Chapter 11

Just as Love’s death seemed to eclipse all other news in Charlottesville, reporters back in Baltimore saw a community reaction like few others. By the end of May 4’s broadcast of Good Morning Maryland, reporter and anchor Megan Pringle knew the station would stay on top of the story at every turn—for better or worse.

If someone ever sat down to map the characteristics required for a case to infiltrate the American consciousness, many of its bullet points would coincide with the Yeardley Love homicide. Attractive victim, check. Life full of potential, check. Loving upbringing, check. Unlikely suspect, check. Nothing in Yeardley’s background remotely hinted that her life could someday end in such brutal fashion—and that made her a perfect victim for Americans to rally behind.

People immediately began calling WMAR with stories. They knew the Loves, some said, and remembered how devastated Sharon Love had been when her husband passed away a few years prior. Even at gas stations, people talked about the case. They were sickened by the news, and many asked whether funds had been raised to help pay for funeral costs or start a scholarship in Yeardley’s name. (There were.) For Pringle, a Michigan native turned Maryland transplant, it was the first time she fully fathomed just how small a town the big city of Baltimore really was.

“Baltimore and the surrounding communities are very close knit,” explained Pringle, who moved to Baltimore in 2007. “When people ask, ‘Where did you go to school?’ they don’t mean what college. They mean where you went to high school. It’s been a very tough place to meet people. People who grew up here and went away to college come back, and they’re still friends with people they went to high school with.”

The Baltimore area is specked with private Catholic high schools. Even Pringle’s co-anchor sent his daughters to institutions similar to Notre Dame Prep, where Yeardley graduated. Jamie Costello, who has worked for WMAR for twenty-four years, said some parents send their children to private religious schools for the theology. Just as many are looking for the best mix of academics and sports. Increasingly, the private schools’ lacrosse programs have become big draws, Costello said, because talented players can secure hefty scholarships for top-rated universities.

Baltimore City Public Schools long ago earned itself a lackluster reputation. In the 1990s, the city and the state of Maryland swapped barbs, each blaming the other for failing students. In 1995, the city even sued the state, saying it had violated the Maryland constitution by failing to give students an efficient education. The state fought back, saying the city had mismanaged the district. After an all-out public brawl, a resolution was finally reached that called for the state to give the district more money and, in exchange, Maryland would have more control in running the city’s schools. The plan, as intended, only lasted a few years, but the criticisms lobbed at the district never seemed to stop. Newspaper editorials regularly called on the politicians in power to strengthen the schools. In 2006, for example, the Maryland State Board of Education aimed to revamp the whole system, from instruction to leadership to school management. State Board members said too many schools weren’t making the grade.

The public district’s mediocre reputation prompted many in Baltimore and surrounding areas to seek out private institutions. Schools such as the Institute of Notre Dame (pronounced “dahm”), which came before Notre Dame Prep, were deeply rooted in their communities and had stellar reputations. IND, as the all-girl Baltimore institute is called, boasts alumnae such as former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and barrier-breaking NBC news anchor Catherine “Cassie” Mackin. IND opened in 1847; when it became overcrowded, the School Sisters of Notre Dame opened the Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies in 1873. Notre Dame’s Towson campus continued to turn out noteworthy graduates, including Susan Aumann, a Republican member of the Maryland House of Delegates representing the 42nd District in Baltimore County.

Students at the various Baltimore-area private schools invariably know each other, either from overlapping during elementary or middle schools, or from competing against each other in high school sports. Many still hang out at the same summer swimming holes and play at the same recreation centers. Jamie Costello said most grow up with lacrosse sticks in their hands. Those who didn’t know Yeardley personally felt as though they did, and the sense that the community had lost one of its own was overwhelming. Even more telling, many Baltimore residents knew of the Huguely family because they followed high school lacrosse—never mind that Bethesda-based Landon was nearly an hour’s drive from Baltimore.

“When you’re here, everybody knows everybody,” said Costello, an Overlea High School graduate. “They all play one another—the DC schools play the Baltimore schools. Everyone overlaps.”

The outpouring after Yeardley’s death was immense, Pringle said, and the station’s coverage reflected it. In the first days, Good Morning Maryland ran multiple stories. Reporters kept tabs on both the legal turns in Charlottesville and the community reaction back in Cockeysville and nearby Towson. Notre Dame Prep officials spoke briefly and solemnly about the loss, describing it as profound and unimaginable. Pringle and Costello continued to field phone calls from heartbroken residents, some of whom called more to share their grief than assist with stories. There was a communal sense of loss beyond anything Pringle had experienced in Baltimore before.

