On the night of February 3, 1972, Bryce Durham drove home to Boone, North Carolina, after a Rotary Club meeting and stopped at his car dealership to pick up his wife Virginia, who had been working late. A blizzard was sweeping through the Blue Ridge Mountains, with winds reaching 40 miles per hour, blanketing every road in white. It was not a night for anyone to be out. But someone came to the brick house on Clyde Townsend Road.
Someone broke in, bound the family members, strangled them with ropes, and held their heads underwater in a bathtub. Bryce was 51 years old. Virginia was 46. Bobby Joe, their son, was a 19-year-old freshman at Appalachian State University.
Three people were wiped out on a stormy night. Virginia managed to call her daughter before her last breath. Her voice was choked. She said there were men holding her husband and son.
Then the line went dead. When her son-in-law arrived, he found three bodies kneeling beside an overflowing bathtub, their heads submerged under the water. The television was still on. Food was still on the table.
Police collected fingerprints from the crime scene. A green and white sports car was left on the side of the road a few miles away, its lights on, engine running, and windshield wipers still moving. But the fingerprints matched no one. The snowstorm had erased every trace.
This was Boone, a small mountain town that had never seen murder before, where no one knew how to investigate a systematic execution. The case went cold. It took 50 years, a daughter who never stopped waiting, a sheriff who refused to give up, and a confession from a Georgia prison where the son of one of the “Dixie Mafia” killers repeated what his father had whispered behind bars before the case broke open. This is the story of how the oldest cold case in Watauga County history was solved.
And the answer did not come from Boone, but from a prison hundreds of miles away, where an old man finally opened his mouth. Bryce Durham was born and raised in the Lomax area of Roaring River in Wilkes County, North Carolina. His wife Virginia Church Durham was from Boomer, also in Wilkes County. They were ordinary people in an extraordinary countryside, but Bryce had a dream.
He wanted to own his own car dealership. He graduated from Appalachian State University, worked in the automotive industry for years, gained experience and capital, and kept waiting for the right moment. In 1969, he moved the family from Mount Airy to Boone and opened Boone’s Buick, a Buick dealership right on the main road of town. For Bryce, it was more than just a business.
It was proof that a man from rural Wilkes County could build something of his own. He was proud of it. Boone was a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains where everyone knew each other’s names, where doors were often left unlocked, and where violent crime belonged to the outside world. Bryce fit in quickly.
He joined the Rotary Club, connected with local businessmen, and built a reputation as a trustworthy man. Virginia worked with him at the dealership, keeping the books, and sometimes stayed late on busy nights. Their son Bobby Joe Durham was born in Boone and grew up with the town. By 1972, he was 19 and a freshman at Appalachian State University, the same university his father had attended.
Jenny Durham, Bryce and Virginia’s daughter, was married to Justin Troy Hall. They lived in a mobile home park about four miles from Jenny’s parents’ house, near where a Walmart stands today. Troy Hall was also a student at Appalachian State and often went to the university library to study in the evenings. They were a normal family in a normal town.
No enemies, no public conflicts, no reason for anyone to think violence would knock on their door. On the night of February 3, 1972, a snowstorm hit Boone. Snow covered the ground four inches deep. Winds blew at up to 40 miles per hour, cutting visibility to nearly zero and making driving dangerous.
Bryce Durham was at a Rotary Club meeting at Appalachian Ski Mountain. The meeting included a presentation by a group of Green Berets training in the area, but because of the weather, very few people attended. Virginia stayed at the dealership working late. Bobby Joe was at home.
When Bryce left the Rotary meeting, another club member who was also a friend followed him back to the dealership to make sure he got there safely in the storm. Bryce picked up Virginia, and the family arrived home on Clyde Townsend Road. At least one neighbor confirmed seeing their car go up the slope toward the brick house around 9 p. m.
From that moment, what happened inside the house could only be reconstructed from the evidence left behind. That same night, Troy Hall went to the Appalachian State University library to study from about 5 p. m. Authorities later confirmed he left the library and arrived home around 10 p.
m. Troy and Jenny were listening to music in their mobile home. Shortly after 10, the phone rang. Troy answered.
