TODAY, it's a nondescript conference room. Empty table, bare walls. But for months in 2008, this space was plastered with maps and charts. Detectives called it the Meghan Room. And every Tuesday, investigators would gather there to strategize their hunt for a 16-year-old girl's killer.

Return to the first half of the story   AS DAYS TURNED into weeks, and weeks into months, some in the community feared the trail of Meghan's murderer was growing cold. Maybe her killer took some comfort in the passage of time, too. Funkhouser didn't share the view.

CLICK ON THE INTERACTIVE ABOVE TO WATCH VIDEOS AND LEARN MORE.   A CASE that began with a stepfather's anguished 911 call on April 10, 2008, in Portsmouth ended Feb. 18 when Robert Lee Barnes was sentenced for sexually assaulting and stabbing to death his 16-year-old friend, Meghan Landowski.  

KILLICK, HAITI Dr. Lesly Archer stepped through the front doors of his packed hospital and out into the heat. He surveyed the patients he could not fit inside - hundreds of them, wrapped in casts and bandages and sprawled out on mattresses in the dirt.

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Vincent and Mary Mitchell stepped into the ballroom at Norfolk State University and paused inside the door, like the others, to scan the thin crowd.
Would they recognize anyone from that time 40 years ago?
Two women nearby approached each other with uncertain smiles.
“Did you go to New Canaan?”

CLICK ON THE INTERACTIVE ABOVE TO HEAR MEMBERS AND LEARN MORE. VISIT THE BEACON HOUSE.
 
For Matt Buckley, the moment fell somewhere between 6 and 10 a.m.,
April 21, 2004, in an operating room at Sentara Bayside Hospital.
For Larry Bain, it was 1 a.m., Nov. 8, 1987, on a highway in Chesapeake.
And for Carl Brockett, it was 1 a.m., June 19, 1980, on the exit ramp

In the space race of the 1950s and ’60s, the leading voices were rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and … another guy.

Household names included Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard and … oh, you know, the fellow who pushed the idea of a separate crew capsule and lunar lander.

More than a dozen Pilot journalists helped create a presentation on the docking of the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower.
On Sunday, see The Virginian-Pilot to learn what it takes to dock a warship the size of a skyscraper, and come back to PilotOnline.com to follow the Eisenhower’s docking as if you were on board.
Here’s a preview:

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ABOARD THE EISENHOWER
After a journey of 56,000 miles, hundreds of combat flights and five months away from loved ones, the crew of the Dwight D. Eisenhower is within sight of home.

VIRGINIA BEACH
E.E. Brickell integrated Virginia Beach schools in 1969, but he figured the first two generations of students would suffer.
Black students had to catch up to their white peers after decades of second hand books and second-class schools, Brickell said. "I thought it would take over twenty years," he said. "I was hopeful, but I was wrong."