Raleigh True Crime Tour exposes city’s chilling past, with less gore
Some people like to explore a new city through its architecture. Others find they learn a place best by riding its public transportation.
Every Sunday night, a select few in Raleigh choose to discover the City of Oaks by way of its most notorious crimes.
The Raleigh True Crime Walking Tour is the brainchild of 25-year-old Andrew Nason, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate and Durham resident.
For $14, Nason will guide people on an hour-long tour of five sites in downtown Raleigh tied to true crimes from the late 19th century to as recently as 2018.
“Raleigh has a lot of interesting stories to tell,” Nason said. “I wanted to be the person to take those stories and bring them back to the forefront, make sure that they are remembered again today.”
Nason, a former tour guide at local history museums, created Triangle Walking Tours last year. It currently has tours in seven cities, including Cary and Chapel Hill; each city has a team of two tour guides offering an average of three or four tours, he said.
“I’ve always loved history,” he said. “It was a topic that I studied back in university, and it’s a topic that I’ve always had a real passion and love for.”
True crime, on the other hand, was not a topic Nason loved.
“I myself am not a true crime fan, which surprises a lot of people to hear,” he said. “But I don’t listen to true crime podcasts. I don’t really watch a lot of true-crime media. I don’t really engage with true crime much outside of my own research.”
The reason for that, Nason said, is because he doesn’t like the sensationalism typical of much true-crime media.
“I find a lot of true crime focuses on grossing people out with the gory details and scaring people, and it leans into horror more than I would like,” he said.
That’s not what the Raleigh True Crime Tour is about, he said.
And indeed, during the tour I took last month, Nason kept his stories informative but respectful, focusing on the societal context of crimes rather than gruesome tidbits. His recountings included a man who allegedly murdered his wife and infant daughter in 1887 to the recent arrest and sentencing of a Russian immigrant accused of hiring a hitman to kill his spouse.
“Our approach is very different from most other true-crime-related media,” he said. “And so I think that has shielded us from a lot of the criticism [of sensationalism] that most people object to with true crime.”
Nason’s fiancée, Thida Lorvan, is a true-crime connoisseur and gave him the idea for the tour. She helped him tie into larger themes of injustice and systemic failures, he said. And yes, she’s been on the tour she helped create.
Nason conducts the tour in reverse chronological order, another factor he believes makes his tour unique.
“I wanted to start people with the most recent and then go back further and further with each step,” he said. “I really wanted it to feel like you’re going further and further into the past, almost like metaphorically descending into an old cave or something like that — descending into an old set of ruins, and each layer you go into goes further back.”
Nason’s tour is happy with the format for now, but he may change things up as more people take his tours
“There might be a Durham True Crime 2.0 in the near future and the Raleigh True Crime 2.0 in the far future,” he said. “just so we can get people who’ve already been on one to maybe come back and hear four or five more chilling stories from the past.”
Tickets for the Raleigh True Crime Tour can be purchased at www.trianglewalkingtours.com for $14 or through online booking sites like Tripadvisor.
