124. The Murder of Isabel Hussey | A North Carolina Hitchhiking Tragedy

SPEAKER_00 0:13

It's 1955 in Moore County, North Carolina. And to an outsider, the Rule South feels like it's standing still. The landscape of tobacco barns, pine forest, and Sunday morning church bells. But for the teenagers in the mid-50s, the world is moving fast. This is the era of the rebel without a cause. On the radio, the smooth crooning of the previous decade is being pushed aside by something louder and more restless. In small towns like Robins, 16-year-olds like Isabel Hussey are caught in the friction. They're trading their school books for jobs, swapping their long ponytails for fashionable, short crop cuts and starched white blouses. There's a desire to grow up, to get out, and to see what lies beyond the county line. But in the 50s, freedom had a specific price, and often it required a ride. For a teen with no car and even less money, that meant standing on the shoulder of Highway 220 with your thumb out. For years, hitchhiking was just a standard way of life, a neighborly hand-up between towns. But by 1955, the sense of security was beginning to fracture.

unknown 1:34

J.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Edgar Hoover and the FBI had launched a massive push called the Death in Disguise Campaign. Across the country, posters were appearing at gas stations and bus stops, warning that the smiling stranger behind the wheel might be a phantom of the highway. The public perception was shifting from a neighborly ride to a dangerous gamble. And it was right into the middle of this cultural crossroads that Isabella Hussey stepped on a hot June morning, dressed in her blue and white striped skirt and black suede loafers, heading for Ashboro. She didn't see the danger. She only saw the road. Tonight we're looking at a case that sits at the intersection of Teenage Rebellion and a changing America. This is the story of Isabel Hussey.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

So today's episode is courtesy of one of our most loyal supporters, Ricky Aurin. If you're a longtime listener, you've heard us speak of Ricky before. He has done so much research for this story, and so a lot of what I'm telling you came from what he has sent me, and then some further research into newspapers.com. So a few weeks ago, Ricky took Darlene and I down to Moore County, North Carolina for a little field trip about this episode, where we found the grave of Isabel Hussey. That cemetery that we went to had an awful lot of Hussies in it. Oh my gosh, it did. Yeah. Cemeteries are so much more than just collections of stone and grass. They're literally libraries of untold lives. They hold stories that risk being lost to time if we don't look for them. Which is why Ricky does such a good job on his cemetery walks there in Ashboro. A friend of mine from Robins, whose maiden name is Huzzy, she has also coincidentally a daughter named Isabel, but not named after the person in our story today. The day that we went down to the graveyard, messaged her and said, Hey, could this be one of your relatives? And she immediately messaged me back and said, basically, all the Hussies in that graveyard are probably pretty much kin to her. That's cool. That makes the connection even it does. And and I asked her, you know, have you heard the story? And she had not. Oh, really? So she didn't know the story? She did not know the story. Wow. So, you know, a lot of times you go you go to a graveyard and you don't know the stories that are behind all those people there. These narratives sit in silence. But now, today, thanks to these digital footprints that we have and these historical records that we can access, we have the privilege and perhaps the responsibility to find those stories and speak their names again. So let me take you back to the beginning before anything went wrong. Or maybe when it already had. The Hussey family was much like many families in the rural south in the nineteen fifties. They had a house full of children. Ten to be exact.

SPEAKER_02 4:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

And they lived among churches, pastures, and farmland. They weren't poor, but life was hard then, and most families worked hard to scrape by and provide for multiple children. And I noticed there was a nine year gap between their last son and then their daughter Isabel, who was born when the mother was forty-five years old. So Isabel was the youngest? Yes. Okay. And that kind of made me wonder was she a menopause baby? A su little surprise. Right. To an already large family. You know, those do happen. In 1955, though, Isabel had just celebrated her 16th birthday on June 10th. She had already quit school several months before while in the ninth grade. In North Carolina, the school attendance compulsory law was was and still is set at age 16. But we all know in those days it's not unusual for a teen to drop out of school.

