Author: Senlin Means

Woodberry Payne (pictured) says that certain places make good horses. But mostly, he said, what makes a good horse is something intangible inside them. It’s about a horse’s desire, what’s in a horse’s heart. (Photo by Carissa Dezort)

The spring race at Foxfield is Saturday, April 28, and Woodberry Payne will be there as usual. For the last four years he’s been a steward there, which basically means he keeps the show running. Before he was a steward, he was one of the patrol judges for…well, he doesn’t know how long. A long time. Between riding, training, and officiating, he’s been involved in steeplechase racing for over 30 years, but his involvement with horses goes back farther. There has never been a time in his life when there weren’t horses around.

Ingleside, the horse-training center Woodberry, 54, has owned since 1996, is located on the grounds of Montpelier. The historic home of fourth president James Madison has been a famous center for all things equine since Marion duPont Scott, the last private owner of the house, established the Montpelier Hunt Races in 1934. A lifelong rider, she imbued the place with a strong legacy. One of her horses, Battlefield, was the only horse to win both of steeplechase’s top races, the American and English Grand Nationals, and is buried on the property. The place is a natural fit for Woodberry, whom I’d been scheduled to meet in advance of the race.

I’m supposed to meet him at the barn, but I get lost, so I stop at the visitor’s center to ask where I can find him.

“He’s probably at the barn,” a nice old lady tells me, but there are a lot of barns at Montpelier, and it takes a while before I find the right one. When I get there, there’s no sign of Woodberry.

“He’s probably at the track,” someone there tells me. “He usually goes to the track about now to watch the horses.”

And that is indeed where I find him, hunched down in the front seat of an old, dark green Mercedes, the inside of which looks much like a mobile office/home. There’s a dog in the back and a cat in the passenger seat and Woodberry is sitting behind the wheel doing a crossword as two people on horses ride by.

“This area,” Woodberry said through the open car window, “has a tremendous, rich steeplechasing history.” A history that, as all things inevitably do, goes back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Woodberry, however, doesn’t train steeplechase horses anymore. He trains horses for flat racing. This is partly because, since he’s now a steeplechase official, training the horses would be a conflict of interest, and partly because flat racing is where the money is.

“The steeplechase market has contracted,” he said. There’s less money in it and limited opportunities. So like him, a lot of people in our area are less involved than they used to be.
After a while, Woodberry leaves the track and drives back to the barn. He gets out and walks inside to his office, leaving the car door open, and the dog, named Infield for the infield of the racetrack where he was found, ambles out after him. The door to the car will stay open the whole time I’m there. His office is inside the barn, but there’s very little demarcation between the two; the barn flows into the office and then follows Woodberry to his car. Everything around him seems to have at least some mud on it.

Curtis Beale “Woodberry” Payne has sandy/gray hair and blue eyes. He seems tall, even though he isn’t. He was born in Virginia, grew up in Virginia, and went to school in Virginia, and he’s been around horses his whole life. His mother rode and his family owned show horses, and from a very young age he worked as a groom and then as an exercise rider for a professional trainer named Dale Jenkins. (The nickname “Woodberry” comes from this time, when someone at a horse show, knowing that he went to a private school, referred to him as “the kid who goes to Woodberry,” as in Woodberry Forest, a school he eventually did end up going to.) In high school, he would go work in the stables after class, and in college he took off on the weekends to ride in races.

But when he graduated, Woodberry veered away from what seemed to be his natural course. In 1980, he got a job about as far away from the stable as you can find, working as an aid for Congressman Ken Robinson. He lived in Middleburg, a 45-minute drive from Capitol Hill that, with traffic, could take two or three hours. His old boss Dale Jenkins had moved to nearby Warrenton, and the two had dinner every night. Just as he did when he was in school, Woodberry snuck away from Washington on the weekends to ride. “The horses,” he said, “kept pulling me back.”

On a typical day, Woodberry goes back and forth between the barn and the track. He monitors the horses for injuries, weight, diet, everything about them. “They’re professional athletes,” he said.

“That reminds me, I’ve got a horse that needs antibiotics.” He grabs a huge hypodermic needle, goes into a stall and slides it expertly into a horse’s neck.

His office walls are covered with framed pictures of winning horses posing with their jockeys and owners. Many of the images are faded, stretching back over decades, and Woodberry has a story to tell about all of them. On most of them, his name appears as the trainer. Maybe it does on all of them, I don’t know. There are, he said, so many major players in the horse world living right here in our backyard that go unnoticed. Woodberry goes to great lengths to tell me about everybody but himself.

After leaving politics, Woodberry went back to working for his old boss until, in 1985, Jenkins “kicked me out of the nest.” He told Woodberry that there was a job open at Ingleside Farm and he should take it. So Woodberry got licensed as a trainer, and 10 years later he wound up buying Ingleside.

There are about 60 horses at Ingleside currently, most of them being trained for races in New York state, where the majority of the client base is located, but a few belong to Woodberry and they race throughout the year. He’s a “licensed trainer up and down the East Coast” and has a stable at Colonial Downs, the second biggest racetrack in the country, where he trains and races horses every year.

