Barefoot Mysteries
The Haunting Legacy of the Lawson Family Killings
Can you imagine the sheer horror of a father brutally killing his entire family on Christmas Day? This chilling episode of Barefoot Mysteries takes you on a harrowing journey to uncover the shocking truth behind the Lawson family massacre in 1929. As your Barefoot Mystery Junkies, we delve into the events leading up to that fateful day.
But hold on, the mystery doesn't end there. In part two, we examine several spine-chilling claims that the Lawson Family spirits may be bound here on earth, unable to move on to their eternal rest until the truth is revealed
Theme Music courtesy of Uppbeat
Artist: Alex Besss
Track Title: Threatened
Theme Music courtesy of Uppbeat
Artist: Alex Besss
Track Title: Threatened
Contact us at: barefootmysteries @gmail.com
Can you imagine the sheer horror of a father brutally killing his entire family on Christmas Day? This chilling episode of Barefoot Mysteries takes you on a harrowing journey to uncover the shocking truth behind the Lawson family massacre in 1929. As your Barefoot Mystery Junkies, we delve into the events leading up to that fateful day.
But hold on, the mystery doesn't end there. In part two, we examine several spine-chilling claims that the Lawson Family spirits may be bound here on earth, unable to move on to their eternal rest until the truth is revealed
Theme Music courtesy of Uppbeat
Artist: Alex Besss
Track Title: Threatened
Theme Music courtesy of Uppbeat
Artist: Alex Besss
Track Title: Threatened
Contact us at: barefootmysteries @gmail.com
Hello and welcome to Barefoot Mysteries. I'm Pat And I'm Dave. Hey, dave, i've got another unsolved myth. Well, no, it's not really an unsolved mystery, it's more like an unsolved motive mystery.
Speaker 2:Motive mystery.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i feel like taking a shot at it.
Speaker 2:I was going to take two shots out of it, but if I only get one, I'm going to make it my best.
Speaker 1:Okay, i'm going to keep that gun steady. Oh, probably again. It's not the word I want to use here. All right, just to let everyone know, this episode does contain sensitive content about familial side, which some people may find very disturbing. The loss in family killing is an incredibly haunting case. It took place in 1929 in North Carolina. I do have to warn you that the details of the event are grim. In the circumstances, the killings left this entire community in shock and with heartache. As always, we invite you to kick off your shoes, get comfortable and join us, your Barefoot Mystery Junkies, as we explore the loss in family killing and the chilling questions that still linger nearly a century later.
Speaker 1:We begin with Charlie Lawson. It's 1918 and Charlie Lawson picks up his family and follows his younger brothers, elijah and Marion, to the Germantown area of North Carolina. They needed to work as tenant tobacco farmers in order to survive their move And it took them probably about two years before Charlie and Fanny were able to save up enough money to buy their own farm. So, moving day they move into their new farm. You've got Charlie, who's 43, his wife Fanny, who's 38, and they have seven children in tow Arthur, 19, marie, 17, carrie, 14, maribel, 10, two younger brothers, james and Raymond. James is seven and Raymond is five, and then the baby, mary Lou, who is five months old.
Speaker 1:They did have another son at one time. His name was William, he was born in 1914, but unfortunately he passed away from an illness in 1920. Yeah, that's sad. It is sad And you know we were talking about this earlier as far as they didn't have penicillin, they didn't have a lot of the medications that we have today, and I wonder how many lives might have been saved, especially children back in those days, if they had had this, had what we are lucky enough to have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, then we take for granted.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, it is now two years later on the farm and it is a week or so before Christmas And Charlie informs his family to get in the wagon. we're going to town, we're going to have a surprise on Christmas and we need to get ready for it. So he takes him into town and he buys them all very expensive clothes. He bought an outfit for himself, one for Fanny and all of the children.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, they must have been so excited. Wow, Can you imagine?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, very special.
Speaker 1:There was something else he had arranged for that day. He had arranged to have a family photo taken, a family portrait.
Speaker 2:Very formal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very formal portrait which you know, the back in the day that would be something that the rich people did. You know they had a portrait in their house of the families.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very, very expensive.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, which you know, and if you look back on it, okay, he's a poor tobacco farmer trying to earn his living out of the dirt. I'm sure all the children worked on that farm as well, and so he had the money to spend on all these new clothes and the portrait. That that's really you know. it's kind of a little odd.
