Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 1: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Mind of a Murder.
Speaker 2: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: We're joined today by Jill Harrington, Dan Harrington and Jane
Lillian Vance here to talk to us about the amazing
work they are doing at help save the next girl.
Thank you all so much for joining us today. Thank
you so we.
Speaker 5: Are really looking forward to a conversation with you all.
Very happy to be here.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Tell us a little bit each of you,
if you would about yourselves before we get into Help
Save the Next Girl and all the other fascinating stuff
we want to talk about.
Speaker 6: Dan Dan Harrington and I am retired seventy two year
old psychiatrists and trained at the University of Virginia. For
most of my career I saw patients, but the majority
of my time was spent as an administrator for the
hospital here at Groanoak as well as I was the
viceteam for the Virginia Tech Careering School in Medicine.
Speaker 7: And I'm Dan's wife, Jill Harrington. I'm Morgan Harrington's mom
and the president and founder of Help Say the Next Girl. Oh,
my background is I'm a nurse. Dan and I met
in the hospital when he was a resident. My nursing
career revolt primarily around on calllogy. I retired and then
had a second career working in Zambia in Africa with
a mobile medical team for sixteen years and really found
that work incredibly fulfilling.
Speaker 5: And I'm Jane Lillian Vance. I'm the vice president of
Help Save the Next Girl. That wonderful opportunity to serve
happened because I was invited to join Virginia Tech to
teach a very unusual course called the Creative Process, in
which my students wrote, saw films, drew and spoke about
big ideas. The course really should have been subtitled Resilience
and how to Cope in the midst of Loss in
the last Spring of her life in a beautiful semester,
a spring semester in Blacksburg, Virginia, my front row student
was Morgan Dana hah Rrington. Soon after Morgan went missing,
I contacted the police because of the essays that she
had written. I became involved as a friend with Dan
and Jill, and we are close, wonderful friends and good
strategic partners.
Speaker 4: I love the idea of that course. That sounds absolutely terrific.
I can see where it would have a lot of
opportunities for you to get to know your students very
intimately and well, so what a blessing that must have
been for you to get to know Morgan in that way, Kristin.
Speaker 5: On the first day of each semester, I would come
in and say, with some melancholy and some joy, to
my students. Now, some of you may have signed up
for this course with a name like the Creative Process,
figuring its finger painting one oh one taught by a
dummy for domies. But it's not if you think that
Ron like a shark with rows of teeth. I will
teach you how to write better, and I will teach
you how to think more independently. Morgan absolutely loved it
because she stayed in the front row, and at the
end of every semester I would bring all my students
to my home, cook for them and give them a
lesson in my home.
Speaker 2: That sounds terrific when you talk about the creative process, Chane,
because you're a visual artist and we've enjoyed looking at
your work. I assumed it was more in that artistic bent,
but it sounds like it's more about creative writing as well.
Speaker 5: There was a lovely woman who came to my home,
a professor at Virginia Tech, and said, Jane, we think
you are an artist who can speak. You are not
a visual artist who is meanwhile and articulate. So would
you come do a course because you can make the
creative process intellectual narrative. I don't know about the intellectual part.
I think intellectual is a big word for joyful, but
I do know that in my paintings and in my life,
everything is a story, and you have to understand the
subtle threads that go into the story to understand your
rich part in it as a participant or an observer.
And Morgan was so good at it. Oh god, Yeah,
she was an extraordinary person. And later when I got
to know her parents, it wasn't a surprise to me
that they were both people of service, because even on
that first day, Morgan was looking behind her, looking beside her,
and making sure everyone felt included, I'm not kidding and valued.
She was watching out for people Morgan.
Speaker 7: When Morgan was killed, and I'm glad we reached this
point that she had really blossomed. She had quickened to
be a parent, and to have an adult relationship with
your child is intensely gratifying. It's not a peer relationship
because they still are your child, but all of a sudden,
they're an adult and you can have different conversations in
different relationships. Dan had in the summer before Morgan was
killed what was really pinnacle time with his daughter, And
I'm so thankful that we reached that blossoming before she
was taken from us.
