Murder at the Motel: The Cold Case of Norma Lanyon Jackson
The hotel night manager was brutally stabbed to death in 1978, but there have never been any suspects.
Norma Lanyon Jackson was 43 and came from the small town of Greenville in South Carolina. She had three adult children whom she had raised single-handedly by 1978, juggling family life with her night-time job as an auditor at the Cabana Inn.
The Cabana was a popular spot for travellers passing through Greenville, having opened in 1959 to much fanfare from the local paper as an “ultra-modern motor hotel” with “outstanding features”.
Nearly two decades later it had probably lost some of its early sheen, but Norma was no doubt still proud of the position of responsibility she must have worked her way up to in order for her to run operations there overnight.
Norma was due to work a night shift at the Cabana on October 12th 1978, and her daughter Tracey, then 21, called her for a chat on the phone just before she was about to start work. The two women were particularly close and Tracey told NBC’s Dateline that although she had just moved into her own place, she still wanted to talk to her mother regularly.
