Lottie Snead (Unsolved Murder)

Lottie Snead was much loved and well respected in her small town of Chincoteague, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. In 1964, the 54-year-old mother of three was found murdered in her own home. There were no signs of a break-in, and the motive for the crime was unclear. Local investigators made two swift arrests, hoping to solve the case in record time, but the optimism was short-lived. The killer or killers have yet to be identified, and the reason for the murder has never been explained. 

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Lottie Snead

Lottie Elizabeth Watson Snead was born to parents George Watson and Elizabeth Clayville on 16th January 1910 in Virginia. Lottie had at least five siblings including Harry, Marvin, Naomi, Edward and Elsie.

Lottie lived in Chincoteague, a town of 5000 people, situated on the island of the same name, and located on Virginia's eastern shore region. The town is the gateway to the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, which lies on the neighbouring island of Assateague, and is famed for its saltmarshes, beaches and wild ponies. As far as I can see Lottie grew up and lived in Chincoteague her whole life. 

Lottie married Norman Snead and the couple had three sons. Claude, Harold and Everett or “Buddy” for short. For many years Lottie worked as head checker (what we would call a head cashier or checkout supervisor today) at the local Colonial Stores. Colonial Stores was a large grocery store chain particularly popular in the southern United States. 

Lottie also devoted a lot of her time to serving the local community and church. She was a member of the Union Baptist Church where she led the choir. Her beautiful solos are still remembered. Lottie was well respected throughout the town and her friends referred to her by the shortened and affectionate version of her name,“Tot”.

In 1950 Norman Snead died, leaving Lottie a widow and living alone in the family's two storey frame house on Clark Street in the central town area of Chincoteague. This was just a short walk from Main Street and the waterfront where many shops and eating establishments were located.  One of her sons, Buddy, still lived in Chincoteague. Claude had settled a few hours drive away in Glenville, near Stanton, Delaware. He was a bookkeeper for a car dealership in nearby Wilmington. Harold was a little over an hour away from his mother in Salisbury, Maryland. In total Lottie had ten grandchildren.

Lottie's sisters Elsie and Naomi lived in Chester, Maryland and her brother Harry lived near her in Chincoteague.

On the morning of Tuesday 9th June 1964, Lottie failed to show up for work on time. This was very unusual and the Colonial Stores manager JT Kelly was immediately worried. He sent an employee, Eugene Merritt, to the Snead house to check on Lottie.

When Eugene arrived he knocked on the door and waited. After a few more knocks he yelled out for Lottie. He received no reply and so made his way back to the store, none the wiser about why the usually reliable 54 year old Lottie had failed to turn up for her shift.

On hearing the news or rather lack of it, manager JT Kelly’s concerns were heightened and he immediately told Eugene to return to the house. He knew something was wrong. 

Eugene hurried back to the Snead house. On this occasion he looked around the property and entered the house through a window. I do not know if the window was open or if he had to break or force it to get inside. 

Eugene had a look around on the ground floor but there was no sign of  Lottie. He climbed the stairs to the second storey. I imagine he called out as he was doing this so as not to alarm Lottie if she was sleeping or ill in bed. Eugene went into the main bedroom where he noticed the light was still on. There he found Lottie lying dead on the bed next to a folded newspaper. She was clothed in a nightgown and a stocking was tied tightly around her neck. 

Lottie was a very popular and well-liked member of the community with many friends. News spread quickly in the small town and friends and neighbours gathered outside the house. This following detail was not reported in the press but from what I have read on a Chincoteague community Facebook page, some of Lottie’s friends and neighbours entered the property before the police arrived at the scene. They began to clean the house. This may seem an odd thing to do but apparently Lottie was well known for her fastidiousness and was exceptionally proud of her clean and welcoming home. I think the neighbours thought that Lottie would be devastated to have people in there if it was not scrupulously clean and tidy. This well-meant decision obviously caused havock for the collecting of forensic evidence, in particular fingerprints.

