22-year-old Roberta Wall was killed in 1986 and for four decades her murder went unsolved. But now, with the help of new technology, police were able to arrest a man in Connecticut. At 6:30 on the morning of May 15th, 1986, a passerby cutting across the grounds of Old Donation Elementary School on Ferry Plantation Drive in Virginia Beach, Virginia, found a body in the field behind the building.
A 22-year-old woman lay in the grass with multiple stab wounds. She had been assaulted. The field sat directly across the street from the Bayside Public Library, the building where she had volunteered. She was killed steps from the place she walked into every day. Investigators collected DNA from the assault and stored it as evidence.
It took 15 years just to build a usable profile from it. Then, that profile sat in the FBI’s national database for another 22 years and never came back with a match. The man who left it had never been arrested for anything, anywhere. The one piece of evidence that could name him pointed at a ghost.
This is how they found the killer in 2026. Her name was Roberta Walls. People who knew her called her Bobby. She was 22 years old and worked as a volunteer at the Bayside Public Library in Virginia Beach. Police later described her as a vibrant young woman with a promising future, a loving daughter, a big sister, and someone who could be counted on.
She had tattoos on her arm and abdomen. She was known for her kindness. On the evening of May 14th, 1986, Bobby left the Bayside Public Library and headed out to spend time with friends. It was a normal Wednesday night in a neighborhood she knew well. She had grown up moving through the Aragona area of Virginia Beach and the Ocean View area of Norfolk, the parts of the Hampton Roads region where her social world had taken shape.
The library sat on Ferry Plantation Drive, a residential street in the Bayside area of Virginia Beach. Old Donation Elementary School stood directly across the road, a single-story brick building with a parking lot in front and a [music] big grass field behind it. Behind the school, a wide field stretched back toward a tree line.
By day, [music] it was a place where children played at recess and families crossed in the afternoons. By night, it was empty. After closing, [music] the library parking lot emptied and the school went dark. Streetlights along Ferry Plantation Drive did not reach the field. The grass between the school and the trees was open ground with no fences, no lights, and the nearest house too far away to see anything.
At approximately midnight, Bobby made a phone call to one of the friends she was supposed to meet. It was the last time anyone she knew heard her voice. Sometime in the hours that followed, Bobby was attacked in the field behind the elementary school. She was stabbed multiple times and assaulted. The violence was severe. Investigators found what the case file described as obvious signs of trauma due to a violent assault.
Her body was discovered at 6:30 the next morning by a passerby walking onto the school grounds. A toxicology report later showed she had drugs and alcohol in her system, a detail Detective Angela Curren mentioned at a 2017 press conference. Virginia Beach Police Department officers responded and sealed the crime scene. Detectives processed the field, the surrounding area, and the perimeter of the school grounds.
They collected biological evidence from the assault and stored it alongside the rest of the physical material from the scene, the clothing, the trace material, the photographs of of field and the body. The crime scene technicians worked the field through the morning, marking and bagging every item that might one day be tied to whoever had been there during the night.
They mapped where the body lay in relation to the school behind it and the library across the street. That evidence was stored in case a future technology could one day read [music] what 1986 forensics could not. The detectives who processed the scene that morning did not know what DNA profiling was. They just followed procedure, labeling and cataloging everything they collected and storing it under conditions that would hold up across the years.
Some of those original detectives are no longer alive. They did not live to see the arrest, but the evidence they preserved is the reason it happened. Virginia Beach police launched an investigation that would span decades. In the first weeks and months, detectives interviewed everyone connected to Bobby, friends she had been with the evening of May 14th, neighbors on Ferry Plantation Drive, people who lived near the elementary school, and patrons of the library.
They canvassed the Bayside neighborhood door by door. Each of those friends voluntarily provided a DNA sample, and everyone was eliminated. Detectives [music] checked the backgrounds of known sex offenders across the Virginia Beach area and the broader Hampton Roads region. They contacted military installations, Naval Air Station Oceana, the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, Naval Station Norfolk, and others nearby.
The transient nature of military service made the search harder, with thousands of sailors, soldiers, and Marines rotating through duty stations within driving distance of the field. Over the course of the DNI investigation, the DNI of 41 different men was compared with the offender’s profile. Each gave a sample voluntarily and was cleared. Everyone was eliminated.
By 1988, the active leads had dried up. The case was transferred to the Virginia Beach Police Department’s Cold Case Unit. The file stayed open and the evidence stayed in storage. Over the decades that followed, new detectives picked up the case every few years, reading through the same witness statements, the interview transcripts, the photographs of the field and the body.
Each one looked for something the previous detective might have missed. There were no witnesses, no murder weapon, no suspect, only the biological material in storage that no existing technology could turn into a name. In 2001, 15 years after the murder, the Virginia Department of Forensic Science developed a full male DNA profile from the evidence.
