S04E16: THE MURDERS OF JESSE MCBANE AND PATRICIA MANN

After over 50 years, the murders of Jesse McBane and Patricia Mann are still a Valentine's mystery. 
The two young college students are tortured and murdered after attending a Valentine's dance together in Durham, North Carolina in 1971. Despite re-opening the case decades later, testing DNA evidence, and confronting multiple leads, the case remains unsolved to this day.

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EPISODE RESOURCES:

"Couple’s abduction, torture, murder remains a Valentine’s Day mystery in Durham almost 4 decades later" (Durham County News):
https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/durham-county-news/couples-abduction-torture-murder-remains-a-valentines-day-mystery-in-durham-almost-4-decades-later/

"DNA collection fails, but podcast pursues clues in Orange County cold case" (WRAL News):
https://www.wral.com/new-test-fails-to-find-enough-dna-to-close-orange-county-cold-case/17626847/

The Long Dance Podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-long-dance-podcast/id1401500880

Transcript

Katie: Coming up on this episode of Crime Family.

So this case is known as a Valentine's Day murder mystery, and it's the murders of Jesse McBane and Patricia Mann. 

How did he get them out of their car, into his car and down that path through the trees without some sort of fight? That's just what I can't get over.

You knowing that your fiance is going through the same thing right beside you, just adds another level of taunting and torment to the whole thing. Just a very brutal way to go. So someone that was obviously very sadistic. 

He found what he at first thought was a mannequin leg sticking out by a tree from under some debris. And of course it turned out that it wasn't a mannequin, it was a body. 

Stephanie: Why leave your stuff behind? You're gonna get into a car with somebody else. Why not take your personal belongings with you? 

This whole case is just weird to me. There's so many questions.

Katie: Hey everyone. Welcome to Crime Family. I'm Katie and I'm here with just Steph. It's just me and Steph today. AJ is having technical difficulties so he cannot join us, so just us. So the case that I'm going to be talking about today actually starts exactly 52 years ago from this date that we're recording. It was actually February 12th, 1971. So this case is known as a Valentine's Day murder mystery, and it's the murders of Jesse McBane and Patricia Mann. Does that sound familiar to you at all, or have you heard about this case? 

Stephanie: The names sound familiar to me, but I don't know why. Maybe I heard it in passing, or I read something about it when I was researching something else, but the names do sound familiar, but I don't, I don't know this case, but I'm very intrigued. 

Katie: Yeah, so maybe when I start talking about it, maybe it'll jog your memory , cuz I mean, it is a pretty old case, but still a mystery, so I'll jump right in. 

It was close to Valentine's Day, 1971, and a young couple from Pittsboro, North Carolina had planned their night together. Jesse McBane was 19 years old, and his high school sweetheart was Patricia Mann. While they were both still very young, they seemed to have their lives planned out and were happy together. Jesse was voted most likely to succeed in his high school yearbook, and he was a student at North Carolina State University. Patricia was also a university student studying nursing in Durham North Carolina. Pat was described as friendly, very family oriented, she was quiet and a very dedicated student. Jesse was also a great student. He was very smart, and he was always joking. No one ever had a bad thing to say about him. So as friends recall on the podcast called The Long Dance Podcast, at this time in their lives, Pat and Jesse were sort of going through a rough patch in their relationship, but even though they may have not been seeing eye to eye on everything, Jesse had recently given Pat a pre-engagement ring. So despite their issues, they were still very much wanting to focus on each other and their relationship. On February 12th, 1971, there was a Valentine's dance being held at a local hospital, Watts Hospital in Durham, which I believe was part of the Watts School of Nursing, where Pat was attending nursing school. Jesse and Pat attended this dance together. They left the dance around 11 or 11:30 PM and then they headed to a Lover's Lane type area. This is just a more secluded place where people can just hang out, have some alone time together. If you're not familiar with a Lover's Lane, it's just a popular place for people, mostly teenagers to park their cars where they can be secluded so they can make out in their cars, do whatever. It's not out in the open for everyone to see. This particular spot was just in a cul-de-sac, near an undeveloped part of town at the time. So they park at this Lover's Lane, and this was really the last time that anyone reportedly ever saw them alive. 

Stephanie: Was this Lover's Lane close to where the dance was, or was it further away? Did you have to drive far to get to it?

Katie: I don't think it was too far. When we started talking about other people in this case, it's people driving home or people that work at the hospital, they pass this area. So I don't think it was too far outta the way. Just a more secluded area that wasn't far. 

Stephanie: Did other people know about it or it was just where teenagers go? Did the locals know of it too, I'm assuming? 

Katie: Yeah, so anyone that lived in that area knew about it. I mean, this is where Pat went to school, but Jesse had driven up to meet her at her university for the stance. He may not have been familiar with this area, but she knew about it and because it was a cul-de-sac, so it was an actual road that people had built because they were going to be developing this area. It wasn't an unknown, secret spot. People knew about it. 