Speaker 6: Now that summer is what I called the magical summer
and Morgan at both of our kids, I would say,
we're at times challenging, and Morgan was finding her way.
In fact, the summer that we spent and I called
the Magical Summer, she actually worked with me as we
were developing this new medical school here in Roanoke, and
she was what we call an intern. She wasn't a
medical intern. She was a gopher in many ways, but
she thrived with Instead of wondering how are we going
to get Morgan up so that she can get to
work at eight o'clock, Morgan was always on time and
we had multiple vacations that summer. Morgan could go out
every night if she wanted to with her friends here
in roanok Morgan actually stayed home almost the entire summer
with us, watching TV and being together. And so when
she went back to school that last semester, it was
her first semester for the third year, she had made
a decision that she was going to become an educator,
and she was very influenced by the dean and the
vice dean at that time with the medical school, who
were both women, and really saw that she had the
options ahead of her that were just so exciting and
it was an incredible summer and we could not have
asked for better better summer before she died.
Speaker 5: And I can say that the reason I had contacted
the police before I knew the hair Harrington saying I'm
going to be writing to her. What else can I do?
I want to reel her in from wherever she is,
and not that I thought she was a runaway. As
Jill said so articulately, anyone would have run into Morgan
Harrington's life, but if there was any complication, I wanted
to be there for her. I knew she liked man.
I just loved her, and I wrote every other night
for those three months, but she could not answer. So
at the end, when Morgan's remains were discovered in that field,
I didn't know what to do. It was an ending point,
but I couldn't end it there, so I wrote, dear
missus Harrington, you don't know me, but I loved your daughter.
This was an email I thought I would never hear
back from these people. They're busy, they are well respected people,
and within five minutes Jill Harrington wrote and said, Jane,
we know exactly who you are. Morgan loved you and
I said, I have something that belongs to you. And
it was her final exam to me, which was to
illustrate a kind of dedication to the person in your
life who has been the most important teacher. And I said,
you have to pick one. Don't mess with that. Of course,
Morgan Harrington came up when everybody else had left the room,
and she said, I have to pick two. And I said, Morgan,
and she said, but it's my parents. That essay that
she wrote, it's in our book is a love letter
to Dan and Jill. It's the most incredible evidence of
how she treasured them as individuals, separately and together. I
still get chills after all these years, almost fifteen years,
fourteen years now thinking of what she did and I
gave that I was able to carry that to them.
No wonder our relationship is strong.
Speaker 7: Can you imagine being the parents of a murdered child
who received posthumously an essay that she wrote creating her shrine?
Speaker 5: What would be her memorial if such a thing occurred?
And it did did, and it was very impactful. She
said about her father, the whole time I grew up,
I would jump on his lap with my grass stained
toes and though he had stacks of responsibilities papers beside him,
I would push them down and he never wants indicated
anything but joy that I had come close. And about
her mother, she said, my mother is the most spiritual
person I've ever met, and I want to become so
much more like my God.
Speaker 4: Wow, she is clearly an exceptional young woman, and that
shines through in every single page of.
Speaker 8: This book, the book that you co authored, Morgan Harrington,
murdered and dead for good, A mother's quest to find
a serial killer and healing is overflowing with her artwork
and these wonderful, loving expressions toward her parents and yours
toward her.
Speaker 4: What an absolute work of love this is. This must
have been both wonderful to write, but also, I imagine
very difficult. Can you talk to us a little bit
about the writing process, all three of you.
Speaker 5: Kristin, It was helpful for me when I am unusually stressed.
I journaled a lot, And I tell you I was.
Speaker 7: Journaling the day after Morgan went missing, and I would
be in the bathtub sticking post it notes on the
side of the tub because getting these ideas and thoughts
out of my mind and putting them on paper. It
was like pulling shards of glass out from your dermis.
