Charlotte True Crime Series

Notorious Cases from Fraud to Serial Killing

Cathy Pickens

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781467142458
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439667668
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A thrilling account of a hundred years of sensational and sinister deeds that marked and shaped one southern town.

Crimes that captivated attention in the Charlotte area over the years run the gamut from missing people to the wrongly accused. This collection of headline stories features violent motorcycle gangs, crusading mothers, a fraudster who claimed a president was poisoned by his wife, a serial killer who broke all the rules and even a man who made Bigfoot. With a mystery novelist's ear for a good tale, Cathy Pickens presents more than a century of sensational sinister deeds that marked this diverse and dynamic city.

1

THE HORNET’S NEST

STATISTICS OR STORIES?

Charlotte has always kept an eye on its place on the national stage while, at the same time, maintaining its sense of humor. Typically, civic leaders only talk about crime in its absence, but in a 1940 Charlotte News editorial, the writer took the FBI—and J. Edgar Hoover, personally—to task for snubbing Charlotte and robbing it of its honors as the nation’s murder capital, beating out Atlanta (“its ancient rival for first honors”).

“As we recall it,” pointed out the editorial writer, with tongue poked into his cheek, “the town was at least seven times as murderous as Chicago and ten times as murderous as New York.” Yet the annual FBI crime statistics reported that year gave “neither hide nor hair of mention of Charlotte. We couldn’t believe our eyes.”

Putting the blame firmly on Hoover’s desk, the editor wrote, “The man not only has no feeling for the proper pride of a city, he has no sense of drama, either.”

Charlotte has always enjoyed a proper pride and a dash of drama. The region has historically been a safe, pleasant place to live but has had its moments in the national crime spotlight and was once dubbed “Little Chicago” in a 1961 Charlotte News headline.

By 1966, Charlotte had achieved the ultimate crime-status pinnacle: number one in the nation in murders per 100,000 residents, with almost three times the national average. That year, Charlotte had thirty-seven homicides; to compare, there were eighty-seven in 2017—Charlotte’s seventh-deadliest year. Twenty years earlier, Charlotte had been number two in the national murdering ranks.

Mecklenburg County’s fifth courthouse (in operation from 1928 to 1978), located at 610 East Trade Street, was in use when the city’s murder rate hit number one in the nation. Courtesy of Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

Statistics—good ones and bad ones—fluctuate over time, and not always with clear reasons for the ways people can go wrong. Comparison statistics seldom give a clear answer as to whether we’re safe or what causes spikes and lulls in crime. Still, we look for explanations and rationales.

In 1977, the police compiled Charlotte’s crime data to create an “average” murderer: “A man who uses a pistol and kills somebody he knows during an argument at a residence between 10 and 11 on Saturday night.” That description summarizes, with fair accuracy, more recent crime statistics; so, while it may seem like things change, they really don’t.

Those regularly reported “annual statistics” or “average” stories seldom grab headlines—or imaginations—for long. So, what makes a story become part of the warp and weft woven into the essence of a city and the people who call it home?

These are the Charlotte stories that started in dark places but show the heart of a city that is still southern and, in good ways, a bit like a small town. These are Charlotte’s headline crimes—the stories too important to forget.

THE ORIGINAL NEST

Charlotte started as a crossroads. The area’s first public building, erected in 1766—before Charlotte became a town in 1768—was a courthouse, encouraging others to recognize the settlement’s respect for law and order, its centrality and its sensibility, though it had fewer than twenty houses.

Soon after, in the Revolutionary War, family and friends faced each other in the Carolinas, where comparatively few British regular troops were stationed. Fleeing losses in Charleston and Camden, British general Lord Cornwallis overtook the Continentals in the Waxhaws (now Lancaster County) just south of Charlotte.

In 1780, the Battle of the Waxhaws (or Buford’s Massacre, depending on which side was telling the story) took place forty miles south of the crossroads. The Patriots surrendered. How it turned into a bloody massacre was open to dispute. Banastre Tarleton, the British officer in command, lay pinned under his horse and reportedly had nothing to do with the order to shoot. The Patriots had a different story. The cairn where 150 Continental soldiers were buried stands outside Lancaster in the Buford community named for Virginia officer Abraham Buford. After that skirmish, “remember Tarleton’s quarter” came to mean “take no prisoners.” The locals were riled.

Four months later, Cornwallis took Charlotte. Charlotte’s residents were none too happy with the occupation forces, especially as news of the massacre spread. Local antipathy turned into acts of sabotage, and Cornwallis reportedly wrote that Charlotte was “a hornet’s nest of rebellion.” Though Cornwallis’s letter has not been found, and some count it as rumor, the description stuck.

Hornet’s nest patch used on Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers’ uniforms. Sketch by Cathy Pickens.

Charlotte embraced and celebrated its irksome reputation—the Charlotte Hornets basketball team is just one commemoration. Another recognition was Officer E.C. Burgess’s design for the police department badge in 1962. Even longtime Charlotte residents may not have studied the emblem on Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department vehicles and uniform patches and badges and likely don’t recognize the swirling blue-and-white oval as a hornet’s nest.

When the separate Charlotte Police and Mecklenburg County Police combined into a single force in 1993, both departments agreed on using the hornet’s nest. According to CMPD’s website, “In the patch, the smaller nest within the larger nest symbolizes growth, while the movement in design suggests motion and change toward a new direction.”

THE MOCCA CASE

Those new directions haven’t always been simple or easy. In September 2016, following the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by an officer of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, uptown Charlotte saw protestors and police in riot gear and the governor declaring a state of emergency. Few realized that this wasn’t Charlotte’s first racially divided riot.

News reports from almost 130 years ago show how crime reporting and the community response to crime has changed, and how the city has changed, often in ways we might not expect.

