As it became clear to local reporters that Yeardley’s case would surpass any other they had covered in recent memory, reporter Brendan Fitzgerald said the C-VILLE Weekly began to devote more and more resources, because the case raised a slew of questions that authorities did not seem ready—or willing—to answer. One of the biggest questions was that of entitlement.
As word of Huguely’s earlier outbursts surfaced, some wondered if the good-looking Landon graduate had been given a pass for behavior that would have landed others behind bars. And others questioned how many of Yeardley’s own friends had ignored signs that her boyfriend was unstable—possibly even dangerous. Looking for answers, Fitzgerald knocked on doors lining a half-mile stretch of 14th Street Northwest. Few people answered, and those who did declined to talk. He headed to the lawn outside of the university’s rotunda, where students lounged between classes. They sprawled on the grass in T-shirts and shorts, the early May days creeping above eighty degrees.
None talked.
In a world where there’s no shortage of people to opine on anything and everything, Fitzgerald was shocked to meet only silence. It was one thing when Huguely’s advisor in the anthropology department declined to comment—that was to be expected—but never had Fitzgerald encountered so many tight lips among students.
“It was a surprise to me as a reporter and as a former UVA student to approach a group of half-dozen students to ask for any comment on any respect and have them all decline, and not for lack of words,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s rare in any of my experiences in UVA that students were hesitant to share their opinions. They are a very bright lot reliably year after year. I expected no shortage of nuanced takes or ideas.”
When pondering why this case seemed to trigger silence at UVA when so many others encouraged an outpouring of thoughts and emotions, Fitzgerald came up empty. Finding students to talk about Morgan Harrington’s disappearance had never been difficult. But there was something about Yeardley Love’s death that left students guarded and speechless. Was it the case itself, the blinding media coverage, or the last straw in a deadly year that left the whole campus emotionally drained? Fitzgerald didn’t know.
“To find nothing was startling,” he said.
Still, reporters toiled away. Sensationalized or not, Yeardley’s case had touched thousands upon thousands of people worldwide. It eventually would grace the cover of People magazine, whose average single-copy sales in the first half of 2010 were nearly 1.3 million. Though Sharon Love gave a brief comment to People, its coverage, like most other publications, relied heavily on early newspaper accounts, quotes, and information gathered immediately after Yeardley’s death. And none of the accounts shed any light on Yeardley’s relationship with George.
University officials, in fact, instructed those who knew the couple to keep quiet. One student athlete told a reporter that members of the university’s sports teams—not just lacrosse—had been told not only to refrain from making public comments, but to refuse new friend requests on social networking sites such as Facebook in hopes of filtering out anecdote-seeking reporters. Indeed, dozens of UVA students contacted via Facebook and LinkedIn (another social site but with a more professional slant) simply ignored incoming messages asking about Yeardley and George.
Faced with few live sources, reporters turned to paper ones, filing a slew of requests under federal and state Freedom of Information Act laws. Journalists wanted the details: What evidence had been collected at the crime scene? What exactly had Caitlin Whiteley and Philippe Oudshoorn described in the nine-one-one call to police? What crucial information had Huguely tried to trash when he stole Yeardley’s laptop and tossed it in a Dumpster? The day after the death, news media were given what they were accustomed to receiving: limited access, but some access nonetheless. In an ongoing investigation, journalists don’t expect to be given information that might jeopardize a case, but they do expect to have access to police and court documents that have historically been deemed public by legal precedent. It’s a checks-and-balances system, after all: The media can’t keep tabs on the government and governmental procedures if the government completely closes its books. Reporters were allowed to review three search warrants linked to the crime, and the contents of those warrants were instantaneously reported in print, on television, and online.
But suddenly and without explanation, the records were sealed in a move that baffled the news outlets. On May 6, three days after Yeardley’s death, Judge Cheryl Higgins with the 16th Judicial Court granted prosecution motions asking that warrants for several searches be sealed—specifically, the searches of Yeardley’s apartment, of Huguely’s apartment, of Huguely’s car, and of Huguely himself. Higgins filed four separate orders, each of which was, like the warrants themselves, sealed.
