The Digital Trail

Taylor Behl was seventeen, a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University, and about a month into life in Richmond. Among the people she had met there was Benjamin Fawley, a thirty-eight-year-old amateur photographer who built his work around skulls and gothic imagery and who had already had a brief relationship with her.

On September 5, 2005, dormitory security video recorded Taylor leaving with Fawley. She was never seen alive again. Twelve days later her 1997 Ford Escort was found abandoned in Richmond’s Fan District wearing stolen Ohio license plates. Detectives worked through her MySpace and LiveJournal accounts and the messages the two had exchanged, and on September 23 Fawley was arrested on unrelated child pornography charges. He gave shifting accounts of that night, and an ex-girlfriend recognized the barn in one of his photographs as her family’s land in Mathews County, about seventy-five miles east of the city. Taylor’s remains were found there on October 5, 2005, in a shallow grave in the woods, and dental records confirmed her identity the next day.

In August 2006 Fawley entered an Alford plea to second-degree murder, accepting the conviction without admitting he had killed her, and was sentenced to thirty years, the maximum for that charge in Virginia. The sixteen child pornography counts were dropped as part of the deal. Reporting on the case has put his scheduled release in 2031.