Stephanie: Oh, okay. 

Katie: It wasn't a downtown parking spot where there'd be people everywhere. So the residents on campus where Pat lived, had a house mother who looked after the dorm, and on Friday nights the curfew was 1:00 AM. When Pat was unaccounted for at 1:10 AM her friends in the dorm looked around a bit and they quickly figured something was wrong. They informed her family the next day that Pat had never returned after the dance. They talked to Jesse's family and they had not heard or seen from him either. They checked the hospital to see if maybe there had been an accident or something, but there was nothing. Everyone knew that Pat was a rule follower, and so for her to not come back or tell anybody where she was, was very out of character, and so they knew right away that something was up and the girls in her dorm flew into a panic pretty quickly. The police, however, were not as concerned. They gave that famous line that you have to wait 24 or 48 hours before you can file a missing person's report . They said that they had probably just run off to get married somewhere, or they were just sleeping together somewhere and they would turn up, but the bad feeling did not leave their loved ones, as they knew Pat and Jesse better than that. They said that there's no reason for them to run away and get married because both families loved the other ones, so it wasn't like they were hiding their relationship or that their parents didn't want them to get married. Everyone was very supportive of their relationship, so they really had no need to hide and run away and get married. You know, that theory just didn't fly with them. 

Stephanie: Did they go to the dance with anybody besides the two of them? Did they go with a group of friends? 

Katie: I know that Pat had talked about the dance with some of her friends that day, but there's not a lot of info about if they had gone in a group or if she had met people there. I would assume that a lot of her nursing friends and her dorm mates would have been there too. But I mean there really isn't a ton of detail about that. 

Stephanie: Because you said the last time they saw them was on Lover's Lane, so I'm wondering if anybody else that she knew at the dance were at this area as well, or was it just the two of them and other people she didn't know?

Katie: Yeah, so what I'm getting from this I think is people at the dance, cause they knew they had left around 11 or 1130 and they may not have gone with them to Lover's Lane, I assume that they wouldn't. I don't know if they told them that's where they were going. You'll find out a little bit later why they knew they were there. So I'm really not sure. 

Stephanie: Okay.

Katie: So the following day was Saturday and one of their friends did find their car abandoned in the Lover's Lane area. That's what I just said, that's how they knew that they were there cuz their car was found there. It was locked, but the crew of nurses who had gone looking for them were able to get the window down and unlocked the door. Inside the car, they found their jackets, they found Pat's purse and a pair of panty hose folded under the passenger seat, but there was no Pat and no Jesse. By Sunday, their disappearances had made the local news and the police were investigating. Locals who owned wooded properties were asked to search their land and unoccupied buildings for the couple or clues to their whereabouts. Throughout the days after Pat and Jesse had gone missing, the mood around the nursing school was very somber. While classes were still going on, everyone who knew Pat just had a bad feeling. An award was established for anyone that had information about Pat and Jesse. A search party on the ground and planes in the air were out looking in the wooded areas surrounding the location where the car was found. Rumors, of course, started to swirl, and one rumor was that a teacher at the college had done something and some said that a doctor from Watts Hospital had murdered them. Nothing at the time led to anything substantial, though. It was just all rumors. After almost two weeks since they had last been seen on Thursday, February 25th, a tragic relief settled in as two bodies were found a few miles away from where Jesse's abandoned car had been found. It was a relief in the sense that they weren't wondering where they were or what had happened to them anymore, but of course it was tragic because this was not the way anyone wanted it to end. On what was then private land, but is now a part of what is called Duke's Forest, right on the border of Durham and Orange County, North Carolina, a surveyor made the horrific discovery. He found what he at first thought was a mannequin leg sticking out by a tree from under some debris. Of course, it turned out that it wasn't a mannequin, it was a body, and it was the bodies of Pat and Jesse tied to a tree back to back. So they had been strangled, but there really was nothing to point to anyone who had been involved at this time. That's really all that had been made publicly known for over four decades in this case. So there was four...

Stephanie: What! Really?

Katie: Yeah. 

Stephanie: They're found by a tree strangled to death and nobody, that's it? Like how? How is there no evidence? 

Katie: There really wasn't a lot of evidence. They looked into a few things and I mean it took, there was four decades of really no answers, there was no justice in this case. Finally, captain Tim Horne, he reopened the case, almost 40 years later, so in 2010. He had found this old dusty box in the jailhouse attic. It was just full of files and so after him looking through this box about this case, he was hooked and he decided that he needed to do some digging into this cold case, and that's what he did. So he reopens this case in 2010. 

Stephanie: They obviously were murdered, but did anybody look into that maybe they had car trouble and they decided to go searching for help and obviously something more tragic happened. 

