By KEITH STRANGE
A 24-year-old mother of three young children is being held without bond in Halifax Regional Jail following a domestic dispute early Tuesday morning that resulted in the stabbing death of her 35-year-old husband.
Amy Ashley Lipscomb, of Huell Matthews Highway, was arrested yesterday and charged with the first-degree murder of Clarence Thomas Lipscomb.
Investigators said the victim was stabbed once in the chest with a kitchen knife and was found dead outside the couple's home in the Cluster Springs community.
Deputies Donnell Barksdale and Todd Moser arrested Amy Lipscomb at the scene.
Family members said that the altercation began inside the house, but the couple left the home during the dispute.
Although deputies had previously been called to the home for reports related to substance abuse, the couple didn't have a history of domestic violence in Halifax County, according to a spokesman for the Halifax County Sheriff's Department.
Amy Lipscomb's mother, Linda Owens, said the couple had a history of domestic violence, but she didn't know what started Tuesday's altercation.
The couple had been married for two years. Neither was known to be employed at the time of the murder.
"They had been having problems every since they had been together," Owens said.
Lipscomb is scheduled for her first court appearance February 12.

After two public meetings and a month-long study, South Boston Town Council has compiled a series of recommendations for Dixie Inc. to, in the words of Mayor Glen Abernathy, "make a good program even better."
A letter detailing council's list of recommendations for Dixie Inc. was mailed last Thursday to Robert Hatcher, president of the Board of Dixie Inc.
Hatcher confirmed yesterday he had received the letter on Saturday and that he had scheduled a meeting with Dixie Inc. board members last night to formulate their response.
Hatcher added that a letter outlining his organization's response would be made public after the meeting.
Council's letter to Hatcher says it did not seek a role in resolving the dispute, that it made the recommendations out of a "sense of obligation to the citizens who came to us with concerns."
Major issues addressed by council include Dixie Inc.'s by-laws, safety, membership procedures and finances.
Council requests that Dixie Inc. formulate new by-laws approved by the general membership and town council and formulate and institute recommended financial system procedures by April 15.
Council is also asking Dixie Inc. to correct or submit a plan for correction of all safety deficiencies at Day Complex by July 15.
By-Laws
Council recommended to Dixie Inc. that new by-laws be adopted which are clear and strictly adhered to by the Board and officers.
By-laws should define who can be a member of Dixie Inc., the procedure that will be followed in scheduling meetings, establishing quorums and procedures for calling special meetings.
The by-laws should also outline procedures by which regular and special meetings, establishment of quorums can be called.
Membership
Council recommends that Dixie Inc. hold a general membership drive in concert with its Spring sign-ups, and that a Board of Directors be elected by the general membership.
The recognized Board, including officers, should be in place within three months, Council said.
The 2002 Board of Directors and officers should be elected following nomination by a nominating committee comprised of two members of Dixie Inc., two council members and two parents or coaches.
Council recommends that one member of the board shall be appointed by town council.
In addition, the Board of Directors should be comprised of 50 percent or more of coaches or parents of youth currently participating in the program.
Terms of office for board members would be for a fixed time, outlined in the by-laws, with members allowed to serve more than one term, and the board would be required to make quarterly reports to town council, including financial reporting.
Finances
Council recommends that sound financial management principles should be defined and adhered to, and that a standardized budget be established that clearly documents revenues and expenses by categories.
The budget should document and account for operating expenses separately from capital expenses, and suggested the town's finance director could assist Dixie Inc. with the establishment of its initial budget, if needed.
Council recommends a purchase order system be put in place that establishes and documents who has purchasing authority, and that two signatures be required on checks.
A petty cash accounting procedure should be established and adhered to, including the performance an annual financial audit and the filing of tax returns annually, as is required by law for all non-profit organizations.
Dixie Inc. is asked to consider maintaining separate financial systems for Dixie Youth, Dixie Boys and Dixie Inc. that will result in financial accounting that can easily be followed by the membership.
Council asks Dixie Inc. to satisfy all unpaid financial obligations and that no future obligations be made until all current and past due obligations are paid.
Safety
The letter recommends that inspections should be conducted by the appropriate building official to identify any safety issues and building code violations existing at the complex.
The most critical safety deficiencies must be corrected prior to the start of the 2002 season, and a fund should be dedicated to safety and operational requirements before any expenditures are made for capital projects.
Council states in its letter that by offering Dixie Inc. its recommendations, it feels it can improve the overall operation of Dixie Inc. and restore the confidence of disaffected parents and coaches in Dixie Inc. management and leadership.
Council also feels that by offering the recommendations to Dixie, Inc. immediate and permanent safety repairs to the complex would be accomplished and that the Town of South Boston would sustain funding support of Dixie Inc.
Council's involvement with the Dixie Inc. issue began in December, when parents and coaches of children involved in the Dixie Inc. baseball programs approached them with concerns over the operations of Dixie Inc.
That group told councilmen that they were essentially "left out of the loop" in financial and operational decisions made by the Board of Dixie Inc., which entered into an agreement with the then City of South Boston in 1992 to operate the Day Complex and its baseball programs "in the public's best interest."
The complex sits on a 23-acre parcel of land at Houghton Industrial Park which is currently owned by the Town of South Boston and leased to Dixie Inc. on an annual basis.