Horseracing is big in Virginia, but not as big as it once was. “In its day,” he said, “when the business was really thriving, it had its own night at the Saratoga Horse sales. ‘Virginia night.’” Now the business has shrunk and Virginia is no longer one of the top 10 horse regions.

But what’s the attraction for him? Why is he at the barn seven days a week? What keeps pulling him back to horses? “I guess just the horses themselves,” said Woodberry, whose wife, Olga, also works at Ingleside. “Each one is an individual, with their own personality. It’s pure sport: who gets there first.”

So, this Saturday, he’ll be at Foxfield races, as he always seems to be, as he was for the first one, on a rainy day in 1978. Foxfield is not a big race, but it’s fast and exciting. Many horse owners use it as preparation for other major races on the circuit, like the Iroquois races in Nashville held a few weeks later.

Foxfield is something of a local tradition. The spring races, Woodberry tells me, are about locals emerging from the long winter to spend a day in the sun. “Personally,” he said, “I love seeing the UVA students there.” He was a UVA student himself, and was there for the tail end of the famous Easters party, called “the best party in America” by Playboy.

“I hated seeing Easters taken away,” Woodberry said. The students needed a spring party, and so they found Foxfield, and that’s just fine as far as he’s concerned. “The students are the biggest part of the crowd on race day,” Woodberry said. “I welcome it. I’ve seen how the meet’s grown over the years. It keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

We wait in the sunshine, in the unexpected warmth of a late February day, for a sign from inside the courthouse that a verdict has been reached. The word verdict means, in it’s original Latin, “to say the truth,” but a legal verdict is the synthesis of 12 opinions into a single pronouncement.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman addressed the media during a rain-soaked press conference outside the Charlottesville Circuit Court after a jury had convicted George Huguely V of second degree murder and grand larceny and recommended a sentence of 26 years in prison, Wednesday, February 22. (Andrew Shurtleff/Zuma Press/Newscom)

No one else has to agree with it, and often no one does. Its only measure of truth comes from the fact that, once given, it can’t be changed. Unless the judge changes it, or there’s an appeal, or the case is overturned by new evidence. So maybe there’s not much truth in a verdict after all, not if we’re using the word truth the way that most of us usually do, which is as something permanent and essential.

A man dressed all in orange is leaning against the railing of the handicapped ramp smoking a cigarette. Throughout the trial, he’s been here raking leaves and emptying trash cans, a prisoner obviously, given a plum job outside the jail and far from his cell. There are about 20 cameras set up in front of the building, their operators lounging in chairs eating chips and drinking sodas. The prisoner leans and smokes, ignoring them. He’s been working here for seven months, most of that time spent with a lot less company when he stopped for a break.

“What do you think of all of this,” I ask, meaning all of the spectacle, the attention, the cameras.

“I think it’ll be hard,” he said, “for them to prove premeditation, with how drunk he was that night.”

Walking down Fourth Street to get lunch I pass two women heading the opposite direction. “I’ll tell you why I think he’ll get off …” one of them says, and I turn around as fast as I can to listen, but the rest of the sentence is lost.

The jury’s opinion is, we hope, the most educated and the most reasoned one available. It’s ultimately the only one that matters, but it’s hardly the only one on offer. During the two weeks I covered the trial, and in the days that followed, everyone I saw gave me their opinion on George Huguely, on his guilt and what his punishment should be. Everyone told me what they thought. Everyone asked me what I thought.

With the amount of media covering the story, it’s no wonder we’re all so informed about it. People don’t merely have an opinion on Huguely’s guilt, they can back it up with quotes from his arrest interview. They hold lengthy discussions on the nature of Yeardley Love’s brain injuries. They can tell you which juror cried and which one stared at Huguely as if she’d already made up her mind.

Every effort was made to keep the media from bringing this information to you. Cameras and all other electronic devices were banned from the courtroom, which led to journalists running outside at every break to grab their phones and tweet. Reporters in the overflow pressroom didn’t have to wait for breaks, they could step out of the viewing room whenever they wanted, and so the ban was ultimately a failure; every second of the trial, no matter how mundane, was communicated in 140 character bursts.

We have new media now, more of it, faster than ever before. But do we have better information as a result? Our opinions are largely formed by context-free facts delivered with little or no thought. Who has time to think? Certainly not the journalists racing each other to the crate of phones to see who can be the first to report what the jury ate for lunch. There was a time when you had to wait until morning to hear about the evening’s execution. If you wanted the news sooner, you had to go in person and watch the body hang.

A well-dressed older man is standing on the sidewalk watching the milling crowd of journalists.

“This whole case has really messed me up,” he said. He lost a daughter many years ago to illness, and subsequently began counseling parents who’ve lost children, many of them to murder.

“The parents have to deal with all of this one year or two years after their child’s death,” he said. “They have to go to trial, because what parent wouldn’t want to go to trial? And they have to see a slick lawyer in a suit talk about what a tragedy this all is as he tries to get the guy off.”

“I don’t like the word closure. That sounds like you’re closing a book and putting it on a shelf. I prefer ‘reconciliation.’”

