S6: The Murder of Faith Hedgepeth: Future COTC?

Crimes of the Centuries

Amber Hunt and Audioboom

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, True Crime

4.7 • 4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2026

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In September 2012, a 19-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill student was found beaten to death in her off-campus apartment. She was a biology major, a member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe, and weeks away from her twentieth birthday. Despite DNA evidence collected from the scene on day one, her case went cold for nine agonizing years — generating hundreds of DNA tests, thousands of interviews, and an internet's worth of amateur theories that muddied the waters and targeted people who had never been charged. An arrest has since been made, and trial is set for September. But questions about what was preserved, what was lost, and whether the systems around her worked the way they should have are only beginning to surface. This is a case worth watching.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even
0:13.4	earn the label, Crime of the Century.
0:16.3	But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.
0:22.8	I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist, an author, and in each episode of this show,
0:27.4	I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.
0:34.2	This is Crimes of the Centuries.
0:50.4	Thank you. This is Crimes of the Centuries. The Hawthorne at the View apartment complex sits on old Chapel Hill Road, nestled in trees.
0:57.7	It's right on the line between Chapel Hill and Durham, close enough to the University of North Carolina's campus to matter, far enough away that you have to mean to go there.
1:06.4	There's one way in and one way out.
1:09.2	On the morning of September 7, 2012, Chapel Hill police responded to a
1:14.1	911 call from the second floor of the complex. A young woman had been found unresponsive.
1:20.7	The caller told the dispatcher, there was blood everywhere. What officers found when they arrived
1:26.3	was a 19-year-old woman slumped against a bed, partly clothed,
1:30.8	her shirt pulled up over her head. The collar had been right. There was so much blood
1:36.8	on her body, on her clothing, on the bed sheet, spattered on the wall in the closet door.
1:42.3	A Bacardi rum bottle that normally lived in the kitchen had been moved and might have been the murder weapon.
1:48.0	A handwritten note on a fast food bag sat near the body.
1:52.0	It did not have a drop of blood on it.
1:55.0	The woman's name was Faith Danielle Hedgepeth.
1:58.0	She was a biology major at UNC Chapel Hill, a Gates Millennium
2:02.4	Scholar, a daughter, a sister. She was a member of the Hollowas-Sopony tribe of North Carolina,
2:08.7	one of the brightest students her community had ever sent to Chapel Hill, and she was weeks
	...

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