Christmas Slay Ride: Most Mysterious and Horrific Christmas Day Murders (5 page)

Finally, the Italians had enough. One of them beckoned to “Needles” Ferry, who had been especially abusive. When he approached the man’s table, words were exchanged, and a bottle was smashed against his face. No sooner had Ferry hit the floor when the lights suddenly went out, guns were produced, and bullets rained on the White Handers.

Lonergan and Harms fell side by side, drilled in the head and chest. There was a loaded pistol in the Irish gang leader’s vest, and he grabbed for it even as he went down, but died before he could return fire. Ferry collapsed with lead peppering his face and stomach.

When the crowd fled for the door, Howard, Maloney, and Hart escaped with them, although Hart was wounded. Someone must have tried to drag Ferry outside, abandoning him when it was clear that he had died.

Al Capone after his arrest. Photo courtesy of Mario Gomes / Al Capone Museum

The police picked up Happy Maloney and Joe Howard after the female singer, Helen Logan, and the cigarette girl identified them. They in turn implicated James Hart, who stuck to the story about holiday partygoers shooting him.

Within days, detectives arrested eight Italians who had been in the Adonis Social Club that night. They included the club owners, John “Stickum” Stabile, “Fury” Agoglia, and Anthony Desso. Also caught in the net was future Chicago kingpin Al Capone, who was visiting his Brooklyn birthplace for the Christmas holidays.

Capone’s only son was in New York to have surgery. The Italian mobster explained to the police that he’d been so anxious about the boy’s recovery that when a friend dropped by and invited him to have a drink at the Adonis, his wife urged him to go, saying it would do him good.

Recalling the episode afterward, Capone said, “We were no sooner there, than the door opens and six fellows come in and start shooting. My friend had put me on the spot. In the excitement two of them were killed, and one of my fellows was shot in the leg. And I spent the Christmas holidays in jail.”

Crime historians have claimed that Capone arranged the elimination of Lonergan and his aides as a favor to his old Brooklyn associates, but as Patrick Downey points out in
Gangster City
, there is no evidence that the White Handers were lured to the Adonis for execution. They drank themselves into a fighting mood, summoned a cab, and rode off to meet their fates.

Lonergan’s sister Anna, who also happened to be the widow of “Wild Bill” Lovett, previous leader of the White Hand gang, told reporters that “foreigners” had engineered the massacre. “You can bet it was no Irish American like ourselves who would stage a mean murder like this on Christmas Day,” she said.

Capone, along with Joseph Howard, “Happy” Maloney, and four other suspects, were arraigned in Homicide Court and held without bail pending James Hart’s recovery, but the White Hander refused to testify and denied he had even set foot in the club. In the end they were all released for lack of evidence. No one was ever convicted in connection with the Adonis Club massacre.

'Pegleg' Lonergan's wake on December 30, 1925.

Photo courtesy of Mario Gomes / Al Capone Museum

Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan’s wake was held on December 30 at his home on Johnson Street. Scores of onlookers grouped outside the residence to stare, and reporters were naturally present. When the police saw two men leave the house with bulges under their jackets, they stopped and frisked the men, who turned out to be reporters with hidden cameras. They told the officers that they had tried to take pictures of the Lonergan wake but had been threatened with bodily harm by Matthew “Matty” Martin, the dead gangster’s brother-in-law.

When the police saw Martin and another man come outside, they approached, but the two gangsters went for their guns. Fortunately, they were subdued before any shots could be fired, and were hauled off to jail. Anna Martin, Lonergan’s sister, was forced to miss the rest of her brother’s funeral to assist her husband, who ended up being sentenced to two and a half years in jail. It was the only jail sentence anyone served in connection with the bloody Christmas evening.

The isolated cabin on Brooke Cove Road in Stokes County, North Carolina, no longer stands, but its former site is still popularly referred to as the old Lawson home. Many claim that the area is haunted, and considering that eight people were bludgeoned to death there on Christmas Day 1929, it’s hardly surprising. If any tragedy would leave a permanent imprint, the Lawson family massacre would definitely qualify.

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The Christmas Day photo. Hours later, all were dead except Arthur Lawson (left).