The biological material preserved since 1986 yielded a usable genetic signature, a sequence of markers that identified one specific person. That profile was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offenders. If the man who killed Bobby had ever been convicted of a serious crime, CODIS would have caught the match. It didn’t.
The profile sat as an unknown for the next two decades and the answer was always the same. Bobby’s family carried the weight of the case across four decades. They declined to make public statements throughout the investigation. They asked for privacy as the years passed and the phone did not ring with the call they were waiting for.
Their grief was held inside a circle that did not include press conferences or television interviews. A daughter murdered at 22. A sister who never came home. No name to attach to the person who had done it. Bobby would have been 32 in 1996, 42 in 2006, 62 in 2026, the year the man was finally identified. The milestones that mark a life, the career she could have built, the relationships she could have formed, the family she could have started.
None of them happened. Years accumulated and the case stayed cold. Her family endured the anniversaries, the holidays, the ordinary days that reminded them of the person who was supposed to be there and was not. They watched detectives come and go from the case. They watched [music] decades pass without a call that changed anything. Their kids grew up.
Their [music] grandkids grew up. For 40 years there was nothing to say publicly and they said nothing. After the arrest, the Walls family asked again for privacy and the police department respected the request, declining to share any details about how the family received the news. In 2017, 31 years after the murder, the Virginia Beach Police Department secured funding for advanced forensic DNA phenotyping, a technology that uses genetic markers to predict a suspect’s physical appearance.
The department sent the crime scene DNA to Parabon NanoLabs in Reston, Virginia. It was the first time the department had used the technology on one of its cases. The hope was that a predicted face might trigger a phone call from someone who recognized it. Parabon produced two composite sketches.
One showed what the suspect likely looked like at approximately 25 years old, around the time of the murder. The other showed what he might look like at approximately 55, his projected appearance in 2017. With more than 90% confidence, the analysis predicted he was of European descent and fair-skinned with blue eyes and light brown hair.
Detective Angela Curran of the Cold Case Unit released the composites to the public on November 28th, 2017. The department distributed the images to news outlets across Hampton Roads and posted them on social media. While the sketches might not be exact, Curran told reporters at the time she hoped they would trigger a memory in someone’s mind and lead them to call the police with a name.
The sketches generated attention across Hampton Roads. They showed a face, two versions of the same man separated by three decades of aging, and news outlets across the region ran them. The phenotyping work also helped investigators in another way. According to Detective Curran at the time, the results eliminated more than half of the people who had been on the case’s list of potential suspects, narrowing the field of possible attackers significantly.
But a face without a context was not enough. Nobody called the police with a name that matched the DNA. The case remained where it had been for 31 years. In 2023, the Virginia Beach Police Department received grant funding through [music] the Assault Kit Initiative, a program administered by the Virginia Office of the Attorney General.
The grant provided resources to pursue forensic genetic genealogy, the same technique that had been identifying cold case killers across the country since the Golden State Killer arrest in 2018. Cases like Bobby’s assaults with preserved biological evidence and no CODIS match were exactly what the program had been designed to address.
The technique did not require the killer himself to be in a public genealogy database. It required only that a distant relative had uploaded their own genetic data for ancestry research. Investigators took the DNA profile developed in 2001 and submitted it for genealogical analysis. Parabon NanoLabs used the preserved evidence to generate a far more detailed genetic profile than the standard [music] set of markers used by CODIS.
The new profile had hundreds of thousands of points of comparison, enough to detect distant family relationships across public ancestry databases. The technique had been identifying killers in cold cases across the country where genetic genealogy traced suspects through distant relatives who had uploaded their DNA for family history research.
A network of agencies contributed to the Walls investigation. The Virginia State Police, the Cold Case Squad, the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia, and the Virginia Beach Office of the Commonwealth Attorney. A family tree was built outward from partial matches in public databases.
Distant cousins, second cousins, anyone who had voluntarily uploaded their genetic data and who shared enough markers to suggest a relative. The matches pointed at a family. Each confirmed match narrowed the pool of possible suspects. From there, the work moved off the genealogy sites and onto a research desk where the team pulled census records, marriage certificates, and military service records.
They traced birth and death documents across multiple states and generations, cutting branches that didn’t [music] fit the geography of 1986 Virginia Beach or the timeline of the crime. Each branch was followed forward through marriages and children, backward through parents and grandparents until the tree narrowed enough to point at one living person.
The lines converged on a man in Newington, Connecticut, a retired United States Navy sailor who had been stationed in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia in 1986, [music] the year Bobby was killed. He had left Virginia decades earlier and settled in a suburb south of Hartford. His name had never appeared in the case file.
Detectives obtained a search warrant for his DNA. The warrant sample was sent to the Virginia Department of Forensic Science for a direct comparison against the profile from the 1986 crime scene. The two matched. After four decades, the case finally had a name. The retired sailor in Newington was the man who had stabbed and assaulted a 22-year-old library volunteer in a field behind an elementary school 40 years earlier.
