Episode 19: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. On today’s episode, I share stories of deaths during the holidays, with the main one being the Lawson Family murders. On Christmas day, in 1929 a rural North Carolina tobacco farmer brutally murdered six of his children, his wife and then killed himself. This crime was so horrific that it made the front page of the New York Times.

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SHOWNOTES:

•   Christmas and New Year are risk factors for cardiac and non-cardiac deaths. A couple of reasons for that are that people delay actually going to the ER. They don’t want to rush up there if there’s nothing truly wrong. They don’t want to leave their families. They’re in the middle of the holiday festivities. They’re spending time with the people that they love and they don’t want to leave. They don’t want to go to the emergency room. So they delay seeking treatment and they consume a large amount of foods. We all know we all overeat during the holidays. I hate to admit it, but I am very guilty of that. Just the stress of the holidays in general, people are having to work extra hours to be able to afford Christmas gifts for the people that they buy presents for. A lot of people don’t have a choice, they are new to their jobs and they are forced to work during the holiday hours. Also, just the general excitement of the holidays can build up the catecholamines that actually can cause fatal heart arrhythmias. And we don’t really think about it that much, but education can help. Moderate consumption of food, not smoking, different things like that can actually improve our risk. But nonetheless, the risk is still there. (02:10)

•   So I looked over at my dad and he was clenching his chest. I could see sweat coming through his shirt and he looked like he was in pain. So I asked him, dad, are you okay? What’s going on? How are you feeling? And he said, oh, my hernia is acting up. And we all know men sometimes are a little bit in denial when they have issues coming up. They don’t want to go to the doctor, but he blamed it on his hernia. So my mom was in the bathroom at the time and my mom was also an RN. And so I went in there and I said, hey, mom, I’m pretty sure dad’s having a heart attack. I’m going to call 911. And so her response was kind of funny. I think she was a little bit in denial. She’s like, let me put my makeup on and I’ll drive him up there. And I basically said, no, you can’t drive and do CPR at the same time. I’m calling 911 right now. Long story short, EMS came and picked up my dad. And when they put him on the EKG, I could actually see him having a heart attack. (07:40)

•   I was looking also into deaths that occurred on Christmas day and I found one that happened back, this was way back in 1929. There was this family in North Carolina that was murdered. There was a gentleman by the name of Charlie Lawson and he was a sharecropper and he murdered his wife and six of his seven children. And this actually happened on Christmas day in 1929. The odd thing is, and this was very strange for a sharecropper because they didn’t make a lot of money. But days before Christmas he took his wife and all seven of his children and they ranged in age from four months to 17 years. His wife, bless her heart, was pregnant her entire life. He took them into town to buy new clothes and his plan was to have a family portrait. This was a big family. Again, very strange for a sharecropper to do this. So on the 25th Christmas morning he shot his 7 and 12 year old daughters with a 12 gauge shotgun. They were leaving to go to their aunt and uncle’s house and he went into the barn and shot them on their way to the aunt and uncle’s house. Now after he did that, he went home and shot his wife, she was on the porch. Then he went into the house and shot all of his children and he bludgeoned his four month old. Then he disappeared for several hours at which time he was in the woods and he eventually shot himself in the head. Now if you can imagine being the only survivor, if you have six siblings and your parents, so a total of eight people that die on the same day and you’re the only surviving family member. Can you imagine how devastating that would be? (11:57)

•  There were a lot of rumors after the event that Charlie, the dad who committed the murders, was sexually abusing his 17-year-old daughter, Marie. She had actually told a friend that she had become pregnant by her father. Now there was a rumor that Charlie had told Marie that if she ever told her mother, and this is a quote, some killing would be done. So it is believed that there’s a possibility that Marie told her mom that she had been impregnated by her father, at which point he found out and carried out what he promised and killed the entire family. If y’all are like me, I would love to go to this location. But shortly after the murders, Charlie’s brother opened the home as a tourist attraction. Now this is a place that I would want to go. This to me would be a vacation. It probably would be for most of you as well. So apparently when Charlie murdered Marie, the daughter that he supposedly was sleeping with, she was in the middle of baking a cake. The cake that Marie baked that day was actually on display in the home when the tourists would come in. Well guess what? People are weird and the visitors, the tourists that were coming into the house, started taking raisins off the cake for souvenirs. So people, come on. Like eventually it had to be covered with glass so that no one could touch it because everyone thought it would be cool to have a raisin off this cake that Marie baked that night. So all of the Lawsons, the entire family, were laid to rest in this family graveyard. And Arthur, who was 17 at the time, of course he was the only survivor, he’s the one that came home and found his entire family had been shot. So he of course survived and went on to get married and have some children, actually four children. And then later in 1945 he was killed in a motor vehicle crash. (15:49)
 
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