Podcast revisits life and brutal murder of Chapel Hill restaurant founder
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Podcast revives 1951 murder of Rachel Crook and trial of accused Hobart Lee.
- Lack of forensic tools and swift jury deliberation shaped controversial verdict.
- Crook’s life as a UNC scholar and business owner reframed her historical legacy.
The former Crook’s Corner restaurant is a West Franklin Street landmark, but the brutal murder of its 71-year-old namesake on a dirt road six miles north of Chapel Hill has almost been lost to time.
A new four-part podcast from Hillsborough resident Elizabeth Woodman revives the story of Rachel Crook and her accused killer, who was acquitted after a short but sensational jury trial.
It was a change of direction for Woodman’s “27 Views” podcast, which normally features local authors, some of whom lent their voices to her latest podcast, “Who Killed Rachel Crook?”
“I did not want to be the only voice in this podcast … and so I recruited some of my friends who’ve grown up in the South, and they did the reading,” said Woodman, who moved to Hillsborough from California nearly 30 years ago. “It was very fun to work with them and to think about the story and what the tone of voice should be.”
Hillsborough attorney Bill Massengale Sr., a fan of Woodman’s podcast, encouraged her to pursue the story, she said, but he died before he could introduce her to Alonzo Coleman, a retired District Court judge who worked early in his career with former Orange County Sheriff Sam Latta and others involved in the case. Woodman continued the work to honor Massengale’s memory, she said.
“And sure enough, I started digging in, and I thought, wow, there’s a lot to this story, and a lot that is beneath the surface,” Woodman said. “I thought it was just going to be the media’s attitude toward her, but then I got into the trial. The trial’s bizarre, just bizarre.”
“I was surprised by how quickly the jury came back,” she said, noting Crook’s alleged killer, 33-year-old Hobart Lee, could have gone to the gas chamber if convicted.
Coleman’s notebook of old clippings and lawyer notes proved to be a key resource, she said. Lee’s defense attorney Bonner Sawyer gave the information to Coleman, who was as close as she got to a primary source, because everyone involved in the case had died.
It showed Crook was “an enigma,” but “very well liked,” she said.
“One of the reasons I really wanted to do this was I looked at some of the clippings, and in the headlines, it says, ‘spinster murdered,’ ‘72-year-old co-ed slain,’ and they call her an old maid,” Woodman said. “The media didn’t know how to label her … She wasn’t a woman to them. She was just this oddity, and I felt like she deserved better than that.”
Trailblazing business owner, UNC student
Crook was born in 1879 to a Confederate Army colonel and minister in Alabama. Her parents died before her 12th birthday, leaving their three children to inherit an 800-acre plantation.
She attended Vanderbilt University and Alabama Polytechnic Institute, earning a master’s degree in mathematics. In the early 1930s, she moved to Chapel Hill and enrolled in a graduate economics program at UNC.
Her first 10 years were spent in a 49-square-foot playhouse, for which she paid a young boy $2 a month. She taught classes, babysat, and wrote for the Durham Herald to earn money, according to news reports and author Daphne Athas, who wrote about the murder in her book, “Chapel Hill in Plain Sight: Notes from the Other Side of the Tracks.”
In 1941, Crook opened Crook’s Corner, a fish shop in a former filling station at West Franklin Street and Merritt Mill Road in the town’s historically Black business district. Crook lived in the back of the store, where she also sold fabric remnants from a nearby cotton mill, flowers and pecans.
In 1947, she added the town’s first self-serve laundry, which quickly grew into a social spot for local housewives, according to reports.
More than 2,000 people attended her funeral — about 20% of the town and campus population — Woodman said. Crook is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery on UNC’s campus.
She was independent and “a trailblazer,” Woodman said.
“I hope that people will realize what a remarkable woman Rachel Crook was. I think she deserves a place in our local history that is honorable, because I think she was so self-determined,” she said.
Murder, and a courtroom spectacle
Crook’s life took a turn on Aug. 29, 1951. She had an evening appointment at a local dressmaker’s home, witnesses later said, and expected a carpenter at her own home later that night.
She was last seen around 7:30 p.m., when someone in a green pickup truck was seen abducting her. A man told investigators he was “frog-gigging” in a creek near New Hope Presbyterian Church when he heard a woman “hollering” as a green truck crossed the bridge.
Crook’s body was found at 10 a.m. Aug. 30. Her dress was pulled over her head, and she was brutally beaten. Her face was almost unrecognizable. State and federal investigators recovered scrapings from her fingernails and reddish brown hair from her smock.
A man who lived nearby was questioned, along with Carrboro lumber store owner J.B. Goldston, who hired a private eye and put up a $500 reward “for information leading to the rumor-monger for the malicious, false rumor that was started ... against me.”
In September, investigators arrested Lee, a bulldozer operator from Graham with a history of sexual assaults. A heel print matching his shoe and tire prints linked to his 1949 green pickup truck were found at the scene, newspapers reported.
“It’s so amazing to look at how far we’ve come as far as forensics go,” Woodman said. “We didn’t have DNA then. We hardly had any kind of forensics to really investigate.”
Lee claimed to have visited a house of prostitution in Durham that night and stopped at a Hillsborough tavern on the way home from work in Cary. But the brothel’s madam said the business was closed, and Lee admitted being so drunk that he didn’t really remember.
As he was questioned in the Durham jail, Lee seemed about to confess. He asked for prosecutor Bill Murdock, who called in the sheriff, Woodman said. Latta acted “friendly and warm” toward Lee, but he stopped talking, she said.
The March 1952 trial was a spectacle, with 200 to 300 observers, including Lee’s wife Una and 12-year-old son Larry, squeezing into the old Orange County Courthouse in Hillsborough. Some packed a picnic lunch for the three-day event, so they wouldn’t lose their seats.
“This is a picture of the women at the trial,” Woodman said, holding a newspaper clipping. “They’re all smiling, and they look so happy.”
Lee’s attorneys didn’t offer evidence or witnesses, and the jury of 11 men and one woman deliberated about an hour, she said. No one from Chapel Hill was allowed to serve, leading Woodman to speculate about how the jury viewed Crook’s life.
“Chapel Hillians were accepting of her, but had the people outside of Chapel Hill ever met the likes of a woman like this? And would they have really — not identified with her — but felt accepting of her and the person she was? I’m not sure,” she said.
This story was originally published June 18, 2025 at 11:06 AM.
