The new faces of the GOP on the Albemarle Board of Supervisors are area old-timers Duane Snow and Rodney Thomas.
PHOTOS BY WILL WALKER

Four years ago, Creigh Deeds lost a statewide race to Bob McDonnell by one of the smallest margins– 360 votes– in recent history. In glaring contrast, his 18-point defeat to McDonnell November 3 marks one of the largest margins in a governor’s race since George Allen crushed Mary Sue Terry in 1993, 58 percent to 41 percent.

So resounding is the rout, both Democrats and Republicans are scratching their heads, despite pre-election polls predicting a McDonnell victory.

“Personally, I thought it would be closer than that,” says Fred Hudson, chairman of the 5th District Democratic committee and the number 3 Dem statewide. He attributes the staggering loss (more)

Comments(4)

Ponzi-schemer John M. Donnelly will serve seven and a half years for running a Ponzi scheme.
FILE FAMILY PHOTO

John M. Donnelly walked out of federal court Friday morning a free man— but not for much longer.

The  man who pleaded guilty last spring to running a decade-long multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme from his Charlottesville office was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison November 6. Judge Norman K. Moon expressed disgust for the crime that bilked 30 of John M. Donnelly’s friends and motorcycle racing teammates of more than $5 million.

“This defendant knew these victims were making life decisions,” said Moon, who referred to Donnelly as “evil” at one point and scoffed when defense attorney John Davidson suggested Donnelly was sorry for the pain he’d caused.

“If they hadn’t caught you, you’d (more)

Comments(2)

A major search effort to find Morgan Harrington launches Friday morning, November 6, and continues through the weekend.
PHOTO FROM STATE POLICE

The Jefferson Room at the Cavalier Inn at the corner of Emmet Street and Ivy Road was filled to capacity tonight— and then some—  as hundreds of Charlottesville residents and out-of-towners registered for a weekend search for Morgan Harrington, missing since an October 17 Metallica concert at John Paul Jones Arena.

The search is being organized by the Laura Recovery Center, a nonprofit search agency founded by the parents of Laura Kate Smithers, a 12-year-old Texas girl who was kidnapped while jogging and murdered in 1997. In addition to Morgan’s parents, Dan and Gil Harrington, various law enforcement agencies are helping coordinate the search.

This weekend’s searches will  begin Friday morning, November 6, at 9am. Interested volunteers, who do not need to have attended the pre-search presentation, should meet at the Forestry Center at 900 Natural Resources Drive behind the Fontaine Research Park. Would-be searchers must be 18 or over and have valid identification.

Laura Recovery Center founder Bob Smither, father of Laura, spoke at the hotel, just blocks from where Morgan was last seen on Copeley Bridge, to the hundreds of assembled volunteers– so many the presentation had to be given twice.

While most of those gathered will spend some portion of the next three days tromping through brush looking for any sign of Morgan, some made the trip just to show support.

“We were away and just found out what happened,” said Ray Mayberry, whose wife, Carole, worked with Dan Harrington at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke. The retired pair said they are unable to participate in the rigors of a ground search, but drove from Roanoke to show support.

“We want to do what we can to help,” Mayberry explained.

Starting Friday morning, groups of 10 will be assigned as-yet-to-be-determined search areas, Smither explained; any possible evidence discovered should not be touched. Volunteers are invited to show up throughout the day, as their schedules allow. The last groups will likely be sent out no later than 3pm.

“Our only priority,” said Smither, “is finding Morgan.’

Anyone with questions about this weekend’s searches can call (434) 960-0401.
Last updated Friday, November 6 at 3:27pm. Correction: Cavalier Inn is not a Best Western.—ed
#

Comments(6)

Minor: “I am taking on these guys because I’m the only one who can.”
FILE PHOTO BY JAY KUHLMANN

He has just lost another lawsuit— this time a $21.6 million judgment for Merrill Lynch— but Halsey Minor vows that legal setbacks won’t deter his quest to complete the Landmark Hotel, an incomplete eyesore that holds the promise of topping the Omni as the most luxurious lodging on the Downtown Mall.

In a recent series of telephone interviews, the man who founded internet giant CNet and whose riches soared to $355 million around the turn of the century alleges that everything the public has been told about him in recent days is wrong.

Minor says he’s not to blame for the Landmark mess, he’s not broke, and he’s not going to let go of the hotel without (more)

Comments(35)

Smart brought a message of hope to Morgan’s parents, Gil and Dan Harrington.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

“We will stop at nothing until she is found,” says the father of missing Morgan Harrington, as he and his wife were joined in Charlottesville Wednesday by the father of once-abducted but miraculously recovered Utah resident Elizabeth Smart.

