Misty Rose Williams, 40, was a White woman who lived in Dunbar, West Virginia, and worked at the Nitro Marketplace Walmart. Her obituary says she was born in South Charleston on June 6, 1985, had previously worked at the Southridge Home Depot, enjoyed camping and fishing, and was devoted to her children. On the morning of April 13, 2026, what began as an ordinary workday ended in a homicide investigation when Williams went outside to her vehicle for a break and never returned to the store.
After enough time passed to alarm her coworkers, they went into the parking lot to look for her and found her slumped inside her vehicle. Police and deputies responding to the scene determined that she had been shot in the chest; authorities reported that she died from a single gunshot wound.
Investigators quickly focused on Eric Dewayne Richmond of Charleston, a man who shared children with Williams and was described in local reporting as her on-again, off-again partner. Surveillance footage from Walmart became a central piece of the investigation. According to the criminal complaint and police accounts, Richmond was recorded inside the store before the shooting and was then seen going outside during Williams' break and approaching or entering her vehicle. At one point, the vehicle suddenly moved forward and struck another parked vehicle. Investigators said the footage showed Richmond getting in and out of both the driver's and passenger's sides several times before leaving the area. The unusual movement of the car and Richmond's repeated movements around it became part of the sequence authorities reconstructed as they investigated what occurred inside the vehicle.
Richmond was brought in for questioning as investigators reviewed the surveillance footage, interviewed witnesses and gathered evidence from the scene. Detectives subsequently arrested him and charged him with first-degree murder. Police also obtained and executed a search warrant at his residence, where investigators reported recovering a 9mm handgun. Publicly available reports did not establish that the recovered firearm had, at that stage of the investigation, been conclusively identified through forensic testing as the weapon that fired the fatal shot. Richmond was arraigned in Kanawha County Magistrate Court and was ordered held without bail at the South Central Regional Jail. Authorities treated the killing as an isolated incident rather than an ongoing threat to the general public.
The homicide also drew attention to the history between Richmond and Williams. Court records reviewed by West Virginia MetroNews showed that Richmond had faced previous domestic-battery allegations, including an April 2023 case involving Williams. According to the criminal complaint from that earlier incident, Williams told police that Richmond grabbed her by the throat, threw her to the ground and pulled her through a parking lot following an incident at a Cross Lanes bar. That charge was dismissed in June 2023. Records cited in the same reporting showed that another domestic-battery charge from 2021 was later dismissed, and a domestic-battery charge filed in August 2024, along with two obstruction counts, was dismissed in December 2024. Those earlier dismissals did not result in criminal convictions and were separate from the murder prosecution arising from Williams' death.
Richmond initially had a preliminary hearing scheduled for April 20. After obtaining a new attorney, he waived the statutory time requirement for that proceeding, and the magistrate rescheduled the hearing for May 6. When that date arrived, Richmond went further and waived the preliminary hearing itself. That decision meant prosecutors did not have to present probable-cause testimony at that stage, and the murder case was sent on to Kanawha County Circuit Court. The May 6 report said Richmond continued to face the first-degree murder charge and remained incarcerated without bail.
The latest substantive online court update located for the case reported the May 6 waiver and transfer to circuit court. No subsequent reliable online report reviewed through August 15, 2026, documented a completed trial, guilty plea, conviction or sentencing. Richmond therefore remained publicly described in the available reporting as the accused defendant charged with first-degree murder, and the allegations against him had not yet been resolved by a reported conviction. Williams' family held a memorial service on April 16, three days after her death, as the criminal case moved forward and her relatives and children were left to mourn a killing that investigators say occurred during a routine break from her job.