Speaker 1:Yeah, seriously, but that's not the only thing that would. That seems kind of odd. If you look at how the family was placed for the portrait, that seems a little strange too, because you've got Charlie and his eldest daughter, marie, in the center of the picture, standing there in the center While the mother, fanny, is standing way over to the side holding the baby, and then the other children are surrounding Charlie and Marie, and it's almost like Charlie and Marie were the parents, surrounded by their children.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that does seem rather.
Speaker 1:Isn't it weird? Yeah, Yeah, it's just like when because I remember all these other parties always you know the staunch mother, maybe. Perhaps the mother is sitting in a chair and the father is standing Next to the mother, and then the children are everybody around now.
Speaker 1:Yeah Yeah, very strange. But in spite of the oddities surrounding the family photograph, they seem to be a very knit, close family and and the community seemed to feel that they were very, very well respected, and I'm sure that Charlie and his family were very well respected until Christmas Day of 1929. That all changed when Charlie committed one of the most shocking and inexplainable crimes in North Carolina history.
Speaker 2:That's not a good thing to be remembered for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah And yeah, especially this crime. This is unforgivable. Well, so let's go to the Lawson Farm on Christmas morning And, as you can imagine, i mean it must have been crazy busy at the farm. The children would have been the noise level alone, probably the children excited about Christmas. That was oh, christmas is finally here. Yeah, all that great excitement.
Speaker 1:Right, mom has to get you know the meal ready. And Marie, the oldest daughter, she woke up early and went into the kitchen so she could make the cake, so they would have a beautiful dessert for Christmas, because Christmas is special. Yeah, exactly. Then Charlie sent his oldest son, arthur, to town. you know you have to go to town. We don't have enough ammunition for our hunt later, because back then it was common in that area for the farmers to hunt rabbits on Christmas. So I would imagine that Charlie and Arthur were gonna go hunt rabbits and that's what they would be having for Christmas dinner.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would think that would be a very popular diet back then. I remember reading a lot of recipes for rabbit.
Speaker 1:Back in the, if you look at the old, old, old recipe books, i'm sure and farmer you know, like Francis Fanny Farmer or whatever recipes, i'm sure that that's the case And if you're poor you are gonna go and shoot rabbit and whatever wildlife you can to feed your family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially if you spend all your money on clothes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a picture Good going Charlie, so anyway. so Arthur heads off to town, and then Carrie, 14, and Maribel, 10, the two sisters. they were all excited because they were gonna go visit their aunt and uncle, who also happened to live on a farm very nearby. So here they, you know, they leave the house and they're giggling and talking about the oh, the fun day ahead and what's their Christmas surprise is gonna be, and just excitement. I bet their little feet never even touched the ground. They were so excited about going over. but they had no way of knowing that their father was hiding behind the barn with a loaded shotgun.
Speaker 2:No kidding.
Speaker 1:Oh Jesus, as they reached the rear end of the farmhouse or the barn I'm sorry, you know the farmhouse. When they reached the end of the barn where Charlie was hiding, he stepped out from behind the barn and he shot both his daughters And then he dragged him into the barn and out of sight.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Probably so no one would see them. Well, what a jerk. Oh God, jesus, fanny, his wife was sitting on the front porch and as soon as she heard the shotgun blast she jumped up. Not knowing what was going on, she jumped up and ran screaming into the house. Probably, you know, to tell the children you know, go hide, go hide something, something's going on, somebody bad here, exactly. Well, charlie, hearing his wife scream, lost no time in running after her. She had just barely made it inside the door when Charlie caught up with her and once again he pulled the trigger. Wow, in the kitchen, marie started screaming and she tried to run away from her father but wasn't able to avoid also receiving a shotgun to her back. Shotgun blast.
Speaker 2:Bastard.
Speaker 1:Now Marie's two younger brothers, little babies, James, who was seven, and Raymond, who was five. you can imagine scared to death going, oh my God, seeing what's happening. They tried to hide. They were so terrified. They tried to climb into a kitchen cabinet and hide from their father, their actual father, but they were unable to escape. They're making too much noise, probably breathing so hard that Charlie found them And, yes, he shot them as well. Now that leaves the youngest, five month old, Mary Lou. So he turned his attention to his daughter.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're kidding.
