On July 10, 1985, Curtis Bane, age 55, and Thaddeus Hayes, age 24, failed to return home after working on a fence on Curtis’s property on N.C. 10, about five miles west of Durham. Curtis’s wife, Dorothy, said the two men had eaten lunch at their home and then planned to go back to the work site for a few hours before dinnertime. Curtis owned different properties in Orange County, which he worked on developing, and also managed several trailer parks. Thaddeus was a friend and roommate of Curtis’s son, Curtis Bane Jr., and often did work for the Bane family.
By that night, when Curtis and Thad hadn’t returned home by 7 p.m. for dinner, Dorothy was worried. She drove to the work site and found her husband’s pickup truck there, with the keys still in the ignition, along with a John Deere tractor that belonged to him. She put it a call to the police department, and when officers arrived, they didn’t see any signs of a disturbance at the scene.
Where Would They Go?
One of the more perplexing things about this case was the fact that two adult men had seemed to vanish off the face of the earth. Curtis Bane was about six feet two inches tall and weighed around 210 pounds. He was last seen wearing dark blue pants, a white and beige striped shirt, brown boots, and a yellow cap. Thaddeus Hayes was described as being around five feet tall, weighing 175 pounds, with a stocky build. He had black hair, and was wearing work pants and a blue shirt. Friends who knew Curtis said he was a physically strong man, making their disappearance even more baffling.
Dorothy Bane said her husband had never stayed away from home without letting her know, leading her to believe he and Thad had met with foul play after they had lunch at their home. They had already made summer plans, with an upcoming family trip to the beach scheduled, and Thad and his brother were scheduled to join them.
Over the next several days, community members and Orange and Durham County officials searched for the two men by land and air, including the use of tracking dogs. They dragged an old power station lake off Pleasant Green Road and the Eno State Park area. They canvassed a two-mile square area where the men had last been working and turned up nothing. A bulldozer also rummaged through about 2 million pounds of garbage at a Chapel Hill landfill but turned up no leads.
By that weekend, the Orange County Sheriff, Lindy Pendergrass, told the media, “We haven’t turned up one iota of anything. It’s as if they just took wing and flew off.” He did note that Curtis had recently been involved with a dispute with a neighbor whose land bordered Curtis’s, but he declined to name who the resident was. Sheriff Pendergrass asked for anyone owning land near Curtis Senior’s property to check their land for anything suspicious.
By July 27, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department announced a $10,000 reward was being offered to any person with information concerning the whereabouts of the two missing men or information surrounding their disappearance.
The Case Goes Cold
Investigators continued to work on leads as they came in, but over the next year, the media didn’t have a lot of new information to publish about the two men’s disappearance. In mid March of 1986, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department announced it had two suspects in the disappearance of Curtis Bane and Thad Hayes, but they were still waiting for a break that would enable them to make arrests. Earlier that month, sheriff’s deputies and members of the State Forestry service had searched land near the Durham County line. This piece of land was in close proximity to where Curtis and Thad had been working. According to The Herald-Sun, these searches were hoping to pinpoint a well or a septic tank related to the case. The Sheriff’s Department said they hadn’t found it, but did make some progress during their search.
In early August of 1986, more than a year after Curis and Thad vanished, The Herald-Sun published an article titled “Mrs. Bane Feels Better After Polygraph.” It reported that Dorothy Bane had taken a polygraph test in Raleigh administered by the State Bureau of Investigation. Her pastor accompanied her for moral support. Her attorney advised her to take the test so that she wouldn’t appear connected or guilty of anything having to do with her husband and his employee’s disappearance. Her son, Curtis Bane Junior, had taken a polygraph the previous August. Dorothy had waited because the SBI told her she was probably too upset to take it when her son did.
After Dorothy took the polygraph, Sheriff Pendergrass said she had never been a suspect in her husband’s disappearance. He said they didn’t ask her to take the test to determine her guilt or innocence, but to clarify a few points that had become confusing in the year since the two men went missing.