By Doug Loftis
Area construction continued its downward spiral last year, eclipsing the dismal performance in 2000 by almost 42 percent.
It was the third-straight year of decline for Halifax County and the towns of South Boston and Halifax where just $27.2 million of new construction and renovations and additions to existing structures took place in all of 2001.
Largely missing from the equation has been commercial and industrial expansions. In fact, industrial expansion was almost nonexistent with just a single project, a warehouse at Bohler Udderholm Specialty Metals Inc., that was valued on building permits at $580,000.
In 2000, $6.4 million of industrial expansion took place. Just two years earlier in 1998, the same category accounted for $36 million alone in a year that saw $69.5 million of overall construction activity.
Mirroring the worldwide economic slowdown was a similar soft expansion of commercial building in Halifax County.
Compared to 2000 when $10.5 million of commercial building took place, just $2.7 million of construction, a decline of almost 75 percent, is reflected in permits issued by the county.
The Town of South Boston, which issues building permits separate from both Halifax County and the Town of Halifax, recorded $1.6 million of new commercial construction plus over $1 million of additions and alterations to existing commercial properties.
Some of the larger projects included the Goodwill Superstore in Centerville ($444,000), a new Sears store in Centerville ($350,000), a medical complex for Dr. Mark Morris on Webster Street ($428,425) and site improvements and a parking lot for Halifax Regional Hospital ($533,000).
Halifax Regional Hospital has just begun a $5-million expansion project that will house an MRI unit.
New, single-family housing starts in the county numbered 84 last year, an increase over the 79 units 2000. But the overall value of homes declined from $8.2 million in 2000 to $6.6 million in 2001.
The Town of South Boston had eight new housing starts in 2001 compared to six the year before.
Manufactured housing permits in the county, which includes mobile and modular homes, declined from 289 to 259. Value of that type of housing showed an even greater 18.2 percent decline.

