Most significant murders in Virginia since 1900

01

Virginia Tech shooting

Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty across two Virginia Tech buildings in 109 minutes, mailing a manifesto to NBC between the first and second attacks. The deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history rewrote federal gun-purchase law.

02

Elizabeth Haysom

Jens Söring, an Oxford-bound diplomat's son, confessed to stabbing his girlfriend Elizabeth Haysom's parents to death in Bedford County, Virginia — then spent 33 years in prison before both convictions unraveled into deportation and dispute.

03

D.C. sniper attacks

For 23 days in October 2002, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo killed 10 people across greater Washington from a blue Chevrolet Caprice with a sniper's port cut into the trunk. Gas stations became killing fields.

04

murder of Cody LeGrand Posey

This article concerns a 14-year-old who killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister in New Mexico — not Virginia. The hog-pen burial detail compresses an entire American gothic into one image; his sentence was life, later reconsidered.

05

Murder of Yeardley Love

UVA lacrosse captain George Huguely V beat teammate Yeardley Love to death in her apartment hours before their 2010 graduation. He was convicted of second-degree murder; her family later won a $7.5 million civil judgment.

06

John Allen Muhammad

John Allen Muhammad recruited 15-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo and engineered the DC sniper campaign as cover for a planned single murder — his ex-wife — so a custody case would disappear. Ten strangers died for that calculation.

07

Briley brothers

James, Linwood, and Anthony Briley murdered 11 people across Richmond, Virginia, between 1971 and 1979 — then escaped from death row together in 1984, prompting a six-state manhunt that ended in Philadelphia six days later.

08

Timothy Wilson Spencer

Timothy Spencer was executed in Virginia in 1994 as the first person in U.S. history put to death on DNA evidence alone — evidence that also exonerated David Vasquez, who had already confessed and pled guilty to one of Spencer's murders.

09

Colonial Parkway murders

Between 1986 and 1989, eight people were found dead along the Colonial Parkway in Virginia — four pairs, different methods, zero suspects charged. The FBI has never closed the case; the killer may have posed as law enforcement.

10

Rebecca Wahls murder

Virginia schoolteacher Rebecca Wahls was murdered by her husband Howard, who poured a concrete floor over her body in their basement. The case broke on a neighbor's tip; Howard was convicted in 2003 after years of claiming she had abandoned the family.