On the night of February 3, 1972, a blizzard swept through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Winds reached 40 miles per hour, blanketing every road in white. It was not a night to be out. But someone came to the brick home on Clyde Townsend Road in Boone, North Carolina.
They broke in, bound the family, strangled them with ropes, and held their heads underwater in a bathtub. Price Durham, 51. Virginia Durham, 46. Bobby Joe Durham, 19, a freshman at Appalachian State University. Three people were killed in a single night of storm.
Virginia Durham managed to call her daughter before her last breath. Her voice was choked. She said men were 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, heads submerged. The television was still on. Food was still on the table. Police collected fingerprints from the scene. A green and white sports car was found abandoned a few miles away, lights on, engine running, windshield wipers still moving.
The fingerprints matched no one. The snowstorm erased every trace.
Boone was a small mountain town that had never seen murder. 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 would not give up, and a confession from a prison in Georgia where the son of a Dixie Mafia killer repeated what his father whispered behind bars.
This is the story of how the oldest cold case in Watauga County history was finally solved. The answer did not come from Boone. It came from a prison hundreds of miles away, where an old man finally opened his mouth.
Price Durham was born and raised in the Lomax area of Roring River in Wilkes County, North Carolina. His wife, Virginia Church Durham, was from Burler, also in Wilkes County. They were ordinary people from an extraordinary rural region. But Price had a dream. He wanted to own his own car dealership.
He graduated from Appalachian State College, worked in the car business for years, gained experience and capital, and waited for the right moment. In 1969, he moved the family from Mount Airy to Boone and opened Boone's Buick, a dealership right on the main road. For Price, it was not just a business. It was proof that a man from rural Wilkes County could build something of his own.
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. Price 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 staying 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 school his father had attended. Jenny Durham, Price 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. Troy Hall was also a student at Appalachian State and often went to the university library to study in the evenings.
They were an ordinary family in an ordinary 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. Four inches of snow covered the ground. Winds reached 40 miles per hour, cutting visibility to nearly zero. Price Durham was at a Rotary Club meeting at Appalachian Ski Mountain. Virginia stayed at the dealership working late. Bobby Joe was at home.
When Price left the Rotary meeting, another club member followed him back to the dealership to make sure he got there safely in the storm. Price picked up Virginia, and the family arrived at their home on Clyde Townsend Road. At least one neighbor confirmed seeing their car go up the hill toward the brick home around 9 p.m.
That same night, Troy Hall went to the Appalachian State University library to study around 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 men were holding Price 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. Troy told Jenny what he had just heard. At first, he thought it might be a prank call. Jenny did not think so. She wanted to go to her parents' house immediately.
Here is the detail that still puzzles 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 the middle of a severe snowstorm, in the dark, on roads that were nearly impassable.
Troy's car would not start. 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 could not drive all the way up the hill to the Durham home. Jenny stayed in the car. Troy and Cecil walked to the house and went inside.
What they saw would haunt the town of Boone for half a century. The house was in complete disarray. Furniture was overturned. Food and drinks were still on the kitchen table. The television was still on. The wall phone had been ripped from its jack, the receiver lying on the floor. A bank deposit bag with a few hundred dollars in cash was on the floor.
Then they reached the downstairs bathroom of the split-level home. Three bodies were kneeling beside an overflowing bathtub, side by side, fully clothed, heads underwater. Price Durham. Virginia Durham. Bobby Joe Durham.
Because the home's phone line had been ripped out, Troy Hall ran to a neighbor's house and called the Boone Police Department. The call came in just before 11 p.m. Police arrived at the scene in the middle of the snowstorm. Outside, snow continued to fall heavily, covering every footprint, every tire track, everything the killers might have left behind.
Autopsies were performed later. The results showed all three victims had marks from ropes or cables around their necks. Virginia Durham died of strangulation. There was no water in her lungs, meaning she was already dead before her head was submerged. Price 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.
