Crime Immemorial

The winter of 1972 would see the bizarre slaughter of an entire family that took place during a raging snowstorm and was almost definitely not what it first appeared.

It was February 3rd, and fifty-one-year-old Bryce Durham was attending a Rotary meeting in Boone, North Carolina. The winter weather had been so harsh that day that the meeting had been something of a wash, with only a few members risking the blizzard.

At a little past eight p.m., Bryce left the meeting and drove to the Buick dealership that he owned to pick up his wife, forty-four-year-old Virginia, who had been working there that day. Also at the dealership was the couple’s eighteen-year-old son Bobby Joe, an Appalachian State University student who had agreed to meet his parents at the dealership so that they could all drive safely home together in the snowstorm.

Bryce borrowed a newly-arrived four-wheel-drive GMC Jimmy from the car lot, and the Durham family piled into the vehicle for the harrowing ride back to the couple’s pleasant house off the 105 Bypass. According to neighbors, the Jimmy pulled into the driveway at around nine p.m.

Approximately an hour and fifteen minutes later, the phone rang at the trailer home of the Durhams’ daughter Ginny Hall and her husband Troy, which was located four miles away from the residence of Bryce and Virginia Durham. Troy, who had only arrived home from the university library at around ten p.m., answered the phone.

After hanging up, he told his wife that the call had come from Virginia Durham, and that she had told him that Bryce and Bobby Joe were in the process of being assaulted by three black men who had forced their way into the house. The line had then gone dead, Troy claimed, and when he attempted to call back, he had gotten a busy signal.

Rather than contacting police, Troy decided to drive to his in-laws’ house in the blizzard, but found that his car refused to start. He therefore recruited the help of a neighbor, Cecil Small, who happened to be a private investigator. Troy, Cecil, and Ginny got into Cecil’s car, and the trio made their way to the Durham home, a journey which took them nearly an hour in the inclement conditions.

Once they arrived, Ginny waited in the car while the two men went inside to investigate; they spotted evidence of trouble right away. The TV and all the lights were on, and the remains of a meal had been left on the kitchen table, as had evidence that the family had been snacking in the living room in front of the television.

Further, the house appeared to have been violently ransacked, and the phone had been torn off the wall. There was also the ominous sound of running water emerging from the bathroom.

When Troy and Cecil tracked down the source of the noise, they discovered that all three of the Durhams were hog-tied, lined up, and slumped over the lip of the bathtub, their heads submerged in the running water. At this stage, Troy and Cecil left the house and went to a neighbor’s apartment to call the police.

Investigators found that Virginia Durham had been strangled before being placed in the tub, but Bryce and Bobby Joe had only been partially strangled before the assailant or assailants had forced their heads beneath the water and drowned them. Both Bryce and Virginia bore signs of a beating: a bloody nose in Virginia’s case, and a fractured skull in Bryce’s. All three victims appeared to have rope burns around their necks.

Due to the fact that none of the Durhams had defensive wounds, it was theorized that there must have been more than one attacker, for wrangling three healthy adults—one of whom was an athletic eighteen-year-old—would have been far too difficult a task for a lone perpetrator.

And because of the state of disarray in the home, authorities initially assumed that the horrific triple murder was the result of a robbery gone wrong. There were, however, a few troubling clues that suggested the scene might have been staged.

First of all, nothing much of value appeared to have been stolen from the home, and that included a bank envelope containing several hundred dollars that remained in plain sight on a dining room chair.

Second of all, two hours after police arrived to process the scene, officers discovered the GMC Jimmy that Bryce Durham had borrowed from his car dealership. It had been abandoned about a mile away from the Durham home. The vehicle was still running, and the headlights and windshield wipers remained on. Notably, the car had left no skid marks in the deep snow, indicating that whoever had driven the car had deliberately parked it in the state it was found to draw the authorities’ attention.

Neighbors reported to investigators that they had seen the Jimmy pulling out of the Durhams’ driveway at around ten-thirty p.m.
In the back seat of the vehicle, detectives found a pillowcase containing some silver plates that had been taken from the Durham residence. It immediately seemed suspicious, though, that the so-called thieves had left behind items in the house much more valuable than the silver, strengthening the conjecture that this crime had not been a robbery at all. Besides that, what gang of robbers in their right minds would target a fairly remote and hard-to-access property in the middle of a howling snowstorm?

