A MURDER ON CAMPUS-Brian and Cameron Santana

the death leaving the Ashville community in shock. The cold case that followed would span over fifty years, involving three generations of detectives and the Ashville Police Department and North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation as they work tirelessly to

uncover the truth. Authors Brian and Cameron Santana discuss law enforcement's dramatic efforts to find Olson's killer, facing numerous obstacles along the way, from the abduction of another University of North Carolina student in nineteen seventy four to a rape and murder victim's body discovered near Olson's crime scene in nineteen seventy eight. Whispers about the killer's identity have circulated for decades, with theories ranging from an escaped mental patient

to one of North Carolina's most notorious serial killers. Until now. Their book, A Murder on Campus is the first to tell the gripping story of this unsolved crime and the surprising twists that led to the author's startling revelation of the killer's identity. This is the fascinating story of how two brothers, Brian, an English professor, and Cameron, a cop, tag team as authors to solve North Carolina's most notorious

cold case. The book that we are featuring this evening is A Murder on Campus, The Professor, the Cop, and North Carolina's most notorious cold Case, with my special guests, professor and author Brian Santana and police officer and author Cameron Santana. Welcome to the program and thank you very much for this interview Brian and Cameron Santana.

friend group or circle yet. And so I was attending my first drama class, which was held at the university's main theater, and as I was standing in the lobby, says, I didn't really know too many people yet. I was just kind of making my way around, trying to busy

myself and looking at different portraits that were hanging. And I found myself looking at this picture that looked like it was from the sixties or seventies to me, at the time and of a young woman painting scenery in the theater, and it was the picture it's on the cover of our book. And another student came up to me and said, Hey, that's Virginia Olsen, and you know she died here a long time ago, and it was

a really sad story. I didn't really think too much about it anymore after that, except that later in that semester another student came up to me when I was in the lobby happened to be staying in front of this picture again, and said, that's Virginia Olson. You know she was raped and murdered in the theater here many years ago. And I mean that creeping out for a little bit. I was when I would be working at the theater late at night. I thought that was a

very eerie kind of remark. And that was the kind of story that many of my peers kind of had for a while. But then before I graduated, other people said, no.

went into graduate school after college. I would keep track of media coverage from the nineteen seventies and kind of later of it, and I would periodically check in and see if there had been any new developments or any use coverage, and most of the time there wasn't there was very If any of your listeners kind of google Virginia Olsen, you'll see that there's they won't find very much. And kind of fast forward, and I finished graduate school.

I became an English professor at a university, and I found myself teaching true crime seminars, and so I was teaching students how to research and kind of write about crime and culture.

had done, and so I reached out to Cameron. And then this was around two years ago, and I reached out to Cameron, and that was when there were things happening in his life that kind of opened up that he can speak to and we found ourselves kind of teaming up for what we thought was maybe going to be an article, and then we very quickly realized that this was a book.

And during that time I really enjoyed it, but like a lot of police officers, started to have families and the balance of work life and family life became an issue, especially when I had my second child that has or had some medical issues and she's also autistic, So working shifts and being called in and doing the extra assignments on your time off became more of a hassle, and so I started to look at some smaller departments I

could work for and still be a cop. So I did that, but it really wasn't the same as when you're working for a larger department. And I was only doing it part time, so I had a lot of time on my hands, and my brother had been teaching the true crimes class, like you'll tell you, and he would tell me about these cases, and naturally I would start to research, and then that turned into kind of like a nightly phone call with us, where we'd start to discussing these cases and what we had learned about

them throughout the day. And then one day you called me and said, you know, I've got this case that I would like us to do, and I'm thinking that maybe it'll be an article we can probably at least get into the Asheville Paper, but you never know, if we've really dig up some, you know, some new things, and we may be able to make this into a book. And honestly, I really didn't think that much into it. I just thought, Okay, maybe this would be a weekend's

worth of work. You know, this is just something that we'll be doing for fun. And then the next day or two my brother called me and said, hey, by the way, we've got a book contract and we need to start discussing some deadlines. So that's kind of the point that it really sunk in that this was not just going to be a little side project. This is actually going to be a real kind of side job.

