With the disappearance of Hannah Graham, Morgan Harrington, Alexis Murphy, Dashad Smith and other young adults, some people wonder if a serial killer is at work in and around Charlottesville.
Law enforcement experts say that while it's possible, other factors may account for these tragic cases. Central Virginia isn’t the only place reporting missing people, and such things have occurred in the past.
Last year, nearly 630,000 people were reported missing nationwide – and by year’s end, more than 84,000 cases were still active. Forty percent were kids and 11% were 18, 19 or 20 years of age. As for the adults, we really don’t know much more. The FBI doesn’t keep records for individual states or cities, because being missing is not a crime.
Even so, experts say college towns may be prime hunting places for predators. Dana Shrad is director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police.
“Too many times college students live under a bubble. They live under a sense of false security, because they think they know their communities, and they’re very lax about their personal safety.”
Former Charlottesville Police Chief Deke Bowen agrees. College kids love their freedom, but he wishes they would stick together.
“This is, to me, very important. If you see two students walking together, that is something that that perpetrator is going to back off from, but when one person comes along, that person is a potential victim.”
He’s also concerned about the use of drugs and alcohol on campus.
“You preach it and preach it and preach it, but you’re talking to a certain age group -- people that are partying hard and you have to worry.”
Of course intoxication on campus is nothing new. In the early 70’s, when he was in charge, UVA was renowned for a week of springtime celebrations known as Easters. Playboy magazine called it “the best party in America,” and one historian wrote that “many students and their dates wallowed about in mud holes, swilling grain alcohol.” Again, Chief Bowen.
‘We’d have 20,000 people up in those streets up there, and they were jammed. You couldn’t get a fire truck or a rescue squad through.”
So carousing is a long-time tradition here, but what about serial killers. Are there more of them around? At VCU, forensic psychologist Robyn McDougle thinks not.
“Most researchers feel like the reason we think there are so many more in current day is because our technology is so much better to track them, so we can comfortably say there are 10-12 operating serial killers somewhere in the United States on any given day. The reason we know that is because we know we have these links of cases that go together. We don’t know who they go to, but we know it because of technology. We also are much more aware of it because of our access to reporting and our access to Information on crime.”
And while it’s hard to compare numbers from one state to the next, Virginia does not appear to be a hotspot for abductions. Monica Caison founded the Community United Effort orCUE Center for Missing Persons twenty years ago.
“We began September 22 of 1994, and we have served more than ten thousand families. That’s probably a mustard seed compared to the numbers that are reported each year.”
We reached Caison on a cell phone, traveling from Wisconsin to Iowa. She’s on her annual Road to Remember Tour, holding rallies in memory of 92 missing people. This year takes her to eleven states, including Virginia. She stopped in Rocky Mount, Lovingston, Charlottesville and Fredericksburg to further publicize the disappearance of eight women and two men – some of them missing for decades.