Though investigators attempted to follow up on the alleged phone call made by Virginia Durham in which she had laid the blame for the attack on three unidentified black men, this line of inquiry had precisely zero evidence to support it, other than the testimony of the Durhams’ son-in-law, Troy Hall.

In fact, there was much circumstantial evidence to suggest that Troy Hall might know more about the triple homicide than he was letting on. Both locals and detectives found it strange that he had waited so long to contact police after receiving the stated phone call. Troy explained this away by saying that at first he had thought the call had been a joke, and then later insisted that he and his wife Ginny had been listening to music when the phone call came in, and that he hadn’t been able to hear Virginia’s words as clearly as he had first claimed. In later years, at least one of the investigators on the case was quite upfront in telling the media that he didn’t believe the phone call ever took place.

It also seemed interesting that Troy had never had the most civil relationship with his in-laws, and it was rumored that the Durhams had been trying to convince their daughter Ginny to divorce him.

In addition, Ginny Hall was the sole heir of the Durham estate, and after the deaths of her parents and brother, received a sum of approximately two-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars, the equivalent to nearly two million dollars in 2022.

In spite of these tantalizing leads, however, the ensuing months would bring a very odd twist that suggested the authorities might have been grasping at straws in order to put the case to bed once and for all.

On April 26th of 1972, police actually made an arrest in the triple homicide of the Durham family from the previous February. Apparently, an unnamed suspect who had been picked up during an investigation into a robbery ring had passed on some intriguing information.

This man claimed that he was with three other individuals who had been responsible for the murders, and that the crime had indeed been a robbery that had turned sour. Four men—all white, in contravention of the ostensible phone call made by Virginia Durham—were initially charged with the killings.

But the arrest was problematic from the get-go, as police were already convinced that the murders had not taken place in the course of a theft, and further suspicion was thrown on this “informant” after he claimed that the Durhams had been killed with shotguns, when it was well known that they had been strangled and drowned. It also quickly came to light that this criminal snitch had actually been in jail on the night of the Durham murders. Authorities sheepishly let all four suspects go.

Troy and Ginny Hall moved away from Boone not long after the murders, and divorced a short time after that. Neither one of them was ever charged with a crime, and indeed, after interviewing Ginny many years later, detectives remained unconvinced that she had anything to do with the killings.

Many researchers into the case, in fact, believed that the slayings had the hallmarks of a professional hit, though no clear motive for such a plot was ever put forward. Though Bryce Durham was a businessman, no evidence of shady dealings could be uncovered that might have put a target on his back or those of his wife and son.

In February of 2022, however, fifty years following the multiple murder, authorities announced that they had solved what had come to be known as the Durham Case. The crucial break in the investigation came in 2019, when a man named Shane Birt was in the White County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia in order to participate in some research about a book having to do with infamous unsolved crimes in the state. Shane told authorities that his father, Billy Sunday Birt, who was then in prison, had once confessed to killing three people in the mountains of North Carolina during a snowstorm.

Subsequently, the White County Sheriff’s Office put in a call to the Watauga County Sheriff in North Carolina, and from there, the lead was followed up on. It soon came to light that the murders of the Durham family had been perpetrated by four white men—Billy Sunday Birt, Bobby Gene Gaddis, Charles David Reed and Billy Wayne Davis—who were all part of a Georgia-based “Dixie Mafia” who were thought to be responsible for a series of violent crimes in Georgia and across the entire southeastern United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

Of the original suspects, only one—eighty-one-year-old Billy Wayne Davis­—was still alive in 2022, and he was serving a life sentence in an Augusta, Georgia correctional facility for several other crimes. When asked about the Durham slayings, he admitted his part in the conspiracy, though stated that he was only the getaway driver, and hadn’t actually entered the home or murdered any of the victims.

Ginny Durham gave her sincere thanks to the investigators who finally broke the case, and though it appears at this writing that the guilty parties have been identified, the motive for the hit and the individual who requested it are still unknown.