On Christmas Day 1929, Charlie Lawson committed the chilling act of murdering his wife and children. What’s darker is the reason why, according to some true crime authors. But are they right, and what do we know today about the rare phenomenon of familicide?
• “Lawson Family Murders: A Look Back After 90 Years” in the Greensboro News & Record
• “Bloodiest Christmas Massacres #1: The Lawson Family Slaughter” on Gizmodo
• “Crazy Farmer Kills Wife, 6 Children” in the New York Times
• “Lawson Family: Display Centers on Stokes Tragedy in 1929, When Charlie Lawson Took a Gun and Killed His Kin” in the Winston-Salem Journal
• Deadly Secrets: The Lawson Family Murder by FOX8 WGHP-TV
• Lawson Family Murders Museum on Strange Carolina
• White Christmas, Bloody Christmas by M. Bruce Jones with Trudy J. Smith (Upwords Pubns, 1990)
• The Meaning of Our Tears: the True Story of the Lawson Family Murders by Trudy J. Smith (DTS Group Inc., 2016)
• Most Notorious interview with Trudy J. Smith
• “Study: Family Killers Are Usually Men and Fit One of Four Distinct Profiles” on Wired UK
• Men Who Murder Their Families: What the Research Tells Us in the National Institute of Justice Journal, Issue 266
• Family Annihilators: The Psychological Profiles of Murderous Fathers, honors thesis by Taylor Oathout at University at Albany, State University of New York
There are all kinds of mass murderers roaming around in the world. You have the type who shoot up offices because they’re disgruntled, those who shoot up Walmart because they’re racist, the handful who convince disciples to drink poisoned Kool-Aid to satisfy their delusions of grandeur, and so, so many more. Of this strand of psychopath, the family annihilator might be the most shocking of all. They kill multiple family members, one right after the other, in an indefensible act called familicide.
These grisly murders always leave us searching for an explanation. After the FBI’s profiling efforts began, and psychologists started studying mass murderers, we learned a lot about who these killers are and what motivates them. Family annihilators are usually white men. They often have a history of abuse, whether physical, emotional, sexual or a combination of the three. Their crimes are premeditated. They think about what they’re gonna do and how they’re gonna to do it. Their killing sprees are most likely to happen when they have access to a gun. In the case of Charlie Lawson, it was multiple guns.
On a cold day in 1929, Charlie used an assortment of firearms to massacre seven members of his family before finally turning the gun on himself. 90 years later, we’re still searching for a reason why. Nobody knows. But there are an awful lot of theories — and some are as gruesome as the crime itself.
I’m Courtney E. Smith and you’re listening to SONGS IN THE KEY OF DEATH. This is the story of the Lawson family murders, in which a dead man tells no tales.
The Lawsons were sharecroppers. Charlie was the patriarch; his wife of some 20 years was Fannie. After years of work, Charlie finally saved up enough to buy a tobacco farm near his brother’s in Germantown, North Carolina back in 1927. It came with a too-small 200-year-old cabin, where they lived with their seven children. Yeah... Charlie and Fannie had a big old family in a teeny tiny house. Marie was the eldest, she was 17. Then came Arthur, 16; Carrie, 12; Maybelle, 7; James, 4; Raymond, 2; and baby Mary Lou was just four months old. All seemed well on the Lawson homestead — until December of 1929.
Part of the family annihilator’s profile is to pick an auspicious date for their crime, because linking it with a major event increases the significance. Maybe it’s Father’s Day or a wedding anniversary or their birthday. For Charlie Lawson, it was Christmas Day.
Christmas morning at the Lawson farm started out with a cake. Marie got up early to bake something for the holiday. She made a raisin cake — but we’ll get back to that. Charlie and Arthur went out hunting in the morning. Local reports say it snowed between six and eight inches that day, so it was an unusually white Christmas. Later on, Arthur wanted to do some more hunting with his cousin, but they were out of bullets. So the boys set off for town to buy some after Charlie told them he was out. Listener, he was not out of ammo.
In the early afternoon, Carrie and Maybell decided to visit their aunt and uncle’s nearby farm to wish them a merry Christmas. What they didn’t know is that their father was laying in wait about a quarter mile away, in the barn where they dried tobacco. When the girls passed by, they became Charlie’s first kills. He shot Carrie and Maybell, before bludgeoning them to death. He didn’t just leave the bodies out in the open, though. Charlie took them into the barn, so they wouldn’t be seen. Then he carefully positioned them. It’s said that he placed stones under each of their heads, like grave markers. Does that sound dark and twisted? Like the actions of someone who isn’t well? Maybe, but it’s par for the course. Arranging the bodies to make a presentation of their grotesque work is a hallmark for family annihilators.
