Quadruple Murder Mystery in Virginia

Clint Van Zandt • Profile • E-mail

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, fictional Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, is the heroine of most of author Patricia Cornwell's novels.  Cornwell got many of her original ideas for the crimes depicted in her novels from her early relationship with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, literally hanging out with the FBI profilers and picking their collective brain concerning serial killers, mass murderers, and the like.  Basing Scarpetta's character in Richmond was easy for Cornwell.  She knew the city as a resident.  And Richmond is well known for its violent crime.  Murder, however, found a new low mark in Richmond on New Year's day when someone entered a home in a quiet residential section of that city and murdered the four members of the young family that lived there.  No, murder isn't a strong enough word.  The family was brutally, cruelly, pathologically slain, murdered as only a killer like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs could do.  But this savagery was real, so real that seasoned investigators were said to have cried at the crime scene.

As an FBI profiler I had seen horrific crime scenes and found dead bodies myself, but when investigators entered the home of Bryan, age 49, and Kathryn, age 39, Harvey and their two beautiful daughters, Ruby, 4, and Stella, 9, it was a crime scene from hell.

Bryan Harvey was a musician who played with the local Richmond band NrG Krysys.  The band played at a New Year's Eve party at a local Richmond hotel, with Harvey returning from the otherwise uneventful session at about 2:15 a.m. on January 1st.  Harvey knew he and his family were hosting a New Year's Day luncheon for friends the next day, so he probably drove home thinking of his music, his family, and the next day's events.  At about 10:15 a.m. that morning the Harvey's daughter, Stella, returned home from an overnight party with friends.  As the mother of one of Stella's friends indicates, when Kathryn Harvey came to the door to greet Stella and the mother and her daughter, Kathryn Harvey appeared ashen, or perhaps drained of color, and nervous.  Stella went inside and headed down to the Harveys' basement family room.  The woman asked if Harvey was all right, and Harvey replied that she didn't feel well and was perhaps getting sick.  The woman and her daughter left.  Somewhere between 1:46 and 1:56 p.m., firefighters, responding to a 911 call, entered the residence and found all four family members murdered in a brutal fashion that only someone perhaps on drugs or with a terrible and vengeful vendetta against the family could have done. 

The crime scene at the Harvey home must have made investigators think of the equally horrific 2005 murders of the Groene family in rural Idaho.  In that case convicted sex offender Joseph Duncan, previously diagnosed as "suffering" from an antisocial personality disorder and described as a sexual deviant, entered a rural home outside Coeur D'Alene and bound and beat to death a mother, her son, and the mother's boyfriend.  Duncan then kidnapped brother and sister Shasta and Dylan Groene, ages 8 and 9, respectively.  Duncan repeatedly assaulted the two children, eventually murdering Dylan, but Shasta was finally rescued from her trip to hell.  Duncan had surveilled the home, evidently targeting the household to get at the young children.  The three adults were murdered to hide the evidence of his crime.

In the case of the Harvey's, all four were murdered in their home, tied or otherwise bound to chairs in their basement-floor family room.  The throats of all four had been cut and a fire started, likely by the murderer to cover his crime, to destroy physical evidence.  Perhaps the killer had some convoluted hope or belief that the fire would consume all evidence of the murder and mayhem that he had committed, with the only evidence of his crimes remaining caught in the folds of his twisted mind.  This crime would be found out, however, when a family friend arrived at about 1:30 PM, (three hours after Stella arrived home to a shaken and nervous mother), to help with the planned luncheon.  The friend entered the home and was overcome by smoke.  He quickly looked around the kitchen area and then ran from the home to call the fire department.  Like many attempts to cover other crimes with arson, even one so severe as a mass murder, the assailant's efforts failed and the house fire was extinguished with the terrible crime scene preserved.

Just an hour's drive north of Kay Scarpetta's Richmond, the scene of the annihilation of the Harvey family, is the small community of Culpeper, Virginia.  It was there that less than two weeks before the murder of the Harveys that another victim met a similar terrible death.  While talking on the telephone to her father, Sheryl Ann Warner heard a knock on her door and told her dad that the person at the door had car problems and needed help.  (This kind of a plea for help has been a common ruse for assailants to obtain entry into a home.)  In less than 45 minutes sheriff's deputies arrived at the Warner household to find the 37-year-old mother of three shot in the head and hanging from an electrical cord in the basement, where a fire had been set near the victim's body.  That fire was also extinguished and the crime scene preserved.

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