This is what reconciliation is like for Yeardley’s mother Sharon: Sometime in the afternoon, three women from NBC sit on a bench in front of the courthouse, talking excitedly. Two of them are middle aged and the third is in her 20s. They haven’t been here for any of the trial; they’re part of the second wave of upper tier media and TV producers that has arrived just in time for the verdict. The three women are all well dressed, like they’re out shopping, which in a way they are.

“Sharon said she’d take a week to think about whether she’d talk or not.”

“She’ll probably take a month.”

“No, she said a week. It will probably be a week.”

“The girls will all probably take their cues from Sharon. I have all their contact numbers.”

Reconciliation for the Love family involves negotiating interviews. It involves being constantly photographed and seeing those photographs everywhere they turn. They’ll never be able to Google their names again, and they now find themselves using the phrase, “We’ve prepared a statement.”

What parents prepare for that?

Reading more than a few news reports about the trial feels like a waste of time. They’re almost identical. Did we really need 20 cameras to capture the same shot of George walking into court? How many journalists does it take to tweet the word “guilty”?

There’s barely any difference between what was said in the media before the trial and what was said after. There were no major revelations, no radical changes to the story. As the trial began, nearly all of the potential jurors said they already had an opinion. During jury selection, one of the people picked for the jury said he thought it was “an open and shut case.”

George Huguely didn’t speak at the trial. The footage from the police interview and the excerpts from letters and e-mails helped to humanize him somewhat, but our collective idea about what kind of human he is didn’t change. Going in, he was a drunk lacrosse player from a wealthy family who killed his girlfriend. Coming out, he was a bigger drunk, and we can now officially say he murdered his girlfriend, though it wasn’t premeditated.

At around 2pm, I’m sitting outside reading a book. A man and a woman who’ve been dealing with their own legal problems in another court sit near me and ask if they can smoke. She has pink hair and a tattoo on her neck.

“Do you think he’s guilty?” she asked.

“I think he’s guilty of something,” I said.

The man laughed. “I think he’s nice,” the woman said. “I talked to him in jail.”

“Don’t tell him you were in jail,” the man said. She ignores him and kept talking.

“I talked to him, but not about the case. He fed me canteen. His eyes had nothing in them. You know how some people’s eyes have nothing in them? They were pitch black.” She paused and took a drag.

“But he was nice.”

Guilty and not guilty
At 4pm a car slows down on High Street and the driver leans out the window. “They reached a verdict yet?” he asked. The cameramen mostly ignore him, a few shrug, and someone said “No, not yet.”

Across the street a TV news crew is interviewing a local defense attorney. The attorney has been in court every day of the trial, and hasn’t been shy about sharing his opinions. He goes down the line of TV cameras, one by one, telling them what he thinks the verdict will be.
Did I mention that everybody I see tells me what they think the verdict will be? On Facebook, on the phone, on the street, even over dinner at my parents’ house. Everybody tells me their opinion. Everybody asks me mine.

Late in the day, hours before Huguely is convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 26 years in prison, I suddenly stop caring about the verdict. I’m overcome by the urge to get up and leave, to go to Miller’s and have a beer and skip the whole thing. Why not? I’ve been over it so many times in my head by now, every possible permutation and outcome, that the element of surprise is long gone. I know the verdict already; I’ve heard it proclaimed on every street corner and in every coffee shop and so at this point I’d rather not know, I’d rather ignore it, because I’ll be expected to say something meaningful and I can’t.

I had the experience, but missed the meaning. The more I’ve learned, the more my ability to render judgment has become crippled. Whichever way the jury swings, nothing I can say will make a difference in the end or change anything. I can’t reconcile what was done to Yeardley Love with what they’re going to do to George Huguely. I’ve been firing words at the target as fast as I can, and so has everybody else. To what end? And what are we doing here anyway? To quote Johnny Rotten, it’s been a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.

I looked into his eyes and saw only blackness. And I couldn’t think of anything at all to say on Twitter.

But I didn’t leave. I stayed and heard the verdict read. I saw it through to the end, which turned out to be a cold and rain-soaked press conference on the steps of the courthouse. No one wanted to get wet, so we all stood behind the podium under the roof, where it was dry, but impossible to hear. Reporters bunched absurdly on Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman’s right side, thrusting tape recorders out while trying to keep their bodies in, desperate for any scrap of his voice. When Chapman was done, a few of the jurors emerged through the front doors and were immediately assaulted by bright lights and confusion, with no way out except through a gauntlet of journalists waving recorders and shouting.
“Sir, will you talk with us for a minute just down there?”

“Can you tell us why you voted the way you did?”

The jurors did, ultimately, tell us why they voted the way they did. It was not, they felt, a premeditated act, but it was a malicious act, the worst ending to a bad relationship. George Huguely V, who at 22 was already using alcohol to propel himself that much faster towards a dead end future, was not likely to change anytime soon. Perhaps, they thought, 26 years, 20 if you factor in time served and time off for good behavior, perhaps that will be enough for both rehabilitation and retribution.

For what it’s worth, I agree with them. Already there are those who feel otherwise, who are saying that he “got off” or that he should spend a lifetime in jail, subjected to whatever justice the penitentiary dispenses. But justice, as we practice it here, is as much about the process as it is the result. The jury listened to the evidence, every boring bit of it, and they wrestled with the meanings of words and the consequences of actions, and then they adjudicated. The Love family wants retribution, the Huguelys rehabilitation.