But before the November 4 press conference announcing that the public would be invited to join the search, new information suggests that the injured 20-year-old Virginia Tech student’s efforts to regain entry to the John Paul Jones Arena after she somehow ended up outside during an October 17 Metallica concert were more intense than previously reported.

“She did make a few attempts to (more)

Comments(35)

About 15 feet above Ridge-McIntire Road, Randall Bowling eyes his Wednesday-morning handiwork.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Just two days after Halloween, three and a half weeks before Thanksgiving (not to mention seven and a half weeks before Christmas), City crews began installing holiday lights downtown on Monday, November 2— in what may be a new record for early decorating.

The lights, installed singly and in pairs on poles, are stylized snow flakes, illuminated by LEDs.

City spokesperson Ric Barrick says the lights are owned by the private Downtown Business Association, which added 16 flakes to its retinue this year and (more)

Comments(11)

Kristin Szakos and Dave Norris won in the city.
FILE PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Democratic machine candidates Dave Norris and Kristin Szakos held off a challenge by independent Bob Fenwick to retain an all-Democratic Charlottesville City Council, according to data from State Elections Board. But in the more politically diverse Albemarle County, the data show that a political newcomer has upset the establishment by ousting Democratic incumbent David Slutzky.

Slutzky, who raised the most money, who aligned himself with the controversial Nature Conservancy plan to create a single mega-reservoir, and who has been serving as the Chairman of the Board, joins fellow Democrat Madison Cummings, the protege of retiring reservoir-backing Supervisor Sally Thomas, in going down to defeat.

The man who beat Slutzky, Republican Rodney Thomas, was the only party candidate who refused to sign a reservoir-backing pledge foisted on the candidates by Conservancy plan backers Liz Palmer and Don Wagner. The man who defeated Cummings is Republican Duane Snow.

Fenwick, who ran on a platform of “saving” McIntire Park from the YMCA and the Meadowcreek Parkway as well as his support of dredging the existing reservoir, nearly tripled the tally of the other independent on the Council ballot. Yet his 3,280 votes fell short of the 5,074 garnered by Szakos and the 6,292 for Norris.

“I can’t remember the last time an independent set the agenda in a Council race like I did,” said Fenwick as the final precincts were reporting. “We raised some important issues, and it’s been a privilege to speak to the community.”

Comments(18)

Six months before she died, Justine danced with her father at her wedding to Eric Abshire.
FILE PHOTO COURTESY SWARTZ FAMILY

While national attention focuses on the Charlottesville disappearance of Metallica concert fan Morgan Harrington, the parents of another young woman are quietly marking the third anniversary of their daughter’s death and hoping this will be the last time they pass the date without an arrest.

“We believe police are making progress,” says Steve Swartz of the investigation into the death of his daughter, Justine Swartz Abshire, who was found dead or dying on a dark country road in Barboursville on November 3, 2006.

While the death was initially called a hit-and-run, evidence mounted over subsequent months that Justine might not have been hit by a car at all. Although her body showed signs of massive trauma— more than 100 blunt force injuries— there was (more)

Comments(5)

The owners of the Amtrak parking lot have graded and filled potholes, but have never paved the lot.
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Although there have been many big plans for the revitalization of West Main Street, including a streetcar, a multi-story mixed use building, and several ambitious UVA expansion projects, a new business group deplores the current state of West Main— particularly the dust that rises daily from the pot-holed parking lot surrounding the Amtrak station.

Calling the lot a “blight on the Midtown landscape” as well as a “health hazard,” and “an environmental travesty,” the newly formed Midtown Association calls on the private owners of the Amtrak parking lot to pave it.

“The history of this situation between the City and the property owners borders on municipal negligence and professional irresponsibility,” reads an Association statement. “Something has to be done.”

In the 1990s, the City pushed Norfolk Southern Corporation to sell the parcel to Gabe Silverman and Allan Cadgene in hopes of fostering a public-private partnership whose (more)

Comments(24)

Bill Moses and Patricia Kluge want to spend more time at their Morocco pad– but Albemarle will remain home.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Undaunted by a slow housing market, winemaker Patricia Kluge has listed her Albemarle House for $100 million, outstripping not only any price tag around Charlottesville, but pretty much the United States as well, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Listed by Sotheby’s International Realty, the estate in the neighborhood of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello boasts eight bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, a theater, a spa and sauna, and an Islamic gallery— nearly 24,000 square feet in all.

