On Friday, October 17, family members of several missing young women in Central Virginia marked the fifth anniversary of Morgan Harrington’s disappearance with a prayer that UVA student Hannah Graham would be found and that her parents, John and Sue Graham, would find some comfort in knowing what happened to their daughter after she vanished on September 13.
“Bring us the closure that they need,” pleaded Trina Murphy, the aunt of Alexis Murphy, the Nelson County teen who vanished last August and whose remains have never been found despite a murder conviction in her case.
Less than 24 hours after that prayer was offered, at a hastily convened press conference on Saturday, October 18, Charlottesville and Albemarle police chiefs Tim Longo and Steve Sellers announced the discovery earlier that day of human remains on a vacant property on Old Lynchburg Road, just a few miles from where Morgan Harrington’s remains were found in January 2010. Two days later, on Monday, October 20, Fairfax authorities announced that the man already charged with abduction with intent to defile in Graham’s disappearance had been indicted on a slew of serious charges including attempted capital murder in a brutal 2005 sexual assault. That case is also connected by DNA evidence to Harrington’s disappearance and death.
“Over nine years, we never gave up,” said Fairfax Police Chief Carl Pardiny, noting that the Fairfax police department is now working closely with the Charlottesville and Albemarle police departments as well as Virginia State Police, the lead agency in the Harrington case. The separate investigations connected now by the indictments against 32-year-old Albemarle County native Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr. extend across the state and include two college campuses, where Matthew was accused of rape more than a decade ago.
While “closure” may never be entirely possible for the grief-stricken families of the missing and murdered, the indictments against Matthew coupled with the discovery of the remains hold promise that the terrible mysteries of two high-profile disappearances—one five years old, one five weeks old—may finally be unraveling.
A massive search, a grim discovery
The search for Hannah Graham began soon after she was reported missing on Sunday, September 14, with thousands of volunteers signing up to scour hillsides, fields, and farms of Albemarle County, as well as the more urban Charlottesville landscape. With Matthew’s September 24 arrest on a deserted beach in Galveston, Texas, where he’d fled after police searched his car and Hessian Hills apartment, and the subsequent announcement that forensic evidence linked him to Morgan Harrington’s disappearance and death, the search effort shifted to southern Albemarle, the area where Harrington’s remains were found on Anchorage Farm. It’s also the area where Matthew once lived with his mother, according to accounts from various neighbors and online property records.
On Saturday morning, October 18, exactly five weeks after Hannah was last seen leaving a restaurant on the Downtown Mall accompanied by Matthew sometime around 1:30am, a team of volunteer searchers from the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office were finishing up a shift at Walnut Creek Park, a 525-acre recreational area that features miles of hiking and biking trails as well as a 45-acre lake. According to Chief Longo, the team extended its morning effort to cover a vacant property nearby on Old Lynchburg Road, where tips had been called in earlier in the month describing large numbers of vultures gathered, according to reports by WVTF.com and Inside cville.com. That’s where they found the remains, and while positive identification requires forensic testing by the medical examiner’s office, Longo said police immediately notified the Grahams about the discovery and canceled a search planned for Sunday, October 19 at Walnut Creek Park.
The property at 3193 Old Lynchburg Rd., first identified by journalist Coy Barefoot and confirmed as that address through aerial photographs taken for C-VILLE, is a 2.5-acre parcel that features a three-bedroom, one-story home and a smaller cottage that abut woods and, according to topographic maps, the final stretch of the Ammonett Branch, a tributary of the South Fork of the Hardware River. It was in a dried-up creek bed, search team leader Sergeant Dale Kelly told a Richmond reporter with CBS 6, that the team discovered the remains.
The discovery rattled the close-knit community, and on Monday evening, the last mile of Old Lynchburg Road was still closed to traffic. News trucks gathered in Walnut Creek Park, cut off from the investigation area by a span of caution tape. A police car, blue lights flashing, blocked northbound traffic at the intersection of Old Lynchburg and Plank roads.
Madison Cummings’ property lies to the northeast of that intersection, and Ammonett Branch, fed by multiple springs, tumbles through his land as a gurgling creek with a steady flow. It might be little more than a gully at its headwaters near the investigation site—maps show that the small tributary runs for less than two miles from that spot before it empties into the South Fork of the Hardware River at Diggs Mill—but Cummings said his stretch of the stream has only run dry once in his 10 years there.
So far, he’s had no investigators walk the creek through his land. He’s heard they may be onsite searching the area through Thursday. It’s an inconvenience for those who live along Plank here, he said, but one that neighbors recognize is necessary.
“It’s a horrible tragedy, for her family and for his,” he said.
Just down the road, off Diggs Mill Ln., another resident who asked not to be named agreed. She said neighbors are speculating about the exact spot where the remains were found, but nobody knows for sure. It’s a familiar route to them, one they drive all the time to get to and from Charlottesville. Having it blocked has been difficult, she said, “but I think everybody understands that’s what they’ve got to do.”
As police awaited confirmation on the identity of the remains and continued searching the woods and adjoining properties along Old Lynchburg for evidence in the Graham case, Fairfax prosecutor Ray Morrogh announced in his Monday press conference that he planned to seek a bench warrant summoning Matthew there for a preliminary hearing in the 2005 sexual assault case. If additional charges are issued against Matthew in the Graham or Harrington cases, the various jurisdictions will have to determine which cases to pursue first. Morrogh said he wasn’t in a rush.
“I’m willing to go first, last, whenever,” he said.
Matthew, who is currently being held at the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail, is scheduled to appear in Charlottesville General District Court for a preliminary hearing on the abduction with intent to defile charge on December 4.—With reporting by Graelyn Brashear
Connected cases
Fairfax sexual assault
Date: September 24, 2005
Location: Oxford Row Condominiums on Jermantown Road in the City of Fairfax
Linked to the Morgan Harrington case through DNA in 2010
Charged: Jesse Matthew, attempted capital murder, abduction with intent to defile, sexual penetration with an object
A 26-year-old woman was walking along Jermantown Road around 10pm carrying groceries when an assailant grabbed her from behind and forced her to a grassy area in the rear of the condominium complex, where he raped and strangled her until she lost consciousness. According to police, a passerby startled the assailant who fled. The victim awakened, sought assistance from nearby residents and provided a description of her assailant, which provided the basis for the sketch in the Morgan Harrington case.
Morgan Harrington
Disappeared: October 17, 2009
Remains found: January 26, 2010
Location: Anchorage Farm in southern Albemarle County
No charges filed
Twenty-year-old Morgan Harrington disappeared after leaving a Metallica concert at the John Paul Jones Arena on October 17, 2009, and being denied reentry. She was last seen hitchhiking on the Copeley Road Bridge, according to police. Her remains were found by a farmer in a remote cow pasture
Hannah Graham
Disappeared: September 13, 2014
Possible remains found: October 18, 2014
Location: 3193 Old Lynchburg Rd.
Charged: Jesse Matthew, abduction with intent to defile
Hannah Graham was last seen with Jesse Matthew leaving Tempo restaurant on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall in the early morning hours of Saturday, September 13, and was reported missing about 36 hours later.