as
time passed, I got a journalist's degree from Columbia University
and began stringing from North Carolina for the New York Times.
I also wrote for political magazines like The Nation and
The Progressive. On the overlap between criminal cases and political causes.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
You covered other high profile cases like those of Ted
Bundy and Jeffrey McDonald's. How did your experience with Nancy
Morgan's case differ from those and what were some of
the unique challenges you faced while covering it well?
Speaker 2 (04:53):
With Nancy Morgan. I was really learning my way. I
didn't know anything about criminal justice, trial procedure like that,
so I was kind of learning as learning by doing.
I would be sent on cases. The Times would send
me on a case, and I'd do what I could.
I worked with a good friend of mine passed away
now named Wayne King, very celebrated a reporter for the
(05:15):
New York Times, and he was as he used to
say at the Times, he was my Rabbi. He told
me and taught me a lot of what I needed
to know, And that all accelerated in nineteen seventy three
when I read an article in the Rawley News and
Observer but a young black woman who was accused of
murdering her white jailer and breaking jail, and I knew
(05:39):
that was that all the elements of a national story.
So I wrote about it for the New York Times,
and in those days stringers, which is what we were,
freelancers didn't get a byline. So my articles appear but
there was no byline, which was fine because I was
also freelancing for other publications, and so there was no
(06:00):
question about, you know, doubling up or making use of
what I was working on. But in covering the joy
and Little case from investigation through her murder trial to
the aftermath, I learned a huge amount. And once I
learned the ins and out, or began learning the ins
and out of covering a sensational criminal trial, through about
(06:22):
the subsequent nineteen seventies, I covered a lot more similar cases,
almost all involving the allegation of racial injustice. Some became
famous locally. Some not the Charlotte Three, the Wilmington ten,
the Dawson five, There were a bunch of them. They
usually involved young African Americans, mostly males, charged with murder
(06:44):
of a white person, although in one of the cases
I covered, the Tarboro Three, these three young black men
faced the death penalty for a rape charge of a
white woman and there was no murder. But in those
years in the South, rape was a capital crime, and
(07:04):
so each time I covered another case, I learned some
more about how to do it. Sometimes I was kind
of isolated because I was stringing for the Times, but
I wasn't a staff writer for the time. So I
would hear about a case and I go into by myself,
into a small Southern town that the civil rights movement
I had often passed by, and it was exciting but
(07:27):
also a little scary as well. And in that decade
I covered enough cases that although my initial involvement was
political and ideological racial justice, I got so good at
the job of covering these cases technically. And one of
my focuses was the disproportioned application of the death penalty
(07:48):
to black people in the South, and that led me
to people who were lawyers who were experts on the
death penalty. And one of them called me one day
and it's also passed away a wonder lawyer, great lawyer
named Millard Farmer. And he said, Mark, he had deep southern,
deep southern Georgia AXI, and he said, would you be
(08:08):
interested in interviewing Ted Bundy? I said, Millard, you know,
thanks for calling me. It's really not my kind of case.
But if you want me to do it, I'll do it.
And so I, you know, rushed to all the sources
I could find to you know, catch up on the
case which I had not covered. And so he arranged it.
And Bundy was then in jail in Tallahassee and I said,
(08:31):
but Millard, how am I going to get in there?
He said, well, we're a jacket and tie carron at
Shay case and look white. They'll let you in. They
won't even ask you who you are. They'll let you
in with me. So I said, okay. The first time,
he couldn't be with me, sent me with his assistant
and they didn't let me in. And I was about
to give up. Although I had pitched the National magazine
(08:53):
on the case and they were very interested, and Millard said, no, no, no,
don't give up. Come back with me and I'll get
you in. And I made a second trip to Tallahassee,
and sure enough we walked right in. And there had
been an escape from that jail the week before. Some
guys just walked away, and so the sheriff, which is
a political office in Tallahassee, was very embarrassed by that.
(09:16):
So Miller took me into Bundy's cell area, not in
his cell. There was a I was on one side
and he was on the cell side. And I walked in.
And until that time, all the cases I covered involved
people who were different from me. They were poor, they
were black or brown. Sometimes there were a different gender.
(09:40):
But I could always dissociate from the horrible stories we
talked about by saying, oh, they're not like me. So
I walk into Bundy's cell and softly lit, and he's
listening to classical music on the public radio station, and
I think, wait a second, what have I got myself into.
(10:02):
It's a handsome guy. I knew by that time that
he was a college graduate, had been to law school,
was a middle class maybe Laura middle class guy. And
Millard set the ground rules I couldn't ask him certain specifics,
but we talked for about an hour, and it's got
creepier and creepier because you have to understand this. When
I was talking to this person, my thought was, this
(10:25):
person could not have done these horrible things. You see
him in a rational setting, but I knew that he had.
So I knew somewhere in the folds of his cortex
was this person being who did murder these thirty some women.
But he was very cordial to me, and I said
at the end, I said, Ted, you know, nobody's gonna
believe that I'm here. And then we had this interview.
(10:47):
He said, well, hand me your legal path. So I
handed it through the bars, and at the bottom of
my last page of notes, he wrote, Mark, thanks for
interviewing me, Ted Bundy. Now, if I could find that
eagle pad today, it would be worth something. So what
happened I left. I wrote my magazine article was a
(11:08):
big deal because it was the first interview with Bundy,
so that launched me into a different level. I used
to say that in the seventies I started out writing
about defendants who were poor, black and innocent, and I
got so good at it I was writing about defendants
who were wealthy, whiting, and guilty, so it was kind of,
you know, creepy to me. And at the in nineteen
(11:29):
seventy nine, I was commuting between Bundy's trial in Miami
and Greenbery doctor Jeffery McDonald's trial in Raleigh. But I
kept collecting material on the Nancy Morgan case because it
just wouldn't let me go. It's like, wherever I turned,
it brought me back to Nancy Morgan. So in the
(11:50):
early seventies, I couldn't support myself as a journalist, so
I got other jobs. And one of the jobs I
got was a researcher for a professor at the University
of North Carolina Chapel Hill who was doing interviews for
their oral history project. And these interviews would be with
political figures and other figures, and the deal was they
(12:11):
would be very frank and the interviews would not be
released until after they died. And so my job, I
was not good enough or didn't have a stature enough
to actually do the interviews, but I was hired. You
did the prep notes. And so there's something called the
Southern Collection in Chapel Hill, and they have at that
(12:32):
time They had files with clippings for hundreds of people,
and so I had a list that I went through,
and as it happened, go figure. I opened one that
said Zino Ponder and I opened it up and it
was about these two brothers, one a politician, the other sheriff,
who had this ironclad political machine in Madison County, North Carolina,
(12:57):
where they controlled pretty much everything. It said the county
only had seventeen thousand people. I thought that myself, well, wait,
if these guys have such a hold on the county
and the county's only seventeen thousand people, and that's where
Nancy Morgan was killed, maybe they had something to do
with it, or at least maybe they knew about what happened,
(13:17):
because the case was still open and unsolved. And so
I copied all the clippings in that column and added
to my Nancy Morgan.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Thought, what was your process like gathering information on the
Nancy Morgan case?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
So I continued to collect stuff until I became a
staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, and I had
a decent career there was there for about eleven years,
and at that point, though, I thought I need to
do something bigger. I was doing sort of the nicol
and Die murders, which had no larger context, and I thought,
you know, I'm doing well. I'm making decent money, I'm
(13:53):
making a career, but it's not why I started this.
