Dr. Daniel Spitz has testified in hundreds of court cases, many of them involving homicides. As a medical examiner in suburban Detroit and a former pathologist in homicide-heavy Miami-Dade County, he has sat on both sides of the courtroom, often testifying for the prosecution, but occasionally, usually when he has been hired privately, for the defense.
Without doubt, he said, the defense in the case against George Huguely V would aim to minimize the damage the repeated head bashing had caused the twenty-two-year-old athlete. One way, predicted Spitz, would be to minimize the number of impacts. If the prosecutors say she banged her head seven times, the defense would likely look for evidence that it could have been as few times as two or three.
“Of course, I’m sure they’d try to get it down to one,” he said.
But to Spitz, “it doesn’t really help. You don’t accidentally hit your head against the wall to the point of causing [the] kinds of injuries [that police had described in the case].”
UVA Professor Gregory Mitchell said he expected the defense to attack Yeardley’s behavior with what ever information they could gather.
“From the defense’s perspective, they’re going to try to say that he was intoxicated and that impaired his view of things—or that she provoked him,” Mitchell said. “What ever the prosecution says, they’re going to try to show the flipside of that.”
If Yeardley had been drinking, that would open the door for defense lawyers to argue that the depressing effects of alcohol were the real reason her life ended.
And that’s where Yeardley’s supposed “Sunday Funday” would likely come into play.
Sunday night was usually a social one for both the men and women’s UVA lacrosse teams. Game days typically fell on Saturdays, Sundays, and Tuesdays, meaning that Sundays offered the one night in a weekend in which players were usually guaranteed not to have a game the next day.
Like many college students, the lacrosse players were known to mix alcohol with their “fun,” according to neighbors and area bartenders.
On May 2, as on so many other nights during the academic year, the beers were tossed back at Boylan Heights, just down the street from Yeardley’s apartment. It was the perfect kind of establishment for a gathering of sports-minded college students: a bit dingy, with a worn concrete floor inside and the type of battered stuffed chairs you often spot on front porches in college towns. But the place had a hint of chic as well, with loft-style exposed brick and ambient lighting.
The beer-and-burger joint thrived off its college patrons. Even its signage was written in the same heavily outlined block font so often associated with universities. Instead of standard menus, customers were given checklists with which to create their burgers (patty options: beef, turkey, veggie or chicken). Fries were of course a mainstay, though Boylan Heights offered an option with a twist: sweet potato fries.
A deck area surrounded by blue railing provided outdoor seating—ideal for people watching—while inside, patrons could gather around a massive projection television screen usually tuned in to one sports competition or another. As one online reviewer wrote, Boylan Heights’s pros were its thick burgers, pool tables, and happy-hour specials. Among its cons? Being packed with college students during the school year.
Indeed, it was a regular hangout for the lacrosse teams. The players often arrived late and stayed until closing, sometimes watching sports on the TVs inside. (Yeardley was said to have insisted on complete isolation during Baltimore Ravens games, but on this Sunday in early May, the Ravens were still months away from taking the field.) Caitlin Whiteley, Yeardley’s friend since the sixth grade and UVA roommate, later testified that the gathering May 2 was altogether ordinary. A group had gathered in the early evening for a friend’s birthday party, but Yeardley didn’t feel like staying long. Caitlin walked her friend home, then went back to Boylan Heights about 11 p.m.—without Yeardley.
“She was tired,” testified Whiteley, who added that Yeardley drank beer at the bar but didn’t seem drunk.
Caitlin testified that her roommate and Huguely’s relationship had been on and off for years, but, according to other friends who spoke to reporters in the days after the death, not everyone knew. The Washington Post quoted one unnamed friend who said, “I still didn’t know they had broken up. Everything seemed fine.” And another friend said she approached Yeardley at the Boylan Heights birthday gathering and asked, “What’s going on with you and George?” Yeardley replied, “Same old stuff. Everything is good.”