And we've gone from that to growing it into making some sales lists i Amazon and doing these podcasts, and so we're just going from there.

in Northern Virginia, though. She went to McClain High School, and she was known in high school as someone who was very both introverted on one hand and deeply spiritual and religious, but also someone who had kind of something very kind of intoxicating and very gregarious about her that

the people found very attractive. You know, we interviewed around thirty two people I think it totally knew her in high school, and that was they all have these very strong, kind of distinct memories of her, and her death deeply impacted them. But her father was transferred to when she finished she was finishing up high school.

that made you UNCA really attractive. And she had gotten into drama and theater and participated in some six competitions in high school, some awards, and it started to think about this idea herself as a is not only a kind of as an actress, but also as a writer and poet and lots of different things.

final exams during her sophomore year at unc Ashow. She was a drama major and part of the first class of drama students when the major was established in nineteen seventy, so she was part of that one of those first groups, and she died at a moment when she was just kind of starting to sort things out and come into

her own. She had developed several close romantic relationships. One of those individuals we spent a live time interviewing for this book her boyfriend at the time, and she was also starting to kind of sort out kind of what

she wanted to do with her life. At the moment that she lost it, she was contemplaying a transfer to UNC Greensboro to be closer to her family, but she was also kind of honing in on this idea of being an actress and was really pursuing different avenues that would allow her to work in the summer and kind of beyond in that capacity. And so she's murdered on April fifteenth, nineteen seventy three, and that is where kind

of the actual kind of investigation starts. And something in a case that was that many imagined would be solved very quickly. Fifty one years later, we are still here.

just different spiritual musings during the day. And one of what was very common is her roommate has stated, and we talk about in the book, when she was studying or just wanted to just kind of organize her thoughts, she was very fond of going into the botanical garden. So this was something that was fairly common for her to do. And the botanical gardens were directly adjacent to the university, in a very short walk from her dorms,

and that's where that's where her murder occurred. So it was technically the murder was on university land and grounds. The medical examiner is going to write UNCA campus as on her actual death certificate we include, but this idea of the location and its connection to university will also be something that very early on becomes a point of contention.

which it did. And we also have a witness saying that during the investigation that he witnessed some books flapping when he passed by for the second time. So what these boys saw is they saw Virgin Yeah, and her pants were pulled down and she was The suspect used a knife to cut her shirt into rags and then use those rags to bind her arms and her legs. And we also know that she was stabbed in the chest, which is what killed her. And there's a massive amount

of blood. I believe those estimated about two leaders were around the crime scene. And then we know the suspects slit her throat after she had died.

with a crime like this. We also know that when we're looking back at some of the issues that arise fifty years later, we know that the crime scene was not properly secured. We know that people are milling around taking photos, which is how we have the photos today. We know that the lease officers get her out of

the crime scene fairly quickly. When we look at the timetable that we were able to construct, which is also in our book, we've noticed that it's about a four hour timeframe from when her body was discovered to when she's on the medical examiner's table for the exam. So that's really not a lot of time at all. The other thing that we noticed, which becomes an issue today,

is that the officers are not wearing any gloves. We can see that in some of the photos, and we see that even when they're carrying her body out that again people are approaching her. Another thing that we know is that her roommate was actually when she heard about what had happened, she felt concerned that it may have been Virgini. So she actually took a picture of Virginia down to the crime scene and was able to show

that to an officer. And we've got the fact that this is a fifty acre wooded property that this crime occurred, and even though it's close to the botanical garden, still you've got the just the logistical aspect of being to lock that down you would need a lot of officers, which again Asheville does not have, so we've you know, they did the best that they could with the training and experience and equipment that they had, but I believe it was definitely very chaotic.

the entity that will do officer invall shootings. That way, a department isn't investigating their own officer for those But during that time in seventy three, that was one of the few agencies besides the FBI, that actually had a training facility and an academy that officers would go to.

So they had the most experience by far. And we can get into this later, but the agents that work this case, especially Charles Chambers who wrote the search warrant for this case, get a massive amount of experience with really complex crimes, so that would be the But the issue with this agency is, of course they are not there day one. They have to be requested from Asheville. So you know, that creates some logistical issues as well.