On May 18th, 2026, at approximately 4:17 in the afternoon, Newington police knocked on his door. He was 66 years old. He was charged in Connecticut as a fugitive from justice pending extradition to Virginia, where he faces charges of rape and capital murder in the commission of a rape. Bond was set at $10 million.
Barry was processed at the Newington Police Department and transported to New Britain Superior Court the next day, where the formal proceedings began. He is currently held at a Hartford correctional facility while extradition is pending. His name was Charles Randall Berry. Berry’s attorney later told NBC News that Virginia investigators had contacted him approximately two years before the arrest, asking to speak with his client. Berry didn’t talk.
The attorney said he didn’t really know what the allegations against his client were until the May 2026 arrest. That timeline suggests the genealogy pointed at Berry around 2024, with additional investigation, warrant DNA collection, lab comparison, and the legal process for an interstate arrest continuing through 2025 and into 2026.
In May 1986, Berry was approximately 26 years old. He was a United States Navy sailor stationed in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, just miles from the Bayside Public Library and the field behind Old Donation Elementary School where Bobby was killed. The Navy does not maintain service records prior to 1990, which is why the trail of his military history was incomplete when reporters tried to follow it.
Berry had no known connection to Roberta Walls. Police confirmed the attack was a stranger crime, a random act of violence by a man with no relationship to his victim. Bobby had never met him. A Navy sailor crossed paths with a library volunteer on a spring evening in Virginia Beach, and what happened in the field behind the school that night defined the rest of one life and ended the other.
After the murder, Barry left the Virginia Beach area. He moved to Connecticut and married Jean. They were married for 40 years, right up to the morning of his arrest. He built a life in Newington while the Virginia Beach Police Department searched for a man they could not identify. He raised no flags.
No officer ever stopped him. No investigator ever questioned him, and no warrant ever required him to provide a biological sample. He worked his way through retirement and into old age while the case against him was being kept alive far to the south of where he lived. He lived freely for four decades while Bobby’s family waited for a name that did not come until 2026.
When he left Virginia, he carried what he had done with him 600 miles north to a new life in New England. When WAVY reporters reached Jean Barry by phone at the family home in Newington after the arrest, she said the truth would come out. She declined to say anything else. Police Chief Paul Newdigate addressed the press conference after the arrest.
He acknowledged the question the case raises, how a crime this brutal could be a one-time event. “It’s incredibly scary,” he said, “for the community to think that someone who would rape and brutally murder someone 40 years ago was out in society.” He said the department was sharing what they could about the case in part to give other families still waiting for answers a reason to hope that the work continues.
[music] “Everyone here wants to know,” Newdigate said. “Someone that brutally murders and someone. How is that a one-time occurrence? So far, [music] the department had no indication Barry was involved in other crimes. He described the arrest as the result of decades of work by detectives who refused to let the case die.
Deputy Chief Jeffrey Wilkerson spoke about Bobby directly. He called her by the name her friends used. Bobby was a loving daughter, a big sister, a friend to those who knew her, and someone who could be counted on. This case really highlights the tenacity and due diligence detectives did 40 years ago, Wilkerson said, not knowing what investigators could do today.
They preserved all the evidence. This case, he added, never left the hearts and minds of the detectives who carried it forward. The legacy of the investigation, he said, was an example of the department’s dedication to Roberta Walls’ memory and to every victim it had ever worked to identify. Captain Michelle Wyatt of the Detective Bureau spoke about the moment of identification.
The evidence had not been tested since 1986, she said, and a direct DNA comparison had identified Charles Barry as the source of the profile generated in 2001. While the murder itself was an egregious event, she said, there was joy in finally finding an answer. During the course of the investigation, Wyatt added, the DNA of more than 30 males had been compared with the offender’s [music] DNA, and all had been eliminated.
The case had outlived some of the people who built it. The arrest in Connecticut closed the loop they had opened in 1986. In its official statement after the arrest, the Virginia Beach Police Department said it hoped the closure brought a measure of peace to the Walls family. No matter how much time passes, the department added, the search for the truth continues.
Barry’s attorney, Robert Lakeabel, told reporters that he and his client had not yet seen the warrant or affidavit detailing the allegations against him. We are kind of in the dark on this at this time, he said. [music] Berry’s court hearing was continued to June 17th, when it will be decided whether he waives extradition back to Virginia.
If convicted of capital murder in the commission of a sexual assault, he faces a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Virginia Beach grand jury indictment that produced the warrant remains sealed under court order. A 22-year-old library volunteer was killed in a field directly across the street from the building where she worked.
40 years later, a DNA profile preserved by Virginia Beach detectives who never knew what they were holding on to matched a retired Navy sailor 600 miles north. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.
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