‘Night Marauder’ work continues as MC’s Nancy Locklin-Sofer turns to Smokies reflections
March 6, 2025
There is, at Maryville College, an expectation of excellence when it comes to the education students will receive.
The faculty members who provide it rise to the occasion, year in and year out. Their classroom commitment is steadfast, but it’s only part of the work that they do. They’re scholars as much as they are teachers, and their work outside of the classroom not only provides intellectual stimulation of the things they teach within it, it also enhances the reputation of MC as a place of academic rigor, populated by educators who routinely submit work to publications across the academic spectrum.
Throughout the course of the 2024-25 academic year, a number of Maryville College faculty members have been recognized for their contributions to academia. This is part three of a six-part series spotlighting those individuals and their accomplishments.
Dr. Nancy Locklin-Sofer
Dr. Nancy Locklin-Sofer, a history professor at MC, continues to get mileage out of the “Night Marauder,” but her recent efforts outside of the classroom demonstrate that she’s more than just a sleuth of serial killers.
In late 2020, Locklin-Sofer was putting together the syllabus for a new course, the History of Murder, when she stumbled across references to a spree between 1919 and 1926 when a killer known as “the Night Marauder” terrorized the town of Maryville and the adjacent communities of Alcoa and Knoxville. While the case was front-page news for years, it was eventually forgotten by all but a few local historians until Locklin-Sofer began digging.
Not only did the case become a linchpin of the course, it turned into a project that’s earned her attention from true crime enthusiasts across the country, most recently as the guest of Lizbeth Meredith on the podcast “Persistence U with Lizbeth.”
“Following a presentation on the Night Marauder at the Museum and Cultural Center at 5ive Points in Cleveland, Tennessee, Lizbeth happened to be in the audience and liked what she heard,” Locklin-Sofer said. “We recorded in December, and the episode was released Feb. 12. Meredith got some fame for telling the story of how an estranged ex kidnapped their daughters, and then she went to Greece and kidnapped them back after the courts took her side, and while most of her guests discuss overcoming trauma in some form, we had a nice talk about the project and how I shared that with my students.”
And while the Night Marauder continues to occupy her academic bandwidth outside of the classroom — she’s under contract with the University of Tennessee Press for a book on the case and her research, scheduled to be released in 2026 — it’s not her only accomplishment of late: She also has a piece in the forthcoming Smokies Life Journal, scheduled for release this spring, titled “Summers of Adventure: Reflections on Camp Margaret Townsend in Tremont.”
“This was based on an oral history project I started years ago with student assistance,” she said. “It kind of fell by the wayside, but Martha Hess ’67 (former MC registrar and a current volunteer in the Maryville College Archives) remembered the research and connected me to the magazine in time for the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scout camp’s start in the Smokies.”
A Girl Scouts camp in the Walker Valley area of the Smoky Mountains, Camp Margaret Townsend was in operation from 1925 to 1959. Smokies Life Journal is a twice-yearly publication of Smokies Life, a nonprofit association set up “to support the scientific, historical and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services to park visitors.”