The Lost Colony murder
This article was published in The News & Observer on July 6, 1997.
VANCEBORO — Kim Holland Thorn remembers a Saturday like any other that first day of July 1967. She was 9 years old, and she'd gone with her parents and older brother to their little trailer in neighboring Jackson County on the shore of Lake Thorpe.
The Hollands had enjoyed a fine day and had cooked out on the charcoal grill. Then, sometime after they'd climbed into bed, they were awakened by a pounding at the door. It was their uncle. The sheriff had called from Manteo. Brenda was missing. Hurry.
That's how the rest of Kim Thorn's life began, sliced by tragedy into distinctive periods, the before and the after.
"I remember they let me and my brother ride in a rescue vehicle," Kim says. "I remember my mother calling me Brenda.
"I remember being stunned with the realization, when I was 13, that Brenda was never coming home."
It has been 30 years since Kim's big sister, Brenda Joyce Holland, was found, strangled, floating in the brackish water of the Albemarle Sound near Manteo. She had been missing for five days from her job as a makeup artist at "The Lost Colony," outdoor drama.
Times being gentler in 1967, the murder of Brenda Joyce Holland became one of the state's most sensational. Yet despite all the publicity and interest, the mystery of who murdered the pretty young college student has never been solved.
Officials say there is little likelihood of ever closing the case at this point despite revelations about one man long considered a suspect.
And while she is frustrated that the words "Case Closed" may not be stamped across her sister's thick State Bureau of Investigation file anytime soon, Thorn says she is at peace with the belief that she knows who killed her sister and why.
It's all she has now. That, and remembering - the good and the bad, the before and the after - to make sure that Brenda Joyce Holland is not forgotten.
The knock on the door
Brenda was the first in her family to go to college, choosing what was then Campbell College in Buies Creek, majoring in home economics and drama.
The life of a college coed was a long way from the life her parents knew in Canton, where they raised four children on Charles Holland's pay as a paper mill worker at the Champion plant beside the Pigeon River.
But Brenda had always had a special spark. The second-oldest of the four children, she was voted most congenial in the 1966 Miss Haywood County beauty pageant, dated a high school football star, sang in a folk group, led church functions.
It was at Campbell that she heard about "The Lost Colony," which in 1967 was celebrating 30 years of depicting the state's first and most abiding mystery about the disappearance of its first settlers. When a drama coach mentioned that the production was looking for cast and crew members to work the summer season, Brenda signed on as a makeup specialist.
Her parents were not pleased.
"My folks didn't want her to go because she would have to leave straight from college to Manteo, and they hadn't seen her since Easter," Thorn says. "That meant they wouldn't get to see her again until the Christmas holiday."
But Brenda convinced her parents to let her go. She wrote regularly, sending updates about the production and her peaceful life along the state's eastern-most shore.
The week of the July 4 holiday, the Holland family left town for their usual vacation spot at the lake. It was a modest place; there was no telephone, and the TV reception was poor.
On that Saturday night, they had all gone to bed before the news. Later, they learned that TV had reported the story of a missing girl, a crew member for "The Lost Colony" drama.
"The sheriff's department had been trying to contact us," Thorn says. "Everybody knew everybody, so when they couldn't get us, they got my uncle Lester. He knew we were at the lake, so he drove up there with them."
That knock on the door changed everything.
Enduring the uncertainty
"The days Brenda was missing were a blur," Thorn says. "My parents went immediately to Manteo, and my brother and I stayed with our oldest sister."
The search lasted five days. The Coast Guard sent out helicopters. The Marines sent soldiers. Campbell College students, family members, friends and townfolk from Manteo formed search team after search team.
A pilot with the civil air patrol finally spied the body on July 6, floating among cypress trees off the coast of Mashoes, a fishing village where the Albemarle and Croatan sounds come together.
Her parents were spared from identifying the body, but when they saw pictures taken of their daughter during her work on "The Lost Colony," they were stunned to see that she had dyed her brown hair blond and bobbed it.
An autopsy revealed that Brenda had been strangled with a braided rope and dumped in the ocean.
"My brother-in-law called me into a bedroom and then got down on his knees to tell me Brenda had been found," Thorn says.
The family buried Brenda at the Ridgeway Cemetery in Candler, a few miles from their home in Canton, on July 8. That would have been her 20th birthday.
"The service was unbelievable — there were flowers from floor to ceiling," Thorn says. "I can remember leaving the funeral home and walking to my sister's house, just up the street. Isn't that weird how you remember little things, like walking up the street?"
Her family tried to focus on the future, but the ever-present question of who killed Brenda gave her mother nightmares and her father bouts of depression.
The Dare County Sheriff's Department and, later, the SBI, headed the murder probe, interviewing hundreds of suspects, potential witnesses, rumor mongerers and outright kooks.
Little advanced the case.
Brenda's last night
That summer, out on her own and away from the constricts of school, Brenda Holland went out with friends, dated men, kept her own schedule. She told friends and wrote family that she was having a wonderful time.
She had just begun seeing Danny Barber, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and member of "The Lost Colony" chorus. On that last night Brenda was seen alive, the two had gone out after the show to the nearby Drafty Tavern, a popular night spot.