Katie: Nothing like that came up in anything that I looked at or listened to. I would assume that they searched the car maybe to rule that out, but it was never really discussed in detail. More detail does come out about this case in the podcast that I'd mentioned earlier called The Long Dance Podcast, and this was really the first source to really dig into this case. They have interviews from family and Tim Horne, the investigator who reopened the case, he is in that podcast as well. If you want a ton more detail on this, it's eight episodes long. You can go and check out that podcast that was released in 2018. So Jesse and Pat's autopsies revealed that their hands had been tied with a hemp rope, and the same rope was tied around their necks and that they died of strangulation . The manner of death was homicide. There was also a stab wound that was non-fatal in Jesse's chest, which was made with a screwdriver or an ice pick or something similar, and that was believed to have been inflicted postmortem. Pat also had similar wounds made postmortem, and these marks are believed to have possibly been made by the killer to ensure that they were dead. They were poking at them to make sure that they wouldn't have any kind of reaction to the pain of being poked by these objects just to make sure that they were actually dead and not just pretending. There was also evidence that they were made to walk a little bit down the path to where they were ultimately tied to that tree, as their shoes had reddish mud on the bottoms, which was the same mud that was on the trail that led to the tree that they were found tied to. While the case was being investigated, originally, they were never able to make any arrests, and when Tom Horn and his team took another look into the case, they revealed some details about some possible leads. Now, of course, when there's a case like this, there's always lots of theories that are out there. Someone had called the ER that night that Jesse and Pat went missing, claiming to be Jesse's father, and he said that he was worried about his son cuz he may have been in a car accident, but it wasn't actually Jesse's father who made that call because he said later on that he never called the ER that night. So who would've made that call and why? Another person had claimed to have info about a Satanic cult who apparently had what they called four feast days throughout the year where they had to sacrifice innocent blood and February 12th just happened to be one of those days. People are thinking that maybe they came across Jesse and Pat and murdered them as part of this ritual. There was another man who lived in a trailer park near the murder scene who was known for being a creep. He would like to peep into people's windows. He was a grave digger and he bought a lot of rope as one of his jobs was to construct tents for funeral services. He knew a lot of elaborate knots. He was a World War II vet who suffered from mental breaks now and then, and he just so happened to have quit his job the day after Pat and Jesse went missing, and then he just stopped talking to people on a regular basis. Someone had allegedly seen him driving late at night down that unpaved road that led to the tree that Pat and Jesse had been tied to. Maybe revisiting the crime scene if it was him. The F B I got involved and they released a profile of the murderer, and so they described him as a man, 25 to 40 years old. He would be paranoid and out to "cleanse the world." He would be clean shaven, average or above average intelligence, and he was likely a loner, and he would've acted alone with no criminal record. He may have suffered from childhood rejection from his mother, and he would likely see himself as above everyone else. He could have very well have been the man that made the call to the ER that night of the disappearances as sort of a taunt to everyone , showing that he was a lot smarter than them. 

Stephanie: There's no witnesses? Were they the only ones at the Lover's Lane at that time? 