It was Virginia Durham. Her voice was faint and choked, as if she was trying to speak without being heard. Troy heard her say that there were men holding Bryce and Bobby Joe in another room of the house. Then the line went dead.
Troy called back; the line was busy. He called again; still busy. He told Jenny what he had just heard. At first, he thought it might be a prank call, but Jenny didn’t think so.
She wanted to go to her parents’ house immediately. This is the detail that still raises questions for investigators years later. Troy Hall did not call the police. Instead of picking up the phone and calling the Boone Police Department, he decided to drive himself to his in-laws’ house in a fierce snowstorm, in the dark, on roads that were nearly impassable.
Troy’s car didn’t work. He asked a neighbor named Cecil Small, a private investigator who lived nearby, to drive the couple to Clyde Townsend Road. The road was so slippery they couldn’t drive all the way up the slope to the Durham house. Jenny stayed in the car.
Troy and Cecil walked toward the house and went inside. What they saw would haunt the town of Boone for half a century. The house was in complete chaos. Furniture was overturned.
Food and drinks were still on the kitchen table. The television was still on. The wall phone had been torn from its jack, the receiver lying on the floor. A bank deposit bag with a few hundred dollars in cash was on the ground.
Then they reached the lower-level bathroom of the multi-level house. Three bodies were kneeling beside an overflowing bathtub, side by side, fully clothed, their heads under the water. Bryce Durham, Virginia Durham, and Bobby Joe Durham. Because the house phone line had been ripped out, Troy Hall ran to a neighbor’s house and called the Boone Police.
The call came in just before 11 p. m. Police arrived at the scene in the middle of the blizzard. Outside, the snow continued to fall heavily, covering every footprint, every tire track, and everything the killers might have left behind.
Nature was doing the work the killers hadn’t needed to do. Autopsies were performed later. The results showed that all three victims had marks from ropes or cables around their necks. Virginia Durham died of asphyxiation by strangulation.
There was no water in her lungs, meaning she was already dead before her head was put in the bathtub. Bryce Durham and Bobby Joe Durham were strangled first, then their heads were held underwater until they died. This was not a robbery gone wrong. This was not impulsive violence.
This was a systematic execution carried out by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Three people were bound, strangled, and drowned in order inside their own home on a snowy night when no one could hear a cry for help. The next morning, when the storm had calmed, investigators returned to the crime scene. The front yard was completely white.
The slope leading to the house had no traces, no footprints, no tire marks, no sign of who had come and gone. The killers had made one mistake the snow couldn’t cover. That night, investigators were told of a green and white SUV leaving the Durham house area shortly after 10:30 p. m.
The North Carolina Highway Patrol found the vehicle hours later parked on the side of the road a few miles from the Durham home. The lights were still on. The wipers were still moving. The doors were locked.
The engine was still running. It sat there in the storm as if the driver had vanished. No one returned for it. No one reported it stolen.
It became the first and almost only lead investigators had. Inside the house, technicians collected numerous fingerprints. This should have been the decisive breakthrough. The prints were sent for matching against databases.
No match. Sent again. No match. Over the years, they were compared many times as technology improved and databases expanded.
Every time, the result was the same. No match. No name ever emerged. Other than the mysterious car and the silent fingerprints, the investigation had almost nothing to work with.
No weapon was left behind. There were no eyewitnesses, because on a snowy night with 40 mph winds, nobody was outside. The killers had chosen the right night, or the night had chosen them. The Boone Police Department was a small unit in a small town.
They handled petty thefts, neighbor disputes, and occasionally DUIs. They had no experience investigating a systematic triple murder. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) was called in. Agents came to Boone, worked the crime scene, interviewed neighbors, and examined records.
But with no witness, no weapon, no matching fingerprints, and no clear motive, the investigation quickly hit a dead end. News of the murders spread through Boone within hours. The Watauga Democrat and the Journal-Patriot covered it on the front page. The town was shaken.
The question everyone in Boone asked themselves was not just who did this, but whether the killer was living among them. In this context, investigators began looking closely at those closest to the Durham family. The first name they looked at was Troy Hall. Not because there was evidence against him, but because there were questions he didn’t answer satisfactorily.