There is cutting-edge technology in South Boston. And with it, Southside is making its mark in the educational community.
Longwood College's Institute For Teaching Through Technology And Innovative Practices just may be the best-kept secret in town.
The center, located in downtown's Bank of America building, serves as a research and development and outreach facility for state educators.
"We research new methods and new technologies for use in education," said Carol Inge, executive director for the institute.
The center is delving into how people learn and is using technology to help the teaching process.
One of the projects that the institute is currently working on is the use of digital video conferencing as a tool for meeting the SOL's.
"Traditionally the teachers may have taught from a textbook," Inge said.
"What we try to do is develop new methods for improving student learning," she added.
Inge said that the concept would allow a student to use the World Wide Web to receive streaming digital video of their subjects.
"Do we learn better that way, or not?" Inge asked, "Those are the kinds of things that we research."
Funding for the institute comes from a variety of sources.
"We are federally funded and we are state funded. Our base funding is through Longwood College and we have various projects that we manage for state agencies," the director said.
Inge cited several agencies currently being served by the institute.
"The Virginia Department of Education, The Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development and Virginia National Guard are a few of the agencies whose projects we are currently working on," she said.
The institute prides itself on the use of cutting-edge technology in its day-to-day operations.
"We have all kinds of equipment here," Inge said, "This is a plasma screen with a matisse overlay to let us use touch-screen technology," she added, pointing out a huge screen on the wall.
"We use digital H.323 video conferencing systems where we can communicate face-to-face with 22 counties simultaneously," she added.
The project Inge is referring to is the Southside Virginia Regional Techology Consortium Advanced Communications Project (SVRTC-ACP).
It is being put in place to bring interactive video communication to Southside.
"What that means is that it's video conferencing over the Internet," Inge explained.
In addition, this project is setting up a Regional Service Access Point (RSAP) to provide video bridging, bandwidth management and provide audio/video streaming to all SVRTC members.
The RSAP will host digitized video of professional development activities and student/teacher projects developed by the different school divisions.
Another area of development by the institute is using palm technology to help learning.
"We've put more palms in the hands of teachers and students than anybody in the state," Inge claimed.
In fact, the institute's use of palm technology in learning was written about in Education Week, which is a premier educational journal in the United States.
The group is also working with the Virginia Department of Education to develop a plan for the use of technology in adult education and literacy.
The institute hasn't forgotten about Halifax County either.
Halifax County High School is currently one of two schools in Southside that is competing in a program sponsored by NASA to build a robot.
"The robotics competition is an Olympic sporting event for the brain," Inge said.
"In a nutshell, a group of area engineers, teachers and high school students come together as a group to design, build and control a robot from scratch.
"Then, the robot will compete against 68 other high school teams in a regional competition held in Richmond," she continued.
While the main mission of the institute is to provide research and development and model programs for education, one beneficial by-product has emerged.
The institute has hired and trained several people from the area to work with them.
"We didn't go into this thinking that our mission would be to take local people and give them these skills so that they could go and get cutting-edge jobs," Inge said.
However, Inge realized that "in order to get the talent that we needed, we could find local people with some technological talent and provide them the training and mentoring" that they need to do the job.
"Most of the people that you see here are local people that are products of the public school system in Southside," she continued.
"We try to find the talent that a person has and try to fit them in to what we are doing."
Inge said that the employees of the institute have received lots of training and support through the institute which enables them to use the cutting-edge technology in development.
She also has praise for Halifax County.
"Halifax County is one of the most progressive counties in Southside Virginia," Inge said, citing the willingness to try new things as the main factor in having the institute based here.
"Our primary goal here is to find teachers who are willing to innovate and give them the tools that they need to use technology in their classrooms," she added.