“We work in the dark,” Henry James said. “We do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.”

Life goes on.

The UVA men’s lacrosse team is ranked number one this year. In the 20 years that Dom Starsia has been head coach, the team has won four national championships and six ACC titles. In 2010, the year that Huguely was arrested for murder, seven other members of the team were arrested on alcohol charges. In January, coach Dom Starsia signed a five-year contract for $250,000 a year, with a $225,000 bonus in three years and a $150,000 bonus in five.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, at least three women are murdered by their husband or boyfriend every day. Three out of four Americans in a 2004 poll said they knew someone who was a victim of domestic violence. In 2009, singer Chris Brown was arrested for beating then girlfriend and fellow musician Rihanna. He punched her repeatedly, slammed her face into the window of his car, and choked her. In a 2009 interview, Rihanna said: “When I realized that my selfish decision for love could result into some young girl getting killed, I could not be easy with that part… Even if Chris never hit me again, who’s to say that their boyfriend won’t? Who’s to say they won’t kill these girls?”

Three years later, with the Huguely trial underway, Brown was awarded a Grammy. He and Rihanna seem to be back together.

During jury selection, the prosecution asked each prospective juror if he or she would feel comfortable judging someone, a question that’s harder to answer than you might think. It’s in our nature to judge others, their hair, their clothes, how good looking or smart they are, we judge and convict people for a million minor crimes every day. Yet we fear it as well; Judge not, lest ye be judged. Because, what if we’re wrong? Who are we to judge?

George Wesley Huguely V, a 24-year-old former UVA lacrosse player, is charged with first degree murder, felony murder, robbery, burglary, statutory burglary, and grand larceny, in conjunction with the May 3, 2010 death of fellow UVA student and lacrosse player, Yeardley Love. Huguely never took the stand during his trial, which ended Saturday, February 18, and he now awaits the jury’s verdict. Deliberation is scheduled to begin Wednesday, February 22. (Photo by Nick Strocchia)

Studies show that most jurors take the job very seriously. The Huguely jurors are mostly in their 30s or 40s. A few of them have been on juries before and almost half have a connection to UVA. They’re very attentive; they lean forward and take notes. The judgment they hand down on George Huguely may not be the one he wants, but I feel pretty certain it will be carefully and fairly decided.

Closing arguments ended on Saturday. Jury deliberation begins Wednesday. The Commonwealth v. George Huguely is all over but the verdict. What that verdict will be is the big question, but there are other questions that I’ve asked myself these last two weeks, questions that may be unanswerable, but that seem vitally important.

How did Yeardley Love die?
The truth is we don’t really know.

The official cause of death was listed as “blunt force trauma to the head,” but from the beginning it was hotly contested. The defense made noise about the possibility that Love died of an Adderall-induced heart attack. The Commonwealth stuck with the blunt force trauma explanation, caused, they said, by Huguely slamming Love’s head against the wall.
By the time the trial was underway, both of these stories had basically been abandoned. Love’s Adderall prescription was brought up in court, but mostly by the prosecution, who squashed the idea thoroughly. The defense, meanwhile, pointed out several problems with the theory that Love’s head hit the wall; most significantly that the wall itself showed no sign of impact, the pictures hanging on it weren’t even crooked.

So both teams changed tactics. The defense had been pushing the idea that Love’s head hit the floor while she and Huguely were wrestling, making any resulting injuries seem almost accidental. Fine, the prosecution said, her head hit the floor, but it hit the floor repeatedly, while Huguely was smothering her with his hand over her mouth.

The medical testimony was long and complicated, and while neither side offered a totally cohesive story, the basic explanations of Love’s death are as follows: The Commonwealth says that the blow or blows to her head caused damage to her brainstem, which in turn caused her heart to stop. The defense claims that the blow to her head wasn’t hard enough to kill her, as evidenced by the lack of a skull fracture or major bruising in her brain. Instead, it was a process called reperfusion, due to the CPR administered when her body was discovered, that caused what damage her brain did have.

Instead, the defense says, she died of positional asphyxia. After Huguely left, she crawled under the covers and lay down, perhaps to try and sleep. With her breathing slowed by a blood alcohol of .14, and her face in her pillow, she suffocated to death. The Commonwealth disputes this by pointing out that she was clearly unconscious when Huguely left, or else she would have screamed or tried to go for help.

We may never know exactly how Love died. The medical evidence isn’t 100 percent certain, and the forensic examination of the crime scene is flawed because Love’s body was moved from the bed by one of the people who found her.

Only Huguely and Love were in the room that night, and Love is dead. Huguely exercised his right not to testify, so for now the only firsthand account of what happened is the rambling, drunken confession he gave the police the morning he was arrested. On the tape, Huguely says he went to Love’s apartment to talk. She wouldn’t let him in, so he kicked a hole in the door. His description of what happened is garbled, but goes something like this:

Love was sitting up and “freaked out.” They sat and talked, but then “she started getting aggressive.” He “shook her a little bit” and she began hitting her head against the wall. He kept shaking her, telling her to stop. She got up and told him to leave. He grabbed her arms and they presumably fell to the floor, where they “wrestled.” He “held her” and at some point her nose began to bleed. Finally he pushed her on the bed and left.

