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Morgan Harrington was twenty, a Virginia Tech student, and at a Metallica concert at the John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville on October 17, 2009. She stepped outside during the show and could not get back in under the arena’s no re-entry rule. She called a friend at 8:48 that night and said she would get home on her own. Drivers saw her about forty minutes later on the Copeley Road bridge, alone, thumbing for a ride.

Her remains were found on January 26, 2010, in a field on Anchorage Farm in Albemarle County, about ten miles from the arena. A T-shirt she had worn turned up separately in Charlottesville, and DNA on it matched evidence from a 2005 abduction and sexual assault in Fairfax City. That profile sat unmatched until September 2014, when Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr., a hospital patient technician, was arrested over the disappearance of University of Virginia student Hannah Graham.

Matthew entered an Alford plea in Fairfax in 2015, midway through his trial for the 2005 attack, and received three consecutive life terms. On March 2, 2016, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and abduction in both the Harrington and Graham cases, and a judge imposed four consecutive life sentences without parole. Prosecutors dropped a capital charge as part of the agreement.