Speaker 1:Oh God, she, this poor little baby, only five months in the world and laying in her crib, i'm sure startled by the noise of the shotgun when he came up to her. And he did not shoot this daughter. What he did was he beat her, bludgeoned her which which we think, or they surmise that he use the butt end of his shotgun to do so And he fractured her skull Terrible. Well, yeah, here's your Christmas surprise, good Lord, no kidding. So poor Arthur is on his way back home. He returns back home And of course he doesn't see anything outside. But as soon as he opens that front door he sees his mother's feet and sees her laying dead on the floor. And then he sees, finds, marie And, of course, his two younger brothers and the baby he's got to be on high alert.
Speaker 1:He's shocked. He's like standing there, unable to move. Just he can't understand and it can't comprehend the horrors that his eyes are showing him. Now he's looking at his family. They're all there. They've been laid out on the floor. Now They're laying in their own blood pool of their own blood, but their heads have been placed on a rock. Each head is has been almost I almost want to say lovingly placed on a rock, and their hands have been placed over their chests, which is what you normally see, maybe in you know, before someone's buried very very propped up.
Speaker 1:right, you can imagine Arthur so in shock. His next thought is Oh my God, where's my father? My father's been killed too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would be who did this?
Speaker 1:Are they still here? So he starts running around trying to find his father and yelling for his father and unable to find him, so he goes back into town and notifies the police. and the police come out and they also begin searching for Charlie. Well, a couple of hours later, the police are all going around and they hear another shotgun blast. This one was coming from the woods. They rushed out to the woods and discovered Charlie laying dead next to a tree from a self inflicted gunshot wound.
Speaker 2:He should have done that to begin with. Oh God.
Speaker 1:He's two small little beagle dogs which they would have used for hunting back then. We're laying next to him. They were alive, but they were just kind of like, okay, we're not. I don't know what he's doing, but or maybe they knew he was dead, who knows? Now the police notice that there were footprints and the dirt around the base of the tree had been disturbed and there were footprints in the dirt that were going around and around the base of the tree. So what they speculated was that Charlie must have come out here, probably intended to kill himself as well or, from the guilt of having killed his family, decided to. you know what? what am I going to do? What have I done? Maybe circling? What have I done? What have I done Until he aimed the shotgun at his chest and killed himself?
Speaker 2:Thank goodness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, seriously. The police did see that there were a couple of letters laying in the dirt next to Charlie's body. They were addressed to Charlie's parents. One note he had written troubles can cause, and the other one read no one to blame.
Speaker 2:No one to blame, i wonder if that means just those two things Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm like some of. For me it's like well, troubles can cause you to do something you wouldn't normally to do, but then what does no one to blame mean? Those are some confusing notes right And it sounds like he probably was confused. Okay, but you know, i'm sitting here thinking, okay, there's two knows what would cause him to murder his. I mean, this is a cold blooded way to To kill your family is just. It's like, do you? oh, i don't know. It's just cold blooded and and makes no sense to me.
Speaker 2:It sounds like it was. It was planned pretty well too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it could, it could have been planned. I mean Because at first I thought, well gosh, maybe he just suddenly snapped. You know, it was like temporary insanity just suddenly, suddenly snap. But There were other theories, um, that surrounded the mode. You know, people are trying to come up with a motive of why did he do that. Why did he do that. And there were some neighbors and family, family Members, that at first thought well, you know, a few months before that he had hit his head, injured his head, when he was working on the farm, so Maybe he had suffered some sort of mental Damage because of that some kind of setback perhaps yeah, something that that, and maybe it had taken that long for the.
Speaker 1:The mental illness just started play with him and it was because of of that injury that he that he'd had to his head. But an autopsy was performed at the John Hopkins Hospital in Maryland and They could find no evidence of trauma to the brain, although they did notice something rather odd with his brain. He is the. The injury he had apparently had not affected his brain, but they did notice that there was a Section of his brain that was underdeveloped.
