High's Ice Cream Homicides: Covering the Case with Small Town Big Crime's Courteney Stuart

Murder Sheet

MurderSheet

True Crime, Murder, Unsolved Case, Killing, Murderer, Cold Case

3.8 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1967, two young women working at High's Ice Cream in Staunton, Virginia were shot to death at work. Decades later, one of their coworkers, Sharron Smith, confessed on her deathbed to the killings.

But that wasn't the end of the story. For some, it was just the beginning. William "Bill" Thomas, a man who had been acquitted of one of the murders, brought a lawsuit against Staunton itself, after living under a cloud of suspicion for years.

Courteney Stuart had previously edited stories about the High's confession for The Hook, a local Charlottesville paper. Then, she found herself reporting on the Thomas lawsuit. She spoke with us about what it was like on the ground, covering the aftermath of an explosive small-town case.

And check out Courteney's own true crime podcast — Small Town Big Crime — wherever you listen to podcasts. It delves into the shocking 1985 murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom, and the subsequent arrest of their daughter Elizabeth and her University of Virginia classmate Jens Soering.

In the upcoming weeks, the Murder Sheet will roll out a miniseries on an unsolved restaurant mass murder, so stay tuned.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Tired of ads interrupting your gripping investigations? Good news. Add free listening on Amazon Music
0:06.5	is included with your Prime Membership. Adds shouldn't be the scariest thing about
0:11.4	true crime podcasts. To start listening, download the Amazon Music App or visit amazon.co.uk
0:17.8	forward slash true crime ad free. That's amazon.co.uk forward slash true crime ad free to catch up
0:24.6	on the latest episodes without the ads. A few weeks ago on the murder sheet, we covered
0:31.2	the story of the high ice cream murders. You can find the whole story in our earlier episodes,
0:37.3	but in brief, two young women were shot to death in the back of an ice cream store in
0:42.2	Stanton, Virginia. William or Bill Thomas was arrested for that crime, tried and acquitted.
0:50.2	Decades later, a woman named Sharon Crawford confessed to the murders on her deathbed and alleged
0:57.4	that the lead investigator on the case, David Bocock, knew she was guilty all along and covered
1:03.5	up for her. We wanted to learn a bit more about the case and how it affected the community,
1:08.8	and so we reached out to Courtney Stewart, one of the reporters who covered developments in the
1:14.4	story after the confession. Courtney wasn't even based in the town where the murders happened.
1:20.0	She worked for a newspaper in Charlottesville. Stanton is 40 minutes from Charlottesville,
1:27.0	so we were sort of reporting out of our area because it was such a crazy story.
1:31.7	This week on the murder sheet, Courtney tells us the wild story of the aftermath of the
1:36.6	high ice cream murders. My name is Ania Kane, and I'm Kevin Greenley, and this is the murder sheet,
1:51.4	a weekly true crime podcast. Ania and I connected over the Bergerchev murders, a 1978 unsolved case
1:59.4	involving the killings of four young restaurant employees. Now we're looking to track restaurant
2:05.0	homicides. To help us understand the patterns of these crimes, we created a spreadsheet of nearly
2:11.0	a thousand eatery related killings, the murder sheet. We'll be drawing on that data throughout
2:17.0	season one to give you a deep dive into undercover crimes. We don't just rely on skimming the headlines.
	...

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