Who is George Huguely?
Yeardley Love was both everywhere and nowhere during the two weeks I spent covering her murder trial. I met her best friends and visited her former apartment. I got a tour of her bedroom and studied her bed. I saw, or at least heard described, her head, face, brain, and heart. But of course, I never actually met her.

George Huguely, on the other hand, was unavoidable. I watched him walk into court every day, with a blank stare and loping swagger, in too-big khakis and a blazer. He usually watched the court proceedings intently, but several times a day he would turn to his right and scan the crowd. He wasn’t looking at his family, just looking at all of us who were looking at him, as if reminding himself that this was real. Sometimes his eyes would meet mine and I was always the first to look away. It felt wrong somehow, as if I was intruding on someone’s private nightmare.

Twenty-one months ago, the story of George Huguely was the story of a khaki-clad killer, a rich and spoiled athlete who brutally murdered his beautiful and bright-eyed girlfriend. Huguely was another symbol of the evils of privilege and the moral decay at the heart of college athletics. Or something like that.

By the time the trial started, most of that had fallen to the wayside. Certainly no one in court was talking about lacrosse or prep schools as if they stood for anything sinister. The focus quickly narrowed to a young man who killed a young woman, and how, and why. In the beginning, I found myself captivated by Huguely. I felt empathetic, moved even, but I didn’t fully understand why. Partly, I knew, it was based on superficial similarities like playing high school lacrosse, but mostly it was a weird sense of identification, a game of “what if” I played during the first few days I watched him in court. Of course, it was also the first time I’d seen an accused murderer in real life, a type of celebrity I admit I have a morbid fascination with.

As the trial went on, my obsession with Huguely faded. At first he’d been a mystery, someone I wanted to understand, but the trial stripped most of that mystery away. Sadly, understanding Huguely didn’t turn out to be that hard.

George Huguely “is not complicated,” his lawyer Fran Lawrence said in his opening statement. “He’s not complex, he’s a lacrosse player.” In many ways this statement is entirely accurate. Huguely has played lacrosse at a high level for basically his entire life. I would guess that from at least middle school on, all of his friends were athletes. At UVA, Huguely lived with, partied with and dated only lacrosse players. Athletes are not necessarily stupid or uncomplicated, but dedication to a sport has a way of narrowing your focus until there’s no room for anything else.

Other than lacrosse, all we know about Huguely is that he liked to drink and chase women; testimony was plentiful about both hobbies.

Court Square has been inundated with media teams covering the Huguely trial for the past two weeks. Thirty-five news outlets registered with the city to cover the trial, including Court TV and networks from Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Richmond. (Photo by John Robinson)

Huguely was arrested for underage drinking in 2007, and a year later for public drunkenness and resisting arrest. By the time we get to the spring of 2010, he was showing all the signs of full-blown alcoholism.

“He’d been drinking a lot,” teammate and friend Ken Clausen testified, always on weekends, often on weekdays, and always until he was very drunk. His friends, who were also drinking buddies, had started noticing that his drinking was negatively affecting his behavior. When he drank, Clausen said, he was “more belligerent than the rest of us.”

None of his friends ever got it together enough to talk to him about his problem, but it seems to be something that Huguely was well aware of, and had discussed with his girlfriend. After the fight in February when he was found choking Love at his apartment, an incident he was too drunk to remember, Huguely wrote her a letter. It said, in part, “I cannot describe how sorry I am. I’m horrified by my behavior. I’m scared to know that I can get so drunk [that] I can’t control my life. … Alcohol is ruining my life.”

More than anything, Huguely and Love fought about other people. They both had flings, and were both very jealous. On Sunday, May 2, Huguely tried repeatedly to get in touch with three different women, texting and calling them right up to the moment he walked over to Love’s apartment to try and work things out. Ten minutes later, Yeardley Love was dead.
That’s the picture we’ve got of George Huguely: an alcoholic, womanizing, lacrosse player who killed his girlfriend. We’ve heard no testimony whatsoever that the kid had a good side.
As the trial has progressed, the amount of people sitting behind the Love family has gotten bigger. Their clothes are colorful, and the mood fluctuates between laughter and tears. The amount of people sitting on the Huguely side has stayed the same. The clothes are darker, the mood more somber. If you had to guess which group was attending a funeral, you’d probably pick the side whose child is actually still alive.

Why do we watch?
When this trial began, the national press attention was the talk of the town. Sure, people bitched about lack of parking, but for the most part, Charlottesville seemed secretly proud that it had a Media Circus to call its own. At first it was only the press and family and friends in the courtroom, but soon people started showing up just to watch.

Most spectators got up and left after two hours of talk about brain anatomy, but a few stuck it out. One older man, an ex-marine, was in court every day. During a lunch break I asked him why he was here. “Well,” he said, “I figured as much as I watched [the] O.J. [trial] I might as well see it in real life.” Courtroom dramas have been staples of our entertainment for a long time; now we just televise the real thing.