The biggest question: why didn’t Troy Hall call the police when his wife received a panicked call from her mother after 10 p. m. saying strangers were holding her father and brother? Any normal reaction would have been to pick up the phone and call emergency services.
Instead, he decided to drive himself to his in-laws’ house in a fierce storm. When his car wouldn’t work, he asked his neighbor Cecil Small to drive them, instead of using that waiting time to call the police. When they arrived, he left Jenny in the car and entered a house he knew might contain violent men, unarmed, without backup, without a plan. Investigators also noted that Troy Hall was the one who discovered the crime scene.
He was the first to enter the house, the first to see the bodies, and the first to describe the scene to police. In criminal investigations, the person who finds the crime scene is always examined closely. There was one more detail. Virginia Durham’s call to Troy Hall was the only channel of communication from inside the house to the outside.
Everything police knew about what happened inside before the bodies were found came from Troy Hall’s account of that call. He said Virginia told him there were men holding Bryce and Bobby Joe. No one else heard that call. There was no recording.
There was no independent way to verify the content of the conversation. There was only Troy Hall’s word. But one thing must be clearly stated. There was no physical evidence against Troy Hall.
None of his fingerprints were found where they shouldn’t have been. No witness placed him anywhere other than where he said he was. Authorities confirmed he was at the Appalachian State library from about 5 p. m.
until 10 p. m. His timeline matched what he said. The suspicion came from his behavior, from the choices he made that night, and from questions his answers didn’t satisfy.
But they also couldn’t be disproven. Sheriff Ward Carroll of Watauga County and SBI agents continued working every lead. But with no weapon, no matching prints, no witness, and no confession, the case slid into the coldest territory of the profession: a cold case. The file remained open on paper, but nothing moved.
No new lead, no new witness, no new reason to move forward. Life went on in Boone, but the shadow of February 3 never really left. In the months following the murders, Troy Hall and Jenny Durham Hall left Boone. They didn’t announce it publicly.
They didn’t offer an explanation. They simply left. For some in town, their departure was understandable. Who would want to stay in a place where her parents and brother were killed inside their home?
For others, especially investigators, the departure added another question mark to the long list about Troy Hall. Shortly after leaving Boone, Troy and Jenny divorced. The marriage didn’t survive the shadows of February 3. Troy Hall then went to law school and became an attorney.
A man investigators once considered the person needing the most careful questioning now understood the law better than those who had questioned him. Jenny Durham Hall became the only survivor of the Durham family in her direct line. She carried that pain alone, in silence, without cameras, interviews, or public attention. She waited, and the waiting lasted for decades.
In the early years, one theory involved Bryce Durham’s work. Before opening his dealership in Boone, Bryce worked in the car business in the Mount Airy and Surry County area. According to some sources, Bryce discovered that a car dealership in Surry County was tampering with odometers on used cars to make them look newer and sell for higher prices. If Bryce knew about it and threatened to report it, he became a threat to someone with a lot to lose.
The theory had its own logic. It provided a motive. But the problem was the lack of evidence to prove that link. There were no documents showing Bryce officially reported anyone.
No witness came forward to say they knew who threatened Bryce over the matter. As District Attorney Rufus Edmisten later noted in a 2015 interview with the Watauga Democrat, there were many interesting theories about who might be involved, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convincingly prove any of the rumors. The odometer theory remained just a theory. In 1974, Rufus Edmisten was appointed District Attorney for North Carolina.
He was a man of the mountains. One of the first things Edmisten did when he took office was create a dedicated unit for unsolved homicides, placing the Durham case at the top of the list. He assigned agents to start over, review the evidence again, re-interview witnesses, and look for leads the original investigation might have missed. Edmisten later said that Bryce Durham’s parents contacted him almost as soon as he took office.
They were elderly people from rural Wilkes County, ordinary people with no power or influence, only the pain of losing a child and the belief that someone, somewhere, must be held accountable for the murder of their son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Edmisten recalled that the first contact was just the beginning. Over the years that followed, he communicated with them 40 to 50 times. Every time the question was the same.
Is there progress? Has anyone been arrested? Has anyone paid a price? Every time the answer was the same.
Not yet. Edmisten later said that of all the cases he assigned his agents to investigate, he wanted to solve the Durham case more than any other. But no matter how much he wanted it, the case didn’t move. His agents reviewed everything and reached the same conclusion as the original investigation.
