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Janet Pelasara remembers the advice she gave her 17-year-old daughter, Taylor Marie Behl, when she dropped her off at Virginia Commonwealth University to begin her freshman year.
"I told her to have as much fun as you can stand and still get good grades," Pelasara recalled the other day, nearly three weeks after her daughter disappeared.

They were the words of a mother confident in her daughter's judgment.

And why not? Taylor Behl had grown up handling responsibilities beyond the experience of most youngsters.

By the age of 5, she was traveling internationally by herself on planes -- a byproduct of Pelasara's second marriage, to an officer with Britain's Royal Air Force.

Behl lived in England and Brussels until she was 11, before returning to the United States when that marriage ended.

Pelasara and Behl settled initially in Ashburn in Loudoun County and then moved to Vienna in Fairfax County. By the time Behl graduated from James Madison High School last spring, she had attended 15 schools.

She worked at a Starbucks, managed the JV boys basketball team and hung out at Vienna's Jammin' Java, where she ardently followed up-and-coming bands, such as the Brindley Brothers.

During it all, Pelasara said, Behl never missed a curfew, always remembered to call and "didn't do drugs -- that I know of."

So when it came time to choose a college, Pelasara had few worries that her "street-smart" daughter wouldn't be able to handle its challenges.

Taylor chose VCU over two other Virginia schools, Pelasara said, because she wanted to take advantage of what a city like Richmond had to offer over a more staid, suburban setting.

"I thought it would be a positive thing for her to be on her own," Pelasara said.

But as her disappearance has evolved into a criminal investigation, even people close to her are questioning whether she was as capable of protecting herself as she appeared to be.

"She's very smart and very worldly at 17, but she's still a 17-year-old," said her uncle, Jeff Pelasara, who has been staying in Richmond with his sister to help in the search for his missing niece.

Behl arrived in Richmond with connections to home.

Her roommate turned out to be a friend of Behl's best friend back home in Vienna. Another high school classmate from Vienna was an upperclassman at VCU. And within a week of arriving on campus on Aug. 19, Behl met her first real boyfriend.

"She was so excited," said Pelasara, "that she had met a boy and he didn't drink or do drugs."

Glynnis Keogh, Behl's best friend, concurred.

"She seemed really happy," Keogh said. "She liked him because he was so straight-edged."

But Behl also had made connections, through friends and the Internet, with people in the city who dwelled on the fringes of college life, some of whom police are investigating for possible clues to her disappearance.

Among them is Ben Fawley, a 38-year-old photographer and self-described "Goth Skater" Behl met in February during a visit to VCU. He was one of the last people to see Behl before she vanished Sept. 5.

Fawley, a father of two with a criminal record of assaults, was arrested Friday and charged with 16 counts of possessing child pornography. He has told police he had a romantic relationship with the 17-year-old Behl.

The relationship was apparently one Behl had not discussed with her mother but had talked about with Keough.[sic]

Keogh, now a college freshman in West Virginia.

"They weren't that close," said Keogh, now a college freshman in West Virginia. "She was like, 'I know it's bad,' but it wasn't anything at first."

"It started evolving . . . She was intrigued by him. I think she enjoyed the attention," Keogh added. "But after a while, she didn't like him as much. I think she realized he was more screwed up than she wanted to deal with."

Fawley told police he last saw Behl about 9:30 the night she disappeared. Earlier in the day, Behl and her new boyfriend had broken up but had dined together at the Village Cafe.

When Behl was last seen, at 10:20 that night, she told her roommate she was going skateboarding with a few friends.

Now, police are investigating a group of skateboarders with whom Behl had become acquainted after arriving at the school. The car of one skateboarder has been impounded under the suspicion that Behl had been riding in it sometime before she disappeared.

And a friend of the skateboarder has been arrested on a drug-possession charge after a search of his house, where police were led when a bloodhound detected the friend's scent in Behl's abandoned car.

The flurry of recent police activity involving Fawley and the skateboarders has heartened Behl's family and friends, even if has yet to bring her back.

