Within twelve hours of Yeardley’s death, Charlottesville swarmed with local reporters. By the next night, Chief Longo—a broad-shouldered cop with a graying crew cut—had appeared on national talk shows hosted by television personalities such as Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell. The interviews would be replayed often in the days that followed as more information trickled out about the case, no matter how minor.
Longo had started his career in Baltimore, graduating with a law degree from the University of Baltimore and being admitted to the Maryland Bar in 1993. For nearly twenty years, he worked on the Baltimore police force, rising through the ranks until he retired as Colonel in charge of Technical Services. After that, he accepted the top-cop post in Charlottesville. Longo was used to public speaking, regularly headlining lectures on ethics and professional standards for law-enforcement agencies. He also taught as an adjunct professor at Towson University, less than three miles from Notre Dame Prep, and served as law and business guest lecturer at the University of Virginia.
Despite his smarts and obvious speaking skills, Longo’s words occasionally weighed him down as he tried to make sense of the tragedy on national television. It was a tough case even for a twenty-five-year law-enforcement veteran.
Grace repeatedly described Yeardley as “scrubbed in sunshine,” a flowery turn of phrase perhaps not surprising from a prosecutor-turned-legal-commentator-turned-author, who in recent years had begun writing crime novels.
“Breaking news tonight,” Grace boomed, her voice dripping with her Macon, Georgia roots. “Beautiful, talented star athlete, scrubbed in sunshine, just days before twenty-two-year-old co-ed Yeardley Love set to graduate UVA, her body found, likely still warm, battered, beaten, facedown in a pool of blood in her own bed, her life, so full of promise, cut short.”
Grace called the case a “bombshell,” and seemed outraged at the prospect of a bad guy with such stellar social standing.
“Oh, no, not a parolee, not a violent felon, not a drifter with a record! Suspect No. 1, another UVA athlete, a college lacrosse star turned killer.”
Grace’s overly animated vexation—and her quickness to convict—mirrored the country’s. The George Huguelys of the world weren’t supposed to turn into murder suspects. Even as reporters dug into his background looking for the dark triggers that might have precipitated such an evil turn, the most they uncovered was an idyllic childhood marred slightly by divorce. His legal run-ins had begun just two years prior, and while they were troublesome, they had never foreshadowed murder.
Courtney Stuart, the senior editor of the weekly newspaper The Hook, explained how the heartbreaking tale spread across the campus:
“We got word yesterday that there was a student that had passed away,” said Stuart, who paused her own coverage of the case to appear on Grace’s show via Skype. “At first, it was presented…as a possible alcohol overdose, but by the middle of the day yesterday, they had announced her name and also the arrest of George Huguely, both, of course, lacrosse players. Then over the course of the next twenty-four hours, details have been coming out…They’ve been pretty horrific.”
Longo elaborated little on what he had already said publicly to reporters.
“Suffice it to say that investigators very quickly began looking at Mr. Huguely in this particular case, perhaps because of his relationship with Ms. Love and information that they began to gather from potential witnesses,” he said. “They contacted him initially at his apartment.”
By then, search warrant affidavits had been obtained by some media outlets. In them, Huguely was described as having made incriminating statements after waiving his Miranda rights. As he referenced the beating Yeardley endured, Longo’s measured façade seemed to waver.
“The facts are horrific,” said Longo, who was interviewed by phone. “They’re shocking. They’re incomprehensible. They’re unthinkable. And to witness that, and particularly as a parent, to look at the body of a young girl who, as you said, you know, had so much to look forward to—it’s just a terrible situation. And to have to sit here tonight and to hear the graphic description of how her body was discovered and to think, at home in a hotel room somewhere here tonight in Charlottesville, her mom is hearing that, is just completely troubling. And this is a very sad, sad set of circumstances for an entire community.”
Longo declined to speculate on a cause of death, saying the autopsy was still pending, though some reporters had incorrectly begun reporting that Yeardley was strangled.
