Fleisher promised a good time. “He said we’d sit in an elegant room over lunch and talk about Billy the Kid, hundred-year-old crimes, we’d bring in experts on Jesse James, even a session on Meriwether Lewis and Clark,” O’Kane later recalled. “I said, ‘OK, I’m in. Sign me up.’ ”
Now, at the Vidocq Society’s second luncheon, the very first case they formally discussed was a triple murder in North Carolina as serious and senseless as In Cold Blood. In fact, the 1972 massacre of the wealthy Durham family in the western Blue Ridge Mountains reminded O’Kane of Truman Capote’s description of the Clutter family slaughter in Garden City, Kansas. It was hardly his idea of a relaxing midday repast.
“What, do they expect me to solve this before dessert? This isn’t fun.”
“No, ’tis not any fun in this kind of case,” Richard Walter sniffed. “Except, of course, for the killer. One can discern from this crime scene that for this kind of personality, it’s the satisfaction of a mission accomplished, a job well done. Oftentimes, the uninitiated fail to grasp how much pleasure is involved for the killer.”
Walter was standing at the head of the banquet table presenting the unsolved case to a couple dozen VSMs. The mass murder had baffled the police for eighteen years, and recently Walter had been hired by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to review the cold case. “It’s a wonderful case,” he said as he passed around crime-scene photos and case documents. “There’s all sorts of drama here.” Fleisher thought it sufficiently cold and fascinating for the Vidocq Society to discuss.
Walter looked down at the case file while gathering his thoughts. “As it happens, the killer was rather obvious,” he said. “This kind of killer always thinks he’s smarter than he really is.”
The Durhams were a quiet, respected, affluent family that, according to police, had no known enemies, Walter said. Bryce Durham, fifty-one, his wife, Virginia, forty-six, and son Bobby Joe, nineteen, had moved from Raleigh two years earlier to Boone (pop. 13,472), the Watauga County seat in the state’s far western mountains, ninety miles northeast of Asheville. Bryce owned a local automobile dealership, Modern Buick-Pontiac. They were conservative, devout Christians.
On the evening of Thursday, February 3, 1972, Bryce left a 5:30 Rotary Club meeting and returned to the dealership to pick up his wife, a secretary at the family business, and son, a student at nearby Appalachian State University, for the ride home. After his last class, Bobby Joe had driven his Buick sedan to the dealership and left it there to join his parents in the GMC Jimmy. A major snowstorm had blown in, and they all climbed into the four-wheel-drive SUV.
Sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 that night, the Durhams reached home, the SUV slowly climbing the icy road to the large brick split-level atop a steep hill. The family settled down for a quiet Thursday evening of dinner and television. Outside, the house was nearly invisible in the blowing snow. It was a night to stay indoors. But the killer knew the local roads and mountains and the Durham house, Walter said, and proceeded through the storm.
That night, Troy Hall, the Durhams’ son-in-law, and his wife were quietly watching TV in a trailer home four miles from the hilltop split-level. At 10:30, the phone rang, and Troy picked it up. On the other end was the barely audible voice of his mother-in-law, he told police. “Help,” she begged, whispering as if afraid of being heard. Intruders were in the house, she said, and they “have got Bobby and Bryce.” Then the phone went dead.
Hall told police he thought the call was a practical joke. He immediately called back, certain his in-laws were all fine, but he got only a busy signal. Growing concerned, he and his wife pulled on their coats and jumped in the car-but the car wouldn’t start, so they asked a neighbor, private detective Cecil Small, to drive them through the storm. It took the three of them twenty minutes to reach the Durham house at the top of the hill. Hall told his wife to stay in the car while he and Small, his handgun drawn, checked out the house. At 10:50, the son-in-law and private eye discovered the bodies and called police.
The crime scene told the story of domestic tranquillity suddenly shattered. The house had been ransacked. In the living room stood three glasses of soda and a half-eaten plate of chicken on the coffee table in front of the sofa, next to Bobby Joe’s solitaire cards. A large patch of blood stained the carpet. Virginia had died from strangulation, the coroner determined. A short piece of nylon cord still encircled her neck. Bryce and Bobby Joe had deep rope burns scarring their necks, a clear attempt to strangle them, but their cause of death was drowning. All their faces were badly bruised. The water was still running, overflowing the tub.
From the beginning, the police were confused. They launched a massive manhunt through the snow-covered mountains of western North Carolina. Within minutes, they found the Durhams’ GMC Jimmy, which the killer had stolen to make his escape. It was abandoned a mile away from the house on a snowy, deserted road known only to locals. The car’s lights were on and the motor was running. On the backseat was a sack of silver plates stolen from the Durham residence.
The state police believed it was a robbery. But then why did the robber(s) abandon the silver plates? And why, Walter asked, were two bank-deposit bags, with cash inside, left on a dining room chair in the house? Police had no answers to that. The Watauga County sheriff surmised it was a grudge killing. But he knew of nobody with a mortal grudge against the Durhams.
The pressure to make an arrest was intense. Newspapers all across the mountains printed the horrors. North Carolina governor Bob Scott joined local business leaders in offering a reward for an arrest leading to conviction. United Press International broke the news that in her frantic last phone call to her son-in-law, Mrs. Durham had said, “We have three niggers here.” The next day, the Watauga County sheriff told UPI, “We have some good clues and we hope to have early arrests. And we definitely are investigating blacks.”
No black men were ever charged. A month later, the sheriff rounded up three Asheville men in their twenties who were part of a burglary ring. The trio was charged with first-degree murder in the commission of a robbery, but the three men were quickly released for lack of any evidence putting them at the crime scene.
“I would argue that the system worked,” Walter said, to the extent that “innocent men were not prosecuted.” Nobody was ever brought to trial for the murders.
As Walter concluded, Fleisher stood and opened the floor to questions.
Was robbery a motive for the murders? a federal agent asked.
“No,” Walter said. “On the contrary, it was rather clumsily staged to look like a robbery. But it was a killing all about power and control.”
What about the son-in-law? another VSM asked.
“It’s interesting that all was not well in the marriage,” Walter said. “The Durham family was pressuring their daughter to leave Hall.” The couple eventually divorced after the murders.
“But police never considered him a major suspect,” Walter said.
What about Cecil Small? someone asked. Wasn’t it odd that a neighbor who just happened to be a private eye was the only witness to the crime scene outside of the family?
Walter raised his left eyebrow to a fine point. “I have my doubts about Small,” he said. “There’s reason to question his general credibility. For the last thirty years he’s told anyone who listened that he knows who killed JFK, and it wasn’t Oswald.” Guffaws swept the table.
The story beggared belief, but Small had insisted so loudly that a Hispanic man had assassinated JFK that FBI agents finally interviewed him in 1967, Walter said.
Small said he and his wife were in their pickup truck in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, on their way home to their Georgia trailer from a western trip with their little dog. Suddenly they found themselves riding in JFK’s motorcade. Small saw the first lady stand up and heard his dog bark the instant the president was shot (the dog always barked at gunfire). Then he saw a short Cuban or Mexican man cross in front of his truck, running away holding a rifle with a scope partially hidden in a bag. Minutes later, Small happened to give a pleasant young hitchhiker named Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Small believed couldn’t have done it, a ride to the library from the Texas Book Depository.