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Dr. Frank “Buddy” McCutcheon Jr., a respected North Carolina plastic surgeon, fell asleep on the couch of his Asheville home on a Friday night in July of 2016 — but would never wake up.
At around 3 a.m. the next morning, someone shot the beloved doctor in the head as he slept, taking his life and sparking a mystery that led detectives to an unlikely suspect, according to “The Day the Music Died” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
Who was Frank “Buddy” McCutcheon Jr.?
At the time of his death, the 64-year-old who loved music was working as a talented plastic surgeon at his own cosmetic surgery practice in Asheville, North Carolina, which he ran with help from his wife of more than three decades, Brenda McCutcheon, a registered nurse.
Together, they had created an enviable practice. But those who knew him said that Buddy’s real passion was music. He had his own music studio, played in local bands and, over the years, had mastered playing everything from the guitar to the banjo, often gravitating to music reminiscent of America’s beginnings.
“Buddy had an ear. He could pick out any melody and he could chord,” close friend and former bandmate Scott Lunsford recalled.
Buddy and Brenda never had children, but lived a full life participating in Civil War reenactments, attending music events, and hopping on Buddy’s private plane.
The night Buddy McCutcheon died
On the evening of July 15, 2016, Buddy and Brenda shared a Subway sandwich and watched television together before settling into their respective places for the night: an upstairs bedroom for Brenda and the couch for Buddy, who liked to drift off to the sound of the TV playing in the background.
Brenda would later tell investigators that at around 3 a.m., she woke up to a loud bang that sounded like a thunderclap and rushed downstairs to find Buddy bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head.
She told authorities that she realized her husband was dead and took off running to a neighbor’s house, but when the neighbor didn’t answer, she ran back to her house to get the phone to call 911.
Deputies arrived from the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office a few minutes later and found a frantic Brenda waiting outside. Unsure of whether anyone else was still in the home, deputies proceeded with caution as they made their way through the residence, where they discovered only Buddy, still lying on the couch.
“It was obvious it was a gunshot wound,” John Ledford, who at the time was a detective for the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office, told Dateline. “There was no exit wound, but it was fairly apparent it was an entry wound to the top of the head.”
Given the location of the gunshot wound and the fact that no gun was found next to the body, authorities were able to rule out the possibility of a suicide.
“Why would anybody… want to kill my husband?”
Brenda agreed to take a gunshot residue test and went down to the station to talk with detectives. She told them that she couldn’t think of anyone who would have wanted her husband dead.
“Why would anybody — nobody that has ever come into our house would want to kill my husband…,” Brenda said in her interview. “Maybe it was — I don’t know, a junkie wanting something. I don’t know.”
The problem with that theory was that nothing obvious had been taken from the home. Even stranger, officers searching the property recovered the gun — a small handgun that the couple usually kept in a kitchen drawer of their home — tossed in some ivy and greenery not far from the house.
Brenda told detectives that she and Buddy had a “good relationship” and insisted that she never fired a weapon that night.
“I am telling you the truth that happened to me,” she said. “I do not know the truth that happened to him.”
Buddy’s siblings didn’t believe that Brenda could have had anything to do with killing their brother.
“She was very caring and… so sweet. She was a wonderful wife,” Buddy’s brother Clutch McCutcheon said.
When the lab tests came back, there was no gunshot residue on Brenda’s hands and only a small amount of it on her clothing, which could have been due to her leaning over her husband’s body.
Financial troubles come to light
But detectives couldn’t shake their suspicions that Brenda was involved, especially after they arrived at Buddy’s office just days after the shooting and found her throwing records from the practice into a dumpster.
“They were selling everything down to like gauze bandages, all the equipment was all being liquidated,” said Walt Thrower, then a detective with the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators also learned that at the time of Buddy’s death, the North Carolina Department of Revenue had launched a criminal investigation into the practice’s activities. The practice was a few years behind on filing its corporate tax returns and although money had been taken out of its employees paychecks for taxes, the business failed to pass that money onto the state.
According to the IRS, $385,000 in federal taxes had never been paid.
As the office manager, Brenda was likely aware of these financial issues, but when the Department of Revenue paid Buddy a visit the same week he died, the news seemed to catch him by surprise.
In the days that followed, the couple met with an attorney and Buddy promised they’d look into their finances that weekend — the very same weekend he was fatally shot.
A few months after he died, Buddy’s brother Clutch listened to a recording of his sister-in-law’s 911 call and was surprised to hear that Brenda had claimed that Buddy always left their back door unlocked. He knew for a fact that wasn’t correct because he’d been to visit his brother just before he died and Buddy made a point of telling him to lock the door because they had bears in the area.
Brenda McCutcheon becomes main suspect
Detectives came to believe that Brenda was the only person with the means, motive and opportunity to kill her husband, but they didn’t have any forensic evidence to tie her to the crime.
Still, Det. Thrower was convinced that the circumstantial evidence pointed only to Brenda. For instance, who else would have known the gun was kept in that kitchen drawer? Thrower prepared a thorough presentation for Buncombe County District Attorney Todd Williams that laid out the case.
It was enough to convince Williams to take the case to a grand jury.
“We do take risks in the DA’s office, we don’t just try the slam dunks,” he said. “There’s a lot of complexity to this case but the case needed to be tried.”
The grand jury returned an indictment for first-degree murder and Brenda, who was now living in Tennessee, was arrested.
The case went to trial in January of 2020. While Brenda’s defense team argued that there was no physical evidence that tied her to the crime, prosecutors focused on the large amount of circumstantial evidence.
Assistant District Attorney Meghan Lock argued that Brenda believed she was the only one who would go down for the financial crimes after being forced to assume the role of office manager, despite not having the qualifications.
“It was just very clear that everything she had ever done was for Buddy, built around what Buddy wanted, built around what Buddy’s dreams were,” Lock told Dateline: Secrets Uncovered. “And so he sticks her in this office, having to do this paperwork, not even utilizing her as a nurse in that office even though that’s what she truly was and she very much, I believe, resented him for that.”
Who killed Frank “Buddy” McCutcheon Jr.?
Lock believed that Brenda finally “snapped” the night of the murder, thinking that with Buddy out of the picture, the Department of Revenue’s case might go away and she’d no longer have to continue to run the business.
The jury agreed and Brenda was convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
