Naturally Intriguing

Aerial View of Frisby Funny Farm   15 hours on the road, and we turn into the gravel drive of the Frisby Funny Farm. Grandpa Mack is waiting on the porch swing in his usual overalls and straw hat. My mother honks the horn of our minivan excitedly, which brings Grandma Jan flying out the front door of their single wide trailer. We park next to the front walk and I slide open the rear passenger door. The gravel crunch under my feet feels like home - not my home in Florida, but rather a familiar place I am returning to after a long absence. I hurry around the front of the van but Grandma is there already, grabbing my cheeks between her thumbs and fingers and pinching hard. I escape her grasp moments before suffering seriously bodily harm and run to Grandpa. I throw my arms around his waist and lay my reddened cheek against his well-fed belly. Grandpa loves Twinkies. Grandma Jan and Grandpa Mack   My dad carries in the luggage, but I have places to be and things to do. I run across a patc

  "I'd like you to take me ruck-sacking in Jennings Forest."   That was my 77-year-old mother's request as we played Giant Jenga on New Year's Eve.   "OK," I replied as I watched my husband wiggle another block free from the precarious tower on the dining room table. I didn't ponder whether or not my mother should be hiking, though I did wonder if she knew what "ruck-sacking" was. Certainly, I knew she could walk a nature trail, but should she really try doing it in a weighted backpack?   My mother had a stroke last spring. The ER doctors didn't call it that, nor did the attending neurologists in the following days as we waited for her release. But what else could it have been? While raking leaves in her tiny front yard, she began to feel strange. Thinking she had simply gotten overheated, she went inside to rest, but while reading a book in her armchair, the words began to look like hieroglyphics. Wisely, she called 911.   That was the

   For the last year, I have been searching for information about my grandmother's murder. I never knew my grandmother, Eunice Johnson McGhee, since she passed away more than two decades before my birth. But reading my father's letters to the Lee County solicitor, the frustration apparent in his words, and recognizing the odd nature of events that night as told to my father by the police, I wanted to know the truth. I also realized part of what motivated me was a sense of unfinished business - my father's unfinished business that I had a chance to put to rest.   Beyond my father's letters, I had little to go on. In a musty file folder were Eunice's birth certificate, driver's license, marriage certificate, and various documents related to the property she had inherited from her father. I had photographs of Eunice as well, mostly black and white images of a rarely smiling woman in modest clothing with a modest hairstyle. Indeed, she did not look like someone that

Eunice(far right) and her five siblings   At the time of her death, all five of Eunice's siblings were alive with most of them living very near to her in North Carolina. Her daughter Inez, who Eunice had always been close to, was married to a successful chemist employed by the GE Research and Development Center. Yet the burden of payment for Eunice's funeral would fall on her son Charles, her youngest child who she had often abandoned and denied any motherly affection.   In 1955, Charles was still in the US Marine Corps and residing in a Florida trailer park across from the Jacksonville naval base. He was saving to buy a house with his wife Polly, and the couple had just purchased a beauty parlor for Polly to manage. Charles was enrolled at Jacksonville Junior College (now Jacksonville University) with dreams of becoming an engineer. The military was helping him with tuition, but Charles was still following a tight budget to help him achieve his goals. So tight that at the time

Charles and Eunice in 1949   Charles McGhee suffered lifelong emotional damage from the way mother Eunice treated him. But her death before they could reconcile was the straw that broke the camel's back. He did not like to speak about her, even decades later with his second wife and children, who had never met her. All he would ever say about her death was that she had been 'killed by a policeman'. Obviously, this created more questions than answers, but there never were any answers for Charles or his family.   When Charles passed away in 2018, the murder of Eunice Johnson McGhee was still unsolved, but a few years later, his family discovered a handful of letters exposing more details around the case. Two of the letters were carbon copies of typed letters Charles had apparently mailed to North Carolina officials questioning the handling of the investigation. As of today's date, the responses to these letters have not been located, but the tone of the second letter does