The 26-year-old nurse was heading for a night shift Jan. 27, 1985, at a downtown Baltimore hospital when she was raped and stabbed - slashed so brutally that she was nearly decapitated.
Now, almost 22 years later, city police believe they have identified her killer - a man who has been in prison all along.
Orrell Youmans, 50, was arrested June 30, 1985, and charged in another city rape case, court records show. He is serving a 40-year sentence at Eastern Correctional Institute and, according to a court document, has a release date of 2015.
This month, police charged him with the rape and murder of Beverly Louise Feight, a nurse at what was then University Hospital. Feight lived in Glen Burnie with her husband and their 6-year-old son.
The nurse left for work in her green 1971 Buick Skylark about 10:30 p.m. Jan. 27, 1985, according to charging documents filed against Youmans.
About 10:30 a.m. the next day, a walker found her body in woods off the 400 block of Westchester Road. During the medical examination, evidence was collected from her body.
Youmans' court documents indicate that Sgt. Roger Nolan of the Baltimore Police Department's cold-case squad asked in February 2002 that the Feight evidence be compared with the FBI's national database of DNA profiles.
In October, according to the court documents, Nolan received notice that the evidence had matched Youmans' DNA profile. Later that month, armed with a warrant, a blood sample from Youmans was taken. That, too, matched with the Feight evidence, court document say.
Youmans is scheduled for a court hearing in January.
julie.bykowicz@baltsun.com