The Washington Post, no stranger to waging battles over the public’s right to know, joined the Daily Progress and Richmond Times-Dispatch, as well as the Associated Press, in challenging the Commonwealth of Virginia for sealing the documents.
It wasn’t just that some documents weren’t available, the media consortium argued, but that Higgins’s order failed to say which records were sealed and why—nor did the judge specify for how long they would remain out of view. Attorney Craig T. Merritt argued that Virginia Supreme Court guidelines require that the public be given such specifics so that they have the chance to oppose the action. Higgins’s filings were unfairly vague, Merritt argued, and offered no timeline—saying only that the documents would be sealed “temporarily.”
Predictably, George’s family said little to the media—not an uncommon position for people whose loved one has been charged with a vicious crime and could face life imprisonment. Yeardley’s family also remained cloistered, as did her friends. The day-after pleadings for time and space turned into a widespread vow of silence at the request of Yeardley’s family. Her likes and dislikes, her goals and dreams, the details that turn a tragic story into a human one, were kept under wraps.
Mary Bartel, Yeardley’s lacrosse coach at Notre Dame Prep, told one reporter via e-mail that Yeardley’s mother had originally granted her permission to speak to Yeardley’s character and history at the school. “Beyond that, we continue to respect the family request that our response to questions be ‘no comment.’ Thanks for your understanding,” she wrote. Others similarly shied from talking, saying that they had promised Yeardley’s family their silence.
Somehow, despite the disconnect, Yeardley’s story wasn’t lost. Within days of her death, several groups on Facebook had been dedicated to her. One online memorial had more than 100,000 members by week’s end. Six months later, “In Memory of Yeardley Love: UVA Lacrosse Player” still had 75,960 members.
Another Facebook memorial page, titled “R.I.P. Yeardley Love, May 3, 2010” drew more than 24,000 members.
“Did not know Yeardley personally, but feel free to post on the wall…” wrote the page’s creator, twenty-four-year-old Benjamin Edmonds of Cooperstown, New York.
“I had no idea that it would get so big,” he said later. “I just happened to be the first person to create it. It started out one by one and soon I was getting thousands of members an hour.”
The outpouring on the Internet provided a forum for both friends and strangers. It was a sign of the high-tech times: Just as young adults had begun turning to the Web to create and maintain friendships, they turned there, too, to share stories of grief, to express their outrage and to post poems and songs they had written in Yeardley’s honor. Social networking proved it’s about more than connecting people in life; it could connect in death as well.
“I never knew Yeardley but this story has really stuck with me,” one woman wrote. “A young life taken too soon and so tragically.”
Wrote another: “It is critically important that women protect their friends. NEVER allow anyone who is being threatened to remain silent…. Yeardley lost her life because of silent acceptance of violent behavior.”
Some who posted online were angry, calling on the Commonwealth to pursue the death penalty against Huguely. Others were more tempered. “He deserves a trial,” one man wrote. “Get your stuff together before you speak.” Thousands reached out to Yeardley’s family, offering support and prayers.
Tiffany Danielle, a lacrosse player from Cincinnati, Ohio, put her thoughts to music, publicly posting a dedication video with a nearly three-minute song written for Yeardley. Through a mixture of rap and R&B, she sang that though she didn’t know Love, the young woman’s death had brought her to tears.
The two shared a mutual love of lacrosse, she sang—“a lax family that we were both part of”—and that commonality made them family. “And when we step on the field, you’re the one we think of,” she sang, before promising to root for orange and blue.
Phyllis Botti of Los Angeles was one of the countless people who had no connection to the case but found herself drawn to it anyway. Months later, she could recall exactly how she first learned of Yeardley’s death and admitted that her friends accused her of being obsessed with the case.
