The Last Photo's of the Valentine's Day Murder Victims

[danielsan]

On Valentine’s Day in 1971, 19-year-old Jesse McBane and his girlfriend, 20-year-old Patricia Mann, went to a Valentine’s Dance in Pittsboro, Durham. The picture below was on that night and were never seen alive again. When they failed to return to their dormitories, their concerned roommates called the police. McBane’s close friend told the police, “I knew immediately. I just got the sickest feeling in my stomach that something terrible had happened. She was a good girl. She went by the rules.”

Then days later, a man found both of their bodies in the woods nearby. Their hands had been tied behind their backs with thick ropes – they had both been tortured to death side-by-side. Detectives never found who tortured and killed the couple – the case, still to this day, remains unsolved.

(Jesse McBane, 19, and 20-year-old Patricia Mann, were killed in 1971 after attending a Valentine's Day dance. There bodies were found tied up and strangled. No one has ever been charged with their killings.)

[kellyhound]

some more:

Friends reported the couple missing to the police who were reluctant to investigate given the short time span. A friend of Patricia's found McBane’s locked car parked at a lovers’ lane near what is now Hillandale Golf Course on Medford Rd. The couple is believed to have been abducted from this area.

McBane and Mann's bodies were found roughly two weeks later. On Feb. 25, a surveyor working in the woods off Howe Street thought he had found a mannequin's leg on what was at the time a one-track dirt road in Orange county. link to present day Howe St. in what is now NW Durham:

Fully clothed but covered with leaves, McBane and Mann lay together in the woods. Their hands had been tied with thick ropes behind their backs to a tree, and ropes were stretched tight and knotted around their necks.

Although still tied to the trunk, their upper bodies had slumped over so that they laid side by side in the leaves.

At the medical examiner’s office, it was discovered that McBane and Mann both had several distinct strangle marks on their necks, as though the rope had been tightened, then loosened, and then tightened again.

They suffered nearly identical injuries though Mann was also found to have a half-inch tear to her liver that may have been caused by a strong blow to the stomach prior to death.

As the bodies were found in Orange County but their likely kidnapping occurred in the city of Durham (part of Durham county), the Orange and Durham county Sheriff’s offices, the Durham Police Department and the State Bureau of Investigation all worked the case, trying to identify and check out possible suspects.

This led to lack of communications between separate departments helped to muddle this case. While there were several suspects, no department was to break the case and it remains unresolved to this day.

The suspect: Two men who were suspects back in the early 1970s continue to be viable suspects, and one of them is still alive.

He was affiliated with Watts Hospital at the time of the murders.

“He was a suspect and a person of interest back then, and he still is” -- Orange County Sheriff’s Investigator Tim Horne.

Horne declined to say how or why the man became a suspect, but when investigators back in 1971 asked him to take a lie detector test, he called his lawyer and declined.

During his recent investigation, Horne again asked the man to take a lie detector test and also to give a DNA sample, and the man called his lawyer and again declined.

[SimoneFlen']

[Moloko]

What a terrible shame. I don't know why, but reading your post reminded me of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

[Weiland]

This is so sad.

[Oswald2001]

RIP is all I can offer.

[luton loyal]

[snk1200]

that's crazy rip ..

[K53]

May peace be found in Heaven

[Dusti_]

Wow, that's just crazy effed up... Rest in peace young couple