And so it was a very helpful full librarian at
the Times, and she helped me gather clips on the
Nancy Morgan case because that was all pre internet. So
she called around to libraries and newspaper morgues they called them,
and she collected a lot of clips from me and
(14:14):
I added that and that gave me much more material,
and I had run out my string. I thought, at
the La Times, I was doing okay, but I wasn't
going to rise any higher. I realized that, and so
I began looking around for another job that would bring
me closer to the scene of the Nancy Morgan murder
and the investigation and the trial. I took a job
(14:35):
with the Orlando Sentinel in Central Florida because I knew
that one of the key players in the murder investigation
was then living in Central Florida, and I reached out
to him, but he was not interested in talking to me.
So I thought, okay, but I needed to move anyway,
and so I took the job with a sentinel, and
(14:56):
then two weeks of every year, a week in the spring,
a week in the fall, I would go up Toton
County with a master list of people I needed to
talk to and a kind of a ven diagram of
the people who posest to what happened, and the people
were oldest because I needed to get to them before
they died or you know, dementia set in. And I
(15:18):
had a friend, a good friend from Duke Days, who
had an inn up there, and that was my headquarters.
And so for almost twenty years I would go up
for two weeks a year, and I used to joke
that fifty weeks a year I was Homer Simpson in
the suburbs, and two weeks a year I was Raymond
Chandler doing I remember thinking to myself at times, I thought,
(15:41):
I feel like I'm in a movie. You know. I
see this on TV and read about it and the mysteries,
and this is what I'm doing now. I'm trying to
track down And there was a certain element of I
don't want to be melodraumatic, but certain I'm out of
I would say danger, because no one had been ever
convict of and the people who were responsible theoretically were
(16:03):
still up there. So I took certain precautions, you know,
prudent actions. I never did interviews at night. When I
went out, I would always tell my friend Elmer Hall
that where I was going and when I was expected back,
so there would be no problem with that. And then
I guess, about maybe sixteen years into it, my brother
(16:25):
Paul is a very straight talking brother, and he said,
you know, you've been researching this for a long time.
I think it's time for you to sit down and
write this book. So I did, and I did lucky
into some incredible material, including a partial transcript of the trial.
And when I talk to young journalists who want to
(16:48):
get into this line of work, I tell him you
should think of it as reanimating a body. You begin
with the skeleton, and the skeleton is the paper, the transcripts,
if they exist, autopsy reports, police reports, and that's your skeleton.
And then you if it's an old case and they're not,
(17:10):
everybody's alive. The next stage is to find contemporary news accounts,
people who are in the courtroom who could tell you
what was the atmosphere in the courtroom, unless you can
find people who are there. That's the muscle. Once I
have the skeleton and the muscle, then I seriously begin
(17:32):
my interviews, put the skin over the body and make
it come alive if I can. It's not always possible.
But once I've done my homework, which is the paperwork
and the newspaper work, I find I waste less time
of the people I want to talk to. And the
more I've found they think you know about the case,
(17:54):
the more they're likely to tell you. Now, some people
lie to me. I'm a newspaper man, that's part to
my job description. More often they shade the truth, and
I you know, I'm not a lie detector. But over
a period of time, you get a sense of when
you're being played or attempted to be played. And so
at that time I felt like I had I had
(18:15):
enough to write the book.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
So met Her on the Mountain has been finished and published,
But then you had more information to add after the fact.
What was that process like and did people respond to
the book as you'd hoped they would.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Sure, I had a small publisher in North Carolina, very
well respected, not self published. It was the real printing house,
and in twenty thirteen. The book came out very strong reviews.
Publishers Weekly gave it starred two star reviews. And I
was on a bunch of the early podcasts. So this
is twenty thirteen, so you know, podcasts hadn't come into
(18:53):
their own serial hadn't appeared yet. But it didn't take off.
Kind of broke my heart, you know, and I I
kept doing what I was doing, being a journalist and
writing about other things as well. I wrote about those
early those two early books totally different in The Gospel
Queen of the Simpsons, the Gospel Queen to Disney, a
world away from what I was doing. But then when
(19:16):
I was reviewing, just to keep my name out there,
true crime books but also novels based on true crime,
and I noticed a couple of them were coming from
the University of Kentucky Press, and I just I'd reviewed
one or two of their books favorably, and I reached
out to the publisher of WUK Press and I said,
you know, I have this book and I own the
(19:38):
rights to it now and it never came out in paperback,
and there have been some developments it came out, would
you be interested? And the director said yeah, I would.
Why don't you send me the book and I'll have
a look at it. I sent her the book within
a week she said, yes, we want it, and she
said I can't pay much money, which I hear all
the time, but I guarantee you it'll stay in print,
(19:58):
in trade paper. And that was kind of the answer,
a second body of the apple that you don't usually get.
So in twenty twenty three, ten years later, it came
out and Audible picked it up, which I thought was
very nice. And we had an addendum of come up
since then, like the emergence of genetic genealogy, and the
(20:20):
investigators the state said they had DNA material that they
took at the time very crude, so they couldn't do
much with it at that time. And the investigators, who
I grew to mistrust, told me that they ran the
test and they didn't come up with the same people
who I named in my book. And I said, well,
(20:44):
why don't you try genetic genealogy, Because these cases were
dropping like crazy all over the country. You may recall
they were house fleeting. There was every case they had,
they hung it like it was on a Christmas tree.
It's a fairly cheap and easy way to clear the
books these cases, but I could never get a straight
answer out of them from the local people, from the
state people, and so I thought, Okay, I'm going to
(21:07):
stick it to them in the book, in the new book,
and so that's what I did in an epilogue, an update.
And they still won't tell me. And my sense is
finally that either they lost the sample or it had
degenerated to the point where it was not usable, but
they didn't want to coalk to it. They owned that store,
(21:28):
so I couldn't do much more about it.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
So how did when Nancy's body was found? How did
the community react? Do you think that they said or
did anything that negatively impacted the police's investigation.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
This is what I came to believe. There were two
theories of the rape, murteran kidnap and the local people.
It's a very insular community. It's you know, it's this
is Appalachia, you know, up in the mountains. The local
people said, nobody of our people could possibly do such
a horrible thing. It had to be an outsider either
or someone passing through or another fellow Vista volumet. Whereas
(22:03):
others who knew Nancy Morgan, who I got to talk to,
was really great, said somebody here did it, and so
it became almost a political division in the counting of
the people who thought an outsider did it, and that
water was carried by the one of the two Ponder
brothers who was the sheriff, and he I believe, basically
framed a fellow Vista volunteer. But the frame was so
(22:27):
transparent that after a week long trial, a local jury
came back with a not guilty verdict within forty five
So that's how badly put together the frame was. That
was and that remains, i should say today, even fifty
years later, more than fifty four, there's still a division
on that point in the county that people who were
(22:49):
Ponder brother supporters were convinced that this Vista volunteer did it,
regardless of what their jury said, and others who said, no,
this this has the fingerprints metaphorically of local people. So
that's kind of where we are now. And you know,
I gave it my best shot, and I did get
(23:11):
a confession from someone and the names of four other people,
which I never would have done because those people are
still alive. So you're you have reliable. If you're if
use somebody of murdered, that's pretty serious. But no one
has ever come forward to threaten me with legal action,
and so I did the best I could. I thought
(23:33):
beat the drum for both local and state people to
do genetic genealogy. And at some point you have to say,
I've done what I can and the only possible change
might happen if there was some sort of a deathbed.