The chapel where Kluge’s mother is buried is not included in the offering.

Does listing the built-in-1985 Georgian, just weeks after celebrating the 10th anniversary of Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard, mean that Kluge and husband Bill Moses plan to move from stomping grapes to stomping out of the area?

Not at all, says winery spokeswoman Kristen Moses Murray. The sale of the house and 300 acres still leaves an ample 2,000 acres of vineyard, forest, and pasture, plenty of room for (more)

Comments(38)

A motorist gets out of the way of the chase near Madison House on Rugby Road.
PHOTO BY CHARLOTTESVILLE P.D.

There has been an arrest in the case of the 85mph chase that resulted in a stolen car scalping a house on Rugby Road. About two months after the summertime incident, a 17-year-old city student was arrested, according to Charlottesville spokesperson Ric Barrick, who also— in response to a reporter’s request— released a tape of the chase, a 112-second video in which even the police car hits 85mph on the residential road.

In a related development, a work crew installed a guardrail Friday at the spot where the vehicle left the roadway to prevent such future dangerous aerobatics, but in so doing, the crew cut an underground gas line, causing a road detour lasting much of the morning.

Meanwhile, Friday, October 30 is also move-back day for (more)

Comments(22)

Morgan Dana Harrington disappeared during a Metallica concert October 17.
FACEBOOK PHOTOS

Morgan Harrington, the young woman who disappeared during the October 17 Metallica concert, received a facial injury before she left the John Paul Jones Arena, according to multiple sources.

According to the sources, Harrington was seen inside and outside the Arena with blood on her chin prior to her disappearance, say witnesses who wish to remain anonymous. Thirteen days after her disappearance, a police spokesperson confirms the accounts but says investigators doubt the injury points to any altercation.

“It was a minor injury,” says Virginia State Police spokesperson Corinne Geller. She explains that police chose initially not to release the detail because the injury was “consistent with what someone would suffer from slipping and falling, not with any kind of assault.”

Contacted about the report of the chin injury Thursday, Harrington’s father, Dan Harrington said he had not (more)

Comments(152)

“I deserve health care.”
SCREEN CAPTURE

One local filmmaker (along with a pack of kids at Riverview Park) might play a key role in the health care debate if a new video keeps advancing in the Obama Health Care Reform Video Challenge. Already, the 30-second spot from Charlottesville has been chosen from over 1,000 submissions to become one of just 20 finalists.

Eric Hurt— who once shot a television show about Spudnuts— wrote, directed, and shot “I Deserve Health Care” with producer Erica Arvold. Voting for the Challenge is now open, and individuals are encouraged to watch the top videos, vote for their favorites, and help select the winning ad that will air on national television.

The whole enterprise, but particularly Hurt’s video and a graffiti video, drew the outrage of FoxNews commentator Sean Hannity, who interviewed a conservative commentator who blasted Hurt for “grooming the next generation of entitlement-seekers.”

–last updated 6:49am Friday
Spelling of Spudnuts corrected 9:20am Friday

Comments(54)

Hastily stitched-together photo from the bridge which carries Copeley Road over the CSX/Buckingham Branch train tracks.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

The young woman whose disappearance during an October 17 Metallica concert touched off a national search was last seen on a bridge around 9:30 that night near busy Ivy Road. The information came in a Wednesday morning press conference in Charlottesville in which State Police Lieutenant Joe Rader expressed hope that a newly detailed timeline would provoke additional clues from concert-goers and other witnesses.

“Perhaps you saw someone stop a vehicle,” said Rader. “Perhaps you saw this young lady get into a vehicle. Somewhere out there lie the answers or lies the vital link.”

Rader described the timeline, pieced together from witness interviews, as fairly accurate, but he noted that it changed within the 30 minutes before the press conference began— and that it remains subject to further refinement, particularly since some witnesses were not wearing watches.

“We believe that what happened from 8:30 to 9:30 is very relevant,” Rader said, adding that subsequent info is also important. “Nothing is too trivial. If you think (more)

Comments(61)

Independent Bob Fenwick wants to defy the odds and get on City Council.
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Independent City Council candidate Bob Fenwick is getting a lot of buzz– and support from a broad coterie of Republicans, Democrats, and independents. But is that enough to get him elected to Council in a city long dominated by Dems?

It’s hard enough for a Republican to get a seat on Council— ask Rob Schilling, who was elected in 2002, the first Republican in 16 years. For an independent running without even minority party support, what are the odds?

