My 50-Year Obsession with an Unsolved Mountain Murder

My obsession with the case of Nancy Dean Morgan began on a sunny June afternoon in 1970, the day after her hogtied body was reported found on an abandoned logging road near the Appalachian Trail in mountainous Madison County. The 24-year-old federal anti-poverty worker had been kidnapped, raped, and murdered.

I was hanging out in the offices of Duke University’s student paper, the Chronicle, where I had written a column called “The Readable Radical” for several years.

I opened the afternoon daily, the Durham Sun, to a long story beginning on page one that jumped to most of an inside page, featuring a large photo of Morgan. She had almost finished her year-long commitment to VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, known colloquially as the “domestic Peace Corps.” 

To me, she epitomized the altruistic impulse, working on various projects around the county: youth recreation, a used clothing store, driving people to medical appointments. By all accounts, she was well-loved by those who knew her. She had been accepted to nursing school in New York and told friends she intended to return to Madison County after graduation and put her new skills to work.

The more I read about Morgan, and later researched, the more she seemed to be an avatar of my socially conscious generation: she majored in social work at college, supported civil rights, and opposed the Vietnam war (although her father was a career Air Force officer). 

A political slogan from the 1930s popularized by the Industrial Workers of the World came immediately to mind: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” But there was more. At the time of the murder, I had friends serving with VISTA. Morgan’s murder felt personal, grafted onto my psyche in a way I could never have imagined. It has held me in its grip for more than half a century.

Sitting at the Chronicle editor’s pitted desk that June afternoon, and not exactly knowing why, I reached for the ever-present, gray metal Pica ruler, and used its edge to tear the article from the paper and put it into a file I called “Morgan murder.” The file would grow fat over the ensuing decades.

Bloody Madison

My obsession with the case grew in fits and starts, just as I embarked on a career as a freelance journalist. My first big break came in 1973 when I brought to national attention the story of Joan Little, a 21–year-old Black woman accused of murdering her white jailer in Washington, N.C. In the trial that I covered for the New York Times and other outlets, Little was acquitted.

For much of the 1970s, I covered similar cases involving racial injustice in North Carolina and around the Southeast for national publications, including numerous capital cases. These ostensibly criminal cases that became political causes included the Wilmington Ten, the Tarboro Three, the Charlotte Three, and the Dawson Five. In this work, I honed my reportorial skills—but the Morgan case was never far from my mind.

Fate, serendipity, and luck sometimes intervened with the Morgan case. In 1972, I was hired as a part-time research assistant for UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Oral History Project. My job was to sit in the Wilson Library’s Southern Collection reading room, making prep notes for interviews with North Carolina political figures, some of which would be sealed until their deaths. 

One afternoon, I pulled a file of clippings with the name “Zeno Ponder.” The stories described a vintage political boss who, through his occasionally brutish machine, ruled mountainous Madison County for decades, along with his brother E. Y., the county sheriff. I copied the clips and added them to my Morgan file.

Shortly after, Elmer Hall, former assistant Methodist chaplain at Duke, left town to take over the historic Sunnybank Inn in Hot Springs, in Madison County, not far from where Morgan’s body was found.

In 1978, while Sunnybank was still being restored for visitors and Appalachian Trail hikers, I paid Hall, an old friend, a visit. I told him I wanted to write about the Morgan murder. He lobbied for a book on the colorful local political bosses, the Ponders, with whom he had already butted heads. But he said he would keep his ears open for any talk of the Morgan case and, on a later visit, he showed me where Nancy’s body was found in a sun-dappled glade.

Given the politicized, conspiratorial times of the 1970s, I began my research convinced that Morgan’s death was the result of a plot designed by a heavy-handed political machine to thwart social reform in Madison County. I reasoned that if the Ponders weren’t involved in the Morgan abduction, with their vaunted control of a county with a population of just 17,000 people, they surely must have known who they were.

In 1984, one of Morgan’s fellow VISTAs, then living in Florida, was brought back to Madison County by Sheriff  Ponder and accused of her rape and murder. However, it soon became clear that the VISTA worker’s trial was little more than a frameup and an election-year stunt to keep the sheriff in power. A local jury took less than an hour to acquit the young man. Two years later, E. Y. Ponder was defeated for reelection. 

