Bad Murder in Burke
County Saturday
Details of the killing of John Fredell at his home in the
South Mountains Saturday afternoon by “Long John” Lail were not in possession of
the local officers today, including Deputy Sheriff W.L. Eckard of Burke County,
who was in Hickory this morning.
It seems that Lail, who was said to be drinking, passed
Fridell’s home Saturday morning and threatened to shoot the Fredell children
and again passed the house late in the afternoon and shot Fredell five times.
Mrs. Fredell and the children saw the killing. Lail said he was going to kill
his own mother.
It was not learned today whether Lail had been arrested. The
funeral over the remains of Fredell was held at John’s church, Burke County,
yesterday.
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From the editorial
page of the Hickory Daily Record,
Monday, Aug. 25, 1919
Can’t It Be Stopped?
The South Mountains in Burke county, officers say, are notorious
for the manufacture of liquor and for other forms of immorality. It was in this
section Saturday that an apparently cold-blooded murder was committed by a
drunken man.
Men and women to go the South Mountains from Hickory,
Lincolnton, Gastonia and other places, it is said, and the Central highway is
the scene of many offenses against good morals.
If half the things reported in that section are true, the
state would do well to exert special efforts to rid the place of lawlessness.
Something surely should be done.
A witness in Burke superior court some time ago declared
that nearly everybody in the mountains maid liquor and he felt that he had as
much right as anybody else to make the stuff. This shows how lightly the
prohibition law is regarded.
The state should do something about South Mountains.
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