SPEAKER_02 5:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

I mean, many times it was a matter of survival. Older kids would have to work to help the whole family get by. But this wasn't the case for Isabelle. She was experiencing some teen angst, feeling a bit confined in that in that rural area where life was just maybe a little slow to a teenager, maybe boring. She had recently gotten her a new modern haircut, more grown up, edgy, shortcropped style. And she was trying to grow up fast.

SPEAKER_03 6:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Like most 16-year-olds.

SPEAKER_03 6:28

I can relate when I was 16. Exactly. Definitely trying to grow up too fast.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Right. And she was itching for freedom. The freedom to have a social life and meet new people and find exciting things beyond backwoods, Moore County, right? Right. And she was known to hitchhike into Ashboro, North Carolina, which was about 26 miles from her home in Robbins. And I'm guessing that wasn't I mean, that was pretty normal for the time. It was. Yeah. I mean, she would actually hitchhike further away sometimes, and I'll and I'll talk about that later in the story, but uh yeah, not uncommon at all. I mean, if you're a teenager and you want to go somewhere, you not everybody had a car. Right right. In this day and age, we are well aware of the danger in taking rides with strangers. But in the mid-50s, the public's perception of hitching a ride, that was just then beginning to shift from people feeling it was relatively safe to starting to think, well, that could be a gamble. Was it as dangerous then as it is today? Actually, it's not that dangerous today if you look at statistics. Really? Yeah. Okay. There it we hear about an awful lot of horrible things today, but we hear about so much more.

SPEAKER_03 7:40

I do feel like though in the 60s and 70s, especially the 70s, you heard about an awful lot of women being killed when they would hitchhike.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Yeah. You know, sometimes things get sensationalized. Yeah. Yeah. Here's let's see if I can find it. There was one quote about that. This was from a 1970s Reader's Digest story. And the quote was In the case of a girl who hitchhikes, the odds against her reaching her destination unmolested are are today literally no better than if she played Russian roulette. Wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 8:16

So it's not a risk I would want to take, but I um But when you were 16, you probably made some risky choices just like 100%. And I and I remember getting into car into vehicles with people that I had no business getting into vehicles with and definitely took a gamble.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Yeah, but we're gonna talk about that later in the show. Okay. So most young people didn't have their own cars, and many did not have the funds to even buy bus tickets. So for most of the 50s, hitching was a standard way for young people to get to work or just travel between towns, mostly without incident. So it wasn't unusual that on June 22nd, Isabel left home for a trip to Ashborough. The five foot five, one hundred and thirty-ish pound teen wore her dark blue and white striped skirt, a crispy starched white sleeveless blouse, and her Bobby socks with black suede loafers. Oh, she sounds so cute. Doesn't she? She told her parents that she was going to visit her sister and would be home later that day. But she did not return that day. Or the next or the next. Growing uneasy, her parents, Alfred and Lita Hussey, finally reported her missing to the Robbins Police Department. Mrs. Hussey stated that her daughter had stayed away from home as much as two days on one other occasion. Slowly days turned into weeks with still no word from Isabel. A parent's worst nightmare.

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Oh my gosh, yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Meanwhile, on the west end of Ashborough, on July 10th, a local man was out picking blackberries in the wooded area near Ashborough Country Club. He came upon an old abandoned house which was adjacent to that property, and this strong odor enticed him to explore further. He went inside and saw nothing out of the ordinary, but the smell pulled him up to the second floor. And that is when he discovered the badly decomposed remains of a woman. He notified authorities. The Randolph County Sheriff's Department responded to the scene. Despite the stench, they had to investigate. The woman's body was fully clothed, but it had a man's handkerchief and a cloth belt knotted tightly around the neck. It was obvious to Randolph County Sheriff Wayne Wilson that he was dealing with a homicide. And once word got out about the discovery of a murdered woman, it became a sensational headline. Curious locals flocked to the house. I found one photo of the house in the paper stating that over a thousand people have visited that location since it had been discovered.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

I have a little rabbit trail story to tell you here.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

Uh that came from Ricky. So he had a friend, her name was Rachel Olsen Van Ost, and her family lived in that area of the Sawyersville community out on Stutz Road, which is right near that country club. And she and her sister, about a week prior to the discovery, had been riding horses.