“I’ll never forget it. It was May 4, I was at work and I see this blurb from AOL saying that this young man was arrested for supposedly killing this young lady,” she recalled. “It was odd. I live in Los Angeles and we hear of people getting killed all the time, or kids being kidnapped. I read about those and get sad, but I move on, but this one really got to me. There was something about this case. My friends said, ‘Phyllis, you’re like obsessed with this story. You act like this is someone from your family.’
“I just think it’s her face and her eyes,” she continued. “She just looked like an angel on earth to me. Her eyes completely haunted me. It’s interesting because before I saw the photo, it still got to me, but when I saw her face…She was full of life and promise, and that smile.”
It wasn’t that Botti identified with the violent ending Yeardley had met, either. The fifty-three-year-old divorced animal rights activist said she’s never been abused either verbally or physically. (With a name like Botti and a six foot four father named Bruno, no one would dare, she joked.) It was more that Yeardley’s death seemed so pointless and avoidable. She takes to heart the famous Albert Einstein quote: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”
“It’s so tragic that no one did anything and there were all of those signs,” she said.
Botti has followed every development. She regularly posts links to updates on her Facebook profile page. She can rattle off the case’s twists and turns with ease—the campus vigil, the details of Huguely’s past arrest, his reportedly heavy-drinking hours leading up to the death. She found herself in tears talking about the case with friends. She even got in arguments with some who didn’t like how the media had focused so much on Yeardley and Huguely’s wealthy upbringings.
“I would say that I know it could happen anywhere, but you don’t expect it to happen in a place like that,” she said.
Yeardley had no shortage of friends through her profile page on Facebook. (It’s unclear if George ever had one, or if it was swiftly deleted after his arrest.) In her public photo, she wore a strappy dark top and white pants draped alongside a friend on top of what appeared to be a barroom pool table. The girls, facing opposite directions with their heads propped, were fresh-faced and beaming; Yeardley’s arms looked toned and tan.
Friends posted and tagged hundreds of photographs of Yeardley. Some of the pictures, later shared with reporters or posted in video montages elsewhere online, showed her smiling and laughing alongside her friends. Her clothes were flattering and fresh, appropriate for Charlottesville’s humid summers. She seemed to favor tops either strappy or strapless, sometimes accented with bold, chunky necklaces. She was known to dress up both for Halloween and New Year’s Eve, and while many of her photos were posed and smiley, she wasn’t afraid to ham it up for the camera. In one, she looked appropriately goofball, dressed with two friends in rainbow propeller hats and nerdy glasses, complete with thick tape at the bridge. In another, she wore an expression of mock seriousness while dressed in camouflage overalls and a hunter orange vest.
She had more than 1,000 Facebook “friends,” though several who responded to journalists’ interview requests said they had only peripherally met the young woman. The hefty friend count isn’t surprising for a girl Yeardley’s age, on the cusp of graduating college, with so many interests. Nowadays, Facebook is used as much to catch up with high school classmates as it is to discover new people with overlapping interests, said Dave Awl, author of Facebook Me! which is in its second edition. In his book, Awl describes how people Yeardley’s age and younger have different concepts of what friendship is than previous generations. They meet someone either in real life or online whom they deem interesting enough to warrant “friending,” and from there, they recalibrate, he said.
Plus, he said, a college student set to graduate is wise to have a huge network (allowing some “friends” more access to personal info than others, he cautioned), as you never know where information about a job might surface. Many of Yeardley’s friends were fellow lacrosse players, both male and female, from universities across the country. Many, too, were from the Baltimore area, some of whom she had met just once or twice before they became part of her entrusted online circle.
“If you’re outgoing, if you’re gregarious, if you have diverse interests and an intellectual curiosity, it’s normal to have 1,000 friends online,” Awl said.
By all accounts, Yeardley was each of those things.
Within six months of Yeardley’s death, her Facebook profile had been deleted. All that remained were the pages created in her memory.