Then, in 1994, while on the staff of the Los Angeles Times, I began to investigate the case in earnest, first at long distance, thanks to a sympathetic Times librarian. I learned that at the time of the murder, the sensational crime prompted the media to dredge up the county’s Civil War-era moniker, “Bloody Madison,” so-called for a massacre of captured Union supporters. Nearly a quarter century after the Morgan murder, the subject was still a tender one. Few locals were anxious to see it unearthed. 

For more than two decades, as I worked for newspapers on both U.S. coasts, I made twice-yearly visits, first from Los Angeles and then from my home in the Central Florida suburbs, to the North Carolina mountains to investigate the case. A week in the spring and a week in the fall. 

Given the insular mountain culture, I knew that as a Jew from the South Jersey suburbs, working for a large, California newspaper, I would always be an outsider, poking at unpleasant memories. Still, I did my best to become a familiar sight around the county. After my first visit, I wrote an affectionate, lyrical feature story about the county for the Los Angeles Times, including interviews with both Ponder brothers, making no mention of the Morgan murder. 

Working from a master list of surviving witnesses and Morgan’s acquaintances, I traveled the towns and hollers, trying to convince people to trust me and speak with me. It was often a race to reach them before they retreated behind the curtain of suspicion, fading memories and dementia. 

Without being melodramatic, I was looking for murderers and rapists, some with numerous relatives who were still at large, as well as allies of the Ponder machine. Fortunately, I had a safe base of operations at Hall’s Sunnybank to conduct my interviews, since by this time he had become a trusted member of the community. Over time, I did everything from attending Friday night musical gatherings at the restored railroad depot in Marshall, the county seat, to entering a charity turkey shoot (don’t ask). 

Outside Madison County, I became friends with George Morgan, Nancy’s younger brother, who was living in the family’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1998, I traveled to Edwardsville, Illinois, to attend the 30th anniversary of Nancy’s class at Southern Illinois University, where I conducted more interviews to get a better idea of who she was. 

To be sure, my obsession with the Morgan case was not all-consuming or unrelenting. I married, had two children, worked for 25 years as a staff writer for the Times and the Orlando Sentinel, and wrote four nonfiction books. But the Morgan murder was always there. 

Malevolence and Opportunity

In 1994, on my first return visit to Madison County and Sunnybank since 1978, Hall told me that he’d heard someone make a chance remark about the Morgan case while he was working as a poll watcher. Another poll watcher had said that the guilty parties were actually local men, one of whose fathers was the Hot Springs police chief who had ties to Sheriff Ponder. 

That led me to Richard Lewis Johnson, the son of the Hot Springs police chief and Ponder ally, who was serving a lengthy prison sentence for poisoning to death his 5-year-old-daughter. Without telling him why or what it was about, I requested an interview with Johnson at a North Carolina correctional center, the first of two there, followed by a third interview at Central Prison in Raleigh in 2010.

At each, he freely confessed to his involvement with Morgan’s abduction, along with three of his cronies, but not to raping or killing her. I interviewed one of the surviving men he named, then living outside Asheville. The man, with a lengthy criminal record and a dent in his forehead where he had once been shot, admitted being with Johnson the day of the abduction, but denied that he was involved in the crime.

Based on Johnson’s interviews, I concluded that the murder was an ill-fated collision of malevolence and opportunity. Morgan, driving home late at night after dinner with a fellow VISTA worker, was forced off the road by a group of drunk local thugs and driven away, first into Tennessee. She was returned to Hot Springs, hogtied by her captors, and she was strangled by the rope around her neck as she struggled to escape. Her body was discovered days later in the backseat of her gray, government-owned Plymouth just off Tanyard Gap. Since the acquittal of the fellow VISTA worker in 1984, no one was convicted of the crime.

In a fourth interview Monday at Nash Correctional Institute, Johnson confirmed my theory and, for the first time, admitted raping Morgan. The men forced Morgan to pull her car over and later raped her on a detached car hood in a barn on Mill Ridge, Johnson said in the interview.  

Johnson had seen Morgan at the Hot Springs theater. “We all knowed her,” he said. “She thought she was high and mighty.”

They raped her again the following night, Johnson said. He said he did not put Morgan back in her car or accompany those who did. He was not remorseful at the time, but he said he is now.

