The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (51 page)

According to Rodgers, there was an unwritten policy at the store that all children, even bratty, poorly behaved kids, were to be treated like royalty. Children were the reason why the stores featured magicians, puppet shows, clowns, and free pony rides. They were also the reason why the Park-N-Shop stores advertised heavily on the locally produced televised children’s shows. Said Rodgers: “Charley wanted the kids to see our stores almost as free amusement parks, because if they begged their moms and dads to bring them to the Park-N-Shops for the free magic shows or the rides on the merry-go-round and the ponies, then we could count on getting the families’ business for groceries.”

Rodgers said Violet didn’t always find it easy to abide by the store policy that all children were privileged guests. More than once she had scolded those who sent her displays of neatly pyramided apples and oranges tumbling to the floor. And more than once La Rue had taken Violet aside to warn her about being too reproving with poorly disciplined children. One incident involving the offended father was the last straw, Rodgers said.

“Charley called me into his office and said we can’t have that woman continuing to insult our customers even if the customers are wrong,” Rodgers recalled. “Because I was the twins’ supervisor, the
job of firing them fell to me. I had to tell them to turn in their aprons and uniforms, that they were through.”

Although he felt awful after he discharged Daisy and Violet, the sisters never showed any resentment toward Rodgers. “They continued to do their shopping at the store,” he said. “They came in at least once a week, and when they did, they always visited with me and asked how things were going. They told me not to feel bad for firing them. They said they understood that I was acting on orders.”

After the twins had been gone a month or two, it became evident to everyone at the store that the Hiltons were struggling. “They started to look almost as bedraggled as they were before they came to work for us,” Rodgers said. “They didn’t have money to go to the beauty parlor anymore. Their hair was a mess, half-gray, half-dyed, and stringy. I really felt very sorry for them. One day I took them aside and asked them if they wanted me to try to get them their jobs back. Both of them started crying. They told me how grateful they would be if they were given a chance to be working again. I told La Rue how bad things seemed to have gotten for the twins. She said let’s give them another chance. Daisy and Vi were so happy when they returned to work. I don’t know how much longer they could have survived.”

Rodgers said he couldn’t remember another time when either of the twins had to be reprimanded again. “They were model employees—two of the hardest workers I ever had,” he said.

While the twins’ attendance at Purcell Methodist stopped within a month after they joined the congregation, their membership was not without its rewards. The church owned a two-bedroom cottage at 2204 Weyland Avenue, kitty-corner from its parking lot. After Daisy and Violet had been living in Charlotte for a year or so, the church’s elders, apparently at the Reids’ request, offered to make the dwelling available to the twins. The frame house was small, but it was on a quiet street and well maintained. Because it was owned by the
church, the rent was even lower than what they were paying for the trailer in Patsy’s Park.

The move to the Weyland Avenue cottage put Daisy and Violet within a couple hundred feet of the Purcell church’s portal, but their relocation didn’t bring about a resumption of their church attendance.

After the Reverend Fitzgerald, the pastor of Purcell, was elevated to bishop of a presbytery, the Reverend John Sills was assigned as the church’s new leader. Sills remembered paying a visit on Daisy and Violet soon after becoming head of the church. “I think it was in the early afternoon when I rang the twins’ doorbell,” he said. “They welcomed me inside. I don’t want to suggest that any kind of questionable activity was going on, but they had a man in the house with them. He was very friendly, very nice, and so were the twins.” Sills said he would learn later that Daisy and Violet’s male guest was Zeke Pierce, a sometime actor and the “Uncle Zeke” of a locally-produced children’s television program.
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Sills said he took a seat with the twins and Pierce in the living-room, and the four of them made small talk. “I felt a little uncomfortable in this situation,” Sills remembered. “Each of them had a high-ball in hand, and even though it was still quite early in the day, it was pretty obvious from the way they were talking that all of them had already been drinking for some time. I was there strictly to pay a social call. The subject of why the sisters were no longer coming to church never came up. I don’t know if it was true, but others told me the twins didn’t come to church because they didn’t like people gaping at them.”

Zeke Pierce seemed to be a frequent caller, showing up on their doorstep day and night. The twins might have felt that this was acceptable because he was at least nominally connected with show business and, thus, had something in common with them. According to Sills and others neighbors, Pierce may have been the single
Charlottan to have anything like a close friendship with the Hiltons. “The women were the most private people I ever saw in my life,” said one Weyland Street resident. “They’d say good morning and wave at you when they left for work each day. But then they’d come back from their jobs and go directly into their house. You wouldn’t see them again until the next morning when they left again for their jobs.”

Other callers at Daisy and Violet’s house were reporters and local television crews who wanted to develop features on the once prominent entertainers. Daisy and Violet always refused to cooperate. “Our show days are over. We only want our privacy now. We would be grateful if you would respect our wishes.”

Some of the twins’ Weyland Street neighbors regarded them as antisocial, a surprising trait for women who had been in show business most of their lives. But it wasn’t really surprising at this stage in their lives that Daisy, and especially Violet, had developed a need for privacy. More than once, they had been ruined by con artists who had left them broke and paranoid. After six decades of losing incalculable sums of money, they had finally come to the conclusion that the best way to protect themselves was to be distrustful of just about everyone.

A few days before Christmas, 1968, a taxi stopped at the Park-N-Shop’s front door. The cab’s rear seat was piled high with holiday-wrapped gifts the twins had selected for their fellow workers and a few of their favorite customers, but the sisters themselves were not in the vehicle. The driver made several trips carrying in the presents and leaving them in an office.