Grace, having invited a forensic pathologist, defense attorney, and prosecutor on the show, hammered Huguely’s lawyer for his statement outside of the courthouse. “I couldn’t believe my ears, so I got a printout to make sure 20/20 and 20/18 got it right,” she said, referring in folksy manner to each of her eyes. She read Lawrence’s statement declaring the death an “accident with a tragic outcome.”
Grace cried bull.
“She was beaten to death. That is not an accident,” she said, exasperated. “That is one blow, another blow, another blow, another blow until she bled through her nose, ears, and mouth.”
Grace wasn’t alone in her disbelief: Velez-Mitchell, also on CNN, declared it impossible for Yeardley’s death to have been accidental. She called the slaying another incident in the “war on women,” and invited law-enforcement analyst Mike Brooks to weigh in on the case.
“There’s no way there’s an accident here,” Brooks said.
Velez-Mitchell incredulously asked Stacey Honowitz, a sex crimes prosecutor, how Huguely’s lawyer could try to claim the death was accidental when the beating was apparently so vicious.
“Well, listen, he’s not going to stand up and tell you that he intentionally killed her,” Honowitz replied. “Then he’d be confessing, basically, on behalf of his client. So what he’s trying to do is probably ease, you know, into people the notion that it was just a tragic accident in the hopes, maybe, that the prosecutors will re-look at this case and think about the relationship that they had, and maybe try to downfile it from a first-degree murder.”
Predictably, the speculation had begun. And not just on the national stage.
Back in Charlottesville, defense lawyers who knew Francis McQ. Lawrence quietly dissected his first public statements about the case. Some thought it was too soon to declare anything accidental. After all, by saying Huguely didn’t mean to kill her, Lawrence was implying that she indeed died at his client’s hands. Perhaps that point wouldn’t matter in trial, where comments made to reporters weren’t likely to be repeated. But Lawrence’s peers wondered if he had already dealt his client a fatal blow in the court of public opinion.
For Brendan Fitzgerald, the C-VILLE Weekly reporter, Yeardley’s death wasn’t the isolated incident that it had been portrayed to be by some national reporters. In fact, Yeardley was the seventh UVA student to die that academic year—making it an unusually tragic year.
“There wasn’t similar national presence for previous instances,” he said.
The deaths were all different. One student, twenty-two-year-old Stephanie Jean-Charles, had returned to her home in Haiti and was killed in the catastrophic January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 230,000 people. Another student, twenty-six-year-old John Jones, was spelunking in November 2009 when he became stuck upside-down in Nutty Putty Cave about eighty miles south of Salt Lake City. Twenty-eight hours after he got stuck, he died, becoming the first known fatality at the cave. On December 14, Justin Key, a first-year business student, succumbed to the flu, according to his friends’ Facebook memorial page. In January 2010, Scott May—a nontraditional student who enrolled in the university in his forties—died of natural causes after several long-term health problems. Matthew King, a graduate arts & sciences student, died April 19, 2010, in a cycling accident away from campus. Also in April, fourth-year student Joseph Arwood passed away at the University Medical Center after a fraternity brother found him unconscious one morning at their shared Sigma Phi Society house. Arwood’s official cause of death has still not been publicly released.
In late April, the university’s Student Council voted in favor of a bill to honor the six students who had passed away so far. On a Friday afternoon just weeks before graduation, about 200 students gathered to honor the six. Relatives of each student were invited. The bill, sponsored by Council President Colin Hood, while in reality inconsequential, was symbolically meant to “attempt to improve the rights, opportunities, and quality of life of every student in their honor.”
Every college endures heartache and loss. A microcosm of outside society, campuses are just as likely as the non-campus world to have freak accidents, disease, and suicide. In a typical year, UVA might have lost three or four students, university officials said. But seven was unusual, and one being a homicide, allegedly at the hands of another student, was devastating and rare.
And yet, it wasn’t the only homicide the Student Council paused to remember. The remains of Morgan Harrington, a pretty Virginia Tech student, had been discovered in January in Charlottesville. Her case was the only one in the spate of recent tragedies to garner even a fraction of the national attention that Yeardley would receive just months later. She wasn’t enrolled at UVA, but her disappearance had haunted many of the young adults on the Charlottesville campus.