Virginia’s Oldest Unsolved Homicide SOLVED After 57 Years

For 57 years, that case file traveled from one detective’s desk to the next. It outlasted every investigator who worked it. It outlasted several of the witnesses who gave statements in 1968. It outlasted the patience of every administrator who ever reviewed it and quietly filed it away, convinced there was nothing left to find.

 Virginia has a cold case database that lists hundreds of unsolved homicides going back decades. For most of those years, the oldest entry in that database belonged to a 24-year-old school teacher from Lexington, Virginia named Margaret Callaway. 57 years is not just a long time. It is a human lifetime. It is the gap between a young woman in her Easter dress pouring lemonade at a church picnic and the moment in the spring of 2025 when investigators knocked on an old man’s door and told him they knew what he had done.

That he had waited 57 years to be found. That Margaret Callaway had waited 57 years to be heard. This is the story of how she finally was. Lexington, Virginia in April of 1968 was a town that still believed its doors were safe to leave unlocked. It sat in the folds of the Shenandoah Valley with the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the Alleghenies to the west.

And it wore its history gently. The old stone buildings along Main Street, the colonnade of Washington and Lee University on the hill, the white steeple of First Presbyterian that had anchored the downtown skyline since before the Civil War. The population numbered roughly 7,000. People knew each other across generations.

The woman who cut your hair had gone to school with your mother. The man who delivered your coal had delivered it to your grandfather. There was a diner on Nelson Street that served coffee in ceramic mugs and never seemed to close. And on any given evening, the soundtrack of the town was a mixture of screen doors and station wagons and someone’s radio finding the news through static.

And the news in the spring of 1968 was hard. Vietnam had taken 47 young men from Rockbridge County already. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed in Memphis just days before. And the grief of that had settled into the valley heavy and slow. People held tightly to what they had here. Margaret Callaway had grown up on Randolph Street in a white clapboard house with a porch wide enough for two rocking chairs.

And she had come back to Lexington after teachers college with a plan to stay forever. She was 24 years old, 5 ft 4 with dark hair she wore pinned back on school days and loose on weekends. And she taught fourth grade at Jackson Elementary in a classroom decorated with a world map she had drawn herself. Freehand.

Because she wanted her students to know that the world was bigger than the valley and that it was waiting for them. She brought peppermints to church in a tin and passed them quietly to any child who looked bored during the sermon. She played piano by ear. She grew tomatoes in the backyard planting them every April from seeds she started indoors in February.

Because she could not bear to lose a single growing week. She was engaged to a quiet young man named Thomas Lear who worked at the county surveyor’s office and the wedding was set for October. The fabric for her dress, soft ivory with eyelet trim, was already cut and folded in her mother Dorothy’s sewing room.

Margaret was the kind of person who made things feel settled without ever doing anything dramatic. Her students’ parents said this. Her colleagues at Jackson Elementary said this. The women at First Presbyterian, where she had worshipped all her life, said this, too. She was not famous. She was not extraordinary in the way that gets written about.

She was extraordinary in the way that holds communities together. Quietly. Consistently. Without asking for recognition. On the morning of April 13th, 1968, a warm Saturday with the dogwoods just coming into bloom, she drove Dorothy’s station wagon to the church’s annual spring picnic. She arrived before 10:00.

She helped set up the folding tables. She poured lemonade and talked to Mrs. Elda Hunsecker about the tomato seedlings she had already started on the windowsill at home. She was seen eating lunch with a group of young women from the congregation at half past noon. That was the last time anyone in Lexington saw Margaret Callaway alive.

By 2:30 that afternoon, the picnic was winding down and the other women had begun to notice she was gone. At first, no one thought much of it. Margaret had a tendency to walk the long way home when the weather was fine, to stop at the library if she passed it on the way back to her car. Her fiance, Thomas Lear, arrived at the church grounds around 3:00 expecting to find her. He did not.

He drove to the Callaway house. Dorothy’s station wagon was not in the driveway. He waited on the porch. He called two of her friends. Neither had seen her leave the picnic. He called a third. Nothing. He called Dorothy. Dorothy called him back 6 minutes later and told him she hadn’t come home. At 5:00, Thomas called the sheriff’s office.

 The deputy who took the report, Russ Darnell, initially logged it as a possible voluntary absence. Margaret was a grown adult. Adults left sometimes. He told Thomas to call around more and come back in the morning if she still hadn’t turned up. By Sunday, nobody had heard from her. On Sunday evening, a state trooper on routine patrol spotted Dorothy’s station wagon parked on the gravel shoulder of Route 11, 3 miles south of town.