ABB continues to add to its win streak in the South Boston Business & Industrial Basketball League.
Clover Yarns forfeited its game Sunday to ABB, giving the regular season champion its twelfth win in a row.
Below ABB, there is a real dogfight in the league standings.
In Sunday's second game of the day, O'Sullivan maintained a share of second place in the standings with a 52-47 win over Lasco.
It was O'Sullivan virtually all the way as O'Sullivan led 24-18 at the half and withstood a bid by Lasco in the second half to chalk up a five-point win.
Tremayne Boyd led O'Sullivan with 21 points and emerged from the day as being one of three players to earn Player of the Week honors.
Duane Whitlock added 13 points in the winning effort while Lamont Boyd and Gary Yancey each added six points.
Lasco was led by Ronald Foster with 13 points. Glenn Barksdale followed with 11 points and Antoine Jones chipped in eight points.
Dollar General survived an early scare from BMW and used a big second half to vault to a 64-48 win over BMW.
Terry Marrow and Andre Williams had a big first half with 14 points and eight points respectively as they led BMW to a 26-23 lead at the half.
However, things changed in the second half as Dollar General focused its defensive efforts on stopping Marrow and Williams.
Marrow was held to eight points and Miller was held to five points in the second stanza as Dollar General outscored BMW 41-22 and posted the easy win.
Dollar General was led by John Giggetts who scored a game-high 28 points on the strength of six three-point baskets and earned Player of the Week honors.
Tim Chappell also hit double figures with 12 points.
Marrow led BMW with 22 points that included four three-point baskets and Miller finished with 13 points.
In another key league game, the Halifax County School System team kept alive its hopes for a post-season tournament berth with an easy 63-47 win over Georgia-Pacific.
The win by the School System and the loss by Georgia-Pacific set both teams up as one of four teams tied for fourth place in the league standings with identical 8-4 marks.
It was the School System all the way as it jumped out of the gate early and rolled up an 11-point 35-24 lead at intermission.
The School System team was able to pick up in the second half where it left off in the first half and cruise to the 16-point win.
Kenneth Day, with five three-point baskets, led School System with 15 points. Garrett Dillard followed with 11 points.
G.C. Ratliff and James Hodges followed with nine points each.
Georgia-Pacific was led by Robert Revis with 17 points. Dominik Shortt followed with nine points and Ronnie Fuller and Charles Crider scored seven points each.
Mecklenburg broke out of a halftime deadlock with C/A and used a solid second half performance to shade C/A 56-48.
The win improved Mecklenburg's record to 8-4 while the loss dropped C/A to 7-5 and put it in peril of not making the field for the post-season tournament.
Kevin Shaw staged a one-man show in the game and led Mecklenburg with 28 points, a performance good enough to earn him Player of the Week honors.
Everette Overby followed with 13 points and Winston Cooper chipped in 11 points.
C/A was led by Morris Mitchell with 15 points and Carl Poole with 12 points. Bryce McCain added eight points to the total.
In a non-league contest, the Bucks rolled to an easy 72-32 win over AW North Carolina.
Jared Wyatt led the Bucks with 22 points. Fred Price added 19 points, Marques Walker chipped in 15 points and Andre Simms added 11 points.
AW North Carolina was led by Dale Daye with 16 points and Phillip Coleman with seven points.
In the day's other non-league game, the A-Team broke out of a 25-25 tie at halftime to easily down Hospital 73-50.
The A-Team was led in scoring by Anthony Watkins with 24 points. Craig Harris followed with 15 points, Preston Faulkner added 13 points and Jimmy Terry connected for 12 points. Jared Wyatt added nine points.
Hospital was led by Joseph Patterson with 20 points and Floyd Clauden with 13 points. Darren Adams added 11 points.

Charles Albert Bates

Charles Albert Bates IV, 44, of 4063 Asbury Church Road, Vernon Hill, died January 20 at Halifax Regional Hospital.
Mr. Bates was born in Halifax County on October 16, 1957, the son of Charles Albert Bates III and Geneva Womack Bates and was married to Vicky Reeves Bates. He was a member of Asbury United Methodist Church and was a lieutenant, investigator with the Halifax County Sheriff's Department.
Survivors include his wife; one son, Charles Albert Bates V; his parents; his grandmother, Sue B. Bates; one brother, Richard William Bates Sr.; one sister, Susan Bates McLamb and husband, Charles A.; one niece, Sidney E. McLamb; and two nephews, Jacob A. McLamb, all of Vernon Hill, and Richard W. Bates Jr. of South Boston.
Services for Mr. Bates will be held today, January 23 at 2 p.m. at Asbury United Methodist Church with the Rev. Luther Ramsey conducting the service. Burial will take place in the church cemetery.
Those wishing to give memorials are asked to consider Oak Level Volunteer Fire and First Responders or the Halifax County Rescue Squad.