Charlie Lawson stands second from the right. Author's collection.

On Christmas Day 1929, 43-year-old tobacco farmer Charles Lawson took his family into town to buy them new holiday suits and dresses and get a family picture taken. The happy procession consisted of Lawson, his 37-year-old wife, Fannie, daughters
Marie (17), Carrie (12), Maybell (seven) and Mary Lou (four months) and sons Arthur (16), James (four) and Raymond (two).

In retrospect, this was strange behavior on his part, because the family was not well-off and this was an unheard-of extravagance for them.

The Lawsons were hard-working but poor. Charlie had been born on May 10, 1886 to Augustus and Nancy Lawson in a community known as Lawsonville, located ten miles from Danbury, the Stokes county seat. He married Fannie Manring in 1911 and had eight children with her, one of whom died in 1920 at the age of six. In 1918, Charlie moved his family to the Germantown area, where his brothers Marion and Elijah also lived, and by 1927, he had saved enough money to buy his own small farm on Brook Cove Road.

Lawson family home, 1929. Author’s collection.

Soon after the Lawsons returned home from town, the oldest son, sixteen-year-old Arthur, went to Germanton to visit one of his uncles. After their brother left, Carrie and Maybell declared that they were going to visit another aunt and uncle. Receiving permission, they headed off, passing the family tobacco barn en route.  Unbeknownst to anyone else, Charlie Lawson was hiding near the barn with a shotgun. When his daughters strolled within range, he opened fire. When they collapsed but continued to move, he beat them with the gun butt to make sure they were dead before concealing their bodies in the barn.

It was just before 1:20 p.m., and Lawson had more work to do.

He walked back to the family’s cabin, where his wife Fannie was sitting on the porch. She must have heard the gunshots that killed her two daughters, but likely assumed that Charlie was shooting at animals. If any last words were exchanged between husband and wife before he killed her too, they have been lost forever. When bullets ripped her chest apart she sank back in the chair and went silent.

Inside, seventeen-year-old Marie screamed when she heard the shot that murdered her mother. She had finished curling her hair in preparation for attending a Christmas play at church that night, and was standing in front of the fireplace when her father barged in and shot her.

Four-year-old James, terrified by the noise, ran and hid under a bed. Charlie persuaded him to come out and bludgeoned him to death before dispatching two-year-old Raymond and the baby, Mary Lou.

His grisly work complete, Charlie arranged all the bodies with their arms crossed over their still chests and rocks beneath their heads. Then he went into the nearby woods to hide.

When Arthur Lawson came home, he was horrified to find the bodies of his mother, two sisters, and brothers in the cabin. He sounded the alarm, and county law enforcement arrived along with extended family members and other local people. When the bodies of Carrie and Maybell were discovered in the tobacco shed, the question on everyone’s mind was, where was Charlie Lawson?

A few hours later, gunfire barked once from deep within the surrounding woods. A policeman who was trying to calm Arthur down ran in the direction of the noise and found Charlie dead from a single gunshot wound to the head. Lying nearby were letters he had written to his parents. Footprints encircling a large tree indicated that he had been pacing for a while before taking his own life. His pocket contained a crumpled note that read, “Blame nobody but I.”

The coroner, Dr. Helsabeck, convened a jury on the spot. There was no inquest per se. Everyone agreed that Charlie Lawson had annihilated his family, so an investigation was unnecessary. All Arthur could say was that his father had always been kind to the entire family, and he was at a loss to explain what had happened.

Contemporary newspaper stories stated that Dr. James Spottiswood, a resident at Johns Hopkins University, took Charlie’s brain back to the university to study it, in the hopes of trying to understand if the rampage had a physical motivator. The results, if any, were never made public.

The Lawsons were buried in a mass grave in Walnut Cove. Shortly afterward, Charlie's brother Marion turned the murder site into a tourist attraction. One of the displays was the cake that Marie Lawson had baked on the day she died. When sightseers started gouging out raisins to take as souvenirs, the cake was put under a glass dish and preserved for years.