not have that. Ashville, in fact, was the only university and the University of North Carolina system did not have

an actual police force. They had kind of non deputized or non certified security officers who didn't have the authority to actually make arrest and so in fact, one of the things that the campus had always prided itself on, particularly in the midst of this like you know, tumultuous kind of you know, civil rights and unrest with Vietnam and other things, this is a campus is fairly progressive politically, both then and now, and there was a lot of

deep skepticism towards the idea of having a kind of campus law enforcement, and they didn't see it as something that was necessary and they wouldn't actually have. It was actually this murder that causes them to go back to the state legislature and decide that having a you, a formal campus police force would be a good idea, and they have that the following year, starting the next fall

after this murder. But building on what camera was saying about the SBI as well, you know, this case does very early on started attracting a fairly high profile within the state. It's the only murder to date this ever

taking place on the grounds of unc Asheville. As far as a student that was murdered, there's been other individuals that we'll talk about, but as far as student deaths, this was the only one in the school's history, And so very quickly this case does get prioritized Governor Holshauser, who was the governor of North Carolina at the time.

He was the first Republican governor elected since reconstruction, and he was very much a kind of Nixon law and order guy, and he really directs the SBI to get increasingly more involved as time is passing and a resolution does not develop. Something we talk about in the book is that this case was imagined as one that would be resolved fairly swiftly Chancellor high Smith, William high Smith, who was the chancellor of unc Asheville at the time.

When we were looking through the administrative minutes that UNCAA has kept to this day, one of the things we realized was, you know, he calls this emergency meet faculty and department chairs and deans, and he tells them, look after this is within forty eight hours after the murder. He says, no productive learning is going to take place on the campus here. Let's send everyone home for a week.

And you know, essentially that things like this don't happen, things like this murder don't happen in a place like this, that it should be obvious who did it. And he says that when we come back after a week, the

authorities likely would have resolved this. And then kind of, you know, more time passes and the SBI about eight months into it, when we get into nineteen seventy four, is going to really escalate their involvement to the point that two agents won with twelve years experience, a guy named James Thomas Maxi, and another who's a new officer or a new agent with just two years experience named Bill Matthews are going to be assigned to work this

case full time. And at the time this was fairly controversial because there are sixteen counties in western North Carolina. There was under seventy agents that were responsible for covering and supporting all of this departments in that area, and there was at least some public outcry in the media about like, why are we devoting two agents to the

single case. But their job, at least early on, was to try to help bring a quick resolution to this, and for lots of reasons we discussed that's just something that didn't happen.

And also that you write that the coroner saves samples smears from the vagina, And also we just talk about you write about the state of forensic technology at that time and the officers and police not knowing what they needed to do in terms of the sample retention, in terms of anything that they could foresee in the future about DNA collection and technology.

hours in total that have elapsed. In fact, they've started on the autopsy within about an hour and forty five minutes for parents being notified, And so they moved with kind of remarkable speed kind of early on. And a lot of the medical examiner's report, which we include in the book consist of a lot of the physical examination

that confirmed some of the original details. So the coroner does come to the collusion that the laceration to the throat likely occurred post mortem, which is why the original officers had noted that there didn't seem to be much much blood imitating from her neck, but just primarily from her chest. And as in the Quarner notes, that rigor mortis is not set in yet and he does see

an abundance of semen. He says he was able to collect an abundance of sperm, and he was able to plait it, and he looks at it under a microscope beyond the physical examination and says that the sperm is still motal. So the sperm itself, you know, which has a window of four to five hours or so, the pit like in the kinds of conditions that we would expect with this kind of crime scene, like this was very very kind of recent and likely attached to the murder.

There's also a pubic hare that's recovered that he determines not to be associated with olsen. But but yeah, so one of the things at the time, it's important to keep in mind with the actual forensics in nineteen seventy three, they could confirm the presence of semen, and they would also use semen to confirm things.

their conclusions. But at the same time, the method of collection and what value that semen had beyond confirming the rape occurred and possibly the blood type status was a

little bit murky at the time. They couldn't have anticipated that by the time we're getting to the late eighties and certainly by the nineteen nineties that with the advent of DNA technology that this would provide potentially many routes to kind of identifying suspects and so both in the collection and the storage of samples, but also the materials

as well that we're associated with the crime scene. There would have been in which Cameron could kind of speak to about what maybe crime scene like evidence gathering would look like today, particularly with the bloody clothes that the investigators still send off every five or seven years to kind of get retested.