We don’t really know a lot about what the house was like when the body was first found. The News Journal (Delaware edition) did report on 10th June 1964 that Eugene Merritt, who found the body, said there was some dishevelment in the bedroom. That same day it was said in the Daily Times (Salisbury, Maryland edition) that there was no sign of a violent struggle in the bedroom and the other rooms in the house were untouched. 

The matter concerning the state of the crime scene is one of many aspects of this case that are confusing and unclear.

Accomack County Sheriff Adair W Matthews took leadership of the case. He was aided by Virginia State Trooper Irvin T Amadeo and Chincoteague Police chief Ebe R Reed. The investigative team began to try and piece together Lottie's last known movements.

Local inquiries soon discovered that Lottie had attended a missionary meeting on Monday evening, June 8th at Union Baptist Church. That's the evening before her body was discovered. She arrived back home at 9.30pm. Neighbours said they saw a light on in the house until midnight. As an aside I've already mentioned that there is a report that the bedroom light was on when the body was found. I do wonder if the light had been switched back on by one of the neighbours when they were cleaning up the house.

Dr Donald Amerine of Chincoteague estimated that the time of death had occurred a few hours after Lottie had returned from church, between midnight and 1am. An autopsy was carried out on the mainland at the medical examiner's office in Norfolk. The cause of death was given as strangulation. This had been done manually with hands. The stocking found at the scene had been tied tightly around the neck after death. There was also bruising to the head (possibly to the face) which had possibly been caused by a fist. It looked like Lottie had been struck first and then strangled.

Neighbours said they saw and heard nothing suspicious from the Snead house on Monday night. 

Less than 24 hours after the body was found Sheriff Matthews told the press that Lottie had also been "criminally assaulted”. This was a phrase which meant sexually assaulted or raped. It is stated in the News Journal (Delaware edition) 10th June 1964 that the autopsy showed Lottie had been sexually molested. 

While there had been a sexual component to the crime, initially robbery was also thought to have been a motivating factor. Lottie had been paid earlier on Monday so this was a very real possibilty. However it wasn't clear if anything was missing from the house and eventually investigators ruled that there was no evidence of a robbery.

Careful search of the property found no evidence of forcible entry to the home. The means by which the killer gained entry remains a mystery.  When the person entered the home was also not known, though it was speculated that the perpetrator may have got inside the house when Lottie was out at the church meeting. The reason for this could be the following unconfirmed detail. A post on the Chincoteague Facebook page by a Snead family member, says that some cigarette butts were found inside the bedroom closet. This would imply the killer waited there before carrying out the attack.

On Tuesday June 9th, within a matter of hours of the body being discovered, the sheriff's department made two arrests in connection with the murder. One local man from Chincoteague and another from upstate New York were being detained at the county jail. They were held and questioned for some time. The names of these individuals were not released in the press, though I suspect locals would have known the identities of the men at the time. I will circle back around to these suspects a little later.

Then came a jarring u-turn. Just a day after investigators had announced that Lottie had been sexually assaulted they changed their mind. They now said the autopsy report actually revealed she had not been raped. Sheriff Matthews inferred that the information previously released was from a  preliminary medical report. The full autopsy contradicted this and suggested rape had not occured.

It's really hard to know what to make of this change of direction. It could well be that the new information was correct and the closer medical examination showed this. However it is possible that family or friends of Lottie had asked for this detail to be changed publicly. In the past it was not unusual for the police to publicly deny that a murder victim had been sexually assaulted due to the shame it was perceived to bring. Obviously the shame and blame of a sexual assault lies solely with the perpetrator not the victim or survivor. Unfortunately in the past and sadly even today this is not always how things are presented.

Sometimes details about a sexual assault are held back for investigative reasons. I don't think that was the case here, as it was a mighty quick turnaround in tactics if this was the reasoning.

Sheriff Matthews said the news about the lack of a sexual assault changed the picture of the investigation and that the physical evidence found at the scene was being re-evaluated. He stated on 16th June that there was no apparent motive for the crime except for murder itself.

Despite this assertion by the Sheriff that Lottie had not been sexually assaulted many newspaper articles continued to report that she had been "criminally assaulted” when referring to the case. The few modern write-ups about Lottie’s case also mention sexual assault.

