Town note
In the 1750s John Bradford moved here and opened an inn, also called an ordinary, and the town was named Bradford's Ordinary.
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FILE 545 / 14 November 2024 / 174 MIN / full
"We are going to North Carolina today"; "a suburb of Raleigh here, East Central, North Carolina, about 15 minutes outside of Raleigh"; "This is in Wake County" about 0:04:04
In the 1750s John Bradford moved here and opened an inn, also called an ordinary, and the town was named Bradford's Ordinary.
about 0:04:44Most of the surrounding land stayed in the hands of two different men, both named Nathaniel Jones.
about 0:05:16In 1775 Jones of White Plains Plantation owned 10,461 acres, while Jones of Crabtree owned most of what is now western Cary.
about 0:05:27After the Revolutionary War the community sat on the road between the new capital in Raleigh and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
about 0:05:42In the 1750s John Bradford moved here and opened an inn, also called an ordinary, and the town was named Bradford's Ordinary.
about 0:04:44Most of the surrounding land stayed in the hands of two different men, both named Nathaniel Jones.
about 0:05:16In 1775 Jones of White Plains Plantation owned 10,461 acres, while Jones of Crabtree owned most of what is now western Cary.
about 0:05:27After the Revolutionary War the community sat on the road between the new capital in Raleigh and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
about 0:05:42Lumberman Allison Francis Page arrived in 1854 and is credited with founding the town.
about 0:06:12Page purchased 300 acres for $2,000 and planned the town.
about 0:06:18Page put up a sawmill and a general store and donated acreage for the railroad depot.
about 0:06:50The town was known at various times as Page, Page's Siding, Page's Station, Page's Tavern and Page's Turnout.
about 0:06:58In 1856 Page added a post office and became the town's first postmaster.
about 0:07:13Page named the community Cary after Samuel Fenton Cary, head of the Sons of Temperance in North America.
about 0:07:44Cary formed the Community Appearance Commission in 1972 to regulate the look of things through ordinances.
about 0:08:28In 1974 the town required developers to set aside one acre of green space for every 35 housing units built.
about 0:08:4043.4%
about 0:13:28White 64% · Black 7.7% · Asian 16.8% · Hispanic 8.1%
Ethnicity can overlap race.Property crime
▼ about one-third below
Violent crime
▼ about one-third
Three-bedroom, three-bath, 1,599-square-foot house
about 0:15:27Six-bedroom, six-bath, 6,028-square-foot house
about 0:16:16Five-bedroom, six-bath, 9,619-square-foot house
about 0:17:03"about one-third below"
Comparison: "national average". Direction: below.
As told in 2024 about 0:21:29
"about one-third"
Comparison: "national average". Direction: below.
As told in 2024 about 0:21:36
"about 3,300"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:08:03
"about 7,600"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:08:06
"about 15,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:35:53
"about 70,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:11:57
"94,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:11:54
"171,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:11:49
"39"
Comparison: "usually about 37". No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:12:47
"62%"
Comparison: "national average". No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:13:06
"64%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:13:14
"7.7%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:13:14
"16.8%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:13:14
"0.4%"
No direction stated.
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"8.1%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:13:24
"3%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:13:59
"$113,782"
Comparison: "$69,000 average". No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:14:06
"$105,000"
Comparison: "$100,000 is regular". No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:14:15
"more than 80%"
Direction: above.
As told in 2024 about 0:36:30
"90%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:36:37
"43.4%"
Comparison: "national average". No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:13:28
"Baptists"
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"$574,400"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:14:24
"$1,630"
Comparison: "national average". No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:14:55
"$465,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:15:27
"$1,595,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:16:16
"$7,500,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2024 about 0:17:03
2.8 / 5 · average of 4
“A charming, vibrant downtown with a new downtown park, green lawns, water features and local breweries.”about 0:09:08
“An affluent suburb with low crime and plenty of restaurants, but the people are generally pretentious and entitled.”about 0:09:58
“Could use more good Asian places, not just expensive ones, and is drastically lacking acceptable vegetarian restaurants.”about 0:10:33
“The music is way too loud and it bothers the neighbours.”about 0:11:27
They married in a Calgary restaurant in October 2000 so that she could travel on his work visa, and by January 2001 they owned a 2,800-square-foot house in the Lochmere subdivision. He earned over $100,000 a year; they had two daughters, Bella, born in February 2004, and Katie, born in 2006.