Price Durham was 51. Virginia Durham was 46. Bobby Joe Durham was 19. A young man with his whole life ahead of him died kneeling beside a bathtub next to his parents on a stormy night. Outside, the snow kept falling, erasing everything.
The next morning, investigators returned to the crime scene on Clyde Townsend Road. The front yard was completely white. No footprints. No tire tracks. No sign of who came and who left. Nature had cleaned the crime scene more efficiently than any professional criminal could have.
But the killers made one mistake the snow could not cover. That night, investigators were told of a green and white SUV leaving the Durham home 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 windshield wipers were still working. The doors were closed. The engine was still running.
No one ever came back for it. No one reported it stolen. The SUV became the first and almost only lead investigators had in those early days.
Inside the home, technicians collected numerous fingerprints. This should have been the breakthrough. Fingerprints are strong physical evidence. Authorities sent the prints for matching. No match. They sent them again. No match. Over the years, the prints were sent for comparison many times as technology improved and databases expanded. Every time, the result was the same. No match.
Beyond the mysterious vehicle and the silent fingerprints, the investigation had almost nothing to work with. No weapon was left behind. No eyewitnesses, because on a snowy night with 40-mile-per-hour winds, no one was outside. No one looked out the window. No one heard anything unusual. The wind swallowed every scream. The falling snow covered every step.
The Boone Police Department was a small unit in a small town. They handled petty thefts, neighbor disputes, and occasional drunk driving cases. They had no experience investigating an organized triple murder. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation 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 town was shaken. This was a place where people knew each other's names, where children played in the street without worry, where the idea of murder belonged in movies, not on Clyde Townsend Road. Now three members of a beloved family had been killed in their home in the most brutal way anyone in town had ever heard of.
The question everyone in Boone asked was not just who did this, but whether the killer was still there, living among them, walking the same streets, shopping at the same store, sitting in the same church on Sunday morning. That fear was never spoken aloud, but it changed how people locked their doors at night.
Investigators began looking closely at the people 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 did not answer satisfactorily.
The first and biggest question: Why did Troy Hall not 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 person's reaction would have been to pick up the phone and call emergency services. Troy did not. Instead, he decided to drive himself to his in-laws' house in a fierce snowstorm on roads that were nearly closed. When the car would not start, he asked his neighbor Cecil Small to drive them, rather than using that waiting moment to call the police.
Investigators also noted that Troy Hall was the person 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 crime scene to police. In criminal investigations, the person who finds the crime scene is always examined closely. Not because they are always guilty, but because their position allows them to control the initial information police receive.
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 that Black men were holding Price 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 said clearly. There was no physical evidence against Troy Hall. None of his fingerprints were found where they should not have been. No witness saw him anywhere other than where he said he was. Authorities confirmed his presence at the Appalachian State library from about 5 p.m. until 10 p.m. His schedule matched his account. The suspicion came not from evidence but from his behavior, the choices he made that night, and the questions his answers did not satisfy.
Sheriff Ward Carroll of Watauga County and SBI agents continued working every lead. But with no weapon, no matching fingerprints, no witness, and no confession, the case began to slide into the coldest area of the profession: a cold case.
The case went frozen. The file remained open on paper, but in reality nothing moved. No new lead. No new witness. No new reason to move forward. Life continued 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 did not announce it widely. They did not offer an explanation. They simply left. For some people in town, their departure was easy to understand. Who would want to stay in a place where their parents and brother-in-law were murdered in their own home? For others, especially investigators, the departure added another question mark to the long list of questions about Troy Hall.
Shortly after leaving Boone, Troy and Jenny divorced. The marriage did not survive the shadows of February 3. Troy Hall went on to attend law school and became an attorney. A man investigators considered the person needing the most careful questioning now understood the law better than those who had once questioned him.
