Chapter 19

Students on the university’s campus tried to get their lives back to normal, but it wasn’t easy. The media scrutiny, while perhaps waning, was still pervasive. With every university milestone came another round of reporters looking to cover it from the “Yeardley Love” angle. On May 13, People magazine hit newsstands and mailboxes with Love on the cover. In bold letters, layered over the team photo that had run in newspapers nationwide, the cover text asked: “COULD SHE HAVE BEEN SAVED?” An inset photo of Huguely in jail garb hovered over the ominous title: “Virginia Lacrosse Killing.” It was heavy fare, juxtaposed alongside a photo of actress Sandra Bullock with her new adopted child and an announcement that country music artists Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert had gotten engaged.

By the time freelance writer Matthew Power showed up to cover the university’s graduation, the whole town of Charlottesville seemed exhausted by what he described as a “shark frenzy” of media attention.

Power, a contributor editor to Harper’s Magazine whose works have been published in dozens of high-profile magazines, including Men’s Journal, Mother Jones, Slate, and Maxim, got a surprise phone call from Rolling Stone magazine. Editors there had been slow to pick up on the Love slaying, but following the cover story in People, they seemed interested in providing readers with a more detailed takeout than they’d seen to date. Power hadn’t paid much attention to the case until he was asked to cover it. But his mother knew all about it.

“It had been an oversaturated media circus since” her death, Power later recalled. “I knew I was going into a tough situation, and Rolling Stone knew it, too. I was so far behind the curve of the rest of the media coverage.”

Power wasn’t thrilled with the assignment, but he accepted it anyway—largely, he acknowledged, because he didn’t want to pass up a gig with Rolling Stone. Plus, despite his distaste for the way Americans eat up grisly murder tales, he had been assured that the magazine would allow him the time and space he would need to tell Yeardley’s story in a respectful, insightful way. Perhaps some good could come from telling the story thoughtfully, he reasoned.

“With Rolling Stone, you have the great fortune of space and time and context and nuance,” he said. “It didn’t have to be boiled down to ‘dead, cute girl.’ You do have the potential of doing it right without it being as sensational a story.”

Armed with as many story clips and contact phone numbers as he could quickly gather, Power rented a car and drove from his home in New York City to Charlottesville, crashing at the home of a journalist friend. He tracked down Brendan Fitzgerald, the reporter with C-VILLE Weekly who had covered the death from the very first hours. Power tried to reach Yeardley’s family, but to no avail. Sharon apparently had spoken briefly to People but was declining further requests. Attorneys from both sides weren’t speaking, either. Power then reached out to Yeardley’s friends, most of whom were polite but clearly unwilling to assist with the piece.

None of that shocked Power, but what did surprise him was the reluctance of people who didn’t know Yeardley but who could have nonetheless helped tell the tale of her life at UVA. It was as if the whole city was on lockdown, as though some directive had been passed out community-wide instructing people to shrug off all media inquiries. It didn’t matter what outlet the reporter was from or how earnest he or she was about telling the story properly. Yeardley’s death had united the city in silence.

The Sunday after Power arrived in town—about three days into his trip—an attempt at a profile piece on Huguely was published in the Washington Post. The story largely was based on public court records, some of which already had been made public, and unnamed sources—a noticeable lack of substance in a story that boasted three reporters in its byline and several more as contributors. One unnamed source was a bartender at Boylan Heights, the bar down the street from Yeardley and George’s apartments, an establishment that reportedly had been busy on the night of the slaying. Even though the source wasn’t identified, Power learned that the bartender who blabbed had been fired after the piece ran. And when Power himself reached out to the bar, a different bartender snarled, “You’ll get nothing from me, pal.”

Power half-smiled, handed over his business card, finished his subpar $3 drink of well vodka and soda, and left.

“The fact was, there was no upside for anyone to talk,” Power said. “They had been completely swarmed over by the media. Most of them were young kids about to graduate, and they suddenly found themselves in the deep end of a media pool. Every kid on both of the teams had been swamped with calls and calls and calls from reporters. Imagine your whole life is ahead of you, and you’re suddenly thrust into a sordid murder investigation.”

Power paused, then mused the university’s colors.

“There was an orange wall of silence,” he said.