For many of the out of town reporters, this trial is old hat. They’ve covered the O.J. Simpson trial, the Michael Jackson trials, the Casey Anthony trial. In the big picture, our media event is a few tents short of a circus. Still, as the trial progressed, the courtroom got more and more crowded with UVA students, lawyers, and local business owners, everyone wanting to see what all the fuss was about.

So what was all the fuss about?
Maybe it’s the allure of real human drama, better than any television show.

Or perhaps it’s a struggle for the heart and soul of UVA, a last gasp of the elitist culture of white male privilege.

Maybe it’s another battle in a war to keep men from hurting women.

We watch because life has become an endless Twitter feed, and we’re all tourists with thinking phones. We watch because we can’t look away from other people’s tragedy. We watch because we want justice to play out in public, so that the punishment can restore order to our world.

We watch because we hope his guilt will make us feel more innocent.

Read the Huguely Trial Blog here.

Read about the first week of the trial here.

On Saturday, a trial that had been moving so slowly it hardly seemed to be moving at all suddenly rocketed forward so fast we got whiplash. The day began with a two-hour delay, and ended with closing statements, and in between we watched as the last cars of the defense team’s train went careening off the rails.

Things started going badly on Thursday when defense attorney Rhonda Quagliana called in sick and the whole day was canceled. She was still sick on Friday, and her partner, Francis Lawrence, struggled through a few witnesses before calling it a day. Both Judge Hogshire and Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman were pushing for the trial to continue, and Lawrence agreed, despite registering a formal complaint on behalf of his client that the trial should be postponed until Quagliana was well enough to continue.

The decision to carry on was baffling. The idea that Huguely would be forced to continue without one of his attorneys, someone who had spent two years preparing his defense, struck most of us as absurd and patently unfair. Chapman was applying a lot of pressure. “The Commonwealth,” he said, “is being harmed with every passing moment.” Judge Hogshire was also pushing for speed, constantly reassuring the jury that they would do everything possible to finish on time.

“Why the hurry?” the members of the press wondered. We wanted the trial to be over because we had deadlines and sore asses, but Huguely’s future was on the line. How is justice served by forcing him to go on with only half his defense team? It’s a first-degree murder trial, why rush to judgment?

Quagliana rallied and was in court on Saturday ready to start, only to have the Commonwealth throw a serious monkey wrench in the works. With the jury absent from the room, Chapman produced a series of emails between Quagliana and the defense’s three main medical witnesses, Dr. Jan Leestma, Dr. Ronald Uscinski and Dr. Jack Daniel. At issue was Virginia’s “Rule on Witnesses” which states that witnesses can’t be given any information about other witness’s testimony during the trial. The emails show the defense’s experts discussing testimony given by witnesses for the prosecution, and seemingly being told what to say.

Lawrence tried to say that it was all a mistake. “Email has changed the way we communicate,” he said, as though he just didn’t understand this new fangled technology. It was also revealed that Leestma and Uscinski have been testifying together for 15 years and had dinner together Wednesday night. “This is very troublesome,” Hogshire said, “I wouldn’t have expected this from counsel.” But he allowed Dr. Uscinski to testify, provided he stayed away from any of the information discussed in the emails.

Lawrence and Quagliana came out of it looking sleazy and stupid. Uscinski testified that Love’s brain showed none of the contusions, bleeding, or skull damage that comes with significant head trauma. But on cross-examination, Chapman showed a picture of a head that had been hit by a speedboat. The person died, but their brain was just as undamaged as Love’s. Dripping with contempt, Chapman pointed out that Uscinski made $200,000 a year testifying in court, all but calling him a liar.

And then, at 2:25pm, the defense rested. It was so sudden and unexpected I wondered if I was hearing things. Back in April of 2011, it was announced that Lawrence and Quagliana had subpoenaed 20 witnesses, but now they were done after calling only eight. Did they truly believe they’d made their case? Or were they feeling pressure to finish before the holiday weekend?

Closing statements started at 2:55 and didn’t end until 7pm. Chapman was emotional, sounding at times like he was close to tears. There were a few last minute changes in The Commonwealth’s case. The idea that Love’s head hit the wall has been dropped for the defense’s claim that her head hit the ground. More importantly, they’re asking the jury to look at second degree murder instead of the first degree premeditated charge. The felony murder charge, also first degree, is still on the table.

Watching Lawrence give his closing statement was like watching a punch-drunk boxer up against the ropes, desperately trying to anticipate the blows with his one good eye. I’ve been unimpressed by his performance since the beginning, and although I realize I’m not a lawyer, neither is anyone on the jury.

During his closing statement, Lawrence displayed not a drop of eloquence, and he was so tone deaf I nearly lost my mind. The prosecution, he told us, just doesn’t understand the way these crazy kids lived. Love barged into Huguely’s apartment and hit him with her purse, and he kicked a hole in her locked door because he wanted to talk. “That was not out of line,” Lawrence said, “for the way they communicated.” While trying to show that Love wasn’t a helpless waif, he dropped this gem: “She’s not a victim of abuse.” Really Mr. Lawrence? I think you meant to say that “she wasn’t a victim,” because saying that a dead girl found covered with bruises is not a victim of abuse seems like a stretch.

