Hannah Graham

Case background and investigation

Hannah Graham was an 18-year-old second-year student at the University of Virginia. Her family had moved from England to the United States, and she graduated from West Potomac High School in Fairfax County in 2013. According to NBC4 Washington, she had dinner with friends on Friday, September 12, 2014, went to two off-campus parties, left the second one alone, and later sent a friend a text message saying she was lost.

Surveillance video from the early hours of September 13 showed her walking unsteadily, and at times running, past a pub and a gas station and onto Charlottesville's Downtown Mall. Footage also showed her with a man who put his arm around her. Police identified him as Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr., 32, a former taxi driver who worked as a patient technician at the University of Virginia Medical Center. Police said they had no reason to believe the two had met before.

ABC News reported that Matthew went to the Charlottesville police station with relatives but left before being questioned and drove away at speed. He was charged first with reckless driving and then with abduction with intent to defile. On September 24, 2014, Galveston County deputies arrested him on a beach on the Bolivar Peninsula in Texas, and he was returned to Virginia.

Searchers found human remains at about noon on October 18, 2014, on an abandoned property off Old Lynchburg Road in Albemarle County, roughly eight miles from where Graham was last seen. Albemarle County police announced on October 24 that the medical examiner had identified them as hers. Matthew was later charged with first-degree murder, and in May 2015 prosecutors added a capital murder charge, citing new forensic evidence.

According to NBC4 Washington, DNA obtained during the Graham investigation linked Matthew to a September 2005 attack on a 26-year-old woman in the City of Fairfax, a case that had earlier been linked by DNA to the death of Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington, who disappeared in Charlottesville in October 2009. In the Fairfax case he entered an Alford plea in June 2015, which is not an admission of guilt, and was sentenced in October 2015 to three life terms.

On March 2, 2016, Matthew pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and abduction with intent to defile in the deaths of both Graham and Harrington. The court imposed four consecutive life sentences, and under the agreement he waived parole, appeal and geriatric release. Prosecutors withdrew the capital murder charge. Both families said they supported the agreement.