Chapter 1 The call for help was panicked and vague. Caitlin Whiteley, a twenty-two-year-old University of Virginia student, had returned home to her cookie-cutter apartment in Charlottesville to find her roommate unresponsive. It was early Monday morning, the end of a typically hard-drinking "Sunday Funday" on campus, and Caitlin couldn't grasp what was wrong. She'd walked home with Philippe Oudshoorn, a friend and fellow athlete, to find Yeardley Love facedown on her bed and a hole kicked through her bedroom door. Something about the way Yeardley's hair lay seemed awkward and unnatural, so Caitlin pushed it aside and gently shook her friend's shoulder. No response. Then Caitlin noticed some blood. Oudshoorn hurriedly picked up the phone and told the nine-one-one dispatcher that something was amiss-a message that somehow was translated to "possible alcohol overdose" when patched through to nearby police cars-before lifting Yeardley's body from her bed and attempting CPR.
By the time detectives arrived to the second-floor apartment on Charlottesville's narrow 14th Street Northwest, the bloody scene looked nothing like the bender gone awry they had anticipated. Medics were bent over the battered body of Yeardley, a pretty and athletic twenty-two-year-old, and were frantically trying to breathe life back into her. They were failing. Charlottesville police officer Lisa T. Reeves was among the first to respond, arriving at the four-bedroom apartment in an off-white building at about 2:30 a.m. May 3, 2010. The apartment was on the second floor, the entrance to which was reachable by a staircase in the middle of the building.
She hunted for unit No. 9 and entered. The front door to the apartment was open and untampered, but the door to the bedroom around which all the activity was now centered-Yeardley's bedroom, Reeves would quickly surmise-was splintered, as though someone had punched a hole straight through it. Reeves spotted Yeardley and immediately saw the blood. A pool had saturated the pillow and sheets beneath the girl's head, and smears of red discolored the bed's comforter. Even the bed skirt was stained crimson. As the officer examined her more closely, she saw bruising on Yeardley's cheek. The young co-ed's right eye was swollen shut, and a large bruise spread down the side of her face.
Blunt-force trauma , Reeves would soon describe in her police report, her cop voice kicking in. There is a pool of blood on her pillow. The girl's face was surrounded by long brown hair sopping with blood. Probable cause exists that Yeardley Love was murdered. Officers arriving at the apartment quickly cordoned off the area. This was no alcohol poisoning; this was a crime scene. Reeves relayed to her superiors the grisly news: The victim, a star lacrosse player on the university's women's team, was dead, pronounced while still in her apartment, wearing nothing but the panties in which first responders had discovered her. The death was clearly violent.
Officers quickly descended on the scene and began gathering evidence. They started by interviewing Whiteley, Yeardley's longtime friend, roommate and teammate, and Oudshoorn, a player on the UVA men's tennis team who was along for the gruesome discovery. Violent crime was rare enough in Charlottesville, with fewer than 250 cases reported in 2009, but violent death was rarer still, stirring in the police force a mixture of shock and curiosity. Reeves tried to tease details from Yeardley's inconsolable roommates, one of whom had rushed to the front yard and was wailing on a cell phone to a friend. The story they weaved in between tears was like something out of a Lifetime movie: Yeardley had been in a rocky relationship, they said, and things had gotten progressively worse in recent days; you need to talk to her boyfriend. Yeardley had been dating twenty-two-year-old George Huguely V, a handsome, six foot two midfielder on the men's lacrosse team, for about two years. Friends knew their relationship had foundered lately, and some felt Huguely was becoming unhinged. He texted Yeardley often, keeping tabs on her when she was out of town with teammates.
