Grad case unsolved |
Andrew Lehman |
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"It struck a chord in me the day after it happened," Pinsky said. "She was by no means perfect, but she went to the mountains to do good. That is why the murder has stuck with me for 30 years." Pinsky, who writes for the Orlando (Florida) Sentinel, was on campus recently, gathering information for a book about the murder of the SIUE grad who joined Volunteers in Service to America after getting a degree in social welfare. Both Morgan and Pinsky were products of the idealistic and free-spirited '60s. "It was a remarkable time," St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Pat Gauen said. "Racial sensitivities were high, peaceful demonstrations took place almost every day and people were becoming aware of environmental concerns." Gauen, who was managing editor of the Alestle in 1970, said the students and the nation were in turmoil. Students would pour their hearts out for the issues they felt would make a difference. It was during these idealistic times that Morgan joined VISTA. In April 1970 she traveled to an isolated, impoverished and corrupt region of the southern Appalachian Mountains leaving her father, now-deceased Maj. Earl Adams Morgan, behind at their home on Scott Air Force Base near O'Fallon. Morgan went to work in Madison County, North Carolina. The county, known as "Bloody Madison" for a Civil War-era massacre, was like "something right out of 'Deliverance'," Pinsky said. "It was, and still is, a backwards community," he added. "The mountain music and scenery literally transport visitors into another world." Another world that Morgan saw for a only few months. On Wednesday, June 17, 1970, Morgan's hogtied nude body was found strangled in the rear seat of a government-owned car. She was bound by a nylon chord used "locally for tying tomatoes," according to an article in the Asheville Citizen Times. The chord tied her hands and feet together behind her neck and back. Any movement caused the chord to tighten around her neck, according to the news account. Pinsky learned of the murder while he was the managing editor of the Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper of Duke University.
Several years after the murder, Pinsky began a research job at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill to help his meager income as a free-lance writer. Pinsky would prepare notes and questions for interviews of political figures for the Southern Oral History Project based on newspaper clippings. While on one of these research missions, Pinsky happened upon an article that would remind him of Morgan. "I opened a file entitled 'Zeno Ponder' and learned that the 17,000 residents of Madison County had been under the control of political boss Zeno and his brother, E. Y. Ponder, the sheriff," Pinsky said. "I realized that if these brothers were in such complete control of this small county, then they must know who was responsible for Nancy Morgan's death." Pinsky added a copy of this clipping to the small file he had started at Duke. In 1978, Pinsky made his first trip to Madison County to visit with a former Duke chaplain who had opened an inn on the Appalachian Trail. "We talked about the murder," Pinsky said. "I told him to keep his ears open for any news about the killing." In 1985, a year after Pinsky had joined the Los Angeles Times, a fellow VISTA volunteer was tried for Morgan's murder. "It was an obvious show trial," Pinsky said. "None of the evidence held up in court and it took the jury less than an hour to acquit the VISTA worker." According to the Asheville Citizen Times, a county resident made up a story that "he saw Morgan tied and dying on (the VISTA volunteer's) couch" and was forced to help dispose of the body. According to the newspaper, the local "fabricated the story and sold it to Sheriff E. Y. Ponder in exchange for the sheriff getting him out of the Madison County Jail." Nearly 10 years after the trial ,Pinsky decided to quit his job at the Times and move his family to Central Florida and take a job at the Orlando Sentinel. He had two reasons. "I was able to locate the VISTA volunteer in Central Florida," Pinsky said. "I was also driven as a journalist to tell this story and to do that I had to move closer to North Carolina." For the past five years, Pinsky has been gathering information on the Morgan case. In 1999 his work yielded results. A jailed Madison County man, son of the former police chief of Hot Springs, N. C., who was an ally of E. Y. Ponder, twice confessed to his role in the Morgan abduction and murder. The man has also named four others in connection with the murder. One of the men is dead, two are missing but Pinsky has been able to locate the fourth. "The man in jail has given two very accurate accounts of the murder," Pinsky said. "Only someone who was there could have given the descriptions he did." In April, Pinsky met with two senior agents of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. They spent three hours going over the information that Pinsky had gathered. Pinsky has not heard from them since. "It's a very cold case and they probably won't follow up," Pinsky said. "But the current sheriff of Madison County is willing to pursue the case himself and even administer a polygraph test if the state is not." Pinsky has covered murder cases off and on for more than 25 years and knows that in real life it is almost always the professionals who solve the murder. But Pinsky may be nearing the end of his investigation into this 30-year-old murder and finally gathering enough information to write a book about the case. Pinsky said he hopes to finish the research in about six months, take a one-year leave of absence from the Sentinel and write the first draft of the book. "Ideally, the book would end with indictments and guilty pleas," Pinsky said. "But I can't guarantee that." | |
After 30 years, the murder of 1969 SIUE graduate Nancy Dean Morgan still haunts the life of nationally known journalist Mark I. Pinsky.
"I wasn't sure what I was going to do about the murder," Pinsky said. "I cut out the article and put it in a file folder. Something told me I would get back to it some day."