You know that for me, that would be great, but
you can't really count on that. And you know, I waited,
(23:56):
you know, went from nineteen seventy to twenty thirteen to
write the book the first time. So we're up to
close to fifty five years.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Regarding the DNA evidence that you were viewed in two
thousand and nine that suggested multiple perpetrators, how did you
reconcile it with your theory of the crime.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Initially I had this Now back we're back in the
seventies now in that mindset, and I, in my view,
my sort of conspiratorial view, the Vistas threatened the political
and economic control that the Ponder brothers had and that
caused her death. That's the way I wanted the story
to read. But you know, you go where the evidence
(24:37):
takes you, and the evidence took me away from that
to a theory that there were five young near do
Will men from the county who were just sitting around
drinking and they saw Nancy Morgan drive up to a
friend fellow Vistas house for dinner and then late that
(25:01):
night came back. And they knew who she was. They
had assumed certain things about her because she was a
kind of a sixties person. She smoke, she drank somewhat,
and she had a boyfriend who visited her, so they
made certain assumptions about her availability, and they forced her
(25:23):
off the road, kidnapped her, took her up on a
ridge where there was a barn, and raped her, and
then they hogg tied her just so she wouldn't get away,
but she struggled, and as she struggled, she strangled herself
being hog tied. And I don't think it was an
(25:45):
intentional murder. I don't think it was premeditated in a case,
I think they were hoping to let her go, and
that they had done things like this over the years
they never gotten caught before, usually because of the low
social status of the local women and hikers. Apple Action
trail hikers that they did this too, and things got
away from them and they quickly dumped the body where
(26:07):
it was found in her car. The fact that the
damp as initially suggested multiple sperm donors coincided with the
story that I was told, not in every particular, but
basically that was it that they that conformed with it,
and not to the theory the sheriff had there was
(26:27):
one fellow of Vista volunteer who she had had dinner
with before, because it was just one person that just
should be one sperm donor family in her body. So
everything circumstantially pointed to the fact that I was right.
The initial investigation had been so bungled by the state
peer of investigation that when I began bugging them, they said, well, okay,
(26:49):
we'll reopen the case, and they came down to see
me and went through my files, and then should have
known this showed me nothing in return for my efforts.
They were most concerned with validating the guilt of the
guy who was acquitted. They showed no interest in my
theory of the five local people. And I initially was
(27:14):
tipped to that because my friend Elmer Hall, whose place
I stayed at was a poll watcher up there, and
sometimes people aren't voting and people chat, and Elmer mentioned
that I was looking into the Nancy Morgan murder. And
this one woman sitting next to us at oh, that
was Richard Johnson and his friends. They did it like boom, not.
(27:34):
I can't tell you not it's a secret, just boom.
You know everybody knows that. So that kind of pointed
me in that direction. And then I went to speak
with Richard Johnson three times in prison, and he admitted
his role in it to some degree. He wouldn't say
exactly what he did, but his description was pretty accurate
(27:56):
from what we know. So I felt that I I
was right, and I kept pursuing that. And just like
in the beginning, if the evidence had taken me elsewhere,
I would have gone elsewhere. I mean, my job is
not to prove someone's innocent or guilt. My job is
to find out what.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
The truth is with Richard Johnson. His I know, his
son is writing his own book about his father, the
poisoning of his sister that Richard Johnson serving time for.
Do you think that with this new book that supports
so much of what you say in yours. Do you
think that that would potentially add some pressure onto the
(28:37):
SBI to do something, you know, if they can test
the sample, if it's not degraded, you know, would that
possibly do you think would lead them to take some
more action.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
I don't think so. For this reason, Chris Johnson's book
is kind of a personal tale, and I don't think
it's going to get published unless he publishes himself. He doesn't.
From from our discussions in my interviews with him, he
was ever able to offer me no new specific details
that I did not know already about the case and
(29:13):
about his father's poisoning of his his little little sister.
So no, I don't you always hope. Of course, of
course that's the you know, the the you know, the
hope is usually the death bet confession. But someone else
apart from Richard, who's confessed already and it's not the
SBI doesn't think he's credible. But if someone oh two
(29:38):
of the two of the five are dead, one committed suicide,
but there's still several others out there and their families,
that's the most realistic hope I have about definitively breaking
the case, or if technology advances even the degraded sample
(30:00):
of the DNA might be helpful. I mean, no one
that I knew expected genetic genealogy to come along and
make it so easy to do that. So theoretically there
could be more technical advances. And if again, if they
didn't lose it, they lost it, then it's lost. But
if they have it but it's in a degraded condition,
(30:21):
who knows.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
If you could go back and change one thing about
how you approached the Nancy mork And investigation, what would
it be and why?
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Well, I guess I wouldn't My initial investigation wouldn't have
been so colored by my politics of the time. Now,
I didn't disregard anything, but that was my working theory
that the ponders had something to do with them with
the murder. And in my book I don't say that
they had something to do with the murder, but they
(30:52):
knew much more than they told at the time, So
I might have saved some time disabusing myself of my
conspiration theory at the beginning.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Other than that, No, now that all of the updates
that can be talked about regarding Nancy's case have been addressed,
and the wait for a definitive resolution is primarily all
that can be done for now, what is your next
project in this?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
In the same way that I became the obsessed actor
in the Nancy Morgan drama, someone came to me very serendipitously.
I work out at the Duke Fitness Center here in Durham,
and I have a trainer and one day I was
finishing up and he said, you know, there's John Martin.
He's up out on the on the indoor track and
(31:40):
he says, a pretty interesting guy. Maybe you should introduce yourself.
So I said, okay, So I finished and I went
up to the Hi, John, my name is Mark Pinsky.
Chris said we might have some things in common. I
said what do you do? He said, well, I'm a
history professor to medieval history. I said, well, first thing,
that's an inside jokes. I said, first, the Jews didn't
poison the wells. That's the first thing you need to know.
(32:03):
And he just laughed, actually didn't left. He didn't get
the joke anyway, and he said, well what do you do?
And I said, well, I wrote about racial injustice and
true crime. He said, well, I may have a story
for you.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Now.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Over the years must have heard that fifty times. It
never works out. It never works out. I said, okay,
tell me the story. So we walked around the track
and he said, well, my father was a rector at
Christ Church on Saint Simon's Island off the Georgia coast,
and he said he told me that there had been
(32:38):
a murder in the house that we, my brother and
I grew up in. And when he wrote a parish history,
his father, the rector, wrote of parish history, he devoted
a chapter to this murder of a previous rector who'd
been shot while preparing a sermon in nineteen thirty eight.
Someone in the yard fired through the window, shot him
(32:58):
in the head and killed him. And the case was
never solved, although they initially charged two white brothers on
the island who were said to control the rackets on
Saint Simon's and a semi literate black janitor who had
worked for them. And again this is southern Georgia in
the nineteen thirties. So the first red flag that went
(33:20):
up was when John told me that he wasn't lynched.
The black guy wasn't lynched. And then, as it happened,
the black guy was the only guy charged for the murder.
He was convicted of first to be murder of a
prominent white episcopal minister, second cousin to Robert E. Lee,
and he was found guilty by an all white jurjury,
(33:43):
but they recommended mercy, and that just didn't happen in
those days. There's something behind the curtain that I knew
for sure. And he said, the guy who told me
most of this is a guy whose wife was in
the congregation for twenty years. He's just an amateur. He's
a true crime buff. He did a serious investigation, collected
all this material, but he seriously ill with cancer and
(34:06):
he's afraid he's going to die before he can interest
someone in doing the book. He tried two other authors
and they had said, well, you write it. He couldn't
write it. And I said, well, how about this. I
have a friend from Duke Days who's also co written
a book, a historical book about a true crime praise.
I've written two books by this time. I said, why
(34:27):
don't you send him our books, let him look at them,
and if he thinks we're the right people, let's go ahead.
And about three weeks later he said, this man Rick
McBride says, you're it. We want what we want you
to do.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
It do this.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
So he began sending me boxes and boxes of material,
which I went through, and the whole process, you'd take notes,
you'd do a timeline, and you try to figure out
what happened exactly. And so then Steve and I went
down to visit him at his home and then we
went with him. He was living in northern Florida at
the time, and we went with him back to Saint
(35:05):
Simon's and did some interviews, did some investigating. Nothing conclusive.
