News

Virginia State Police Say Jesse Matthew's Arrest Gave Them a Forensic Link to Morgan Harrington

Five years after the Virginia Tech student vanished from a Charlottesville concert, a terse statement tied her case to the man held in Hannah Graham's disappearance.

Published

Illustration: a man in a suit carrying files up the steps of a brick building

Morgan Harrington had been dead for almost five years, and the man the police were looking for had a face only in sketches. She was 20, a Virginia Tech student from Roanoke, when she became separated from her friends at a Metallica concert in Charlottesville on October 17, 2009. Her remains were found three months later on a farm about ten miles outside the city. Her family said in 2010 that she had been kidnapped, raped and murdered. In 2012 the FBI released a sketch of a man believed to have had contact with her and said her case was linked to a 2005 sexual assault in Fairfax.

Then, on Monday, September 29, 2014, Virginia State Police issued a short written statement. "Last week, the arrest of Jesse L. Matthew Jr., 32, of Charlottesville, Va., provided a significant break in this case with a new forensic link for state police investigators to pursue," it said. The agency added that a great deal of work remained, and that it would make no further comment and give no on-camera interviews.

Matthew was already at the center of another search. Hannah Graham, 18, a University of Virginia student, had last been seen in the early hours of September 13 at an outdoor mall in Charlottesville with a man matching his description. Five days later police searched his car and apartment after studying surveillance video and talking to witnesses. The next day he slipped away while state police were watching him. On September 24 he was arrested on the Bolivar Peninsula in Galveston County, Texas, about 1,300 miles away, after people reported a suspicious man camping on the beach.

The state police did not say what the link was. Richmond station WTVR, citing sources close to the investigation, reported that evidence belonging to Matthew matched material collected in the Harrington inquiry. At that point Matthew was facing a charge only in Graham's disappearance, and nothing in the Harrington case had been brought against him. Even so, the statement asked the public to keep its attention on bringing Hannah Graham home.

What this story covers. The state police statement is quoted from its text as published by Fox News on September 29, 2014; the account of the Graham search, the arrest in Texas and WTVR's report of a match also comes from that report. The nature of the forensic link was never stated officially that day, and the match was a press report from unnamed sources. On September 29 Matthew had not been charged with any killing. He was later indicted in Harrington's death and in March 2016 pleaded guilty to the murders of both women, as our later story records. The image is an illustration of a lawyer entering a brick building, not a real place in the case.

Sources

Related News