Katie: According to everything that I looked into about this, there was no evidence that there was anybody else there at the same time as them, apart from the murderer, of course. Nobody ever came forward to say they were there or saw anything. Police and even the medical examiner though, believed that the murders could have been the work of two people because there was no signs of a struggle or defensive wounds on either of their bodies. It seems most likely that it would've taken two people to get both of them out of their car, get them into their car to drive them to this secluded wooded area, make them walk down this path through the woods, tie them up to a tree without any struggle. So if there was maybe one person holding a gun or two people that could control both of them, it just seems more likely. The FBI did say that they think it was just one person. One thing that they did say about these murders was that Jesse and Pat were likely tortured as well. So the marks on their neck, they're saying they're signs of them being strangled, but the killer would let up for a little bit so that they could breathe again and maybe regain consciousness, and then he would strangle them again and then let it go, and then they would come back. He did this a couple times, just, you know, so that would be terrifying. And then you knowing that your fiance is going through the same thing right beside you, it just adds another level of taunting and torment to the whole thing. So just a very brutal way to go. So someone that was obviously very sadistic. They could also tell that from their feet, there were scuff marks in the mud underneath their feet where they would've been kicking and thrashing the whole time while they were being strangled. All this evidence pointed to that. That is what happened here. In this podcast, The Long Dance, they look into three suspects that they think are very plausible, that could have been the murderer in this case. One suspect that the police couldn't eliminate, his name was James Brandon Ray, and his first arrest was when he was only 15 years old for stealing cars, and he had a long string of arrests after that throughout his life. He had been arrested before for impersonating a police officer, and he had the red and blue lights in his car and you know, he liked to turn them on and pull people over. When they searched his trailer, where he lived, they found police badges and they also found two keys to the lockers at Watts Hospital, which is also where Pat worked. So on February 10th, so two days before the murders, James Ray had stolen some rope from someone to tow his car, even though that person had told him that that rope wasn't strong enough, so there's no point in him even trying. He stole the rope anyway, and sure enough the rope snapped, so he wasn't able to tow his car. After the murders, police showed the man whose rope it actually was, and he identified that as the rope that was stolen. So it seems like what they're implying here is James stole that rope and then used it to commit the murders. As soon as the bodies were discovered, James sold his car and so the man he sold it to said that James talked a lot about the murders and he seemed to know how the rope was cut, he knew a lot about the knots that were used. He knew about the prank calls that had been made to Pat's mother. He said he knew Pat and he was in a couple of her classes cuz he was training to be a paramedic. He says that he was at the Valentine's dance that night with them , but he tells his wife a different story. He tells her that he actually didn't know Pat. He only knew her because of what was being reported about her on the news. Then he also told other people that he had dated Pat, so for whatever reason, he has different versions of the story about how he knew Pat and how well he knew Pat. He was also linked to both scenes that night by witnesses that he was with for a short period of time. But there are hours of time that he was unaccounted for that night as well, and so of course, only he knows what he was doing and what he was up to during that time. But then there's the question of what was his motive? James and Pat actually did both work at Watt Hospital. That was a known fact. He worked as an orderly, but they actually weren't friends. Pat didn't care for him as he would constantly comment on how she did her job, and how she looked. She filed complaints about him and he was eventually fired. But reports say that he wasn't fired because of these complaints. They say he was fired just because he would often leave work early without telling anyone and other little things like that, that were against the rules. Eventually it was just enough to add up to them firing him. But maybe he could have seen these complaints that Pat made as, you know, a vendetta against her. Also there's other speculation for motive because maybe James had mistaken Jesse's car that night for another car that was exactly the same. So that same night there was a car that was just like Jesse's in the Lover's Lane area and it was just taunting people. It would pull up behind them and honk their horns and blare the lights and just irritate the people in these cars. So James was there and he had run outta gas and he was in this area. So he saw what was going on, he was getting annoyed and angry, and so he maybe decided to teach these troublemakers a lesson. But when he actually approached the car that he thought was doing these things, it was actually Jesse's car, cuz it was the exact same make and model as this other car. So maybe he pulled his cop routine where he pretends to be a cop, and then he confronts Jesse and Pat. But because Pat recognized him, knew he wasn't a cop, he knew that she could report him and he would go back to jail. So maybe that was another motive for him to get rid of her. All this, you know, seems like a likely situation, but there's really no evidence that any of this actually happened or went down this way.

Stephanie: Did Jesse have any enemies? He worked with Pat? They were at the same college, right? 

Katie: No, they went to the same high school, but then Pat...

Stephanie: Oh, the same high school.

Katie: Yeah. Pat went to a different university than Jesse. And so people that knew Pat didn't necessarily know Jesse cuz they were living in different towns at the time.

Stephanie: Did Jesse have any enemies? Did he have somebody out to get him or something? 

Katie: As far as I know, he really didn't have anything against him. There was some people that said, oh, they knew him and he was kind of an ass, but there was nothing really substantial that he would've done to make anybody mad at him.

Stephanie: I just find it really hard to believe that there was only one person that killed these two people. I feel like it's very hard to kill two people if you're one person to kill two people. To drag them or to tie them to a tree. One would get away you'd think? To me it's just really hard to just be one person. 

Katie: Yeah, I would think even one person by yourself, would be hard to kill one person. They would fight , you know, and kick and scream and there'd be defensive wounds. But for one person to kill two people and not have any kind of struggle, yeah, it does seem really unlikely. Unless they had some sort of weapon and they were just scared of him, you know? This comes up a little bit later too, if they were pretending to be a cop and these, you know, Jesse and Pat believed it was a cop, they probably would comply, maybe get outta their car, get into his car. Right? So there's that possibility. That theory comes up too. 

Stephanie: For two people who are as smart as Pat and Jesse were, to get in somebody else's car that they don't know just seems really odd. So maybe it was a cop or somebody of authority that their like, "Okay, well we might as well get in their car cuz they know what's, up." I just feel like they wouldn't just volunteer, get into somebody's car for no reason. 

