After 15 years, a plea for answers on Daniel Moses, the missing ‘Barbecue Man’
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- Daniel Moses went missing in 2011.
- His charred house was half burned and both his cars sat in the driveway.
- Shelia Moses has led repeated searches and public appeals and the case remains unresolved.
Fifteen years ago, I took a call in the newsroom from a woman I’d never met: a children’s book author from the tiny town of Rich Square, who explained in desperate tones that her older brother was missing, and the tin-roofed house where he lived stood mysteriously empty, burned halfway to the ground.
She asked me to come look, and to write about his disappearance, because after two months, nobody else was looking very hard for Daniel Moses, a retired truck driver better known around Northampton County as the “Barbecue Man” for the chicken plates he grilled and delivered.
So I drove two hours northeast through miles of swamp and cotton fields until I met Shelia Moses at the charred wreck of a house her grandfather built and heard the chilling details:
- Daniel Moses was a big man even at 60, standing 6-foot-3, and he held a black belt in karate, so nobody could have taken him without a tussle.
- Neighbors saw him in the yard the day he vanished, and both of his cars sat parked in the driveway. His tools sat on the grill. His dog wandered home a day later.
- On the first day I visited, a single vehicle passed Moses’ home in an hour’s time, and that belonged to a man searching for a hunting dog that had wandered off. On the outskirts of Rich Square, population 822, it is easy to go unnoticed.
That was 2011.
Daniel Moses is still missing.
“I promised our mother that I would find her oldest son in her lifetime,” Shelia Moses told me last week. “That did not happen. I was 49 years old when he went missing. In a few weeks, I will be 65. I hope to find Daniel in my lifetime.”
Such a happy place
At first, what drew me to Moses’ disappearance was the eerie connection to his sister’s work.
In 2011, Shelia Moses was 50 and decades removed from Rich Square, having left her hometown as a young woman to study at Shaw University. By the time of her big brother’s disappearance, she was a successful writer living in Atlanta.
But she had used the very house where Daniel Moses was living as a setting in her award-winning book “The Legend of Buddy Bush,” a proud symbol of her grandfather’s hard work in the rural, segregated South.
Henry Braxton Jones bought that with roughly 10 acres in the 1950s, farmed it and dug ditches to keep the family going.
“Such a happy place,” she told me at the time. “Eerie is the word for all of this. For this to happen in a place where we played in the yard and caught fireflies.”
Her brother even serves as inspiration for the character of “Coy” in her young-adult novel, moving north to Harlem and inspiring his younger siblings.
To see the house and her brother gone felt like a terrible new chapter.
“I make a living telling stories,” she said, “and I wouldn’t ever tell a story like this.”
It’s real unusual
But that strange connection faded quickly from the case, and another thing kept me coming back to Rich Square: the persistence of Shelia Moses.
Even in 2011, this case raised few eyebrows — even in a county with 16,500 residents. I got little idea it was keeping investigators awake at night.
“There’s no evidence other than he’s missing and it’s suspicious,” Capt. D.M. Harmon of the Northampton County Sheriff’s Office told me at the time. “According to the family, it’s real unusual that he’d be gone that long without calling anyone.”
And when I called a year later, he didn’t call back.
But haunted by the idea that her brother lay dead somewhere, and at least one person knew the spot, she refused to let anyone forget.
In 2016, with five years gone, she held a rally in nearby Halifax, pointing out that 12 people remained missing from the pair of counties nearest her home — one of them her brother, all of them Black. She asked for the FBI to intervene, arguing that Daniel’s cell phone pinged off a Virginia tower around the time of the fire, expanding jurisdiction.
Shelia Moses kept pushing for searches: in a nearby well, in a place called the Quarry Swamp. I have joined volunteers on two of those searches, pushing through sticker bushes and scratching the ground with a hoe, finding no clues.
“I hate to say it, but we’re only human,” Sheriff Jack Smith said in 2021. “We’ve talked to everyone we can think to talk to.”
After a decade, a woman called Shelia Moses from nearby Woodland to say she was driving on Cumbo Road when a car in front of her hit a bump going over the bridge. The trunk popped open, showing a dark-skinned man’s leg with a tube sock, which her brother was known to wear.
In 2023, another woman called Moses and named the killer, along with a connection to the woman who spotted the sock foot, while a caller also reported the same suspect to the nearby Jackson police.
After a recent meeting with Northampton deputies, Moses told me last week, nobody followed up when Jackson officers gave them that name.
“The people many people believe are responsible for Daniel’s disappearance are known to the Northampton County Sheriff’s Office,” she said. “It is my hope that this year they will ask the FBI to take over the investigation.”
Meanwhile, she told me, a retired SBI agent long working the case as a reserve deputy has another full-time job in Texas, working remotely. When I asked Walter Brown, the reserve deputy, about this workload, he said he had little time to investigate Moses’ death anymore but said other deputies are working on it.
“We haven’t given up,” Sheriff Smith told me last year.
He didn’t return a text last week.
One more time
I’ve written this story 10 times now since 2011.
In all that time, not one person has complained about reading this old news yet again.
I would be surprised if anyone has noticed.
So if necessary, I’ll write Daniel Moses’ story again next year. And the next, if I’m able.
And every year after that until somebody, finally, gives it the ending it deserves.