He and an accomplice eventually were convicted of the 1973 murder of an elderly Wrens couple, whom they strangled with coat hangers. Birt even set fire to Ruby Nell’s parents’ home and shot his own brother. He and his gang robbed banks, hauled moonshine, burned down and blew up buildings.
Some were for revenge people knew not to cross him. Most of the murders were brutal, strangling, drowning, smothering, stabbing or simply shooting. Those who wanted to eliminate an enemy knew Birt would do it for a fee. Many of Billy Sunday Birt’s murders were “contracts,” when somebody wanted somebody else dead. “I lived in terror over how their bearing the name ‘Birt’ would affect their lives,” she said. She said she tried to shield their children from her husband’s notoriety. Yet he often would buy groceries for the elderly or give money to children he didn’t even know. He often stayed away from home, either with his woman of the moment or with fellow criminals doing their dirty deeds. It was no secret, even to Ruby Nell, that Billy Sunday Birt openly dated other women. The book is titled “Grace and Disgrace: Living with Faith and the Leader of the Dixie Mafia.” Some of the pages are in Billy Sunday Birt’s own words from letters to his family. He worked with Shane and the other Birt children, along with law enforcement sources and others who knew Billy Sunday Birt and his long list of crimes. “The main reason for writing this book,” she wrote, “is to show my children and everybody else that it is impossible to live the life I’ve lived, and to come through it blessed, without the Lord.”Īuthor Phil Hudgins of Gainesville put together the story, allowing Ruby Nell to tell much of it in her own words. Mainly, he also wanted to tell the story of his mother, Ruby Nell Birt, Shane’s hero who persevered through her husband’s infidelity and crimes to protect and raise her five children.ĭeeply religious, she often had to work five jobs to support the family after her husband went to prison. One of his sons, Shane, said much had been written and broadcast about his father, some of it distorted or untrue, but he wanted to set the record straight. Some of the murders might remain unsolved, but there are bodies buried all over Barrow County and elsewhere that are tied to him and the Dixie Mafia, a loosely connected gang of criminals that prospered in Northeast Georgia in the 1960s and ’70s. Billy Sunday Birt was one of the most notorious killers in Georgia’s history, law enforcement estimating he was responsible for the death of more than 50 victims.
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