Annie Wiseburg was a 76-year-old white / Caucasian woman living in Aiken County, South Carolina, when violence tore through the quiet routines of her life on September 28, 1946. In burial records her name appears as Annie Gilbert Weisberg, with her death recorded that day in Aiken and her grave placed in the Sons of Israel Cemetery in the county, a small Jewish burial ground on the edge of town.
On that September day, a man named Monroe Hickson came to her home.
Contemporary and later accounts describe how he entered the house in Aiken and turned it into the scene of a brutal killing. During the attack he stabbed and bludgeoned her, beating her with a piece of firewood until she lay mortally injured on the floor of her own home. After the assault, he stole a small amount of money from the residence—five dollars taken from the house where she had every reason to feel safe.
The murder of Annie Wiseburg did not occur in isolation. Earlier that year, in April 1946, Hickson had already killed a shopkeeper, David Garrett, with an axe in his store in Aiken, and then shot Mary Bennett and fatally wounded her husband Edward during a robbery at their grocery. These killings formed the beginning of a pattern of violent, profit-motivated attacks around the city, yet authorities initially struggled to see the full scope of what was happening. Annie’s death, coming months after those first murders, was another sudden act of shocking brutality, but at the time it was simply one more crime in a community that had not yet realized a single offender linked all of these scenes.
After Wiseburg’s killing, Hickson continued his violence. In October 1946 he attacked a female clerk at a local liquor store, striking her in the head with a brick during another robbery attempt. Unlike Annie and the earlier victims, the clerk survived the assault. Her survival, however, proved to be the turning point in his immediate freedom: Hickson was arrested shortly after this attack and received a 20-year prison sentence. Crucially, at that moment investigators did not connect him to the earlier unsolved murders, including the killing inside Wiseburg’s home. For years, the crime that ended her life remained uncoupled from the man who had actually committed it.
Hickson escaped from custody in 1947 but was quickly recaptured, and the Aiken murders faded into the background as time passed. It was not until a decade later, in 1957, that the truth about Annie Wiseburg’s death emerged. That year, Hickson was arrested again after attempting to kill another woman, Lucy Hill Parker, leaving her with a severe head injury. During the interrogation that followed, local authorities began comparing his movements to a cluster of unsolved cases from 1946. Faced with this scrutiny, Hickson abruptly confessed to four murders in Aiken that year—David Garrett, Mary and Edward Bennett, and Annie Wiseburg—admitting that he had been responsible for the attack in her home as well as the other killings.
Those confessions finally gave Wiseburg’s case an identified killer. Prosecutors moved forward, and Hickson was sentenced to four consecutive life terms for the four murders he admitted committing, in addition to the 20-year sentence already imposed for the 1946 liquor-store assault. He was sent to the Manning Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, where he served for years before a brief escape in 1966 led to his addition to the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Hickson died while still a fugitive in 1967, bringing a grim end to the life of the man who had taken Annie Wiseburg’s life more than two decades earlier. For her, whose name survives in cemetery records and in the victim lists attached to Hickson’s crimes, justice came belatedly and only after years in which her murder, and those of others in Aiken, had not been fully understood for what they were: the work of a single, violent predator.
