There was no shortage of theories at the time as to who murdered the family, with The Watauga Democrat noting that investigators even looked into rumors that several Green Berets could have carried out the slaughter while visiting the area for a skiing demonstration.Īfter the case had been cold for many years, there was new hope it would be solved in 2019 after a man named Shane Birt revealed to the White County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, just over the North Carolina state border, that his father had spoken of his involvement in a decades-old triple homicide during a prison visit, authorities in Watauga County say.īilly Sunday Birt told his son about “killing three people in the North Carolina mountains during a heavy snowstorm, remembering that they almost got caught,” the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office announced this week. “The Durhams were tied with their hands placed behind their back and were subsequently placed side by side, bent over at the waist in a tub with their heads submerged in water with cord around their necks,” former North Carolina Attorney General Rufus Edmisten said of the case amid renewed efforts to solve it in 2015, according to The Watauga Democrat. Bryce and Bobby Durham had both been drowned, while Virginia was strangled to death, autopsies showed. They apparently suffered some form of torture, with rope burns discovered on their necks, according to The Charlotte Observer. Their bodies were found by family members stuffed into an overflowing bathtub in their own home, and the evidence at the scene left a baffling puzzle: A money bag was found filled with hundreds of dollars the phone cord had been ripped out of the wall.Ī half-eaten chicken dinner left in the kitchen suggested the family had been enjoying a meal together when they were interrupted by their killers.
The triple killings of Virginia Durham, Bryce Durham, and their 18-year-old son, Bobby, shocked the entire community of Boone, North Carolina, in February 1972. A Georgia inmate fondly reminiscing to his son about “killing three people in the North Carolina mountains” during his glory days has led to police cracking one of that state’s most brutal cold cases.
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