The Black Dahlia, JonBenét Ramsey, The Zodiac Killer: all of these are names of famous cold cases within the United States, and in 1971 another one was set to join the list. The double homicide of North Carolina students Patricia Mann and Jesse McBane is still unsolved, however the team of The Long Dance podcast hope to resolve that.

The Long Dance is created by Eryk Pruitt, Drew Adamek, Piper Kessler and Mike Rollin in collaboration with Major Tim Horne of the Orange County Sheriff’s department. The podcast team sets out to chronicle the recently reopened Mann-McBane case in hopes to steer the 47-year-old tale to its conclusion.

The new investigation started when the Sheriff’s department started looking at cold cases and reaching out to witnesses and suspects.

“We got to the Mann-McBane case and found a contact with new information on it,” Horne said. “I’ve been investigating it since for the last few years and became a close friend of the families because of it.”

On Valentine’s Day in 1971, Jesse McBane, an NC State student at the time, and Patricia Mann, a 20-year-old nursing student at Watts Hospital, went to a dance at the hospital in Durham. The two left so McBane could walk Mann to her dormitory before her 1 a.m. curfew. The couple did not return that night.

The Long Dance’s involvement in the story begins with Adamek, an investigative reporter from Durham who contacted Pruitt, an established fiction writer and filmmaker, for assistance in writing investigative pieces on cold cases in the Triangle area after reading an article Pruitt wrote for Indy Week. Pruitt’s search only yielded the Mann-McBane case, but it was all he needed.

“[The story] was so compelling even though there was very little out there about it,” Pruitt said. “There was really no other story for me. This was a sensational story like you would pull out of a fiction book, but there was nothing publicly available.”

Adamek was instantly on board once Pruitt introduced the case to him. Once the duo found out that Horne was leading the investigation, they immediately reached out to him.

“The first time they asked, the families and I said no,” Horne said. “I wasn’t skeptical of them, but we wanted them to prove their worth first so this wouldn’t be a relationship where we give all our info and get nothing out of it.”

In response to Horne’s challenge, Pruitt and Adamek conducted their own investigation for a short period. It yielded results, despite virtually no information on the case appearing online.

After this, Horne gave them the green light to join in on the investigation. Pruitt and Adamek began outlining the podcast and contacted Kessler, a friend and frequent collaborator of Pruitt’s, and Rollin, a musician and Pruitt’s college roommate. Kessler was tasked with sound and editing, while Rollin handled the podcast’s soundtrack.

The podcast covers the investigation over eight episodes: three for an introduction, three covering new suspects and two bringing the audience up to speed with the current state of the investigation.

“We went back and forth between seven and eight episodes for it, but we’re glad we limited ourselves to eight,” Pruitt said. “As we put out episodes, more information has come to light that will hopefully lead to a resolution.”

Kessler, who has worked as a sound designer on numerous projects, stated that working on the podcast still came with its difficulties.

“[The podcast] forced me to figure out a lot about my software,” Kessler said. “The challenge of using only sound is that there’s no visual aid to make up for any errors within it. If there’s a conversation happening in a car or a restaurant, I have to drown out the background noise enough for them to be heard but not so much that you can’t tell where they are.”

While the team’s plan was to stop with eight episodes, Pruitt has stated that once the case is either solved or enough extra evidence is gathered, The Long Dance will return for a ninth episode.

“Throughout the podcast, we referred several times to an attempted abduction in Duke Forest,” Pruitt said. “No information on it is publicly available, but since the podcast came out we’ve had people come forward to give us the information we need.”

Both Horne and the Long Dance team highly suspect that the perpetrator of the attempted kidnapping is the same person who committed the Mann-McBane murders. For the first time in almost 50 years, it looks like an end may finally be in sight.

“It takes a very sick person to do something like this,” Horne said. “I’ll do everything in my power to bring him to justice.”

To contact the investigators with any information about the Mann-McBane case, visit the Orange County Sheriff’s Office’s website at www.ocso.com.