Christmas Mass Murder: The Lawson Family

Has commercialized holiday cheer got you down? Do you find yourself longing for the ghoulishness of the spooky season amid December decorations? You’ve come to the right place. In the darkest time of the year and in the spirit of traditional ghostly Christmas celebrations, enjoy our “12 Slays of Christmas” series. For twelve days leading up to Christmas day, we will thrill and chill you with analysis of Christmas-related horror films, lore, true crime, and more.

Christmas is supposed to be a festival of good cheer—the one time of the year that you can get together with your loved ones and forget the transgressions of the previous 12 months. You join around the fire, exchange presents, eat too much, drink too much, and spend the day basking in the enjoyment that family life brings.

The one thing you don’t expect is for somebody in your tribe to brutally and callously murder every single member of your household, for reasons unknown or otherwise. Sadly, on December 25th, 1929, this is exactly what happened to the Lawson family in Germanton, NC after their patriarch, Charles Davis Lawson, slaughtered his wife and six of his children.

Just before Christmas, 1929, Charles “Charlie” Lawson took the unusual step of heading into town with his family to have a portrait taken. Normally, this wouldn’t have been seen as strange, but due to the fact that he was a working-class farmer and had to spend a lot of money to make sure his wife and seven children had brand new clothes, it raised a few eyebrows among the locals.

Charlie wasn’t from an affluent background. His parents had been sharecroppers, a practice whereby they rented a small patch of land and in return gave a portion of their yield over each year to the landowner, and this was not a practice you could use to get wealthy.

He had met and married Fannie Manring in 1911, and after they’d saved up enough money by farming tobacco, they bought a rundown farm in 1927 close to his brother. This marriage was fruitful when it came to children, and Charlie and Fannie had eight in total: Arthur, Marie, Carrie, Maybell, James, Raymond, and Mary Lou. The third-born, William, died aged six after he contracted an illness.

For all intents and purposes, Charlie was a devoted if occasionally strict father, so even though a few of the townsfolks seemed suspicious that he had splashed out the kind of money he really shouldn’t have been able to afford to, no one expected the horror that was to come.

That Christmas morning, Marie (17) woke to bake a cake for the family festivities that had been planned, and at some point, while she was doing this, her sisters Carrie (12) and Maybell (7) set off to visit their aunt and uncle who lived close by. They would never make it. Charlie was waiting by the tobacco barn, and as soon as they came into view, he cut them down with a 12-gauge shotgun. To make sure they were truly dead, he also bludgeoned them with the weapon for good measure.

From here, he returned home and opened fire on his wife Fannie (37) who was sitting on the porch, killing her instantly. He then entered the house to be greeted by a hysterical Marie, who he wasted no time in shooting dead before he searched the house and found James (4) and Raymond (2), who had tried to hide. He killed both of the boys as well before turning his attention to Mary Lou, who was only four months old. He chose not to use the business end of his gun this time but beat her to death instead. Charlie then walked out into the woods and after a few hours committed suicide.

The only survivor of this massacre was Arthur (16) who was off running an errand. Depending on which story you believe, either he returned home to find his family murdered or visiting relatives did, but all the reports agree that their bodies were laid out, with their arms crossed across them and pillows under their heads. Except for his first two victims who were found in this manner in the barn, but had rocks under their heads instead. Along with a police officer who was with him, Arthur eventually found his father who had letters with him that he had written to his parents.

Nobody knows why Charles ‘Charlie’ Lawson snapped on Christmas morning and performed one of the most unspeakable acts a human being can, but as you can imagine, there is plenty of speculation surrounding just what drove him to slaughter all but one member of his family.

For a long time, his surviving relatives and friends pointed to the fact that Charlie had suffered some form of head trauma a few months before the incident, and they were convinced that that was the source of the madness that drove him to such an unspeakable act.

In fact, insanity was seen as the sole reason for his actions and was even reported as fact in the Twin-City Sentinel the day after;

Believed to have become suddenly insane, Charles Lawson, 42, who lived near Germanton in Stokes County, Christmas Day killed his wife, Fannie, 38, and six of his seven children and then committed suicide.

For over 60 years this was taken as gospel. It was seen as the only logical reason for Charlie doing what he did, but, initially, I was convinced that this couldn’t be the case as during my research I failed to find evidence of any kind to back it up. I spent hours scouring the internet, searching for the slightest morsel of information to say that Charlie had had any kind of accident or that his behavior had deviated from his normal pattern in any way, shape, or form.

In fact, so convinced was I that this angle was false that I wrote a whole paragraph on it:

“Firstly, no-one has ever said what this accident was, at least, as far as I can tell while doing my research. If he had suffered a head trauma wouldn’t there be some form of a record? And if it was the cause of such a nefarious deed then surely there would’ve been some telltale signs? If he was suffering the effects of, say, a fractured skull then wouldn’t there have been a noticeable change in his behavior? Perhaps he would’ve been susceptible to mood swings, or maybe he would’ve been prone to sudden violent outbursts, yet there is nothing that I can find that suggests that Charlie Lawson appeared, at least on the outside, any different to those who knew him. Secondly and possibly the most damaging evidence to this theory is that when they performed an autopsy upon him at Johns Hopkins Hospital, no abnormalities were found in his brain, seemingly blowing the whole premise out of the water.”

