The Legend of Tom Dooley

Another mystery of the mountain region comes from Wilkes County, North Carolina, right after the Civil War. Handsome Tom Dula (pronounced "Dooley" by the locals) came home from the war looking for beautiful Ann, the girl he'd left behind, but she had married James Melton in the meantime. Many believed she and Tom picked up their relationship anyway.

The ladies liked Tom, and he saw other women, including Laura Foster, a cousin of Ann's. When Laura was murdered, and Tom went missing, many assumed he had committed the crime. The sheriff found him in Tennessee and 

brought him back for trial, but there's always been a lot of doubt about what really happened. Some of the testimony at the trial sounds too much like gossip and hearsay. Although some sources listed Laura as Tom's fiancee at the time of her death, it was all based on a few comments she'd made about running away with Tom. However, some believe the man she was planning to leave with was someone else entirely, and she wanted to keep it a secret, because there was no reason for her to run away to marry Tom. At his hanging, Tom's last words about Laura Foster was to say, "I didn't harm a hair on that girl's head."

After he was sentenced, Tom did sign a confession, but many think it was to protect Ann, who had also been jailed. "The Ballad of Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio and the movie starring Michael Landon as Tom also made people wonder if Tom wasn't innocent. In 2001, Tom Dula was acquitted of all charges, but it held little weight at this point.

There were others who could have been guilty. Many believed that Ann had actually killed Laura from jealousy, or at least had directed someone other than Tom to do so. Author Sharon McCrumb took a different

view. According to her novel, The Ballad of Tom Dooley, Pauline Foster, another cousin of Ann and Laura, was a sociopath who manipulated everyone and had Ann so jealous she killed Laura. Then, Pauline arranged for Tom to take the blame. She had been staying with the Meltons as a helper at the time. I wasn't impressed with McCrumb's version, because every character was presented in such a degrading, stereotypical, poor mountain-trash way. There wasn't one really respectable character in the whole book. Even Tom's lawyer, later to be governor, Zebulon Vance, is portrayed as bungling and incompetent.

This is one of those intriguing stories that will likely never be clearly resolved. Whatever happened, Tom Dooley has never been forgotten.

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