Solved Hampton homicide hits cable
‘On the Case with Paula Zahn’ to feature 1981 crime
HAMPTON — A national cable television show will feature the case of a 32-year-old Hampton woman whose brutal 1981 murder was solved more than three decades later.
Olivia Dare Christian, a schoolteacher at Captain John Smith Elementary School, was found dead one morning in her home on Ivy Home Road.
It wasn’t until 2015 — 34 years after the crime — that Ruben Edward Moore was arrested in the cold case. Now 67, Moore was convicted of second-degree murder in May and was sentenced to 40 years behind bars.
“On the Case with Paula Zahn,” which runs on the Investigation Discovery network, will explore the murder Sunday night.
The episode, “A Face and a Voice,” airs at 10 p.m.
“When a beautiful young schoolteacher is murdered inside her home, police must rely on the eyewitness testimony of a young neighbor who saw the killer lurking outside the window,” the show’s promotional blurb says.
The episode will feature reenactments of the crime mixed with interviews.
Retired Hampton police detective Randy Mayer, the investigator who cracked the case, will be featured on the program. He connected Moore to the crime after discovering parallels between Christian’s slaying and a sexual assault Moore committed less than a year later.
Mayer’s investigation, which began in 2011, included sitting at a microfilm machine in the police building’s basement and going through old police reports one by one. The detective said he spent more than 60 hours over nine months on that work alone.
Phillip Figura, the prosecutor with the Virginia attorney general’s office who handled the case, will also be interviewed, as will Liza Ludovico, an FBI agent who helped with the case. The victim in the prior sexual assault case and a friend of Olivia Christian’s will also appear.
On Sept. 4, 1981, Christian was outside walking her cat at the rear of the apartment complex about 7 a.m., when Moore apparently slipped into her apartment. Prosecutors believe he lay in wait for Christian.
An eyewitness said Moore looked into Christian’s apartment, then slipped into the building. A little bit later, the witness said she saw Moore driving away slowly “in the same distinctive car” — an aqua green 1965 Ford Galaxy — that he showed up in.
“She’s watching him like a hawk,” Mayer says on the show.
Prosecutors said Moore bashed Christian’s head in at least six times with an alarm clock, wrapped its cord around her neck, and attempted to sexually assault her.
That pattern — of striking a victim with an object during a sexual attack — matched the later crime.
“I ask myself, ‘ Why am I alive?’” the victim in the later case says on the TV show. “He came there to rape me, and that’s what he did. Olivia couldn’t get away. She has no voice. I can be her voice.” Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com