Virginia gained a lot of attention for its mysterious disappearance of a young university student in 2014, and how this case is related to another unresolved case back in 2009. Then the arrest of the serial killer Jesse Matthew came with many new discoveries and the new findings of more unresolved cases around the state.

The man who first started committing sexual assault never had any charges against him but his act then led to an extreme level when he murdered his first victim in 2009. The case remained a mystery until another similar murder took place in 2014 and Matthew was arrested which solved many unresolved mysteries.

Jesse Matthew Wiki: Who is Jesse Matthew?

Jesse Matthew Jr. was born in Charlottesville Virginia on December 12, 1981, to Jesse Matthew Sr. and Debra Matthew. Matthew and his sibling Latasha Nicole Matthew were raised in Charlottesville but the family lived in different places in Virginia including Lynchburg.

Matthew played football from the early days of his junior high so after graduation, he attended Liberty University and was a part of the school football team but he dropped out at the end of 2002, then played for the Christopher Newton University in 2003. Still, he again left the team after being accused of sexual assault on the campus university but there was no charge made against him.

Later in 2005, he started working as a cab driver in Charlottesville city after he got his license then he later started working as a patient technician in the University of Virginia medical operating room in 2012.

Then he was a part-time volunteer for a football team at the Covenant school until he was charged for the abduction and murder of a University of Virginia(UVA) student Hannah graham 18 in September 2014.

Jesse Matthew- Back to School Killer

Matthew has had a dark history of violence and assault since the 2000s but his crime took to an extreme level when he was involved in the abduction and murder of two young university students. Though his first murder victim Morgan Harrington was murdered in 2009, he was still able to stay clean from the case until he committed another similar murder in 2014 which led to his arrest.

Let’s look into the two murder cases in detail to know more about the back-to-school killer.

Morgan Harrington Murder Case

The 20-year student was abducted and murdered when she went to watch her favorite rock band, metallic concert in October 2009 with her friends at the Virginia university campus. She went to the concert with her friends on October 17 but she couldn’t attend the concert because of the no re-entry policy when she went to the restroom.

She told her friend about the situation by phone and that she will be heading back home. According to some witnesses she was seen hitchhiking on a nearby bridge somewhere at 9:30 pm and this was also when Matthew was working as a taxi driver. After her disappearance police made an immediate search of her and they found her purse containing her id card and her cellphone without the battery at the university Lannigan athletic field.

Later her t-shirt was also discovered in November which she wore during the concert and the forensic test report also showed a link between another victim back in 2005 in Fairfax, who was also abducted and raped, which made it clear that the criminal is the same person.

Her body was later found after about 4 months in January 2010, on remote rural farmland of Albemarle and it was disclosed that the killer brutally murdered Harrington after she was raped, however, the police were able to find the suspect DNA but they didn’t find out who was the exact person.

The authority took over four years to find this serial killer who murdered another victim in the same way, which is described in the follow-up murder of Hannah Graham.

Hannah Graham Murder Case

She was an 18-year-old student at the UVA who was abducted and murdered after she went missing while partying with her friends. The student went out partying with her friends on September 13 but later she texted her friends that she lost her way when she got separated from them. There was much footage of Graham and Matthew having seen each other before her disappearance, and she also seemed intoxicated.

Matthew became the prime suspect and the police sent out his arrest warrant but he was on the run and was later arrested near Galveston in Texas. An unknown body was found a month later in October and was confirmed to be of her, in some abandoned property in Albemarle, the same place where Harrington was also murdered.

After Matthew’s arrest, everything came to light and the connection between Graham and Harrington’s murder also became clear, not just this the police did a full search of Matthew’s history and found out about his dark criminal past.

Matthew previously had many sexual accusations against him since the time he was a student at the Liberty university but was never being charged for any and one of them was the known case from 2005 when a 26-year-old woman was abducted and raped in Fairfax.

Not just this, there are also many similar sexual assault cases that are connected with Matthew, making him a notorious serial criminal in Virginia.

Aftermath of Jesse Matthew’s Arrest

After the arrest, the court trial started in 2015, and was given four life sentences for the two murders he committed and an additional sentence of three life sentences for his 2005 raped and attempted murder case of the Fairfax woman.

The court decision was made with the agreement of the victim’s families, though murder cases involved the death penalty, however, Matthew was put into life imprisonment under the condition that he will not have any early release, nor he will be eligible for any parole and he has to serve each four years life sentence separately.

Jesse Matthew now 40 was initially serving his sentences in the Red Onion state prison in Wise but was later shifted to Sussex state prison in Waverly in 2019 after he was diagnosed with cancer to receive medical treatment.

He was also admitted to a hospital in Richmond in December 2020 and where it was reported that Matthew has stage four colon cancer, indicating that cancer has spread to many parts of his body. He himself announced his cancer news during one phone interview where he said, “I just now found out that I have cancer” in May of 2020 but didn’t say anything else and later the official made a further announcement about his health.