The Killing Trails: Two Centuries of Violence Against the Women of Western North Carolina

As Featured on the Missing in the Carolinas podcast Episode 166.

Between 1808 and 2025, more than 150 women and girls were murdered in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Some cases made headlines. Most did not. Their names filled brief newspaper columns, then faded from public memory.

The Killing Trails is the first comprehensive record of these deaths — a county-by-county, case-by-case documentation of over two centuries of violence against women across twenty-three counties in one of America's most beautiful and deadly landscapes. From the ballad of Naomi Wise to the serial killers who stalked the Blue Ridge Parkway, from domestic violence homicides in Asheville to cold cases still under investigation, this book names the victims, follows the investigations, and exposes the system failures that allowed killers to walk free.

This is not a book about killers. It is a book about the women and girls they killed — and the many more killed by husbands, boyfriends, and neighbors whose names never made the news at all.

Book 1 of The Unrecorded Dead series

Also by Helen St. Clair: The Mill Town Murders