The only thing conclusive we found it was that the
black Jenner could not have done the murder. And it
was a kind of an open wound on Saint Simon's
because you know, the black guy spends twenty three years
(35:25):
on the chain gang and the white guys skate.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And so.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
We learned how deeply that was when we went back
to give a talk a panel with Steve, myself and
Rick in this big auditorium on Say Simon's Island, and
it was on a weekday morning, and two hundred people
showed up, which showed the depth of remaining interest. Now
we had hoped that when we shared what we had
(35:51):
we might shake loose some fruit from a low hanging tree.
Hasn't happened yet, but it was worth the effort for us.
I mean, that's how you do these things. You sort
of try to bring them to people's attention, to hope
that somebody who is not on your radar comes forward
and reaches out to you. Still may happen. We're not
done yet, but we have a manuscript and the Atlantic
(36:14):
magazine had said they would give us the first look.
No contract, but they give us the first look. We
now have twenty thousand words, which would be a very
long magazine piece, which once we're finishing editing it, we
will show to the Atlantic and they may say no,
they may say yes. They may say yes, but we
want you to do this. Our problem structurally is that while
(36:36):
I believe we made an excellent case that man George
Clayburn did not do it, we haven't reached the point
where we can say who we think did do it,
which is the third act, and so both injuries and
in true crime you aren't required to, but the reader
really wants to know what you think, and so we're
(36:57):
going to have to deal with I guess if we
earning their trust. In the first twenty thousand words, we're
hoping they'll trust us to make an informed speculation as
to who really was involved. And these involved some very
rich people at that time, very powerful people. So I mean,
everybody's dead, so libel law, your libel rights die when
(37:20):
you do. So we're okay there. There are still some
relatives of threatened. Didn't threaten us directly, but they threaten
anybody wants to write about it, and so well, like
before we had the big meeting in Saint Simon's, a
very nice reporter for the Brunswick Paper did a column
about it, and now I think that gin d up
interest in people coming to us, and we also that
(37:42):
would shake the tree.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
A little bit.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
So far, not yet, but we'll have to see. And
in a sense, I feel like it brought me back
full circle to why I began writing about true crime.
That there was an injustice done to someone because of
his race, I believe, and so history has its claims.
(38:04):
He's long dead, but his name should be cleared, and
I think we can clear his Nay.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Absolutely, I believe he can clear his name. The last
question I have for you is for anyone out there
working on their own investigation into cases that keep them
up at night. What advice would you give them?
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Well, again, collect as much paper as possible, trial transcripts,
police reports, autopsy reports, as much as you can. Then
collect as many contemporaneous news accounts you can, and school
yourself in as much as we know, and I mean
schooled yourself. Then go talk to people, and talk to people.
(38:52):
If it's a cold case, talk to the oldest people first,
that's important. And you know, people will lie to you
if it's in their interest. People will shade the truth
if it's in their interest. But over time a kind
of consensus will likely form in your mind. But don't
go in if you can avoid it with a thesis
(39:16):
that you want to prove, and then find if your
thesis isn't right, then you quit. I don't think that's
the most honest way to do these things. Follow the evidence,
take the evidence where it takes you. If it's if
it's not where you want it to go, you know,
do your best with that. I mean, the truth is
(39:37):
always the most important thing. I mean, the gold standard
for you know, cold cases. The crusading reporter takes up
the case of a minority person already on death row
and clears that person and finds the person who did it.
(39:58):
Those cases don't come along very often. It happens, and
when it happens, you read about it because it's so,
you know, so definitive. And also with genetics genealogy, you
have you do have certainty, and that's important to know.
But go and wanting to know what happened, not necessarily
proving that this person is innocent, because that can shade
(40:21):
your research techniques. But if you're a family member, it's
going to be very hard if you put all your
belief in something like that and it doesn't work out
that way. You know, it's very tough. I go from
case to case. It's not my one and only case.
And this is just I've learned from, you know, and
(40:43):
I've covered a lot more murder cases as news stories.
I've covered a number of other murder cases when I
work for the La Times, one that if I live
long enough, may become another book we'll see, and the
same tools apply. I mean, I've used and developed these
tools in day to day trial coverage for my different clients.
(41:06):
I will say I shouldn't, but I will in these
when these big sensational cases happen, and there's a lot
of reporters from around the country. At the end of
the trial, there's often a pool, a betting pool amongst
the reporters, and you would say what the verdict will
be and how long it will take the jury to
(41:26):
find the verdict. And I won the Bundy pool. I've
been doing this enough. So I was stringing for the
New York Times in the morning. The editors want to
know what's going to happen that day if you can
tell them, And I said, well, another great old newspaper
man passed away. Now Irv Horowitz on the national desk.
I said, well, Irv, I think it's going to be
(41:47):
a guilty verdict around four o'clock and so and so
it was. So it happened to be, and so my
reputation at the desk went sort of sky high, and
my verdict story was on the front page of the
Times with my byline. You know, it's not magic. This
this kind of work is not magic. It's you know,
hard work and luck. That's what I've learned in fifty
(42:11):
five years.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Absolutely, it's a lot of hard work and a lot
of luck. But hopefully with all of that hard work
and all of that luck good results come out of it.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yes, that's why I still do it.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Mark, Thank you so much for joining me today. Is
an absolute pleasure speaking with you.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
This has been fun and I don't have to worry
about an elbow from my wife for talking too much,
which at parties I tend to get. Well, I get
a report card afterwards. She's very good. You didn't talk
too much about yourself.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Well. The last thing I would want is to have
you get an elbow from your wife. As always, everyone,
thank you so much for listening. In the source of
sense below you will find link to Mark's book as
well as his different social media is. If you check
out the website botdpot dot com, you can view attached
(43:10):
to this episodex biography with additional links as well. As always,
I hope you have a wonderful week and I will
see you in the next chapter of the Book of
the Dead. Bye, guys. Another page closed. But the story
isn't over for the families left behind. The pain doesn't
(43:33):
end when the headline's fade. And for the victims, we
owe them more than silence for our on solved cases.
If you have any information, please reach out to local
authorities or visit our show notes for links and resources.
Someone out there knows something. Maybe it's you. Thank you
(43:55):
for listening to the Book of the Dead. If this
story moved or spoke to you in some way, talk
about it, share it, keep their names alive. Until next time,
I'm Courtney Liso. Stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant,
and remember the dead may be gone, but their stories
(44:17):
will not be forgotten.
Every story has a beginning, but not everyone has an ending.
In the shadows of headlines and buried police reports lay
the voices of the missing, the murdered, and the forgotten,
waiting to be heard and have their stories told. This
is The Book of the Dead, a true crime podcast
(00:21):
where we remember forgotten victims of heinous crimes, reopen cold cases,
ree visit haunting disappearances, and uncover the truths buried beneath
the years of silence. I'm your host, Courtney Liso, and
every week we turn to another chapter, one victim, one mystery,
(00:43):
one step closer to justice. Brought to you by Dark
Cast Network indie Podcasts with a Twist. Hello, Hello, Welcome
(01:11):
to the next chapter in the Book of the Dead.
With me today I have a very special guest. Mark
Pinski is a journalist of over fifty years working for
countless publications and newspapers like The Orlando Sentinel, The New
York and LA Times, and USA Today, covering everything from religion, politics,
(01:33):
racial issues, and explosive true crime cases that include Ted Bundy.
He is also an author, writing six nonfiction books, like
The Gospel according to the Simpsons and The Gospel according
to Disney Mark is with me today to discuss the
case that has followed him for the last fifty years,
so much so that he wrote the book on it,
(01:56):
Met Around the Mountain, The Murder of Nancy Morgan's spans
Mark his own investigation into the murder of twenty four
year old Vista worker Nancy Morgan, who was found raped
and murdered in June of nineteen seventy in Madison County,
North Carolina, hindered by a less than competent investigation, confusion
on jurisdiction, as well as political corruption. Nancy Morgan's murder
(02:20):
was a crime that North Carolina tried for decades to forget. Mark,
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Thanks for having me, Courtney.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I want to start at the beginning. What was it
about Nancy's case that drew you in while you were
a young journalist at Duke University and what kept you
so dedicated to that investigation for five decades.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Well, in nineteen seventy I was working for the Duke
University Chronicle. I had a column called The Readable Radical.
