Solved cold cases in North Carolina
3 documented cases.
Bobby Joe Durham
Bobby Joe Durham, an 18-year-old Appalachian State University student, was murdered alongside his parents, Bryce Durham, 51, and Virginia Durham, 44, in their Boone, North Carolina home during a snowstorm on February 3, 1972. All three were found bound with their heads submerged in a running bathtub. The triple killing of the prominent local Buick dealer and his family went unsolved for 50 years until, in February 2022, the Watauga County Sheriff's Office announced that four members of a Georgia-based criminal network known as the Dixie Mafia had carried out the murders as a paid contract killing.
Deborah Elaine Deans
Deborah Elaine Deans, a 29-year-old mother of four, went missing in Spring Hope, Nash County, North Carolina, in January 2004. She had briefly lived with her former sister-in-law, Kimberly Hancock, and prosecutors later said Hancock was the last person known to have seen her. Detectives questioned Hancock in 2004, and about a year later she was arrested for cashing support checks that were addressed to Deans, but Deans stayed missing for fifteen years. In October 2019 a detailed email tip about the location of a body reached a local crime-fighting website and Facebook page, which passed it to the Nash County Sheriff's Office. On October 24, 2019 deputies with a search warrant found human remains in a shallow grave behind Hancock's home on Wiley Road, wrapped as the tipster had described. Hancock, then 49, was charged with first-degree murder after an in-depth interview. DNA from Deans's mother was used to identify the remains. In September 2022 Hancock entered Alford pleas to aiding and abetting voluntary manslaughter and to concealment of death and was sentenced to prison.
Zebb Quinn
Zebb Quinn, 18, vanished on January 2, 2000, after clocking out of his shift at a Walmart in Asheville, North Carolina. He had planned to look at a car with a co-worker, Robert Jason Owens, and a surveillance camera recorded the two at a convenience store at about nine. Owens said Quinn left after receiving a page. Two days later a man phoned Walmart claiming to be Quinn; the call was traced to Owens's workplace, and Owens admitted making it. Quinn's car turned up two weeks later with a live puppy inside and lipstick lips on the rear window. His body has never been found. Owens was a suspect for fifteen years. After his March 2015 arrest for the killing of Cristie and J.T. Codd, he told his lawyers and detectives that a family member, his uncle, had killed Quinn; searches found no remains. A grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder in July 2017. On July 25, 2022, he pleaded guilty not to murder but to accessory after the fact of first-degree murder, and was sentenced to 150 to 189 months, to run at the same time as his sentence in the Codd case. Prosecutors said they were skeptical that he was not the killer. The district attorney said the plea legally establishes that Quinn was murdered.