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One night in August, Janet Siclari was killed. And the Outer Banks has never been the same. It was one of summer’s last steamy, heavy-with-tourists weekends. Hurricane Emily was menacing offshore that Friday, but after a week’s vacation spent with friends at a Southern Shores cottage, Janet Siclari wanted to stay one more night before heading back to New Jersey. On August 27, 1993, she and her group decided to go south to the Carolinian Hotel in Nags Head.
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At about 6:30 the next morning, a janitor found Siclari dead on the beach behind the hotel deck, naked from the waist down, her hand clutching her shorts to the fatal slash wound on her neck. The murder sent a searing shock wave across the Outer Banks.
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“First of all, we couldn’t believe it happened here on the Outer Banks,” remembers Anna Sadler, a member of the Nags Head Board of Commissioners. “Those things didn’t happen here. That was big-city stuff.”
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Most locals assumed the murderer was from out of town. A case of “wrong place, wrong time.” Still, the sense of unknown was unnerving for residents who didn’t usually worry about killers prowling loose on the beach.
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“This was somebody vacationing who had their life taken by a stranger,” says Sarah Downing, a Nags Head resident who at the time worked at WOBR-FM. “I think we were on pins and needles until they found the guy who did it.” As Emily aimed at Hatteras, new worries took over. On Monday, barely 48 hours after Siclari’s body was found, an evacuation order was issued. As 150,000 visitors fled the Outer Banks, investigators despaired that the murderer might escape forever in the ensuing chaos.
For decades, the Carolinian was all pool games, parties and pretty smiles... Photo: Outer Banks History Center
boyfriend, washed ashore. Sadly, in July 1997, another woman, Denise Johnson, was murdered in her Kill Devil Hills home. That case remains unsolved. Most recently, the killing of an Ohio woman, Lynn Jackheimer, made national headlines last summer. Her accused murderer, boyfriend Nathan Summerfield, still awaits trial.
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But in 1993, random murder and rape like the Siclari case was unheard of here.
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“I just remember the feeling that the community was infiltrated,” says Downing, today the assistant curator at the Outer Banks History Center. “I felt like the age of innocence on the Outer Banks was over.”
But he didn’t escape. He just continued going about his business on the Outer Banks. For almost five years, no one here knew the killer was one of their own. Before Siclari was killed, there were only six previous murders in Nags Head. That’s not counting the especially gruesome murder in 1991 where a headless, handless body of a nude woman, killed elsewhere by her
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The three-story Carolinian opened in June 1947 and was torn down in 2001. During its ‘50s and ‘60s heyday, the hotel was the
most happening spot to hang poolside or go dancing. In the mid-90s, the Carolinian Hotel was a landmark past its prime, but with its deck bar overlooking the beach and a comedy club on the premises, it was still a popular partying spot for tourists. And when Siclari, her two girlfriends and her brother rented their two rooms that night, the hotel still had a shabby charm. Siclari, a petite 35-year-old medical technician, shared a room with her brother, who was the last person to see her alive. Robert Siclari said that when his sister returned to the room at about 2:30 a.m., she stepped outside to have a cigarette. He woke the next morning to a commotion outside, and to his horror learned that his sister had been stabbed to death. A $20,000 reward was offered for information leading to the capture of Siclari’s