On December 21, 1987, the News and Record published an article titled “Orange county search more than 2 years old, but information scarce.” The lead paragraph read: Law officers, who have been searching for 2 ½ years for two Orange County men, are looking for a happy ending, but while the case remains open, the doors of information remain firmly latched.”
Finally, an Arrest
The Banes and Hayes’ families fears that this case would never be solved changed almost three years after Curtis Bane and Thad Hayes went missing from their work site. On July 1, 1988, Orange County District Attorney Carl Fox held a press conference and shared that Charles Antonio Buchanan, age 34, a former deputy with the Durham County Sheriff’s Department, had been arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. He said murder indictments were planned for another suspect, 34-year-old former Durham police officer Lentz Craig Franklin. At the press conference, Fox said their investigation showed that the two men had shot and killed Curtis and Thad after an argument over a property line. Investigators believed the two men were shot the night they disappeared, although at the time of the arrests, their bodies had not been recovered.
Fox said the two men had been suspects since the Curtis and Thad disappeared in July of 1985, and tips from members in the community also pointed to their involvement. However, Fox said the arrest was only made after “an examination of the totality of evidence.” He declined to provide any more information about the evidence at the press conference. Antonio was arrested at a rest area on Interstate 85 in Granville County, denied bond, and placed in the county jail in Hillsborough. He had been living in the town of Wise and working in a pet store.
A Surprising Background
The other suspect awaiting arrest, Lentz Craig Franklin, who went by Craig, had been fired as a Durham Public Safety officer in 1984 after an incident that occurred off duty where he was charged with pointing a gun at another man. He was then sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading no contest to charges related to two 1986 robberies at two Durham restaurants. Additional years were added to his sentence after he was found guilty of growing marijuana at his home.
In the days following the press conference family members of the two victims spoke to the media, saying they had always felt Craig Franklin was involved. Dorothy Bane said Curtis and a surveyor had been at the property line about two weeks before the disappearance, and Craig approached them with a weapon. He demanded to know what Curtis and the surveyor were doing there, and when they told him, he just stared them down. He refused to shake Curtis’s extended hand and simply turned and walked back into his house without a word.
Dorothy said Curtis tried not to talk about his concerns about the dispute because he didn’t want to worry her. He was putting up a fence because Craig Franklin owned several dogs, including a pit bull, that he left outside while Curtis was working there. The dogs acted aggressively, and he grew concerned for his physical safety. Another friend of Curtis’s said that after he had the property line officially surveyed, someone was pulling up the wooden stakes and throwing them out. Curtis thought putting up the fence would finally lay to rest any arguments about where the property line was.
The disappearance of Curtis Bane and Thad Hayes affected the Hillsborough community deeply, and they breathed a collective sigh of relief when the District Attorney was able to announce the arrests. One resident named Ruth Browning told The Chapel Hill Herald that after the two men went missing, neighborhood children were more hesitant to play outdoors. She said her husband had kept a loaded gun at each entrance to their home for safety, and one of her neighbors had become fearful of walking out to her car alone on winter mornings in the dark. Other residents said they always suspected a property dispute was at the heart of the disappearances, so they weren’t as fearful for their own personal safety.
Authorities worried that because they hadn’t found the physical bodies of the two missing men, it might make the job of prosecuting the murder suspects more difficult. At the time, there had only been one other case where a suspect was prosecuted for murder without a body. That was the case of Johnny Joseph Head, who was convicted in 1985 of murdering realtor Dianne Gabriel. I discussed that case back in Episode 15, “Missing Real Estate Agents from North Carolina,” if you’d like to go back and check that one out.
A Mysterious Phone Call
Dorothy Bane, Curtis’s wife, told the media she would consider the prosecution making a sentencing deal with the two suspects if it meant she would be able to learn where her husband’s body was. District Attorney Carl Fox said he was prepared to go to trial without the bodies of Curtis and Thad regardless, and would be seeking the death penalty. Dorothy Bane said, “I had always been staunchly against the death penalty, but I am just so afraid that they will get out and hurt somebody else. After reading that if people kill once they will again, I am all for the death penalty now. I really am.”
