A Georgia inmate fondly reminiscing to his son about “killing three people in the North Carolina mountains” during his glory days has led to police cracking one of that state’s most brutal cold cases.
The triple killings of Virginia Durham, Bryce Durham, and their 18-year-old son, Bobby, shocked the entire community of Boone, North Carolina, in February 1972. Their bodies were found by family members stuffed into an overflowing bathtub in their own home, and the evidence at the scene left a baffling puzzle: A money bag was found filled with hundreds of dollars; the phone cord had been ripped out of the wall.
A half-eaten chicken dinner left in the kitchen suggested the family had been enjoying a meal together when they were interrupted by their killers. They apparently suffered some form of torture, with rope burns discovered on their necks, according to The Charlotte Observer. Bryce and Bobby Durham had both been drowned, while Virginia was strangled to death, autopsies showed.
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“The Durhams were tied with their hands placed behind their back and were subsequently placed side by side, bent over at the waist in a tub with their heads submerged in water with cord around their necks,” former North Carolina Attorney General Rufus Edmisten said of the case amid renewed efforts to solve it in 2015, according to The Watauga Democrat.
There was no shortage of theories at the time as to who murdered the family, with The Watauga Democrat noting that investigators even looked into rumors that several Green Berets could have carried out the slaughter while visiting the area for a skiing demonstration.
After the case had been cold for many years, there was new hope it would be solved in 2019 after a man named Shane Birt revealed to the White County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, just over the North Carolina state border, that his father had spoken of his involvement in a decades-old triple homicide during a prison visit, authorities in Watauga County say.
Billy Sunday Birt told his son about “killing three people in the North Carolina mountains during a heavy snowstorm, remembering that they almost got caught,” the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office announced this week.
That tip prompted authorities in Watauga County to chase “new leads” and interview Birt’s associates, Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman said.
Another man, Billy Wayne Davis, reportedly admitted to investigators that he and three others had been hired to take out a family in the North Carolina mountains. He said he’d served as the getaway driver while Birt, Bobby Gene Gaddis, and Charles David Reed carried out the killings.
Davis, who is serving a life sentence for unrelated crimes, is the only member of the group still alive today.
Authorities say all the men were known members of the “loose confederation of thugs and crooks” known as the Dixie Mafia.
“He would just sort of hint every once in a while, he’d say something,” another Birt son, Billy, told WSOC-TV. “About this particular case, he told my baby brother about one time he was in North Carolina in a snowstorm about to lock them in on a hit, and that was the clue that connected the dots.”
The son told the station that his dad had showed him maps of where several other bodies have been discovered.
“I know this sounds crazy to you, but my father killed over a hundred people,” Birt said.
“It remains unclear who solicited the crime against the Durham family,” the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office said in its press release.
Ginny Durham, the Durhams’ 19-year-old daughter who likely survived the attack only because she lived elsewhere with her husband, thanked investigators who devoted years of their lives to solving the case.
“I know that they sacrificed many days and weekends in order to work on solving this case since 1972,” she said.
