Dale M. Brumfield

Special to The News Leader

Augusta County Sheriff’s Deputy C. L. Botkin was on a routine overnight patrol on Route 250 east of Staunton near Brand’s Flat on February 3, 1975 when he noticed a broken window on the front of a popular restaurant named Billy Dee’s. After a call for backup, Deputy C. C. Harris arrived and the two men began investigating what they assumed was a break-in.

Harris was stunned when he shined his flashlight through the window and saw what he recognized as a bundle of dynamite sticks just inside the door, wrapped in tape and connected to a wire to a smaller package also wrapped in tape. He then noticed a second bundle of four sticks over by the bar.

Harris and Botkin cleared the area, and minutes later at 4:33 a massive blast ripped through the building, utterly destroying it.

“It was very loud,” the thankfully uninjured officers told the News Leader. “Cinderblocks were thrown out in the road, and we could see them [thrown] as high as the power lines.” Harris added that the front door was blown more than 100 yards into a nearby field.

The early 1970s were curiously hazardous years for Augusta County restaurants and night clubs, when a seeming wave of fires, bomb threats and explosive devices haunted four separate venues – two of them owned by one man, H. B. Dice.

And there has been no resolution to any of them.

The first disaster in this mysterious series actually began almost five years earlier, on December 3, 1970, when a wildly popular nightclub called The Rafters – located on Rt. 644, or Frontier Drive today – burned to the ground moments after closing in a spectacular midnight conflagration. Unfortunately, water was not available and firefighters could only stand and watch it burn. Owners Jerry Eavers and Charles Hunter reported that the building was insured, but that a musical group called The Lasers lost about $14,000 in equipment.

The cause of the fire was never determined, and the owners elected not to rebuild.

After Billy Dee’s blew up, Dice was clueless as to why someone may have wanted his restaurant destroyed. In fact, a year earlier, a fire determined to be arson also caused major damage, but no arrests were made.

“I can’t imagine who would have done something like this,” a puzzled Augusta County Sheriff John E. Kent told the News Leader of the bomb blast. “But it looks like the work of an expert.” He called in explosive specialists from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to investigate, but they found nothing.

“It’s really a tragedy,” Dice told the press the morning after the blast. “One bad thing is that 14 people worked for me and now they are all without jobs.”

Not to be deterred, however, on April 3, 1975, Dice began construction of a new restaurant and nightclub on the site of the former Rafters. It opened in June, 1975 as Dice’s Inn.

Seven months after the Billy Dee’s explosion, on Sunday, September 29, 1975, another popular restaurant west of Waynesboro also on Rt. 250 called Goodtime Charlie’s sustained damage by a pipe bomb that had been planted in a window air conditioner. The blast blew out several windows and a door but caused minimal damage to the restaurant interior.

Sheriff Kent said at the time that he did not “assume any connection” between the blast at Goodtime Charlie’s and at Billy Dee’s.

Finally, two days after the Goodtime Charlie’s bombing, and three weeks after receiving a bomb threat at his newly-opened Dice’s Inn that forced an evacuation, Dice’s son Mike was investigating a non-functioning toilet in the women’s restroom around 9:00 a.m. on September 30 when he stumbled across yet another homemade dynamite bomb in the air vent.

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Upon arrival, Kent and investigators found a small triggering device wrapped in masking tape, with two wires leading to the air vent pipe, on the restaurant’s north roof. Bomb disposal experts from Fort Belvoir were called in and they dismantled the bomb.

Kent said in a press conference later that day that the bomb was set to go off “several hours before it was discovered” but that it “malfunctioned.” He did admit it was the same type of bomb that exploded at Goodtime Charlie’s only two days earlier.

On October 10, Kent offered a reward of $2,500 for information leading to an arrest in both the Billy Dee’s and Goodtime Charlie’s bombings and the attempted bombing at Dice’s Inn. Despite the similarities in the cases and the ample cash prize, the investigation went cold.

Strangely, at the same time, two Staunton men and a Columbus, Ohio native were arrested and charged with stealing dynamite from a construction site in a twisted plot to kill a State Trooper and an undercover narcotics agent, who assisted State Police in drug investigations.

The three men, along with a fourth, had stolen two cases (44 sticks) of dynamite and blasting caps from A. J. Connor dynamite warehouse in Brand’s Flat right around the time of the Billy Dee’s bombing. It seemed an open and shut case – all of them admitted they planned to use the explosives to kill the State Policeman and the informant; however, they never admitted any involvement in the restaurant bombings, and they were never charged in any of them.

In fact, Chief Sheriff’s Department Investigator Forest Hamilton testified in Augusta County Circuit Court June 6, 1975 that all 44 sticks of the stolen dynamite were recovered near Deerfield.

Thus, the 1970 Rafters fire, as well as the mysterious restaurant bombings of 1975, to this day remain unsolved.

Dale Brumfield can be reached at dalebrumfield@protonmail.com.

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