Interview leads veteran cop to link 50-year-old unsolved triple murder to Dixie Mafia
Bob Ingram, who retired from a long, distinguished career in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, googled a few words in 2021 that linked him to one of most notorious unsolved murder cases in North Carolina.
In his new role as chief deputy for the White County Sheriff’s Office in Cleveland, Georgia, Ingram had typed into the Internet bits of information he had just obtained. He found a crime that fit the pieces.
The seasoned investigator sensed a familiarity in the 50-year-old crime. Ingram saw that the North Carolina murders fit the mode of operation for a violent gang of northeast Georgia criminals known as the Dixie Mafia who were operating during that same period in the 1970s.
Ingram, in his younger GBI days, had investigated murders attributed to this group that was based out of Barrow County.
Ingram also discovered that one man, who likely was involved in the North Carolina killings, was still alive.
Making the murderous connections
Billy Wayne Davis was incarcerated in the Augusta (Georgia) State Medical Prison. In the weeks that followed this revelation, Davis became an integral part in solving the three murders that occurred Feb. 3, 1972, in the college town of Boone, N.C.
The timing was fortuitous for Ingram, who was able to secure a confession from Davis. At 82 years old, Davis died on Christmas day 2022.
His death came shortly before 5 a.m. of complications from prostate cancer, according to Richmond County Coroner Mark Bowen. Davis had served 48 years in prison dating back primarily to a murder conviction that stemmed from his Dixie Mafia days.
Davis was largely a forgotten man. That is, until the shocking news was released in February 2022 during a press conference in Boone, N.C., that he was among four men who five decades ago murdered a family of three.
A half century of investigations
For 50 years, investigators in North Carolina had investigated the killings of car dealership owner Bryce Durham, 51; his wife, Virginia, 46; and, their son, Bobby Joe Durham, an 18-year-old freshman at Appalachian State University.
Their bodies were found bound, laying over the edge of a bathtub, with their heads submerged in water. For years, the baffling mystery of the crime would continue to resurface in newspaper accounts across North Carolina.
While many theories abounded, no one had the slightest inkling that the killers drove all the way from northeast Georgia to accomplish what is now believed a crime instigated as a hired killing.
The fire that rekindled the cold case happened in Georgia.
And that spark emerged through fate and the work of Ingram, who has a storied reputation among his fellow agents for his interviewing skills.
Ingram, a veteran of more than 50 years in law enforcement, had retired as a ranking GBI agent and took on the role as chief deputy for the White County Sheriff’s Office. Ingram had worked murders affiliated with the Dixie Mafia. The infamous Billy Sunday Birt, whose murder count may reach 50 or more, lived in Winder, Georgia and was the unchallenged leader of the criminal gang.
“In the early 1970s, from '71 to '73, they were running wide open, robbing and killing people if not on a weekly basis, a monthly basis,” Ingram said in a recent interview.
Surprise interview leads to revelations
In 2019, Ingram recalled that Phil Hudgins, a journalist in Gainesville, Georgia, asked for an interview in regards to a proposed book on the Dixie Mafia and especially Birt, whom Ingram described as “a cold bloodied killer.” Birt, incarcerated since 1974, took his own life in prison in 2017 after he suffered failing health.
Surprisingly, Hudgins asked Ingram if Birt’s youngest son, Shane Birt of Winder could sit in on the interview. Ingram said he was reluctant, but he would agree to speak with Birt prior to the interview.
“Sometimes you meet people, and you get a good or bad feeling from a first impression. I felt like he was sincere, genuine. He was real,” Ingram recalled.
After the interview, Shane Birt told the officer, “You know. I visited my father in prison for 30 years on a weekly basis. We talked a lot. He told me a lot and I know a lot.”
Almost two months later, Ingram asked Birt to visit him at the sheriff’s office in White County. Ingram said he conducted an interview based on three categories. He asked Birt to talk about cases his father had described, then Ingram questioned the killer’s son about Dixie Mafia cases Ingram had worked as an agent. Then he wanted to know about any crimes his father talked about that occurred outside Georgia.
Ingram had worked a notorious murder case in Wrens, Georgia where an elderly businessman, R.O. Fleming, and his wife, Lois, were tortured and murdered in 1973. So the information Birt volunteered quickly caught Ingram’s interest.
“He said (his) father told me about a case he committed in North Carolina in the mountains,” Ingram recalled. “I don’t’ know exactly where it was, but father told me they almost got trapped in a blinding snowstorm. He said there were three victims. They were tortured and killed and the motive was robbery. There was a mother, a father and an adult child,” Ingram said reciting Birt’s recollection.
Birt also remembered his father saying Durham, but the son thought it referred to Durham, N.C., Ingram said.
Ingram said he googled the general facts along with the name Durham.
“We ended up finding a case on the Internet. And it didn’t take long,” he said.