“It is virtually impossible,” says Schilling. “The last independent (more)

Comments(51)

Phil Bradley survived 36 hours (plus at least 50 years) after the crash.
PHOTO BY ED ROSEBERRY

While several newspaper photographers slipped up to the top of Bucks Elbow Mountain 50 years ago to photograph the rescue and recovery operation after Piedmont Airlines Flight 349 was discovered with a sole survivor 36 hours after it went down in fog, another photographer reached the scene and has revealed his photographs for the very first time.

Ed Roseberry, who would go on to fame as a leading chronicler of Charlottesville and University life in the 1960s, was there on the Mountain in 1959 with with his 4×5 Speed Graphic camera to capture images of survivor Ernest Philip “Phil” Bradley as Bradley was taken up the mountain in a stretcher. The images did not come easy.

Roseberry, then 34, had driven his new Vauxhall station wagon up the Skyline Drive (more)

Comments(4)

Unlike the rest of “the nine,” Morgan opted for a red dress on prom night. (Others: Amy Melvin, Maggie Herrick, and Jenna Testerman.)
PHOTO COURTESY HARRINGTON FAMILY

The parents of missing Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington urge would-be sleuths not to blame the 20-year old woman’s friends for failing to report her disappearance during an October 17 heavy metal concert in Charlottesville.

“They’re not to blame,” says father Dan Harrington. “Everyone wants to make them out to be the bad guy, but they’re not the bad guy.”

The woman’s disappearance didn’t get reported to authorities until the next day when her father called police after she failed to show for a pre-arranged visit home to study math and balance her checkbook.

But should the friends at the concert have reported her missing?

“I wish they had,” says her dad, “but I don’t know that (more)

Comments(52)

Harrington’s dad holds Kirby while mom gives the family’s “I love you 2 much” signal Saturday.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

It’s been hell on earth for the parents of missing Virginia Tech student Morgan Dana Harrington.

“God, this has been a long week,” says her father, Daniel “Dan” Harrington, who last saw his daughter around noon on Saturday, October 17, just hours before her disappearance from a concert in Charlottesville. “This,” says mother Gilbert “Gil” Harrington, “has been physically, emotionally, quite a hit.”

During a recent interview at their home in Roanoke, the couple speak fondly of the 20-year-old daughter they eagerly hope to see again; yet throughout an hour-long conversation, they occasionally refer to her, seven days gone at that point, in the past tense.

“You have a choice,” says Gil, pronounced JILL, “you can dissolve in the corner or become hard and bitter– or forge a way to find something positive because that’s what Morgan is, or was.”

“She always called me Papa,” says Dan. “She said (more)

Comments(30)

Morgan Harrington, center, with her father at left and her mother at right, on a recent family vacation.
PHOTO COURTESY HARRINGTON FAMILY

The father of Morgan Dana Harrington believes that the person responsible for abducting her outside the October 17 Metallica concert is someone from the Charlottesville area.

“If I had to bet my guess,” says Dan Harrington, “this is someone local.”

He expressed his theory Saturday morning in a living room interview, sandwiched between visits from the top television network morning news programs and a visit from two members of the Virginia State Police. While investigators continue (more)

Comments(50)

“This case is about right and wrong,” says RSWA director Tom Frederick in a recent memo, accusing recycler Peter Van der Linde of “defrauding” the RSWA out of more than “a million dollars in tipping fees.”
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

After nearly two years of silence, the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority has finally responded in detail to public comments and media coverage of its $20 million RICO lawsuit against trash recycler Peter Van der Linde. Authority director Tom Frederick released a memo ahead of the RSWA Board’s October 27 meeting that includes some of the “substantial evidence” that Van der Linde “defrauded the RSWA in excess of a million dollars in tipping fees.”

According to Frederick, after the RSWA’s  “service contribution fee” was implemented in 2005, Authority officials began noticing sharp drops in the amount of area trash that Van der Linde was hauling, as reported to them by BFI, a development that Frederick characterizes as a smoking gun.

“During one twelve-month period from September 2006 through August 2007, Mr. Van der Linde’s companies declared zero tons from Albemarle/Charlottesville,” says Frederick, “a period within which there are multiple photographic records” of Van der Linde’s orange dumpsters in the area.

At the time, Frederick had his recycling manager, Bruce Edmonds, tracking and photographing Van der Linde’s containers. In the county, development director Mark Graham had instructed his building inspectors to keep track of the distinctive orange containers.