Paulita G. Worrell Patterson

Paulita Gillespie Worrell Patterson, 93, a former long time resident of Halifax, died January 20 in Garner, N.C.
A funeral service for Mrs. Patterson will be held at Halifax Presbyterian Church January 25 at 11 a.m. with the Revs. Bill Young and Terry Blevins conducting the service. A graveside service will take place January 26 at 2 p.m. at Oakland United Methodist Church Cemetery, Pipers Gap Road, Galax with the Rev. Randy Morris officiating. The family will receive friends at Vaughan-Grayson Funeral Home in Galax Saturday from 12 - 1 p.m.
Born in Carroll County on April 9, 1908, Mrs. Patterson was the daughter of the late Norman Joshua Worrell and the late Susan Elizabeth Blackard and was married to the late Errett Daniel Patterson.
Mrs. Patterson was educated in the public schools of Carroll County. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from Radford College and a Master of Physical Education from the University of Virginia. She had a long career as a public school teacher in Carroll and Halifax counties.
Active in church and community affairs, Mrs. Patterson was a long time member of Halifax Presbyterian Church where she taught Sunday school, served as an officer in the Women of the Church and as an Elder of the church.
Mrs. Patterson was active in the Berryman Green Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Halifax Woman's Club, Halifax County Retired Teachers Association and Delta Kappa Gamma. She was a member of the Wood's River Chapter of the Virginia Society Colonial Dames XVII Century in Carroll County and most recently a member of the Rand's Mill Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Garner. Her accomplishments as a winning basketball coach were recognized by her induction into the Halifax County/South Boston Sports Hall of Fame.
Survivors of Mrs. Patterson include three children, Paulita Wade of Raleigh, N.C., Dr. E. Daniel Patterson Jr. of Sellersburg, In. and Betsy Helms and her husband, Buz Helms of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.; eight grandchildren, Teri and Laura Wade, Ashley Smith and husband, Kevin Smith, E. Daniel Patterson III and wife, Kristen, Susan Patterson, Laurens Patterson, David Helms and wife, Mindy and Greg Helms and wife, Ginny; three great-grandchildren, Sullivan Helms, Nathan Wade and Julia Smith; one sister, June Coe of Sylvatus; and one brother, Bill Worrell of Maryville, Tn.
Those wishing to give memorials are asked to consider the memorial fund at Halifax Presbyterian Church, Halifax County or Pipers Gap Rescue Squads, Halifax County/South Boston Museum or charity of choice.

Mary Wade Bauldwin

Mrs. Mary Wade Bauldwin of 2009 Coleman Dr., Alton died January 22 at Danville Reginal Medical Center at the age of 68.
She was born in Person County, N.C. April 22, 1933 and was the daughter of the late Carlton Wade and Edna Cunningham Wade. She was married to Edward Franklin Bauldwin and was a member of Dan River Bethel Baptist Church.
Mrs. Bauldwin was a retired employee of ABB, Inc.
Survivors include her husband; three daughters, Shirley Carrington, Linda Edmonds and Brenda Terry, all of Alton; two sons, James Bauldwin of Blairs and Jerry Bauldwin of Alton; two sisters, Luetta Scott and Gladys Richardson, both of Alton; three brothers, John Wade of South Boston, Carlton Wade, Jr. of Alton and Arthur Wade of New Rochelle, N.Y.; two daughters-in-law, Linda Bauldwin and Carletta Bauldwin; three sons-in-law, Ronald Carrington, Marion Edmonds Sr. and Eddie Terry; one brother-in-law; four sisters-in-law; 10 grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; six step-grandchildren; and five step-great-grandchildren.
Funeral services for Mrs. Bauldwin will be held Friday, January 25 at 1 p.m. at Dan River Bethel Baptist Church with the Rev. James L. Thomas officiating. Burial will follow in the church cemetery.
The family will receive friends at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Carrington, 2083 Coleman Dr., Alton.