Brenda wasn't much of a drinker, but Danny had a beer and played pool with another cast member and his wife. After leaving the pub, they drove in Danny's Chevy Corvair to Jennette's Pier in Nags Head, where they ran into another friend and watched people fish for sharks.
Then they headed to Barber's house, which he shared with two other fellows. Danny grabbed another beer, and the two went up to his room to read a magazine. The couple kissed and made out, Barber told police, and he fell asleep.
When he awoke the next morning, Brenda was gone. He assumed she had walked home. He wasn't worried until he got to the production that night and discovered she wasn't there.
When Brenda turned up dead, case records indicate, Barber was one of the suspects since he was the last to see her alive.
He was never charged, and Thorn says there's a good reason: He didn't do it.
The rumors
Law officers chased one wild tale after another.
An ex-convict said he heard another ex-con boasting of killing Brenda Holland. A man said he had seen guys acting weird in the woods and surmised that they were the killers. One drunk Indian-wrestled another, and, given his opponent's strength, decided he must be the killer.
And, too, the bizarre goings-on of small-town Manteo were revealed: A town lush was found drunk and hiding in a coffinlike structure under the floor of a house; the police chief was accused of coercing a bogus confession from a mentally handicapped man; various members of the town's social elite were linked in relevant and irrelevant liaisons.
And then there was the talk about the local dentist, a man known for his violent drinking bouts.
Speculation was that Dr. Linus Edwards, crazed by liquor after a fight with his wife, Dotty, spotted Brenda as she walked home from Danny's house and mistook her for his wife, realizing too late his error. In the dark, with her bleached blond hair, Brenda resembled Dotty.
It's a theory whose biggest proponent is Dotty Fry, Edwards' former wife. She says her husband physically abused her during their five years of marriage, and that she took off the night Brenda disappeared because he'd threatened to kill her. She didn't go to the sheriff at the time of the murder but neighbors told investigators what they knew - that they heard the Edwards' fight and saw Dr. Edwards leave after Dotty in the early morning hours.
Fry says her husband told her several times that he had killed Brenda Holland.
"My husband was a brilliant man," says Fry, who is now the Dare County register of deeds, "but he was very sick."
Linus Edwards killed himself in 1971, leaving no explanation.
Records indicate that police suspected Edwards all along, that they questioned him more than once about his activities the night Brenda disappeared. Case files also indicate that other relatives of Edwards' told authorities they thought he had something to do with Brenda's death — or, at the least, that he was capable of doing terrible things when he drank.
While the SBI has not ruled out the dentist, evidence to charge him never materialized; he also apparently passed a polygraph test.
"It's a very, very good rumor," says Bill Godley, special agent in charge of the SBI's northeast region. "But there isn't the evidence to support it to closure. I'm not discounting it, but with the passage of time and the death of the dentist, it makes it impossible to make the case."
Searching for an end
Thorn says her family never questioned whether authorities were pursuing all the leads, nor did they hear the theories about Dr. Edwards. So when Dotty Fry came forward in public accounts a few years ago, the family's entire view of the crime changed.
"After speaking with Dotty and others in Manteo, I concluded that [Sheriff] Cahoon's friendship with Dr. Edwards kept the whole truth from being divulged," Thorn says. "When Dr. Edwards committed suicide, there was sort of an attitude of 'let sleeping dogs lie.' " Fry says she was not contacted by authorities about her former husband, and that she spoke out after all that time because she wanted to set the record straight.
"I feel sorry for that family," Fry says, adding that she wishes the evidence were more clear. "It's sad that there is some doubt in people's minds, because there is no doubt in my mind."
Whatever became of Danny Barber is unknown; Thorn says she last heard he was still in the state and had tried to go on with his life.
Sheriff Cahoon died some years ago. Many witnesses, too, have passed on. The case remains open but inactive at the SBI. The last time it received priority status was in 1977, when the SBI formed its special task force to look into a host of long-unsolved slayings.
Godley says every now and again, someone comes forward with information: "A murder case is never closed unless it's solved. But the passing of every day makes it more difficult."
For the Holland family, the time between Easter and Brenda's July 8 birthday remains traumatic. Brenda would have turned 50 in two days.
The death, Thorn says, still haunts her parents, who are in their late 70s.
"My parents have suffered — they have never gotten over this," she says.
As a little girl who idolized her glamorous and popular teenage sister, Thorn says, she never felt she could match Brenda's achievements.
"I remember her being so beautiful and sweet," she says, recalling a tender moment in church when she laid her head on her big sister's lap.
That authorities will not close the case, despite the family's convictions, is a matter of some frustration to Thorn. She says there is comfort in thinking she knows who killed Brenda.
Still, she says, she wishes for some final, official outcome to the case, something more satisfying than "inactive" or "unsolved."
Mostly, she wishes that a 30-year-old mystery could be put to rest, so that her sister's memory would be graced with a beginning and an end, rather than merely a before and after.
This story was originally published April 26, 2018 at 4:32 PM with the headline "The Lost Colony murder."