He Was Ha.nged for Murder—Then His Name Became a Folk Song That Hid the Real Killer||
ShTom Dula was ha.nged in 1868 for murdering Laura Foster—but before dying, he signed a statement clearing his lover Anne.
The murder of Laura Foster has been sung about in ballads for generations. The story became famous through the name Tom Dooley, a name that eventually found its way into American folk music. Behind the song, though, was a real crime, a real trial, and a young woman whose death became one of the most enduring murder stories in Appalachian history.
Tom Dula was born in 1844 in Wilkes County, North Carolina. His extended family had deep roots in the area. According to local histories, the wider Dula clan settled in Wilkes County’s Happy Valley region in the late 1700s.
One ancestor, said to have served in the Revolutionary War, acquired several thousand acres of fertile land between the communities of Patterson and Ferguson. Some branches of the family grew wealthy, with large farms and plantations worked by enslaved people. Tom’s immediate family never enjoyed that kind of money.
By the 1860 census, Tom’s father was already dead. His mother, Mary Dula, was raising four children and running the household alone. The family owned some land, but much of it was rocky and poorly suited to farming. Tom grew up poor.
He was described as tall and good-looking, close to six feet, with brown hair and brown eyes. He also developed a reputation for being popular with women. Even his name would become part of the legend. In the local mountain dialect, “Dula” was often pronounced more like “Dooley,” and when the story reached folk music, that is how it stuck.
Long before any song was written, Tom became tangled in a web of relationships that would eventually put him at the center of a murder investigation. A few miles from his house lived the Foster family. Lydia Foster had several children, including Anne, Thomas, Martha, Lenny, and Marshall.
Like many families in isolated mountain communities, the Fosters had little formal education and lived modestly. Lydia also had a local reputation for heavy drinking. Her daughter Anne married a man named James Melton when she was reportedly only 14 or 15.
Marriage did not keep Anne from Tom. According to later testimony, Lydia once found the two together. Tom was around 15 at the time, and Anne about a year older.
The relationship did not end there. Anne stayed married to James Melton, yet Tom kept visiting her. The Meltons’ one-room cabin reportedly held three beds, and James often slept by himself.
Anne’s cousin Pauline Foster, who later lived in the same cabin, testified that she regularly saw Tom slip into Anne’s bed after dark. Accounts from the period describe Anne as attractive, forceful, and quick-tempered. Tom, meanwhile, kept seeing other women, and that was about to make things far more complicated.
In early 1866, another Foster relative arrived at the Melton home. Pauline Foster came from neighboring Watauga County and took a job as a live-in housekeeper for Anne and James. She had another reason for being there. She was suffering from syphilis.
According to later accounts of the case, Pauline needed money to pay a local doctor, George Carter, for treatment. Working for the Meltons would help cover the bill. Soon after she arrived, Pauline became involved with Tom, too.
That put Tom in relationships with both Anne and Pauline. Before long, there was a third woman. Laura Foster, another relative of Anne and Pauline, was the daughter of a tenant farmer named Wilson Foster. People who remembered her described chestnut hair and a noticeable gap between her front teeth.
At some point in early 1866, Tom began seeing Laura as well. By spring, he was involved with three women from the same extended family. It might have stayed a source of local gossip, but then illness entered the story.
Tom is believed to have contracted syphilis from Pauline. Unaware of the source, he then appears to have passed it to both Anne and Laura. The trouble was that Tom did not believe Pauline had infected him. His symptoms showed up during the period when he was seeing Laura, so he blamed Laura.
He apparently became convinced that she had infected him and that he had then passed the disease to Anne. According to later testimony, Tom was furious. He reportedly told a neighbor he meant to “put through” the woman responsible, a phrase understood as a threat to kill her.
The neighbor tried to talk him out of violence, but the tension kept building. Then came Thursday, May 24. Anne pulled Pauline aside for a private talk. She said Tom believed Laura had given him “the pox,” a period term for syphilis, and that she herself was now infected too.
Then, according to Pauline’s later testimony, Anne said something chilling. She said she intended to kill Laura. She also allegedly warned Pauline to keep quiet and threatened to kill her as well if she repeated it.
Later that morning, while Pauline was alone at the Melton house, Tom showed up. He said Anne had sent him for some alum, used to treat mouth sores, and to borrow a canteen. Pauline handed over both.
Tom later asked a man named Carson Maguire to fill the canteen with moonshine and deliver it to the Melton house. Then he went to Lydia Foster’s home to borrow a mattock, a heavy digging tool similar to a pick. Lydia reportedly asked what he needed it for. Tom gave an odd answer. He said he had “some devilment to work out.”
A neighbor named Martha later reported seeing Tom swinging the mattock near a path about 100 yards from his cabin. When asked what he was doing, Tom said he was widening the path so it would be easier to walk after dark. That detail would matter a great deal later, because the place where Laura’s body was eventually found was not far away.