Jenny Durham Hall became the only survivor of the Durham family in her direct line. Her father was dead. Her mother was dead. Her brother was dead. Her husband, the only person who was with her that night, was no longer with her either. She carried that pain alone, in silence, without cameras or interviews or public attention. Jenny was not the type to speak to the press. She waited. That waiting continued for decades.
One theory raised in the early years involved Price Durham's work. Before opening his dealership in Boone, Price worked in the car business in the Mount Airy and Surry County area. According to some sources, Price discovered that a car dealership in Surry County was tampering with odometers on used cars to make them appear newer and sell at higher prices. That was a crime. If Price 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, a reason for someone to want Price Durham silenced forever. But the problem was a lack of evidence to prove the connection. There were no documents showing Price formally reported anyone. There was no police file about an odometer fraud case involving his name. No witness came forward to say they knew who threatened Price about this matter.
District Attorney Rufus Edmisten later noted in a 2015 interview with the Watauga Democrat that there were many interesting theories about who might be involved, but there was not enough evidence to prove any of the rumors convincingly. The odometer theory remained just a theory. No more, no less.
In 1974, Rufus Edmisten was appointed District Attorney for North Carolina. He was a mountain man. He understood the mountains, and the Durham case had stayed with him since it happened. One of the first things Edmisten did when he took office was create a dedicated unit for unsolved murders, putting 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 Price Durham's parents contacted him almost as soon as he took office. Mr. and Mrs. Durham, Price's parents, were elderly people from rural Wilkes County. Ordinary people with no power or influence, carrying 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 with the Durham family 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 the 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. Perhaps because the murders happened so close to his home, so close to the land where he grew up. Perhaps he simply wanted to bring comfort to a family he had met, real people with real pain he saw in their eyes every time they called.
But no matter how much Edmisten wanted it, the case did not move. His agents reviewed everything and reached the same conclusion as the original investigation. Not enough evidence. No breakthrough. No one coming out of the darkness to say, I know who did this.
Price's parents continued to call Edmisten over the years. They kept asking the same question and kept receiving the same answer. Then they passed away. 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 their deaths.
The 1970s passed. Then the 1980s. Then the 1990s. The world changed. Boone changed. The town grew. Appalachian State University expanded. More visitors came. New roads were built. The house on Clyde Townsend Road still stood, but most newcomers to Boone did not know what had happened inside. The Durham case became something only the older residents remembered. A story told quietly in a coffee shop, mentioned in passing when someone drove by Clyde Townsend Road and suddenly remembered.
But it never disappeared. Every time a new sheriff took office in Watauga County, the Durham file was pulled out, reviewed, flipped through, and put away. Each sheriff came with hope of being the one to solve the case. Each sheriff left disappointed.
The old files were scattered. Some were at the Boone Police Department. Some at the SBI. Some at the county sheriff's office. No one had the complete picture. Each agency had a piece, but no one put them all together.
SBI agent Charles Whitman continued working the case even after retirement. He did not give up. He took the file home, reread the reports in his spare time, checked old leads again, hoping fresh eyes would see something others had missed. Whitman was not 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, that three people had died, and no one had been held accountable.
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 their marriage collapsed afterward. She was the survivor, but survival did not mean escape. It meant endurance. Every day, every year, every decade, she carried February 3 with her, her mother's phone call, the howling wind outside the window, 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 with a headline saying the unsolved triple murder still haunted law enforcement. The article recounted the events of the snowy night, listed the leads that had been followed, all leading to dead ends, and repeated the questions that remained unanswered. The article ended without providing an answer.
By that time, most people had accepted that the Durham case would remain cold forever. That the killers would die without ever being identified. That the Durham family would never receive justice. That the snowy night of 1972 would keep its secret forever.
But one person did not accept that. Len Hagaman became Sheriff of Watauga County, carrying the Durham case like an unfulfilled promise. He did not know that the answer he was looking for would not come from Boone. It would not come from North Carolina. It would come from a prison in Georgia, from the mouth of a man he had never heard of.