I was very much politically involved in what was happening
in the late sixties and then into the early seventies.
When I opened the newspaper that day and June and
saw that Nancy Morgan's body had been discovered up in
the mountains, it struck me personally. The more I read
(03:08):
about her, the more I felt she was like me
in some senses, and many of my friends in other senses.
She was a federal anti poverty worker working for an
organization called VISTA, which stood for Volunteers in Service to America,
and as it happened, not surprisingly, several of my friends,
maybe half a dozen of them at the time of
(03:29):
the killing, were already in VISTA. So I took it
personally as an individual, but I also took it personally
because my friends were in similar situations doing what she
was doing, and in some cases somewhat risky. When you
challenge the status quo, you run a certain risk. Usually
it's minor, but sometimes it's not mine. In her case,
(03:51):
it wasn't minor, and so I ripped out the article
about her body being found, a long takeout on her life,
and started to file and just said Nancy Morgan on it.
And I didn't know at that time. I was only,
you know, a college newspaper guy, and I didn't know
where it would end, but it just grabbed hold of me.
And the years that followed, whenever there was a development,
(04:14):
I would add that to my file. And I hadn't
reached any status at that point as a journalist, so
I didn't know where I would take it. And as
time passed, I got a journalist's degree from Columbia University
and began stringing from North Carolina for the New York Times.
I also wrote for political magazines like The Nation and
The Progressive. On the overlap between criminal cases and political causes.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
You covered other high profile cases like those of Ted
Bundy and Jeffrey McDonald's. How did your experience with Nancy
Morgan's case differ from those and what were some of
the unique challenges you faced while covering it well?
Speaker 2 (04:53):
With Nancy Morgan. I was really learning my way. I
didn't know anything about criminal justice, trial procedure like that,
so I was kind of learning as learning by doing.
I would be sent on cases. The Times would send
me on a case, and I'd do what I could.
I worked with a good friend of mine passed away
now named Wayne King, very celebrated a reporter for the
(05:15):
New York Times, and he was as he used to
say at the Times, he was my Rabbi. He told
me and taught me a lot of what I needed
to know, And that all accelerated in nineteen seventy three
when I read an article in the Rawley News and
Observer but a young black woman who was accused of
murdering her white jailer and breaking jail, and I knew
(05:39):
that was that all the elements of a national story.
So I wrote about it for the New York Times,
and in those days stringers, which is what we were,
freelancers didn't get a byline. So my articles appear but
there was no byline, which was fine because I was
also freelancing for other publications, and so there was no
(06:00):
question about, you know, doubling up or making use of
what I was working on. But in covering the joy
and Little case from investigation through her murder trial to
the aftermath, I learned a huge amount. And once I
learned the ins and out, or began learning the ins
and out of covering a sensational criminal trial, through about
(06:22):
the subsequent nineteen seventies, I covered a lot more similar cases,
almost all involving the allegation of racial injustice. Some became
famous locally. Some not the Charlotte Three, the Wilmington ten,
the Dawson five, There were a bunch of them. They
usually involved young African Americans, mostly males, charged with murder
(06:44):
of a white person, although in one of the cases
I covered, the Tarboro Three, these three young black men
faced the death penalty for a rape charge of a
white woman and there was no murder. But in those
years in the South, rape was a capital crime, and
(07:04):
so each time I covered another case, I learned some
more about how to do it. Sometimes I was kind
of isolated because I was stringing for the Times, but
I wasn't a staff writer for the time. So I
would hear about a case and I go into by myself,
into a small Southern town that the civil rights movement
I had often passed by, and it was exciting but
(07:27):
also a little scary as well. And in that decade
I covered enough cases that although my initial involvement was
political and ideological racial justice, I got so good at
the job of covering these cases technically. And one of
my focuses was the disproportioned application of the death penalty
(07:48):
to black people in the South, and that led me
to people who were lawyers who were experts on the
death penalty. And one of them called me one day
and it's also passed away a wonder lawyer, great lawyer
named Millard Farmer. And he said, Mark, he had deep southern,
deep southern Georgia AXI, and he said, would you be
(08:08):
interested in interviewing Ted Bundy? I said, Millard, you know,
thanks for calling me. It's really not my kind of case.
But if you want me to do it, I'll do it.
And so I, you know, rushed to all the sources
I could find to you know, catch up on the
case which I had not covered. And so he arranged it.
And Bundy was then in jail in Tallahassee and I said,
(08:31):
but Millard, how am I going to get in there?
He said, well, we're a jacket and tie carron at
Shay case and look white. They'll let you in. They
won't even ask you who you are. They'll let you
in with me. So I said, okay. The first time,
he couldn't be with me, sent me with his assistant
and they didn't let me in. And I was about
to give up. Although I had pitched the National magazine
(08:53):
on the case and they were very interested, and Millard said, no, no, no,
don't give up. Come back with me and I'll get
you in. And I made a second trip to Tallahassee,
and sure enough we walked right in. And there had
been an escape from that jail the week before. Some
guys just walked away, and so the sheriff, which is
a political office in Tallahassee, was very embarrassed by that.
(09:16):
So Miller took me into Bundy's cell area, not in
his cell. There was a I was on one side
and he was on the cell side. And I walked in.
And until that time, all the cases I covered involved
people who were different from me. They were poor, they
were black or brown. Sometimes there were a different gender.
(09:40):
But I could always dissociate from the horrible stories we
talked about by saying, oh, they're not like me. So
I walk into Bundy's cell and softly lit, and he's
listening to classical music on the public radio station, and
I think, wait a second, what have I got myself into.
(10:02):
It's a handsome guy. I knew by that time that
he was a college graduate, had been to law school,
was a middle class maybe Laura middle class guy. And
Millard set the ground rules I couldn't ask him certain specifics,
but we talked for about an hour, and it's got
creepier and creepier because you have to understand this. When
I was talking to this person, my thought was, this
(10:25):
person could not have done these horrible things. You see
him in a rational setting, but I knew that he had.
So I knew somewhere in the folds of his cortex
was this person being who did murder these thirty some women.
But he was very cordial to me, and I said
at the end, I said, Ted, you know, nobody's gonna
believe that I'm here. And then we had this interview.
(10:47):
He said, well, hand me your legal path. So I
handed it through the bars, and at the bottom of
my last page of notes, he wrote, Mark, thanks for
interviewing me, Ted Bundy. Now, if I could find that
eagle pad today, it would be worth something. So what
happened I left. I wrote my magazine article was a
(11:08):
big deal because it was the first interview with Bundy,
so that launched me into a different level. I used
to say that in the seventies I started out writing
about defendants who were poor, black and innocent, and I
got so good at it I was writing about defendants
who were wealthy, whiting, and guilty, so it was kind of,
you know, creepy to me. And at the in nineteen
(11:29):
seventy nine, I was commuting between Bundy's trial in Miami
and Greenbery doctor Jeffery McDonald's trial in Raleigh. But I
kept collecting material on the Nancy Morgan case because it
just wouldn't let me go. It's like, wherever I turned,
it brought me back to Nancy Morgan. So in the
(11:50):
early seventies, I couldn't support myself as a journalist, so
I got other jobs. And one of the jobs I
got was a researcher for a professor at the University
of North Carolina Chapel Hill who was doing interviews for
their oral history project. And these interviews would be with
political figures and other figures, and the deal was they
(12:11):
would be very frank and the interviews would not be
released until after they died. And so my job, I
was not good enough or didn't have a stature enough
to actually do the interviews, but I was hired. You
did the prep notes. And so there's something called the
Southern Collection in Chapel Hill, and they have at that
(12:32):
time They had files with clippings for hundreds of people,
and so I had a list that I went through,
and as it happened, go figure. I opened one that
said Zino Ponder and I opened it up and it
was about these two brothers, one a politician, the other sheriff,
who had this ironclad political machine in Madison County, North Carolina,
(12:57):
where they controlled pretty much everything. It said the county
only had seventeen thousand people. I thought that myself, well, wait,
if these guys have such a hold on the county
and the county's only seventeen thousand people, and that's where
Nancy Morgan was killed, maybe they had something to do
with it, or at least maybe they knew about what happened,
(13:17):
because the case was still open and unsolved. And so
I copied all the clippings in that column and added
to my Nancy Morgan.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Thought, what was your process like gathering information on the
Nancy Morgan case?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
So I continued to collect stuff until I became a
staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, and I had
a decent career there was there for about eleven years,
and at that point, though, I thought I need to
do something bigger. I was doing sort of the nicol
and Die murders, which had no larger context, and I thought,
you know, I'm doing well. I'm making decent money, I'm
(13:53):
making a career, but it's not why I started this.