Katie: Yeah, that's what makes me suspicious about this because there's no sign of a fight or anything. It makes me think that they did trust the person that they were getting into the car with. So James is actually arrested for an unrelated incident, and the police's interest in him just fades. He is never arrested or investigated further for the murders of Pat and Jesse. The police did find his car that he had sold and they checked for DNA and fibers that could have matched the rope, but there was no positive hit to Pat or Jesse or the rope used that night. So that of course doesn't rule him out, but the other circumstantial evidence doesn't look good. But again, it is just circumstantial. They really don't have any solid evidence to tie James to these murders. He didn't have any history of violence, even though he had a record for theft and impersonating a police officer, he was never violent with anybody, and so they're thinking that because he wasn't a violent person, this doesn't really match, you know, with his MO. He has since died and he has taken any info that he knows about this case, if he knows anything, to the grave with him. So that's the end of what they have on James. What are you thinking about James at this point? Do you think he seems like a viable suspect? 

Stephanie: Not really. I don't think it's him, but it has to be somebody they knew or somebody of higher authority for them just to get in the car with no struggle. So it might have been him, but I don't see it. I can't see it.

Katie: I go both ways as well, cause I mean, yeah, there is a bunch of circumstantial evidence that ties him to both the Lover's Lane and the murder scene that night. But there really isn't anything substantial. So, yeah, he's never questioned further about it, and that's where his involvement ends.

Stephanie: I can't see him killing both of them over something that he did to Pat whenever ago. That doesn't seem like, "Oh, I'm just gonna go and kill them for no reason." That doesn't really seem...

Katie: Yeah, and even if he was pretending to be a cop, and then he realized that Pat recognized him, how did he get them out of their car, into his car and down that path to the tree without some sort of fight. That's just what I can't get over. Right? Even if they knew him, why was there not that struggle, that obvious struggle. So yeah, things just aren't adding up. So there was actually another suspect that the police were never able to rule out, and this was Dr. James Wilson. He actually died in 2009. He was known to be a very smart, creative, charismatic, entertaining person, but he was also described as vindictive, manipulative, controlling, arrogant, volatile, and unstable. These were people that knew him, people in his family that used these words to describe him. So people that knew him very well knew that he had this evil side to him. So on the night that Jesse and Pat were murdered, Dr. Wilson and his wife, and a couple of friends were planning to have dinner together, but Dr. Wilson doesn't actually show up until after midnight. I'm assuming the dinner was at his house and he doesn't get home until after midnight. When he gets there, he's all worked up about something. He keeps looking out the window constantly, but he won't tell anybody what's up. At this time, Dr. Wilson lived in Durham, North Carolina, and he lived just a quarter mile away from the murder scene. Apparently, Dr. Wilson knew Pat, as she was a student at Watts, where he worked ,in at least one of his classes, so they knew each other that way, and he had apparently asked her out a couple times, but she turned him down. Now, 10 years before the Pat and Jesse murders, there was a murder at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and this was October of 1961, and that woman's name was Betty Brown. She was strangled in her car, so this was in Kentucky, but Dr. Wilson actually lived there at the time and he was working at the university, the Transylvania University, and he knew Betty Brown. He had asked her out a couple times and Dr. Wilson had seemed to know a lot about that murder, but he had never been arrested or considered a serious suspect at that time. He did tell people that he was a person of interest in the Betty Brown murder, even though there was no evidence of that, and people that knew him said he was a pathological liar, and he liked to insert himself into the action when he really had nothing to do with it. So he may have told people that he was being looked at for this murder, even though he wasn't. It seems like a coincidence that he happened to live very close to this other murder of Betty Brown. She was a pretty blonde student at his university. You know, gets murdered very close to where he lives. 10 years later, another pretty blonde is found murdered. A university student of his very close to where he lives. He's never really questioned or thought to be involved officially. So I mean, these two happened decades apart. It just seems very coincidental for him to be around both of them. What are your thoughts on this guy, Dr. Wilson?

Stephanie: I mean, he does seem a little bit sketchy. Maybe he could have done it, but there's nothing really there to say he did and she would've known him, right? So maybe they got in the car cuz he was there. These theories are really hard. I don't know, it could go either way. I'm like, he could have done it, but then I'm like, well there's not enough evidence to prove that he did do it, but she did know him so it could have been him. I don't know. It's very wishy-washy to me. 

Katie: There's this whole thing of why make them get outta their car, put them in his car and drive them somewhere else when he could just murder them in their own car. Why do you have to go that extra step? 

Stephanie: I was gonna say, why do you have to take them away? Just murder them in their car. It sucks they got murdered in the first place. But if you're gonna murder somebody, why drag them into your car and drag them all the way over to this other place just to murder them when you could have just done it there.

Katie: I know that's weird. And the thing about Betty Brown, she was murdered, strangled in her car, so it's not like he took her somewhere else, if this was him, but he took these other two and it seems crazy that he would take two people from their car into his car. So yeah, it doesn't seem to add up, but I mean, it still seems super coincidental that he was around the area of these two very similar murders.

Stephanie: And it does feel weird to me that neither of them put up a fight. But for Jesse, for him not to put up a fight to save his girlfriend or his fiance. Why no struggle? I can see one of them not struggling, but both of them not struggling. I don't get it. It's hard to subdue two people if you're one person trying to kill them. I don't know how. 