Violent death is by no means rare in the big city, which reported 238 murders and non-negligent homicides to the FBI in 2009. Baltimore often ranks alongside Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans as having the highest per-capita murder and manslaughter rates in the country. Many of the slayings don’t make the news at all simply because the media outlets don’t have the staffing to keep up.

“Some people said there are lots of women the same age in Baltimore City who are murdered perhaps at the hands of domestic violence and it doesn’t get the same kind of attention,” Pringle said. “They said, ‘You guys are just doing this story because it’s a pretty, rich, white girl.’”

That prompted debate in the newsroom. Did Yeardley’s case warrant more coverage than average? It was a tough discussion, Pringle said, in part because the station—like dozens of other media outlets nationwide—could not ignore the community’s response to Yeardley’s death. It was all anyone talked about. On the other hand, Pringle struggled with thoughts of the many other nameless women whose deaths were going unreported. She couldn’t help but wonder whether the outcry would have been as deafening had Yeardley been black or poor.

The newsroom divide reminded Pringle of a similar debate in 2007, when the body of twenty-five-year-old Sintia Mesa was discovered in the trunk of her own car. Mesa, a former Morgan State University student, had been reported missing just days prior. Police found her cell phone and other personal items near a Dumpster. Then came her body. The other big news of the day was the death of racehorse Barbaro, notable in Baltimore especially because of the area’s huge horseracing following. Barbaro won the 2006 Kentucky Derby, then shattered a leg two weeks later after a false start in the Preakness Stakes. Six operations failed to properly heal the horse, and it was euthanized January 29, 2007. WMAR producers planned to lead the evening news with the horse, followed by coverage of the gruesome discovery of Mesa’s body. Some balked, arguing that a woman’s life was worth more than a horse’s. In the end, Pringle said it was a split decision: Barbaro led the 5 p.m. newscast, Mesa the 6 p.m.

Pringle’s newsroom wasn’t the only one contemplating its coverage of the case. The Washington Post’s Daniel de Vise penned a column titled “Yeardley Love slaying: overplayed?” on the newspaper site’s College Inc. blog. De Vise, responding to dozens of reader comments posted beneath the previous days’ news stories, defended the case as being worthy of the Post’s newsprint: It took place where homicides are rare, and the suspect was from an affluent Chevy Chase family. So while Yeardley being a Baltimore resident would perhaps not have elevated the story to warrant eight bylines in the Sunday edition, de Vise reasoned, Huguely’s status as a local boy would have.

“What if Huguely were from Baltimore?” de Vise pondered. “I am sure we would still cover the story. But perhaps not on the front page, and perhaps not with seven or eight reporters.”

He pointed to the Morgan Harrington homicide as proof that it takes more than a young, white female victim to land on the Post’s coveted section fronts. Harrington’s case had gotten ink, but never section-front ink, he wrote, “because Morgan wasn’t local.”

In the weeks surrounding Yeardley’s death, there were dozens of fatal and nonfatal shootings plaguing both Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Many weren’t reported. In one, a nineteen-year-old pregnant woman was shot March 21. Three months later, a second young pregnant woman survived two bullets to her abdomen. Neither woman was white. Pringle said it was telling that the local news barely followed up on either story, while even the smallest developments in Yeardley’s case often led the newscast.

Historically, stories about young adults slain in college settings have made substantial headlines. Eight months before Yeardley’s death, the country was transfixed by another East Coast campus murder—that of twenty-four-year-old Annie Le, a doctoral student at Yale University who disappeared just days before she was to be married. While officials at first wondered if she fled in fear of the lifetime commitment she was facing, her friends and family knew that Annie had been happier than ever and was thrilled to be getting married. The days of worrying came to an end on September 13, 2009, the day she was supposed to walk down the aisle. Le’s body was discovered crammed into a wall panel of a research building. She had been beaten and strangled.

Like Yeardley, Annie seemed on the cusp of greatness. She was attractive and intelligent, working in the medicine school’s Department of Pharmacology. She wanted to cure cancer.

The media attention was so great that one TV producer ended up crushed in a bum rush at a news conference. NBC News producer Alycia Savvides reported that she “saw stars” after a cameraman—one in a throng gathered around a police spokesman—bashed into her with his camera, knocking her to the ground. Afterward, a police sergeant admonished the journalists.

