The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (52 page)

The bodies of Daisy and Violet were found sprawled over a hall-way heating grate. It could be that Violet was suffering from chills in her final hours, and, with Daisy’s corpse at her side, positioned herself on the grate because it was the cottage’s best source of constant warmth. Or, because the twins’ bodies were discovered close to the front door, it might be conjectured that as her penultimate act, Violet let their dogs outside to relieve themselves. In what may have been her last moment of consciousness, Violet then called dogs back inside and collapsed on the grate.

How much time did Violet spend attached to her sister’s dead body before she succumbed herself? The Mecklenberg County medical examiner’s report recorded that someone checked on the twins at their home on December 31, 1968, and that both sisters were alive. Who was that visitor? Dr. Leath? La Rue? Their close friend Zeke Pierce? The report doesn’t identify the caller, nor does it record the time of the day. It also fails to provide any information as to the caller’s impression of Daisy’s condition at the time of the visit. Since both twins were seen alive by somebody sometime on December 31st, it can be concluded that Daisy either died later the same day after the caller left, or that she died on the first or second day of January, 1969. When the policeman forced his way into the cottage on the
night of January 4th, the decomposition of Daisy’s body was already quite advanced, indicating that she could have been dead for between two and four days. Violet’s body, on the other hand, showed little deterioration. All evidence suggests she must have struggled with Daisy’s stiffening and decomposing body for somewhere between forty-eight and ninety-six hours before her own death.

Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton born in England 60 years ago, were found dead yesterday in their home in Charlotte, North Carolina. They are believed to have died from flu. They were joined at the base of the spine yet had a successful vaudeville career. Both married; both marriages were dissolved
.

The Brighton United Twins. This photo, circa 1908, ran with the obituary at left, one of many that ran in newspapers around the country
. (
Author’s collection
)

No autopsies were performed on the bodies, but Dr. Hobart R. Wood, the Mecklenberg County medical examiner, recorded that the sisters had been ill with the flu. He attributed both deaths to influenza pneumonia.

About sixty people attended the services, held in the Hankins and Whittington Funeral Home and presided over by the Reverend John Sills. Most of the mourners, including the six pallbearers, worked at Park-N-Shop. Also paying their last respects were a few of
the twins’ neighbors and some of the regular shoppers with whom they had become close, among them Dot Thompson Correll.

La Rue and Charley Reid, along with the Reverend Sills, planned the service. They wanted everything to be simple. They were sure that Daisy and Violet wouldn’t have wanted their last event to become a sideshow exhibition. Inevitably, the service did attract a sprinkling of curiosity-seekers. As few in number as the funeral crashers were, Sills seemed intent on making them feel out of place amidst the twins’ co-workers and friends. He stood before the small gathering and looked directly into the eyes of the people whom he suspected had turned out only because of morbid curiosity. “How many of you,” he asked, “are here to grieve?”
²²

The interlopers may have been too insensitive to feel any chagrin even after having been recognized by the minister as intruders. But almost certainly these infiltrators were disappointed. The funeral was not a freak show. There was no opportunity for anyone to get a last look at Daisy and Violet Hilton. The lid on the single, over-sized casket remained closed.

The floral offerings in the funeral chapel—a reporter from the
Charlotte Observer
counted twenty-three of them—came from colleagues and customers. Although accounts of the twins’ deaths had appeared in newspapers across the country, not one person from the stage or cinema worlds attended their funeral or sent flowers. Sills couldn’t get over how sad it was that the world had exploited the sisters all their lives and then, when every last bit of their stage appeal was used up, rejected and forgot them.

“Daisy and Violet Hilton were in show business all but the last half-dozen of their sixty-one years, and who could even count the number of people who profited on the misfortune with which they went through life?” he asked. “In the end, though, they were cast aside by the glittery and glamorous world that they had been a part of for so
long. In the end, it was only ordinary people who showed they cared about them—the stockboys and cashiers at the Park-N-Shop, the shoppers whose apples and potatoes Daisy and Violet weighed and bagged, the neighbors around their little house on Weyland Avenue.”
²³

At the time of their deaths, the combined assets of Daisy and Violet totaled $4,644.57.
²⁴
All but about $1,000 of the amount was retirement money accumulated through a profit-sharing plan at the store. By the time all their bills were paid, their savings had shrunk to $1,611.23. These were skimpy leavings for two women who once had earned $4,000 a week.