No. No breakthrough. No one stepped out of the darkness to say, “I know who did this. ” Bryce’s parents kept calling Edmisten over the years.
They kept asking the same question and getting the same answer. Then they passed away. They both died without ever knowing who killed their son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Edmisten spoke of them with visible pain even decades later.
He said the Durham family never found peace before they died. The 1970s passed, then the 1980s, then the 1990s. The world changed. Boone grew.
The university expanded. New roads were built. The house on Clyde Townsend Road still stood, but most newcomers to Boone didn’t know what had happened inside it. The Durham case became something only the town’s older residents remembered, a story told quietly in a coffee shop, a reference made in passing when someone drove by Clyde Townsend Road.
But it never disappeared. Every time a new sheriff took office in Watauga County, the Durham file was pulled out, reviewed, examined, and put away. Each sheriff came with the hope of being the one to solve the case. Each left disappointed.
The old files were scattered. Some were at the Boone Police Department. Some at the SBI. Some at the sheriff’s office.
No one had the complete picture. SBI agent Charles Whitman continued working the case even after retirement. He refused to give up. He took the file home, reread the reports in his spare time, and checked old leads again.
He wasn’t alone. There were people in the Watauga County justice system who considered the Durham case an unhealed wound. Not because they knew the Durham family, but because the existence of an unsolved case was a reminder that the system had failed. Three people had died and no one had been held accountable.
And somewhere, Jenny Durham was living a pain no one could fully share. She lost her father in 1972. She lost her mother in 1972. She lost her brother in 1972.
She lost her husband when the marriage collapsed afterwards. She was the survivor, but surviving didn’t mean escaping. It meant enduring. Every day, every year, every decade, she carried with her the night of February 3, her mother’s phone call, and the fact that no one knew why her family had to die.
By the early 2000s, the Durham case had reached 30 years, then 35, then 40. In 2012, the Winston-Salem Journal published an article on the 40th anniversary of the case. The article recounted the events of the snowy night, listed the leads that had been followed, all of which led to dead ends, and repeated the questions that remained unanswered. It ended without providing an answer.
By then, most people had accepted that the Durham case would remain cold forever, and that the killers would die without ever being identified. But one person had not accepted that. Len Hagaman became Sheriff of Watauga County, and he carried the Durham case like an unfulfilled promise. He didn’t know that the answer he was looking for wouldn’t come from Boone, or even from North Carolina, but from a prison in Georgia, from the mouth of a man he had never heard of.
In May 2019, 47 years after the blizzard night on Clyde Townsend Road, the phone rang in the office of Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman. The call came from the White County Georgia Sheriff’s Office, a small county just across the border, a few hundred miles south of Boone. The caller said they had information that might relate to an old murder case in North Carolina. Hagaman listened.
In the first minutes of the conversation, he realized this information might be what five sheriffs before him had been waiting for over half a century. The story didn’t begin with an investigation. It began with a book. A few months before that call, a man named Shane Burke came to the White County Sheriff’s Office to search records.
Shane was writing a book about crimes in Georgia, and was particularly interested in a 1973 case known as the Fleming case, a brutal murder in which his father was involved. Shane Burke’s father was Billy Sunday Burke, and Billy Sunday Burke was no ordinary criminal. He was a leader of one of the most violent criminal groups in the American South during the 1960s and 1970s, a network known as the “Dixie Mafia. ”
The Dixie Mafia was not a traditional mafia.
It was a loosely connected criminal network operating mainly in the southern states from Georgia to Mississippi, Alabama to Tennessee. There was no single leader and no code of silence. There were only small groups of violent men who knew each other, trusted each other enough to commit crimes together, and were willing to kill for money. The roots of the Dixie Mafia began with bootlegging.
In the mid-20th century, rural areas of the South were a haven for moonshiners. When the bootlegging trade declined, these networks shifted to other crimes: bank robbery, theft, fraud, and especially contract killing. One of Burke’s sons described his father’s world bluntly. He said the people involved in the Dixie Mafia transported more liquor than anyone else in history, and that led to other things like bank robbery and murder for hire.