just disappeared. But the other really concerning one that we will have loved to have had today is that we spoke with a medical examiner investigator, a friend of mine, and he said that he would have loved to have had the bindings because he said, even today, that would be something that they could test for because there would have been a lot of skin cells which they use for touch DNA to be able to get from those bindings when you're making the actual not so anytime you're

making a not you know you've got to grab the material and put some torque behind it, and that whole process would have left some very good evidence. The problem is that the officers or someone unseen thought it was going to be a good idea to remove those from Virginia's body, which we absolutely would not have done today. And so those bindings never even made it to the theme's office, and we really don't know what happened with them.

had been raped and murdered, not connected to this. That particular case was not connected to this one, but a similarity is that the medical examiner the autopsy was for that one was also done in Nashville at Memorial Mission Hospital, and the medical examiner in that case expressed frustration because, like Cameron said, when we're thinking about the bindings, Nancy Morgan was also bound and when he starts the medical examination he realizes. He asked where the actual the bindings

are and they said, well, we're not really sure. I think it's in one of the officers patrol cars. We'll have to call them and see if we can get him over here, and they couldn't find them. And there's another book of a called Meta on the Mountain that talks about this, but they basically the actual crime scene materials have been kind of left in someone's car and they were had to find which car.

was ahead of its time in some regards. But this was a lead in Florida, a second suspect, while early suspect was easily eliminated, had little droplets of blood on his shoes. But this one is you write Glenn Allen Carlson. So tell us about Glenn Allen Carlson and these two and these two special agents that brought this case to the attention of the Ashville Police and the SBI itself.

few reasons. One, he had a kind of a history of crimes that had started to escalate a little bit in the area, but most of the crimes were still related to burglaries. He had been rested a number of times in Buncom County. But the SBI, as I mentioned, was kind of ahead of their time, and we want

to stress that as well. They had a thing called the Police Information System where they were really working to create a kind of network where they could communicate with other agencies both within the state but also law enforcement

outside of the state. And so when we think about the nineteen seventies, many of your listeners are probably familiar with cases like Ted Bundy and others, and they know that some of the things that made those cases complicated was you move from one state to another or even moved to a different area of the same state, and law enforcement or not necessarily, they don't have a centralized streamline information system for easily and quickly sharing and so

people can fly under the radar and the same thing is happening here a bit. And so there was a

guy who was picked up, Glenn Allen Carlson. He is arrested in Florida, and Maxi and Matthews find out about this, and they'd get really interested because they know that when they were kind of taking inventory of the people who lived around Ashville who had criminal records, they know that this is a guy who formerly he's arrested in Florida on rape initially, and that catches their attention, and they know that he also lived formerly near the crime scene.

Now early on the question, in their mind, they didn't know when he relocated to Florida, so there was some confusion about what the timeline was about when he left North Carolina and moved to Florida, or if he was even still.

of people kind of not doing their job. But at the time when resources in that communication was very difficult, they are looking really really hard for any possible connection that people have to UNCA or the areas surrounding that have these criminal records that might make them persons of interest.

named Eugene L. Ray, their first campus police force. The university is publicly proclaiming that the campus is now safe and that they're using this one year anniversary as an opportunity to both mourn the passing of Virginia Olsen, but also celebrate the way that they have kind of pulled together and the fact that this crime, in one like it,

is not as likely to happen in the future. And while they are actually preparing for a book sale in other campus events, police start descending on campus and these news breaks that a UNCA students they believe has been abducted and her name was Karen McDonald. And telling I think for us is that one of the first things that the police do is they send officers down to the botanical gardens. Now there's never any evidence that Karen McDonald was ever anywhere near.

lure her to their brownstone apartment downtown. She had been en route to shop at a woolworst downtown in Nashville, and they hold her hostage there for several days and take turns raping her, and she has a very dramatic escape that we talk about where she stabs one with a fork and kind of flees naked, bruised and battered into a construction zone that happening near the Civic Center, and the police are called and she ends up surviving

and she leaves you unca the next year. But one of the things that is interesting at this moment is during this period from the time she disappears to the time that she pops back up again, the Ashvillsys and Times runs a headline that says, a frightening coincidence, and it has a picture of Virginia Olsen and it has a large picture of Karen McDonald and the two pictures are side by side, inviting people to make a comparison.

And so to us, this is again I can think further proof to just what the community climate was during this time that, beyond just the police kind of potentially suspecting this Virginia Olson of these ties to some of these other crimes that will continue to kind of pop up throughout this investigation, had a really kind of profound effect on how investigators were trying to kind of understand what was happening.

