Convoluted

The 1972 Durham Family Triple Homicide

By: Terry L. Harmon

Narrated by: Evan Peter Smith

For fifty years, the 1972 murders of Bryce and Virginia Durham and their teenage son Bobby on a bitter winter's night in Boone, North Carolina were unsolved, but in 2022, the Watauga County Sheriff's Office announced that their killers had finally been identified. Based on information from Georgia, four men associated with the Dixie Mafia (including the infamous Billy Sunday Birt, whose notoriety was explored by the popular "In The Red Clay" podcast) were proclaimed with certainty to be the guilty parties who strangled the Durhams and placed them headfirst into a water-filled bathtub. Although the case was officially closed, questions remain about motive and who orchestrated the crime. Who and what would have brought these men from northeast Georgia to the home of a small town car dealer and his family in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina and why? Or have the killers accurately been identified? This detailed account explores the lives and murders of the Durhams, the decades of investigation that followed, and the multiple leads, theories, motives, and suspects that have been put forth.

©2024 Terry L. Harmon (P)2024 Terry L. Harmon

Detailed Look at a Lesser Known Unsolved Murder

I first heard of this 1972 case only a few years ago via an episode of the excellent The Trail Went Cold podcast. Bryce Durham, his wife Virginia, and 18 year old son Bobby brutally murdered on a snowy night in their home in the small NC town of Boone. Shades of In Cold Blood except the killers were never caught. An unusual aspect of the case is a frantic phone call made during the crime by Virginia to her daughter's nearby trailer home answered by her son-in-law.

in 2022 I was gladdened to hear the case had been solved; Police attributed the crime to members of the so-called Georgia Mafia in a murder for hire plot. I quickly became dubious of the reports however. The sources were a son of one of the Mafia who just happened to have a book deal and an octogenarian lifer who said he participated in the crime but only as a driver. Not great. And even if true - who hired them? You can't call a hit job solved if you don't name the guy who hired them.

I was afraid this book might just detail the new "official" line of the case but it doesn't. The author has a healthy skepticism and goes into the various possibilities. Nearly all lead back to the son-in-law who got the phone call that night (or did he?).

There's a lot of info here. A bit too much. A good editor would have cut it by a third or even a half. We don't need all the details on the son-in-law's mental fitness in the 2010's for instance. A couple of unique things the author did that I really liked were a chapter on the timeline of the murder night and an appendix going into 20 questions about the case.

The reader was excellent. I honestly didn't expect such a high quality narration on an independently published book.