TRAGIC JULYS FROM 40 YEARS AGO

As we sweat out these hot dog days of July, some Julys from an earlier time, from  several back-to-back summers  40 years ago in Henderson County, are worth noting…and for those of us who were around to experience them, they’re well worth remembering.

A whole series of tragic Julys began for local folks on Friday July 22nd 1966...the day when the dead and strangely mutilated bodies of Vernon Shipman, Charles Glass, and Louise Shumate were discovered in a ten foot triangle, with their feet together, in a clearing near Lake Summit.  That brutal and bizarre triple homicide remains unsolved to this day…and it set off decades of investigations and speculation…and even now, 44 years later, to no real conclusions or suspects.  It’s been assumed now for years…that those with full knowledge of that awful crime, and of the person or persons who did it, are long since dead…and the truth will likely never be known.  That was the first in a trio of tragic Julys.

The next one happened  July 19th a year later in 1967...when an almost new Piedmont Airlines jetliner collided with a small private plane over Hendersonville with both planes and all aboard crashing to the ground a few feet off I-26, just south of the Highway 64 interchange, and into a summer camp for boys…thankfully injuring none of the young campers.  Among those killed in the crash was Secretary of the Navy John McNaughton and 80 other people on the Piedmont jetliner and the pilot of the small private plane.  The memories of that smoking crash site, of the temporary morgue set up in the National Guard armory, and of the jetliner re-assembled by federal investigators behind a service station where Thompson Street is now…will never be forgotten.  A memorial to the victims of that crash stands about a block away from the crash site, in the parking lot of Mountain First Bank on Jack Street.

As if that event wasn’t sad and shocking enough for our community that July, word came a few days after the crash, on July 22 1967, that Pulitzer Prize winning poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg had died of heart failure at his home at Connemara in Flat Rock.  Sandburg’s significance as a literary giant was not fully recognized by all us local folks before his death.  40-plus years ago, Sandburg was routinely seen driving through town with goats in his station wagon, on his way to leave one off, or pick one up, at the train depot.  Sandburg was cremated and his ashes, and later those of  his wife Lillian, were buried beneath a stone called Remembrance Rock in his native Galesburg, Illinois…the stone was named for Sandburg’s only novel.

The third in that series of three back-to-back and tragic Julys came a year later in 1968...when the last bad man to officially be declared an “outlaw” in North Carolina cut a swath of rape, kidnapping, and murder through Henderson County that stretched from here to Rockingham County.  Before outlaw Edward Thompson, Junior was finally caught at an intersection near Eden, North Carolina…he had kidnapped a Hendersonville doctor and his wife, had raped and brutally, mindlessly killed others, had shot a local deputy…and was the last man bad enough to officially and legally be declared an “outlaw” in North Carolina…which, had he failed to surrender when ordered to do so, would have permitted his captor to shoot him “on site“.  Thompson was later given three life sentences and lived out his life behind bars.  One can only wonder how much taxpayer’s money could have been saved, how much local grief could have been satisfied, and how many local folks could have slept safer in their beds…had Thompson flinched, just a little bit, as that lawman held a gun to his head and finally took him into custody in Rockingham County. 

As we sweat out these long hot dog days, we thought those three tragic Julys in Henderson County‘s history, from just over 40 years ago, were worth remembering and
sharing with you.

By WHKP News Director Larry Freeman