Katie: Yeah. It is. But I mean, maybe if he was threatening Pat with a gun to her head and telling Jesse, you know, if you don't listen or cooperate, then you know, I'm gonna shoot her right now and kill her. That may have made him comply.

Stephanie: I guess. Yeah.

Katie: But still, I don't know. 

Stephanie: You're not gonna keep calm if your fiance is about to get killed. You're gonna put up a fight, I would think. 

Katie: Yeah. You'd think there'd be some sort of, I don't know. That's why it's weird. Just seems like they just got in the car and then so easily. But I mean, we really don't know what went down, what was said, what was done. 

Stephanie: Why leave your stuff behind? If you're gonna get into a car with somebody else, why not take your personal belongings with you? 

Katie: Yeah. Especially her purse, right? Why would she, even if she thought she was going with someone that she knew, why would you leave your purse behind? So, yeah.

Stephanie: That's what I'm thinking. If they were going, like you said, going with somebody they knew and they didn't seem suspicious at the time. or whatever, why not take your stuff with you. Why would you just leave it there? 

Katie: Yeah, so they definitely probably knew at that point something was up, something sketchy.

Stephanie: This whole case is just weird to me. There's so many questions. Unanswered questions. I wanna know why?

Katie: I know. 

Stephanie: Why they got in the car. 

Katie: I mean, unless they got out of the car to maybe help this person or talk to them and thinking they were just gonna get back in their car. But once they got out, that was when he was like, you know, "Get in my car!" So they didn't have a chance to grab their stuff and wasn't thinking that they would need to, you know what I mean? But yeah, it's still...

Stephanie: Maybe they pulled the whole like, "I need a boost for my car? I have car trouble. Can you come help me with my car? 

Katie: Yeah. That could have been something too. Yeah. So many possibilities. You really don't know and I feel like we might not ever know. So that's that on Dr. Wilson and I just have one more suspect that I'm gonna talk about that they dug up in this investigation. This person is another doctor actually, and his name is Dr. Carl Britt he also worked at Watts Hospital and he actually had a record of assault and resisting arrest. In 1971 he was accused of harassing staff members at the hospital. He would steal other doctor's white coats. He would slash their tires. He threatened some of them with a gun at one point about something. There was also a lot of alleged inappropriate comments that he would make to other doctors and nursing students. He was just not a friendly guy yet he continued to be employed as a doctor here. I mean, I don't know why you would allow that to go on, someone that's threatening other doctors with a gun, to still work there, but nothing really came from this whole harassment threat thing that was happening. So it seemed like he got away with anything no matter what he did. He had also hit someone with his car and killed them one night, this is completely unrelated, but he killed somebody with a car one night when he was driving to a wedding, and that case was eventually settled as a wrongful death, but he was never really punished for that either. It was like, "Oh, he killed someone with his car, but he still got away with it." There was a man that came forward named Mark, and he claimed that in November of 1973, so it was a couple years after the murders, he was hitchhiking with a friend in Durham, North Carolina, and they weren't really being successful trying to get a ride. It was a cold night, and Mark, just being a teenager, he was getting angry and frustrated and he starts flipping off, you know, giving the finger to the cars that are driving by and not picking him up. Dr. Britt happens to be one of the people that drives by and he sees what happens. He's mad, he whips his car around and gets out. He has a gun and he tells Mark and his friend that he's a police officer and he tells them to get into the car. Now, Mark and his friend aren't just gonna comply, they fight back and Dr. Britt retreats. He gets back into his own car and leaves without really doing anything to these boys. Mark gets a license plate and he wants to report it cuz he still thinks it's a police officer. So he reports it to the police and they find out that this was not a police officer. The license plate comes back to Dr. Carl Britt, and he actually just lived blocks away from the Lover's Lane cul-de-sac, where Jesse and Pat had been abducted that night. He was also apparently at Watts Hospital that Friday night at the Valentine's dance and his route home would have passed at least one of those crime scenes that night. So some speculate that maybe Dr. Brit had been pretending to be a police officer that night, and like we were just talking about before, he maybe made Pat and Jesse get out of their car and into his car and because they believed he was a police officer, they didn't put up a fight. Even though he worked at Watts Hospital, he might not have necessarily known Pat, so she may not have recognized him, could have actually thought he was a cop.

Stephanie: I was just gonna say, wouldn't she have known him? But I guess not. 

Katie: Maybe she just didn't recognize him cause they just never really worked together. He may have known who she was, but yeah, that's just one theory. They could have thought he was an actual cop and then they got in his car and then he drove him out to the murder scene and killed them. Like we were saying, maybe that's why there wasn't a struggle if they thought he was a police officer, if he had a gun. You know, maybe they just complied. 