And so it was a very helpful full librarian at
the Times, and she helped me gather clips on the
Nancy Morgan case because that was all pre internet. So
she called around to libraries and newspaper morgues they called them,
and she collected a lot of clips from me and
(14:14):
I added that and that gave me much more material,
and I had run out my string. I thought, at
the La Times, I was doing okay, but I wasn't
going to rise any higher. I realized that, and so
I began looking around for another job that would bring
me closer to the scene of the Nancy Morgan murder
and the investigation and the trial. I took a job
(14:35):
with the Orlando Sentinel in Central Florida because I knew
that one of the key players in the murder investigation
was then living in Central Florida, and I reached out
to him, but he was not interested in talking to me.
So I thought, okay, but I needed to move anyway,
and so I took the job with a sentinel, and
(14:56):
then two weeks of every year, a week in the spring,
a week in the fall, I would go up Toton
County with a master list of people I needed to
talk to and a kind of a ven diagram of
the people who posest to what happened, and the people
were oldest because I needed to get to them before
they died or you know, dementia set in. And I
(15:18):
had a friend, a good friend from Duke Days, who
had an inn up there, and that was my headquarters.
And so for almost twenty years I would go up
for two weeks a year, and I used to joke
that fifty weeks a year I was Homer Simpson in
the suburbs, and two weeks a year I was Raymond
Chandler doing I remember thinking to myself at times, I thought,
(15:41):
I feel like I'm in a movie. You know. I
see this on TV and read about it and the mysteries,
and this is what I'm doing now. I'm trying to
track down And there was a certain element of I
don't want to be melodraumatic, but certain I'm out of
I would say danger, because no one had been ever
convict of and the people who were responsible theoretically were
(16:03):
still up there. So I took certain precautions, you know,
prudent actions. I never did interviews at night. When I
went out, I would always tell my friend Elmer Hall
that where I was going and when I was expected back,
so there would be no problem with that. And then
I guess, about maybe sixteen years into it, my brother
(16:25):
Paul is a very straight talking brother, and he said,
you know, you've been researching this for a long time.
I think it's time for you to sit down and
write this book. So I did, and I did lucky
into some incredible material, including a partial transcript of the trial.
And when I talk to young journalists who want to
(16:48):
get into this line of work, I tell him you
should think of it as reanimating a body. You begin
with the skeleton, and the skeleton is the paper, the transcripts,
if they exist, autopsy reports, police reports, and that's your skeleton.
And then you if it's an old case and they're not,
(17:10):
everybody's alive. The next stage is to find contemporary news accounts,
people who are in the courtroom who could tell you
what was the atmosphere in the courtroom, unless you can
find people who are there. That's the muscle. Once I
have the skeleton and the muscle, then I seriously begin
(17:32):
my interviews, put the skin over the body and make
it come alive if I can. It's not always possible.
But once I've done my homework, which is the paperwork
and the newspaper work, I find I waste less time
of the people I want to talk to. And the
more I've found they think you know about the case,
(17:54):
the more they're likely to tell you. Now, some people
lie to me. I'm a newspaper man, that's part to
my job description. More often they shade the truth, and
I you know, I'm not a lie detector. But over
a period of time, you get a sense of when
you're being played or attempted to be played. And so
at that time I felt like I had I had
(18:15):
enough to write the book.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
So met Her on the Mountain has been finished and published,
But then you had more information to add after the fact.
What was that process like and did people respond to
the book as you'd hoped they would.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Sure, I had a small publisher in North Carolina, very
well respected, not self published. It was the real printing house,
and in twenty thirteen. The book came out very strong reviews.
Publishers Weekly gave it starred two star reviews. And I
was on a bunch of the early podcasts. So this
is twenty thirteen, so you know, podcasts hadn't come into
(18:53):
their own serial hadn't appeared yet. But it didn't take off.
Kind of broke my heart, you know, and I I
kept doing what I was doing, being a journalist and
writing about other things as well. I wrote about those
early those two early books totally different in The Gospel
Queen of the Simpsons, the Gospel Queen to Disney, a
world away from what I was doing. But then when
(19:16):
I was reviewing, just to keep my name out there,
true crime books but also novels based on true crime,
and I noticed a couple of them were coming from
the University of Kentucky Press, and I just I'd reviewed
one or two of their books favorably, and I reached
out to the publisher of WUK Press and I said,
you know, I have this book and I own the
(19:38):
rights to it now and it never came out in paperback,
and there have been some developments it came out, would
you be interested? And the director said yeah, I would.
Why don't you send me the book and I'll have
a look at it. I sent her the book within
a week she said, yes, we want it, and she
said I can't pay much money, which I hear all
the time, but I guarantee you it'll stay in print,
(19:58):
in trade paper. And that was kind of the answer,
a second body of the apple that you don't usually get.
So in twenty twenty three, ten years later, it came
out and Audible picked it up, which I thought was
very nice. And we had an addendum of come up
since then, like the emergence of genetic genealogy, and the
(20:20):
investigators the state said they had DNA material that they
took at the time very crude, so they couldn't do
much with it at that time. And the investigators, who
I grew to mistrust, told me that they ran the
test and they didn't come up with the same people
who I named in my book. And I said, well,
(20:44):
why don't you try genetic genealogy, Because these cases were
dropping like crazy all over the country. You may recall
they were house fleeting. There was every case they had,
they hung it like it was on a Christmas tree.
It's a fairly cheap and easy way to clear the
books these cases, but I could never get a straight
answer out of them from the local people, from the
state people, and so I thought, Okay, I'm going to
(21:07):
stick it to them in the book, in the new book,
and so that's what I did in an epilogue, an update.
And they still won't tell me. And my sense is
finally that either they lost the sample or it had
degenerated to the point where it was not usable, but
they didn't want to coalk to it. They owned that store,
(21:28):
so I couldn't do much more about it.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
So how did when Nancy's body was found? How did
the community react? Do you think that they said or
did anything that negatively impacted the police's investigation.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
This is what I came to believe. There were two
theories of the rape, murteran kidnap and the local people.