SPEAKER_03 11:25

I saw her at the cemetery walk and heard her tell this story. You heard her tell it? Yes, go ahead, keep going.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Okay, wow, interesting. And her the horses stopped, and no matter what they did, they couldn't get the horses to go any further, and they didn't know why. But a week or so later, when this all f was found out, the girls realized it's because those horses smelled that and they wouldn't go any closer to the house. Wow. And then while all these onlookers are there seeing the house and that kind of thing, Rachel and her sister Mary Olson, not the Mary Olson you're thinking of, they were there looking around, realizing why that had happened. And Rachel realized her sister was missing, and so she's looking around for her, and she finally spots her peering out from the upstairs window at her. Oh my gosh. I know how crazy is that. Oh my gosh. So she went up. She went up there while they were investigating. And I thought it was funny because I could I was picturing Mary Olson from Little House on the Prairie looking out that window.

SPEAKER_03 12:31

That's so cool. So the first cemetery walk that I ever went on, now I'm thinking, did I just hear Ricky tell that? But I'm like 99.9. I can see the lady who I believe told that story.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

And so I thought that was super cool. Did you go before 2021? Because this is her obituary. She died in 2021.

SPEAKER_03 12:53

Okay. I did not hear that. Nope.

unknown 12:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 13:00

Maybe I just heard him tell that story. That's crazy that I genuinely thought I heard that.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

This is why we don't. This this is why we don't take witness testimony. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 13:14

Okay. That's so funny.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

All right, now back to the program. One paper, but and again, we know how those scenes get, you know, with curious onlookers and things, and then this the papers sensationalize. So one newspaper, I believe it was the High Point Enterprise, actually had to run a retraction because it had an article that was headlined The Country Club Murder, causing people to associate the crime with the club. Well, it wasn't actually on the country club property, but the property that was adjacent to it. Right. So they did issue an apology for that misleading headline, but they'll do anything to sell a paper. Right. Of course, people wanted to help too. I mean, they genuinely wanted to help find who this was. And the sheriff's office began to get a slew of calls from people who had reported having seen the girl or family members of missing people who thought perhaps this was their loved one. One such call was from Alfred and Lita Hussey of Robins, who had not seen their daughter for 18 days at that point. They made the trip to Randolph County and they did identify the remains as their daughter Isabel.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Not because they could tell the remains because they were too bad too badly decomposed. And I'm not sure if the authorities even let them see that because that would be horrible. I hope not. But they were not but they were able to identify the clothing that she was wearing when she left as identical to what was on this young lady. And so they were confident enough that it was her daughter, and so authorities did let them take the remains back with them to Moore County to be buried.

SPEAKER_02 14:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

The belt that had been used to strangle Isabel was her very own belt.