In 2009, Dr. John Butts, then the state medical examiner, showed me slides of DNA samples taken from Morgan’s body that had been preserved in paraffin. He said the DNA indicated multiple men were involved in the rape—consistent with the accounts Johnson gave me. At that point I felt I had reached a dead end. So I reached out to the State Bureau of Investigation, which I knew had maintained a robust cold case unit for unsolved crimes. 

I was contacted by two SBI agents from the Asheville office, neither of whom had been involved in the original Morgan investigation. In phone discussions and follow-up emails, the agents gave me a respectful hearing. They asked if they could fly down to my home in the Orlando suburbs to review my materials. In return, I asked them for some materials that were not included, or were redacted, from the FBI’s file on the case, which I had gotten under the Freedom of Information Act. 

But when they sat around my kitchen table, going through my material, they seemed more interested in any information that pointed to the guilt of the VISTA worker who had been acquitted in 1984, a man I would subsequently refer to as “Ed Walker,” to protect his identity.

Given that Morgan’s body was found in a section of Pisgah National Forest, there was some initial confusion as to which law enforcement agency—federal, state, county—would lead the investigation, so the crime scene was chaotic. The FBI came and went, and in the end the SBI became the lead agency, and did not cover itself with glory. 

Dr. Page Hudson, the esteemed state medical examiner who had retired to Madison County, told me that, beginning with their site investigation and their late arrival to the Morgan autopsy, the SBI agents were incompetent in handling key evidence at the scene. In the months following they allowed other physical evidence to be lost or destroyed. So, even 40 years after the crime, sitting in my kitchen, the SBI agents seemed intent on proving that the bureau had handled the initial investigation properly, and that they had the right suspect in the acquitted VISTA worker. This form of tunnel vision, known as confirmation bias, is a frequent element of wrongful convictions.

In the end, the agents asked if I could persuade “Ed Walker” to take a DNA test, since they had no idea where he was. I wanted to avoid any charge of confirmation bias on my part: My objective was to find out who killed Morgan, and not to confirm the scenario that I had developed. So, I agreed to the agents’ request, reaching out to Ed Walker and making the case for providing a DNA sample for comparison. 

To my surprise, he accepted the offer, with one caveat: he would only submit the sample to an independent lab. When I conveyed this to the agents, they refused, saying the murder was an open case, and so would have to be handled by the state forensic lab. Walker refused and, in retrospect, with good reason. Following a series of scandals, the state forensic lab was removed from SBI jurisdiction. 

I had been played by the SBI agents. The material the agents brought with them to my house was essentially worthless. I could never get a straight answer from them about what happened to the fingerprints I was told were taken from the interior or exterior of Morgan’s car. Did they still exist, in Raleigh at SBI headquarters, or with the FBI in Washington? Did they include any of the four men I had suspected?

The agents did promise to follow up with the DNA evidence, testing it against Richard Johnson and the others he named that they could locate. Weeks later, they informed me that the DNA did not match Johnson or two of the other men they had located. But they never offered any documentation. They wouldn’t say whether they had run any of the DNA samples against DNA database maintained by the federal government.

Contrary to what the agents told me, Johnson said this week that when they visited him in prison, they did not swab him for a DNA sample.

A Confrontation

My book, Met Her on the Mountain: The Murder of Nancy Morgan, was published in hardback in 2013 by a small, North Carolina press. I thought—along with book reviewers—that I made a convincing case against Johnson and the other Madison County men I named for killing Morgan. Yet, for whatever reasons, I was unable to persuade a succession of Madison County sheriffs or the SBI to accept and pursue my conclusion. 

In 2022, the University Press of Kentucky published an updated, trade paper edition of Met Her on the Mountain. There was new hope to solve the case, as I wrote in the book’s Postscript, “Loose Ends.” More and more cold cases around the country, including in North Carolina, were being cleared using a new forensic technique called “genetic genealogy.” The procedure, most prominently used to break the notorious “Golden State Killer” case in 2018 (that case took 40 years to solve), uses DNA connections from a variety of databases to match with an intersecting list of collateral relatives of previous suspects.

I have spent the last five years trying to get Madison County Sheriff Buddy Harwood to pursue this avenue. We had a face-to-face confrontation in the autumn of 2022, when Harwood crashed my presentation at the Madison County Library for the new edition. On that occasion, he gave the crowd of 50 residents vague assurances that he would continue to investigate the case, mentioning a recent trip to Washington, D.C., to pursue the Morgan case, yet no results followed. Since that encounter I have made repeated requests for an interview with Harwood, whose office has never responded.

