The Lawson Family: A Christmas Murder
Happy Holidays horror freaks! Today I bring you one of the most famous murders to happen on Christmas day: The Lawson Family murder. Back in December 25th, 1929 Charles Davis “Charlie” Lawson murdered his wife and six of his seven children.
Charles Lawson married Fannie Manring in 1911, they had eight children. The Lawsons worked as tenant tobacco farmers, having their own farm on Brook Cove Road.
The murder
In 1929, shortly before Christmas, Lawson took Fannie, his wife, and their seven children, Marie, Arthur, Carrie, Maybell James, Raymond, and Mary Lou into town to have a family portrait taken. This led to think that the murder was premeditated since this type of behavior was uncommon would for a working-class rural family of the era.
Lawson first shot his daughters, Carrie and Maybell, as they were setting out to their uncle and aunt’s house on the afternoon of December 25. He shot them with a 12-gauge shotgun and made sure that they were dead by bludgeoning them, then he placed the bodies in the tobacco barn. He returned to the house and shot Fannie, who was on the porch. Marie was inside while James and Raymond where attempting to find a place to hide. Lawson shot Marie, found and killed the two boys, and at last he killed the baby, Mary Lou. After killing his family, he went into the woods and, several hours later, shot himself. The only survivor was Arthur, his eldest son, whom he had sent on an errand just before committing the crime. The bodies of the family members were found with their arms crossed and rocks under their heads.
The Lawsons were laid to rest in a family graveyard established in 1908, originally for the use of the W. D. Browder family and selected friends and neighbors. Today, it is open for burials only for direct descendants of W. D. Browder, owing to limited plot availability. Arthur Lawson was killed in a 1945 motor accident (age 32), leaving a wife and four children.
Theories of the murder
Lawson had a head injury months before the murder; some family and friends theorized that it had altered his mental state and was related to the massacre. However, an autopsy and analysis of his brain found no abnormalities.
It was not until the book White Christmas, Bloody Christmas was published in 1990 that a claim of Charlie sexually abusing Marie surfaced, beginning with an anonymous source who heard a rumor during a tour of the Lawson home shortly after the murders. More support for this theory was revealed in The Meaning of our Tears, published by the same author in 2006. A close friend of Marie Lawson’s, Ella May, came forward and disclosed that a few weeks before Christmas 1929, Marie confided in her that she was pregnant by her own father and that both he and Fannie knew about this. Another close friend and neighbor to the Lawson family, Hill Hampton, stated that he knew of serious problems going on within the family, but declined to elaborate.
Murder of the Lawson family
