Family was found dead in a bathtub 50 years ago. Now NC cops say they know the killers
“Help.”
Virginia Durham’s voice was hardly recognizable to her son-in-law, Troy Hall, when she called in a state of panic from her family’s home in Boone, North Carolina, on a snowy night in 1972, according to newspaper reports.
20 minutes later, Hall was on the phone with the sheriff’s department to report a murder — three of them.
The mysterious slayings of Virginia Durham, 44, her husband, Bryce Durham, 51, and their 18-year-old son, Bobby Durham, on Feb. 3, 1972, went unsolved for decades. A lack of evidence led to bizarre theories as to who the culprits might be — from ringleaders of a car dealership scam in a neighboring county to Green Berets in town for a ski demonstration, The Watauga Democrat previously reported.
Now Watauga County investigators say they have solved the 50-year-old cold case thanks to a tip from a sheriff’s department 200 miles away in Georgia.
Four men from the Georgia-based Dixie Mafia were responsible for the murders of the Durham family, the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office said in a Feb. 8 news release. Their deaths were reportedly a hired hit, but law enforcement don’t know who ordered it.
Only one of the four suspects is still alive — 81-year-old Billy Wayne Davis, who is serving a life sentence for murder at the Augusta State Medical Prison in Georgia.
Corrections department records show Davis has been incarcerated since 1986.
The Watauga County Sheriff’s Office identified Billy Sunday Birt, Bobby Gene Gaddis and Charles David Reed as the remaining suspects.
All were members of the Dixie Mafia, which the FBI described as “a loose confederation of thugs and crooks who conducted their criminal activity in the Southeastern United States.” The group had significant ties to Biloxi, Mississippi, known for its “long tolerance (of) wide open, illegal gambling and seedy striptease clubs,” the Biloxi Sun Herald previously reported.
Murdered in a snowstorm
Weather conditions in Boone were treacherous on Feb. 3, 1972. There was 4 inches of snow on the ground and wind was whipping at 40 mph, The Charlotte Observer reported in 1989.
The Durham family lived on Clyde Townsend Road — a steep dead-end road off N.C. 105 Bypass on the west side of Boone, according to a news report from the Winston-Salem Journal on the 40-year anniversary of the murders. They had moved to the mountain town from Mount Airy in 1971, the Observer reported.
Bryce Durham owned a Buick dealership, where Virginia Durham kept the books. Bobby Durham was in his first year of school at Appalachian State University.
The family was by all accounts hard-working, quiet and largely kept to themselves.
According to The Observer’s retelling in 1989, the Durham’s also had a 19-year-old daughter — Ginny Sue Hall — who lived 4 miles away with her husband, Troy Hall.
Both were home at 10:30 p.m. on the night of the snowstorm when the phone suddenly rang. Virginia Hall was on the other end of the line. She told them some men had Bobby and Bryce before the line went dead, The Observer reported.
“I didn’t really recognize her voice,” Troy Hall told The Observer. “I thought it was a practical joke.”
But Ginny Sue Hall was worried. The couple decided to go check on her family, but their car wouldn’t start. A neighbor, private detective Cecil Small, agreed to drive them, The Observer reported.
The road up to the Durham’s home was too treacherous to traverse by car, so Travis Hall and Cecil Small went alone while Ginny Sue Hall waited in the car.
“The house had been ransacked,” The Observer reported. “The telephone cord was ripped from the wall. Blood spattered the den. The television was on. But its sound was muffled by the steady swoosh of running water. The two men followed the noise to a bathroom where they found three bodies, their heads dangling in an overflowing bathtub.”
An autopsy report later revealed Virginia Durham died by strangulation, while Bryce and Bobby Durham had been drowned. All three reportedly had rope burns on their necks.
Troy Hall called the sheriff’s office from a neighbor’s apartment at 10:50 p.m., according to The Observer.
A slew of officers converged on the house, The Watauga Democrat reported. They found a baked chicken on the kitchen table, half-eaten. A money bag stuffed with hundreds of dollars remained untouched, according to The Observer, and nothing appeared to have been taken.
Investigators were told a green and white SUV was seen leaving the Durham’s house just after 10:30 p.m., The Watauga Democrat reported. The N.C. Highway Patrol found it several hours later on the side of the road a few miles away with its “lights on, windshield wipers slapping, doors closed, motor still running,” according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
Bryce Durham had taken the car from his dealership to get home in the snowstorm, investigators said, and the killers used it as their getaway vehicle. A bag of silver was found inside.
A break in the case
The first major breakthrough on the Durham murders came in 2019, when Birt’s son, Shane Birt, came to the White County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia to help with some research for a book about crimes in Georgia.
White County is about 90 miles northeast of Atlanta and about a dozen miles south of the North Carolina border.
Shane Birt had been close with his father and often visited him in prison, the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office said. It was during one of those visits that Birt reportedly told his son about “killing three people in the North Carolina mountains during a heavy snowstorm, remembering that they almost got caught,” the sheriff’s office said.
The White County Sheriff’s Office immediately contacted authorities in Watauga County after Shane Birt relayed the story.
Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman said his office realized the tip “could be very important to the Durham case.”
“We immediately began to investigate the new leads, and conducted in-person interviews with Billy Wayne Davis in September 2019, October 2020, and August 2021,” Hagaman said. “It was these interviews that ultimately helped us determine who was responsible through the corroboration of evidence. We are confident that we now know who committed these crimes.”
According to the sheriff’s office, Davis said he and three other men were hired for a “hit” in the North Carolina mountains. Just as Birt had said, Davis told investigators a bad snowstorm hit the night of the murders and they were almost caught.
He said he acted as the getaway driver while Birt, Gaddis and Reed killed the Durham family.
Mystery solved
Surviving family members spent decades yearning for answers.
At 89 years old, solving the murder was all Bryce Durham’s mother, Collie Durham, could talk about, her daughter Gayle Mauldin told The Charlotte Observer in a 1989 interview.
“She just wants to see it solved,” Mauldin said.
While Collie Durham died long before law enforcement cracked the case, the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office met with the remaining members of the Durham family in November to break the news. Ginny Sue Hall, who now goes by Ginny Durham, was among them.
“I would like to thank all of the people who worked for decades on my family’s case,” she said in the news release. “I know that they sacrificed many days and weekends in order to work on solving this case since 1972.”
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