That afternoon, Tom returned to Lydia’s home without the mattock. Around 3:00, he and Anne left together. Witnesses did not see either of them again until the next day. The mattock would not be returned for several more days.
The following morning, Tom went to Laura Foster’s cabin. Her father was still inside, and not wanting to wake him, Laura slipped outside to speak with Tom. No one knows what was said.
Afterward, Laura went back in and began getting ready to leave. She gathered extra clothing and put one dress over another for warmth, fastening them together with a brooch. She also wore a cape, reportedly to hide sores on her chest. Then she took her father’s mare.
Laura told others she was headed for a spot known as Bates Place. A blacksmith shop had once stood there. By 1866 the building was gone, but locals still used the location as a familiar meeting point.
The ride was roughly six miles. About a mile in, Laura passed a neighbor named Betsy Scott. She told Betsy she was going to meet Tom. Betsy reportedly doubted that Tom would keep his promises, but Laura rode on. That was the last confirmed sighting of her alive.
The next morning, Laura’s mare came home without her. A broken rope still dangled from the animal’s halter. Her father knew immediately that something was wrong. He alerted the neighbors, and a search began.
At first there was hope that Laura had simply gone somewhere without telling her family. But as hours turned into days, concern turned into fear. Search parties combed the woods, trails, and countryside, and found nothing. Days stretched into weeks, and Laura seemed to have vanished.
As rumors spread, people began talking about Tom Dula. They knew Laura had planned to meet him. They also knew about his tangled relationship with Anne. Suspicion slowly settled on both of them, but there was no body, and without one there was no proof a murder had even occurred.
Then, more than three weeks after Laura disappeared, the search ended. On June 18, 1866, searchers found a shallow grave near Bates Place. Inside lay Laura Foster’s body. She had been stabbed in the chest, and some accounts claimed she was pregnant when she died.
The discovery changed everything. This was no longer a missing-person case but a murder, and attention swung quickly to Tom. The location of the grave also raised questions about the mattock he had borrowed shortly before she vanished.
Tom apparently saw investigators closing in. The day after Laura’s body was found, he fled. He headed first toward Watauga County, then crossed the state line into Tennessee. He began calling himself Tom Hall.
Near the community of Trade, Tennessee, he found farm work with a man named Colonel James Grayson. For a short time, the new name kept him safe. Eventually, though, Grayson learned who his hired hand really was.
Once he discovered that the man was wanted in North Carolina in connection with Laura Foster’s murder, Grayson joined the hunt. Tom was captured roughly three weeks after he fled, and his escape was over. He was taken back to North Carolina to stand trial.
Tom was indicted for the murder of Laura Foster. Anne Melton was charged as an accessory before the fact. The evidence against both was largely circumstantial. No eyewitness could say they saw Tom kill Laura.
Prosecutors, however, had several troubling pieces of evidence. There were Tom’s threats. There was the mattock. There was his flight after the body was found. And there was Pauline Foster’s testimony about Anne’s threat against Laura.
The case first came before the Wilkes County Superior Court in the fall term of 1866. Because the story had drawn so much local attention, the proceedings were moved to Iredell County. At Tom’s request, his trial was separated from Anne’s, and he faced the jury alone.
The prosecution argued that his behavior before and after Laura’s disappearance pointed to guilt. The jury agreed. Tom was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His lawyers, however, pushed back with an appeal.
The case went to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which overturned the first conviction over procedural problems and ordered a new trial. Tom had escaped the gallows for the moment. In January 1868, he was tried again.
Prosecutors once more laid out the circumstances of Laura’s disappearance and death, and once more the jury convicted him. Tom appealed again. This time the state’s high court upheld the verdict. There would be no third trial, and his legal options were nearly exhausted.
Shortly before his execution, Tom signed a statement accepting sole responsibility for Laura’s death. In it, he said Anne Melton had nothing to do with the killing. Why he did this remains one of the case’s lingering mysteries.
Some believe he was simply telling the truth. Others suspect he was trying to protect Anne. Skeptics of both readings point out that the full story may have died with the people who lived it.
On May 1, 1868, Tom Dula was led to the gallows in Statesville, North Carolina. He was only in his early 20s. The young man who grew up in the mountains of Wilkes County was about to become one of the region’s most famous murder defendants.
Anne Melton later faced her own trial. She was acquitted. Legally, the case was closed, but the story was only beginning.
In the years that followed, the murder sank into Appalachian folklore, and the details shifted with every retelling. Some versions cast Tom as an innocent man. Others painted Anne as the true killer. Defenders of the conviction say the evidence and his own signed statement settle the matter, while doubters say the case rested too heavily on circumstance and on one witness.
Some songs went further and rewrote Laura as Tom’s lover or fiancée. Fact blended with rumor, rumor hardened into legend, and legend became music. “Dula” became “Dooley,” and the killing of a young woman in the North Carolina mountains in 1866 became a ballad.
More than a century later, people still sing it. But behind the famous name was a real crime, a real trial, and a young woman, Laura Foster, whose death remains one of Appalachia’s most enduring murder stories.
