HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL — Double slaying rocked Thomasville in 1977

Yahoo

01-03-2025

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first story in a three-part High Point Confidential series.
THOMASVILLE
It's been nearly 50 years since Officer Robert Crawford kissed his wife goodbye for the final time.
The 24-year-old husband, a patrolman with the Thomasville Police Department, was leaving for work on the night of Jan. 8, 1977. He worked third shift that week, and he was hoping for a quiet night.
Like always, Crawford and Frienda, his wife of only about six months, kissed goodbye at the door. As he walked to his car, he turned back toward Dumpy — his affectionate nickname for his wife — and said, 'Dumpy, I love you, and I'll see you in the morning.'
That was the last time Frienda ever saw her husband alive.
Meanwhile, Crawford's patrol partner — 27-year-old Dennis Spinnett — was also headed to work. He wasn't married yet, but he had a steady girlfriend he planned to wed. He, too, hoped for a quiet night — it might be boring, but boredom beats danger anytime.
As you've surely reasoned by now, it was not a quiet night — far from it.
The irony is that the disturbance that started it all occurred during second shift, before Crawford and Spinnett had even begun patrolling. However, shift change was only minutes away when the station got the call around 10:50 p.m., so the two young officers hopped into a squad car and headed to a house on Douglas Drive.
According to eyewitnesses, two men had been arguing over money. When the verbal altercation turned into a physical scuffle, one of the men — who reportedly had been drinking — angrily shot the other in the foot. That's when a neighbor called police.
When Crawford and Spinnett arrived, they approached the house where the shooting had taken place, but the man who answered the door — the actual victim of the shooting — assured them everything was fine. The officers were suspicious, but they grudgingly returned to their patrol car.
Just as the officers were getting in the car, a man at the house next door came to the front door and shouted something at them. It's not clear what he yelled, but it caused the officers to turn around, approach his house and go inside.
Two men were in the house, one of whom — unbeknownst to Crawford and Spinnett — was the shooter in the earlier incident. Another scuffle ensued, this time involving the two officers, and it quickly escalated into gunfire. Spinnett took the first bullet, a shot through his eye that felled him in the hallway of the small, two-bedroom house.
Crawford, a huge teddy bear of a man that fellow officers called 'Fluffy,' rushed to his partner's side to help him, but it was too late — Spinnett had died almost immediately.
Even worse, as Crawford crouched beside his fellow officer's body, another shot rang out, striking him in the throat and severing his jugular vein. Crawford was still breathing when paramedics reached the scene, but he had lost too much blood — he died at the hospital.
Two fallen officers, fatally shot in the line of duty on what they had hoped would be a quiet night. Thomasville Police Chief Paul Shore, who'd been chief for three decades, called it 'the worst tragedy that has befallen this department in my many years here as the chief of police.'
Meanwhile, the two suspects — 47-year-old Joe Cleven Medley, aka 'Big Joe,' and 32-year-old William Junior Lindsay — were in the wind. By the time backup officers reached the house, the suspects had escaped through the back door, hopped a backyard fence and fled through a patch of woods.
As you can imagine, the slaying of two police officers led to an all-out manhunt for the killers. Bloodhounds were brought in to track the two suspects, as were almost all of the Thomasville Police Department's officers.
'I would say just about all personnel — detectives, vice, narcotics, patrol — pretty much everybody was called in,' remembers retired Lt. Tommy Shuler, now 82 and living in Williamston. 'Didn't matter what shift you were working or if you were supposed to be off that day, everybody got called in, and we took every police car we had.'
Deputies from the Davidson County Sheriff's Department joined the search, as well, and it was a deputy who caught the suspects.
But where he captured them? And how? Well, that was a scene that belongs in a Hollywood movie script.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Part two of 'Officers Down' will be published in Tuesday's High Point Enterprise.