bubblepup
Former Member
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A Murder on the Rappahannock River
A little over 30 years ago, a Northern Neck fisherman named Emerson Stevens went to prison for the brutal slaying of a homecoming queen and mother of two. Now, a reexamination of the case by a hard-charging UVA lawyer has turned up troubling questions. Did police have the wrong man?
The sun was just beginning to fade when David Riley pulled up to the little house off Route 354. The Virginia State Police detective got out of his unmarked Ford Fairmont and took in the setting of the mystery that had brought him here—a low-slung home shrouded in trees and underbrush. Across the street, a cemetery.
It was Friday, August 23, 1985, and earlier that day, the local sheriff’s office in Lancaster County had gotten a disturbing call: Mary Keyser Harding was missing.
A 24-year-old mother of two, Mary was a bookkeeper at the local bank. She also shouldered the weekday parenting while her husband, a commercial fisherman, was out to sea. She hadn’t dropped her kids off at the sitters’ that morning, so the children’s great-grandmother went by the house. Mary’s four-year-old son, Ray, answered the door. “Momma is gone,” he said.
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With a killer on the loose, rumors bloomed like dark bruises. Some people said a Satanic cult had murdered Mary. Others guessed it was a summer vacationer who’d already left town. Either option was easier to stomach than the idea that the murderer was one of their own.
“Everybody was just so scared and, you know, ‘Who’s going to be next?’ ” says Karen Lewis, one of Mary’s best friends. “Of course, that’s what people were thinking—‘It could have been anybody.’ ”
People bought dogs, installed floodlights, added to their gun collections. Some sent their children away to stay with relatives. A psychic came to town to help investigate, and the Bank of Lancaster, Mary’s employer, along with other donors, pooled $20,000 in reward money for information about the crime.
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As Riley, the detective, tracked down leads, he posted up at the R&K Country Inn, the convenience store where watermen gassed up their boats and cashed their checks. It wasn’t long before he began to zero in on one fisherman in particular. The man was an independent operator that Mary’s husband had singled out, and one who happened to share his first name: Emerson Stevens.
Like his father and brothers, Stevens was a crabber and oysterman—had been since quitting school after the ninth grade. He worked a 32-foot wooden boat named for his wife, the Miss Sandra. People knew him as a typical waterman: simple, liked his Old Milwaukee. “What you saw is what you got,” says Lawrence Taft, owner of the R&K.
Stevens wasn’t a friend of the Hardings’ per se, but he lived nearby and had been to their home. Harding told Riley that the waterman was around during the search parties as well as after Mary’s funeral, and seemed shaky after the service. According to a police report, Harding described him to Riley as a loner and a drinker who talked a lot about women.
---
A little over 30 years ago, a Northern Neck fisherman named Emerson Stevens went to prison for the brutal slaying of a homecoming queen and mother of two. Now, a reexamination of the case by a hard-charging UVA lawyer has turned up troubling questions. Did police have the wrong man?
The sun was just beginning to fade when David Riley pulled up to the little house off Route 354. The Virginia State Police detective got out of his unmarked Ford Fairmont and took in the setting of the mystery that had brought him here—a low-slung home shrouded in trees and underbrush. Across the street, a cemetery.
It was Friday, August 23, 1985, and earlier that day, the local sheriff’s office in Lancaster County had gotten a disturbing call: Mary Keyser Harding was missing.
A 24-year-old mother of two, Mary was a bookkeeper at the local bank. She also shouldered the weekday parenting while her husband, a commercial fisherman, was out to sea. She hadn’t dropped her kids off at the sitters’ that morning, so the children’s great-grandmother went by the house. Mary’s four-year-old son, Ray, answered the door. “Momma is gone,” he said.
---
With a killer on the loose, rumors bloomed like dark bruises. Some people said a Satanic cult had murdered Mary. Others guessed it was a summer vacationer who’d already left town. Either option was easier to stomach than the idea that the murderer was one of their own.
“Everybody was just so scared and, you know, ‘Who’s going to be next?’ ” says Karen Lewis, one of Mary’s best friends. “Of course, that’s what people were thinking—‘It could have been anybody.’ ”
People bought dogs, installed floodlights, added to their gun collections. Some sent their children away to stay with relatives. A psychic came to town to help investigate, and the Bank of Lancaster, Mary’s employer, along with other donors, pooled $20,000 in reward money for information about the crime.
---
As Riley, the detective, tracked down leads, he posted up at the R&K Country Inn, the convenience store where watermen gassed up their boats and cashed their checks. It wasn’t long before he began to zero in on one fisherman in particular. The man was an independent operator that Mary’s husband had singled out, and one who happened to share his first name: Emerson Stevens.
Like his father and brothers, Stevens was a crabber and oysterman—had been since quitting school after the ninth grade. He worked a 32-foot wooden boat named for his wife, the Miss Sandra. People knew him as a typical waterman: simple, liked his Old Milwaukee. “What you saw is what you got,” says Lawrence Taft, owner of the R&K.
Stevens wasn’t a friend of the Hardings’ per se, but he lived nearby and had been to their home. Harding told Riley that the waterman was around during the search parties as well as after Mary’s funeral, and seemed shaky after the service. According to a police report, Harding described him to Riley as a loner and a drinker who talked a lot about women.
---