As it turned out, Huguely was headed to Yeardley’s apartment soon after. Friends testified that he had spent the day at a father-son golf tournament at the Wintergreen Resort, a mountainous retreat about forty-five minutes southwest of Charlottesville. After spending the day golfing and drinking, Huguely was “definitely drunk,” his roommate, Kevin Carroll, would testify months later. At 11:40 p.m.—not long after Whiteley left Yeardley alone in their apartment—Carroll said he left to buy more beer before the stores closed at midnight. Huguely stayed behind. When Carroll got back, Huguely was gone.
About ten minutes later, Anna Lehman, who lived downstairs from Yeardley, heard “very loud” banging noises coming from upstairs, according to testimony she gave months later. Next, she heard footsteps come down the stairs and spotted a man wearing a blue shirt leaving the building. Soon after, Huguely returned to his apartment and told Carroll that he had gone downstairs with two friends for a few minutes. Carroll called one of the friends, Will Bolton, to suggest he join the upstairs crew for a few beers, but Bolton said he wasn’t there, immediately disputing where Huguely said he’d been.
The other downstairs friend also said he hadn’t hung out with Huguely that night. In fact, he testified, he was so busy studying that when Huguely knocked on his door earlier in the evening, he told Huguely to go away and locked his door.
Caitlin got back to the apartment she shared with Yeardley about 2 a.m., she testified, and spotted the hole in the door to Love’s bedroom. She peeked in the room and noticed her hair, which had earlier been pulled up, splayed in that unnatural fashion.
“I saw Yeardley in bed facedown with a comforter over her,” Whiteley testified. “I shook her shoulder. I moved her hair to the side and touched her shoulder.”
That was when, she said, she saw blood on Yeardley’s neck and face. She and Oudshoorn called police, and as Oudshoorn lifted Love out of the bed to attempt CPR, he saw more blood on Yeardley’s face and eye. Soon, the apartment filled with police and medics and the once-calm home was transformed into a crime scene.
Yeardley’s body, found around 2:15 a.m., offered investigators something they were less likely to be able to obtain from Huguely: a relatively accurate reading of her blood-alcohol content. While police wouldn’t tell reporters whether Huguely voluntarily submitted to any Breathalyzer or blood tests to determine whether he was intoxicated—and if he was, how much—Detective Reeves’s search warrants seeking bodily fluids and DNA samples wasn’t signed until 11:52 a.m., presumably more than eight hours after Huguely would have last had a chance to drink. And even if the sample had been taken earlier, he might have had more to drink after Yeardley’s death, thus raising his BAC, or perhaps he had stopped drinking, which would have given his body time to process the alcohol and lower his reading by the time Reeves caught up with him.
Yeardley, however, would likely have been tested soon after her death.
If police had a BAC for Huguely, they didn’t release it to the public, leaving many to speculate. A high BAC could work in favor of his defense, bolstering Lawrence’s assertion that the death was an accident. If Huguely had been significantly impaired, his ability to form intent was questionable, his lawyers could argue. He’s a generally good man with an unfortunate illness: It was a sometimes-successful argument to jurors. It worked in Andrew Alston’s case, after all. As far as the jury in that case knew, Alston had no significant criminal history. (In reality, he had been previously charged and acquitted of assaulting his girlfriend. The judge ruled that to be inadmissible in the murder trial.) He was the son of a well-respected lawyer, and he’d just two years earlier suffered the tragic loss of a brother to suicide.
On the other hand, Huguely was well aware of his ongoing alcohol issues—the blackouts he reportedly told friends about, and the public service sentence he got after threatening to kill an officer trying to arrest him. If jurors were told about those incidents, they could lose sympathy for someone who should have known better, even if he was too drunk to at the precise moment of his crime.
Yeardley’s drinking could theoretically have played a role in her death, Spitz said (“Anything’s possible,” he regularly testified in trials), but the issue would likely become a contentious one between the prosecution and defense. Spitz had seen it before.