Crime Immemorial

In the summer of 1969, a hard-working North Carolina grandmother would be mercilessly stabbed to death in her home, for reasons which are still a complete enigma.

Fifty-five-year-old Elizabeth Hilts Grant was a widow who had lived alone in a house on Robinhood Road in Winston-Salem since the death of her husband in 1953. The couple had two grown children living out of state, and Elizabeth was also a grandmother to a two-year-old.

Every single day without fail, including weekends and holidays, Elizabeth would report to work to run a newsstand in the lobby of the Hotel Robert E. Lee, a business that had been in the family for five decades. At night, she had a second job, as a bookkeeper at the Twin City Club.

On the rainy night of July 28th, 1969, Elizabeth left work and stopped by a local grocery store at about ten-thirty p.m. to pick up a gallon of milk. She then proceeded on to her home, where evidently someone was lying in wait for her.

When Elizabeth didn’t show up for work as usual the next morning, her sister Ruth immediately became concerned; Elizabeth, who friends and family affectionately called Lib, was nothing if not a creature of habit. Ruth went to the house on Robinhood Road and immediately knew that something must be wrong, for Elizabeth’s keys were still hanging from the back door lock, all the lights in the house were on, and the gallon of milk still sat on the kitchen counter.

Just a little way inside the residence, Ruth soon learned the horrifying reason for her sister’s absence at the newsstand: the fifty-five-year-old woman was lying amidst a bloodbath in the bedroom of her home. Blood was splattered up the walls in all the rooms leading to Elizabeth’s final resting place, indicating that Lib had fought valiantly against her attacker all throughout the house.

Police soon descended on the scene. Elizabeth Grant had been stabbed an unbelievable fifty-four times. Four knives, all of which had been taken from her kitchen, lay near the body, though it was unclear if the victim had used one or more of them to defend herself, or if the killer had wielded them all at varying points. Elizabeth had not been sexually assaulted.

Robbery was clearly not the motive, for the house did not appear to have been searched, and Elizabeth still wore her two expensive diamond rings. Her white straw purse, however, was missing, though Ruth did not believe there had been much more than a few dollars in it. Investigators surmised that the killer had entered the house through a back window which had been pried open, and then ambushed Elizabeth as soon as she walked into the kitchen through the back door of the home.

There were a few other clues found at the house as well. Detectives were able to obtain fifteen sets of fingerprints from the scene, and also documented a trail of wet footprints which led into the garage of Elizabeth’s home, which led them to believe that the killer had hidden in the garage in order to keep out of the rain.

Oddly, investigators also recovered a pair of gray suede boots, size nine-and-a-half, which had been placed very deliberately on a rocking chair in the bedroom. These shoes did not belong to Elizabeth Grant, and it was theorized that the murderer had left them as some sort of message.

Detectives canvassed the neighborhood for clues, though few residents had heard anything unusual, and even guard dogs in nearby houses had failed to bark. One neighbor, however, did state that he had heard a car door slamming near Elizabeth’s house at around ten-thirty p.m., and had peered out to see a shadowed man in the driveway. The neighbor further told police that the man asked if there was a filling station nearby, though he hadn’t got a good look at the possible assailant. The neighbor also claimed he had heard a vehicle speeding off at around eleven p.m.

On the same day that Elizabeth’s body was discovered, an anonymous caller phoned the newsstand that Elizabeth owned, saying that he had her wallet and wished to return it. The man was later identified as a barber named Kenneth Dodd, who told police that two boys had found the wallet in a playground and brought it into his shop.

Over the ensuing days, there would be another bizarre phone call, as well as a handful of possible leads. A strange woman phoned authorities days after the crime and insisted, “It wasn’t a man; it was me.” Police didn’t seem to take the anonymous call very seriously, but it was chilling, nonetheless.

Another tip that came in shortly after the murder seemed somewhat more compelling. An unnamed man informed police that he had seen a middle-aged white man with long blond hair throwing Elizabeth’s wallet out of the window of a green Falcon at around eleven-thirty on the night of the homicide. This jibed with the investigators’ suspicion that the wallet had been deliberately tossed into the playground—which was located in a predominantly black neighborhood—in order to throw police off the trail of the presumably white killer.

Conflicting with this hypothesis, though, was a lab report that revealed that a few hairs found on Elizabeth Grant’s stockings belonged to an African-American man. However, the possibility remained that the hairs had come from someone other than her killer, such as perhaps a co-worker or patron of one of her places of business. At any rate, the hairs could not be conclusively linked to her murderer.

And according to psychiatrist and profiler James Brussel, who was called in to consult on the case, Elizabeth Grant’s attacker was very likely a mentally disturbed white man, aged between thirty and fifty years old, who knew her and held some kind of deep-seated grudge. Brussel pointed out that the murder weapons had all come from Elizabeth’s own kitchen, indicating that the perpetrator had likely not come to the house with the intention of killing Elizabeth, but probably wished to confront her about some perceived slight, after which the situation got drastically out of hand. The fact that Elizabeth was stabbed more than four dozen times, after all, suggested an intensely personal vendetta.

The gray boots that had been left behind at the scene, additionally, could have been some sort of totem of triumph that had some particular meaning to the killer. Investigators were able to determine that the boots likely belonged to a right-handed male who weighed around a hundred and fifty pounds and walked with a slight limp.

Five months after the slaying, a construction worker came across Elizabeth’s purse near Muddy Creek, not far from Elizabeth’s home, but it yielded no new clues, and in spite of the best efforts of detectives and a very large reward for information, the case stagnated for several years.

In 1972, though, a very similar crime took place only about thirty miles away from where Elizabeth Grant had been murdered. A couple in Stokes County, North Carolina was stabbed multiple times by a killer who had broken into their home and waited to ambush them.

The main suspect in the double homicide was a man named William Otis Stewart, who had a long rap sheet in several southern states which comprised a number of charges including murder, rape, and assault. Stewart would have been seventeen years old at the time of the Elizabeth Grant murder, which was far younger than the profile suggested. In addition, police could never definitively place him in the Winston-Salem area, and the lead eventually fizzled out.

In 1997, DNA evidence led authorities to another unnamed suspect, who had lived in Winston-Salem at the time of the murder and knew Elizabeth Grant from the newsstand. This individual allegedly made some slightly incriminating statements when questioned by police, and was mentally handicapped, as the profiler had predicted the killer would be. Elizabeth’s family speculated that the suspect’s father might have been the individual spotted discarding the wallet in the playground, in order to protect his son.

However, no solid proof of this suspect’s involvement was ever established, and as of this writing, the brutal murder remains unsolved.