Arthur Lawson, the sole survivor of a once-large family, never wrote about the tragedy, and anything he may have said about it has been lost to history.  On May 5, 1945, he was killed in a truck accident near Walnut Cove. There were no witnesses to the wreck, but it happened in an area where the highway was undergoing repairs, which may have caused him to lose control and crash into the other vehicle. He was survived by his wife, son, and three daughters.

******

Speculation over the murder continued. Some said Charlie had slowly gone crazy after suffering a head injury in a plowing accident. Others stated simply that he had been a monster in human form, just waiting for the perfect moment to unleash the evil of which he was capable.

A few people insisted that he did not murder his family at all, saying that the entire massacre had been staged to look like a murder-suicide. Proponents of this theory believed that he had witnessed a criminal act, and been killed along with his wife and children to ensure their silence. One rumor accused a black man with whom Charlie had supposedly fought, although this rumor soon died out because it was neither plausible nor consistent with the known facts.

Eighty-five years after the Lawson family massacre, there are still questions. What caused Charlie to break like he did? What did his last letters to his parents say? Why did he spare the life of his oldest son?

The answers may never be known, but a possible hint about Charlie Lawson’s motives came to light in 1990.

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That year, a book called
White Christmas, Bloody Christmas
came out. Authors M. Bruce Jones and Trudy J. Smith had interviewed several people, some of whom said they had heard rumors about an incestuous relationship between Charlie Lawson and his daughter, Marie, being the source of the tragedy. The day before the book was published, the authors got a call from Stella Lawson, daughter of Charlie’s brother Marion.

Stella had already been interviewed, but now she had something extra to reveal; the reason why Charlie had killed his family.

She said that at the funeral, which she had attended, she overheard a group of Lawson women saying how Fannie had been concerned about an improper relationship between her husband and daughter.

Hill Hampton, a close friend of the murdered family, was also interviewed. He said that he knew that the family was dealing with a serious problem. While he admitted to knowing what the problem was, he chose not to provide details.

In 2006, Trudy J. Smith brought out another book,
The Meaning of Our Tears
. She had investigated the incest rumor and uncovered convincing evidence. Marie Lawson’s close friend, Ella Mae, said that weeks before that fatal Christmas, Marie had told her that she was pregnant, and the baby was her father’s.

Ella Mae added that both Charlie and Fanny knew about the pregnancy. The conclusion was that Charlie couldn't bear the shame that would befall him and the entire family once Marie’s condition became more obvious, and his mind broke. He chose to kill his loved ones and himself rather than suffer community scorn and disgrace.

Although he could be kind, Charlie Lawson also had a temper, or a “strong hand,” in the parlance of the day. He publicly beat a man once, and it was later said that Arthur, who was tall and bulky for his age, had even started wearing his clothes to bed in case he had to jump up quickly to protect his mother or siblings.

Was that why Charlie had waited for Arthur to leave before commencing the rampage? With their protector gone, Fannie and the children would be far easier to dispatch.

Like the incestuous pregnancy story, it’s another theory that will probably never be confirmed.

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Years passed, but the tragedy continued to be remembered, thanks to a bluegrass murder ballad called “The Murder of the Lawson Family.” The Stanley Brothers recorded it in March, 1956, and in 2004, Columbia Records released it as “The Story of the Lawson Family” on the CD compilation
An Evening Long Ago
. Ghost stories, crime scene tours, and websites dedicated to the murders kept interest in the story alive.

In 2006, BOD Productions released a documentary called
A Christmas Family Tragedy
, which did more than just explore the massacre itself. Director Matt Hodges also revealed the impact the crime had (and continues to have) on the community and shone a spotlight on rural domestic violence.

The filmmakers believed that the deaths of Fannie Lawson and the children had been the act of a man determined to exercise the ultimate control over his family – life and death. At the documentary’s conclusion, they remarked:

The cold, hard, observable, tangible fact of the matter is that Charlie did it because he felt like he had the right to make that decision for his family by himself. He thought he had the right to make life-or-death decisions for other people without their knowledge or consent.

We hope we can give the spirits of the Lawson children a proper burial by honestly acknowledging their suffering and confronting the shocking brutality of what happened to them that day without blinking.

Maybe instead of forgiving and forgetting, we should be acting on warning signs and preventing the next tragedy from happening in our own neighborhoods.