The driver’s door was unlocked. Margaret’s cardigan was folded on the passenger seat. Her purse was on the floor of the back seat. Her wallet was inside it. Her keys were in the ignition. Investigators canvassed the area. There was a payphone at the junction of Route 11 and Jenkins Road, 60 yards from where the car was parked.

Phone company records, pulled 2 days later, showed that a call had been placed from that payphone at 2:53 on the afternoon of April 13th. The call lasted 4 minutes. The number called was never identified. The name of whoever answered was never established. What happened in those 4 minutes? That question would consume the next 57 years.

On the morning of April 16th, a man named Elias Comstock was walking his hunting dogs through the pine flats off Jenkins Road when the dogs pulled toward a stand of shortleaf pines and would not come back. He found Margaret Callaway 20 yards in from the road on the cold spring ground. She had been strangled.

She was still wearing the dress she had worn to church 3 days earlier. Investigators secured the scene by 8:00 that morning. Working the area around where Margaret lay, they found one piece of physical evidence that would shadow the case for the next half-century. Pressed into the mud close to Margaret’s right hand, was a single plain white button.

It did not come from her dress. It did not match any clothing that had ever belonged to her. Whether she had torn it from her attacker in the last seconds of the struggle, whether it was the last deliberate act of a woman who understood what was happening to her, investigators could not say. But they photographed it.

They bagged it, and they sealed it in an evidence envelope that would sit untouched for 57 years. Within 24 hours, Margaret’s story was on the front page of the Rockbridge News Gazette. Men organized to search the remaining acreage of the pine flats on foot. Her photograph, the one from her teaching certificate, in which she was looking just slightly off to the side as if she had just thought of something, was posted in the five and dime window, and in the pharmacy, and at the counter of the diner on Nelson Street.

Thomas Lear did not eat for 4 days. Dorothy Callaway sat in the front room of the house on Randolph Street with the shades half drawn and answered every knock at the door herself, as though at any moment the The she was waiting for would come. The case was assigned to Detective Frank Albright of the Rockbridge County Sheriff’s Office.

A 38-year-old with 12 years on the job and a reputation for methodical patience. He had three children at home. He had never worked a murder before. He started with the basics. Who had been at the picnic? Who had seen Margaret last? Who had she spoken to in the final hours before she disappeared? He interviewed 41 people in the first week.

He built a timeline that placed Margaret at the picnic through approximately 1:00 p.m. and unaccounted for after that. The payphone call at 2:53 fell inside a window of time that no one could explain. The investigation developed two primary persons of interest. The first was a young man from outside Lexington who had been spotted near the Route 11 Junction that Saturday afternoon and who was known to have had a confrontation with a woman at a local filling station some months before.

Albright investigated him for 6 weeks. His alibi was thin at first, then corroborated by three independent witnesses who placed him at a family gathering in Augusta County for the entire afternoon. The evidence did not hold. The second was a former acquaintance of Margaret’s who had, according to two women from the church, made unwelcome comments about her at a social function the prior year.

Albright looked hard at this man, too. He collected testimony. He compared timelines. In the end, there was nothing that placed him near that road on April 13th, and the physical evidence connected to nothing. Albright eliminated him and it in the file. Then, in the fall of 1968, Albright received a quiet directive from his superior.

The county’s resources were stretched. Active cases needed priority. The Callaway investigation would remain open, but the daily active work would have to stop. Albright requested two more months and was given 6 weeks. 6 weeks later, he had not broken the case. The Callaway file was moved to cold case storage. What Albright’s investigation had not done, what no investigator in 1968 could have done, was test the button for biological material.

 The forensic sciences of that era could establish blood type from a stain, but little more. The button had been collected and preserved, but there was nothing that the science of 1968 could tell them that it had not already told them. It was a white button. It was not Margaret’s. For Dorothy Callaway, the end of the active investigation was a particular kind of devastation.

She had sat by her phone every day for 7 months waiting for Frank Albright to call with news. She had provided every document he asked for. She had made him coffee twice. She had believed completely and without reservation that the machinery of justice, once set in motion, would not simply stop. It had stopped.

Thomas Lear moved quietly out of Lexington by the following spring. The wedding fabric stayed in Dorothy’s sewing room for 11 years before Dorothy finally could not look at it anymore and gave it away. The years that followed moved the way years do when grief is the only constant? They passed, but they did not really go.

