How did an item that was stolen nearly 75 years ago — and apparently ditched by the robbers — recently resurface in the Roanoke River? And what does that have to do with High Point?
That’s the mystery a New York man has been trying to solve since last fall, when the stolen keepsake — a fraternity ID tag that had belonged to his late father — was found in a braided stream, just upriver from Weldon, North Carolina. How it got there — and how it then made its way to the original owner’s family — makes for quite a tale.
“I just think it’s amazing that this tag has come back to us after 70-some years,” says Kent Mathewson II, of Mayville, New York. “And since then, we’ve been spinning all these scenarios of how it happened. I mean, how in the heck did this tag end up in the Roanoke River?”
The mysterious tale began last fall, when a Virginia geologist named Mark Carter was surveying the Roanoke River by kayak. As he navigated a shallow stream near Weldon, he spotted something shiny lodged in the sediment and scooped it up. It was a small, metal tag, similar to a military dog tag.
Though the tag was worn and slightly misshapen, the words inscribed there were still legible: Kent Mathewson, Sigma Nu House, Chapel Hill, N.C.
Carter stuck the unusual find in his pocket and promptly forgot all about it until his wife, Aina, found it in the laundry and asked him about it. Intrigued, she launched a quest to track down Mathewson, or at least his family. That search ultimately led her across the country to Salem, Oregon, where she connected with Worth Mathewson, a son of the tag’s original owner. When he received the tag, he forwarded it to his brother, Kent, in New York, who has since been trying to piece together where the tag has been all these years.
Mathewson’s father had joined the Sigma Nu fraternity in the late 1930s, when he was a student at the University of North Carolina. As far as Mathewson knew, his dad had never spent any time on — or even near — the Roanoke River. His wife, Kathy, suggested her late father-in-law could’ve given the tag to a girlfriend, who later tossed it in the river when they broke up, but Mathewson wasn’t buying it.
Then Kathy offered another scenario: “Was your family ever robbed?”
Mathewson’s eyes lit up.
“Oh my god, we were!” he replied, explaining the family had been burglarized in Martinsville, Virginia, in January 1950, when the elder Mathewson was the city manager there.
“I was 3 or 4, but I vaguely remember it,” says Mathewson, now 77. “We had been out of town, and when we got home, the house was all torn up.”
Among the items taken, according to newspaper articles, were a couple of $100 war bonds, a lockbox, cigarettes and about $3 in cash. The burglars also raided the icebox, making off with some frozen meats and a bottle of champagne.
Mathewson can’t prove this, but he speculates that his father’s Sigma Nu tag must’ve been in that lockbox, and that’s where High Point comes into play.
Motivated to trace the tag’s meandering journey, Mathewson began researching the 1950 burglary and discovered the perpetrators were a High Point couple — Billy and Jacquelyn Hussey — who earned themselves the nickname “The Tourist Bandits” by embarking on a cross-country burglary spree in which they broke into nearly 200 houses.
By the time they were arrested in San Diego — in May 1950 — they’d committed crimes in numerous states, including North Carolina, Virginia, Idaho, Arizona and California. Jacquelyn had even kept a log with detailed accounts of each robbery. Included in that list was the Mathewson home in Martinsville, Virginia.
As Mathewson’s research continued, he amassed dozens of newspaper articles about the Husseys, including a 2021 High Point Confidential history column from The High Point Enterprise. That article detailed the couple’s remarkable crime spree and included a vintage photo of Billy and Jacquelyn.
Therein lies the most likely explanation of how the Sigma Nu tag ended up in the Roanoke River, Mathewson believes. He thinks the tag was in the aforementioned lockbox, which the Husseys opened as they were driving back from Martinsville to High Point with their stolen loot.
When they discovered the tag with the elder Mathewson’s name on it, they stopped somewhere along the highway and tossed it in one of the river’s tributaries — perhaps the Smith River or Dan River — so police wouldn’t be able to connect them to that break-in. Over the next 73 years, the currents ever so slowly carried the tag to where it was found last fall.
According to Mathewson, this scenario makes sense because one newspaper article he found confirms that police found other stolen items that the Husseys had tossed on their way back to High Point.
“That’s what I think happened,” Mathewson says. “Either way, though, I’m having a whole lot of fun trying to piece all this together.”
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