{"id":1508,"date":"2026-06-01T20:05:37","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T20:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/durhammovinghub.com\/?p=1508"},"modified":"2026-06-01T20:05:37","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T20:05:37","slug":"after-15-years-a-plea-for-answers-on-daniel-moses-the-missing-barbecue-man-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/durhammovinghub.com\/?p=1508","title":{"rendered":"After 15 years, a plea for answers on Daniel Moses, the missing \u2018Barbecue Man\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.<\/p>\n

Read our AI Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n

Fifteen years ago, I took a call in the newsroom from a woman I\u2019d never met: a children\u2019s book author from the tiny town of Rich Square, who explained in desperate tones that her older brother was missing, and the tin-roofed house where he lived stood mysteriously empty, burned halfway to the ground.<\/p>\n

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She asked me to come look, and to write about his disappearance, because after two months, nobody else was looking very hard for Daniel Moses, a retired truck driver better known around Northampton County as the \u201cBarbecue Man\u201d for the chicken plates he grilled and delivered.<\/p>\n

So I drove two hours northeast through miles of swamp and cotton fields until I met Shelia Moses at the charred wreck of her grandfather\u2019s house and heard the chilling details:<\/p>\n

That was 2011.<\/p>\n

Daniel Moses is still missing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI promised our mother that I would find her oldest son in her lifetime,\u201d Shelia Moses told me last week. \u201cThat did not happen. I was 49 years old when he went missing. In a few weeks, I will be 65. I hope to find Daniel in my lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, what drew me to Moses\u2019 disappearance was the eerie connection to his sister\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

In 2011, Shelia Moses was 50 and decades removed from Rich Square, having left her hometown as a young woman to study at Shaw University. By the time of her big brother\u2019s disappearance, she was a successful writer living in Atlanta.<\/p>\n

But she had used the very house where Daniel Moses was living as a setting in her award-winning book \u201cThe Legend of Buddy Bush,\u201d a proud symbol of her grandfather\u2019s hard work in the rural, segregated South.<\/p>\n

Henry Braxton Jones bought that with roughly 3 acres in the 1950s, farmed it and dug ditches to keep the family going.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch a happy place,\u201d she told me at the time. \u201cEerie is the word for all of this. For this to happen in a place where we played in the yard and caught fireflies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her brother even serves as inspiration for the character of \u201cCoy\u201d in her young-adult novel, moving north to Harlem and inspiring his younger siblings.<\/p>\n

To see the house and her brother gone felt like a terrible new chapter.<\/p>\n

\u201cI make a living telling stories,\u201d she said, \u201cand I wouldn\u2019t ever tell a story like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that strange connection faded quickly from the case, and another thing kept me coming back to Rich Square: the persistence of Shelia Moses.<\/p>\n

Even in 2011, this case raised few eyebrows \u2014 even in a county with 16,500 residents. I got little idea it was keeping investigators awake at night.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no evidence other than he\u2019s missing and it\u2019s suspicious,\u201d Capt. D.M. Harmon of the Northampton County Sheriff\u2019s Office told me at the time. \u201cAccording to the family, it\u2019s real unusual that he\u2019d be gone that long without calling anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

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And when I called a year later, he didn\u2019t call back.<\/p>\n

But haunted by the idea that her brother lay dead somewhere, and at least one person knew the spot, she refused to let anyone forget.<\/p>\n

In 2016, with five years gone, she held a rally in nearby Halifax, pointing out that 12 people remained missing from Northampton and Halifax counties \u2014 one of them her brother, many of them Black. She asked for the FBI to intervene, arguing that Daniel\u2019s cell phone pinged off a Virginia tower around the time of the fire, expanding jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

Shelia Moses kept pushing for searches: in a nearby well, in a place called the Quarry Swamp near Cumbo Road. I have joined volunteers on two of those searches, pushing through sticker bushes and scratching the ground with a hoe, finding no clues.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hate to say it, but we\u2019re only human,\u201d Sheriff Jack Smith said in 2021. \u201cWe\u2019ve talked to everyone we can think to talk to.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a decade, a woman called Shelia Moses from nearby Woodland to say she was driving on Cumbo Road when a car in front of her hit a bump going over the bridge. The trunk popped open, showing a dark-skinned man\u2019s leg with a tube sock, which her brother was known to wear.<\/p>\n

In 2023, another woman called Moses and named the killer, along with a connection to the woman who spotted the sock foot, while a caller also reported the same suspect to the nearby Jackson police.<\/p>\n

After a recent meeting with Northampton deputies, Moses told me last week, nobody followed up when Jackson officers gave them that name.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people many people believe are responsible for Daniel\u2019s disappearance are known to the Northampton County Sheriff\u2019s Office,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is my hope that this year they will ask the FBI to take over the investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, she told me, a retired SBI agent long working the case as a reserve deputy has another full-time job in Texas, working remotely. When I asked Walter Brown, the reserve deputy, about this workload, he said he had little time to investigate Moses\u2019 death anymore but said other deputies are working on it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t given up,\u201d Sheriff Smith told me last year.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t return a text last week.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written this story 10 times now since 2011.<\/p>\n

In all that time, not one person has complained about reading this old news yet again.<\/p>\n

I would be surprised if anyone has noticed.<\/p>\n

So if necessary, I\u2019ll write Daniel Moses\u2019 story again next year. And the next, if I\u2019m able.<\/p>\n

And every year after that until somebody, finally, gives it the ending it deserves.<\/p>\n

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This story was originally published June 1, 2026 at 5:00 AM.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shelia Moses is a well-known writer whose grandfather\u2019s house burned in a mysterious 2011 fire from which her brother Daniel disappeared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-read-todays-edition"],"yoast_head":"\nAfter 15 years, a plea for answers on Daniel Moses, the missing \u2018Barbecue Man\u2019 - Durham Moving Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/durhammovinghub.com\/?p=1508\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"After 15 years, a plea for answers on Daniel Moses, the missing \u2018Barbecue Man\u2019 - 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