Four Suspects Identified in Triple Homicide Cold Case from 1972
The Watauga County Sheriff’s Office announced this week that they have solved the 1972 triple homicide of the Durham family, the New York Times reports.
On February 3, 1972, the bodies of 51-year-old Bryce Durham; his wife, Virginia, 44; and their 18-year-old son Bobby were discovered strangled to death in their home in Boone, North Carolina. Virginia Durham had been strangled, while Bryce and Bobby Durham had been strangled and then drowned.
The case went cold for 50 years until this week, when authorities identified the four perpetrators of the crime: Billy Sunday Birt, Bobby Gene Gaddis, Charles David Reed, and Billy Wayne Davis. Birt, Gaddis, and Reed have since passed away. Davis, now 81-years-old, is serving time in a Georgia correctional facility for an unrelated crime.
NBC News confirms that the four suspects were members of the Dixie Mafia, a criminal network that operated in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2012, the FBI described the Dixie Mafia as a “loose confederation of thugs and crooks who conducted their criminal activity in the southeastern United States.”
Investigators were able to tie the suspects to the Durham murders based on a tip received in 2019 from the son of Billy Birt, who was in the process of writing a book about his father.