From the end of the Civil War and into the turn of the next century, Charlotte was a remarkably mixed-race southern city. Charlotte historian Tom Hanchett observed, “Segregation had to be invented.” Until the Jim Crow laws mandated divides not along class lines but along racial lines, blacks and whites all lived together uptown, with black- and white-owned homes and businesses side by side.

In 1891, John Mocca, an Italian fruit vendor, had a store at the corner of Poplar and Trade Streets, near where the Carillon Building stands today. Between 11:00 p.m. and midnight on Saturday, April 14, he was bludgeoned in what the Charlotte Democrat described as “one of the most brutal, cowardly, quiet, and at the same time, daring murders in the annals of crime”—referring not just to crime annals in Charlotte but to all crime annals.

The Italian fruit-seller’s murderer, a “negro gambler from Charleston” named Henry Bradham, was under arrest by 10:00 a.m. the next day, which was a Sunday morning. “All day Sunday the city wore a serious demeanor.” The talk was of lynching, the paper reported.

Bradham had been in town for a few weeks and was “known as a professional gambler in Charleston, Savannah, and Atlanta…and was hanging around Mocca’s store all day” on the day of the murder.

Mecklenburg County’s third courthouse (in operation from 1845 to 1896) was located on West Trade Street. Courtesy of Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

The news account goes into great detail about the Hornet’s Nest Riflemen on guard at the jail, sent by the mayor to protect the prisoner and the gatherings of blacks at their nearby church and of whites in the streets. Tempers rose. Two or three hundred shots were fired. Somehow, no one was killed. One white man was shot in the leg.

The news report said: “Judge Means, in his charge to the grand jury and the citizens Monday said the majesty of the law must be vindicated, if the authorities had to wade through blood to do it.”

Sheriff Z.T. Smith told the crowd gathered at the jail “that they would have to walk over his ‘dead body to lynch that negro.’ He is one of the nerviest men in the state and the boys are afraid of him. All idea of lynching has been abandoned.”

John Mocca was buried at Elmwood Cemetery “on a lot purchased and donated to deceased’s family by Mr. Garibaldi.” Mr. Garibaldi was not further identified.

No matter the color of the accused’s skin, justice was swift in those days. Three months after the murder, Bradham was tried and hanged “in the jail corridor.” On July 3, 1891, the Methodist Episcopal church’s reverend, Mr. Austin, spoke for Bradham, saying he’d confessed and he “adjured” other young men to stay away from gambling.

The tradition of gallows confessions is a long one. In England, published pamphlets featuring confessions gave lurid details of crimes (which ensured the pamphlets enjoyed robust sales) and pleas that others would learn from their mistakes (which likely had little influence).

In Charlotte, the newspaper summary was shorter than the old-fashioned English broadsides and omitted the lurid details of the crime, which, of course, limited reader interest in the news report.

Charlotte has grown rapidly, and growing pains can be tough on a city. In fact, growing pains can feel like too-tight shoes as a fairly homogeneous, smallish southern farming and trading town transitions to become a national banking center and a draw for international residents.

Charlotte has always been full of civic boosterism. Its leaders and citizens have, for the most part, been proud of Charlotte. For that reason, sometimes the sketchy parts have been covered over instead of discussed. At one point, a chief of police reportedly forbade officers from mentioning the word “gangs,” as if erasing the word would erase the existence of gangs. But why ignore our crime stories? Those stories helped shape the city, and the victors—victims and villains alike—are woven into the fabric of the city.

CHARLOTTE’S FAMOUS CASES

Charlotte has several nationally known cases I won’t explore in detail, because good accounts appear in other History Press books—see Wicked Charlotte: The Sordid Side of the Queen City by Stephanie Burt Williams (2006) and Charlotte: Murder, Mystery and Mayhem by David Aaron Moore (2008). These cases deserve at least a quick mention.

PTL

When Charlotte’s NationsBank acquired California-based Bank of America in 1998, Charlotte became the second-largest financial center in the United States. While the banking industry has hosted its own frauds and failures of judgment, those tend to lack the flair of some of our homegrown financial fandangos. A city would find it hard to claim kin with PTL or the Loomis Fargo “gang who couldn’t shoot straight” without a firm hold on its sense of humor.

Mention “fraud” around Charlotte, and those who know the city’s history will immediately think of PTL (Praise the Lord) and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. In the mid-1980s, the couple’s religious broadcasts, Christian theme park and residential retreat put their 2,500-acre center, which was located five miles southeast of Carowinds, on the map. They built one of the most recognizable Christian retreats in the country, much of it patterned on the Disney parks. They then presided over its slide into ignominy amidst charges of financial fraud against “partners” who invested in a resort hotel with five hundred rooms (including one hundred honeymoon suites, where couples could come to recharge their marriages).

When rumors of Jim Bakker’s sexual impropriety with a church secretary in a hotel in Florida were substantiated and the lavish lifestyle of the Bakkers was uncovered (an air-conditioned doghouse and gold-plated bathroom fixtures featured prominently in television and newspaper coverage), the Bakkers resigned. The downfall was swift.

Accusations that PTL vacation rentals had been oversold and monies misused led to a federal criminal prosecution, a fraud conviction and a prison sentence for Jim Bakker, the preacher who started it all.

Long before the criminal investigation, jokes around...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Hornet’s Nest
• 2. Tricksters, Frauds and Murder
• 3. Getting Away with Murder?
• 4. Gangs and Gangsters
• 5. The Woman Who Loved Horses
• 6. The Doctor and the Handyman
• 7. Here and Away, Solved and Unsolved
• 8. On the River
• 9. International Intrigue
• 10. Crime-Fighters
• References
• About the Author