The marriage was not the stable arrangement Nancy had hoped for. She had an affair of her own within the first year, with a man she met in Florida, and told her twin sister Krista she was thinking of leaving Brad after ten months. She was homesick and, because her visa did not allow her to work, bored. By February 2008 he had cut off her access to the bank and credit cards and put her on a weekly allowance; from April he was reading her emails. She hired the Raleigh lawyer Alice Stubbs, who drafted an aggressive separation agreement requiring $2,100 a month in child support, private schooling for the girls and a share of the house and 401k. Brad rejected it, and the couple continued living in the same house, sleeping in separate rooms, while Nancy told friends he had become mentally cruel.
In late June and early July 2008 Nancy and the girls went with her family to Hilton Head, South Carolina. Her parents thought she had faded into a different person, and they hired a lawyer to help her get out. She came back to Cary about 10 July to a filthy house and left her father an angry voicemail about food and ants in the kitchen.
On Friday 11 July 2008 Nancy cooked ribs for a neighbourhood barbecue at Craig and Diana Duncan's house across the street. She arrived about six in a teal sundress with a black floral print, drank four or five glasses of wine and some beer, ate ribs, pita chips and dip, and spent the evening telling anyone who would listen that she hated Brad and wanted a divorce and a move back to Canada. Nancy stayed past midnight.
Brad's account was that he was woken at four by Katie, took her downstairs, and that Nancy joined him; that he made two trips to the Harris Teeter, shortly after six for milk and later for detergent and a green juice, both captured on store video; that Nancy asked him about her shirt, then said never mind; and that he heard the door close about seven as she went for a run. She was due at Jessica Adam's house at eight to help paint a dining room. She never arrived. Jessica called the house at 9.30, spoke to Brad, called 911 in a panic and then had a friend drive her to the Coopers' house, where she screamed in the front yard that Brad had done it. The police treated Nancy as an adult who was late, and Chief Pat Bazemore told the press the disappearance was an isolated incident and joggers had nothing to fear.
Hundreds of volunteers searched. Sixteen people reported seeing a jogger answering Nancy's description that morning, and four reported a white and maroon van acting suspiciously; a neighbour, Jan Boyer, had seen a white truck with its lights off drive into a cul-de-sac the night before. On the evening of Monday 14 July William Boyer was walking his dog off Fielding Drive when he saw vultures and then a body in a drainage pond at the edge of a new construction site. It was Nancy. She was face down, wearing only a sports bra rolled up under her arms, with dirt on her knees and legs and one diamond earring. Dr John Butts found she had been strangled: a faint linear mark on her neck, the hyoid bone broken, debris in her trachea. There were no signs of sexual assault. Tire tracks and footprints at the scene matched neither of the Coopers' cars and were never cast.
Brad's behaviour drew suspicion. He had been cleaning the house and doing laundry while she was missing, and had washed the teal sundress, saying it had barbecue sauce on it, though deodorant stains remained. He refused a thorough search of the house and asked for a lawyer. Detectives found Nancy's keys and phone at home, though friends said she never went anywhere without them. His work laptop held Google Maps files and a satellite image of the exact remote spot where the body was found, and the state argued that he had faked a call from his home phone to his mobile to make it look as though Nancy was alive while he was on camera at the supermarket. On 16 July a judge gave emergency custody of the girls to Nancy's parents and sister.
The prosecution had no blood, hair, fibre or fingerprint evidence: the Google Maps search was the heart of its case, along with the cleaning, scratches on his neck and the keys left behind. The defence attacked the police for erasing all the data on Nancy's phone, which had sat in a drawer for two weeks before an officer wiped it, and argued that the computer timestamps showed the searches came after the body was found. Witnesses described the affairs on both sides, including Nancy's encounter with John Pearson, a man she brought home from a Halloween party, and the fact that Katie was born eight months and 24 days later.
Nancy's parents agreed to it, and her father said he had only ever wanted the person responsible to admit what he had done. Nancy's sister Jill started a domestic abuse programme for women in Edmonton. A Free Brad Cooper campaign, a blog and a book, Framed by Lynn Blanchard, argued his innocence, but the hosts conclude that he did it.
July 12, 2008 / the Cooper home in the Lochmere subdivision, Cary, and a construction cul-de-sac off Fielding Drive
As told in the episode, on 14 November 2024.
Accused
Public places are marked on the map.
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