Dorothy told The Chapel Hill News that in the days following her husband’s disappearance, she received a call from a woman who said she had seen Curtis and Thad being shot. She told Dorothy not to worry about her husband suffering or being tortured, because he was dead. The woman did not want to identify herself and was crying. She said she couldn’t go to the police because she feared the people responsible would kill her, too. Dorothy told the police about the call, but without knowledge of who made it, they were unable to interview the alleged witness at the time. However, this tip probably only further convinced them that Curtis and Thad met foul play related to the property dispute.
Bane and Hayes Laid to Rest
On July 11, 1988, Antonio Buchanan was released from jail on bond. Craig Franklin remained incarcerated at Central Prison for the other crimes he’d been convicted of. Shortly before Antonio’s release, on July 8, authorities announced they had discovered the bodies of the Curtis Bane and Thad Hayes buried in a shallow grave near the Lake Michie Dam in Durham, off Old Oxford Road. District Attorney Fox announced he believed Craig Franklin had fired the fatal shots that killed the two men. It appeared Antonio had made a deal with law enforcement in return for his release on bond. District Attorney Fox said, “I wouldn’t release someone out of custody whom I believed fired the shots.”
The autopsies of the two men showed Curtis Bane had been shot once in the back of the head, while Thad had been shot twice in the back of the head. The suspected murder weapon was a small-caliber pistol. Authorities had not recovered the gun at the time but said they believed it was still with one of the two suspects.
Both Curtis Bane and Thad Hayes received the burials their families had been hoping for since they went missing. At Curtis’s funeral, his pastor Rev. Jerry Harper Senior said he would remember Curtis Bane, an Air Force veteran, as a friend and neighbor who cared so much about his community that he was a charter member of the Eno Volunteer Fire Department. He was a lifelong resident of the area who’d attended high school in Durham, and college at Campbell University and the University of North Carolina. At Thad’s funeral, he was remembered as a “carbon copy of his father,” devoted church member, and a young man who wasn’t afraid to work two jobs, including the one that ultimately cost him his life.
In early June 1989, former Durham police officer Craig Franklin pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in the July 1985 slayings of Curtis Bane and Thad Hayes. Superior Court Judge Craig Ellis sentenced him to two terms of life imprisonment, plus 40 years for two June 1985 break-ins in Durham County. He had set fire to a building at Durham Academy on Academy Road, and while his former fellow officers were away from the station, stole a shotgun and six pistols belonging to the department. He used one of those stolen handguns to murder Curtis Bane and Thad Hayes.
Antonio Buchanan told investigators Craig Franklin became so enraged over Curtis Bane putting up a fence near his house that he dug the graves near the dam ahead of time. He told Antonio he was going to “get Bane.” Antonio was with Craig on the day they returned to his house and saw Curtis and Thad working on the fence. Craig approached the two men with the pistol and shot Thad in the back of the head. When Curtis saw what had happened, he tried to flee the scene before being shot twice. Craig and Antonio then drove the two men’s bodies to the gravesite, poured gasoline on top of them, and then buried them.
In exchange for his cooperation, the district attorney dropped the murder charges against Antonio Buchanan. During his sentencing hearing, Craig Franklin told the Bane and Hayes families:
“I am sorry for what has happened. I know it will not make anything right. I am not the character of evil the media has made me out to be. I pray to the same God as you do.“
Craig Franklin Speaks to Media
On September 3, 1989, The Chapel Hill Herald published an interview they conducted with Craig Franklin in Central Prison. I’m not going to get into all the details here, because I believe he was trying minimize his involvement in the murders. One thing he did say was, “I was a trained police officer. I know how to commit a first-degree premeditated murder and get by with it. I’d never do something that stupid within coin-thumping distance of my house.”
He did admit he’d become addicted to cocaine after being fired from the Durham Police Department. He said after the initial confrontation with Curtis Bane over the property line, they’d been cordial. He even said Curtis had come to his door once to ask him to put his dogs up while they were working on the fence, and he’d agreed. This does not line up with what Curtis had told his wife Dorothy about their encounters. He denied planning the murders ahead of time and said he was high on cocaine when he and Antonio had gone out to his backyard for some target practice and crossed paths with Curtis and Thad. According to his statement, he became involved with an altercation and shot both men then. But in this new confession he said he had shot both men in the chest, which did not line up with the details from the autopsies, that showed Curtis and Thad had been shot execution style.