I don't know why we have barriers as human beings
between each other and communicators, but I wanted to pull
that shade back and let my love for my daughter,
as well as the pain that we were experiencing, be
accessible to other people.
Speaker 5: I think that's very important. Having your daughter abducted and
murdered by a serial killer is a very rare, rare occurrence,
thank god, but everyone inevitably will experience loss, and I
think that's why the book in our story is interesting
and valuable to other people, because people are looking for
some tools to deal with their loss when it shows up.
One of the big lessons for us we are part
of the club that no.
Speaker 7: One wants to belong to, of people with murdered children.
Not everyone is successful in recovering from that injury. People
are looking how did you manage that?
Speaker 5: And we have emerged with a great deal of wholeness,
and I want to share some.
Speaker 7: Of how we did that. For one thing, we did
not devolve into anger and hatred. I think if you
do that, if you become full of hate, you become
the very thing you're working against. We have tried to.
I don't hate Jesse Matthew. I never have hated him.
Speaker 5: I just wanted to stop him, yes, And the reason
I wanted to do that was not born in hatred.
It was because I wanted to spare other people, other families,
the anguish of having a murdered child. I think he
is different than we. He is an apex predator.
Speaker 7: Predators do what they do for every population of mice.
There are a certain number of owls that are on
the periphery, and I think human predators are the same.
We did want to help save the next girl. Help
save the next girl came about very organically. Police told
me it's likely we won't find your daughter until there's
another body and we'll have better forensics. And I understood
logically that may be how it evolved. But I was
darn sure that I was going to do everything in
my power to help save the next girls. It's too
late for moretin she's dead, but let's stop this killing
from this guy.
Speaker 2: One of the things I found in starting to read
the book is that it's beautifully written, but it's also
a difficult read. Was that something that was intentional on
your part? As co authors?
Speaker 5: I didn't want to sugarcoat it. I didn't want the
these girls went to heaven on a pink cloud. I
didn't want to be unduly harsh. But I also didn't
want to lighten it to make it palatable. It is
a hard, sharp thing. I don't like the language around it. Missing.
Speaker 7: I'm missing my reading glasses all the time, and it's
because I am careless with my reading glasses.
Speaker 5: I leave them around. We were not careless with our daughter.
We did not misplace our daughter. Our daughter was stolen
from us.
Speaker 7: We didn't choose to be the poster people for missing,
abducted and murdered girls, but we wanted to be very
accurate and clear with what had happened.
Speaker 5: I am so proud of Jill's writing and the stories
about Dan and Jill and Morgan and her brother Alex
and the book. As medical people, it's obvious when you
read our book or have any conversation with the Harringtons
that as medical people, they are so precise and they
are so compassionate. They, as I like to put it,
they want to do the most good and the least damage.
I don't know a better piece of praise than that.
It happens that Jill is an exquisite writer. She's visual,
she's poetic, prose poetic, she's great. And the preface I say,
Jill Harrington knows a way out of hell, and if
there is one, we all need to know it.
Speaker 4: There was so many times when I sat and read
this book over the last twenty four or forty eight
hours that I found myself nodding and going, Wow, this
is amazing, this is wonderful. And there are times when
I had to put the book down and step away
from it for a little bit because it is so raw,
and it is so unflinchingly honest. I think is probably
the way that I would put it, and I think
there is a lot of good that comes from that.
I agree with you one hundred percent, Jill, that you
shouldn't sugarcoat it. And I really enjoyed the way that
you put this together, although I cannot imagine how hard
it must have been at points.
Speaker 5: For it to contain Morgan's early art, her essays, her
drawings only shows how much she was cherished in this
household as well. And my part came when Jesse Matthew
had been arrested and we were going to be in
the courtroom with him, and Jill said, once we get
in the courtroom, Jane, I don't want to have to
think about him, look at him, or think about the writing.
Can you take that part over in a different way?
I wrote these essays, my favorite of which is the Beatitudes.
It's the dream, and it's the visitation of Morgan and
other beauties, the strong angels who have been killed or
who have died in terrible ways, and they have especially
strong powers to comfort and reach spiritually their loved ones.
