She started her career in Richmond, Virginia in 1996 as assistant editor at both Style Weekly and its sister publication, Inside Business magazine, and spent 11 years at the Hook in Charlottesville, where she served first as senior editor and then as chief editor. She is the recipient of more than two dozen journalism awards from the Virginia Press Association, including multiple first place prizes for investigative reporting and feature writing. Her written work has appeared in publications including Las Vegas Weekly and Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and she has appeared on numerous national television news programs including Dateline NBC, Primetime Crime, Nancy Grace, as well as on the Headline News, Investigation Discovery and E! News channels.