Jackson County murders the topic of new book

By Dave Russell It’s not light reading material, but a new book shines a light on murders in Jackson County. Longtime friends and first cousins Bill Crawford, Ann Melton and Mary Katherine Lowder collaborated on “Shadows in the Mountains, early murders of Jackson County, North Carolina.” The trio grew up together and while Crawford told the stories, the women typed them up. “I stayed with my granny when I was a little boy and she would talk to me like I was a grown man,” Crawford said. “She told me all these stories and I remembered them. I was always interested in those stories. I told Ann and Mary Katherine the stories about things that happened that I was told about. What started Ann on it was we went out to Webster to see the stump of the hanging tree. The last hanging they had there was the Lambert hanging.” Andrew Jackson Lambert fell in with some men near Webster, including a moonshiner and a revenue agent, and embarked on a night of drinking. As events unrolled, a man named Wilson lay dead, and the murder was pinned on Lambert. His trial was held in Charleston in Swain County (that’s now Bryson City, with the name changed in part to avoid constant confusion with the South Carolina oceanfront town), and he was found guilty and sentenced to hang. Appeals of the sentence were unsuccessful. Not all the stories end in death. Some are mysteries. “Old man John Holden was supposed to have killed his wife and they had him in the Webster jail,” Crawford said. “His first cousin was the sheriff at that time and somehow he escaped jail and never was seen or heard from again.” The disappearance of Frank Allison makes an appearance in the book. Allison was one of four hunters camping out at Shut-In Ridge. He and Roy Dills, Charlie Knox and Canary Shepherd built a campfire and when they heard their dogs tree around 6 a.m., three members of the party followed the dogs while Allison stayed at the fire. “They were gone three or four hours or longer and when they came back, they found Allison’s boots and socks at the fire,” Crawford said. “The fire had died down and there sat his boots.” A frying pan was missing. So was Allison. “They hollered for him and searched for him and asked some folks who lived up there about him and they hadn’t seen him,” Crawford said. “They went back to his parents and they hadn’t seen him. If I remember correctly, it was December of ‘34.” Not surprisingly, Crawford is correct, according to the Jackson County Journal of Dec. 20, 1934. “They never could find him,” he said. “They formed search parties and went back in there and looked for him, but they never saw or heard tell of him again.” The story of Jack Hall stands out for Crawford. “It happened just around the curve from where we lived on Old Dillsboro Road,” he said. According to the Sylva Herald in 1947, taxi driver Jack Hall and his wife, Marjorie Maples Hall, were bludgeoned to death with a pair of machine hammers which were thrown in Scotts Creek. “Me and Eddie Buckner and Gary Carden climbed up on the fence down there and they made them boys get in there and get those hammers and we watched them,” Crawford said. Prolific writer Melton is the author of 37 books, most of them with regional interests, including five on Jackson County, she said. “Mary Katherine, Bill and I are first cousins and we lived on the same street,” Melton said. “Growing up, we were so close, probably closer than a lot of brothers and sisters. Bill would take Mary Katherine and me out to old home places and old cemeteries and tell us stories, but mainly we just wanted to hang out with Bill Crawford.” They still do. “So now he has all this knowledge in his head and newspaper clippings and so he wanted to do this book and Mary Katherine and I agreed to write it,” Melton said. “Why? Because we could hang out with Bill Crawford.” She also picks the Jack Hall murder as a standout. “Just because it happened at the foot of our driveway,” she said. “Frank Crawford, Bill’s older brother, was working on a Boy Scout badge and camping right there where it happened.” The book covers 26 murder stories ranging from 1872 to 1962. Other murders might have occurred in the county during those years, but the trio picked the most interesting ones, Melton said. To order a copy, call the Jackson County Genealogical Society office at 631-2646.