“We don’t want anyone getting hurt, all right?…Those cameras are heavy,” Sgt. Anthony Zona said.

Spokesman Joe Avery reportedly slowly shook his head.

“I’ve never seen a bunch of people so out of control in my life,” he said.

Two days later, the media mob reassembled for word that a suspect had been arrested: Raymond Clark III, a lab technician who worked in the building. On March 17, 2011, Clark pleaded guilty to murder and attempted sexual assault in a deal that called for a 44-year prison sentence. For the first time, prosecutors revealed that he had left behind evidence of a sexual assault and related DNA evidence. Until then, they had not publicly suggested a motive for the killing.

The arrangement, made under Connecticut’s Alford Doctrine, allowed him to agree that the state had enough evidence to convict him without admitting he committed the crime.

In reporting Yeardley’s death eight months after Annie’s, some national outlets drew parallels. But there were other, seemingly long-forgotten cases that more closely mirrored the UVA student’s death than that of Annie Le. One such case is that of Kathleen Roskot.

Roskot was a sophomore and star lacrosse player at New York’s Columbia University in the fall of 1999 when she met Thomas Nelford Jr. Though Nelford, a struggling artist, had dropped out of school out of fear that academics would interfere with his artwork, he was bright and kind, and the two had much in common—including sports.

Nelford was a wrestler, making a big enough splash his freshman year to be named “one of the top” freshman wrestlers in the Ivy League by the Columbia sports media guide. Roskot, meanwhile, was known as an upbeat, go-get-’em type who often took to the field and told teammates, “It’s a great day to get better,” a high school teammate recalled at her funeral. Like Yeardley, she was all drive and discipline, and a powerful on-field competitor. With green eyes and dark hair, Roskot, too, had been raised in insularity by still-married parents in an affluent suburb—in her case, Long Island.

Over their six-month relationship, Roskot and Nelford spent a lot of time together, as college paramours tend to do. For Nelford, whose parents had dragged out a nasty divorce, Kathleen was his first real girlfriend. To her friends, Nelford perhaps seemed a little weird—more reclusive and arty than her previous boyfriends—but he never seemed violent.

Still, like Huguely, Nelford provided plenty of red flags in hindsight. Nelford’s cartoons, published in the student newspaper, sometimes turned lugubrious. As the New York Times described:

In one cartoon, a man and woman trade a series of insults and ugly confessions, culminating with the man saying, “The voices told me to kill you in your sleep.”

The woman then screams, “April Fool’s!”

The man replies, “That’s today?”

Another strip, called Sid, the Ugly Kid, described a smart but troubled teenager who fantasized about slaughtering those who ridiculed him for being ugly, according to a New York Daily News account. In one panel that later haunted classmates, Sid finds a rope and hangs himself because “that fucking bitch broke my heart.”

Roskot was discovered February 5, 2000, in her dorm room with her throat slashed. The security guards who found her naked body had been asked by her lacrosse coach to check on her after she failed to show up to a morning meeting at the school gym. An hour later, Nelford was found dead beneath a subway car uptown. He had his girlfriend’s college ID and her wallet. Though the couple had been seen holding hands just hours before Roskot’s death, friends said she was trying to end their relationship. It’s the only motivation for the murder-suicide that police could offer. Busloads of classmates and lacrosse teammates attended her funeral.

 

Kathleen Roskot’s death was basically in another media era, however, before twenty-four-hour news cycles and lightning-fast Internet communication. There were no Twitter or Facebook updates about her death, and today, only a handful of stories are accessible online. Occasionally, for a few years after her death, Roskot’s name and a brief paragraph describing her untimely death appeared alongside a fresher crime for comparison’s sake.

At the time, however, the impact was comparable to Love’s death. The New York newspapers posed similar questions: What warning signs were missed? Were colleges doing enough to head off potentially deadly problems? Time magazine mentioned the case in 2001 in a story about a spate of recent campus suicides—at least two of which began with murders. Those accounts focused on whether campuses were ill equipped to deal with the mental-health issues buried deep inside some students.

But another issue was raised, too. Erica Goode, a New York Times writer, penned a piece called “When Women Find Love is Fatal,” highlighting three separate domestic attacks that all occurred within the span of a weekend.

