It was Day Three of the highly charged Rachel Crook murder trial. The well-liked 71-year-old had mysteriously disappeared from Crook’s Corner, her Chapel Hill fish store, in the late summer of 1951. Her body was discovered the next day outside of town. She had been brutally murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. 

“Bold as Lions” is the fourth and final installment of the Who Killed Rachel Crook? podcast series. Hobart Lee, a bulldozer operator with a history of sexual assault charges, faced the death penalty if found guilty. In a surprisingly abbreviated trial, the jury had listened to a day and a half of testimony from the prosecution’s witnesses, and a day and a half of final arguments before they began deliberating Lee’s guilt or innocence. Like everything else about the trial, even the jury’s deliberations were fast-tracked. After a little over an hour, they delivered their verdict.

This series is narrated by 27 Views podcast producer and writer Elizabeth Woodman. Dramatization in this episode is read by Jim Parker, Randall Roden, Kent Davis, James Rainsford, Sam Coleman, Eryk Pruitt, John Bemis, James Rives, and Tom Rankin. Commentary is by retired North Carolina District Court Judge Alonzo Coleman.

In 1952, bulldozer operator Hobart Lee faced a jury of his peers at the highly charged murder trial of Chapel Hillian Rachel Crook. The previous August, the beloved 71-year-old woman had been found murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. 

In Episode Three of the "Who Killed Rachel Crook" podcast, "Thanks for the Memories," Lee is on trial for his life after a preliminary hearing found probable cause that he had committed the killing, and after an unusual jury selection process. The testimony seems to favor the prosecution. And then there’s a bombshell. 

Who Killed Rachel Crook is a special four-part podcast series. The series is narrated by 27 Views podcast producer and writer Elizabeth Woodman. Dramatization in this episode is read by Nancy Demorest, Jill McCorkle, James Rainsford, Sam Coleman, Jim Parker, Eryk Pruitt, John Bemis, James Rives, Kent Davis, Randall Roden, and Tom Rankin. Commentary by retired North Carolina District Court Judge Alonzo Coleman.

In mid-century Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a beloved 71-year-old woman was found murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. Rachel Crook was a familiar figure around town. She ran a fish store called Crook's Corner. She'd also been pursuing her doctorate in economics at UNC for 20 years. Everyone was mystified. Who in the world would want to harm the well-liked woman?

Who Killed Rachel Crook is a special four-part podcast series. In Episode Two, "Getting Punked," there’s a breakthrough in the murder investigation when the local sheriff arrests a 32-year-old bulldozer driver who had a history of sexual assault. His name is Hobart Lee. No sooner is Lee locked up than the Durham jail where he's held experiences a swatting incident.

The series is narrated by 27 Views podcast producer and writer Elizabeth Woodman. Dramatization in this episode is read by Nancy Demorest, Frances Mayes, Jane Holding, Jill McCorkle, James Rainsford, Sam Coleman, Eryk Pruitt, John Bemis, Pat Revels, and Tom Rankin. Commentary by retired North Carolina District Court Judge Alonzo Coleman.

In mid-century Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Rachel Crook was a familiar figure around town. The 71-year-old ran a fish store called Crook's Corner. That same site, under the same name, would eventually become a celebrated restaurant. But back in the Forties and Fifties, Crook's was a modest shop, selling fish, fabric remnants, pecans, and featuring the town’s first laundromat. Rachel Crook worked there every day, and after hours she retired to a small apartment in the back to spend the evening writing her dissertation in economics. She'd been pursuing a doctorate at UNC for 20 years.

On August 29th, 1951, Rachel Crook mysteriously disappeared. Her body was discovered the next day outside of town. The woman had been brutally murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. 

Who Killed Rachel Crook is a four-part podcast series. Episode One, "Citizen Crook," introduces listeners to the fascinating, quirky and self-determined Rachel Crook, and to the town's reaction to her killing. It examines the media coverage of this well-liked woman who defied labelling. 

The series is narrated by 27 Views podcast producer and writer Elizabeth Woodman. Dramatization in this episode is read by Jane Holding, Jill McCorkle, James Rainsford, Sam Coleman, Eryk Pruitt, John Bemis, Pat Revels, and Tom Rankin.

Keeping deer out of a garden is a challenge. But at Montrose, the famous and expansive gardens in Hillsborough, North Carolina, it required an installation of tall fencing, followed by a coordinated effort to drive the lingering deer through the garden gates. There is an art to it, and novelist Craig Nova, a veteran deer driver, led the way.

Craig Nova is the author of a memoir, Brook Trout and the Writing Life, and fifteen novels, including The Good Son and All the Dead Yale Men. His most recent book is Double Solitaire. He is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper-Saxton Prize (previous recipients have been James Baldwin and Sylvia Plath), multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and other prizes. Craig’s work has appeared in the Paris Review, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Men's Journal, Best American Short Story series, and other publications. He is also a screenwriter who has worked for various film producers. In 2018, his novel, Wetware, was adapted to the big screen. Craig lives in Hillsborough.

Writer Celia Rivenbark reaches back to her high school days to explore the humor and challenges of waiting tables at her small town’s only sit-down restaurant. It served the best food in town, and featured the most elaborate salad bar east of Raleigh. It also came with a sizeable portion of unapologetic Lost Cause nostalgia. It might have been 1974, but social change, and extending a warm welcome to Yankees passing through on their way to Florida, were not necessarily on the menu.