He said everyone came to his father to do the dirty work. He also said something else. He said Billy Sunday Burke killed more than a hundred people. That number can’t be independently verified, but it shows the scale of violence the network was willing to commit.
Burke wasn’t a criminal who killed out of anger or personal grudges. He killed because he was paid to. It was a job, and he was good at it. Burke worked with a small group of men he trusted: Bobby Gene Gaddis, Charles David Reid, and Billy Wayne Davis.
They moved across the Southeast from Georgia to Tennessee, Alabama to the Carolinas, carrying out contract killings. One important feature of Burke’s method later became the biggest obstacle to solving the case. He never told his partners who had hired them. He took the contract, organized the hit, and led the group, but the identity of the person who hired them was known only to him.
If anyone in the group was caught, they couldn’t name the person who ordered the job because they genuinely didn’t know. Burke kept that secret like a vault with no spare key. When Burke died, the secret died with him. But Burke had one weakness.
He talked to family. His son Shane said he was very close to his father. During visits to his father in a Georgia prison, Billy Sunday Burke told his son Shane about things he had done. One of the stories Burke told his son was about a night in the mountains of North Carolina.
Burke said he and his group killed three people in a house in the mountains during a blizzard. He said they almost got stuck, almost couldn’t get out because of the storm. He remembered that storm clearly. When Shane Burke told this story to White County Sheriff’s Office staff while researching his book, the reaction was immediate.
They realized the story matched an unsolved case across the state line. They contacted Watauga County at once. When Sheriff Hagaman received the call from White County, he had spent enough time in office to know the Durham case by heart. He knew every lead that had been pursued.
He knew every dead end. He knew every name mentioned and then dismissed. And he knew this case needed exactly what the call from Georgia provided: a voice from the inside. Someone who knew what happened because they were close to whoever committed the crime.
Hagaman began to move. He contacted the SBI, coordinated with Georgia investigators, and began verifying Shane Burke’s story. Was there really a group of men from Georgia in the mountains of North Carolina on the blizzard night of 1972? Did a triple murder matching the description really take place?
The answer to both questions was yes. But Shane Burke’s account, however important, was hearsay. Hagaman needed more. He needed someone who was actually present that night.
Someone who could say, “I was on Clyde Townsend Road on the night of February 3, 1972. ” And he found that person. His name was Billy Wayne Davis. Davis was 81 years old, serving a life sentence in a Georgia correctional facility for a 1971 murder.
He had been in prison for more than 30 years. He was a partner of Billy Sunday Burke, a member of the same network and the same group. While Burke, Gaddis, and Reid had all died in prison, Davis was still breathing, still remembering, and perhaps still willing to talk. Investigators from Watauga County and the SBI coordinated with Georgia authorities to gain access to Billy Wayne Davis.
Davis was 81 years old. He had lived most of his adult life behind bars. He had nothing left to lose. No freedom to protect, no future to worry about.
He would die in prison whether he spoke or not. Sometimes that despair alone opens a man’s mouth. Sometimes it’s something else: exhaustion from carrying a secret for too long, or simply old age weakening loyalty to people long dead. Whatever the reason, Billy Wayne Davis spoke.
In interviews with investigators, Davis said that on the night of February 3, 1972, he and three others drove from Georgia to Boone, North Carolina. The three others were Billy Sunday Burke, Bobby Gene Gaddis, and Charles David Reid. They came to carry out a job. Davis used that word, “job,” as if killing three people in their home was an assignment that had been completed.
He said it was a murder for hire, and that they were paid to come to Boone and kill the Durham family. Davis said that when they arrived in Boone, the snowstorm had already started and was getting worse. He described himself as the getaway driver, the person who sat in the car waiting outside while Burke, Gaddis, and Reid went into the house. Davis said he never went inside.
He said he didn’t directly participate in the killings. He just drove the car. Davis also said they almost got stuck that night because of the blizzard. That detail matched exactly what Shane Burke had said, that his father remembered the storm clearly because it almost prevented their escape.
Two independent sources, a son repeating his father’s words and a partner relaying his own experience, both recalled the same distinctive detail. The investigators didn’t stop with Davis’s statement. They interviewed two additional sources to corroborate evidence from the Durham crime scene. Their identities were not publicly revealed, but Sheriff Hagaman confirmed their information matched the evidence collected at the site in 1972.