In May 2019, 47 years after the snowy night on Clyde Townsend Road, the phone rang in the office of Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman. The call came from the White County Sheriff's Office in Georgia, 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, and in the first minutes of the conversation, realized this information might be what five sheriffs before him had waited half a century for.
The story did not begin with an investigation. It began with a book. Months before that call, a man named Shane Burke came to the White County Sheriff's Office to research documents. Shane was writing a book about crimes in Georgia, 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. Billy Sunday Burke was not an 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 mafia in the traditional sense. It was not a tightly organized group like Cosa Nostra in New York or Chicago, with a boss, consigliere, and clear hierarchy. The Dixie Mafia was a loosely connected criminal network operating mainly in the southern states from Georgia to Mississippi, from Alabama to Tennessee. There was no single leader. There were 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 moonshine. In the mid-20th century, rural areas of the South were havens for moonshiners. Moonshiners built transport networks, bribed local police, and used violence to protect their territories. When moonshine declined, the networks did not disappear. They moved into other crimes: bank robbery, theft, fraud, and especially contract killing.
One of Burke's sons described his father's world with complete frankness in an interview with WSOC-TV. He said the people involved in the Dixie Mafia moved more moonshine than anyone else in history. That led to other things, like bank robbery and contract killing. He said everyone came to his father to do the dirty work, and that was as close to a mafia as you could get.
He also said something else, something that if true belongs in the realm of nightmares. He said Billy Sunday Burke killed more than a hundred people. That number cannot be independently verified, but it shows the scale of violence this network was willing to commit. Burke was not the type of criminal who killed out of anger or personal conflict. He killed because he was paid to do it. It was a job, and he was good at it.
Burke worked with a small group of men he trusted. Among them were Bobby Gene Gaddis, Charles David Reed, and Billy Wayne Davis. They moved across the Southeast, from Georgia to Tennessee, from Alabama to the Carolinas, carrying out contract killings for whoever paid. Burke's method had one important feature that later became the biggest obstacle to solving the case. He never told his partners who hired them. He received the contract, organized the killing, and led the group to carry it out, but the identity of the person who hired them was known only to him.
This was a deliberate precaution. If anyone in the group was caught, they could not name the person who ordered the job because they genuinely did not know. Burke kept that secret like a safe with no spare key. When Burke died, the secret died with him.
But Burke had one weakness. He talked. Not to police, not to journalists, but to family. Shane Burke, his son, 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. Not everything, but enough.
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 severe snowstorm. He said they almost got stuck and almost did not get out because of the storm. He remembered that storm clearly, perhaps because it almost got them caught.
A snowstorm. Three people. The mountains of North Carolina. 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 immediately.
Shane Burke did not come to the sheriff's office to turn in his father. He came to research for a book. But in the course of retelling the stories his father had shared, he accidentally opened a door that 50 years of investigation could not open. Sometimes, solving a case does not require advanced DNA technology or facial recognition software. Sometimes it only requires a son repeating what his father whispered behind bars.
Billy Sunday Burke told his son about that stormy night, perhaps thinking the words would stay in the prison visiting room and die with him. He did not calculate that his son would repeat those words to a sheriff's office, not to inform but to write a book, and that a deputy in Georgia would pick up the phone to call a sheriff in North Carolina, and that call would wake a case that had slept for half a century.
When Sheriff Hagaman received the call from White County, he had spent enough time in office in Watauga County to know the Durham case by heart. He knew every lead that had been followed. He knew every dead end that had been reached. He knew every name that had been mentioned and then dismissed. 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 the person who committed the crime.
Hagaman began to move. He contacted the SBI, coordinated with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and began verifying Shane Burke's story. Were there really a group of men from Georgia in the mountains of North Carolina on the snowy night of 1972? Did a triple murder matching the description actually occur? The answer to both questions was yes.