Craig said he and Antonio hid the men’s bodies on the property until his wife came home so they could take them elsewhere in her truck. He said they had not dug the graves ahead of time like Antonio Buchanan stated.
He said a lot of other things during this interview, about his many crimes, but Craig Franklin seems like the type of man who has a high opinion of himself and always has an excuse for anything he does wrong.
When The Chapel Hill Herald reached out to the Chatham District Attorney Carl Fox about Craig’s new revelations, he wasn’t shocked. “I’m not surprised by what Mr. Franklin is saying, but you have to consider the source and where he is now. It is only natural to expect Mr. Franklin would be very resentful about being in prison and Mr. Buchanan being on the outside.” Craig said he had accepted the plea deal offered to him because he didn’t want to risk getting a death penalty conviction from a jury.
Antonio Buchanan Walks Away from the Crime
Antonio told investigators he had not taken drugs on the day of the murders, even though Craig said he had. Antonio said he went to the house that day to try and talk Craig out of committing the murders, even if he was unsuccessful. Craig Franklin had apparently shared details of the murders with other inmates while he was incarcerated, and they matched up with the details Antonio had shared.
Craig didn’t seem to have any remorse over the murders of Curtis and Thad. He did tell The Chapel Hill Herald he needed a lesson and got it. He said his first two years in prison had been good for him, and that he’d kicked his cocaine addiction. He said that despite being an ex-police officer, he got along with his fellow inmates fine. He did add he hoped to be released in 15 to 20 years, and was hopeful it would happen due to prison overcrowding. His exact quote was, “They’ve got to make changes with the prison overcrowding, and these people can tell I’m not the run-of-the-mill-type convict.”
Craig Franklin is still incarcerated at the age of 67, although he now resides in a prison in Sanford rather than Raleigh. I guess the prisons never got so overcrowded anyone felt the need to release him.
Show Sources:
Disappearance of Curtis Bane and Thaddeus Hayes
The Herald Sun
July 13, 1985
Search widens for two men
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The News and Observer
July 14, 1985
Hunt for men ends; foul play suspected
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The Durham Sun
July 16, 1985
Orange sheriff seeks help finding 2 men
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The Herald Sun
Crimestoppers Cash Reward Ad
July 27, 1985
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The Charlotte Observer
2 Weeks of Searching Turn Up Nothing in Disappearance of 2 Hillsborough Men
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The Herald-Sun
August 8, 1986
Mrs. Bane Feels Better After Polygraph
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The Durham Sun
August 8, 1986
Missing man’s wife takes test
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The Herald Sun
August 9, 1986
Sheriff Says Mrs. Bane ‘Never Was a Suspect’
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The Herald-Sun
March 21, 1986
Two Persons Under Suspicion in Hayes-Bane Disappearance
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December 21, 1987
Orange county search more than 2 years old, but information scarce
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Curtis Bane obituary
The Durham Sun
July 16, 1988
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The Chapel Hill Herald
July 2, 1988
Murder charged in Bane-Hayes Case
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The Chapel Hill News
July 6, 1988
Bane family, friends say suspect was feared
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The Chapel Hill Herald
July 7, 1988
Franklin, Buchanan indicted for murder
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The Chapel Hill Newspaper
July 7, 1988
Widow might favor deal in Bane case
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The Chapel Hill Herald
July 18, 1988
After three years, Bane, Hayes get proper burials
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The Chapel Hill Herald
August 8, 1988
Franklin, Buchanan planning to waive arraignment today
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The Chapel Hill News
August 8, 1988
‘Innocent’ pleas set for accused killers
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The Chapel Hill Herald
June 2, 1989
Franklin pleads guilty to slayings
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The Chapel Hill Herald
September 3, 1989
A convicted killer gives his account
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