Humorist Celia Rivenbark was born and raised in Teachey, North Carolina, just down the road from Wallace, NC, and Norris’s Restaurant. She began her writing career at age twenty, when she was hired as a reporter and jack-of-all-trades for the Wallace Enterprise. From there she went on to the Wilmington Star News after an editor read a story she wrote for the Enterprise about the rare birth of a mule. She eventually began writing a weekly humor column that became widely syndicated. It continues to this day, but now with a more political bent. Celia is a New York Times best-selling author who has published seven books, including We're Just Like You, Only Prettier; You Can't Drink All Day, If You Don't Start in the Morning; and most recently, Rude Bitches Make Me Tired. She wrote the essay, “Grape Expectations on Highway 17,” for Eno Publishers’s The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, as well as the the Introduction to Eno Publishers’s anthology, 27 Views of Wilmington: The Port City in Prose & Poetry. Celia has written or co-written a number of plays, including a stage adaptation of “Rude Bitches,” which won Best Original Play at the annual Wilmington Theater Awards, and a rollicking political comedy, “High Voter Turnout,” staged at historic Wilmington’s Thalian Hall in 2023.

Journalist Hal Crowther is a connoisseur of green places. He has a particular reverence for trees, sparing neither effort nor expense to keep the beautiful maples and hickories in his yard as healthy and as upright as possible. When he’s overwhelmed by politics, Hal heads outside. Back inside, he’s still writing up a Menckenian storm about the state of things.

Hal Crowther is the author of six books: An Infuriating American: the Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken, and five collections of essays, including Cathedrals of Kudzu, Gather at the River, and Unarmed But Dangerous. His most recent book, Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers, won the Independent Publishers gold medal for Creative Non-Fiction. Hal was a media editor and critic for Time and Newsweek magazines, a film and drama critic for the Buffalo News, and executive editor of The Spectator in Raleigh. He has several writing credits for film and television. His books and essays, and his syndicated column for the Spectator and the Independent Weekly, have won various prizes, including the H.L. Mencken Writing Award, the Lilian Smith Book Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is married to novelist Lee Smith. They live in Hillsborough, North Carolina, surrounded by a yard full of well-tended trees.

Diya Abdo has settled into life in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s thousands of miles from Jordan, where she, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, was raised. A professor at Guilford College, Diya is working hard to reshape the refugee experience in America. She is challenging university campuses everywhere to step up and host families fleeing war and violence around the world. It stems from her own experience, as well as her belief in radical hospitality and radical accountability. Every Campus a Refuge, the program she founded, is changing hearts and minds.

Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. She is a second-generation Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jordan. Her teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers, Arab and Islamic feminisms, and refugee studies. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her book, American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience, was selected as a North Carolina Reads 2024 Book. In 2015, Diya founded Every Campus a Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. The flagship chapter at Guilford College has hosted nearly 90 refugees thus far. Diya is the recipient of several awards, including the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize. Diya contributed her story, “Food and Other Weapons,” to Eno Publishers’ anthology The Carolina Table. She also contributed an essay to 27 Views of Greensboro. She lives in Greensboro with her partner, two daughters, and four cats.

Poet Michael McFee talks about his anticipation of winter ending and spring beginning when he strolls through Coker Arboretum on the UNC–Chapel Hill campus. The harbinger of spring is the First Breath of Spring, also known as Lonicera fragrantissima, or winter honeysuckle—also known as “a gorgeous weed.” Michael talks about his years of visiting the arboretum, “the Central Park” of Chapel Hill, and the importance of paying attention, which is at the heart of all writing.

Michael McFee earned his B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1978) from UNC–Chapel Hill. He left graduate school to work a variety of jobs—editorial assistant, librarian, and freelance journalist among them—while he completed his first book. After it was published, he taught part-time at N.C. State University and  UNC–Greensboro. In the late 1980s, McFee was poet-in-residence at Cornell University, and also at Lawrence University. He began teaching at UNC–Chapel Hill in 1990, where he is now Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program. In 2018, McFee was awarded the North Carolina Award for literature, the state's highest civilian honor.

Much of McFee's work deals with his native North Carolina mountains. His book of poems Earthly (University of Chicago Press, 2001) was co-winner of the Roanoake-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, and was an honorable mention for the Poets' Prize; his next collection, Shinemaster (University of Chicago Press, 2006), won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association. He also wrote a book of one-line poems, The Smallest Talk (Bull City Press, 2007); That Was Oasis (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012); We Were Once Here (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017); and A Long Time to Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022).

Journalist Paul Cuadros has written a lot about the Latino communities of North Carolina. He moved here more than 25 years ago to write about life in Siler City, a small town in the central part of the state that was experiencing a seismic demographic shift. When Paul joined the faculty of the journalism school at UNC–Chapel Hill, he got to know another Latino community, when he headed each day to the lunch counter at Sutton’s Drug Store. There, the cocineros have become as much a Chapel Hill institution as the drug store itself.

Journalist Paul Cuadros is the author of the story “The Cocineros of Franklin Street,” featured in 27 Views of Chapel Hill, published by Eno Publishers. Paul is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Time, and other national and local publications. He has focused on issues of race and poverty in America. In 1999, he won a fellowship with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, one of the most prestigious in journalism, to report on emerging Latino communities in rural poultry-processing towns in the South. The culmination of this reporting was his book, A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America, which tells the story of a predominantly Latino high school soccer team as Siler City grapples with Latino immigration.

A Home on the Field was the summer reading selection at UNC–Chapel Hill in 2009, as well as at other universities in North Carolina and beyond.

A professor of journalism at UNC–Chapel Hill, Paul is co-recipient of the 2006 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism Award for his contribution to the radio series “North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty,” broadcast on WUNC. He has won the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Award for Online Reporting, and the UNC Diversity Award in 2012 for his work on campus, opening doors for minority students, faculty, and staff.

He was involved in a documentary film and episodic series based on his book, chronicling the lives of Latino youth on the soccer team he coaches in Siler City. He is working on his second book on migration.