SPEAKER_02 14:57

Oh, that's so sad.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Yeah. I mean it really, really is. The Hussies buried their daughter on Tuesday, July 12th at Smyrna United Methodist Church Cemetery in Robbins. Her tombstone reads, I leave thee and go to God.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Now, although the family had been allowed to claim her body and they were allowed to bury it, the sheriff reiterated that the identification still had not actually been positively confirmed. They had sent some samples to the FBI for further comparison. Hairs from Isabel's hairbrush that her family had given them, along with hairs on the deceased's body, and nail polish from her home compared to nail polish on the deceased, were all tested. And Isabel's dental charts were also being compared. The hairs, nail polish, and dental records all did compare favorably with Isabel. Eventually, the FBI would report that the remains could be Isabel, but they still stopped short of saying that it was definitively her. Those findings, along with the positive identification of her clothing by her parents, were taken as confirmation that this was the young woman. Now the investigation was being worked on by several agencies, including Randolph County, where she was found, Moore County, the SBI and the FBI. Several thousand posters with a photo of Isabel and an artist depiction of the clothing she was wearing when she disappeared were distributed throughout the state. The sheriff, speaking to the media, attempted to stop rumors. He had to publicly deny that they had arrested several people in connection with the murder and were holding them for questioning. But he did assure the community that they had several leads and they were following up thoroughly on each one of those. One compelling lead was from someone who had claimed to have seen a young girl in the car with two soldiers. Isabel's friends had told officers that she had hitched to Fort Bragg on more than one occasion to meet up with some guys down there. She had also been seen skating at a local rink with a couple of them. This lead did have officers going down to Fort Bragg where they questioned several of the men who there who were her known acquaintances.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

And at that point, everyone they spoke to checked out, and nothing else did come from that. So it was true that she had hitchhike to Fort Bragg in the past. Yes. According to her according to multiple sources. Okay. They received calls from as far away as Atlanta, Georgia and Texas from folks who had claimed to have seen the missing girl, but still none of those leads were panning out. There was one lead though that came in and gave them pause. An Ashboro businessman claimed that he had seen her on either June 30th or July 1st when she had applied for a job with him. This stuck out in his mind because her her clothes were disheveled and soiled, which was unusual for a job applicant. And so he was confident it was the same girl. And several others also claimed to have seen the girl around Ashborough during that that time that he claimed. But this conflicted with the autopsy results, which indicated Isabel had been deceased for approximately three weeks, placing her death around the day that she actually went missing, June 22nd.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

If these reported sightings were accurate, this meant there was an eight or nine day gap between when she left and when she was actually killed. Which begged the question, where had she been during those days?

SPEAKER_02 18:38

Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

You know, and who had she been with. So which time of death was correct? And that was a big puzzle piece in the investigation. One possible reason for that discrepancy though was that the body had been subjected to intense heat. This was June, end of June, the hottest time in North Carolina. In a closed up house on the top floor, under a tin roof.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

So that could have greatly sped up the decomposition process. Officers had to consider both timelines. But investigators, they needed more. And so they they questioned those who knew her best. They dug into Isabel's past. They spoke with her friends, her family members, her schoolmates, and what they learned was that Isabel seemed a little more mature than most girls of her age, but in a worldly wise way. She frequently dated older boys or men, sometimes smoked cigarettes, and recently had opted for that more mature haircut, not the long hair and a ponytail. Right. Another interesting development was the discovery of a ten karat gold ring worn on her left hand. It had a fancy design on the crown, and on the inside of the band were the initials JTS. Friends told officers that Isabel had been wearing that ring for several weeks, but no one seemed to know who had given it to her. Later, officers did determine that two of those soldiers from Fort Bragg that she had dated shared those same initials.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

Oh wow, okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

They did check those out thoroughly and ultimately both of those men were cleared. Okay. Officers then came into possession of several unmailed letters that Isabel had written shortly before her death. In one of those letters, she had written about her intent to visit a couple in Tennessee. But when officers tracked down that lead, the officers in Tennessee had never even heard of that couple. So it was a dead end, but certainly an odd one. Right. Ultimately, more than two hundred and fifty people were questioned. Some sources said over four hundred, but you know newspaper accounts can vary widely. Oh yeah. Officers still were trying to account for a possible gap between her disappearance and when her body was found, and they knew if they could answer that, they would find her killer. But for several months nothing else was to be found in the papers about the case. And the case naturally began to cool a little bit. I found this really sad, but when the case began to cool, her mother offered a small reward for anybody who could give information that would lead to the arrest of her daughter's killer, and it was a fifty dollar reward.

SPEAKER_03 21:21

Oh bless her heart.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

I know. I mean she that was just all she had, but she was desperate and she was offering what little she could and That's so sad. That breaks my heart.