Roskot’s case was the first. The next day, thirty-nine-year-old Marie Jean-Paul’s husband cut her throat with a machete, then set her body ablaze. Soon after, eighteen-year-old Joy Thomas was shot in the head by her ex-boyfriend. Somehow, she survived. Goode’s piece highlighted frightening domestic-violence statistics that were true in 1998: 32 percent of nearly 3,500 women killed in the country died at the hands of husband or boyfriend, either past or present. “In comparison, 4 percent of 10,666 male homicide victims in 1998 were killed by current or former intimate partners,” she wrote.

“We haven’t come close to affecting intimate partner violence and homicide the way we have other kinds of violence and assault,” Dr. Susan Wilt, a representative with the New York City Department of Health, told Goode. “It remains a shocking issue that this is the main reason that women end up dead and that it occurs within the context of their home and family, where they are supposed to be safe.

“Women worry when they go out,” Dr. Wilt added. “They should worry when they stay in.”

Wilt had been tracking homicides by intimate partners in New York since 1990. She found, and other studies had borne out, that many of the deaths occurred either while or soon after the woman tried to leave the man.

“It’s absolutely a crime of rage,” she said in 2000. “There is a sense of ‘How dare you think you can live without me?’”

It’s a question resurrected at least once a year with a high-profile domestic violence slaying. Entire true crime libraries are dedicated to cases in which one half of a once-happily married couple kills the other. Domestic violence experts say the statistics can’t possibly tell the whole story, either: There are many murders that likely were committed by one’s partner that have gone unsolved for lack of evidence. Many of those cases eventually are forgotten by everyone but the victim’s family, perhaps a reflection of a “she should have known better” mentality.

But in cases where the killer is known and the victim is a young college student, it seems more likely that people will pay attention. Such was the case with Kristin Mitchell’s murder in 2005. And when Mitchell’s father learned of Yeardley’s death five years later, he felt an immediate connection—and a sinking in his stomach.

 

Kristin was a pretty, blond twenty-one-year-old studying food marketing at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Like Yeardley, she had attended Notre Dame Prep, though after two years, she felt she didn’t relate well with the privileged girls in Towson. She ultimately graduated from Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville, Maryland, which was still a private institution, but was slightly less expensive. Also like Yeardley, Kristin had been devoted to helping the less fortunate, volunteering for Project Appalachia, which helped build homes for the poor, and spending time in other career-service programs at St. Joe’s.

And like Yeardley, she met a guy who, police said, would cut her life short.

Bill Mitchell, Kristin’s father, said there were red flags, but her circle of friends didn’t know how to recognize them—least of all Kristin. At twenty-eight, Brian Landau, her boyfriend, was several years older, and he seemed to crave control. The text messages were constant. He’d ask her to skip her night classes at school to spend more time with him, then sulk if she said she needed to keep up on her schoolwork. He harped on her to lose weight, then accused her of cheating on him when she shed a few pounds. Brian seemed generous at first, buying Kristin gifts for no reason—but then used the gifts to argue that she owed him her loyalty.

“We learned these things after the tragedy,” Bill Mitchell said. “We lived near Baltimore; she lived near Philadelphia. She was almost twenty-two, so you hope she’s safe on her own.”

She wasn’t. Aside from an occasional comment about her relationship with Landau not being “perfect,” Kristin’s life seemed more or less normal, and she focused on graduating. She began the joyless task of pursuing job interviews when potential employers set up shop at her college’s job fairs in the fall of 2004. She seemed to do well making the rounds, talking with companies such as Hormel and Rubbermaid, but the big job, the one everyone wanted, was with General Mills, her father recalled.

Bill Mitchell coached her through her through several interviews, but they concentrated mostly on the big job interview with General Mills. He helped her prepare for the dreaded “where do you see yourself in five years” types of questions. Bill told his daughter to study the company and its competition. “Go in and win it,” he encouraged her. “She had nothing to lose and I wanted her to be as confident as could be,” Bill later recalled. “She was always good in an interview setting.”

She dressed in power clothes—likely her favorite dark gray business suit—and nailed the interview, landing a job as a sales associate. She was to start her new career on July 8, 2005. Part of Kristin’s new beginning, however, included ending things with Landau. She told some friends things just weren’t working out. Then, on June 3, police discovered Kristin’s bloodied body inside her apartment in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. Her life had drained out from dozens of stab wounds.