Investigators also noticed something else important. The method used in the Durham murders, how the victims were bound, strangled, and drowned, was strikingly similar to another case the four suspects were linked to, the 1973 Fleming case in Georgia. The four men, Burke, Gaddis, Reid, and Davis, had all been convicted or implicated in the Fleming case. The similarity between the two cases was no coincidence.
It was the signature of a murder gang. Professional killers have habits like anyone else. They find a method that works and repeat it. With Davis’s statement, Shane Burke’s account, the corroboration of two additional sources, and the similarity to the Fleming case, the picture was complete enough for Sheriff Hagaman to reach a conclusion.
The four killers of the 1972 Durham family murders had been identified: Billy Sunday Burke, Bobby Gene Gaddis, Charles David Reid, and Billy Wayne Davis, all members or associates of the Georgia-based Dixie Mafia criminal network. All four had already been sentenced to life in prison for other murders. Burke died in prison. Gaddis died in prison.
Reid died in prison. Davis, 81 years old, was still alive, still in prison, and would remain there until his death. None of them were ever tried for the Durham case. None stood in a courtroom to hear an indictment listing the names of Bryce Durham, Virginia Durham, and Bobby Joe Durham.
They killed three people and never had to face justice for those three deaths. They were held accountable for other murders in other places and received life sentences for other lives, but the Durham family was never on any indictment. In November, before announcing the findings to the public, Sheriff Hagaman contacted Jenny Durham. He wanted her to be the first to know.
He wanted her to hear it from him, not from the evening news. After 50 years, after her mother’s last phone call, after sitting in Cecil Small’s car waiting for her husband to enter the house and find her family murdered, Jenny Durham finally heard the names of the men who killed her parents and brother. Four men from Georgia, from the Dixie Mafia, a murder for hire. She had waited half a century to hear those words.
Now she knew who. But she still didn’t know why. Davis said it was a murder for hire, but when investigators asked who had hired them, Davis didn’t answer. Either he didn’t know or he wouldn’t say.
Given Burke’s method of operation, Davis probably genuinely didn’t know. Burke was the one who took the contract. Burke was the one who knew who paid and why. He didn’t share that information with his partners, and Burke died in 2017.
That secret went with him to the grave. Hagaman prepared for the press conference. He knew the announcement would bring relief to some people and raise new questions for others. He knew Troy Hall’s name would come up, because if this was a murder for hire, it meant someone had paid the money.
In the short list of people who had a reason to want the Durham family dead, Troy Hall’s name had always been at the top for many investigators. But Hagaman also knew he had no evidence against Troy Hall. He had only questions. On February 8, 2022, Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman issued an official press release.
Three days later, on February 11, he held a press conference. Fifty years and eight days after the blizzard night on Clyde Townsend Road, authorities stood before cameras for the first time in the case’s history to announce they knew the identity of the Durham family killers. Hagaman read the names one by one: Billy Sunday Burke, Bobby Gene Gaddis, Charles David Reid, and Billy Wayne Davis. He described the murders with two words he repeated throughout the press conference: murder for hire.
It was not a robbery gone wrong. It was not random violence. It was a contract killing. Someone paid money for the Durham family to die.
And four men from Georgia took the money and carried out the contract. But after using the term murder for hire, Hagaman had to say the next thing, the thing everyone in the room was waiting to hear. Who hired them? And why?
His answer was what no one wanted to hear, but everyone had to accept. He said Billy Wayne Davis, the only living member of the hit team, either didn’t know who hired them or refused to answer that question. When investigators asked Davis about the person behind the contract, he remained silent. He didn’t deny it.
He didn’t confirm it. He simply didn’t speak. Hagaman explained why this silence might be genuine rather than tactical. Burke was the one who accepted the contract.
Burke was the only one who dealt directly with the person who hired them. His method was to keep that information to himself. That’s how Burke protected the group and protected himself. If any of them were caught, they couldn’t name the person who ordered the job because they simply didn’t know.
