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...