R.I.P., Dale Hudson

Body of writer positively identified

We received very sad news today about fellow true crime author Dale Hudson, missing since Wednesday, Aug. 13. A body found near Hudson's abandoned car, left in a wooded area in Marion County, South Carolina, has been identified by the Horry County coroner's office as Dale's. The body was found in the Pee Dee River. The cause of death was pending toxicology tests. The Sun News reported that foul play has been ruled out.

After Hudson's car was located last Friday, detectives with the Horry County Police Department's violent crimes unit and crime scene investigators went to the scene where his car was found and began investigating the case.

According to CarolineLive news, a father and son fishing along the Pee Dee River about two miles south of the U.S. Highway 76 bridge discovered the body in the water about 8 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 15. 

It's ironic -- and at the same time eerie -- that Hudson's last whereabouts has become a crime scene. Detectives looking into Hudson's disappearance all no doubt had met him personally over the years as Hudson conducted his own investigations into various cases. The Sun News, based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, reported that Hudson, who was 56, "has profiled some of the area’s most infamous homicides."

It's true. Hudson was the author of Dance of Death, the story of Kimberly Renee Poole, a North Carolina woman who was convicted of getting her boyfriend, John Frazier, to shoot her husband in 1998 while the couple walked on the beach in celebration of their third wedding anniversary.

Hudson also wrote Die, Grandpa, Die about Christopher Pittman, a 12-year-old boy convicted of murdering his grandparents in 2001.  His last two books, released in 2007 and 2008, include All I Want To Do is Kill about the Holly Harvey case where she and boyfriend killed her grandparents because they ordered her to stop seeing him. The second was Kiss and Kill, about Rick Pulley, a highly a youth pastor and music director at his River of Life Church in Virginia, and the mysterious disappearance of his wife.

Hudson authored two more books with writer Billy Hills. They were An Hour To Kill, about the 1991 rape and murder of a Conway teenager Crystal Todd, considered at the time Horry County's most gruesome crime, and A Reason To Live, the story of Pawleys Island resident Wanda Summers, who survived the killing spree of two men in February 1979.

Hudson was a member of a true-crime online forum, of which I'm a member, but he had not been active since 2007. I never met him, but I feel like I knew him. We were, after all, fellow crime sleuths.

Rest in peace, William Dale Hudson. You and your investigative work will be missed.