Power reached his contact at Rolling Stone and told him the story might be tough to deliver. Somehow, the case was the talk of the town—but no one was actually saying anything. Still, Power decided to stay on through the university’s graduation ceremonies in hopes that he might find two or three people to help him tell an appropriate story. The story he felt he was uncovering, even in people’s silence, was one about wealth and connections in an insular high society. In fact, he said, it was an “insular culture within an insular culture within an insular culture”—a group of wealthy young adults admitted to the prestigious University of Virginia who belonged to the cloistered lacrosse culture. The story made headlines not just because Yeardley was young, beautiful, and white, Power said. It garnered international attention in part because of the “shock that trailer park behavior would occur” within that society.

 

Behind the scenes, Yeardley’s family was hard at work trying to distance the young woman from the image of a domestic violence victim. While John Casteen’s heartfelt words at Yeardley’s on-campus vigil had garnered national praise, the family, by many accounts, was not happy with her being depicted as a victim—or, as in the lyrics of the haunting Pink Floyd song, among the “weak and the weary.” As the family’s displeasure became known, university employees were cautioned not only to avoid media questions, but to particularly shy away from any phrasing that might depict Yeardley as the victim of intimate partner violence.

One employee felt this was a mistake. Frances Godfrey*, whose name has been changed because she fears she will lose her job by speaking publicly, said the university missed an opportunity to reach out to young adults by acquiescing to the family’s request to stay silent.

“It might seem honorable within the university to honor the family’s wishes, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s the right way to go. There are ways to talk about the incident that don’t make Yeardley look like this was somehow her fault,” Godfrey said.

Others at the university agreed. Some wanted to use the case to reach out to young women in unhealthy relationships, but they were forbidden. Publicly, only Casteen had been granted permission to speak about the case, and even he fell silent within a week of Yeardley’s death.

“He was considered by many to have made very eloquent statements,” Godfrey recalled. “Everyone at the university was consoled by that. But then even he stopped talking. Everything got quiet.”

Asked via phone message and e-mail about the university’s response to the tragedies, UVA spokeswoman Carol Wood refused to reply. To some, it seemed reflective of the university’s decision to fall mute. The pall cast over the university was palpable, employees said. The academic year had been so difficult. People felt sucker punched and drained, and now they felt they had to walk on eggshells around campus when so many were ready to scream out.

This had been a year when students kept hopeful vigil on the bridge where Morgan Harrington was last seen, only to be devastated with the discovery of her body three months later. A year when the peak of lacrosse season was marred by the brutal slaying of one student, and the unfathomable arrest of another. A year when six other students—three of them seniors, on the cusp of graduating and entering the so-called real world—died suddenly. For many, these instances marked their first introductions to death, serving as a wakeup call that the world they were entering could be unthinkably sinister and heartlessly random.

“It had been a terrible, terrible year. Just godawful,” Godfrey said. “This genuinely isn’t a place that we think of as being violent. It was so shocking—profoundly, profoundly shocking.”

Outside of Yeardley’s vigil, students involved in the White Ribbon Campaign—meant to raise awareness for violence against women—passed out the looped material, but Godfrey said she later learned that they had already been asked not to directly link Yeardley with domestic violence. Instead, the volunteers—mostly young women—passed the ribbons out quietly to people approaching the campus lawn.

Sharon Love acknowledged to one reporter that she was tired of the media portraying Yeardley as a domestic violence victim. The reporter, a woman, said that she was personally familiar with such violence and saw Yeardley’s story as a chance to illustrate how even smart, strong women could be victimized. Maybe some good could come from the story, the reporter suggested.

“Yeardley was no shrinking violet,” Love interjected.

The reporter was taken aback. “Neither was I,” she answered.

“The family did not want it to be called domestic violence because that meant particular things about Yeardley, and that was the end of that,” Godfrey said. “It could no longer be called that. We were not to link these two things.”

Liz Seccuro, the UVA alumna and victims’ rights activist, noticed that people shied away when she called it domestic violence as well.

“That is what it is: Domestic violence,” she said. “People don’t like that moniker because it doesn’t speak to ‘nice kids’ who go to ‘nice schools.’”

The family’s decree colored how—and whether—Casteen and others would discuss Yeardley from then on.

 

Though Yeardley wouldn’t be there to cross the stage, she was still set to graduate from the University of Virginia. The school announced that she would receive her degree posthumously, allowing her to achieve in death what she’d set her sights on years prior: the UVA degree her father never got.