But Shane Burke's account, however important, remained hearsay, a son's words about what his father said. Hagaman needed more. He needed someone who was actually present that night. Someone who could say, I was on Clyde Townsend Road on February 3, 1972.
He found that person. His name was Billy Wayne Davis. Davis was 81 years old, serving a life sentence at a correctional facility in Augusta, Georgia, 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, the same group, the same dark world, and he was still alive. While Burke, Gaddis, and Reed had all died in prison, Davis was still breathing, still remembering, and perhaps still talking.
Investigators from Watauga County and the SBI coordinated with authorities in Georgia to reach Billy Wayne Davis at the Augusta correctional facility. Davis was 81. 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 talked or not. Sometimes that hopelessness itself opens the mouth of a man fear kept silent for decades. Sometimes it is something else. Exhaustion from carrying a secret for too long, or simply old age weakening loyalty to people who died long ago.
Whatever the reason, Billy Wayne Davis talked. 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 other three were Billy Sunday Burke, Bobby Gene Gaddis, and Charles David Reed. They came to carry out a job. Davis used that word, job, as if killing three people in their home was an assignment to be completed.
Davis said it was a contract killing, that they were paid to come to Boone and kill the Durham family. He said 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 Reed went into the house. Davis said he never went inside. He said he was not directly involved in the killings. He just drove the car.
A man of 81 sitting in a Georgia prison saying he just drove the car, that he sat outside in a snowstorm while three of his partners broke into a house, bound three people, strangled them with ropes, and held their heads underwater in a bathtub until they died. He sat in the car, listened to the wind howl, watched the snow fall, and waited until the job was done. Then he drove away.
Davis also said they almost got stuck that night because of the snowstorm. 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 repeating his own experience, both mentioning the same distinctive detail: a snowstorm that almost ruined the escape.
In criminal investigations, this type of correlation carries significant weight. It is not physical evidence, not DNA, not a fingerprint. But when two people who have not communicated tell the same story with the same distinctive details, a picture forms that is difficult to ignore.
Investigators did not stop at Davis's statement. They interviewed two additional sources to strengthen the evidence from the Durham crime scene. The identities of these two sources were not publicly revealed, but Sheriff Hagaman confirmed their information matched the evidence collected at the scene 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 Fleming case of 1973 in Georgia. The Fleming case was one of the most famous cases involving Billy Sunday Burke's gang, and all four men, Burke, Gaddis, Reed, and Davis, were convicted or implicated in it. The similarity between the two cases was no coincidence. It was the fingerprint of a gang of killers. Their method, their style, the pattern of violence they repeated from job to job. 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 confirmations from the 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 in the 1972 Durham family murders had been identified. Billy Sunday Burke. Bobby Gene Gaddis. Charles David Reed. Billy Wayne Davis.
All four were 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. Reed died in prison. Davis, 81, was still alive, still in prison, and would remain there until his death.
None of them were ever tried for the Durham case. None of them ever stood in a courtroom to hear an indictment read with the names of Price 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 not part of 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 since the snowy night, after 50 years since her mother's last phone call, after 50 years since she sat in Cecil Small's car waiting for her husband who entered the house to 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 contract killing.
She waited half a century to hear those words. Half a century lived in not knowing. Half a century watching the hours pass, the calendars change, the decades go by without anyone able to tell her who entered her parents' home on the stormy night and why. Now she knew who. But she still did not know why.
Davis said it was a contract killing, but when investigators asked who hired them, Davis did not answer. Either he did not know or he did not want to say. Given Burke's method of operation, Davis probably genuinely did not know. Burke was the one who took the contract. Burke was the one who knew who paid and why. Burke did not share that information with his partners, and Burke died in 2017. That secret went to the grave with him.
