In the summer of 1967, nineteen-year-old Brenda Joyce Holland disappeared. She was a mountain girl who had come to Manteo to work in the outdoor drama The Lost Colony. Her body was found five days later, floating in the sound. This riveting narrative, built on unique access to the state investigative file and multiple interviews with insiders, searches for the truth of her unsolved murder. This island odyssey of discovery includes séances, a suicide and a supposed shallow grave. Journalist John Railey cuts through the myths and mistakes to finally arrive at the long-hidden truth of what happened to Brenda Holland that summer on Roanoke Island.
John Railey has spent much of his life on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, he is the former page editor of the Winston-Salem Journal, has written for the Coastland Times on the Outer Banks and has won numerous national, regional and state awards for his writing and investigative reporting. He is the author of the memoir Rage to Redemption in the Sterilization Age: A Confrontation with American Genocide.