But the craziest moment was when he referred to the 14th St. area as a “20-something ghetto of these young people.” He later called it, “A men’s and women’s lacrosse ghetto,” and “Charlottesville’s student ghetto.” Using a word predominantly associated with poor minorities to describe a bunch of preppie kids is truly bizarre and evidence of how completely out of touch with reality the man is.

Throughout the trial I wondered why the Huguely family had chosen a local attorney and not some D.C. powerhouse. There are guys up there who would eat this case for breakfast. Were they looking for some local advantage? Or could they just not afford anyone better? If I were the Huguely’s at this point, I’d want my money back.

The trial isn’t over until the jury sings, and there’s enough evidence of reasonable doubt that Lawrence and Quagliana could still pull some sort of victory.

I’ll have some more thoughts on the end of the trial in Tuesday’s C-VILLE. On Wednesday, the jury will begin deliberation, followed by the sentencing phase, all of which will be covered on the blog, and then one last story in the print edition.
Read the Huguely Trial Blog on the verdict and sentencing here.

Read the Huguely Trial Blog from the beginning here.

 

From the beginning of this trial, the chatter in the courtroom has been about how long everything seems to be taking. First it was the endless jury selection, then the tedious presentation of every possible scrap of evidence and now we have a vomiting defense attorney. Court was canceled on Thursday due to Rhonda Quagliana being sick, and despite optimism on Judge Hogshire’s part, she was still sick Friday morning.

Quagliana has been handling the medical witnesses for the defense, which means that without her, there’s very little defense at all. Hogshire asked Lawrence if he would be able to bone up on his doctors in 24 hours. “Despite my high estimation of my talents,” Lawrence said, “that would be impossible.”

And so a discussion ensued as to whether or not to continue, with the upshot being that we went through the non-medical witnesses Lawrence had lined up and postponed the rest of the proceedings until Saturday.

It was a morning filled with the bizarre and the inconsequential, devoted to arguments over minor details and interpretations of events. We were finally introduced to the two high school girls, now sophomores in college, who were in Huguely’s apartment the night Love stormed in and hit him with her purse. Their testimony introduced nothing new, something that could honestly be said for the whole day.

Both women (whose full names none of us could hear,) gave a version of what happened April 27 that differed from the one offered by witnesses for the prosecution. Everyone agrees that Love came in, fought with Huguely, and then hit him with her purse, but Friday’s witnesses denied seeing Huguely’s teammate Tim Fuchs in the apartment that night, despite the fact that three other witnesses, plus Fuchs himself, said he was. I’m not sure what we can glean from this, except that Fuchs seems to be very easy for young women to ignore.

Friday also saw the defense trot out two non-medical expert witnesses to try and counter a couple of the Commonwealth’s claims. The first was Dr. Michael Woodhouse, a biomechanical consultant who works for places like Vector Dynamics, a “full service investigative engineering and accident reconstruction firm.” Woodhouse examined the piece of wall removed from next to Love’s bed, and his expert opinion was that it showed no sign of having been struck with an object, like, say, a young woman’s head.

The prosecution has claimed all along that Love died because her head was slammed against the wall, but the defense has done a lot to call that into question, mostly by showing that the wall, including the pictures hanging on it, shows no sign of having received such a blow. The Commonwealth hasn’t done much to fight back, concentrating instead on the specifics of Love’s head injuries, perhaps hoping that how Love received the blunt force trauma to her head will matter less to the jury than the fact that she received it in the first place.

To that end, this trial has turned into a battle of expert witnesses, and the prosecution has a serious advantage in that regard. On their side they have mostly people associated with MCV and UVA hospitals, the state forensics department and the police; people who are local, official and just doing their job.

The defense, on the other hand, isn’t so lucky. They are forced to use people who, rightly or wrongly, are perceived to be experts-for-hire, McWitnesses whose testimony comes tainted by the fact that they’re paid very well for giving it, and presumably know in advance what the person paying them wants them to say.

The defense’s first expert, Dr. Jan Leestma, testified on Wednesday that the damage to Love’s brain was caused not by a blow to the head, but by the CPR administered at the scene. Whether he’s right or not is beyond my medical knowledge, but his testimony did absolutely nothing to dispel the notion that some expert witnesses will say anything for a buck.

Leestma has good credentials, and his direct testimony sounded convincing enough, but during cross-examination Chapman just eviscerated him. Leestma is the author of a paper entitled, “Shaken Baby Syndrome: Do Confessions by Alleged Perpetrators Validate the concept?” which debunks the claim that many children die from brain injuries caused when vigorously shaken, the most famously example being the 1997 trial of British nanny Louise Woodward. Although not exactly the same, “shaken baby” cases often involve the same essential argument being made here, and Leestma has testified for the defense in more than one of those cases. As the Commonwealth pointed out Wednesday, Leestma makes $8,000 for his testimony, plus being paid for his study time and travel expenses.

The second expert the defense called on Friday was Ben Thomas, a business computer consultant brought in to assign a monetary value to Love’s computer. On Wednesday, Snooky’s Pawn Shop owner James Sacco said the computer was worth $250-$350 dollars, based on two similar laptops he’s sold recently. Thomas, on the other hand, said the laptop was only worth $100-$150, based on his professional opinion, as well as recent sales on e-bay.

