Call it a harrowing day on Sept. 13, 1977, when Barbara Davenport and her friend Mary Jo “Nancy” Coates walked along a wooded path near Manchester Road and not far from the mobile home park where they lived outside of Spring Lake.

Davenport was 16.

Coates was 14.

Stephen Carl Silhan, a 23-year-old Fort Bragg soldier and 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper, was lurking in wait as the teenagers returned from a nearby convenience store, and where they stopped on the path to smoke cigarettes.

‘‘There’s someone spying on us,’’ Coates, according to Davenport, would say, and Davenport says she saw a man in Army fatigues and dark glasses before he disappeared into the brush.

It was not the first time Silhan preyed on the innocent.

Twelve months earlier, the Army sergeant kidnapped a couple at gunpoint from a recreation area in Chatham County and sexually assaulted the woman.

Finishing their cigarettes, Davenport and Coates headed down the path toward their home, when they again saw Silhan, and as they passed him, Davenport recounted how the soldier grabbed Coates and put a bayonet to her throat.

‘‘Do what I tell you,” Davenport was reliving the nightmare in 2001, “and I won’t hurt you.’’

Silhan tied up both of the terrified teenagers, Davenport would say, cut off their bras and stuffed the clothing in their mouths.

“I could hear her screaming while he was raping her,” Davenport later would relive the day. “He stabbed her once in the chest and twice in the back.”

Davenport could hear her friend gasping.

Mary Jo “Nancy” Coates was dying.

Bayonet in hand, Silhan then came for Davenport.

“God!” Davenport cried out before Silhan slashed her throat and twice stabbed her in the back. “Please help me!”

Silhan, a married father of a 3-year-old son, was arrested a week later on N.C. 87 while driving to his Sanford home.

Silhan, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in October 1977 for the Chatham County crimes, the same month he was indicted by a grand jury on charges of the murder and rape of Coates and the attempted murder of Davenport. He was sentenced to death in March 1979 for killing Coates, and 20 years for the attempted murder of Davenport.

Silhan's death sentence was overturned in March 1981 by the N.C. Supreme Court, and he was sentenced to life in prison at a second trial in July 1981.

Davenport, who later married and became a county detective, would spend the rest of her life advocating for her friend and pleading with prison officials to never parole Coates' killer.

“What about Nancy?” Davenport would say in 2010 while Silhan was incarcerated in a Tabor City correctional center, and up for parole. “Where is her parole?”

Barbara Lynn Davenport died May 24, 2016.

She was 54.

“I was sad to read that Barbara passed away almost two years ago,” Chris Block of Wisconsin wrote in a March 8 email. “I have been trying to find out if anyone knows if Sihan is still in prison. Hope so. Is there anyone fighting for Barbara anymore to keep him behind bars? If there is anything I can do as a concerned citizen to keep that animal in prison, please let me know.”

The murder was in the television crime edition of “I Survived,” on the Biography Channel, and Debbie Haslinger, an Illinois resident, also inquired about Silhan after recently watching the telecast.

Stephen Silhan died of natural causes on Jan. 24, 2017, according to the N.C. Department of Public Safety, in the Tabor City Correctional Institute.

He was 64.

Offender Number: 0369212. Inmate Status: Inactive.


Columnist Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at bkirby@fayobserver.com or 486-3571.