While the nineteen seventy four is one of the peak years for kind of the investigative push really up until the nineteen eighties, again, there's another stop that we talk about with the task forces in seventy seven, which Cameron could probably speak to business task forces looking to try to find a correlation put potential correlations between Olson's murder and also other unsolved murders that were happening around North Carolina.

But yeah, this reminded people. I think there was Olsen early on in these In these years, whenever one of these crimes would occur, it was almost like the community was starting to move on. It is, something would pop up and maybe this is connected, and it kind of

reopens this wound again and again. And the McDonald's case was particularly so because al since friends and colleagues, unlike the later one that will occur in seventy eight, they were still students at UNCA at the time, so this was a very frightening scenario for them.

arboretum on their campus. And again this is in the middle of the day, just like the Virginia case, and the suspect snatched her from the trail that she was walking down into some bushes and tries to rape her.

The suspect was being unsuccessful because Swellen was fighting back and she starts screaming for help, at which time he took his knife that he had and he stabbed her in the chest, just like virgin And then after he stabbed her and she had led out, he did the same thing that happened in the Virginia case where he flits her throat and then flees, and in that case, It's very interesting to read about just how much effort the local police department put behind it, and they did

a really good job. They got officers on scene right away, They did the best that they could to lock down the area of campus where the incident occurred. They even bring a dog to run a canine track. They were unsuccessful, just like with the Virginia case. But you know, just seeing those eerie similarities is I think, what just caught that task force eye right away? And then we also, you know, Brian, you can speak more about this, but they also looked at some other cases that had similarities.

But I really believe that when you look at the Swelling case in Virginia case, besides the year, I mean, the other kind of eerie fact about this case is Virginia was living in around Lexington, North Carolina, toime or her family home was at the time, so Swelling Evans her family home was from Monroe, North Carolina. So they're both around that Charlotte area as well.

some of that was released. But one of the other kind of startling details was that around an hour after the murder that this individual that the police executed a search warrant on had approached a neighbor and in the apartment complex where near where he lived and asked her to pray with him, and seemed very incoherent and was muttering all sorts of kinds of things about that to her at the time were disturbing in the context of hearing about Olsen's murder the next day, and that kind

of how he popped up on police's radar. But one of the fascinating things that for us about this individual was that he was The police and the Task Force in seventy seven released all these details surrounding this individual. They don't name him, and so there's this kind of curious kind of back and forth where when Glenn Allen Carlson is being considered, they openly say they're looking at this guy, Glenn Allen Carlson that may or may not be connected, and we're going down there to Florida to

talk to him. When they publish stories about the two boys age fourteen to seventeen that find Olsim's body, they say, well, they go to the South French Broad School, they live at this address. Here's the names of their parents. They

give a lot of information. So very early on for us, we were very interested because the Task Force confirmed that this individual was someone that police had looked at all along both the AshEL Police and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, and also that a search warrant had been executed for his personage and also his place of residence on April twenty ninth, nineteen seventy three, so this

is fourteen days after the murder. We learned that this individual had fled shortly after the murder to the Murtle Beach, South Kena, and investigators essentially were waiting for him near his apartment and when they came back, when he came back, they detained him, went down to the district court and a search warrant was obtained at ten pm, around ten pm on the night of April twenty ninth, and that's

when their interest in him really becomes formalized. This is seventy three, two weeks after the murder, and Kimer can speak to the search warrant in terms of what the logic of the early investigators were, why they care about this guy at all.

that should be an easy thing to do. You should just be able to go to the clerk of court where the search want was filed and ask them for a copy, and they have to give you a copy. It's a public record. There's some limited circumstances where they can redact parts of it, or they can hold it for a short period of time, but for the most part, you should be able to get the document with no problem. When I called about the search warrant, the person that I spoke with told me that he couldn't find it.

