By NC WANTED Staff

Posted: Feb 25, 2009
Updated: Mar. 4, 2010

HALIFAX COUNTY — April Caine said a quick prayer before she took a breath and recounted the night she got the news her father had been murdered.

He was shot in an acquaintance’s kitchen, an apparent robbery gone bad, and died within minutes.

Wilbert Caine, 58, lived in Hobgood, a small community of about 400 people in Halifax County. Caine was a kind man, well liked, who never got into any trouble with the law.

His daughter does not know why he was at Clifton Holiday’s house on November 24, 2006, but she knows the two men who stormed into the house raining gunfire meant to hit Mr. Holiday.

Holiday has not provided Halifax County Sheriff’s deputies with much information about who came to the house last night. Right now, the best investigators have is a description of a car – a black SUV, either a Lincoln Navigator, Ford Expedition or Cadillac Escalade with a chrome grille – and a vague description of one of the men – 5’8” to 5’10”, medium-brown complexion and slightly stocky build.

Holiday has drug convictions, currently is absconding from parole and Major Bruce Temple said investigating Caine’s murder has been a challenge that has consumed countless hours.

“It was a household with a local reputation of drug sales. So to say it was simply picked at random, it was a somewhat isolated area,” Temple said. “A very contemporary crime would be robbing drug dealers. People on the street are certainly willing to rob a drug dealer. They can get product, they can get money, and quite often those crimes go unreported because of the targets, or the victims.”

April gets angry at the thought that someone holds the key to justice for her dad’s senseless murder, and confesses she has grown more distrustful of strangers and casual acquaintances over the past two years.

“I heard rumors that it was a hit. And you know that he had owed money. And I don’t know for sure if it’s true. But I know if you owe someone money, you know who you owe. So you got a clue of who did it,” she said. “My dad was just in the way. Someone has killed an innocent person and, you know, that’s not right. It’s not right to take a life at all, but to take an innocent life, you know, that’s just hard.”

Major Temple is sure the case is solvable – only one of the gunmen was masked, so he thinks someone local enlisted the help of an out-of-town accomplice. He hopes someone in the area remembers someone in town with a Lincoln Navigator or similar vehicle matching the description.

“Anybody capable of murdering anybody shouldn’t be out amongst us,” he said. “There’s a special place for them here and after.”

April hopes the day comes here when her father’s killer is behind bars. She expects to be haunted by what happened to her father forever, but thinks an arrest would make the day-to-day questions easier to live with.

“Just have a whole lot built in me and it’s hard,” she said. “And I still go past the house that he was living in, and um, I drive by there slow and just look at it. And just go on to the grave and sit out there and I say a prayer and I always say when I go there that justice will be served on whoever did this.”

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