On the night of May 12, 1975, 30-year-old Beckley Police Sergeant David Lee Lilly was killed while on duty. Shortly before midnight he stopped a vehicle at the Route 19/21 bypass and New Raleigh Road; the driver was a suspect in a coin store robbery earlier that day. During the encounter Sergeant Lilly was shot twice with a .32 caliber pistol. The suspect fled in Lilly’s patrol car and was captured after a 12-day search in Wayne, New Jersey.

The suspect was returned to West Virginia, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. He later escaped the West Virginia State Penitentiary on November 7, 1979, and during that escape shot and killed West Virginia State Trooper Philip Kesner with a gun taken from a guard. He remained at large for two years, committed other murders including one in Arizona, and was recaptured after a shootout with federal agents in New York City and returned to continue serving multiple life sentences. Sergeant Lilly, a U.S. Army Vietnam veteran, had been with the Beckley Police Department six and a half years and was survived by a wife and child.