SPEAKER_03 21:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

What makes that especially sad to me is that in my research I discovered that the Hussies they carried a weight of grief that I hadn't expected because before Isabel was even born they had already lost three children. Oh a son at just sixteen months, an eight year old daughter, and another daughter at sixteen.

SPEAKER_03 21:54

Oh my gosh, are you serious? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

And it makes you wonder about I don't know, I can't Imagine that kind of grief.

SPEAKER_03 22:02

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

And then that you have this teenage your last baby, the baby you had at 45, and she's missing, and then you go and claim her body, and you're you're desperate to find out what happened to her. I just can't even I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 22:17

Wow, that's terrible. Do you know what like the causes of death for the other children?

SPEAKER_01 22:23

No, I didn't see any death certificates. I just found those siblings listed on findagrave.com and their their dates of death. But then several months after the murder, in March of 1956, the High Point Enterprise ran a story with this headline. SBI says convict confesses slaying young Ashborough girl. How that came about is rather intriguing. Three weeks prior to this headline, officers had been investigating another death, the strangulation death of a 45-year-old woman in High Point named Mary Hopkins in 1951. She had been strangled with a nylon stocking and sexually assaulted. The research in that case led them to a man who was already detained in McIntyre in a McDowell County prison camp. Joseph Lon Johnson, a baby-faced 34-year-old filling station attendant in Randolph County. So he worked in Randolph County? Prior to being put into the prison camp, yes. Okay. When officers located Johnson, he was then serving an eight-year sentence for armed robbery and assault of another woman in Davidson County, Betty Ford, whom he had left lying in a roadside ditch. That sentence had been handed down the previous winter. Now investigators felt that he might be involved in Hussie's murder as well. The papers stated that when they presented Johnson with evidence linking him to the murder of Hussie, he broke down and confessed. It did not say what that evidence was. In fact, the sheriff's department held their hand close to their vest, being very careful not to divulge what had led them to finger Johnson for Isabel's murder. But something led him to him, and they paid him a visit, and whatever it was they had on him, he did decide to come clean.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Johnson told authorities that he was driving out of the Ashboro Country Club at about ten thirty on the morning of june twenty second. The huzzy girl was standing on the opposite side of the road near Highway sixty four bypass, hitchhiking. He watched as an elderly man pulled over and she got in his car. Johnson proceeded south on two hundred twenty, and soon the car that contained the man and the girl passed him by. And then just beyond the Eula community, the duo pulled over at the curb market along two hundred twenty. Local folks will know that as the previous cliffs curb market on the way to Seagrove. And we stopped there, right, with Ricky? Yes, that's where we stopped on our field trip. When the elderly man got out of the car and went inside, Johnson approached the girl and he struck up a conversation, enticing her to ride with him instead. She switched cars, called back to the man that she had changed her mind and was going back to Ashborough instead, and left with Johnson. And it was that moment that sealed her fate forever. And when you're young, you think tragedy is something that happens in somebody else's story, but not your own. As a mother now, I just want to reach through time and tell her, don't get in that car. Don't don't do it. And like you like you said earlier, most of us remember taking rides we shouldn't have taken. Or making risky choices as a teenager that you shouldn't have made. You know, when I was 15, me and my older sister, Kim, we rode all the way down to Myrtle Beach with two guys we had just met. Wow. Well, two let me rephrase that. Two guys that she had just met. Oh gosh. She just informed me that we were riding with them. We got down there. Thankfully they weren't killers.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

We got down there. None of us had any money really. We spent all of our money to get a room. Their car broke down while we were there. We were stuck there for three days. We had to call back home. Well, we didn't call her mama because we didn't, you know, she didn't know we had rode with them. We called her older sister, Angel, and and we were trying to get her to help us out. I think we tried to get her to lie for us. I don't remember, but anyway, she ended up having to call mama, and my mama and her boyfriend drove down there in the middle of the night. We I think they got there at four o'clock in the morning to pick us up. And yeah, I mean I look back on that and think, oh my gosh, yeah that was so stupid for both of us.

