2. On Christmas Day 1929, Charlie Lawson killed his wife and 6 of his 7 children
Old pictures, such as the one above, are creepy at the best of times, but just wait until you hear this Christmas horror story. This family portrait of the Lawson family, from Germanton, North Carolina, was taken a few days before Christmas Day 1929. On Christmas Day, Charles Lawson (standing, second from right) took a shotgun to everyone in the picture besides his 16-year-old son Arthur (rear, far left), whom he had sent out on an errand. The baby, Mary-Lou, was bludgeoned to death. Charles then turned the gun on himself, having posed his family’s bodies with their arms crossed.
Imagine how poor Arthur felt when he discovered the bodies of his entire family. The photograph, a rarity for a 1920s working-class family, suggests some premeditation, but Charles offered no explanation for the massacre in his suicide letters. So what lay behind this tragedy? Charles suffered a blow to the head a few months before the event, but an autopsy of his brain found nothing of note. According to a relative, Charles’s wife Fannie (back right) discovered her husband’s incestuous relationship with their daughter, Marie (left of Charles), and soon afterwards he committed his awful crime out of shame.
