True Crime Chronicles: A fight over someone "friending" his girlfriend on Facebook led to her 2015 murder
On the night of December 8, 2015, in the small Arkansas town of Waldron, a man called Scott County dispatchers from a house on South Main Street and told them he had just killed his girlfriend.
Officers from the Waldron Police Department arrived to find Daniel Ray Roseberry outside the residence he shared with Lavonda Gail Legitt. Inside, Legitt lay unresponsive with multiple stab wounds, including to her stomach and neck.
Roseberry, then 46, later admitted to police and Arkansas State Police special agents that he had stabbed her after an argument that spiraled out of control. Waldron Police Chief David Willard said the dispute involved something about someone Roseberry had friended on Facebook.
Waldron sits in the Ouachita Mountains of Scott County, a community of fewer than 3,500 people where violent crime is uncommon and neighbors tend to know one another. The killing registered as a shock in a place more accustomed to ordinary rural life than to domestic violence turning fatal in a shared home.
Lavonda Gail “Von” Flurry Legitt was born July 10, 1960, in Van Buren to Edgar Leroy Flurry and Reba Mae Hutchinson. She was 55 years, 4 months, and 28 days old when she died. She had lived in Waldron after earlier years in Mansfield and was known as someone who loved her family and spending time with them.
She left behind her mother, Reba Hutchinson of Mansfield; two daughters, Jamie Hutchinson of Mansfield and Brandi Gibson and her husband Albert of Dover; three sisters, Brenda Morris of Texas, Melinda Lovett of Mansfield, and Debbie Breeland of Texas; a brother, Haskell Gene Flurry of Texas; and grandchildren Trenton Weaver, Dakoda Weaver, and Bryce Weaver. She was cremated.
Roseberry, born July 24, 1969, was a Caucasian man with blue eyes who stood 68 inches tall and weighed 205 pounds. Public records list prior addresses in the Waldron area and Hamburg, Arkansas. He had no prior felony convictions and this was his first incarceration with the Arkansas Division of Correction. At the time of the killing he lived with Legitt as her boyfriend.
Police processed the scene with assistance from the Arkansas State Police. Roseberry was taken into custody that night, booked into the Scott County Jail on a $1 million bond, and charged the next day, December 9, 2015, with first-degree murder in Scott County Circuit Court case 2015-166.
His confession and the physical evidence left little room for doubt. After months of proceedings he was convicted and sentenced on November 3, 2016, to 40 years (480 months). He entered the Arkansas Department of Corrections the same day.
As of November 3, 2026, Roseberry, now with gray hair, remains housed at the Tucker Unit near Pine Bluff under custody classification C2 and good-time class I-C. His projected parole eligibility or tentative release date is December 7, 2043. He has one ADC incarceration, no listed aliases, and a total sentence of 40 years, 0 months, and 0 days.
No public record indicates successful appeals or modifications that altered the outcome. The case remains a stark local example of how a domestic argument can end in fatal violence and a decades-long prison term in a town that rarely sees such things.