It had been more than a week since the sisters had been to the store. Like several other workers, Daisy had been suffering from the Hong Kong flu. A couple of weeks earlier, Violet, too, had been laid low by the illness. After a few days of bed rest, Violet was again feeling fine and the twins were able to return to work. The sisters had only been back on the job for a week when Daisy fell ill.

One in five Americans contracted Hong Kong flu over the winter of 1968–69. Most started feeling normal again after a three or four days. But even after being bedridden for more than a week, Daisy only seemed to be growing sicker. When it became clear to the twins they would not be returning to work before Christmas, they arranged to have the gifts delivered to the supermarket.

The sisters spent Christmas in bed. Daisy was swathed in heavy quilts but still burning with fever and shaking from the chills. She had no appetite, and when Violet insisted she eat or drink something, she wasn’t able to keep it down. Because Violet had rebounded so quickly, she was growing increasingly concerned that Daisy wasn’t getting better.

The twins had never gotten over their childhood terror of physicians, and indeed, Daisy and Violet retained such a strong aversion to doctors that even when their vision started failing, they had to be forced to visit an ophthalmologist to get fitted for glasses.
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Violet recognized that Daisy’s condition was growing graver day by day. She finally persuaded her sister they needed to seek help. Apparently traveling by taxi, the twins visited the office of Dr. Thomas Leath three days after Christmas, 1968.
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After examining Daisy, the physician concluded that because she had become so malnourished and dehydrated, it would be best if the twins were hospitalized. Daisy was adamant in refusing it. The best Leath could do was prescribe medication for Daisy. The sisters returned to the cottage.

What could it have been like for Violet?

After never knowing a time in sixty-one years when she could not feel another life pulsing with her own, what was it like when, in an instant, that other life stopped? Did she panic? What did the sisters
talk about in the last moments before Daisy lost consciousness? Was Violet asleep when Daisy took her last breath? Or did she wake up to discover that, for the first time in her life, she was alone? And how acute was Violet’s terror, knowing that with each passing hour, more of her own life was draining from her? Did she consider having herself rushed to a hospital to be cut away from her sister’s corpse, and perhaps, if the virus in Daisy’s body hadn’t already infected her own, go on living?

No physician, no friend, no neighbor was with Violet in the cottage at the time Daisy died, so these questions will never be answered. It is impossible today to determine the exact time and date of Daisy’s death, although pathological evidence would suggest that the end came for her sometime between the very last day of 1968 and the first or second day of the new year.

Immediately after Daisy died, according to John Dunnagan, Violet phoned La Rue Reid.

“I know this because right after Rue got off the phone with her—it was probably close to midnight—Rue called me at my house,” Dunnagan said. “Rue was feeling very sad. She said she had just talked with the surviving sister. The sister told Rue that the other one had just died. She told Rue that now she knew that she would soon be dying, too. She said she was just calling to thank Rue and Charley for all they had done and to say goodbye for the last time.”
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Dunnagan conceded that his version of how Violet responded after Daisy’s death was secondhand because it was based on an account relayed to him by La Rue. But if it can be accepted that Violet rang up La Rue soon after Daisy died, then some other facts can also be inferred. The only phone in the cottage was in the living room. Daisy died in the twins’ bedroom. This suggests that before getting to the phone, Violet had to remove Daisy from the bed, probably wrapping her sister’s arms around her neck. Half-lifting and half-dragging Daisy’s
body, she then would have struggled the twenty feet or so to the phone in the living room.

It can also be surmised that during her call to La Rue, Violet would have pleaded with her employers not to report Daisy’s death to the police or coroner’s office. La Rue may have felt conflicted about acceding to the request. If so, she must have concluded that the most loving, generous, and humane final act she could carry out for the twins was to honor Violet’s wish and resist the temptation to report the death. Throughout their lives, the sisters had lived in fear that when death came to one of them, doctors might seek to save the survivor by surgically separating them. The sisters had entered the world as an inseparable pair and, from the time they were young children, they had determined they wanted to remain a pair in death. Neither could imagine life without the other.

But could there have their been another reason why Violet phoned La Rue, one whose intention she never stated? Could Violet have secretly hoped that La Rue would ignore her pleas not to report Daisy’s death to the authorities? Did she covertly long for an ambulance to be dispatched to rush the pair to a hospital operating room where waiting surgeons would separate the two and perhaps keep Violet alive. Violet might have felt that if such a series of events were to play out, she would not have to suffer guilt at having broken the sisters’ life-long pact never to leave one another. After all, the events described above would have been set into motion by others. Their unfolding would have been beyond her control.

Two or three days into the new year of 1969, the Charlotte police started getting reports from neighbors that Daisy and Violet hadn’t been seen outside their house in days, and they weren’t answering their phone, although the sisters’ failure to answer their phone wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm among those who knew them well.
When Daisy and Violet didn’t want to be bothered at home, they ignored their phone or even took the receiver off its hook.
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After calling the Hilton cottage repeatedly for a day or two, Charley and La Rue Reid drove to the house in the early evening of January 4th.
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They pounded on the locked door. They called out the sisters’ names. They could hear the dogs barking inside. But when no one came to the door, they called the police. An officer pulled up in front of the house in a squad car at about 7:30. After a brief discussion with the Reids, the officer jimmied open the door.