Twenty-year-old Morgan Harrington, a striking blond education major, had traveled to Charlottesville’s John Paul Jones Arena for a Metallica concert October 17, 2009. She got separated from her friends when she wandered outside the arena hoping to find a bathroom. Without a ticket to get back inside, she called from her cell phone and told them not to worry about her, that she would find a way home. Witnesses described seeing a woman hitchhiking a few miles from the stadium, but Morgan never made it home. She was last seen walking across a bridge near busy Ivy Road wearing a black miniskirt, black tights, knee-high black boots, and a Pantera T-shirt.
A few days passed before officials were satisfied that Morgan hadn’t simply stayed over with a friend. The search frenzy began. Morgan’s purse and cell phone were discovered in a parking lot near the university’s track and baseball fields, but there were no signs of a struggle, and certainly no Morgan. Ominously, the battery in her cell phone was missing, a possible attempt by an attacker to keep authorities from tracking her down via pings off cell phone towers.
The search stretched into a nearby valley. Students not only from UVA and Virginia Tech, but also from Shenandoah Valley’s James Madison University, combed the targeted areas and passed out flyers alongside law-enforcement agents. Police painstakingly pieced together her movements from the time she left the arena, at about 8:30 p.m., until about an hour later when she was last spotted on the Copeley Road bridge.
Virginia State Police Lt. Joe Rader used the media to issue a plea for information.
“Perhaps you saw someone stop a vehicle,” Rader said. “Perhaps you saw this young lady get into a vehicle. Somewhere out there lie the answers or lies the vital link.”
The disappearance ate away at the area’s college students. How many times had they walked alone in Charlottesville at 9:30 p.m.? What ever happened to Morgan could have happened to anyone.
While the arena was criticized for refusing Morgan re-entry, many who attended the concert were shocked that anything had gone awry. Despite heavy metal’s harsh reputation, this particular concert was remarkably placid.
“The thing that surprised me the most of all about this concert was how calm it was and how safe and in control the security was in the venue,” one concertgoer said. “There were policemen inside and out.”
After Morgan had been missing about a month, police released a description of a Swarovski crystal necklace she had been wearing in hopes of drumming up any new leads. The chunky piece was made up of large crystal chain links, an edgy addition for a planned night of head banging.
The case generated national attention. Morgan was, after all, gorgeous and white, two prerequisites for widespread coverage. And her parents’ appeals were too dolorous to ignore.
“Please come home,” Dan Harrington, her father, said while fighting back tears. “If someone has Morgan, please let her come home safely.”
“She has her Halloween costume picked out, and we’d love to see her walking around in it,” said Gil Harrington, Morgan’s mother. “She’s got a dog that’s missing her. Let’s bring her back, and she can address all these things, so she can be back with her family.”
The anguish was amplified with dozens of Morgan sightings nationwide, not only locally in Virginia, but from as far away as New Mexico. Police couldn’t discount the reports, especially considering that in recent years several college students had faked their own kidnappings to get attention. But Morgan’s family and friends knew this wasn’t in her makeup. She would never intentionally cause her family so much grief. Besides, she did what she was told, her father told reporters: “I called her two weeks ago and told her to get her flu shots. She got it the next day.”
As the search dragged on, Gil Harrington took to a blog to regularly post updates in hopes of generating tips for police. Christmas was unbearable, she had written on the blog (www.findmorgan.com) on December 29, 2009:
“Our pain was sharpened by expectations for this holiday season. I found Christmas compromises that were acceptable to me. It was challenging to have a new, different tradition that acknowledges Christmas and still honors our missing Morgan. Our décor was pretty muted, but what has been done is genuine and celebratory of love and caring. It’s tricky, though, to find that path. Every time I go into our closet, Morgan’s Christmas gifts reproach me from the top shelf. And then despair almost takes me out.”
As the weeks continued, Gil Harrington’s words alternated between heartrending and hopeful. She balked at the police’s characterization of Morgan’s disappearance as an “abduction.”
“It is soft language,” she wrote. “Abduction means to move away from—that is a passive euphemism for what has occurred here. Morgan was not ‘moved away’ from us—she was ripped away, severed from us! She was amputated from her life. The person who did this robbed her from us. I think even the posters could better reflect what has been inflicted on our family—Morgan is not missing—like my frequently misplaced reading glasses—SHE was stolen!!”
That was written January 12, 2010. Three weeks later, Morgan’s parents got the nightmarish phone call: A farmer had spotted a skeleton on his rural Albemarle County land about an hour’s drive northwest of Richmond. The Harringtons rushed to the area. All that remained were bones, but they were sure it was their daughter. DNA testing eventually proved they were right. (Though authorities determined that she actually died in 2009, near the time of her abduction, the remains’ January discovery placed the homicide statistically in 2010 for record-keeping purposes.)
