News Roundup

Late last week a man involved in a long running dispute with Annapolis newspaper the Capital Gazette stormed the paper’s newsroom with a shotgun, killing five people and wounding several others.  The Gazette itself has extensive coverage of the incident.  Reports suggest that the suspect, Jarrod W. Ramos, had been upset with the Gazette for some time because of an article the paper ran in 2011 regarding his guilty plea to a criminal harassment offense.  Ramos tried unsuccessfully to sue the paper for defamation and otherwise harassed Gazette staff over several years.  He has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder.  Yesterday, newsrooms across the country held a moment of silence for the victims at 2:33 pm, marking the precise time of the attack a week earlier.  Keep reading for more news. Podcast.  The News & Observer says that a new true-crime podcast exploring a decades-old unsolved double murder in Durham recently was released.  Titled “The Long Dance,” the podcast focuses on the 1971 murders of Patricia Mann and Jesse McBane, of Sanford and Pittsboro respectively.  The couple had attended a Valentine’s Day dance in Durham and then disappeared; they were discovered two weeks later strangled to death in a wooded area in northwest Durham.  The Observer report says that the creators of the podcast and detectives working the re-opened cold case independently have identified the same suspect in the murders, though no arrest has yet been made.  Here’s a link to the podcast. Fireworks Return.  The Charlotte Observer reports [...]