I made a similar request to the SBI, which likewise brushed me off. In several emails, a bureau spokeswoman informed me that they would be unable to help because: (1) the state criminal lab was no longer under the SBI (which I knew, and why); and (2) that the responsibility for pursuing the case lay with the originating jurisdiction, Madison County (which was false). 

I got no response from N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein’s office. When Gov. Roy Cooper spoke at a recent Durham campaign event, I gave a copy of the book to one of his aides, along with my elevator pitch on the case and genetic genealogy.

All my efforts to interest law enforcement to utilize genetic genealogy were rebuffed or ignored. My suspicion is that the DNA material by now either has been lost or deteriorated beyond its use. Or that authorities just did not want to admit the latest incompetence in a criminal investigation they had so thoroughly bungled since it happened.

A Call From Madison County

Still, I couldn’t let the case go. As fate would have it, last July a call came from Madison County. It was from Christopher Johnson, 51, son of Richard Johnson, one of the four men I believe were responsible for Morgan’s kidnapping, rape, and murder. The son, a former EMT, was reaching out to me to let me know he was working on a book of his own, and his call reignited my interest in the case. 

When his sister died in 1984, Chris was 11 and was thought to be in danger of his own life as the only living witness to his sister’s poisoning; he took the witness stand to testify against his father. 

His son had accepted my theory of the case. He called me to say he was now working on a book, an intensely personal family memoir called How I Survived the Man Who Met Her on the Mountain. In the first sentence of his brief book proposal, Chris Johnson chillingly describes his father, now 76, as “a man that the world would have been a better place without … Somewhere between the 1940s and 1960 evil overtook him and his story became one of horror to people that were in his life.”

Richard Johnson’s father, Leroy, was police chief of Hot Springs from 1953 to 1984, and was a cog in the Ponders’ wheel of control. Under that political shield, Chris wrote of his father, “Richard would later admit to raping several women in North Carolina and Tennessee, pulled over by him using a blue light he had taken from his own father.” As a paid informant for Sheriff Ponder, “he and his friends would rape and sodomize women all over Western North Carolina and Tennessee, where they hid them, beat and tortured them.” 

That scenario fit the pattern of Richard’s account of Morgan’s abduction, as he told me the story from prison. None of the three Madison County men Richard named (one now dead) was ever charged with these other sexual assaults, in part because of the low social and economic status of some of the women who accused them. But also because Chief Johnson was not likely to investigate his wayward son, or allow Sheriff Ponder to do so. Morgan’s fellow VISTA worker, Walker, had nothing to do with the killing, wrote Chris. “The jury saw right through the lies and acquitted him.”

One particularly negative aspect of my obsession with the Morgan case was my relationship with Richard Johnson. To be sure, without him and his confessions I might not have written my book. But after publication, Johnson wanted to be my friend, and in the months and years that followed he bombarded me with letters, sometimes twice weekly. They were rambling, and never addressed additional details of the abduction, assault, and killing. Some asked for money. Eventually I stopped replying, until I spoke with him in prison this week. 

Johnson, who has prostate cancer, is in the 41st year of his 20-years-to-life sentence for poisoning his daughter, Joyce, in 1984. I asked him Monday if he expected to be paroled. “I ain’t looking to get out,” he said. 

While I was investigating the Morgan case, I collected and reviewed police and forensic reports. For decades, I had gotten used to dispassionately reading these kinds of documents about other cases. But nothing prepared me for turning a page in 1998 to suddenly find a photograph of Morgan’s body laid out on a slab. The shock of this unsought intimacy felt like a horrid intrusion into her life. That picture haunts me to this day.

In the Jewish tradition, we recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer of remembrance for the dead, at services. And in many synagogues, we preface the recitation by saying, together, “We keep faith with those who sleep in the dust.” 

That is what I have been trying to do for more than half a century for Nancy Morgan. Further, Deuteronomy 16:20 admonishes us to “pursue justice, and only justice.” The Scripture doesn’t put a deadline on that pursuit. That is what I have been doing, and will continue to do. It’s the least I owe her.

Correction: This article gave an incorrect name for the Industrial Workers of the World union. It has been corrected.

Durham resident Mark I. Pinsky, a former reporter for the L.A. Times and Orlando Sentinel, is the author of six nonfiction books.