It's a very insular community. It's you know, it's this
is Appalachia, you know, up in the mountains. The local
people said, nobody of our people could possibly do such
a horrible thing. It had to be an outsider either
or someone passing through or another fellow Vista volumet. Whereas
(22:03):
others who knew Nancy Morgan, who I got to talk to,
was really great, said somebody here did it, and so
it became almost a political division in the counting of
the people who thought an outsider did it, and that
water was carried by the one of the two Ponder
brothers who was the sheriff, and he I believe, basically
framed a fellow Vista volunteer. But the frame was so
(22:27):
transparent that after a week long trial, a local jury
came back with a not guilty verdict within forty five
So that's how badly put together the frame was. That
was and that remains, i should say today, even fifty
years later, more than fifty four, there's still a division
on that point in the county that people who were
(22:49):
Ponder brother supporters were convinced that this Vista volunteer did it,
regardless of what their jury said, and others who said, no,
this this has the fingerprints metaphorically of local people. So
that's kind of where we are now. And you know,
I gave it my best shot, and I did get
(23:11):
a confession from someone and the names of four other people,
which I never would have done because those people are
still alive. So you're you have reliable. If you're if
use somebody of murdered, that's pretty serious. But no one
has ever come forward to threaten me with legal action,
and so I did the best I could. I thought
(23:33):
beat the drum for both local and state people to
do genetic genealogy. And at some point you have to say,
I've done what I can and the only possible change
might happen if there was some sort of a deathbed.
You know that for me, that would be great, but
you can't really count on that. And you know, I waited,
(23:56):
you know, went from nineteen seventy to twenty thirteen to
write the book the first time. So we're up to
close to fifty five years.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Regarding the DNA evidence that you were viewed in two
thousand and nine that suggested multiple perpetrators, how did you
reconcile it with your theory of the crime.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Initially I had this Now back we're back in the
seventies now in that mindset, and I, in my view,
my sort of conspiratorial view, the Vistas threatened the political
and economic control that the Ponder brothers had and that
caused her death. That's the way I wanted the story
to read. But you know, you go where the evidence
(24:37):
takes you, and the evidence took me away from that
to a theory that there were five young near do
Will men from the county who were just sitting around
drinking and they saw Nancy Morgan drive up to a
friend fellow Vistas house for dinner and then late that
(25:01):
night came back. And they knew who she was. They
had assumed certain things about her because she was a
kind of a sixties person. She smoke, she drank somewhat,
and she had a boyfriend who visited her, so they
made certain assumptions about her availability, and they forced her
(25:23):
off the road, kidnapped her, took her up on a
ridge where there was a barn, and raped her, and
then they hogg tied her just so she wouldn't get away,
but she struggled, and as she struggled, she strangled herself
being hog tied. And I don't think it was an
(25:45):
intentional murder. I don't think it was premeditated in a case,
I think they were hoping to let her go, and
that they had done things like this over the years
they never gotten caught before, usually because of the low
social status of the local women and hikers. Apple Action
trail hikers that they did this too, and things got
away from them and they quickly dumped the body where
(26:07):
it was found in her car. The fact that the
damp as initially suggested multiple sperm donors coincided with the
story that I was told, not in every particular, but
basically that was it that they that conformed with it,
and not to the theory the sheriff had there was
(26:27):
one fellow of Vista volunteer who she had had dinner
with before, because it was just one person that just
should be one sperm donor family in her body. So
everything circumstantially pointed to the fact that I was right.
The initial investigation had been so bungled by the state
peer of investigation that when I began bugging them, they said, well, okay,
(26:49):
we'll reopen the case, and they came down to see
me and went through my files, and then should have
known this showed me nothing in return for my efforts.
They were most concerned with validating the guilt of the
guy who was acquitted. They showed no interest in my
theory of the five local people. And I initially was
(27:14):
tipped to that because my friend Elmer Hall, whose place
I stayed at was a poll watcher up there, and
sometimes people aren't voting and people chat, and Elmer mentioned
that I was looking into the Nancy Morgan murder. And
this one woman sitting next to us at oh, that
was Richard Johnson and his friends. They did it like boom, not.
(27:34):
I can't tell you not it's a secret, just boom.
You know everybody knows that. So that kind of pointed
me in that direction. And then I went to speak
with Richard Johnson three times in prison, and he admitted
his role in it to some degree. He wouldn't say
exactly what he did, but his description was pretty accurate
(27:56):
from what we know. So I felt that I I
was right, and I kept pursuing that. And just like
in the beginning, if the evidence had taken me elsewhere,
I would have gone elsewhere. I mean, my job is
not to prove someone's innocent or guilt. My job is
to find out what.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
The truth is with Richard Johnson. His I know, his
son is writing his own book about his father, the
poisoning of his sister that Richard Johnson serving time for.
Do you think that with this new book that supports
so much of what you say in yours. Do you
think that that would potentially add some pressure onto the
(28:37):
SBI to do something, you know, if they can test
the sample, if it's not degraded, you know, would that
possibly do you think would lead them to take some
more action.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
I don't think so. For this reason, Chris Johnson's book
is kind of a personal tale, and I don't think
it's going to get published unless he publishes himself. He doesn't.
From from our discussions in my interviews with him, he
was ever able to offer me no new specific details
that I did not know already about the case and
(29:13):
about his father's poisoning of his his little little sister.
So no, I don't you always hope. Of course, of
course that's the you know, the the you know, the
hope is usually the death bet confession. But someone else
apart from Richard, who's confessed already and it's not the
SBI doesn't think he's credible. But if someone oh two
(29:38):
of the two of the five are dead, one committed suicide,
but there's still several others out there and their families,
that's the most realistic hope I have about definitively breaking
the case, or if technology advances even the degraded sample
(30:00):
of the DNA might be helpful. I mean, no one
that I knew expected genetic genealogy to come along and
make it so easy to do that. So theoretically there
could be more technical advances. And if again, if they
didn't lose it, they lost it, then it's lost. But
if they have it but it's in a degraded condition,
(30:21):
who knows.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
If you could go back and change one thing about
how you approached the Nancy mork And investigation, what would
it be and why?
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Well, I guess I wouldn't My initial investigation wouldn't have
been so colored by my politics of the time. Now,
I didn't disregard anything, but that was my working theory
that the ponders had something to do with them with
the murder. And in my book I don't say that
they had something to do with the murder, but they
(30:52):
knew much more than they told at the time, So
I might have saved some time disabusing myself of my
conspiration theory at the beginning.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Other than that, No, now that all of the updates
that can be talked about regarding Nancy's case have been addressed,
and the wait for a definitive resolution is primarily all
that can be done for now, what is your next
project in this?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
In the same way that I became the obsessed actor
in the Nancy Morgan drama, someone came to me very serendipitously.
I work out at the Duke Fitness Center here in Durham,
and I have a trainer and one day I was
finishing up and he said, you know, there's John Martin.
He's up out on the on the indoor track and
(31:40):
he says, a pretty interesting guy. Maybe you should introduce yourself.
So I said, okay, So I finished and I went
up to the Hi, John, my name is Mark Pinsky.
Chris said we might have some things in common. I
said what do you do? He said, well, I'm a
history professor to medieval history. I said, well, first thing,
that's an inside jokes. I said, first, the Jews didn't
poison the wells. That's the first thing you need to know.
(32:03):
And he just laughed, actually didn't left. He didn't get
the joke anyway, and he said, well what do you do?
And I said, well, I wrote about racial injustice and
true crime. He said, well, I may have a story
for you.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Now.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Over the years must have heard that fifty times. It
never works out. It never works out. I said, okay,
tell me the story. So we walked around the track
and he said, well, my father was a rector at
Christ Church on Saint Simon's Island off the Georgia coast,
and he said he told me that there had been
(32:38):
a murder in the house that we, my brother and
I grew up in. And when he wrote a parish history,
his father, the rector, wrote of parish history, he devoted
a chapter to this murder of a previous rector who'd
been shot while preparing a sermon in nineteen thirty eight.
Someone in the yard fired through the window, shot him
(32:58):
in the head and killed him. And the case was
never solved, although they initially charged two white brothers on
the island who were said to control the rackets on
Saint Simon's and a semi literate black janitor who had
worked for them. And again this is southern Georgia in
the nineteen thirties. So the first red flag that went
(33:20):
up was when John told me that he wasn't lynched.
