A small-town killing cooked in the August sun

On a sweltering July 1981 evening in the podunk unincorporated community of Lawsonville, N.C., Brenda Kay Nancy Oakley had had it with her no-count unemployed husband, Daniel, and their two-bit, dilapidated, trailer-park way of life.

Lawsonville is a tiny Stokes County, N.C. drive-by on NC Route 8, about three miles south of the Virginia border. It has a couple of schools, an auto parts store, a Dollar General, and the Berry Patch Market & Grill.

The North Carolina Septic Tank Association headquarters, too, let’s not forget.

It’s central North Carolina farmland. The primary economic driver is livestock. The county seat, Danbury, is 8 miles due south.

After what was later assumed to be an inebriated domestic argument, Daniel, 29, headed off to the bedroom in the back of the trailer and pretty much passed out cold.

Not Brenda. The 28-year-old wasn’t going to take this low-rent lifestyle anymore.

So, Brenda grabbed the household .38 pistol and with a single headshot rendered Daniel stone-cold dead as he slept.

In an attempt to get rid of the evidence, she chopped her deceased husband into five pieces, right there on the blood-splattered bed, hauled him bit by bit out back to the trash barrel, and set him on fire.

Daniel didn’t burn, even with a good dousing of gasoline. The flames probably weren’t even seen by the neighbors. Who happened to be Daniel’s parents.

Brenda went to what could be considered Plan B which was to lug her dead, dismembered, partially-burnt, no-count husband off site and dispose of him and the evidence — the gun, the ax, the knives, bloody bedsheets — elsewhere.

Like maybe the small pond near Performance Livestock and Feed Company next to the railroad a mile north.

So, she spent the rest of the night transferring things to the trunk of her 1970 Ford Torino wreck of a car parked in front of the trailer. She went back inside, curled up on the couch and called it a day.

Inexplicably, she never relocated the evidence. It eventually cost her.

Let’s pause here. This is a true story. It was a Stokes County crime I covered in late August 1981 while a reporter at the Greensboro Daily News. It was, without a doubt, one of the most bizarre stories I had covered to date.

And that included the Morganton witch, Joanne Denton, who ran for Mayor of Morganton with the spirit of Elvis as her campaign advisor. (She lost to incumbent Andrew Kistler.)

Back to the event.

A week went by. It was now early August with all its heat and humidity. Daniel’s parents started asking Brenda about their son. They hadn’t seen him around.

“She stated to the relatives that, several days later, she received a call from him informing her he was in Florida and for her not to worry about him, that he had to think some things over,” Stokes County Sheriff W.F. Southern told me three weeks later.

More days passed. They were seething, white-hot Piedmont North Carolina summertime days. The kind of hot where pavement softens and you stick to car seats.

Daniel’s dad knocked on his neighbor and daughter-in-law Brenda’s aluminum beat-to-hell front door one evening in mid-August, asking again about Daniel’s whereabouts. In Florida, she said, like I told you before.

By the way, the father said, eyeballing the dark cloud over the trunk lid of Brenda’s car. You have a real black fly problem over there. He did not notice, or comment on if he did, the dripping dark slime pooling beneath the back of the car.

Neither of them mentioned the growing stink in the air.

Daniel’s mother and father would sit in rocking chairs on their front porch in the smothering August evenings. They were, the mother testified later, extremely suspicious of all things Brenda Oakly.

They watched the cloud of flies grow. You couldn’t ignore the pungent aroma wafting through. It didn’t add up. Still no contact from their son and the car that drew flies like the cattle farm down the road.

Three weeks after the murder Daniel’s parents called the law.

Sheriff Southern dispatched deputy Perry Frye to the scene, and, with Brenda’s permission, forced open the trunk.

“When the officer gained entry into the trunk, there was something covered in the sheets and blankets,” Southern said. “The officer could see enough to realize it was a body and he called for assistance.”

Brenda was arrested on the spot and taken in cuffs to jail. A preliminary trial date was set in Stokes County Courthouse in Danbury four days later, Aug. 27.

Located in the heart of Danbury the courthouse was (it has since been replaced) a classic red-brick institutional affair with a monumental portico. It sat on a patch of elevated lawn and was surrounded by hardwood trees and decorative landscape.

Judging from the crowd, Stokes County had never seen anything like it, crimewise. Half the population of Danbury, and probably all of Lawsonville, turned out Aug. 27 to catch a glimpse of the accused murderer being transferred to the courthouse from the jail.

The curious clamored for view spots. They climbed the trees, stood atop the stone wall bordering the property, and took to the roofs of neighboring buildings.

When the sheriff’s car bringing Brenda showed up, the excited hum was replaced by an eerie stillness and hushed whispers.

Brenda emerged from the backseat wearing blue jeans, a red and white checked shirt and a gray sweatshirt. She pulled the hood over her head and much of her face and was rushed into a side door of the courthouse.

By the time Brenda Oakley was sentenced, Stokes County knew what it didn’t want to know. The stink, the flies, the stories about Florida, all of it had seeped past rumor and into fact.

After an evaluation at Dorothea Dix mental hospital in Raleigh, in late January 1982, Brenda was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years.

And that is the thing about small places like Lawsonville. You can disappear from a porch, but you can’t disappear from a community that watches. Not for long. Not when the truth is parked out front, sealed in steel, and cooking in the August sun.