The first graduation was on May 23, and it was the one most university students attended. Yeardley would not have crossed the stage in that ceremony had she lived because she would have been traveling with her teammates 180 miles away in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, after playing in the final lacrosse match of the year. Still, her absence seemed to weigh down the crowd, recalled Matthew Power, who, like Brendan Fitzgerald, attended the ceremony.

Tens of thousands of people gathered to watch the sea of graduates, garbed in black gowns and colored hoods, make the hour-long trek across the stately lawn to their seats. As they walked, the heartache of the past few weeks lifted slightly and gave way to high-fives, hugs, and laughter. Students snapped photos of themselves on their cell phones and texted them to friends. Images from the ceremony were posted to Facebook profiles before the commencement even began.

As soon as the class was seated, however, the crowd quieted for a moment of silence to honor the four members of the graduating class who did not live to see graduation. Though Yeardley was just one of four, her death seemed to overshadow the others. Perhaps it was just timing as hers had been the most recent, or maybe it was the lingering what-ifs, the senselessness of it—and the feeling that it could have, and should have, been avoided.

As Charlottesville’s streets clogged with commencement-goers, volunteers again quietly passed out their white ribbons—reportedly 25,000 of them—in hopes of raising awareness. Caitlin Donaghy, a UVA student, was one of only a few to agree to speak to reporters.

“The reality is, domestic abuse is prevalent everywhere, and people really need to talk about it and know that there are resources out there,” she told CBS’s Early Show.

But the reality was, no one was talking about what killed Yeardley Love. As the commencement speeches began, there would be some allusions to, and a few direct mentions of, Yeardley, but there would be no discussion of what caused her death. Nor would there be any mention of Huguely, who had also been set to graduate that day.

John Casteen, looking even more like an academic than usual, approached the podium, wearing a traditional black robe. He “appeared both timeless and unshakeable before a crowd of thousands,” Fitzgerald wrote in the May 25 edition of C-VILLE Weekly. For the university president, the day weighed heavy for more reasons than Yeardley’s death. He had announced prior to the academic year that 2010 would mark his final commencement before an August 1 retirement, bringing to an end a twenty-year legacy at the school. He had arrived amid a bud get crisis, navigating through complicated changes to how the state would fund the university. In 1990, the university had been smaller; Casteen helped it grow, both in terms of its facilities and in student enrollment. In his two decades as president, the university had built or bought 134 new buildings, increased female undergraduate enrollment from 50 to 56 percent, increased minority enrollment by nearly 7 percent, and increased overall enrollment from about 18,000 to nearly 21,000. Casteen had been lauded for creating the Office of Diversity and Equity at the university in the wake of racial incidents between 2003 and 2005, during which black students reported experiencing racial epithets scrawled in bathrooms and screamed at them as they walked down the street. Largely, Casteen was praised as a university president. Some said he would likely go down in history as its best.

But his last year on campus had been remarkably dark. Seven of his students had died, four of whom were on the cusp of graduating and beginning new lives, and the murder of Morgan Harrington had also disquieted the town.

“This is, in a sense, a daunting moment for me,” Casteen began as he faced some 6,000 graduates. “Just as the University has not been perfect in your time here, the world to which you go is flawed and, in some senses, corrupt.”

Casteen admitted that he was more accustomed to watching commencements rather than speaking at them, and he struggled to find the right words and advice. Jokingly, he passed along his wife’s tip—“don’t sweat the small stuff.” But his real message was wrapped in references to John Keats, the nineteenth-century poet whose life was cut short at age twenty-five by tuberculosis. For Casteen, it was Keats’s theory of “negative capability”—or the capacity to accept the uncertain and unresolved—that resonated most.

“Here we must decide for ourselves whether or not to act—whether we will step out courageously to explore those dark passages,” Casteen said.

Though he didn’t say Yeardley’s name at that point, those attending were sure he was referencing her.

Casteen mused about the things he would miss hearing most when he left the campus: “The sounds of children on the lawn during Halloween. The chapel’s bells. Cheers at games, no matter what the sport. And the name of Yeardley Love.”

It was the only time he uttered her name, and they were the final two words Casteen spoke. His message seemed clear: Yeardley must not be forgotten.