The black guy wasn't lynched. And then, as it happened,
the black guy was the only guy charged for the murder.
He was convicted of first to be murder of a
prominent white episcopal minister, second cousin to Robert E. Lee,
and he was found guilty by an all white jurjury,
(33:43):
but they recommended mercy, and that just didn't happen in
those days. There's something behind the curtain that I knew
for sure. And he said, the guy who told me
most of this is a guy whose wife was in
the congregation for twenty years. He's just an amateur. He's
a true crime buff. He did a serious investigation, collected
all this material, but he seriously ill with cancer and
(34:06):
he's afraid he's going to die before he can interest
someone in doing the book. He tried two other authors
and they had said, well, you write it. He couldn't
write it. And I said, well, how about this. I
have a friend from Duke Days who's also co written
a book, a historical book about a true crime praise.
I've written two books by this time. I said, why
(34:27):
don't you send him our books, let him look at them,
and if he thinks we're the right people, let's go ahead.
And about three weeks later he said, this man Rick
McBride says, you're it. We want what we want you
to do.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
It do this.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
So he began sending me boxes and boxes of material,
which I went through, and the whole process, you'd take notes,
you'd do a timeline, and you try to figure out
what happened exactly. And so then Steve and I went
down to visit him at his home and then we
went with him. He was living in northern Florida at
the time, and we went with him back to Saint
(35:05):
Simon's and did some interviews, did some investigating. Nothing conclusive.
The only thing conclusive we found it was that the
black Jenner could not have done the murder. And it
was a kind of an open wound on Saint Simon's
because you know, the black guy spends twenty three years
(35:25):
on the chain gang and the white guys skate.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And so.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
We learned how deeply that was when we went back
to give a talk a panel with Steve, myself and
Rick in this big auditorium on Say Simon's Island, and
it was on a weekday morning, and two hundred people
showed up, which showed the depth of remaining interest. Now
we had hoped that when we shared what we had
(35:51):
we might shake loose some fruit from a low hanging tree.
Hasn't happened yet, but it was worth the effort for us.
I mean, that's how you do these things. You sort
of try to bring them to people's attention, to hope
that somebody who is not on your radar comes forward
and reaches out to you. Still may happen. We're not
done yet, but we have a manuscript and the Atlantic
(36:14):
magazine had said they would give us the first look.
No contract, but they give us the first look. We
now have twenty thousand words, which would be a very
long magazine piece, which once we're finishing editing it, we
will show to the Atlantic and they may say no,
they may say yes. They may say yes, but we
want you to do this. Our problem structurally is that while
(36:36):
I believe we made an excellent case that man George
Clayburn did not do it, we haven't reached the point
where we can say who we think did do it,
which is the third act, and so both injuries and
in true crime you aren't required to, but the reader
really wants to know what you think, and so we're
(36:57):
going to have to deal with I guess if we
earning their trust. In the first twenty thousand words, we're
hoping they'll trust us to make an informed speculation as
to who really was involved. And these involved some very
rich people at that time, very powerful people. So I mean,
everybody's dead, so libel law, your libel rights die when
(37:20):
you do. So we're okay there. There are still some
relatives of threatened. Didn't threaten us directly, but they threaten
anybody wants to write about it, and so well, like
before we had the big meeting in Saint Simon's, a
very nice reporter for the Brunswick Paper did a column
about it, and now I think that gin d up
interest in people coming to us, and we also that
(37:42):
would shake the tree.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
A little bit.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
So far, not yet, but we'll have to see. And
in a sense, I feel like it brought me back
full circle to why I began writing about true crime.
That there was an injustice done to someone because of
his race, I believe, and so history has its claims.
(38:04):
He's long dead, but his name should be cleared, and
I think we can clear his Nay.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Absolutely, I believe he can clear his name. The last
question I have for you is for anyone out there
working on their own investigation into cases that keep them
up at night. What advice would you give them?
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Well, again, collect as much paper as possible, trial transcripts,
police reports, autopsy reports, as much as you can. Then
collect as many contemporaneous news accounts you can, and school
yourself in as much as we know, and I mean
schooled yourself. Then go talk to people, and talk to people.
(38:52):
If it's a cold case, talk to the oldest people first,
that's important. And you know, people will lie to you
if it's in their interest. People will shade the truth
if it's in their interest. But over time a kind
of consensus will likely form in your mind. But don't
go in if you can avoid it with a thesis
(39:16):
that you want to prove, and then find if your
thesis isn't right, then you quit. I don't think that's
the most honest way to do these things. Follow the evidence,
take the evidence where it takes you. If it's if
it's not where you want it to go, you know,
do your best with that. I mean, the truth is
(39:37):
always the most important thing. I mean, the gold standard
for you know, cold cases. The crusading reporter takes up
the case of a minority person already on death row
and clears that person and finds the person who did it.
(39:58):
Those cases don't come along very often. It happens, and
when it happens, you read about it because it's so,
you know, so definitive. And also with genetics genealogy, you
have you do have certainty, and that's important to know.
But go and wanting to know what happened, not necessarily
proving that this person is innocent, because that can shade
(40:21):
your research techniques. But if you're a family member, it's
going to be very hard if you put all your
belief in something like that and it doesn't work out
that way. You know, it's very tough. I go from
case to case. It's not my one and only case.
And this is just I've learned from, you know, and
(40:43):
I've covered a lot more murder cases as news stories.
I've covered a number of other murder cases when I
work for the La Times, one that if I live
long enough, may become another book we'll see, and the
same tools apply. I mean, I've used and developed these
tools in day to day trial coverage for my different clients.
(41:06):
I will say I shouldn't, but I will in these
when these big sensational cases happen, and there's a lot
of reporters from around the country. At the end of
the trial, there's often a pool, a betting pool amongst
the reporters, and you would say what the verdict will
be and how long it will take the jury to
(41:26):
find the verdict. And I won the Bundy pool. I've
been doing this enough. So I was stringing for the
New York Times in the morning. The editors want to
know what's going to happen that day if you can
tell them, And I said, well, another great old newspaper
man passed away. Now Irv Horowitz on the national desk.
I said, well, Irv, I think it's going to be
(41:47):
a guilty verdict around four o'clock and so and so
it was. So it happened to be, and so my
reputation at the desk went sort of sky high, and
my verdict story was on the front page of the
Times with my byline. You know, it's not magic. This
this kind of work is not magic. It's you know,
hard work and luck. That's what I've learned in fifty
(42:11):
five years.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Absolutely, it's a lot of hard work and a lot
of luck. But hopefully with all of that hard work
and all of that luck good results come out of it.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yes, that's why I still do it.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Mark, Thank you so much for joining me today. Is
an absolute pleasure speaking with you.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
This has been fun and I don't have to worry
about an elbow from my wife for talking too much,
which at parties I tend to get. Well, I get
a report card afterwards. She's very good. You didn't talk
too much about yourself.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Well. The last thing I would want is to have
you get an elbow from your wife. As always, everyone,
thank you so much for listening. In the source of
sense below you will find link to Mark's book as
well as his different social media is. If you check
out the website botdpot dot com, you can view attached
(43:10):
to this episodex biography with additional links as well. As always,
I hope you have a wonderful week and I will
see you in the next chapter of the Book of
the Dead. Bye, guys. Another page closed. But the story
isn't over for the families left behind. The pain doesn't
(43:33):
end when the headline's fade. And for the victims, we
owe them more than silence for our on solved cases.
If you have any information, please reach out to local
authorities or visit our show notes for links and resources.
Someone out there knows something. Maybe it's you. Thank you
(43:55):
for listening to the Book of the Dead. If this
story moved or spoke to you in some way, talk
about it, share it, keep their names alive. Until next time,
I'm Courtney Liso. Stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant,
and remember the dead may be gone, but their stories
(44:17):
will not be forgotten.
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