Speaker 2:Well, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how does one section of the brain not grow, with the other not enough blood flow? or maybe it was during child, i don't know, i don't know. Or here's another theory Could it have been because there was a rumor That his oldest daughter, marie, had been continually molested by Charlie And that she was pregnant because of it? That might have changed his thought patterns.
Speaker 2:Could it be that that was more than a rumor?
Speaker 1:that it was true and Maybe he couldn't face the humiliation that, the disgrace that was going to be brought on his, on Marie, his entire family and himself. There were a lot of, you know, people trying to figure it out, and it's just something that you can't really figure out. It wasn't until sometimes, it wasn't until some time in the 1990s, that an author, there was an author that was writing a book about it, and so, of course, he was interviewing people. And at that time in the 1990s, when he was interviewing people, someone had told them.
Speaker 1:One of the sisters in law, sister-in-law said, said that Fanny, the wife, had confided to them That she was very worried. She was concerned about what she thought there was a sexual relationship between her daughter and Charlie. And You know, back then it was a different day in time and, and she may have suspected it, she may have even known about it, but was afraid of what would happen to her and maybe her family if If she, you know, blew the whistle, yeah, did anything about it. And it was during that same time with that author that it came out That a friend of Marie's, that the author, know that Marie had confided in her, that she was indeed pregnant, and that her father was The child's father as well.
Speaker 2:Hmm.
Speaker 1:Wow, oh my gosh. Whatever the motive, i'm gonna say that he bought new clothes, expensive new clothes. He spent money on an expensive family portrait and He got rid of Arthur. You know, let me get Arthur out of the way because Arthur's 19. He's big. He may have been afraid that Arthur was gonna stop him. If you put all those two, all three of those together, i would say that this was not a Momentary lapse in insanity or that he suddenly snapped. This sounds like he. It was totally Really well thought out of. He planned everything, which makes it a premeditated act of cold-blooded murder.
Speaker 1:Yes that's how it sounds to me.
Speaker 2:I kind of lean toward that Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was. There's just just too much pointing to that. Now. This motive may never be fully understood, but one thing is certain that That legacy of that tragedy lives on. The story of this family massacre has been immortalized. I bet you didn't know this, huh in popular culture. They've had a couple of books written about it, there have been songs written about it and there was even a movie That was reduced. It was called a Christmas family tragedy. So I mean, it's their legacy is living on. Probably not the way Charlie wanted his legacy, i agree. But oh my gosh, and here we are. All this time has passed And yet it still remains One of the most haunted and disturbing cases of mass murder in American history.
Speaker 2:It just doesn't make any sense where he came from and took it to yeah what?
Speaker 1:it is just awful, it's just It's. You know, almost a hundred years later, and, and here we are not able to figure out Why it happened. Now, you know what, dave? did I mention haunting? I Think you did. I think at the very beginning.
Speaker 2:I mentioned it You did.
Speaker 1:Yes, i did tell you it was a haunting case, right You? you had mentioned that. Yes. Well Want to know why Um.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Because there's more to the loss and legacy. Oh, you're kidding. Oh, but if you want to hear more. You're gonna have to wait and listen to part two, which I'm hoping will post shortly.
Speaker 2:Well, i've, i've got my, uh, my bare feet on the ground and ready to go. Fantastic, all right. Well, we're gonna look forward to that.
Speaker 1:And, in the meantime, all of you out there in listening land, listening land, we love to get feedback from you. What is it that you want to hear? Are there stories that that you have, or even stories that you've written that you want us to read Online? we'd love, we'd love to do that, and we love getting our our listeners feedback. Some of the feedback we've got And has just made us want to do even more agree, so if you would, like to.
Speaker 1:Send in your stories or or ideas for us to to research and and and bring Online, can they? can they just talk to us about it too Sure Just give me a call.
Speaker 2:You know we're easy to talk to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know what? it probably be better if they just Attach the stories to an email or just wrote us an email with the story and shoot us an email real quick.
Speaker 1:We'll get it real fast and our email address, of course, is Barefoot mysteries at gmailcom, barefoot mysteries at gmailcom, and Dave and I will take a look at them. And again, we love getting your emails and and hearing all the all, all the good things that you You have for us, and your suggestions as well. We take them to heart, you bet we do. In the meantime, my dear wonderful listeners, as always, until next episode, please remember to be good to each other and be safe.