The Lawsons lived in a part of the country where hunting, for fun and for food, was commonplace. So it’s possible no one even noticed the gunshots — and Fannie may not have thought twice when she saw Charlie walking back to the house with a gun or two. But...she probably realized something was wrong when Charlie took aim at her. By then, it was too late.
Fannie was found on the porch, dead from a shotgun blast to the chest. Marie was next, her body was found inside, beside the fireplace — also shot through the chest. The clock in the house froze at 1:25 p.m. when she was killed. A neighbor boy was there when the two women were attacked. He ran from the Lawson house back to his own, where he told his family what was happening. But Charlie’s killing spree was almost over.
Next, he went after James and Raymond, the toddlers. Some say he bludgeoned the two boys to death, while others say he shot them. The last to die was his infant daughter Mary Lou, who he bludgeoned with the butt of his gun. When the bodies were found, they were all lying with pillows under their heads and hands folded across their chests, as if they were in a deep sleep. It seems like that has to signify something. Did he want them to be comfortable? In Charlie’s mind, were they happier and safer now that they were dead?
Later that day, Charlie’s brother Elijah and his sons stopped by for a Christmas visit. Instead, they found a horrifying scene. The police were rounded up and someone went to get Arthur, still at the store buying ammunition. Charlie, on the other hand, was gone. He took off and was hiding out in the woods with the family dogs WHO REMAIN INNOCENT OF ANY CRIME, THEY WERE VERY GOOD DOGS.
Hours later, around 5 p.m., a gunshot echoed out. Police and neighbors followed the sound. There they found Charlie, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He spent those hours pacing around a tree and weighing his options. In his pockets, the police found two notes. Neither formed a complete thought or revealed anything about why he did it. One was unfinished and read: “Trouble can cause…” The other simply said: “Nobody to blame.”
After they found Charlie’s body, the book was pretty much closed on the Lawson family slayings. The suspect was dead. There’s not a lot of official information about why Charlie Lawson killed his family. We didn’t know as much about mental illness and mass killers back then. But there’s a whole hell of a lot of speculation, gossip, and conjecture that has lived on with this story.
The first theory to explain it is a brain injury. Some time before the murders, Charlie had an accident with a pickaxe type tool. He hit himself in the head with it. But the idea that brain damage would explain all this was debunked by Dr. Spottswood Taylor, brother of Stokes County Sheriff John Taylor.
Spottswood heard about the murders while he was home for the holidays from his internship at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. He helped the local coroner with the inquest and volunteered to have Charlie’s brain examined. Their autopsy found no evidence that Charlie suffered a traumatic brain injury. So, sorry if you wanted this to be an open and shut case! It’s not.
Then there’s a motive that gets unfairly shrugged off, in my opinion: money. As you’ll recall from history class, there was another inauspicious event in 1929: Black Tuesday. The stock market crashed just two months prior. If Charlie was having financial issues with the farm already, the crash could have set him off. Financial distress is a known risk factor for family annihilators — usually combined with other mental health issues, including depression and feelings of worthlessness. They call it suicide-by-proxy when the swirl of darkness leads a killer to think that the only way to save their family is by exterminating them.
One creepy artifact remains: the Lawsons’ family portrait, which they took in Winston-Salem just weeks before the murders. Charlie organized a trip for everybody into the city to buy new outfits and have the picture made. It was his Christmas gift to the family.
The image is haunting to look at now. No one’s smiling. And sure, that was the style in photos back then, but it makes them all look dead eyed and miserable. It’s also unsettling, because it’s so hard to look at those kids, knowing what a tragic end awaits — and how soon it’s gonna come.
Marie and Arthur stand shoulder to shoulder in the back row of the photo, next to Charlie and Fannie, with the four younger children seated on a bench in front. Fannie holds the baby tightly in her arms. Arthur is already bigger than his father, taller and with a larger build. Marie is the only one looking straight into the camera. It makes it feel like she’s looking right at you.
The point of telling you about this is to say: it was unusual for a family of their position to buy all new clothes at a city store and take a portrait. It was an expensive treat. Some reports say Charlie spent all of the family’s money on that, taking his last bit from the bank just before he killed everyone.
Family annihilators tend to think of their family as property. Since most are men, when they feel their control over the family unit is threatened, they act out. It’s the quintessential example of Toxic Masculinity. If he can’t take care of em, what use is he? And what reason do they have to go on?