Burke died in 2017. And the secret died with him. Then Hagaman said what many in the room had believed for 50 years but had never heard an official say out loud. He said some people, including those in law enforcement and the public, had long suspected that the Durham family’s son-in-law, Justin Troy Hall, was involved in hiring the killers.
He said it quite clearly. “I would have very much liked to have interviewed Troy Hall, but Mr. Hall passed away on December 19, 2019, and I no longer have that opportunity. ” Consider the timeline.
Troy Hall died on December 19, 2019. The call from White County, Georgia, the call that opened the case file, came to Hagaman’s office in May 2019. Troy Hall died about seven months after that call. Seven months.
Had he lived another year or two, Hagaman might have sat across from him in an interrogation room and asked him directly: “Did you hire the Dixie Mafia to kill your wife’s family? ” But time didn’t allow it. Troy Hall took his answer, if he had one, to his grave just months before the final question was asked. Hagaman confirmed there was no specific evidence against Troy Hall.
Suspicion is not an indictment. A question is not a verdict. But he also didn’t close that door. He left it open, half-closed, exactly as it had been for 50 years.
Local historian Terry Harman, who later published a book about the case titled “Twisted: The 1972 Durham Family Triple Murder,” was more direct than Hagaman. He said those four men did not drive from Georgia to Boone randomly, and that everyone generally believes Troy Hall was involved. Harman’s book contains more than 160 photographs, maps, and diagrams reconstructing the lives of the Durham family, the night of the murders, and decades of investigation. It is the most complete public record ever published about the case.
And even in it, the question of who hired them remains unanswered. The “Red Clay” podcast, in its first and second seasons, told the story of the Dixie Mafia and especially the legend of Billy Sunday Burke to a wider audience. The Durham case is placed within the broader context of dozens of violent acts committed by this network across the Southeast during the 1960s and 1970s. The Durham family was not the only victims.
They were three among dozens, or even hundreds, of people who died at the hands of Burke’s group. But they were three people the town of Boone never forgot. Legally, no one was ever tried for the Durham family murders. Three of the four killers died in prison.
Davis, the fourth, was serving a life sentence for another murder and would never leave prison. Even if the evidence had met courtroom standards, a trial in the Durham case would not have changed the outcome. He had already received the harshest penalty the justice system could impose. He would die behind bars.
The Durham case was treated as solved, not in a judicial sense, but in an investigative one. The police knew who committed the murders. They knew how. They knew the group that carried it out.
But they didn’t know who ordered it or why, and they may never know. Jenny Durham released a public statement after the press conference. “I want to thank everyone who has worked for decades on my family’s case,” she said. “I know they sacrificed many days and weekends to solve this since 1972.
” She specifically thanked Sheriff Hagaman, who had pursued the case since the beginning, and other investigators. Her words of thanks were not long. She was not a person who liked speeches, but in every word she said there was the weight of 50 years of waiting. 50 years of not knowing.
50 years of waking up every morning with the same question no one could answer. Now at least she knew the names of the men who entered her parents’ house on a stormy night. She knew where they came from. She knew the group they belonged to.
It wasn’t everything she wanted to know, but it was more than she’d had for the past 50 years. Hagaman called this a necessary turning point for the Durham case. He thanked the SBI, the Boone Police Department, the White County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, and many experts, community members, and their families for years of work on the case. He didn’t declare victory.
He didn’t declare that justice had been done. He declared that the truth, or at least part of it, had finally been found. And sometimes part of the truth is all time allows you to have. The Durham case left an uncomfortable legacy.
It showed that organized violence can reach anywhere, even a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains where people thought they were safe. It showed that a cold case doesn’t mean a dead case. And that 50 years is not too late to find the killers, even if sometimes it’s too late to try them. It showed that a word in a prison visiting room can break half a century of silence.
And it left a question that may never find an answer. Who paid for the Durham family to die, and why? Troy Hall took his answer with him, if he had one, when he died on December 19, 2019. Billy Sunday Burke took his answer with him when he died in 2017.
And the night of February 3, 1972, the blizzard night that painted Boone white, the night 40 mph winds swallowed every cry for help, the night three members of the Durham family were killed in their home on Clyde Townsend Road, that night kept the rest of the truth. The storm melted long ago. The snow melted long ago.
But some things buried under the snow that night have never been discovered.