Sun Drop murders: A timeline of nearly 20 years before arrest in Concord case
The distinctly yellow Sun Drop soda is, in many ways, synonymous with North Carolina culture — and, for locals who remember, a long-unsolved double homicide inside a Concord bottling plant.
Three police chiefs have tried to find the person who shot and killed two people over petty cash inside the Sun Drop Bottling Co. north of Charlotte. For 18 years, the June 13, 2008, murder went unsolved.
This week, a department across the country — on the coast of Washington and farther west than Seattle — arrested and charged a man in the killings of 59-year-old Donna Barnhardt and 44-year-old Darrell Noles.
Details on how police connected the man, Johnny Steven Talbert, to the deaths remain scant. Concord Police this week said they contacted him shortly after the killings, and he fled the state.
But how the homicides he is accused of affected the then-small-town of Concord are crystallized in newspaper clippings.
Here’s a timeline of the Sun Drop murders, according to Charlotte Observer archives.
June 13, 2008
Barnhardt started her day at Sun Drop at Branchview Drive and Cabarrus Avenue the same way she had for 18 years. Although, today, she planned to leave around lunchtime to drive to the beach with her family.
She was a mother to three and a grandmother to five and was known to dote on her granddaughters all the time, but especially before dance recitals.
Noles was in the office, where less than 30 people worked and called themselves family, to apply for a part-time gig after being laid off from Windstream. His wife dropped him off at the brick building and would be back soon.
They had two children and two grandchildren, and Noles was the song leader at Bright Light Baptist Church.
But at 10 a.m., before Barnhardt could drive east and before Noles could sing and hold in his hands a new paycheck, a man wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt walked into the plant, shot them both and fled with vending machine change and cash from the front office.
Another employee found Noles and Barnhardt. More than 30 officers swarmed the area. Everyone locked their doors.
The CEO of Sun Drop Bottling Co., John King, and his wife, Connie, were at the beach already. The King family had founded the small bottling company in 1954, but their roots in soda bottling went back to 1904.
First, John’s phone rang. Then Connie’s.
“No. No. No,” she said, over and over, shaking and crying on the side of the road for 10 minutes.
June 14, 2008
Police continued looking for the man who turned the small company into a crime scene. At the time, there were no surveillance cameras at Sun Drop. Officials said they were “searching for a black man in his 20s, from 5-foot-5 to 5-foot-10, with a slim build and shoulder-length dreadlocks.”
June 20, 2008
A prayer vigil surrounded the Sun Drop plant. For the second time this week, police set up checkpoints to stop motorists in the area, asking them questions and giving them fliers.
June 24, 2008
Police announced a $50,000 reward for information on the shooter.
Aug. 2, 2008
Noles’ wife is charged with embezzling from her former company, and a benefit dinner for her and her family is subsequently canceled.
She was charged in a $60,000 embezzlement from Spectrum Sales in Concord, where she worked for 13 years.
Detectives had nearly completed their investigation when her husband died in the double homicide. The Concord Police Department delayed serving the warrants out of respect for grieving family members.
Sept. 9 2008
Police released a sketch of the man they think killed Barnhart and Noles.
The reward for information on the man would go up from $50,000 to $75,000 to $85,000 over the years. The case would be on the “America’s Most Wanted” television show. The King family would make a website with news and information on the case called www.justicefordonna.com.
It is now inactive.
Oct. 12, 2011
NASCAR driver Kevin Conway’s No. 87 ExtenZe Toyota carried images of Barnhardt and Noles, along with Concord police contact information, during the Dollar General 300.
May 2026
Police followed up on hundreds of tips over nearly two decades. Nothing panned out until late last year.
“Through a meticulous reexamination of evidence and the pursuit of previously undeveloped leads, detectives uncovered critical information,” the city said in a statement, without much elaboration.
In December, they reached out to Port Angeles police in Washington, and on May 18, Concord officers traveled there themselves.
By Monday, Talbert was in custody.
He remains in Washington and has an extradition hearing scheduled for June 12.
Sun Drop’s significance
While more hearings, investigation and perhaps a trial must play out before the Sun Drop killings are solved, Talbert’s arrest is the first real development and chance at closure for the victims’ families and the town of Concord.
As an Observer freelancer and professor wrote in 2009:
“Sun Drop’s history goes back a long ways in this town.”
It starts in 1892, when a man named John Thomas Honeycutt was born and, 21 years later, started making soda deliveries in a horse-drawn “truck.” He bought a bottling company and its Sun Drop drink (originally developed in Missouri and perfected in Gastonia) in 1954.
He put his niece, Margarett King, in charge of Sun Drop Bottling Co., which remained in the King family until 2016, when it sold to Cheerwine — another iconic North Carolina drink.
Sun Drop grew and grew and eventually wasn’t bottled much in Concord, where the staff stayed small. But its presence was huge — and so were the celebrities who backed it, like Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr.
In Mooresville, murals made artist John Morris more than $15,000. One is about the size of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” at 16 feet tall and 28 feet wide, Morris told the Observer in 2010.
The brand to this day has lifelong fans, and in Concord, what was at risk of becoming a lifelong mystery may be on its way to a close.