At issue is whether or not Huguely committed felony larceny when he took Love’s computer. In Virginia, the item you steal only needs a value of $200 to qualify, a number set in 1980. Adjusted for inflation, that $200 would be $550 today, and most states set felony larceny at $500 or higher. Since the second murder charge Huguely faces is murder in the commission of another felony, $50 one way or the other means a lot to both sides.

Two lawyers in the middle of a murder trial fighting about Intel vs. AMD processors, whether one gigabyte is better than two, or if the value of a computer includes the power cord, seems truly absurd. The scary thing is, when it comes to the law, it’s often exactly such absurd struggles that determine the course of our lives.

The last witness before the day was halted early was a strange one. Alina Massaro, Huguely’s aunt on his mother’s side, spoke about a dinner on Saturday, May 2 at Boylan Heights for senior lacrosse players and their families. Massaro attended with her two teenage daughters, Huguely and his mother. They ran into Love as they walked in, a meeting captured by a Boylan Heights security camera.

The Jury watched silent video footage as Massaro narrated. They saw Love hug Massaro, her daughters and Huguely’s mother. And then, as they all stood around talking, Huguely and Love apparently held hands. All the testimony until now has been that they barely talked that night and were both upset by the purse incident.

Does the video show that they were trying to work things out? Does it make it harder to see Huguely as a premeditated killer? Or does it just prove that Love was polite? If nothing else, it reminds us that memories of Yeardley Love don’t belong solely to her family.

Watching Huguely’s aunt narrate this flashback of a happier time was a bizarre moment for many reasons; not least of which was the eerie feeling that someday trials will simply consist of watching footage from the “security” cameras tracking our every move. But it also made me feel very sad. Watching her I thought about how we all play, over and over in our minds, the silent footage of our past, looking for the good times, but also for an answer to why things have turned out the way they have.

Witnesses in this trial have spent a significant amount of time talking about what happened inside Yeardley Love’s room and inside her body. Medical and forensic experts have looked at hundreds of photographs of her bed and her brain. We’ve listened to long discussions about how her comforter was folded, the amount of blood on her floor, and the shape of the contusions on her cerebral cortex.

Yesterday, we heard testimony from Marjorie Harris, a bloodstain expert from the Virginia Forensics department, on the configuration of various bloodstains in Love’s room and what that tells us about how they got there. She talked about drips, flows, and spatters, all while pointing to pictures and saying, “You see here, where the stain is smooth on one end and rough on the other?”

But we didn’t see, because as I related two days ago, everything the jury is shown faces away from us, and the court has decreed that no effort will be made to rectify that. Today, when the defense brought in their brain expert, Dr. Jan Leestma, to counter the Commonwealth’s version of how Love died, the problem was made crystal clear. One doctor comes out, points to pictures of Love’s brain, and tells us, in language we don’t understand, why she died. Later, a different doctor points to the same pictures and says that, as you can plainly see, there’s no evidence of the previous theory. Since we can only compare nothing to nothing, our ability to understand the testimony is severely impaired.

I keep thinking about the idea of spectral evidence. During the Salem Witch Trials, all a witness had to do was point to the sky and say, “You see there? Goody Proctor’s spirit just bit me!” And off poor Goody Proctor would go to be hanged. Evidence didn’t have to be evident.

Perhaps that’s a tad hyperbolic. After all, the jury can see Goody Proctor just fine, and justice will be served even if the press is pissed off.

But the frustrating experience of being unable to see Huguely’s taped confession was repeated on Wednesday. As they wound down their case, the Commonwealth called three female witnesses whose testimony took everybody by surprise. On the day Love died, Huguely contacted each of them, mostly via text message, for the presumed purpose of having sex. One of the text conversations ended only 30 minutes before Huguely decided to walk over to Love’s apartment.

So, what do the texts say?

We don’t know. The Commonwealth’s attorney decided to show the jury screen shots of the conversations. We sat and watched them silently stare at the TV for what must have been five minutes. We were told nothing about what the messages said.

It’s frustrating, but we’ll live. The end result was that Huguely came out looking even worse than he did before. Being a womanizer doesn’t make him a murderer, but it certainly makes him less sympathetic to a jury.

One other thought on seeing or not seeing the evidence: Marjorie Harris, the bloodstain expert, never actually visited the crime scene. She conducted her investigation by looking at police photographs taken when they arrived at Love’s apartment. Which is fine.

But Harris isn’t the only one who hasn’t seen the crime scene. In actuality, only three people have: George Huguely, Caity Whiteley, and Philippe Oudshoorn. No one else, not the police who were first to respond, the EMTs, or the forensics detectives has seen how Yeardley Love looked when she died, not even in photographs.

How is this possible? Because when he was on the phone with 911, Oudshoorn was told to move Love to the floor to attempt CPR. He turned her over, lifted her out of bed, and placed her on the rug. So when you get right down to it, we’re all discussing something we didn’t see. Huguely was wasted that night, and Whiteley and Oudshoorn were hurried and scared. It looks like the only reliable witness to Love’s death is a ghost.