“They might think I’m a criminal, but do they think I’m stupid?” responds Van der Linde, who plans to issue his own memo to refute Frederick’s comments, point by point, at the Authority’s Tuesday meeting. “Do they really think (more)

Comments(17)

‘Everybody who’s anybody musically in this town played with Johnny Gilmore,’ says singer-songwriter William Walter.
PHOTO COURTESY WILLIAM WALTER

Acclaimed local drummer Johnny Gilmore has died in a fire, and his father was hospitalized after the blaze erupted Thursday night in the musician’s room at the Green Leaf Townhouses in midtown on Fifth Street, SW.

“I was talking to him an hour or an hour and a half before it happened,” says Rougemont Avenue resident Kenneth Jackson, who was visiting his sister in the unit adjacent to Gilmore’s in the nine-unit apartment complex. “He was sitting on the wall, and we were talking about music.”

Music was the 45-year-old’s life, say those who heard the (more)

Comments(46)

RWSA director Tom Frederick has enjoyed the support of his board, including Charlottesville Public Works director Judy Mueller.
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Despite a request from a prominent critic of the controversial plan to replace three existing reservoirs with one that would adjoin Interstate 64, the study of the pipeline needed to make the scheme possible appears to be slipping past the local elections, according to a document submitted last month by the head of the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority.

“The review of the conceptual plan for a future South Fork to Ragged Mountain pipeline was estimated to be completed by the end of 2009,” Authority director Tom Frederick writes in a late September response to a reporter’s question. “RWSA entered into a contract in late August with the firm Wiley/Wilson to perform the review.”

Questions about how the $25,000 review is going could not be immediately answered, as Wiley/Wilson’s project manager, Tim Slaydon, is hiking the Appalachian Trail and not expected back (more)

Comments(12)

The John Paul Jones Arena parking lots are usually scenes of frivolity, as seen in this pre-DMB concert photo from April.
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Friday update: the reward announced at findmorgan.com for information leading to the young woman’s safe return is $100,000.

~

“Witnesses and conversations” indicate that missing Virginia Tech student Morgan Dana Harrington– who left a concert in search of a bathroom– spent the hour between 8:30pm and 9:30pm Saturday outdoors near the John Paul Jones Arena, a time when the performance by Metallica, according to the venue manager, was underway.

The time information came October 21 before a phalanx of reporters at a press conference held at UVA Police headquarters by Lieutenant Joe Rader of the Virginia State Police, who also announced the then imminent reward fund and a new (more)

Comments(115)

“This is a monumental waste of time and money,” says Bob Fenwick of the Waste Authority’s lawsuit against Peter Van der Linde, seen here on the trolley Van der Linde uses to give school tours of his recycling facility.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Independent City Council candidate Bob Fenwick held a press conference today at Peter Van der Linde’s $11 million Zion Crossroads recycling facility, at which he dropped off some trash of his own (concrete scraps, yard waste, and a broken weed trimmer) and called on Charlottesville City Council to rescind the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority’s $20 million RICO lawsuit against the recycler.

“We have two governments going after Peter Van der Linde using my tax money and my water fees,” said Fenwick. “Their staff attorney has been reported to be charging $515 an hour. This is a monumental waste of time and money.”

As an area businessman for 30 years, Fenwick said that Van der Linde’s struggle with the RSWA “struck a chord,” and like the YMCA plans for McIntire Park, seemed like another case of “government not following the will of the people.” Fenwick said he’s tried to find out the RSWA’s side of the story, but to no avail.

“Why doesn’t someone from the County Board of Supervisors or City Council stand before us and tell us why this lawsuit is a good idea?” Fenwick asked. “They have publicly accused this man of being a criminal, and now they hide from public comment.”

Fenwick also criticized the RSWA’s (more)

Comments(8)

Morgan Harrington left the Metallica concert early.
PHOTO FROM STATE POLICE

“She’s a very responsible young lady,” says Diane Scribner Clevenger, the pastor of the Roanoke church that missing Virginia Tech student Morgan Dana Harrington attends.

“It’s just a time of shock,” says Scribner Clevenger. Best known to the Harringtons as “Reverend Diane,” she is serving as a family spokesperson while Morgan Harrington’s parents, Dan and Gil, have uprooted their lives in Roanoke to assist with the Charlottesville-based search for their 20-year-old daughter.

Harrington came to Charlottesville with a group of friends to see the Metallica concert at John Paul Jones Arena on Saturday night— but she left (more)

Comments(63)