Alamance County’s incoming clerk of superior court, Kristie Culler, practically grew up inside Alamance County’s Historic Court House, where she spent much of her youth watching her mom, Patty Miller – a longtime legal assistant in private practice who also worked 12½ years in the clerk’s office as a deputy clerk and assistant clerk of court before retiring in 2011.
Culler, who currently serves as the county’s assistant clerk of superior court, was appointed earlier this month by Alamance County senior resident superior court judge Andy Hanford to serve the remaining two-year term of clerk of court Meredith Edwards, who was elected last month as the county’s fifth district court judge.
Culler’s schedule is about to become more hectic than it already is. As clerk, she’ll be responsible for supervising numerous judicial and administrative court functions that include presiding over nearly four dozen types of civil court actions; overseeing the recording of every court document that flows through the county’s court system; receiving and disbursing funds from court fees, traffic tickets, and fines; and overseeing 52 court employees. She’ll also be meeting with her fellow clerks from other counties in the Piedmont-Triad region and continuing, as she does currently, to take classes in her field through the School of Government at UNC.
“I’m hoping it’ll be a seamless transition,” says Culler. “I literally will be walking next door from my office [that adjoins the clerk of court’s office just off the rotunda in the Historic Court House].” She had served as one of the dozens of Alamance County deputy clerks of court for nearly a decade before her promotion to second-in-command after Edwards won her first term as clerk in November 2018.
Two halves of the same Post-It
In a recent interview with The Alamance News, Culler reflected on her upbringing in Burlington, her early interest in the legal profession, and how an election night “watch party” brought her and her husband of 20 years, then an Alamance County sheriff’s deputy, together.
As an assistant in the Alamance County attorney’s office, Culler (then Kristie Miller) met her future husband on November 5, 2002 at the Alamance County Historic Court House, where county staff, court employees, and law enforcement had gathered to watch local election results roll in.
“You can ultimately say sheriff Johnson brought us together,” Culler says, explaining that the 2002 general election coincided with Terry Johnson’s election to the first of his five terms as Alamance County sheriff.
Future husband Dean Culler initially tried to woo her with a Post-It note that he’d relayed to Kristie through one of the female assistants at the sheriff’s office.
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It didn’t go over as well as he’d apparently hoped.
“I tore it in half,” Culler says with a laugh. Instead, she sent the other half of the Post-It back to him, with a note that read, “‘I was raised not to call boys.’”
Fate found some other way. The couple wound up dating two years before tying the knot in 2004 and becoming the parents to four “fur babies,” including a Golden Irish (a cross between a Golden Retriever and Irish Setter), West Highland Terrier, Redbone Coonhound, and a German Shepherd mix.
Though the couple never had children of their own, Culler, 51, has a 32-year-old stepson who lives in Colorado with his wife and their four children. Husband Dean, five years her senior and a native of Jamestown, retired from the Alamance County sheriff’s office in late 2023 but now works part-time as a courtroom bailiff.
Culler’s career charted a similar path as her mother, Patty Miller, a deputy clerk in the special proceedings division who later became second-in-command as the assistant clerk of superior court. Her mother tenure began under longtime clerk of court Louise Wilson (Alamance County’s clerk of court from 1958 to 1998) and continued under former clerks Diane Pickett and David Barber, as well as James “Hunt” Johnson, who was appointed in 2009 and served until Barber’s election in November 2010.
A lifelong education
“I kind of feel like I grew up here, coming to see my mom,” Culler recalls. “I always knew it was a place I wanted to work.” It wasn’t until after her mother’s retirement in 2011, after 12 ½ years as a deputy clerk of court and assistant clerk, that Culler could apply to work in Alamance County’s court system, where she says nepotism was frowned upon.
Born in Little Washington (in Beaufort County), Culler moved as an infant with her parents to Burlington and later graduated from Williams High School and went on to attend East Carolina University, with plans to work in the legal profession.
But at 19, Culler took a job with a business law professor at ECU that ignited a passion for the practical, rather than academic, application of the law and ultimately shifted her trajectory. “I fell in love with it; that started my career,” she recalls.
Though naturally introverted, Culler says she was drawn to the profession by a desire to serve other people.
“It’s not always easy, but I love it because of the people that work there, the people I work with, the lawyers and judges – and the public,” she elaborates. “They’re not coming here at their best moment, [so] to be able to help them, to listen to them is very rewarding. For them to say ‘thank you’ just fills my heart.”
Culler has since dedicated her 31-year career in the legal profession to learning on the job, both in the Alamance and Guilford County courts system and in private practices specializing in criminal, civil, family, real estate, and corporate law. Her prior public-sector legal experience also includes working for the Alamance County attorney’s office, under then-county attorney David I. Smith.
“I will forever be learning,” says Culler. “Our laws are always changing, and we have to keep up with that.”
Culler’s boss, Edwards, describes her second-in-command as her “right hand” in navigating unprecedented challenges, such as the Covid-19 pandemic; the subsequent launch of eCourts, the state’s online filing and document management system; and the retirements and resignations of about a dozen longtime deputy clerks.
“About nine or 10 people left since April due to eCourts implementation, and with that, a lot of institutional knowledge left,” Culler explains. “It has created a lot more work and a lot more steps than we were doing before. For old-timers like me, although the contents are the same, all the job descriptions have changed; all the steps we take now are completely different. You have the new people who’ve come in [and] love it, but the [institutional] knowledge isn’t there. So we’re in a rebuilding process that’ll take a few years.”
“We’ve had good times here, through some real adversity, from the [2020] protest cases to eCourts,” she acknowledges. While she hasn’t fully “come back down” since learning the news of her appointment, Culler is already looking to the future and planning to run as a Republican candidate for clerk of court in 2026.
“It’s outside of my comfort zone,” Culler says. “I’m an introvert. I love politics – to watch it, not do it. I don’t think [this job] should be [political],” she says, adding that Hanford, a Democrat, hadn’t based his decision about who to appoint as clerk on partisan affiliation. “I’m so thankful to judge Hanford for trusting in me,” she says.
More importantly, Culler credits God. “I would not be in this position if it were not for Him,” she says. “I feel like all of this happened for a reason. I’ve prayed a lot during this process [and] put it in His hands.”
Opening doors for others
In her spare time, Culler and her husband enjoy traveling – at least once a year to far-flung destinations throughout Europe – cheering on ECU’s Pirates during football season, and spending time with their family and friends. “I’m a simple person; I like to work, to meet new people, and to read.”
Culler also serves on the steering and executive committees for Sustainable Alamance, a nonprofit re-entry program that helps former inmates find jobs, housing, and other resources after they’re released from prison, with a goal of interrupting the cycle of recidivism and enabling participants to become self-sufficient, productive citizens.
“If you’re willing to do the hard work it takes, to get a job, to stay clean, this program works,” says Culler. “I’m passionate about it. If [they’re] willing to get help, that’s great for society, to give people what they need to get back on their feet.”
Culler is scheduled to be sworn into office as clerk of superior court next week, on January 2.
Edwards is also scheduled to be sworn into office as a district court judge next week.
