HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: Death by trowel-Mysterious 1953 slaying remains unsolved

GUILFORD COUNTY

The news was frighteningly disturbing.

In rural Sumner Township, only a dozen or so miles outside High Point, an elderly man had been found dead in his small, log-cabin house, his badly beaten body bound, gagged and tossed onto his bed. His injuries included 14 broken ribs, punctured lungs, a ruptured spleen and liver, and brutal wounds on his head and face.

The victim, known as a bit of a recluse, was believed to have been dead for at least two days when a neighbor went to check on him and found the body.

The year was 1953. It was during the afternoon of Nov. 17, a Tuesday, that a neighbor became concerned about Jonathan Alonzo Anthony, a man in his mid-70s who hadn't been seen since the weekend. What the neighbor found in Anthony's house was horrifying.

Anthony's lifeless body, repeatedly beaten with some sort of blunt object, lay on a rumpled bed. His hands had been bound behind his back with a strip of sheet. Another strip had been tied around his legs, just above the knees. Yet a third strip had been stuffed into his mouth.

The house had been ransacked, leading authorities to suspect robbery as the motive. Anthony's brother, the only surviving family member, told officers Anthony had more than $100,000 in assets, but how could that be? Anthony was a simple blacksmith and farmer, and his house didn't even have electricity.

Four sheriff's deputies — two from the Greensboro office and two from High Point — were assigned to the case, but clues were scarce. No neighbors had seen anything unusual in recent days. No telltale fingerprints had been found, nor a murder weapon. And because nobody seemed to know what Anthony had in his house, it couldn't be determined whether anything had actually been taken.

Finally, some five days after the discovery of Anthony's body, Deputy L.A. "Lonnie" Bergman — a former High Point police officer — found a possible clue on the victim's back porch. Propped on a shelf was an old, weatherbeaten mason's trowel, with what appeared to be a piece of human flesh and blood sticking to it.

"Bergman ... said the shape of the trowel's point corresponds with wounds about the elderly man's head and on one hand," The High Point Enterprise reported, adding that the possible clue was being sent to a pathologist for further analysis.

Could the trowel have been the murder weapon? And if so, why would the killer have left it sitting out in plain sight, where a detective could find it and possibly link it to the murder?

"Meanwhile," another newspaper wrote, "officers reported no other leads in their search for the slayers."

After three weeks of a futile investigation, Guilford County commissioners — at the request of the county sheriff — offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, but the reward went unclaimed.

Finally, the following March — four months after Anthony's slaying — it appeared investigators had cracked the case. Deputies arrested two Greensboro men, Wade Walden and David Newton Causey, and charged them with Anthony's murder. Witnesses had reportedly seen the two men in the vicinity of Anthony's house the weekend he was killed.

Under hours of interrogation, though, the two men refused to wilt, claiming repeatedly that they had nothing to do with Anthony's death. With no hard evidence, the authorities had to release them. The case went cold and remained unsolved.

There is, however, one bizarre footnote to add to the slaying of Jonathan Alonzo Anthony. In September 1990 — some 37 years after Anthony's death — fliers began showing up on the lawns of residents in southeast Guilford County. According to a newspaper , the fliers implicated a former county man — he's not named in the — who had since moved to Houston, Texas. According to the fliers, the man should be investigated because he left Guilford County soon after the murder, and because his father had become "a nervous wreck" after the slaying took place.

Approximately 5,000 of the leaflets were distributed by an anonymous group of citizens calling themselves Concerned Citizens for Justice.

Authorities investigated the fliers and tried to find out who had distributed them, but nothing further came of their investigation, and the case remains unsolved to this day.

Sadly, 71 years after his murder, Jonathan Alonzo Anthony has not gotten the justice he deserves ... and it appears he never will.