SPEAKER_03 26:46

But yeah. Oh, I did e some things that were as equally crazy.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

Yeah. And when you do stuff like that and nothing bad happens, you continue sometimes because she had probably hitched many times before and never had run into any trouble. So you you feel like it's not going to happen.

SPEAKER_03 27:05

And I I it stuck out to me that you said he was a babyface. So he probably looked, you know, just he didn't look like a murderer, he didn't look like somebody that would do anything to her, you know?

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Right, because in our minds, as children, really at that age, in our minds, bad men look like bad men. Right. And and good looking guys that are sweet talkers, they're they're good men.

SPEAKER_03 27:29

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

Until they're not.

SPEAKER_03 27:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Well Johnson and Hussey headed back toward Ashborough, riding around for a while, talking, and then at some point he stopped and bought a pint of whiskey. Eventually they made their way back to West 64, where Johnson took her to the abandoned house near the country club. And then it was there that an argument between them began. Now Johnson's story's a bit murky here. He mentioned something about the huzzy girl asking him asking to borrow money from him. He wasn't sure, but all he claimed to remember was realizing suddenly they had argued and then he didn't remember anything until he realized he had done a very bad thing when he saw that she had been strangled. Just like your guy last in last week's episode. It's that same, oh, I don't remember, which is an awfully convenient thing. Had she been sexually assaulted or her body was too sheep decomposed to They said that they did not think she had been sexually assaulted. Okay. My best guess there is they probably got in an argument before that could happen. Okay. I feel like he probably did take her there for that purpose, whether she was willing or not willing, but s the argument must have broken out prior to anything like that happening.

SPEAKER_03 28:52

But I wonder it could have been that he was trying to get her to and she wouldn't do it. Possibly, but that's what because I mean he's clearly a predator.

SPEAKER_01 29:01

Right. And while I mean, maybe he's lying about that part. Exactly. Because he says that she has to borrow money, making it sound like she was the one who got mad.

SPEAKER_03 29:10

Well, he's the only one that gets to tell his side of the story, and I just don't feel like he's very trustworthy.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

So it could very well be that he that he did attempt something of that nature, and and that's where the argument And maybe she just thought she was gonna go there and drink or And hang out. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 29:26

Or who knows what he told her to get her in the car. Who knows what she thought she was gonna be doing.

SPEAKER_01 29:31

Right. Right. Realizing what he had done, instead of calling for help or anything like that, of course, he just took off and left her where she lay. The next day he reported to work at the gas station in Randolph County, where his employers said that he was acting strangely and he had scratches on his face and arms. He claimed his baby had scratched him. For some reason, though, he didn't show up for work the next day at all. He returned home to High Point, where he lived with his wife Daphne and three young children. With that confession came the realization about the actual timeline. Officers now knew Isabel had been killed the day of her disappearance, and there was no eight or nine day gap, as they were led to believe by an eyewitness. Right. The Ashborough man who claimed to see her was once again a faulty eyewitness. Chances are he had read the description of her clothes in the paper or seen one of those posters, and then that memory just imprinted on his mind the girl that he saw.

SPEAKER_02 30:35

Right. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

I mean, I'm sure he wasn't just trying to lie. I'm sure he really believed he had seen her.

SPEAKER_03 30:40

Just like I believed I saw the lady who told that story about the horse, and I literally can see her in my mind.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

That is wild.

