At one year mark, Harringtons try to put joy back in their lives

Tonight will mark one year since Morgan D. Harrington was taken.

A 20-year-old Virginia Tech student, she left a Metallica concert, tried to hitchhike and vanished.

More than three months later her remains were found in a remote pasture. Her father, a doctor, described her recovered body as a brutally damaged skeleton.

During the initial search phase police were able to build a fairly detailed timeline of Harrington’s movements from the concert to a Copeley Road railroad bridge. But her path from there to the pasture remains a mystery.

She had started out with friends, headed for the concert. She had gone to James Madison University in Harrisonburg and ridden from there to the concert in her own car, with one of her friends driving.

She was wearing a black Pantera T-shirt, a black mini-skirt and boots. Later, when the case grabbed national headlines, her mother would talk on national television about discussing the outfit with her daughter.

Inside the concert, early in the show, Harrington left her friends, saying she wanted to find a bathroom, according to the Virginia State Police.

Somehow, she ended up outside the John Paul Jones Arena at the University of Virginia, where the concert was being held. Once outside, she wasn’t allowed back in.

Eventually, in an 8:48 p.m. phone conversation, Harrington told a friend that she would try to find her own way home.

Police have reports of her hitchhiking on the Copeley Road railroad bridge 30 to 40 minutes later, and that’s the end of their timeline.

In January, a farmer found her remains. They were near a fence line in a pasture at the back of the farm, near the Blandemar Farm Estates subdivision.

Later, the chief medical examiner’s office would declare her death a homicide but, in an unusual move, not release a cause of death.

In July, police announced they had made a forensic connection to an abduction and sexual assault that happened in 2005 in Fairfax. The link doesn’t prove that the suspect in that case — police have a sketch, but no name — hurt Harrington, police stress, only that he came into contact with her sometime that night. He is definitely wanted for abduction and sexual assault in Fairfax.

There are also a couple of events police know occurred, but cannot definitively place in their timeline. Harrington’s purse and her cell phone, minus its battery, wound up in a parking lot near the arena. Her T-shirt ended up on 15th Street Northwest, which isn’t near either the arena or the farm where she was found and isn’t on any logical route from one to the other.

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At this point, the investigators are trying to grind the case out, Harrington’s mother said.

“There are some things that they’re chunking through,” Gil Harrington said. “There’s no great ‘Aha!’ moment that there’s something huge. They’re just re-sifting data. It’s going to be methodical kind of work … that will solve this, although I’d love an ‘Aha!’ moment.”

Corinne Geller, Virginia State Police spokeswoman, put it more simply.

“It’s very much into the minutia of the investigation,” she said.

Investigators are still seeing periodic surges in tips: There was one after they announced the Fairfax tie-in, and they’re in the midst of another, as media outlets have been running stories on the one-year mark.

Investigators still don’t have any persons of interest in the case but want badly to solve the case, Geller said.

“For our investigators it’s very personal,” she said.

And police and Harrington’s parents still hope that there’s a person out there with information that can help crack the case.

The man from the Fairfax assault was definitely in Charlottesville on Oct. 17, 2009. And police believe the person who killed Harrington knew the area — Anchorage Farm and its immediate surroundings — where she was left. Those might or might not be the same person. Police hope someone can help them piece the picture together.

Investigators are hopeful about the sketch, Geller said.

“It’s an absolute in a case that still carries a lot of questions for investigators,” she said.

And Harrington’s parents agree with the police about the place their daughter’s remains were left.

Gil Harrington described a recent drive through the area: “There were thousands of places where you could put a girl without penetrating into Anchorage Farm.”

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The Harringtons have generally praised the police effort, which aimed at first to find their daughter and then to learn how she died. But a year in, the Harringtons wish a few things had gone better.

Almost as soon as her parents reported her missing, officials were treating the case as a potential crime, not merely a runaway, the Harringtons said.

“There was something untoward that had gone on, they got that right away,” Gil Harrington said.

But officials seemed a bit lost at first, Dan Harrington said.

“One of the things that we saw early on is that we were totally ill-prepared, as was any … law enforcement official in Charlottesville, when Morgan disappeared,” he said.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children offered to send in a specially trained team to help, but officials weren’t interested, Dan Harrington said.

The Laura Recovery Center, a Texas-based organization that organized a massive community search in the area near the bridge, came in at the behest of the Harringtons with help from Ed Smart, the father of Utah abductee Elizabeth Smart, and Camille Cooper, a local lobbyist who campaigns against crimes of exploitation.

“They were waiting for Morgan to be found by a hunter or a runner or a fisherman or someone like that,” Dan Harrington said.

He said law enforcement officials need to be made more aware of resources for finding missing people.

“The law enforcement community is a really complex, kind of old-style institution, where there is much precedent and protocol and jurisdiction,” Gil Harrington said. “And … sometimes you get bogged down in jurisdiction and protocol, and it’s hard for you to move forward on the case.”

She said she thinks the profession is improving on that point, but will necessarily be slow to change.

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In the last year, the Harringtons have been busy keeping attention on the case and trying to solidify their daughter’s legacy.

The strategy for keeping the case front-and-center has been simple. They’ve granted interviews, held press conferences and generally gotten as much media attention as possible.

“That gave us a feeling that we were doing something for our girl,” Gil Harrington said.

The Harringtons have also said they want to change what Gil Harrington has described as a “predatory” cultural view of young women. It’s likely to be a slow change, but they hope it’s starting, the Harringtons said.

Dan Harrington pointed to the recent attention given to a series of assaults and robberies committed this fall against UVa students, mostly women, as possible evidence of improvement in the wake of the death of his daughter and other events, including the May beating death of UVa lacrosse player Yeardley Love.

“I don’t think all of a sudden there’s more crime in Charlottesville; I think it’s being reported and paid attention to,” Dan Harrington said.

The Harringtons also mentioned UVa’s recent Day of Dialogue, designed to urge students to intervene with others to prevent violence. The Day of Dialogue made much mention of Love’s death.

There have also been projects to keep Harrington’s memory alive.

Harrington’s parents have been to Congress, to lobby the Virginia delegation to support more funding for finding missing adults.

In February, they’re speaking at the National Conference for Responding to Missing and Unidentified Persons about using social networking to find missing people.

They’ve announced the Morgan Dana Harrington Memorial Scholarship at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Dan Harrington is a senior associate dean at the school.

And there’s the three-room school in Ndola, Zambia, that Orphan Medical Network International is building. Part of it will be named in memory of Harrington.

“If you can get out of the way of your grief and fear and despair, even something as big as the death of your child can unfold in a remarkable way,” Gil Harrington said.

At a year’s milestone, it’s important for Dan and Gil Harrington to start finding ways to have a better life.

It’s a small start, but on Saturday they planned to go to Monticello. Years ago, they donated an etching that a family member had picked up at a Charlottesville estate sale to the presidential estate. It now hangs at the site, and they like to go every few years, they said.

“This year of existing does not really seem like a worthwhile enterprise,” Gil Harrington said. “We have to, moving forward, find a way to factor in some kind of joy in living. And I don’t know how you do that, but it’s paramount that you do that.”