A man was walking near a field behind an elementary school in Virginia Beach when he saw her. It was just after 6:30 in the morning. She was lying in the open, in plain view of anyone who passed by. She had been stabbed more than once. She had been sexually assaulted. Whoever did this had not tried very hard to hide her.
It would take 40 years to learn who did this. 40 years of tested men who turned out to be innocent. A sketch built from nothing but genetic code. And a name that wouldn’t surface until 2026 in a quiet Connecticut town far from that field. Her name was Roberta Walls. Friends and family called her Bobby. She was 22, living in Virginia Beach, and she volunteered at the Bayside Public Library.
People who knew her used the same words to describe her again and again. Kind. Compassionate. Someone you could count on. She had close relationships with her family. She had a future in front of her that nobody expected to end. On the evening of May 14th, 1986, she finished up at the library. She went home for a bit, then went back out to spend time with friends.
It was an ordinary night. Nothing about it stood out. Around midnight, she called one of those friends. That phone call is the last confirmed contact anyone had with her. After that, there is a gap. Nobody knows exactly where she went or who she was with in the hours that followed. Just over 6 hours later, a man walking near a field behind Old Donation Elementary School found her body.
The field sat directly across the street from the library where she had worked hours earlier. It happened close to home. Near a place she knew well. Police arrived to a scene with almost nothing to go on. No murder weapon. No witnesses. A young woman who had spent her last known hours with friends drinking and using drugs.
On a night like any other in that city. Detectives had to build a suspect list out of her own life. Her friends, her acquaintances. Men who had simply crossed paths with her at some point. Over the following months and then years. Investigators drew blood from man after man. Comparing it to evidence collected from the scene. Dozens of them. Eventually more than 30.
Were tested and cleared. One by one, the list got shorter. And one by one, the case got colder. Then about a year into the investigation. They thought they had him. At the crime scene, investigators had found a folded piece of paper. On it was a man’s name. His pager number. And the hours he worked.
It had been sitting there since the night Roberta died. Detectives spoke to this man’s neighbor. And what she told them was alarming. She said that on the night of the murder. She’d heard a scream coming from nearby. Not a normal sound. A scream she described as bloodcurdling. They brought the man in. He wouldn’t talk.
He wouldn’t explain the paper. He wouldn’t explain the scream his own neighbor had heard. To detectives already desperate for an answer. His silence looked like guilt. By August of 1987. Police believed an arrest was close. They were confident enough to tell a local reporter that they had their man. Then the blood tests came back, and he wasn’t a match. He was cleared.
Whatever he knew, whatever his silence meant, it was not this. The case that police thought was about to close stayed open. And within a year, it went cold enough that it was handed off entirely to the department’s cold case unit. For the next several years, there was nothing. No new leads, no new suspects, just a file that got quieter with time, while a family kept waiting for someone to call with news.
In 2001, that changed just slightly. Investigators worked with the Virginia Department of Forensic Science to build a DNA profile from evidence they’d preserved 15 years earlier. It was the first concrete lead in years, a genetic profile of the man they were looking for. They entered it into the national DNA database, the same system used across the country to identify offenders whose crime scene evidence hasn’t matched anyone yet.
There was no match. It sat in that database for years, waiting for a name that never came. In 2017, detectives tried something new. They sent the old DNA to a lab in northern Virginia that specialized in a technique called DNA phenotyping. Unlike a database search, this method doesn’t look for a matching name.
It looks at the genetic material itself, and predicts what the person who left it behind might actually look like. Hair color, eye color, skin tone, even freckles. What came back was a composite image. Two of them, actually. One showing what investigators believed the suspect looked like at around 25 years old.
The age he likely was when Roberta died. The other showed what he might look like now, decades later, at around 55. The composite showed a white man with brown or dark hair, light-colored eyes, and freckles across his face. It wasn’t a name. But it let detectives cross more than half their remaining suspects off the list.
For the first time in years, the case was moving. It still wasn’t enough. Nobody was arrested. No name matched the image. The case, having already outlived some of the original detectives, moved quietly into its fourth decade. Then, in 2023, something changed. It had nothing to do with new evidence. It had to do with money.
Virginia Beach police received grant funding through the state’s sexual assault kit initiative. Funding meant specifically to help departments revisit unsolved cases, like this one, using newer forensic techniques. With that funding, investigators were finally able to pursue something called forensic genetic genealogy.
It works differently than anything they had tried before. Instead of searching for the suspect directly, genealogists take his DNA profile and search public genealogy databases for distant relatives, people who had voluntarily submitted their own DNA to trace their family history. From there, they build out family trees, branch by branch, narrowing down generations of relatives until one name sits at the center of all of them.
That process led investigators to a man who had real documented ties to the Virginia Beach area during the exact years Roberta was killed. They didn’t move right away. According to his own attorney, investigators quietly reached out roughly 2 years before any public arrest. Wanting to speak with this man directly.
Whatever was said in that conversation, it didn’t stop what came next. Investigators eventually secured a warrant for a direct sample of his DNA. They compared it to the profile developed back in 2001. It matched. The man’s name was Charles Randall Berry. By the time his name surfaced, Berry was 66 years old living quietly in Newington, Connecticut.
He’d been married to his wife for 40 years. Nothing about his life there suggested a man wanted by police in another state for a crime like this one. Back in 1986, Berry had been a young man in the United States Navy stationed in the Virginia Beach area living near the very field where Roberta’s body would be found.
The Navy itself could not confirm many details of his service. Records from before 1990 were not something they kept on file. What is known is that he was there in that place at that time. According to investigators, Berry had no prior relationship with Roberta Walls. He wasn’t a friend. He wasn’t an acquaintance.
He’d never appeared on any suspect list in 40 years of investigation. Police believe the two of them crossed paths only once on the night she died. Beyond that, nobody has offered an explanation for what happened between them. On May 18th, 2026, almost exactly 40 years after Roberta’s body was found, police in Newington arrested Charles Barry as a fugitive from justice.
He was processed and taken to court the next day. A Virginia grand jury had already returned an indictment against him, one that remained sealed at the time. He’s facing charges of rape and of capital murder committed during the course of a rape. His attorney told reporters he hadn’t yet seen the warrant or the affidavit laying out the allegations against his client.
Barry was held in Connecticut on a substantial bond while the extradition process to Virginia moved forward. As of now, that process is still working its way through the courts. He has not stood trial. He has not entered a plea. Under the law, he remains presumed innocent until proven otherwise. At the press conference announcing the arrest, the deputy chief overseeing the investigation said the case had stayed with the detectives who worked it all these years.
The police chief said it was unsettling to think that someone capable of this had simply been living an ordinary life out in the world for 40 years. He also said that as of now, there’s no evidence connecting Barry to any other crime. This won’t feel like closure to her family, not the way people usually mean that word.
Nothing undoes what happened to her in that field. Nothing gives back the four decades they spent without an answer. What they have now is a name, a case moving through the courts, and the possibility that a trial will someday tell them exactly what happened that night.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