There’s one more theory that people just love to entertain. It comes to us courtesy of a book from 1990, by the father and daughter team of Bruce Jones and Trudy Smith, called White Christmas, Bloody Christmas. Yes seriously, that’s the title — clearly they’re paragons of nuanced storytelling and stick to verifiable facts.
White Christmas, Bloody Christmas was printed in a small press run, and it’s a confusing mish-mash of first person story telling with no sources noted and conversations with locals about their recollections of the event. It’s hard to tell what’s fact and fiction — and frankly, it’s just bad true crime writing. It’s enough to make any editor with a red pen get an itch.
The amateur historians behind it printed a depraved story of incest told to them by a Lawson family cousin, Stella Boles. Stella said Charlie was abusing Marie and got his daughter pregnant. According to Stella, Fannie discovered the pregnancy shortly before the murders and told Stella’s aunt the ugly truth.
In a 2006 follow-up book by Smith, The Meaning of Our Tears, a friend of Marie’s also said that Marie admitted she was pregnant with her father’s child just weeks before the massacre. But there’s a big issue: Marie’s autopsy...showed no pregnancy.
Is it possible the local coroner kindly omitted this information from the autopsy report? If Charlie’s brothers asked to keep it quiet, I suppose the coroner could’ve obliged. It’s not impossible, but it is unlikely. Back then, people wanted to know what Charlie’s motive was just as much. It seems doubtful they would have covered this up.
Even the authors of the book find the incest story hard to believe. In an interview with the Most Notorious podcast, Smith said: “To this day, I can’t tell you 100 percent. I can only tell you what people told us. And that’s the way I wrote it.”
Now for you sleuths at home, this is not how journalism works. Ideally, the claim would come from the abuse survivor. Obviously, that isn’t possible in this case. Journalists prefer to have some evidence, especially for a claim this old. If Marie’s cousin or friend wrote about their conversations in a diary or a letter after Marie made her confession — or told another friend who could confirm the conversation — that would be something. The claim would be corroborated. But it’s not.
Sexual abuse, either as a victim or a perpetrator, is a possible motive in familicide, although it’s rare. It’s an appealing story because it makes everything easier to rationalize. If Charlie abused his daughter, then we can just say, “oh, well this man was troubled and troubled in a way I could never be.” It makes the story safer to tell, because it couldn’t happen to us. But I don’t buy the incest story, and I don’t think you should. The most sensational reason isn’t necessarily the most likely reason.
So it goes without saying that this crime was thee talk of Stokes County, of North Carolina, of all Appalachia. It even made the front page of the New York Times under the headline: Crazy Farmer Kills Wife, Six Children — which...yup, that sums it up. They say 5,000 people attended the funeral. And it caught the attention of a local songwriter named Kid Smith — Walter to his mother — who wrote a ballad about it.
By March 1930, a mere three months later, Smith and the Carolina Buddies recorded “The Murder of the Lawson Family” in New York City for Columbia Records. In the podcast Deadly Secrets: The Lawson Family Murder, bluegrass enthusiast Kenny Roar says it became one of the label’s best selling hillbilly singles of the year — that’s what what they used to call country music...hillbilly. It moved more than 8,000 units, even as the Depression was starting.
The song was re-recorded in the next year by a few other local groups, like the Red Fox Chasers and the E.R. Nace Singers. But the definitive version can be found on An Evening Long Ago, a live recording by the Stanley Brothers from 1956. It’s a lot more polished, as one would expect from Ralph and Carter Stanley, and it sounds almost like a hymn. They suck the darkness right out of the whole thing, focusing on a single question: why?
That song wasn’t the end of the strange Lawson family legacy though. The postscript to this unsettling story is that Charlie Lawson’s brothers left the house open to visitors, charging looky lou's 25 cents to walk through the still blood stained house. They sold pamphlets, photos, and sodas to the crowds who just couldn’t get enough.
The makeshift museum was open for five years. Five years! They did it to raise money so Arthur could keep the farm, since he was now solely responsible for the mortgage. They left Marie’s Christmas cake, iced and decorated with raisins, under glass in the kitchen, preserved along with everything else as a horrible reminder of the darkest Christmas there ever was.
Thanks for listening to this particularly dark episode of Songs in the Key of Death. For more on the Lawson Family murders, please see our show notes. Particularly helpful in putting this script together were the Greensboro New & Record’s review of the case 90 years later and Taylor Oathout’s honors thesis on family annihilators for SUNY-Albany. We also reference theories put forth in a pair of books written by M. Bruce Johnson and Trudy J. Smith.
Now, get out your cake covers and dust off your search party boots, because we’ve got Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Nathan Salsburg with their take on “The Murder of the Lawson Family.”
