Latest news with #HighPointConfidential
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Yahoo
HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL — Double slaying rocked Thomasville in 1977
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.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Yahoo
HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: The blind bootlegger Mysterious slaying baffled authorities in 1944
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first story in a three-part High Point Confidential series. HIGH POINT In the summer of 1944, as young U.S. servicemen were fighting a war overseas, local law enforcement authorities were engaged in a battle of their own here in High Point. That April, a pretty young woman named Alice May had been found brutally murdered, her half-nude body carelessly hidden beneath a pile of brush in a patch of woods on the outskirts of town. According to the county coroner, the 19-year-old brunette had been choked, struck in the mouth with a blunt object, and her throat had been slashed so violently that it severed her windpipe. She also had what appeared to be fingernail scratches across her throat. May's murder (which we wrote about in a four-part High Point Confidential series three years ago) understandably shocked the community. Equally shocking, however, was the city police department's inability to solve the slaying — despite what seemed to be a wealth of clues and potential leads — further frustrating and frightening city residents. As the unsolved case dragged into the summer months, local journalists bemoaned the police department's futility. The High Point Enterprise, for example, openly questioned whether the department was in over its head and might need some assistance from the State Bureau of Investigation. Two months after the slaying, with public confidence continuing to erode, the last thing the authorities needed was another unsolved murder in High Point ... but that's exactly what they got. This time, though, it was the Guilford County Sheriff's Department that would be stumped by the mysterious killing. It happened after dark on the evening of June 9, 1944. The victim was Robert Lee 'Bob' Beck, a 47-year-old Davidson County native who had spent most of his life living in or near High Point. At the time, Beck — who was blind — and his wife lived on the old Greensboro Highway, just north of High Point. Around 10 p.m., Beck was listening to the radio when he heard a knock at the front door. His wife, who was lying down in a rear bedroom, heard the knock, too, but it was her husband who went to the door. 'Don't move or I'll shoot you!' she heard a man yell. 'Don't shoot him!' another man shouted. The next sound she heard was the firing of a .45-caliber pistol. She ran to the front of the house just in time to see her wounded husband stumbling away from the door. She helped him to the bathroom, where he collapsed, and she immediately called for an ambulance. Meanwhile, the shooter and his sidekick retreated to their vehicle and sped away. The darkness prevented Beck's wife from getting a good look at either of the two men or their car. An ambulance rushed Beck to the Washington Street branch of High Point Memorial Hospital, but doctors held little hope for his survival. The bullet had ripped through his left arm and lower abdomen, nearly exiting on his right side. There was little the doctors could do to save him. As Beck lay feebly on his deathbed, Sheriff John C. Story and his deputies tried to extract whatever information they could from him. The officers suspected Beck recognized his killers' voices, but if he knew the identity of the two assailants, he wasn't saying. Around 4 a.m., Beck — who may have been the most important witness in his own shooting — died. He was laid to rest in his family's burial plot at Oakwood Cemetery. Sheriff Story and his deputies were baffled by the mysterious killing. Their only working theory seemed to be that Beck, a known bootlegger, might've been offed by a couple of business rivals, but who were they? They had slipped away from Beck's house in darkness, and the only witness who might've been able to identify them was dead. Would the authorities somehow crack the case and nab the two killers, or would Bob Beck join Alice May in the 'Unsolved' file? EDITOR'S NOTE: Part two of 'The Blind Bootlegger' will be published in Tuesday's High Point Enterprise.
