"It still stands today as the city’s worst mass killing – five people slaughtered in an Outlaw motorcycle gang clubhouse on Independence Day 1979.
On Wednesday, 36 years and four days later, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police announced they closed the case.
Someone knew something, and decades of time – and the dogged pursuit by a homicide detective who wouldn’t give up – finally loosened that person’s lips.
Police won’t say who talked, but after sharing their findings with the Mecklenburg District Attorney’s Office, they were ready to name the two men they hold responsible for the slayings: Gregory Scott Lindaman and Randy Allen Pigg.
Both are long dead. Lindaman was killed in a traffic wreck in Houston on Oct. 15, 1990, and Pigg died in his Charlotte home Oct. 5, 2007, from liver disease.
For years, there has been speculation that a rival biker gang, possibly the Hell’s Angels, was responsible for the killings. Not so, police Maj. Cam Selvey revealed. It was to settle a personal score.
In a rented house at 2500 Allen Road South, the Outlaws kept a fortress. No one knows how the intruders got past its 8-foot fence and vicious dogs.
About 5:30 a.m. that July 4, Outlaw leader William “Chains” Flamont rode up to the clubhouse and discovered the slaughter.
William “Water Head” Allen, 22, was leaning back in a chair on the front porch, his body riddled by bullets. He was a probationary member of the club, and it appeared he had been taken by surprise while on guard duty. One leg was propped up, and a .38-caliber pistol lay in his lap.
Just inside the door, William “Mouse” Dronenburg, 32, was sprawled on the floor, legs wrapped in blankets on a couch. An unfired gun lay nearby.
On a sofa was Bridgette “Midget” Benfield, 5-feet tall and two months shy of her 18th birthday. She had been shot in the head. She had run away from her family’s Gaston County home after falling in with the biker culture months earlier.
Beside her was Leonard “Terrible Terry” Henderson, 29, resting beside an unfired gun. On another couch lay Randall Feazell, 28, bullet holes from leg to face.
“You’ve heard of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre,” a detective told reporters at the scene. “Well, this is the July Fourth massacre.”
Investigators believe the group was out until sometime around midnight the night before and were probably killed in their sleep."