And it's the story of a visit led by Morgan
and some of the other people who've been murdered here
in Virginia to his cell and what it's like, as
she says, I want to show you something, And what
she shows him is the future that he killed not
just her, but her children, their graduations, their travels together,
their friendships, their marriages, and at the end of the
dream there is a powerful, I hope, realization, even for
Jesse Matthew, that he killed a lot. Yeah, parents of
murdered kids often talk about creating legacy. I don't think
that we are motivated by hubris. I think we are
motivated because we are desperate that the potential of our
beloved children is not bored like water into the sand.
Speaker 7: Morgan was going to make a difference in the world.
She was going to do wonderful things, and she was
not able to accomplish them on her behalf, on the
behalf of the world. We want to make sure that
some of her potential is realized.
Speaker 5: Dan, you can speak to how you have done some
of that for Morgan. Yeah.
Speaker 6: As I mentioned before, Morgan worked with me in the
development of the medical school the summer before she was murdered,
and we knew she was going to be an educator.
And Morgan was missing from October seventeenth for one hundred days,
and on the day that her body was found, I decided,
along with the Jill, that it would be good for us
to establish a scholarship at the medical school in her name.
We did that. Morgan was never going to be a doctor,
but she was going to be an educator, and a
scholarship we thought would be a good way to help
a medical student. And in the end, we're actually sending
healers back out to the community for the loss that
we've had.
Speaker 2: You're listening to mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors, we're back here at
Mindover Murder.
Speaker 6: Morgan was going when the day that she was murdered,
she was going to a Metallica concert and James Hetfield
called me the day after Morgan the day two days
after of the event, and he and Metallica gave fifty
thousand dollars to that scholarship, and so far we've been
able to raise about five hundred thousand dollars and that
allows us to support one student for four years for
half of their tuition. And we also have developed something
called the Docs for Morgan where the students play a
basketball game every year with basically to honor Morgan and
Joe and me and the students played the basketball game
against the attendings at the hospital and the residents of hospital,
and it is quite aggressive. It's almost like a circus.
We have a high school band that comes, we have
two high scho groups of cheerleaders, and it's actually a
fun thing that we can do to remember Morgan. And
the school actually has put up a basically a part
of a wall that shows of Morgan's life before she
was murdered. And then what has been accomplished since she
was murdered, and so that for me, having been at
the medical school up until recently, every day I could
basically see this wall, which reminded me obviously of Morgan
and all the things that she did, but all the
things that we've not been able to see because of
her murder.
Speaker 2: Do the young students kick the butts of the residents
or how's it usually go?
Speaker 6: It can go either way. It's quite an aggressive game.
And actually students have broken fingers and one of the
attendees and one of our surgeon attendings actually had a
dislocated job last year we have We don't really raise
much money from that, and in a way it doesn't
matter because it's a way to bring the community together.
A big high school gym where we probably have four
hundred people from the community who obviously know us and
people from the hospital that worked with me comes quite
a game.
Speaker 5: We have been the recipients of a tsunami of love
and support. We lost our daughter, but we have received
blessings in people measure. The problem is in your humanness.
You tend to clutch to what you have and that
life will never be again. And when the blessings try
and come down on you. You tend to want to
keep dumping them out because you want what you had.
So part of recovering from injury is to accept and
create except that your old life is finished, and create
a new life. We had this very pretty picture perfect
life and it was smashed. Then you end up just
with these shards. So what you did.
Speaker 7: You can take those shards and reassemble them. It's never
going to be that picture of perfect life again, but
maybe you can arrange it into a mosaic.
Speaker 5: It's something different. It still is beautiful if you can
accept the change in form. And I think that is
a valuable tool in a response to loss. We were
very determined from the beginning that we took one massive hit,
but that was it. There was going to be no
collateral damage. We weren't going to throw anybody under the bus.