By 1972, 4 years after Margaret’s murder, Frank Albright had retired from the sheriff’s office with an arthritic knee and a case file he had never stopped thinking about. He kept a copy of his notes in a box in his study at home. He read them sometimes in the evenings, though he could not have said what he expected to find in them that he hadn’t found before.

By 1980, a decade after the murder, Dorothy Callaway’s hair had gone entirely white. She still lived in the house on Randolph Street. She still planted tomatoes every April because Margaret had planted tomatoes every April and stopping felt like agreeing that it was over. She attended Margaret’s grave on the anniversary of the murder each year and brought whatever was first blooming in the garden, forsythia sometimes, or daffodils.

And she left it and drove home and did not talk about it. By 1990, the children who had been in Margaret’s fourth grade class at Jackson Elementary were adults with children of their own. Some of them still remembered the tin of peppermints. Some of them had told the story to their own children. A world map hung in the hallway of one former student’s home in Staunton, not the one Margaret had drawn, but one he had hung there because of her, because she was the person who had first told him the world was bigger than

the valley. By 2005, Dorothy Callaway died at the age of 84. She died in the house on Randolph Street. She died without an answer. Margaret’s younger sister, Catherine, had never left Lexington. She was the one who had kept the pressure on, writing to the sheriff’s office on every anniversary, calling the state police, attending every community forum on cold cases she could find.

Catherine was in her 70s now, with gray hair and a quality of attention when she listened to people, a directness, a stillness that Margaret’s former students said reminded them of her sister. The reward poster in the window of the Nelson Street Diner had been replaced so many times it was essentially a museum piece.

The phone number at the bottom rang directly to the Virginia State Police cold case tipline. Every case on this channel represents weeks of digging through records, verifying facts, and piecing together real lives that deserved better. If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, take a second to like this video and subscribe, and drop us a comment telling us where in the world you’re watching from.

 Your support is what makes this possible. Now, let’s get back to Margaret. The case had been cold for 51 years when, in 2019, Virginia State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation assigned Special Agent Karen Trent to a statewide cold case review initiative. The Callaway file was on the list. Trent was not a woman who read case files casually.

Karen Trent had grown up in Roanoke, 50 miles south of Lexington. Her grandmother, a woman named Agnes who had died when Karen was 12, had once mentioned Margaret Callaway’s name at the dinner table in the context of a terrible thing that had happened in the valley back when Agnes was still young. Trent had not remembered this connection when the case was assigned to her.

 She remembered it 3 weeks into reading the file when she turned a page and saw Margaret’s teaching certificate photograph. And she felt something she couldn’t quite name, a recognition, some thread between the past and the present that pulled tight. She kept working. In 2021, Trent submitted the Callaway evidence for reprocessing.

 The button, still in its original evidence envelope, now more than 50 years old, was sent to AstriUM, a forensic laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, that specializes in recovering DNA from degraded material. The process AstriUM uses is called forensic DNA sequencing. It extracts genetic information from material that standard testing would abandon entirely, then reconstructs a profile the way you might reassemble a photograph from thousands of torn pieces.

Trent was told the chances were uncertain. The button had been in storage for 53 years in conditions not designed with future science in mind. She waited 11 months. On a Thursday morning in March 2023, Karen Trent was at her desk in the BC Fairfax Field Office when her email loaded a new message from AstriUM.

The subject line read, “Callaway, profile ready.” She sat still for a long moment. Then she opened it. The lab had recovered a complete male DNA profile from cellular material preserved beneath the button shank trapped in the layered fabric at its base, pressed deep enough by the mud and the decades to survive where surface material had long since degraded.

The profile was uploaded to a public ancestry database. Trent did not find a direct match. What she found was a cluster of distant relatives, second and third cousins. People who had submitted their own DNA years earlier out of simple curiosity about their family histories with no way of knowing their genetic information would one day intersect a 57-year-old murder investigation.

From that cluster, Trent and a forensic genealogist began building a family tree outward and backward through birth records, marriage records, census data, and old obituaries looking for a male of the right age who had been in the Lexington area in 1968. She called Katherine Callaway in the fall of 2023. She told her that she had a DNA profile.