Stephanie: Well, now he sounds plausible. 

Katie: Yeah. This seems the most plausible one, right? 

Stephanie: Yeah. I feel like he pretended to be a cop before to that Mark and his friend. So I feel like this is the most legit suspect they've had so far in this case that you've been telling me about. He seems like a person that would do it. 

Katie: It fits the most, right? 

Stephanie: Because he has anger issues. He seems to be a horrible person at work, waving his gun around to people and whatnot.

Katie: Mm-hmm. 

Stephanie: So I feel like he would be the one that would have the motive to kill them. 

Katie: Yeah, he obviously has some sort of rage where he is slashing people's tires for, I mean, God knows what some petty work stuff . I mean they never really say, but it seems crazy that he got away with all that. But of course he denies that he was the one who tried to lure Mark and his friend into his car that night, even after Mark identified him in a photo lineup. So he was actually never charged with that crime cuz they couldn't actually prove it was him, even though his license plate matched, they matched his picture with who actually they thought it was. Anyway, he got away with that as well, if it was him. In February of 1996, a phone call came into Jesse's mom late at night and the man on the other end of the phone said, "I killed your son." And when she asked who it was, he said, "It's Dr. Britt." She asked him to repeat himself and he said, "Dr. Britt, I killed your son." She had received other calls like this, but they never identified themselves. They would always just say," I know who killed your son." And this person actually claimed to be Dr. Britt saying that it was him who killed her son. They traced that call to a payphone at a local mall, but they were never able to identify if it actually was him who made that call or who made the call if it wasn't him. So of course, he was never identified by police as the person who made that call. That's still another dead end, but it seems weird that that call came in years later to Jesse's mother. So Captain Horne, he's the one who actually reopened this case, I mentioned earlier, he actually in this podcast, The Long Dance, he actually was able to contact Carl Britt cuz he was still alive at the time and they actually asked to go into his house and talk to him. They said that they just wanted to talk to him and they noted that usually if police show up at your door, you know, you ask, "What is this about?" But he never asked that. He just was very polite. Just let them in. But he seemed very nervous the entire time. So when they said that they were there to talk about the Jesse and Pat murders, he just chuckled and he said that that was 40 years ago and in 40 years, none of it would even matter. So just a weird statement. He also acted like he didn't know Pat and he didn't know much about the case. When they asked if they could take his DNA and if he would take a polygraph, he got visibly upset. He started shaking and he had to excuse himself from the room. When he came back, he was a little bit more composed, but he said that he would cooperate. He gave them his phone numbers, gave him his card, and then they left, but a few minutes later, Tim Horne got a call from Dr. Britt's attorney saying that he would not be participating anymore in their investigation and to not contact him ever again. So things escalated quickly there. It seemed like he wanted to cooperate, but then very fast was like, "No, get outta my face." Apparently back in the day, Dr. Britt had a lab technician that worked for him at Watt Hospital, and that lab technician's name was James Ray. So if you remember, James Ray was that first suspect that I had talked about. So two of these main suspects in this case, they actually knew each other. They worked closely with each other. They had similar interests, as in they both liked to impersonate police officers. They both knew Pat and you know, they were both known to have been in the area the night of the murder. Maybe they could have tagged teamed this, maybe they could have talked about it. Or maybe it's just a coincidence that they worked together. But yeah. What are your final thoughts about Dr. Britt? 

Stephanie: I feel like if it wasn't him, then it has to be somebody who's trying to frame him because everything's adding up to him doing it. Just his behavior and him cooperating and then not wanting to cooperate and then just him being weird about it. I feel like it was him or somebody trying to be him, maybe. 

Katie: Yeah. 

Stephanie: Who knows? It could have been his lab partner. 

Katie: Yeah. Maybe they did it together or something. The FBI thought it was just one person, but the police did think that it could have been two people. So, I mean, who knows?

Stephanie: I think it's two people. I, I feel like it's two people. I can't see it being one person. For them to kill two people in one night together, it just seemed there has to be two people. I feel like it's just hard for one person to... 

Katie: Unless they actually did think he was a cop though, and they got into his car willingly.

Stephanie: Maybe.

Katie: I mean, I don't know.

Stephanie: I don't know. 

Katie: Yeah, it's still very much a mystery, but I think this guy does seem to be the most plausible and, from this other podcast that is what people are leaning towards, he's the only one that was actually still alive when they were investigating.

Stephanie: Is he still alive now? 

Katie: I don't actually know. So that was back in 2018. He could still be alive, but I mean... 

Stephanie: How old was he when he killed them? 

Katie: At that point it would've been almost 50 years ago. So he's in his eighties by now. 

Stephanie: Even if he did do it, you could arrest him. Ugh. It's likely he's gonna die before he goes to trial. 

