EDITOR'S NOTE: John Railey is former editorial page editor of the Winston-Salem Journal. This column was initially published in The Coastland Times. The State Bureau of Investigation has assigned cold-case investigator Tony Cummings to the unsolved homicide of Brenda Joyce Holland in response this series.

Early Sunday morning, July 2, 1967 Dare County Sheriff Frank Cahoon knocked on the Manteo door of “Lost Colony” singer Danny Barber. Brenda Joyce Holland, the makeup supervisor for the outdoor drama on Roanoke Island, hadn’t been seen since her date the previous Friday night with Barber.

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It was the start of a test of wills between Cahoon and Barber.

Cahoon soon had Barber in his patrol car for the short ride from Barber’s Burnside Road house to the sheriff’s office in the brick courthouse building in downtown Manteo. The lantern-jawed sheriff was about 60 with a trim build. He parted his gray hair near the middle. He was tough but soft-spoken guy.

The world was changing all around him in 1967. Long-haired kids were protesting President Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Others were just raising hell in general – around the nation and in Cahoon’s county -- on some nights over at the Casino in Nags Head.

Barber, 24, wasn’t a hellraiser. His hair and beard were neatly trimmed. The Goldsboro native was square-jawed and fit. He’d served in the U.S. Army band and was attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

And he was, in his own way, every bit as tough as Cahoon. Barber was part of “The Lost Colony” clique. Cahoon, despite friends who worked in the play, was not.

The sheriff, having kept his elected office since 1946, was dealing with the most controversial case of his career. The Dare County seat of Manteo was a company town. The company was and is “The Lost Colony.” The outdoor drama began in The Great Depression and revived the town. It continues to be Manteo’s economic lifeblood. Andy Griffith got his start in this play where dreams begin.

But that July 1967 Sunday flipped the dream. The sheriff, soon joined by SBI agents, put Barber in an interview room, beginning the longest ordeal in Barber’s life. Years later, Barber would remember the grueling the questioning and how frightened, helpless and vulnerable he felt.

To some extent, Barber visited the trouble upon himself through his initial statement about the last hours of his date with Brenda, who was 19.

That previous Saturday night, Brenda didn’t shown for work. Irene “Renie” Rains, the longtime costumer for the play, mother figure to the cast, told law-enforcement agents that Barber told her that night he’d driven Brenda to her rented room at Dick and Cora Gray Twiford’s house at around 2 a.m., according the SBI file on Brenda’s homicide. But before the play was over, Barber told John Fox, the general manager of “The Lost Colony,” that he hadn’t driven Brenda to her room. Instead, he said, he’d driven her to his house where he’d fallen asleep and awakened to find Brenda gone.

Barber’s initial shift in his story apparently led Cahoon to concentrate on him as the massive search for the missing Brenda began. The pressure was on.

Reporters from all over the state poured in as the sheriff tried to organize the hundreds of searchers, many volunteers including from Brenda’s Campbell College. Brenda’s parents, Geraldine “Gerri” Holland and Charlie Holland, had raced down from their native mountains. Her father packed his revolver, seeking justice for his middle daughter, the first to go to college. He wanted some “alone time” with Barber. Cahoon tried to cool Holland down.

Thursday morning July 6, 1967 -- a pilot in a search plane spotted a body near Mashoes in the Albemarle Sound. Cahoon soon had Barber at the scene to identify the body. “Barber looked at her, walked away, then came back and said it was her [Brenda],” the sheriff told reporters.

The sheriff could have had Brenda’s parents identify the body, but picked Barber in an apparent effort to break his main suspect.

One of the Twifords’ daughters, Penny Twiford Craven, told me that she thinks Barber “got a bum rap.”

“I think he was scared and made a mistake in saying he brought Brenda home when he actually did not. He came to our house and apologized to my mother for not bringing her home. He felt bad about it. He made a mistake and he tried to do right.”

Craven, like many others believes that another man, Manteo dentist Linus Edwards, killed Brenda.

A longstanding theory of the case is that Edwards, a violent drunk, mistook Brenda for his wife, strangled her and threw her body in the sound. From my interviews and review of the SBI file, Edwards was a much stronger suspect than Barber.

But at the time, Cahoon and the SBI agents never pressed Edwards hard. They continued to interview Barber in the days immediately after Brenda’s body was found. Years later, Barber would remember he couldn’t convince the lawmen that he had not done the crime. The officers finally backed off after one of Barber’s brothers retained a lawyer for him.

Barber finished the summer as a chorus singer at “The Lost Colony.” Play costumer Rains told the SBI agents that most of the cast believed that Barber had nothing to do with Brenda’s slaying, a belief that was supported by Brenda’s roommate at the Twiford house. But the SBI kept up the pressure on Barber. There was an agent in the audience each night of the play that summer of 1967, according to a note in the SBI file.

Fox, “The Lost Colony” general manager, told The Charlotte Observer in August 1967 that Barber told the same story consistently to investigators and they had concluded that “if Barber is not telling the truth he is such a good actor he ought to be on Broadway.”

Sheriff Cahoon was not satisfied. “He hasn’t given us all the answers we’d like to have,” he told the Charlotte paper. “But we haven’t got enough to pick him up.”

The following November, with Barber back at school, SBI agents interviewed him in Chapel Hill – without a lawyer present. The agents again interviewed Barber over dinner in Chapel Hill the following April. He ended the interview, saying he needed to talk to his lawyer.

Even after suspect Dr. Edwards fatally shot himself in his Manteo home on Valentine’s Day, 1971. investigators continued to press their case on Barber, including by monitoring his changes in residence. As Barber advanced in his career in 1972, SBI agents wrote that he was considered “an excellent employee.” They even noted what kind of car he drove: a 1970 Opel.

Danny Barber came to be known as Dan Barber in the formal world of business. He married in 1975. His wife, Diane Barber, recently told me that during their engagement he told her a girl in “The Lost Colony” had been found dead and investigators had tried to put it on him. He was forever grateful to his brother for retaining an attorney for him, Barber told his wife.

“He thought in his heart of hearts this made no sense,” Diane Barber said. “Why would somebody kill her?”

Diane Barber said her husband took her to “The Lost Colony,” and later, their two girls. “He talked in glowing terms of his time in ‘The Lost Colony.’ Dan loved ‘The Lost Colony.’ … I cannot imagine if anything untoward happened he would bring his children there.”

In 1985, Diane Barber said, her husband got a call from an investigator on Brenda’s case. “I took the phone call in the kitchen. Dan was sitting at the kitchen table. … I just remember he was kind of resigned, like ‘Why are they calling me?’ It certainly didn’t send him into any kind of a panic or anything. It was just like, ‘Huh?”

The pressure continued after Cahoon had retired and died.

At least one more investigator would call Barber, in the spring of 1995. Barber was open and cooperative, the investigator indicated, according to the SBI file. Barber had just retired from Sara Lee Hosiery, where he’d risen to the top ranks. He concentrated on his singing with professional and amateur engagements. He died unexpectedly on Jan. 15, 2011.

Right up until the autumn before his death, he had vacationed with his family in Dare County, the place of the ordeal of his youth.

John Railey is working to solve the Brenda Joyce Holland case with Brenda’s sister Kim Holland Thorn. Please relay any tips to: raileyjb@gmail.com.

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