It took my incredibly patient editor to find what I was looking for in a North Carolina newspaper, Greensboro News & Record. It’s an article written by Susie C. Spear that looks back at the events that happened 90 years previous, and even though the evidence she lays out shouldn’t be taken as gospel, it still helps to contradict my initial findings. (Also note, that if you click on the link and you live in the EU, you won’t be able to access the piece due to the General Data Protection Regulation law, so you’ll have to take my word on it).

She writes that Charlie Lawson had, in fact, been acting very erratically in the months leading up to the incident and had complained to the family doctor on more than one occasion of terrible headaches and insomnia. She also points out that this is all backed up in Trudy J. Smith’s book The Meaning Of Our Tears. This lends a lot more credence to the claim that instead of planning to kill his family, Charles Lawson lost his mind and that the act was in the spur of the moment.

This seems to be an open and shut case, but there was also another theory that emerged many years after the fact that might explain why the insanity idea was pushed so hard by those left behind because the ‘truth’ was too much to bear—a ‘truth’ that wouldn’t come to light until 1990 when a new book about the Lawson Family Massacre was released called White Christmas, Bloody Christmas, written by M. Bruce Jones and Trudy J. Smith. The authors claimed to have proof that what had driven him to perform such an unthinkable act was that he had raped Marie and gotten her pregnant.

They claimed that a fair few people had suspicions in regard to the relationship between father and daughter, including an anonymous tip from someone who had gone on a tour of the Lawson farm where the guide stated that the incest story was indeed fact. Adding even further fuel to the fire, just before the book went to publish, they were contacted by Charlie’s niece, Stella Lawson, who claimed that at the funeral she overheard members of the family discussing how Fannie had her suspicions that there was something unsavory going on between the two.

Trudy J. Smith went even further in her previously mentioned book, The Meaning Of Our Tears, where she recounted that Marie Lawson’s closet friend, Ella May Johnson, told the story that during a sleepover Marie had come clean and confessed that she was pregnant with Charlie’s child, to which Sam Hill, a neighbor of the Lawson’s, claimed that Charlie had told Marie if she told anyone,

…there would be some killing done.

The fact remains that the only person who knew why he did what he did that day was Charlie Lawson, and he took that knowledge to the grave with him. This means that all we can do is try to figure out what turned this family man into a monster and for this to happen, there are a few things we need to take a closer look at, starting with why did he have the portrait taken?

It seems completely out of character for a man of such frugal means to spend so lavishly. Not only would the picture itself have set him back a fair chunk of change, but he also bought brand new outfits for all eight of them, and that would not have been cheap. If this act was premeditated, it’s also strange that he would go to the lengths of having it done in the first place. What did he hope to achieve by this? Did he plan to keep the picture as a reminder of his actions, and, if so, had he not planned to commit suicide and instead allow the law to take him in? This last part definitely has a ring of truth to it as when they found his corpse, the area around it was covered in footprints, meaning that in the hours between the deed and his suicide, Lawson had been pacing frantically as if trying to figure out his next move.

Personally, I think that Charlie wasn’t the one who came up with the idea of the portrait. I have no facts to base this on, but I just have a feeling that it was his wife, Fannie, who wanted to have the photo taken as a Christmas present for the family and talked Charlie into it.

And talking of Christmas, was there a significance as to why Charlie waited until that day before he acted? It can’t be because he knew that this would be the one time of the year that the whole family was under the same roof, as they were always in each other’s company, so what was it? If we are to take it as read that he had indeed gotten Marie pregnant, then perhaps she had waited until that morning to inform him, thinking that her father was less likely to react in a negative way on such a religious holiday.

There is also the question as to why he would spare Arthur. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense. Did he do it out of love for his eldest child? Considering the horrific act he was about to perform, it doesn’t appear that Charlie had any feelings toward his kin at all, so to think that he had a sudden burst of fatherly devotion to one of his children hours before a premeditated murder spree is a stretch of the imagination too far for this writer.

While the incest angle would explain a lot, it’s never sat right with me. I’m not denying that it’s a possibility, but why did it take six decades to surface? Admittedly, no family wants something as serious as that aired in public, and though I have no doubt that the authors of the two books I’ve linked in this article believed what they were told, I feel that this is just a case of ‘he said, she said.’ Though that makes for good copy, it is hardly based in fact, mainly because an autopsy would’ve found evidence that Marie was pregnant, and that has never come to light. There would be no hiding what had gone on between Charlie and Marie, and we wouldn’t have had to wait 61 years for a book to bring us this truth.

This leaves only the head-injury theorem, and it is the one that I favor. Considering the era this happened in, medical procedures were nowhere near the standards that we have today, so to say that he had zero abnormalities on his brain when they cut it open might have been true then, but I’m sure that under today’s rigorous tests and examinations, it would be discovered that there was a serious amount of damage and that it led to Charles Lawson committing the ultimate sin against his own family.

As a father myself, this was one of the most difficult articles I’ve ever had to write and I will never understand the motivations behind Charles Lawson’s actions. That may be the reason that I am more comfortable with the idea that he wasn’t in control of his emotions due to a fractured skull than I am with the idea he raped his daughter and then butchered everyone to cover his tracks, but whatever the reason for the Lawson family murders, this is the kind of violent act that will never wash clean.