S20 Ep12: A Murder On Campus: North Carolina's Most Notorious Cold Case w/ Brian & Cameron Santana
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4.8 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2025
⏱️ 155 minutes
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Summary
On April 15, 1973, two high school students discovered the body of 19-year-old drama major Virginia Marie Olson on a trail near the campus of the University of North Carolina-Asheville. The scene was horrific. Olson had been bound, raped, and brutally stabbed to death. The murder shocked the Asheville community and set off an investigation that would span three generations of detectives.
A MURDER ON CAMPUS: The Professor, The Cop, And North Carolina’s Most Notorious Cold Case by Brian and Cameron Santana is the first book to present the story of law enforcement’s dramatic efforts to find Virginia Olson’s killer and bring him to justice.
For more than 50 years, whispers about the killer’s identity have circulated throughout Buncombe County—from an escaped mental health patient from nearby Highland Hospital, to one of North Carolina’s most notorious serial killers, to a mysterious prime suspect whose wealthy and influential family kept his identity secret from the public … until now.
On today's TCT, Brian and Cameron Santana join us to break down this cold case, cover the different suspects and motives, explain why the solution to this case was described as easy by police, yet so difficult to solve, and if this case will ever have a resolution!
Get your copy of "A Murder On Campus... " here: https://wildbluepress.com/murder-on-campus-true-crime-santana/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome in to the best in True Crime Podcasting. This is True Crime Tuesday. I'm your host, Tim Dennis. |
| 0:29.1 | Today, folks, we have a very interesting story, one that will confound you a little bit, one that is over 50 years old, and one that happened |
| 0:40.5 | in the small town of Asheville, North Carolina, on a college campus that, we'll put it this |
| 0:47.1 | way. It has suspects, has motive. It has what should be, you would think, it should be easy enough to wrap up, but it's not. |
| 0:58.0 | In fact, at one point, the cops in North Carolina said we were one piece of evidence away from solving this thing. |
| 1:04.7 | In fact, they think they had a suspect, and they had it pretty much well nailed down. |
| 1:09.9 | My guest today, Brian Santana and Cameron Santana, say, well, this was far from a slam dunk, |
| 1:17.7 | if anything. |
| 1:18.9 | It's a little, the waters are muddied. |
| 1:21.6 | It's muddied by maybe some, put it this way, but it was muddied by the sands of time. |
| 1:29.2 | It was muddied by an evidence room that was not very well organized. |
| 1:34.8 | It was muddied by some suspects that came along that maybe muddied the water. |
| 1:40.6 | And there's some other factors here at play that make things interesting. The book |
| 1:46.3 | in itself is very interesting. A murder on campus, the professor, the cop in North Carolina's |
| 1:52.1 | most notorious cold case is the name of the book. It's out by Wild Blue Press. We have a link in the |
| 1:57.6 | description of this program so that you can pick it up. I highly encourage you to pick it up because it is quite the interesting program. |
| 2:04.0 | Let me tell you about both of our authors before we bring them in here. |
| 2:07.3 | Brian Santana is a college English professor and writer. |
| 2:10.8 | After graduating from UNC Asheville in 2003 with a degree in drama, |
| 2:15.1 | he earned an MA in English at North Carolina State University and a PhD |
| 2:19.2 | from the George Washington University. He currently resides in West Virginia with his wife and children. |
| 2:25.3 | And Cameron Santana is a veteran law enforcement officer with over 18 years of experience. |
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