On the morning of February 6, 2014, a man came to the door of a house on Ridge Road Drive in Alexandria and shot Ruthanne Lodato, a fifty-nine-year-old music teacher, in her own home. He also shot her caretaker, Dorcas Franko. Franko lived, and at trial she identified the man who had done it.
Two people had already been killed the same way, and for years nobody knew by whom. Nancy Dunning was sixty-two, a successful real estate agent and the wife of the Alexandria city sheriff, James Dunning. On December 5, 2003 she was shot several times in her home in broad daylight, and the killing went unsolved for a decade while suspicion fell on people around her. Ronald Kirby was sixty-nine, a regional transportation planner, the man reporters called when they needed the traffic explained. On November 11, 2013 he was shot at his front door.
The three houses were blocks apart in an affluent part of the city. All three killings happened in the late morning, and all three victims answered their own doors. Examination of the recovered bullet fragments found similarities across the three scenes, and a home surveillance camera on Braddock Road, across the street from a church, recorded a car driving away from the Lodato shooting.
Charles Stanard Severance was born in Fairfax County on September 25, 1960 and took a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Virginia. He ran for mayor of Alexandria in 1996 and again in 2000, and for Congress in the eighth district in 1996, and was noted on the campaign trail for erratic behavior. He lost a custody case over his son in an Alexandria court.
He was arrested on March 13, 2014 at a public library in Wheeling, West Virginia, on a warrant for a weapons offense at his home in Loudoun County. Alexandria police regarded him as a person of interest, partly because he resembled the sketch of the Lodato gunman, and said publicly at the time that they were nowhere near charging anyone. He was not charged with the killings until September.
Besides the ballistics and Franko, the prosecution had his own writing, and the jury heard a great deal of it. He wrote about members of what he called the enforcement class. He wrote about tomahawking the homestead, a phrase he used again and again, and about introducing murder into a safe and secure neighborhood, and those passages were dated before the Kirby and Lodato killings. He had also written admiringly and in technical detail about a five-shot .22 mini revolver and the advantages of subsonic ammunition. The Supreme Court of Virginia later summarized the prosecution's theory in his own terms: every victim was, as he put it, a member of the enforcement class, and the murders were part of his plan of retribution.
Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney David Lord told the jury that the apparently random killings made sense only seen through the eyes of a man who hated Alexandria. The Commonwealth's Attorney, Bryan Porter, later pointed out that the three houses formed a triangle with an old cannon at Braddock and Russell roads near its center, and said the firearms evidence was what tied the case together.
The trial was moved from Alexandria to Fairfax. It ran from October 8 to November 2, 2015. The jury deliberated for three days and convicted him on all ten counts: two of capital murder, for Kirby and Lodato, under the Virginia statute that makes the premeditated killing of more than one person within three years a capital crime; first-degree murder for Dunning; malicious wounding of Franko; four counts of using a firearm; and two of possession of a firearm by a felon. He never testified. He sat in a wheelchair with an injured ankle as the verdict was read.
Prosecutors did not seek death, which left life without parole as the only sentence on the capital counts. On January 20, 2016 Judge Randy Bellows imposed three consecutive life terms plus forty-eight years and $400,000 in fines. His voice broke as he said that killing the victims in their own homes was an act of unsurpassed cruelty, because it made certain their families would be the ones to find them. The defense had asked him to weigh a documented history of mental illness and argued that Severance had not been born evil.
On appeal Severance argued that the Dunning case should have been tried separately and that two capital murder punishments under the same three-year provision were double jeopardy. The Court of Appeals of Virginia rejected both arguments in 2017. The Supreme Court of Virginia refused the rest of his petition and took the double jeopardy question alone, and in 2018 affirmed: killing two victims at two different times in two different places, it held, constitutes two different criminal acts.