Davis was the mastermind
The unsolved Durham murders – with so many newspaper accounts and podcast reports online – came up on Ingram’s computer screen. Ingram read the accounts.
“They were bound. They were tortured. They were killed. All of that is very important and critical to their method of operation, a kind of ritualistic behavior,” Ingram said as he compared that case to the murders of the Flemings in Wrens.
“More importantly is Davis had a couple of car dealerships in the Austell, Mableton area. He was from the Cobb County area,” Ingram said.
Also, Davis was often the person who received the information on who to target for robberies and would travel with a crew or set up the crime, according to Ingram.
“Davis was very clever, very smart,” he said.
As happened in the Durham case, Ingram said the common plan would be for Davis to park in a predetermined location within a mile or two of the crime scene. They would commit the crime, steal the victim’s car, and drive it to Davis' location, then leave in the getaway car that Davis had provided.
“They always killed everybody so there would be no witnesses that could identify them,” Ingram said.
With all the alleged suspects dead except Billy Wayne Davis, he now became a key focus in the North Carolina murders.
Bad blood between Birt and Davis
Davis and Birt had parted ways on bad terms. Davis testified against Birt in the double murder case in Wrens, sending Birt to prison. Later, Birt provided information on Davis linking him to the killing of a gambler in Douglasville. Davis didn’t want to pay a gambling debt, so he and Birt killed the man.
Feeling he was on the right track, Ingram said he called the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office and told a captain what he had found. Soon, the sheriff called back. Ingram said the sheriff also wanted the involvement of the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation. They visited Ingram in Georgia, where Ingram went over the details, including a PowerPoint presentation of the Dixie Mafia.
Ingram remembered asking a retired N.C. investigator who attended the session what he thought of the evidence. The officer replied, “This is the best information that we’ve ever gotten on this case.”
“And they worked it for 50 years,” Ingram said.
“Birt, Davis and that whole Dixie Mafia crew had a reputation of never talking to people. They were very tight-lipped. They certainly didn’t talk to police and anyone who talked to police usually ended up dead,” he said.
A Watauga officer and N.C. state agent went to the Augusta prison to question Davis.
Ingram recalled that they basically told Davis they wanted him to tell them about the murders in Boone. Davis told them nothing.
Ingram mulled over the situation as it was not his case to call the shots.
“I wasn’t going down there to talk to him unless they wanted me to or unless they were unsuccessful,” Ingram said. “I waited some time and I talked to a current GBI agent, who is a friend of mine. And he said, Bob you need to talk to him by yourself.’
“My strategy was a lot different than them in terms of approaching him. I spent probably an hour talking about historical aspects of cases and people. The case in Wrens and my associations and knowledge of the case."
Davis opens up
“’The opening I waited for came when he said, ‘You really do your homework, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes sir,’ and he said, ‘Why are you here?’ I said, ‘I’m here about the case in North Carolina – in Boone in the mountains where you almost got trapped in a snowstorm.
“If you’re dealing with a Billy Wayne Davis the approach you use is far different than anybody else. These are cold -blooded mass murderers, who basically kill and lack a conscious. If you appeal to their conscious, it won’t work,” Ingram said.
Davis admitted his involvement in the case in a confession recorded by Ingram. Later, Davis provided the information in an interview with the North Carolina officers present.
In the February 2022 news conference in Boone, Watauga Sheriff Len Hagaman announced the decades-old case had been solved.
Hagaman identified Birt, Davis, along with Bobby Gene Gaddis and Charles David Reed, the latter two also from Winder, as the men who killed the Durham family.
All four served time in prison in Georgia. Gaddis died in prison after serving 33 years, while Reid was paroled from prison, but was shot and killed.
Fear of the Dixie Mafia
These men and their other associates known as the Dixie Mafia instilled fear back in the 1960s and 1970s, according to Ingram.
“Even after they were incarcerated people were afraid of them,” he said.
Shane Birt knew this while visiting his father.
Ingram recalled that Shane Birt asked his father how he was still able to get matters done, even while he was in prison. Billy Birt replied, “People owe me a lot of favors and they know I have a lot of information.”
Some facets of the Dixie Mafia murders will never be known.
Living with regrets
Shane Birt told the investigator that his father had a religious conversion in the 1980s and during that time Birt said he regretted killing the Fleming couple.
“I didn’t want to kill them, but I knew I had to – they paid me to do it, so I killed them,” the son recalled his father saying.
Years have passed, but memories from the Fleming murders in December 1973 still linger in the retired agent’s mind.
“The Flemings were hard-working, church-going folks,” Ingram said.
The couple, both in their 70s, were tortured until they revealed money in fruit jars was buried in a smoke house behind their home.
Ingram still recalls the details. He has not forgotten the crimes that put the GBI on the trail of hardened criminals known as the Dixie Mafia, not even when a new trail surfaced 50 years later.