I provided the address, the date, the victim's name, all the information that normally you would need. I kept on calling back. He would tell me that, oh, it's in the state archives, or it's when this other entity. This one on for about four months until we finally got it. And when we got it, I was expecting to see, Okay, we finally have this person's name in front of us. Now we can really do our research with him and

really wrap this book up. But was really surprising is when I was reading it, Charles Chambers quotes the guy that he was with James Gore, and James Gore refers to actually being with the suspect and pointing Virginia out to the suspect, which I thought was really odd. And then the other odd and interesting thing about that search, one which I think really stands out, is the comment that Agent Chambers makes that there's no way that you were going to be able to stand in the location

of the gardens and be able to see Virginia. So these two would have had to have walked down the trail to actually be able to see Virginia, and I think that that really is a very big piece of this investigation. The other really interesting fact about these two is when you go down rabbit holes and you start to look at about rumors of the investigation and who

people believe was responsible. Is there's a rumor floating around that the suspect was in Highlands Hills Hospital, a mental institution, and that he broke out because he's from this prominent family, so he's able to kind of ribe the doctors and the guards to be able to go outside, and that he murdered Virginia and he went back to the hospital

and dumped his bloody clothes in a dumpster. And then the doctors even knew about this murder, but they refused to name, you know, his name because of his family's connections. And then when we started to actually, once we got his name and we started to dig into it, some of that's actually true. He really is from While I don't think that he broke out of a mental institution, he is from a very prominent family.

who matches. John Revis Junior is a man's name, but John Revis Junior's description the matches description that the statement from Judy Needle, one of the other witnesses, who describes him being very agitated about an hour after the murder and coming to him and asking to pray with him, combined with the fact that by their own admission, we

have a fairly short window. We include in DEPENDIX of our book an actual timeline that Detective Taylor, who's the current cold case detective, confirmed was kind of accurate by

their own kind of metrics. And so according to that timeline, we only have around a thirty minute window when did this murder likely occurred between one point fifteen and one five most likely, And so Agent Chambers knows that John Revis and James Gore have placed themselves close to the crime scene around the time that the murder takes place, and we have a fairly short wind though, and he also does his Cameron saying that they're not being entirely

truthful with him. Now, we don't have the entire case file for that portion. I you know, I would love to know what the rest of that conversation was we know that James Gore quote pointed out the girl to him. What does that mean? You know, that's something this may be opened that. Does that point to a level of familiarity did they have with the victim that's maybe tied with religion in some ways? Does it mean something? Does

it mean something entirely different from that? But but agent Chambers regardless does directly point out that they are not being truthful with him. There's no other commentary offering a search for it on that, and so we could we could kind of speculate what was going through his head. But at least those are red flax for investigators very early on.

like every fifteen to thirty minutes. So I think that that gives it some credibility that either a this guy felt really lucky or felt comfortable in you know, committing this rape and murder and he thought that the being off the rock was secluded enough that's the possibility. Or I don't think that you can rule out that another person could have been there as a lookout or some type of accomplice.

more secluded and off the beaten path. But it's not, it's not it's not obscure, and and we see that from just different witnesses that see people kind of moving in that direction. There's people out and about. So really, by any standard, it is a very bold crime that the person engages in a high risk crime.

was Revus. His were included in that and then also the San Francisco Police Department, we know he had a former voyeurism arrest in charge. The San Francisco Police Department was able to confirmed that detail for me, but they said due to their retention schedules, the original incident reports that were taking were all were destroyed, so they no longer exist. So we have these little fragments. But yes, he was educated. He was divorced at the time of

his death. He did have one child who's still alive today, and his father was a prominent attorney and members of his family actually helped direct a mental hospital that was based near Boston, Massachusetts. And so after the search warrant is executed on April twenty ninth, he is going to flee to Boston, and depending on who you ask or depending on the coverage, he is either staying there for treatment or seeking refuge from the scrutiny of the Asheville

Police Department. He will eventually make his way three years later to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he will spend the rest of his life and where investigators in the nineteen eighties will make one final push traveling out to Santa Fe, New Mexico to try to get a confession and extradite him back to North Carolina.

The first was, you know, by her what her friends told us, and if we take what they say to be true, what they told us was that the Asheville Police have never reviewed the letters that she sent them, including the ones that were sent and postmarked one day before she died. We think this goes to the larger kind of victimology of her and understanding what her life looked like at this time. Both of these individuals have

kept these letters to this day. In fact, we reached out to the current cold case detectives and kind of advised them of this and they might want to kind of look into this, and we never heard anything back from them.

photos that were equivalent of a bikini photo. And one of the people close to her remark that they thought it was strange, given her kind of religious nature and also given that she could be a little bit more kind of a conservative, that she was taking those pictures. But they said they didn't want to say anything to

her at the time because she seemed incredibly proud. She had talked about the fact that there was an individual who had connecting connections to the advertising world and they believed that, and she thought that this could potentially lead

to some work in print advertising. She was in the moment she was killed, she was trying to decide whether she was going to spend another summer working at the pool in her parents' neighborhood near Lexington, North Carolina, like she had the previous summer, whether she was going to do summer stock with theater, or whether there was other opportunities to do, like print advertising work that she was exploring.

