During Christmas of 1981, armed men broke into the house of American singer-songwriter Johnny Cash and his family and robbed them. Three men with weapons interrupted their peaceful evening, just as the Cash family sat down to eat a holiday dinner.
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This happened in Cash's second home in Jamaica on December 21, and not at his usual residence in Hendersonville, Tenessee. The property was called Cinnamon Hill, and it used to be a sugar plantation originally built in 1747. Cash's Jamaican home was one of the last houses left after the 1831 slave revolt.
Some also say this home that Cash bought during the 70s was haunted by the "White Witch of Rose Hall." Rose Hall is what they normally call Cinnamon Hill's property.
How Johnny Cash And Family Survived Robbery At Gunpoint
"What do you want?" Cash demanded from the armed robbers. One of the masked men said "Everything, or the boy dies," after putting his gun to Doug Caldwell's head. This was the 11-year-old friend of Johnny's son of the same age, John Carter Cash.
The three dangerous men soon ordered the rest of the lot to lie down on the floor face down. Chuck Hussey, Johnny's brother-in-law, remembered how it all went down. He reported that the robbers brandished a pistol, a hatchet, and a knife while threatening to lock the family in the cellar.
"They held the gun to every head," Hussy recalled, "they took each person that was there, one at a time, and went from room to room looking for valuables." The brother-in-law also said the armed men "pushed and shoved" while asking the victims if they wanted to die.
So how did the famed singer and his family get out of this dire holiday nightmare? Well, Hussey said that he and Cash worked out a plan while whispering to each other in secrecy.
"John and I lay there whispering that we would take a chair and charge the man with the hatchet," Hussey continued." Luckily, no opportunity arose where they enacted this plan. Cash's sister, Reba Hancock, asserted that "had we resisted, I think they would have killed us all."
Nobody was injured that night, but unfortunately, this ordeal took four long hours in which the thieves stole many items. The robbed items included $50,000 in cash and jewelry, and 175 pairs of shoes (which Cash meant to donate to an orphanage that Christmas).
They also fled in Cash's wife's Land Rover. In a mission to alert the authorities, Hussey and the estate's servants took a different Land Rover.
A Lucky Turn Of Events
Fortunately, some vengeance was served when the authorities informed Hussey the following Monday that they arrested two of the suspects. The two men attempted to take a flight to Miami from Montego Bay's Donald Sangster International Airport when police caught them. They also managed to recover most of the stolen goods.
The police inspector of Jamaica told Cash that the men who robbed him were part of a terrorist group. Just a week before the robbery, the cops shot and killed the group's leader.
In usual Johnny Cash fashion, the artist spoke in his Autobiography about how he felt sympathy for the robbers. "I grieve for desperate young men and the societies that produce and suffer so many of them," he wrote, "and I felt that I knew those boys. We had a kinship, they and I: I knew how they thought, I knew how they needed. They were like me."
The family continued using Rose Hill for family and holiday events, despite the terrifying incident that occurred during Christmas of 1981.