We were going to be okay. And we have done
that and neutralize evil and mitigated it's the damage. It's
like a burn that the injury to the tissue extends
past where the fire was, and we were trying to
stop that and we have continued to do that. The
scholarship at the medical school.
Speaker 7: How amazing that as a direct response to our injury,
we send healers back to the community that has sustained us.
Even with that determination to commit the damage and to
be positive, you have some wobbles. I've had wobbles. I
had a wobble.
Speaker 5: My neighbors across the street, who I love, were preparing
for their daughter, who was a friend.
Speaker 7: Of Morgan's, to get married and all those plans. And
I was sitting in my living room thinking, other people
have weddings to plan, and they're going to have grand babies,
and all I've got is this box of ashes.
Speaker 5: I've got this box of ashes. And then I.
Speaker 7: Did do the pull yourself up by the bootstraps, talk
to myself, and I said, if you've got ashes, what
do you do with ashes? You can make cinder blocks,
and with cinder blocks you build, And by Goali, we
built a gorgeous school in Zambia, Africa. Or Morgan who
wanted to be an educator. I took some of those
ashes and mixed them in the foundation in that building,
and more children are being educated in the Morgan Harrington
Educational Wing in Indolah, Africa than Morgan it could have
ever taught. If she lived to be a thousand years old,
and those kids will go forth and be part of
the enfranchised.
Speaker 5: Africa of tomorrow. And that is how you neutralized evil.
And Dan and Jill's great skill in neutralizing evil and
in loving their community and being grateful rather than embittered,
means that over and over every week, if not every day,
I speak to someone who speaks of the hair Rington's
and loves them dozens hundreds thousands of times. No wonder.
The people at the docks for Morgan basketball game are crazy,
wild players because they're playing for Morgan and the Harringtons,
no wonder. When Jill and I were one day out
in an antique store in a little mountain town outside
of any big town, there was a retired janitor from
the public school there and he had read our book
and when he saw Jill, I could tell this is
a strong countryman that he was about to weep. But
he wrote me this eloquent text that night and said,
I couldn't do it, but I've got to meet her again.
I've got to hug her and tell her that she
changed my heart. She changed me because she can take
a tragedy and still love people. I want to be
like Jill and.
Speaker 2: Dan Well speaking of at some point as you're making
your way from October two thousand and nine, when Morgan
is murdered, this idea begins to bubble up. We should
start an organization and we should do some more worthwhile things,
which seems to be the mo in the Harrington household.
What comes up with this idea we should start an
organization and call it help save the Next Girl and
try to move things forward in a positive way. Where
does that come from?
Speaker 5: It was very organic. It came about pretty early. Morgan
was still missing, so it was in the first one
hundred days and I was giving a talk or at
a presser and I said, too late for Morgan. We
need to help save the next girl. Morgan's dead. And
so then we said, how do you do that? How
do you help save the next girl?
Speaker 7: We were building a little patch of ground at that
point and having to step on it before it was dry,
and we didn't know that it would hold us. But
we kept doing that and we never crashed down. We
just kept building a little bit. Dan and I at
night would say, can you do this again?
Speaker 5: It was so stressful.
Speaker 7: We were so active in the media and we were
trying to find our daughter when that missing time is
so difficult because you're on a pendulum of trying to
maintain hope and yet bracing for the worst news.
Speaker 5: You ever had. And Dan and I both agree that
the missing phase was the most challenging. But we said,
we're trying to help see the next girl. What to do? Okay,
there's got to be education. We need to teach some
self protection techniques. We need to reach out to young
people and give them information. So we had that, and
then we became involved with the club that no one
wants to belong to and helping other families. We help
Alexis Murphy's.
Speaker 7: Family get more media and for it to amplitude and interest,
and really then realized not only do we need to
educate young people, we need to have some efforts towards
victim and family support. And then, astoundingly, we a little
bit further down the line, realized that we had a role,
perhaps a responsibility in legislative activism as well to change
some laws that enhance safety. And indeed, Dan and I
lobbied the Virginia State Assembly successfully on sixteen laws that
had been passed in Virginia that if they had been
in effect on October seventeenth, two thousand and nine, Mark
and Harrington would be alive.