SPEAKER_03 30:48

I mean, I I'm sure there was a lady there, but I just have it jumbled up in my mind. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

The human brain does weird things. It does. Well, Lon Johnson may have been a husband and a father, but his rap sheet of arrest went way back. All the way back to 1940, when he had been sentenced for assault with intent to commit rape. Okay, yeah. I don't trust this guy at all. Yeah. And then again in 1944, he was convicted of two counts of forgery, and in nineteen forty-seven he received four months for assault on a female. Even his wife admitted that she had been a f that she was afraid of him when he had been drinking. Reading through his rap sheet feels less like looking at isolated crimes and more like watching these warning lights flash one after another. Assault, intent to commit rape, more violence, more chances. And it's hard not to think about how familiar that pattern still feels today. Right. You know, communities they're we're left wondering why we have dangerous repeat offenders that that continue to be released until another victim gets added to the story. Even when I was researching this one and the it came up in the news about the the young woman, the Ukrainian woman in Charlotte, Arena and De Carlos Brown, and how many times and he has his rap sheet was so long and they just kept letting him out. And they have still just this week decided that he can't stand trial yet. What a miscarriage of justice.

SPEAKER_02 32:25

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

And so even back in the 50s, we were facing those same kinds of questions, like how many chances does a person get? Right. How many victims do you need before you quit letting this guy out? Yeah. Sorry, I went on that rant.

SPEAKER_03 32:40

No, I I mean it it's a great point.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Well, at least this time, prosecutors wasted no time in charging Johnson with the murder and bringing him to trial. After pleading guilty to second degree murder, which actually saved him from a possible death sentence, Johnson received eighteen to twenty years in June of nineteen fifty-six. I don't think that's enough. No, it isn't enough. They did say this sentence was to run consecutively with the eight to nine year sentence that he was already serving. Still not enough. No. As his sentence was handed down in a packed courtroom of over twelve hundred spectators, the guilty man showed no emotion. His wife and children sat behind him. The victim's mother sat in the front row to witness her daughter's killer face justice. She sat in that courtroom and watched the man responsible finally sentenced for her daughter's murder. But no sentence could undo what had already been taken from this mother who had already faced so much loss in her life. And decades later, the story of Isabel Hussey remains a heartbreaking reminder of how quickly innocence, trust, and one seemingly ordinary decision can collide with unimaginable evil.

SPEAKER_03 33:55

Oh my gosh. Well, my gut says that he was definitely planning to sexually assault her. And that's probably why she was murdered because she, you know, didn't want to go along with it. Also, I just feel like the whole belt around the neck and the nylon stocking, right? Did you say a nylon stocking?

SPEAKER_01 34:20

That's not just something you accidentally Well, the nylon stocking was on another woman that they were investigating him for. It was a man's handkerchief and her belt.

SPEAKER_03 34:30

He has a pattern. Yes. And even that could be some part of some sick, you know, sexual impulse that he has. Yeah. But in yeah, I don't know. It just breaks my heart. That's terrible. But I don't think probably back in the 50s, I can see, you know, if she was a little bit of a wild child, I can see some b victim blaming possibly happening there, which is heartbreaking because you know this guy was evil and he was a predator.

SPEAKER_01 35:03

Right. And it's not her fault. No. Yeah. And I think about when they stopped at Cliff's Curb Market and that older gentleman, you know, he he followed them there. He was behind them and he followed them. I think he had in his mind then. Oh yeah. He and he saw his chance and he took it.

SPEAKER_02 35:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

But I'm just thinking that man would have gotten her home. That other man would have gotten her home, probably.

SPEAKER_03 35:27

And it was just a chance, like he just happened to see her. Yeah, exactly. So those were some hard times. They sure were.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Now, out of all the things I've heard Darlene and Melody talk about on this program, this little girl deciding to walk from Robbins to Ashboro has gotta be the craziest. I know from experience, when I was about 14, I decided to make that trek on a bicycle. From Ashboro to Robbins. About halfway, I got a flat tire. The second half on foot took me over four hours. I don't know what was in Ashboro in 1955 that was worth walking to. But it clearly isn't here now. The only thing crazier than walking from Robbins to Ashboro would be not downloading every single episode of Hard Times and True Crimes. Liking, sharing, subscribing, and tell everybody you know, even if they live in Robbins, to check us out. Till next time, get back.