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A daily look at some of The News & Observer headlines on this date in past years.
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On this day in 2018, a Durham County judge awarded $8.8 million a businessman with a ruined marriage — all of it to be paid by the man he said seduced his wife.
Keith King, who owned a BMX bike stunt show company, successfully sued Francisco Huizar III of Texas under North Carolina’s “alienation of affection” law, which allows jilted spouses to seek compensation.
The testimony detailed Huizar’s affair with King’s wife, including more than 6,000 minutes on the phone over a few months’ time.
Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson ruled King should get $2.2 million in compensation and three times that total in punitive damages.
A 16-year-old Irish girl spent a night recuperating at Rex Hospital in Raleigh after stowing away aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer, hiding for 10 days inside a compartment only 10 feet high. After making it across the Atlantic, aided by sailors who were disciplined for bringing her food, the girl told authorities she was an orphan seeking work. But police in Dublin identified her as a runaway, oldest of four children.
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The secretary of the North Carolina Historical Commission announced what he believed to be a crucial clue in the centuries-old mystery of the Lost Colony: a tombstone from South Carolina that spent years propping up a moonshine still. This link to the past came to light after scholars posted a newspaper advertisement offering a cash reward for any artifacts that might explain what happened to North Carolina’s earliest settlers. The secretary said the moonshine tombstone might be the genuine article but would require “thorough research.”
In 1926, police in Winston-Salem found the sad scene where a traveling salesman died by his own hand in the boardinghouse bedroom he rented for just three weeks.
John T. Brooks, who was 65, had come south selling patent medicine he designed himself, but left a note next to his body leaving all of his books to Mrs. A.P. Grizzard, who owned the boardinghouse, and $30 to the county undertaker.
His room was strewn with works by Thomas Paine and Charles Darwin, and police found a pamphlet written by the notoriously dour German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, where Brooks had underlined the phrase “There are two things that make it impossible to believe that this world is a success.”
He had no family.
Mrs. Grizzard told police her boarder showed no outward signs of distress but told her “not to be surprised if she found him dead in bed some morning.”
Read more Wake County deputy arrested after allegedly biting ex-boyfriend