On November 7, 2005, 68-year-old Rosa Lee Crabtree came home from Sunday service to her house in Rougemont, North Carolina. Someone was waiting inside. Twenty-one years later, no one has ever been arrested or charged — and this month, North Carolina raised the reward in her case to $25,000 as investigators resubmit evidence for new DNA testing.
Crabtree was killed inside her own home in a burglary that turned violent, with no sign of forced entry — a detail that has shaped the investigation for two decades. Her niece, Tonya Miller, has spoken publicly about the family’s long wait for answers, and Durham County Sheriff Clarence Birkhead has kept the case active even as the years passed with no arrest.
Investigators believe more than one person was involved in the burglary itself, but that only one person delivered the fatal wounds — meaning at least one other living person may know exactly what happened inside that house on November 7, 2005, and has stayed silent for 21 years.
In September 2026, Governor Josh Stein announced the reward in the case had been raised to $25,000, as the Durham County Sheriff’s Office and the NC State Bureau of Investigation resubmitted physical evidence for modern DNA testing — forensic tools that didn’t exist, or weren’t nearly as capable, when Crabtree was killed in 2005.
The case remains unsolved. No one has ever been arrested or charged.
If you have any information about this case, please contact:
Durham County Sheriff’s Office: (919) 560-0897
NC State Bureau of Investigation: (919) 662-4500
Related reading
No well-reviewed book has been written about this case specifically. For more on the cold-case DNA techniques discussed in this video: search results on Amazon.
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Sources
- Governor Josh Stein, “Governor Increases Reward for Information on Durham County Murder,” governor.nc.gov, Sept. 14, 2026.
- Monica Casey, “20 years after murder, Durham victim’s family still waiting for answers,” WRAL.com, April 8, 2025.
- CBS17.com, “NC Governor increases reward for information in 2005 Durham County unsolved murder: Rosa Lee Crabtree,” Sept. 2026.
- Hoodline, “Durham Cold Case: $25K Reward in Crabtree Murder,” Sept. 2026.
- Victim photograph: family photograph widely published in coverage of the case (WRAL, April 2025), used for factual identification.
- All other imagery is licensed illustrative stock or reused illustrative assets from this channel and is credited on-screen as such; none depicts the actual persons, location, or evidence in this case unless otherwise noted.
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