Charles Severance
- Victims
- 3 convictions - 2 of capital murder and 1 of first-degree murder, all upheld on appeal
- Years active
- December 5, 2003 / November 11, 2013 / February 6, 2014
- Location
- Alexandria, Virginia, USA
- Method
- Shooting
- Status
- Convicted by an Alexandria jury on November 2, 2015 of two counts of capital murder for the deaths of Ronald Kirby and Ruthanne Lodato, one count of first-degree murder for the death of Nancy Dunning, and seven related firearms and malicious wounding charges, ten counts in all. Sentenced on January 20, 2016 to three consecutive life terms without parole plus forty-eight years and four hundred thousand dollars in fines. The Court of Appeals of Virginia granted leave to appeal in December 2016 and a three-judge panel upheld the convictions unanimously on May 23, 2017, rejecting arguments that the Dunning case should have been severed from the other two and that sentencing him for both capital murders offended the double jeopardy clause. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed, holding that he had received one sentence for one murder and another for another and so had not been punished twice for the same crime.
Charles Severance shot three prominent residents of Alexandria, Virginia at their own front doors over ten years. All three were strangers to him.
He was born in 1960 and had run repeatedly and unsuccessfully for public office in the city. Nancy Dunning, sixty-two, the wife of the county sheriff, was shot at her home on December 5, 2003. Ronald Kirby, sixty-nine, a regional transport director, was shot on November 11, 2013. Ruthanne Lodato, fifty-nine, a music teacher, was shot on February 6, 2014, and a woman with her was wounded and survived. The attacks were in daylight, at the door, with a small-calibre handgun.
The prosecution case was that he was driven by bitterness over a child custody case he had lost in Alexandria and by hatred of what he saw as the city's elite; his own writings, read to the jury, set out both. He was arrested on March 12, 2014 and sentenced on January 20, 2016 to life imprisonment plus forty-eight years.