The sky was dreary and the colors of the chivalric code, glory and justice, gods and kings, glittered dully as the old Ford sped down the highway.
• CHAPTER 24 •
A CASE THEY CAN’T LET GO
On the afternoon of Thursday, September 27, 1990, Joe O’Kane took a bite of chicken almondine and a sip of hot coffee, and looked down at three decaying corpses with their heads plunged into an overflowing tub.
“Nice lunch,” O’Kane said, dabbing the corners of his mustache with a cloth napkin. He gingerly passed the photograph down the banquet table in the Navy Officers’ Club. “I hope this club has a budget for Tums.”
The big federal agent was dressed to kill. He was the picture of a brawny, dandified Irish cop in a custom- tailored, three-piece Italian suit and black alligator cowboy boots. Clipped to a wide, silver-buckled belt was a small Beretta pistol, his “Sunday going-to-church gun.” His big silver beard was neatly trimmed—the final touch that made him Kenny Rogers’s double. With the husky build of a former semi-pro football player and a sweet tenor voice, O’Kane sang at weddings and parties as the country crooner. Special Agent O’Kane was loquacious, brilliant, cocky, a self-described “two-fisted drinker.” He’d signed up for the Vidocq Society for a few laughs. There were enough tears on the job.
O’Kane was in the prime of a major law enforcement career. He’d been a key man on covert operations all over the world. Despite his accomplishments, O’Kane never forgot that he was blue-collar Irish, son of a Kensington millwright, product of a high school education, and proud of it. He was one of Customs’ “Mustangs,” the Army term they borrowed for the Horatio Alger grunts who made it to the top on merit. “None of us waltzed into some fancy job out of college,” he said. The Irishman had a wild, rebellious streak; he’d grown his beard just to piss off a supervisor who insisted he be clean-shaven, and it became a permanent part of him. He followed his own muse. The burly cop was a poetry lover who’d read thousands of novels and had written three thrillers for kicks. “Chesterfield put it best,” he said. “The Irish are a merry race and surely they are mad, for all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad.”
The last thing he needed was some uptight, buttoned-down agent trying to re-create the FBI over lunch. He wanted to have fun! He was the first man Fleisher approached about joining the society.
“Bill, that sounds great but I’m not a big joiner,” he said. “I don’t join the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police]. I don’t join the Sons of Ireland. These people get carried away with themselves; everybody’s got an agenda. I don’t need any of that in my life. Tell me we’ll have fun. If we can sit around and have lunches and have fun with the guys, I’ll do it. If everybody takes themselves serious as a shoelace, I don’t need that. I’m working twenty-three hours a day on major cases against the scum of the earth. I don’t need that over lunch.”
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
“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
