RICH SQUARE
Eleven years ago, Daniel Moses disappeared from the tiny town where he grew up, vanishing from a house so remote maybe five cars pass it in a day.
He was a big man — 6-foot-3, 200 pounds — and trained in karate. And around Rich Square, he was known as “The Barbecue Man” for the chicken dinners he delivered by hand. So his long absence remains all the more mysterious, being easily recognized and hard to overtake.
For more than a decade, his sister Shelia Moses has pressed for answers, goading law enforcement to stay on a trail that never really warmed up, let alone turned cold. In that time her mother, who lived next door to Daniel, has died without knowing what became of her son.
But new clues offer hope in Daniel Moses’ case: a tip from a witness who saw a leg poking out from the trunk of a car, wearing the same kind of tube sock he liked to wear on his bike.
With people finally talking, Shelia Moses hopes investigators will push harder and bring peace, closure and long-sought answers.
“I’ve aged probably 20 years,” she said. “He’s the first person I think of every morning, and the last person I think of each night.”
Without a trace
Shelia Moses is a celebrated writer who has penned both young adult stories — one of which, “The Legend of Buddy Bush,” featured Daniel as a character — and a memoir from comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory.
She comes from a big family of 10 brothers and sisters that grew up on Rehobeth Road, just outside Rich Square — a Northampton County town just east of Interstate 95 with a population of 741.
By 2011, Daniel Moses had retired from truck driving at 59 and settled back home. That June, investigators found his small, one-story house burned to a blackened wreck. His door remained locked, his air-conditioner was still running, his car sat in the driveway and his tools were on the grill.
From the outset, local investigators did not treat the case as a homicide. The Northampton sheriff’s office found no conclusive proof that the fire and disappearance were connected. No blood was found inside the house, even after a Luminol test. The former police chief in Rich Square who helped fight the fire said the air-conditioner likely sparked the blaze.
The landscape offered no trace of Daniel. Around Rich Square, flat farmland and swamps stretch for miles in every direction.
In 2020, after nine years, an eight-person search team, including SBI agents and sheriff’s deputies, combed the farm across from Daniel’s old house, covering 65 acres with a cadaver dog. They searched a 38-foot well with an underwater camera and found nothing.
A Facebook tip
Last year, with her brother gone for 10 years, Shelia Moses posted a video collage on Facebook with piano music in the background. Soon after, she got a message in her inbox with a number to call.
The woman on the line said she had been on a joyride around Rich Square around the time Daniel Moses disappeared, smoking marijuana while on a break from work.
She told Shelia Moses she was following behind a car on Cumbo Road, not far from Daniel’s house, when the car hit a bump at a small bridge and the trunk popped open. A dark-skinned leg appeared from inside, wearing a tennis shoe and tube sock.
“I screamed,” Moses said, recalling the conversation.
The woman was crying while she told the story, explaining that she turned away in another direction. While Moses didn’t believe all of her story, it had enough of the truth about it that she called the State Bureau of Investigation.
This week, law enforcement agents in Northampton County confirmed that they have the woman’s story and are continuing to investigate that and further information they could not yet share.
‘Other areas to search’
Last August, deputies and SBI agents searched the area around Cumbo Road and did not find any evidence related to the case, the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald reported. Northampton Sheriff Jack Smith told the newspaper, “We have obtained some additional information that identified other areas to search.”
Moses knew that her brother liked to wear tube socks and tennis shoes when he rode his bike. Earlier this year, while a guest on the popular Joe Madison “The Black Eagle” podcast, she said another witness reported seeing him near that bridge around the time of his disappearance, standing near his bike with a girl.
On that show, she added that the caller had been interviewed three times and passed a lie detector test — all information Madison called encouraging.
“When a lot of time has passed by,” he said on the show, “people’s attitudes change. People say and know things that maybe there were afraid to say in 2011. ... You’re talking about a city or a town, a rural town, 900 people. Everybody knows everybody. Now you’ve got eyewitnesses to what could best described as suspicious behavior.”
Until the whole truth is known, Shelia Moses will not rest.
This story was originally published August 30, 2022 8:00 AM.