Though the discovery was made in the morning, Bill Mitchell said he didn’t learn about his daughter’s death until that evening. Police, apparently busy collecting evidence, had trouble finding Bill’s cell phone number and called the local police in Baltimore for help. Bill was in the car, driving, when his phone rang. He didn’t understand why police would be calling, he recalled, and, suspicious when the officer insisted they talk in person, Bill agreed to meet at a public supermarket, just in case the person on the other end of the line was an imposter. He met the officer near the front doors of a Giant supermarket. The detective asked him to come into her police car, but Bill refused.

“This situation was just so out of place. I wanted to hear what ever the detective had to say right there at the doors of the supermarket,” Mitchell later recalled.

The officer hesitated, then told him that Kristin had been killed.

“I walked to her car and sat in the passenger seat and called a detective in the Philadelphia area as I busily wrote notes on a legal pad,” Mitchell recalled.

Mitchell had already told his wife that he was meeting with the police. Now he headed home to tell her and their son that Kristin was dead.

 

Landau, in a dramatic display of what hardened cops call overkill, stabbed his girlfriend more than fifty times. Her throat had been slashed six times; her back stabbed eleven.

He told police that the couple had been fighting, and each had stabbed the other, according to news reports in the days that followed. Though Landau went to a hospital for treatment of his own wounds, the medical examiner determined they were actually self-inflicted. Landau backtracked and said that some of the wounds were from an aborted attempt to kill himself. When the news stories came out, Bill Mitchell was mortified. The media had reported what Landau told police—including a claim that Kristin had slashed him when he rebuffed a sexual advance.

“Talk about insult to injury!” Mitchell said. “Imagine: Your daughter’s been murdered and our newspaper sends up the tabloid version of what happened.”

Kristin simply would not have grabbed a knife in anger, her father said.

“My daughter would have been panicky if she had a tiny splinter in her finger,” he said. “She had no tolerance for pain, whether it be hers or someone else’s.”

District Attorney Bruce Castor Jr. opted not to seek the death penalty in the case but still charged Landau with first-degree murder, meaning life behind bars without parole. The court proceedings dragged. The trial, originally set for early December 2005, was postponed, leaving the Mitchells to endure their first Christmas without Kristin with no idea when the case would reach court.

“The wait,” Bill recalled, “was numbing.”

Eventually, a new date was set: June 5, 2006. But before the jury was selected, Landau hedged, pleading guilty to third-degree murder against the advice of his counsel. Facing life imprisonment, he opted instead to plead to the lesser charge and was sentenced to thirty years in prison, making him eligible for parole beginning in 2020.

The Mitchells considered it a victory. Though they wanted Kristin’s killer locked behind bars and away from society forever, there was always the possibility of things going terribly wrong in the courtroom.

“A trial would have been devastating,” Bill said. His family had already endured what he considered Kristin’s character assassination in the days after her death. He never believed her fight with Landau was mutual; it wasn’t in Kristin’s character to grab a kitchen knife and stab another human being.

“We knew from advice we were given that in the courtroom, first they kill the person, then they kill the person’s reputation,” Bill said. “Kristin would not be there to defend what ever this man or his attorney would say about her. We would also be at the mercy of the judge.”

And then there were the crime scene photographs. Kristin’s body, mutilated and bloodied, looking nothing like the sweet-smiled cat lover her family knew and loved.

“It’s as if she would have been murdered all over again,” Bill said.

Mitchell and his wife, Michele, collaborated with two of Kristin’s friends and created the Kristin Mitchell Foundation (www.kristinskrusade.org), a non-profit educational organization meant to raise awareness among young adults about the potential dangers of unhealthy dating relationships. Each year, it sponsors Kristin’s Krusade, a 5K run/walk on St. Joseph’s campus. The goal, her family said, is to warn young adults about the dangers they face in the hope that another family might be spared their pain.

It was a lofty aspiration, one reinvigorated with the death of Yeardley Love five years after Kristin’s murder.

Bill learned about Yeardley through an e-mail from a friend who had attended UVA years earlier. The details released by police rang painfully familiar: A young Baltimore-area woman, well educated and immersed in volunteer work, killed by a boyfriend near graduation time at college. The Mitchells were drawn to the case; they attended Yeardley’s wake and extended condolences to family members. It wasn’t the first death since their daughters that struck a chord.

Somehow, though, Yeardley’s death seemed different than the others. It seemed that this time, the whole world was paying attention.