For those familiar with Keats’s life and death, that message was especially poignant. The young man, whose poems and letters were only appreciated after his death, was both afraid and certain that his existence on earth would be forgotten. The epitaph he wrote for his tombstone reads: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Casteen seemed to be urging the campus to make sure Yeardley’s name was written in stone.

Department chair Jeffrey Legro presided over the ceremony for Yeardley’s 250 political science classmates. It seemed a bittersweet day for those crossing the lawn to receive their diplomas. The death was too fresh—just three weeks had passed—for students to feel ready to selfishly celebrate their own accomplishments. A sense of survivor’s guilt hung thick in the air.

After what seemed to be the last name was read and the final diploma received, Legro said he had one remaining.

“As you know, Yeardley Love was killed just weeks short of this ceremony,” he told the crowd. “Today, we are not mourning Yeardley. We are celebrating her achievement as a member of the class of 2010 at this University of Virginia.”

Several members of Yeardley’s family sat in the audience, including an aunt and uncle and some cousins, Legro said. He called on Lawren McChesney, Yeardley’s cousin and a 2006 UVA graduate, to accept the diploma on Love’s behalf.

“It is a privilege to recognize all that Yeardley achieved as a student at UVA and all the potential she had in life by awarding a posthumous degree of bachelor of arts in government,” Legro said.

He paused, then called her name the same fashion as everyone else who had received a degree: “Yeardley. Reynolds. Love.”

The crowd erupted in applause. It lasted a raucous forty-five seconds, tempered only by Legro’s prompting.

“You are now officially alumni,” Legro told the graduating class. “You will be missed.”

On Monday, the university held a special graduation for the men’s lacrosse and softball players who had missed the previous day’s ceremonies. The athletes filed into Old Cabell Hall, one of three buildings designed by Stanford White for the south end of the Lawn in 1898. Originally known as the Academical Building, it was stately and grand, with an auditorium stage lined with giant organ pipes and adorned on the north wall with a copy of The School of Athens by Raphael.

Several members of the men’s team wore buttons bearing Yeardley’s name and the date of her death on their robes. Ken Clausen, the men’s captain who had worn both Yeardley’s and Will Barrow’s initials on his cheeks, was introduced as a stellar athlete, one of the men’s lacrosse team captains. He took the microphone to uproarious applause and thanked the university, its faculty, his coaches, his teammates, and all the lacrosse parents. He shared in the university softball team’s solid 2010 showing, and said that they gathered this day not only to celebrate the athletes’ accomplishments in the classroom, but also their accomplishments on the field.

The weeks leading up to graduation had tested everyone, he added.

“The untimely death of Yeardley Love sent shockwaves through our program, the university, and the country,” he said, reading from a speech. “This tragic event forced our teams and the university to stick together to come out stronger rather than fragment and fade away.

“Well, I can assure you the latter has not occurred, and that our university has come together like no one could have imagined.”

The coaches, staff, students and parents had all supported the team immensely, he added. He thanked them on behalf of his whole team.

After his speech, as the applause began to quiet, Clausen stepped down. Matthew Power, who had already e-mailed and called Clausen before the graduation, tried to sidle up to him in hopes he would elaborate. Power’s approach was respectful and a bit laid-back—more “please consider calling me” than the stereo typical microphone-in-the-face approach that some attach to journalists. He knew the kids were hurting. He knew, too, that they already seemed banded together in silence. Clausen had come across as a stand-up guy, and it seemed he had a lot more to say on the matter than what he presented in his seven-minute speech. But Clausen declined, as did Caitlin Whiteley and the other members of both the men and women’s teams. No one was willing or able to shed light on either Yeardley’s or George’s personalities or their relationship.

Power had repeatedly run into the same refrain. After about a week of in-person and phone research, he gave up and alerted Rolling Stone that the story had stalled. It was the first time in his professional career that he had ditched a story because no one would cooperate. He assured Rolling Stone that the failure wasn’t caused by any personal shortcoming.

“I said they could be comforted in the knowledge that no one else would have the story, either,” he said.

A few months later, as he recalled the experience, Power said he couldn’t blame anyone for refusing to cooperate. He suspected that many felt complicit in Yeardley’s death—and he didn’t disagree. There had been several public run-ins between Yeardley and Huguely, and for what ever reason, apparently not one of those instances had been reported to the authorities.

“Everyone should have known it was a huge problem,” Power said. “I’d be surprised if many weren’t aware, which makes them complicit in some way.”