Evidence collected at Lottie's home was sent to the FBI in Washington to be analysed. The Sheriff’s department would not release details about the exact items that were sent. If the story about the cigarette butts is true I assume they would have been included. This was decades before DNA evidence so the main forensic tool at investigators’ disposal was fingerprinting. Identification Experts, basically, forensic technicians specialising in finger printing) were brought in from the State Police 5th District Headquarters in Norfolk to help solve the case.  

The funeral service for Lottie was held at 2pm on 12th June in the Union Baptist Church of Chincoteague. Pastor Rev Ryamond Britton led the service assisted by Rev Dr O W Sawyer. There was no viewing of the body. The community gathered to remember a much loved and well respected woman who had a big impact through her everyday life in the town and beyond. People celebrated Lottie as a person of high character who lived her life modestly. 

Lottie was laid to rest next to her husband at Downing’s Cemetery in Oak Hall, Accomack County. 

While all this was going on the two men being held at the county jail continued to be quizzed over the murder. They were, however, finally released without charge over a week after first being detained. Shortly before their release Sheriff Matthews told the press that the investigation had no substantial leads to pin on anyone. The identities of the men were not officially released and we do not know why they first came on the investigators’ radar.

A month later those working the case had well and truly hit a brick wall. With few clues Sheriff Matthews was still searching for a motive to this cruel and pointless murder. It is known that by this stage some leads had taken investigators out of state, though the finer details, namely where and why, were not released. By the end of July it did come out that investigators had visited Wilmington, Delaware, and a short time later police admitted to travelling to New Jersey in the search for the killer or killers.

In September 1964 the FBI lab was still going through evidence collected from around the Snead home. This may be explained by the fact that neighbours and friends had compromised the crime scene by entering the home and cleaning it. All in all, 75 people were fingerprinted, including 50 local residents. There may have been so many fingerprints from all the people who passed through the crime scene that it was impossible to narrow down a list of suspects.

Sheriff Matthews lost count of how many times he had searched the house. He continued to go through it regularly, looking for anything he may have missed. 

By autumn 1964, 24 people had been questioned closely, including Lottie's three sons, which would be standard in a case like this. A number of people had been administered polygraphs, but the results had not shown deception. 

In March 1965 a lead in the case took staff from the Sheriff’s department and State Police to Baltimore, Maryland. However, like most of the leads that had come investigators' way, it brought little or no value. 

Desperate for a breakthrough the town of Chincoteague issued a reward of $500 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for Lottie's murder. The amount was matched by the Snead family, bringing it to a total of $1000. That would be nearly $11,000 today. The reward was offered for a one year period ending on 15th April 1966. If the killer of Lottie Snead remained at large the reward money would be returned to the donors.

The reward was never collected. 

On the five year anniversary of Lottie's murder, Sheriff Matthews was still working the case, but the lack of clues meant there had been no new developments. Nevertheless he remained hopeful. I guess it is impossible to do that kind of job without hope. The last words I can find on the case by Sheriff Matthews are him maintaining that the case was far from closed and the killer may yet still be found.

A thread on a Chincoteague community Facebook page from 2025 shows that many local people still remember Lottie Snead and the murder. A few share stories that have been passed on through the generations concerning the crime. One person states that a nephew of her great-grandmother was a suspect and fled to Arizona shortly after the murder. The implication is that the crime may have had some motivation in obtaining money from Lottie. The man was later convicted of offences against women sex workers. The person who posted this story says that after getting out of prison in the 1970s this man would make phone calls to his aunt in which he threatened to burn down her house. This man certainly seems a viable suspect.

Another person posted that their father-in-law had insisted he knew who had committed the murder. However, he said he would take that knowledge to his grave and essentially leave judgement in God's hands. 

There is other talk by a relative of Lottie suggesting one of her sons believed he knew who had murdered his mother but, I assume, never had enough evidence to prove it.

I do not imagine many murders, if any, have happened on the island of Chincoteague in the decades since Lottie's senseless slaying. It leaves a dark stain on the collective memory of the community but thankfully, as is evident from reading local tributes, it is Lottie’s kind and generous character that is most remembered.