She told her she was working a lead. She told her she was not stopping. Katherine did not speak for a long moment. Then she said, “Tell me what you need from me.” The family tree led to a man named Roy Alton Summers. He was 83 years old in the fall of 2023 living alone in a small brick house at the end of a gravel road 6 miles outside of Lexington.

He had grown up in Rockbridge County. In 1968, he had been 27 years old and working as a route deliveryman for a hardware wholesaler driving a panel truck through a circuit of Shenandoah Valley towns twice a week. His route included a stop in downtown Lexington at the hardware store on Main Street every other Thursday.

He had been through that town dozens of times. He knew the streets. He would have known the church. He could have known the picnic was happening that Saturday. He had never been a member of First Presbyterian. He had never been a member of any Lexington congregation. His name had never appeared in Frank Albright’s interview notes because Albright had focused on people connected to Margaret’s life in obvious ways.

Roy Summers was none of those things. He was a man who drove through town. He was invisible. Neighbors who had known Summers for decades described him as quiet and private. He had been married for 30 years to a woman named Helen who died of cancer in 2009. He had two adult sons who lived in other states. People who knew him said he kept to himself. Said it without alarm.

 He was not unfriendly. Just contained. The kind of man you described by saying he kept to himself because you couldn’t think of anything else to say about him. In December 2023, Trent and a colleague drove to Summers’s home and told him they were conducting routine follow-up on a historical investigation. They asked for a DNA sample.

He provided it. Without hesitation. Without visible concern. The results came back in February 2024. The DNA from the sample Roy Summers had given on his own front porch matched the profile recovered from the button that had lain in the mud beside Margaret Callaway’s right hand on April 16th, 1968. It was him.

Roy Alton Summers was arrested on the morning of April 14th, 2025. One day after the 57th anniversary of Margaret Callaway’s murder. Virginia State Police vehicles came up the gravel road before 7:00 a.m. He came to the door in his bathrobe. He looked at the badges. He said nothing. He was charged with first-degree murder.

He was 84 years old. In Lexington, the news broke before noon. It moved the way news moves in small towns, from phone to phone, from porch to porch, from the diner on Nelson Street to the school district offices to the old cemetery on White Street, where Margaret Callaway and her mother Dorothy were buried 50 yards apart.

The former students who had sat in Margaret’s fourth-grade classroom were in their 60s and 70s now. They learned the news, and they cried. Most of them. Many said afterward they were not entirely certain what they were crying for, for Margaret, for all the years, for the fact that it was over. Finally, finally over.

Catherine Callaway learned the news by phone from Karen Trent herself. She cried for 20 minutes. Then she said, “Now I can stop writing letters.” What Margaret Callaway was, before any of this happened to her, was a woman in full. She was the person who drew the world map on the classroom wall. She was the hand that passed the peppermints down the church pew.

She was the voice that read aloud on Friday afternoons while her fourth-graders lay on the rug with their shoes off, still enough that you could hear the school clocks ticking. She was the woman who started her tomato seeds in February because she could not bear to lose a single week of spring. She was the daughter who drove her mother’s station wagon to church on a warm April morning with no reason in the world to believe it was the last ordinary day of her life.

She was 24 years old. She had a dress half made in a sewing room. She had a future that belonged to her by right. And it was taken by a man who drove a truck through her town and saw something he decided he was entitled to. And then spent the next 57 years living out his days while she lay buried in the valley she had never left.

The case against Roy Alton Summers is proceeding through the courts in Rockbridge County. His attorneys have challenged the evidence. The DNA has been upheld. A jury will decide what happens next. What has already been decided, what cannot be undone, is that his name is now permanently attached to what he did.

That is not everything, but it is not nothing. Karen Trent visited Margaret’s grave after the arrest. She brought yellow tulips because it was spring. People who know her say she was quiet for several days after. The way people are quiet when something they have been carrying a long time finally sets itself down.

Catherine Callaway, now 76 years old, told a reporter afterward that she planned to keep planting tomatoes in April. Margaret had started that tradition. She wasn’t about to be the one to break it. What do you think? Does a conviction at 84 still constitute justice? Or does the weight of those 57 years change what justice even means? And what does it say that the breakthrough came from a single button sealed in an envelope and stored on a shelf waiting for science that didn’t exist yet? How many other cold cases from this era

are sitting in evidence rooms right now holding answers that the technology to read them already exists and no one has gone back to look? Justice came for Margaret Callaway after 57 years. Stories like hers are why this channel exists. If you believe truth is worth pursuing, no matter how long it takes, subscribe.

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