Murder in the moonlight

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

St. Augustine, Fla. - All the ingredients were in place for a young couple’s romantic late-night beach walk: holding hands, barefoot in the moonlight, the luring soundtrack of waves rolling to the shoreline...

That’s how it started as Justin Barber recalled the evening in 2002 — a special stroll on a north Florida beach after an anniversary dinner with April, his wife of three years.

Justin Barber: We took off our shoes and left them at the foot of the boardwalk.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Walking hand in hand?

Barber: Yes.

Murphy: Kicking your feet in the water?

Barber: Yes.

But a beach walk on a humid night in the off-season, on a desolate stretch of sand, can also make a young couple a little jittery, the crashing waves sounding more primitive than soothing, feeling all too vulnerable to the forces of the night.

That was the unwelcome tingle the instant before the anniversary walk ended so violently.

A passing motorist made the call to 911. Justin was found slumped behind the wheel of his SUV on a coastal highway near the shore.  He was dazed and bleeding—he said he and his wife had been attacked by an unknown assailant and it got worse.

As authorities searched the beach for the injured wife, 27-year-old April Barber, her 30-year-old husband Justin was choppered to a trauma center in nearby Jacksonville.

Now seasoned lawmen like Sheriff’s Detective Skip Cole know all too well that Saturday nights can end in gunplay and ruin a perfectly nice weekend.  The phone rang late at night and the dispatcher asked him to got to the emergency room to get a statement from a male gunshot victim. To him, it was just another day at the office.

Det. Skip Cole: He’s sitting in a hospital bed. He’s upright. He doesn’t have a shirt on. He’s conscious, he’s alert.

Murphy: Could you tell right away he’d been a gunshot victim?

Det. Cole: Sure. He had four wounds.  He had one on his left shoulder that appeared to kind of be going out and away.  He had another one on his right shoulder kind of like on a muscle that you shrug your shoulders.  That kind of was on an angle kind of out and away.  He had another wound right here on the right chest that almost appeared like a grazing wound.  And then he had another wound in the center of his left hand which exited out the back of the hand.

Murphy:  You think you have a robbery attempt here?

Det. Cole:  That’s what he’s reporting, yes.

A botched robbery turned fatal? Back at the beach, paramedics were not able to revive Justin’s wife April. She’d been found crumpled at the foot of the boardwalk, a single gunshot to her left cheek.  Justin Barber was released from the hospital a day later.

And the next week, he was back out on the beach with Detective Cole to walk him through the story he would tell again and again: exactly what happened that awful night.

Justin said at beach, he and April had kicked off their shoes at the end of the boardwalk and meandered hand-in-hand along the water’s edge.

Justin Barber:  We were walking along, and I was looking down, watching the waves come in over feet and I felt April tense up. And I looked up and a man was approaching us, very quickly.  And he was not too far away.

Murphy:  Wearing a cap, you thought?

Justin Barber:  Yes.  Yes.

Murphy:  Brandishing a pistol, obviously?  Or-

Justin Barber:  Yes.

Murphy:  So, this is all happening in slow-speed, nightmare time?

Justin Barber:  No, it was happening fast.

Det. Cole: [Justin Barber said] the man was holding up his hand, seemed agitated and demanded cash. 

Justin told Detective Cole that he remembered hearing a shot and then struggling for the weapon.  He said he passed out briefly, and when he “came to” he ran up and down the beach looking for April.

Det. Cole: He ended up finding her in the surf.  Floating, face down. 

He tried to drag her about 100 yards up the beach, but felt something was wrong with his body—he didn’t realize yet he’d been shot. He got April only as far as the foot of the boardwalk.

Det. Cole: He said once he put her on this rail and she fell down, he couldn’t pick her up and he couldn’t take her any further.  So at that point he elected to leave and go get help.

For days police scoured the beach and scrub for clues—using metal detectors, helicopters.  Would they find the assailant’s gun?  Some trace of him?  But they came up empty.

And the vague details Justin Barber gave detectives about the man he’d grappled with on that dark beach didn’t yield much either.

Murphy: Is he giving you a description that’s useful at all?

Det. Cole: The sum total of that description was, “He’s a little taller than me.  He’s a little heavier than me.  He had on a baggy shirt and a ball cap.  I couldn’t see his face.  He was very tanned and had pale hands.”

Murphy:  So you’ve limited it to a population of about 800,000 suspects in the greater Jacksonville area, huh?

Det. Cole:  It wasn’t something that I thought would net any positive results, that’s for sure.

Murphy:  So this is a tough case?

Det. Cole:  Sure.

Murphy:  You got a guy that came out of the night, killed somebody, wounded another, and then disappeared?

Det. Cole: Like a phantom in the night.

Detective Cole may have been short of hard evidence but not patience. Making sense of what had happened on that beach he’d surfed off of as a teenager would consume him for the next four years. Though he didn’t know that back in August 2002.

He was still trying to understand why a robber would murder and then not take anything... kill a woman and only wound a man.

The detective would have to take his case back to the Barbers’ home state of Oklahoma to figure out just who Justin and April were.

To try to figure out why, he would later learn, Justin Barber lied right to his face.

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