Speaker 5: Today. We really have kind of that triptich that we
have education, victim, family outreach, and legislative activism of the
areas that help staate the next girl works upon Dan,
you should talk about the law that you helped to
change the front of NYA. Yeah, version. Yeah.
Speaker 6: The Actually Jill was in Zambia believed when all this occurred.
In the legislature, legislative committee looking at the particular law
of familial DNA was scheduled, and so I went to
Richmond and presented in front of that committee. At that time,
Colorado was actually the only state that had familial DNA legislation.
And this is important because Jesse Matthew, for example, his
father had raped a young child years before, and so
there would be some DNA from that particular event. Those
kinds of things would be helpful not for us at
the time, but going forward for families. And it clearly
makes a huge difference for families where the DNA can
be looked at for relatives of an individual that they
think may very well be the perport area. So we
were able to look at that passed, and we had
a good relationship. I think with the legislature. Joey in particular,
I think is so eloquent and so good at presenting
all of this. She's quite She's very compelling and persuasive.
Speaker 4: It seemed by reading the book that your relationship with
the Virginia State Police was shall we say, rocky at
the best of times. And Bill is laughing because he
understands exactly what that is.
Speaker 2: Like all the stories we could.
Speaker 4: Tell, how's your relationship with VSP improved or smoothed out
over time? Are they in any way supportive of the
efforts that you are making with help save the next
girl and legislatively or is it still a little rocky?
Speaker 5: I think we have moved it along quite a bit.
For instance, when Morgan's body was found, they never notified us.
We heard from media that her body had been found.
Speaker 2: You are hitting. I never knew this.
Speaker 5: It's horrible, and we, like magnets, were pulled. We rushed
to Charlottesville and I said, I want to go there.
I will not where her body was found. I won't
cross your the yellow tape, but I need to be
there as a mother. And I was told you cannot
go there. This is our case. And I said, I'm
going to go there. If you won't take me, then
media will take me there. And was told if you
go there, I will have you arrested.
Speaker 2: I am floored.
Speaker 5: I said, if you have me arrested, I'm just saying
I ain't going to go easy, and it's going to
be on TV. So quiet minds thumb took over. I
liken it to how medicine was.
Speaker 7: That's how my lens is that forty years ago, fathers
were smoking cigars and wringing their hands and in the
waiting room while their children were being born.
Speaker 5: Today fathers are in obstetrical suites cutting the umbilical cords
of their children. And they are not obstetricians, but they
have a role in the process. Law enforcement still has
the forty many of them that forty years ago ideas
that this is our case, and we were We told
them we are not investigators, but this is as much
our case as it is your case. I think they
didn't utilize us as resources as well as they may have.
But then the culture did move. When Hannah Graham was killed,
Tim Longo took her family, took her dad, her mom,
wasn't able to go, but to where Hannah's body was,
not just where it had been found, where it was,
and she was their family. I think was treated with
more compassion and perhaps more understanding than we. So I
do feel like we have moved it along, and I
actually have become good friends with many. In fact, a
week or so on talking to the new group of
recruits here at the Rona Police Academy, because we are
friends with a lot of those officers.
Speaker 4: Now, well, this has been amazing talking to you. Thank
you so much for joining us.
Speaker 5: It was really such a pleasure to meet both of you.
Thanks so for the evening it has been. We so
admire your work, we understand the nature of it, and
we're here for you as well. And Bill, can I
just tell you what a champion for justice you have been.
You're here, your sisters behalfy. We have been walking this
path for fifteen years. You have more than doubled the
distance that we have, and you still have stamina and
resilience to keep on. I admire that so much. We
are sorry not to know her.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. Join us again next time as we
continue our fascinating conversation with Dan Harrington, Joe Harrington and
Jane Lily in vance of help save the next girl.
That's next time one. Mind Over Murder.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McCloud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media.
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Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.