In February, Morgan’s death was officially ruled a homicide.
Because crime is so rare in the area, and because Morgan, like Yeardley, had been slain in her prime, the case seemed tailor-made for crime-hungry media. The experience left many in Charlottesville disenchanted. It seemed reporters only swooped into town for horrific news, splashing images of the picturesque city alongside gruesome descriptions of tragedy. Morgan’s parents seemed to recognize that public attention was a necessary evil in drumming up leads in the case. It was at their prompting that police released a sketch of a possible suspect after DNA testing connected Morgan’s remains with the sexual assault of a Fairfax City woman in 2005. Dan Harrington, Morgan’s father, said that based on the location of his daughter’s makeshift burial spot—farmland that is difficult to reach by car—he was certain the killer was someone local. “Someone has to be comfortable with knowing the area, knowing where to go,” he told the Today Show. The Harringtons also were vocal in their disappointment at what they perceived as foot-dragging by the Charlottesville police. On January 23, Gil Harrington took to the blog:
“I am concerned about the complacency in Charlottesville. I am feeling a tendency to downplay Morgan’s abduction, to protect the idyllic reputation of the city. I bought into that idyllic image until my daughter was stolen there. I understand the reluctance to be associated with this crime. I myself would prefer not to be known as the Mom of a missing girl. Charlottesville would prefer not to be recognized as the location of abduction. But there is no going back.”
Despite the offering of $150,000 in reward money—$100,000 from Morgan’s family and $50,000 from the band Metallica—Morgan’s murder remains unsolved.
Five months after Morgan’s bones surfaced, as TV cameras choked the usually peaceful street on which Yeardley and Huguely lived, it seemed like déjà-vu for Charlottesville residents. Frustrated with the negative attention, many passersby ignored reporters’ questions and looked perturbed when caught on film for B-roll, or supplemental footage to be interspersed with interviews and talking-head experts opining about the case. One Boylan Heights employee told a reporter she was tired of talking about the case. She had been interviewed three times already that day, she said.
Journalists tried to gobble up what ever morsels of detail they could, talking to people on the street and interviewing area business employees. Those wanting to dig deeper, to find out if Yeardley had any clue she was in danger or to learn if there was a broader lesson to be gleaned from the tragedy, were shut down. Unlike in Morgan’s case, where the missing girl’s parents invited journalists into her bedroom to ensure she was seen as person and not merely a statistic, Yeardley’s loved ones were mum. Surely they were blindsided and overwhelmed by the massive national attention. And unfed journalists become all the more ravenous. It seemed everyone remotely connected to the Loves and Huguelys were contacted in one way or another—by phone, by e-mail, through social networking sites. The less information reporters get on a high-profile, competitive story, the more desperate they become for any tidbit of information. Sometimes the perseverance pays off with someone landing a scoop; other times, it backfires, causing people to clam up. The handful of friends who had been willing to talk to the media were quickly asked by Yeardley’s family to quit responding, and they complied. Calls to Sharon and Lexie Love were met with “no comments” and assurances that other people close to Yeardley would decline to comment as well. The only family member to speak, albeit briefly, was Granville Swope, Yeardley’s uncle—the UVA alumnus who had once been a star lacrosse player. Known to Yeardley as “Uncle Granny,” he called his niece a “delightful lady in every respect.”
“She had a great future,” Swope told a reporter. He accused Huguely of robbing her of it.
Yeardley’s sorority sisters were clearly floored by the loss. They huddled on the front porch of their three-story brick Kappa Alpha Theta home and embraced in tears. Nevada Thompson, identifying himself as the sorority’s cook, answered reporters’ knock on the front door and somberly said they weren’t ready to comment.
“We’re in mourning,” he said.
A pall hung over the entire university. Normally early May buzzes with end-of-year activities, eleventh-hour cram sessions for finals, and graduation parties galore. For Yeardley’s sorority sisters especially, the joy had been sucked out of their final month on campus. Outwardly, they said little, posting a one-sentence mention of the tragedy on their blog that Yeardley was a wonderful person and that her “sisters” were praying for her family. The posting prompted responses from “other Theta sisters” that echoed the sentiment. One woman wrote: “I hope your warm memories of Yeardley carry you through this difficult time.”
Courtney Schaefer, the chapter’s president, issued a statement: “We are in a state of mourning, and for the respect and privacy of Yeardley and her family are not ready to comment further on the situation.” Schaefer and other sorority sisters declined to speak with reporters even months later, saying they had promised Yeardley’s family that they would remain silent until after the case went to trial.
Though the public sentiment was in their favor, Yeardley’s family didn’t want conclusions reached before trial for fear that a potential jury would be tainted. In declining one interview, Sharon Love, Yeardley’s mother, said that her primary concern was “doing right” by her daughters, and assured one reporter that answers would come in time.