Charley and La Rue Reid remained silent on the subject, but some say they helped with the funeral expenses. Help also came from Dot Thompson Correll. She had come to know the twins through her weekly trips to the Park-N-Shop. She adored the sisters, and because Daisy and Violet had once been great stars, she felt it would be disgraceful if the two were lowered into a pauper’s grave. Dot Thompson Correll and her second husband, James, owned four burial plots at Forest Lawn Cemetery. One of them was already occupied by a Private First Class Troy Miller Thompson Jr., Dot Correll’s son from her first marriage.

Brenda McCallum, a niece, explained what happened. “Aunt Dot felt terrible when the twins died,” she said. “She had been so fond of them. She knew that their lives had been filled with a lot of suffering and loneliness. She wanted them to at least have a nice final resting place. Aunt Dot went to Mr. Reid and said, ‘I’ve got a plot of four grave sites in Forest Lawn. My son is already in one of them. I’ll only need two more, one for myself, one for my husband. Why not let Daisy and Vi have the one that’s left over?”
²⁵

And so it happened. Daisy and Violet Hilton were lowered into the ground just feet away from Pfc. Troy Miller Thompson Jr. All three now share the same address, Lot 313, Section M, Forest Lawn
Cemetery, Charlotte, North Carolina. They lie beneath a large, gray granite slab. The stone, at its center, is incised in large letters with the name THOMPSON. Near the monument’s base, in smaller letters on the far left and far right sides, respectively, are the names: TROY M, June 21, 1944–Sept. 26, 1965, and DAISY & VIOLET HILTON 1908–1969.

Today, Daisy and Violet rest in peace beside Pfc. Thompson, a young man thirty-six years their junior, the third of eighty men and women from Mecklenberg County who lost their lives in the Vietnam War. Daisy and Violet, of course, had never laid eyes on him in life. If they had had any say in the matter, perhaps they would have made different arrangements. But probably they wouldn’t have objected too strenuously.

Chapter One
Pages 1–19

1.
Military records provided to author by P. D. Rooth.

2.
Birth records for Charles Laker Skinner and his daughter, Kate Skinner, show both to have been twins. Charles, born July 26, 1855, in Steyning, England, had a brother, Harry Beggat Skinner. Kate, born August 23, 1886, in Brighton, England, had a sister, Maggie.

3.
Rooth, J. “The Brighton United Twins,”
British Medical Journal
, 1911. 653–654.

4.
The Intimate Lives and Loves of the Hilton Sisters, World Famous Siamese Twins
, undated and unpaginated, was purported by Daisy and Violet to be their autobiography. The self-published booklet was printed in the mid-1950s by Wonder Book, Hollywood, California. Subsequent citations will refer to the work as
Lives and Loves
.

5.
According to city census records: documentation obtained from Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys, St. Catherine’s House, London.

6.
He was publisher of a weekly paper: correspondence with John B. McKee, County Archives of East Sussex, England, May 1, 1966.

7.
“Their mother (Kate) was a serving girl”: Jim Moore interview conducted by Esther MacMillan for Bexar County Oral History Program, June 30, 1978.

8.
“My mum had always been devoted to her sister Kate”: Joseph Haestier, Sussex, England, phone interview with author, April 8, 1996.

9.
Kate was never to marry: ibid.

10.
“The sisters were joined so tightly at the buttocks”: J. Rooth, op. cit.

11.
“Take my babies”; Kate Skinner cited by Edith Myers, “Decision In Siamese Twins Receivership Case Due Today,”
San Antonio Express
, January 21, 1931.

12.
Minutes before the hour:
Brighton Herald
, March 28, 1908.

13.
“A volley of smack, smack, smack”: ibid.

14.
“Were they older”: ibid.

15.
“Brighton’s United Twins are thriving”:
Brighton Herald
, April 22, 1908.

Chapter Two
Pages 20–26

1.
“Our earliest and only recollection”: Daisy and Violet Hilton, “Life and Loves of the Siamese Twins,”
World News
, September 27, 1937.

2.
“I fell in love directly”: Mary Hilton,
Brighton Herald
, March 28, 1908.