A week after this picture was taken, all but one of them would be dead

A week after this picture was taken, all but one of them would be dead

The Lawsons family portrait.

Nearly everyone’s been in a family portrait at some point. This photo looks quite run-of-the-mill. Most of the family members look fairly wooden—though the father standing at right has a certain far-off look in his eye. His name was Charles Lawson. And he was already planning on murdering everyone around him.

The Lawsons were a poor family, eking out a meager living as tobacco farmers in North Carolina. Their poverty must have weighed heavily on Charles’s mind. Another factor in his disquiet was that he had incestuously impregnated his daughter Marie (back row, second from left)—and she’d started confiding that fact in the neighbors.

A week before Christmas 1929, Charles finally decided to pay for a family portrait, because he knew he wasn’t going to need the money.

On Christmas afternoon, the father hid in the barn with a 12-gauge shotgun and lay in wait for his daughters Carrie (front row, far right) and Maybell (front row, second from left) as they walked to their uncle’s house. He blasted them at point-blank range, then finished them off with the butt of the gun. 

Stalking back to the house, he gunned down his wife Fannie (back row, standing far right) on the front porch. Then he charged into his own home as an invader. As Marie screamed, he shot her in cold blood, along with his unborn child/grandchild. The small boys James (front row, far left) and Raymond (front row, second from right) ran for cover, but Charles hunted them down in a macabre game of hide and seek. 

Last was baby Mary Lou (in Fannie’s arms, top right). He finished her off without wasting a bullet and then killed himself in the woods shortly thereafter. The only survivor was son Arthur Lawson (rear row, far left), who was out of the house at the time.Within seven days, a standard portrait had become the last record of a family about to be destroyed by its deranged patriarch.

All What's You Should Know— where you'll discover the most interesting things that you Should know