Katie: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, unfortunately, whoever did this probably isn't gonna get put to justice before they die. 

Stephanie: No. Crazy, it's taking this long just to get evidence. But I guess back in the seventies there wasn't a whole lot of DNA or a whole lot of technology as there is now. 

Katie: Well, yeah, Anna did say in the podcast that they feel like it could have gotten solved, but because cuz ,like I said, it was right on the Durham, Orange County lines, so there was multiple law enforcement agencies involved that didn't wanna cooperate with each other. So there was the Orange County Sheriff's Department, there was the Durham Police, and they wanted to be the ones to solve it, so they weren't sharing evidence and talking to each other like they should. So the State Bureau of Investigations got in there, the F B I had that profile, so there's just multiple people, multiple agencies. 

Stephanie: Oh, that makes sense I guess.

Katie: Yeah, and they just weren't really talking to each other. They're not cooperating as much as they should have. 

Stephanie: That's unfortunate. 

Katie: Yeah. People think, if they would've just worked as a team, they could've gotten a lot more accomplished.

Stephanie: Mm-hmm. 

Katie: Unfortunately they didn't. So yeah, there was DNA found on the rope that was used to strangle Pat and Jesse, but even with new technology that's designed to extract DNA from hard to reach places like maybe the inside of those knots on that rope, they weren't able to get enough DNA extracted, or there just wasn't enough present to get a full profile. Even though they did gather DNA from Dr. Britt, some anonymous source gave them his DNA, they were able to get DNA from one of the other suspect's sons, so they could match that familial DNA, but they were never able to make a match just because the DNA that they had on the evidence just wasn't enough. So they haven't been able to match DNA and they haven't been able to point the finger at any specific person to say, this is who did it. To this day, the murders are still unsolved. 

Stephanie: Would the DNA still be viable 50 years later?

Katie: I mean, if they preserve it properly, I think it's okay. I think they must have done it in this case, because this was, I think in 2018.

Stephanie: Oh, okay. 

Katie: Like I was saying, they retested this DNA, but they just couldn't get a big enough profile on the rope to get it to point to anybody. So yeah, that's the end of this cuz that's all they have. Even after reopening this case after 50 years, they were able to narrow it down and present the people that they think it was, but they still haven't been able to say who it was. 

Stephanie: There's probably at this point most of them are probably dead. Whoever did it is probably dead at this point. So they may never know and it may never get solved.

Katie: I know.

Stephanie: Which is unfortunate.

Katie: I mean, their family's not gonna get justice. 

Stephanie: No. It's just a weird case. I don't know why I've heard those two names before, but I don't remember this case at all. Anyways, this case was weird. So many unanswered questions. I wanna know what happened. 

Katie: I know. I'm intrigued too. I just want them to get that DNA and just figure out who it was. It's so annoying that they're so close. They just don't have...

Stephanie: I know.

Katie: The full profile to know who it is.

Stephanie: I wanna know why they got in the car? That's my thing. That's my biggest thing. Why did they get in the car? It was weird that there was no other witnesses because at the time of their disappearance or the murders, it was around Valentine's Day, which is one of the popular love days of the year. So I feel, for nobody to be in Lover's Lane on Valentine's day, there'd should be more people.

Katie: Yeah. Yeah. You'd think there'd be other people around? 

Stephanie: Of course there's nobody around when you want them to be around. 

Katie: Yes, I know. Yeah. Maybe that was the nice thing about this Lover's Lane that they picked because there wasn't gonna be anybody else there. They don't think that it was some random person that killed them that didn't live there. Maybe just someone passing through because where they were killed in the woods, tied to that tree, you would have had to know where that was, and only a local person...

Stephanie: That would be my next thing I was gonna say, it had to be somebody who knew the area, and I feel like it had to be somebody they knew in order to get into that car. They felt safe enough to get in the car.

Katie: Yeah. Or someone they trusted. 

Stephanie: Yeah, somebody they trusted. 

Katie: A police officer. 

Stephanie: We see a lot of this, where people get in cars, someone trying to pretend to be somebody they're not. 

Katie: Yeah, I guess it happens more often than we think. To me, it definitely seems to be one of those three people for sure that I talked about. Yeah, still a mystery. Still open, unsolved, crazy case. 

Stephanie: Yeah. Interesting one. 

Katie: Yeah, it definitely is. And just in time for Valentine's Day. 

So if you're a fan of the podcast, you can follow us on Facebook @ Crime Family Podcast, Instagram @crimefamilypodcast, and Twitter @crimefamilypod1. You can send us an email at crimefamilypodcast@gmail.com, you can check out our website, crimefamilypodcast.ca. You can also find us on Patreon to get bonus material and extra episodes, and you can also check out our merch store. Get some crime family merch. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Bye. 

Stephanie: Bye.