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 ...