Rumors circulated that he had punched a fellow lacrosse player for walking Yeardley home one night, possibly offering a goodnight kiss, and others had to break up a fight between the couple that had gotten so ugly, Yeardley had hit Huguely with her purse. Yeardley had broken off the relationship a few weeks prior, but to some, it was hard to tell. The two hung out in the same crowd at the same bars, and when one friend asked Yeardley the night before she died how things were with George, Yeardley had replied vaguely that things were the same as always. * * * As Reeves set out to find Huguely, Charlottesville Police Sgt. Steve Dillon, a forensic detective, took photos of the scene, a typical bedroom in a nondescript apartment building situated about half a mile from the heart of campus. Yeardley's room largely looked like any other college student's, complete with strewn-about clothing. Dillon carefully documented each angle he could think of, taking special care to photograph the hole in the bedroom door, which Dillon noticed had little bits of hair clinging to its jagged edges. Reeves, meanwhile, learned that Huguely lived on the same street, just one building down.
The roommates' story had been a little hard to follow, but what the officer gleaned was this: Yeardley had tried to call off their relationship because Huguely would sometimes drink too much and get violent. Huguely, Reeves gathered, didn't like that plan. Officers had no trouble finding Huguely just a building away, in his apartment inside a brick building on 14th Street Northwest, near its T-junction with Sadler Street. It was still dark outside, still the middle of the night, when he agreed to answer questions at the police department. He wore a black T-shirt ironically adorned with a police logo on the front and back, his brown flip-flops and blue Nike shorts appropriate for the spring Charlottesville weather. It had reached 82 degrees the day before; even when bar hopping after sunset, the college kids often left their jackets behind and simply wore T-shirts. After reaching the police department less than two miles from his house, George waived his Miranda rights, saying he was willing to talk. Police secretly set up a video camera to record the conversation.
He acknowledged that he had the right to an attorney and the right to keep silent; he invoked neither, Reeves would report. He seemed shaken and distressed, and as he began to tell his story, he admitted that he had been to see Yeardley. As he described the night's events, he used the passive language that cops so often hear from culprits-damning enough to admit some culpability, but distant enough to shirk full blame. Yes, he'd fought with Yeardley, George told Reeves. He said the couple had ended their relationship of about two years, and the last few days they had chatted primarily over e-mail. George said he had gone to Yeardley's apartment and kicked her bedroom door in, but he had just wanted to talk. Things got out of hand. He shook her, and her head hit the wall.
He noticed blood pouring from her nose. He pushed her onto the bed and left. He didn't know she was seriously hurt, he said. He had been injured himself, he said, motioning to scrapes along his right leg-the type that one would get by kicking in a door. Reeves noticed some other scrapes and bruises on George's arms and hands. He shook those off-they were from lacrosse, not the fight, he claimed. It was impossible for Reeves to know if George was being completely forthcoming. When confessing, criminals often downplay their crimes, turning intentional acts into accidents and using slippery language to minimize their involvement.
George could have been doing the same. He didn't bang Yeardley's head against the wall; rather, her head "repeatedly hit the wall" as he shook her. George did, however, admit to stealing an Apple laptop from Yeardley's room and tossing it in a Dumpster. Reeves asked him where, so officers could retrieve it when the interview was over. Huguely repeatedly asked Reeves how Yeardley was, defense lawyers told a judge months later. An hour into the interrogation, Reeves finally told him that Love was dead. "She's dead, George," Reeves said, according to the lawyer. "You killed her.
" Huguely was shocked, his attorney said, and replied, "She's dead? She's not dead … You guys said she had a black eye. I never did anything that would do that to her." With his statement, Reeves knew she had plenty of probable cause to arrest George Huguely V on suspicion of murder. By the interview's end, she likely sensed, too, that the case seemed tailor made for media consumption. Reporters had already gotten word about the story, and local scribes had gathered down the street, trying to interview neighbors over the sirens and wails that shattered the early-morning calm. Yeardley's friends clutched each other and cried in disbelief. The first news release on the death was distributed by the Charlottesville Police Department before sunrise. Its contents were sparse: On the morning of May 3rd, 2010, at 0215 hours, City Police were called to 222 14th ST N.
W. apartment number 9 for a possible alcohol overdose. Officers arrived and found a female University of Virginia Student unresponsive in the a.