And so that's not a definite connection. We do think that given the fact that the police were pretty good about interviewing the people on campus that were a part of Olsen's orbit, we think a potential oversight is the fact that many of her closest lifelong friends were not at unc Asheville. She was only there a year and a half at the time of her death, but she continued to travel back to Virginia, and she continued to write on a weekly basis to many of these individuals

from high school. And the fact that a lot of these letters have never been reviewed, we think there is potentially evidence that could be of use to investigators, even to confirm some existing theories.

He's like yes, And again, we knew about the SEMEN sample, so we said, well, do you have DNA from the SEMEN sample? No or sorry? He didn't say no, he said We've got DNA, and I thought that that was really odd that We kept on pressing him about the Semen sample, and the response was either this is, you know, still an open investigation, or it would be some type of diversion, like we have DNA in this case. And you know that's such a an open response too. I mean,

I'm sure they have someone's DNA on that close. But I think that when you look back at how the crime scene was managed, how things were packaged that day, the two things that we can be sure that are the suspects or at least the highest probability is the semen sample and the PUBA care And if those things aren't present, then I really think that DNA technology is going to be really hard to use today.

But one of their students, I believe this was in twenty seventeen, had interviewed Captain Silverman, who's the head of CID with Ashville, and I think kind of building what Kimer was saying, there's a really interesting moment that interviewed with the student is pressing him about the actual whether there was a rape kit done, and Captain Silverman conceeds, well, there wasn't a rape kid done. Rape kits weren't really

in common use, and all of that is true. But the student said, well, you know, okay, so rape kits weren't being used like with this seamen sample, are you interested in pursuing kind of any of the ancestry or kind of some of the genetic technologies that are being

used now in a lot of other cold cases. And the response that the student quotes and attributes to Captain Silverman is that there are certain considerations, is what Captain Summons said that make genetic testing impractical in the Olsen case. So to my mind, that opens up a few different possibilities. And so we're speculating now. But it can be impractical

because it doesn't exist. It can be impractical because the original collection and storage over the years has caused the original DNA to degrade to the point that a full

profile cannot be extracted. And the third possibility, which I think is the least likely to be honest, is that they just simply aren't interested in investing the time and resources to do a series of one to one comparisons between the semen sample and the other individuals that have been considered over the years, many of them are now deceased.

I do think that last possibility is the least likely, and I think, like Cameron said that a lot of the materials but they will typically tell you is we have more materials in this case than we do in most cases of this area, and that's a very careful wording.

But when they're talking about materials, they're typically referring to the they have Virginia Olsen's clothes, her bloody clothes, and and different in the eighties and nineties when this case is mentioned, they often talk about sending her clothes to the lap, and in that we think that due to both storage and other kinds of factors that the camer could probably talk about, those clothes are really unlikely to produce any kind of evidence, given the kind of nature

of the compliance that we saw from her and the lack of defensive wounds that the medical examiner did not find in his autopsy, and so we think that if you're looking at this forensically, this really only gets solved with the with the DNA that's going to come from semen because of the original kind of crime scene. But we do think there's potential with enough coverage that while the case is unlikely to be closed, we think there could still be for all intensive purposes, it could be solved.

what they have. I think that going forward with this case, one of the missing pieces that really intrigue me is what are in these letters that Virginia wrote, especially days before she passed away or was murdered, And I think that things like who was this guy that was taking pictures of her are really important in my and I know that logistically that would be really hard because you've got to think that the people that we would be getting these letters from today, which are her friends, and

I know that some of them are going to come to our event in March. But just logistically getting in touch with those people and then getting copies and be able to review them, I'm sure that that's really hard.

But I think either that or a if you want to call it a deathbed confession, or someone just coming forward with a memory that they have that they didn't seem significant, whether it's the saw someone leaving the woods that day that had blood on them, or they had a family member that was acting really strange that day

and may have had some ties to Virginia. Whatever that is, I think that the human source is probably our most likely avenue to solve in this, and that's why I think it's so important for us to do these podcasts and get the word out and ask people to come forward and provide us with any information they have no matter of how small it is.