Most notorious contains adult themes. It is not suitable for all audiences.

Listener discretion is advised.

Welcome everyone to the most notorious podcast.

I'm your host, Eric Rivenes. The holidays, of course, are a time for family, peace, and love.

There have been moments in American history, however, when the Christmas season was not a happy time.

Today, we remember a terrible tragedy that happened on Christmas Day in Germanton, North Carolina in 1929.

I'm pleased to speak with Trudy J. Smith about her book, The Meaning of Our Tears.

She had an earlier edition a few years ago called White Christmas Bloody Christmas.

Ms. Smith, alongside her father, embruced Jones, compiled interviews that helped document a tragic story, the loss in family Christmas murders.

Thank you, Trudy Smith, for joining me today. Could you talk about what originally piqued your interest in this story?

How did you initially hear about it and how did you and your father team up to write the first edition of this book?

Thank you so much, Eric, for having me on. That's a question I get asked quite often.

It's a sort of a unique situation. My father, in 1929, he was eight years old.

When that tragedy happened, it was several miles away from him here in North Carolina. He lived in Thomas Stil.

He was just a small child, but that day, when that mass murder had occurred, and it was on Christmas Day, and it was unusually cold and snowy Christmas that year.

He was just absolutely done found that there's a small child that a father could murder his entire family on Christmas Day.

He just really captured his heart and his mind, and he wasn't alone, and I think that's part of why this story resonates with so many people.

The fact that a father would do this on Christmas Day was just really huge for him and others.

So he always talked about that from the time I was very small. He would bring that murder up, and it was always talked about.

He always wondered what happened, what caused him to do such a tragic thing.

So, like in the early 60s, when I was small, he took us up to where the cabin was if they lived in. It was still there at the time, and we weren't able to go in it.

But even then, he was talking about it, interested in it. In 1987, when he retired, and he was in the 60s, and of course he retired, and had some friends up in that area, and of course they would sit around and talk about it.

...