Wednesday's weather might have tempted you to curl up and get lost in a good book.
However, you don't have to turn to a mystery novel to find an unusual caper.
That's because more than a $100,000 worth of rare coins have been stolen in the east.
Investigators arrested a suspect -- though Nine On Your Side's Philip Jones reports many of the coins could be lost forever:
“The coin collection belonged to Mr. Lionel Willis Sr., who ran a store in the Goose Creek area of Pamlico County on Neuse Road for many, many years,” said Pamlico County Sheriff’s Department investigator Billy Jewel.
He says that store was once an institution for people who lived in the area.
“If you were traveling that way and you wanted to stop and get a Coca-Cola, that's where you went,” he said.
But even more legendary than the store was Willis' coin collection.
He owned hundreds, if not thousands, of coins.
So when he recently died, his family wanted to take stock of the gold dollars, steel pennies, Morgan dollars and mercury dimes.
“When they opened the safes up, the coins were missing,” Jewel said.
An investigation was launched immediately.
Eventually, Jewel says, it became clear Willis' grandson, Shannon Todd Willis Jr., had been stealing the coins and selling them for months.
Jewel says Todd Willis Jr. has confessed to selling hundreds of those coins to two different shops in New Bern for a little under $12,000. Because the investigation is on-going and because those stores had no way of knowing the coins were hot, Jewel has asked us not to identify them in this story.
Investigators were able to recover very few coins from Todd Willis Jr.
The rest of the coins -- valued roughly between $180,000-$250,000 -- may never be found because they've either been sold by those shops or are still missing.
Todd Willis Jr. faces two counts of safecracking and felony larceny.
Deputies say he admits to stealing some of those coins. But, he told investigators some were already missing before he got to them.
Jewel says Willis Jr. got the combinations to the safes from other family members and that he used the money to support himself after he lost his job.
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