Hagaman prepared for the press conference. He knew the announcement would bring comfort to some people and raise new questions for others. He knew the name Troy Hall would come up, because if this was a contract killing, someone had paid the money. In the short list of people who had a reason to want the Durham family dead, the name Troy Hall had always been at the top for many investigators. But Hagaman also knew he had no evidence against Troy Hall. He had questions only, and questions are not an indictment.
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 snowy 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 Reed, and Billy Wayne Davis. Four men from Georgia, members or associates of the Dixie Mafia criminal network. They came to Boone on a snowy night, carried out a contract killing, and left before the snow melted.
Hagaman described the murders with two words he repeated throughout the press conference: contract killing. This was not a robbery gone wrong. This was not random violence. This was a murder contract. Someone paid money for the Durham family to die. Four men from Georgia took the money and carried out the contract.
But after Hagaman mentioned the term contract killing, he 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 killer team, either did not know who hired them or refused to answer that question. When investigators asked Davis about the person behind the contract, he remained silent. He did not deny, he did not confirm, he simply did not 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, not share it with his partners, not let anyone other than him know who paid and why. That was how Burke protected the group and protected himself. If any of them were caught, they could not name the person who ordered the job because they simply did not know. Burke died in 2017. 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 aloud. He said some, including people in law enforcement and the general public, had long suspected that the Durham family's son-in-law, Justin Troy Hall, was involved in hiring the killers. He said it very plainly. I would very much have liked to interview Troy Hall, but Mr. Hall died on December 19, 2019, and I no longer have that opportunity.
Consider this 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. If he had 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 did not allow it. Troy Hall took his answer, if he had one, to his grave just a few 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 did not close that door. He left it open, half closed and half ajar, just 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. Everyone, generally speaking, believed Troy Hall was involved. Harman's book contains more than 160 photos, maps, and diagrams reconstructing the Durham family's lives, the night of the murders, and decades of investigation, every lead, theory, motive, and suspect ever raised. It is the most complete public record ever published about the case, and even in it, the question of who hired them remains unanswered.
Alongside Harman's book, the Red Clay podcast, in its first and second seasons, brought the story of the Dixie Mafia, especially the legend of Billy Sunday Burke, to a wider audience. The podcast tells the dark criminal world of moonshine, robbery, and contract killing in the American South. The Durham case is placed in the broader context of dozens of violent acts committed by this network across the Southeast during the 1960s and 1970s. The Durham family were not the only victims. They were three of 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 remaining one, was serving a life sentence for another murder and would never leave prison. Trying him in the Durham case, even if enough evidence existed to meet courtroom standards, would not change the outcome. He had already received the harshest punishment the justice system could impose. He would die behind bars.
The Durham case was treated as solved, not in the judicial sense, but in the investigative sense. Police knew who committed it. They knew how. They knew the group that carried it out. But they did not know who ordered it or why, and they probably never will.
Jenny Durham issued a public statement after the press conference. She said, I want to thank everyone who worked for decades on my family's case. I know they sacrificed many days and weekends to solve this case since 1972. She specifically thanked Sheriff Hagaman, who had followed the case from the beginning, SBI agent Wade Colvard, Investigations Captain Carolyn Johnson, and agent Charles Whitman, who continued working the case even after retirement.
Jenny's 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. Fifty years of not knowing. Fifty years of waking up every morning to 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 was not everything she wanted to know, but it was more than she had had for the past 50 years.
Hagaman said this was a necessary turning point for the Durham case. He thanked the SBI, the Boone Police Department, the White County Sheriff's Office in Georgia, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Appalachian State University Police, and the many experts and community members and their families for years of work on the case. He did not declare victory. He did not declare that justice had been served. He declared that the truth, or at least part of it, had finally been found. 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 does not mean a dead case. That 50 years is not too late to find the killers, even if time sometimes runs out 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 the money 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 on the night of February 3, 1972, the snowy night that covered Boone in white, the night when 40-mile-per-hour winds swallowed every cry for help, the night when 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 were never uncovered.