"It sounds like she was exploited by several people," her mother said, "and they are going to pay."

In his second-floor office on Virginia Commonwealth University's campus, Willie Fuller is struggling through his third week with little sleep and a weight on his shoulders the size of a skyscraper.
"This is the most emotionally trying case we've ever had. All any of us want to do is find Taylor and return her safely to her family. . . . It's all we think about."

Fuller is chief of police at VCU, an urban university of nearly 30,000 students that has been set on a razor's edge by the high-profile disappearance of one of its freshmen. Taylor Marie Behl, a 17-year-old from Vienna in Fairfax County, vanished from campus Sept. 5, less than two weeks after fall classes began.

On Friday, Ben Fawley, a 38-year-old photographer with ties to Behl, was charged with 16 counts of possession of child pornography. Fawley, a man police have identified as a "person of interest" in Behl's disappearance, has acknowledged that he had a physical relationship with her.

Fuller said VCU still has detectives and street officers working on the case, although the criminal investigation has been turned over to Richmond police. The FBI is also involved.

The chief said he can't keep track of how many media interviews he has given, as the Behl case became the white-hot focus of news organizations as diverse as NBC's "Today" and Court TV.

"We've never had anything this high profile," Fuller said wearily. "This has been a very trying ordeal."

Fuller said he has met with Behl's parents, as have VCU President Eugene Trani and other VCU administrators, police officers and students.

The burly police chief, who has headed VCU's police department since 2000, said he has a 23-year-old daughter, and his heart aches when he thinks about how the Behl family must feel as the hours creep by.

"This is personal for us," he said. "Our officers are serious about keeping students safe. Taylor is one of our own."

Although there is no clear evidence of what has happened to Behl, VCU is not the only state college to deal with the trauma of a missing student.

In 2002, the University of Virginia reported two kidnappings/abductions, the same number the College of William and Mary reported in 2001, according to crime statistics kept by the Virginia State Police.

With 76 sworn officers, VCU has the fourth-largest university police force in the nation.

Fuller said officers keep a highly visible presence on campus, but he believes one of the department's most important duties is hammering home to students the importance of personal safety.

Every year the department's officers give hundreds of presentations to groups on campus, including faculty and staff members.

Considering the city it's in, VCU is a remarkably safe campus, Fuller said.

During the past 10 years, Richmond has averaged 80 homicides a year, and it recently was ranked the nation's ninth-most-dangerous city to live in based on homicides per 100,000 population.

Despite that, VCU has recorded only one homicide during the past five years, and that came last year when thousands of college students from across the region flocked to the VCU campus after the Black Entertainment Television hip-hop festival at Paramount's Kings Dominion.

The student who was shot was from Virginia State University in Petersburg and was killed as he sat in his car. This month, a Richmond Circuit Court jury handed up a first-degree murder conviction against a 21-year-old Richmond man in the case; the investigation that was led by VCU police.

Fuller said he rarely leaves his office these days without having a student or a group of students talk with about the Behl case and how they're feeling.

"My impression," Fuller said, "is that students feel relatively safe, and [that] they see this is an isolated incident."

That's generally the way Lillian Dunn, a 20-year-old VCU junior, feels about things.

"I would say I don't feel less safe, but I think about it more," said Dunn, who lives in the Fan District, a popular residential area that includes much of VCU.

Dunn said that if you live in an urban area, you need to take precautions for your personal safety and be aware of your surroundings. She never walks alone at night, which she says is just common sense.

An art-history major from Richmond, Dunn said she is "in love with VCU" and hopes all the publicity the Behl case has been receiving will not give the public a bad impression of the school.

She added that like most students, she identifies with Behl and is sad that Behl disappeared without really getting a chance to experience college.

Amanda Glover of Norfolk, a 20-year-old senior anthropology major who also lives in the Fan, expressed a sense of fatalism.

"No matter how safe you think you are, something like this can happen," she said.

Dunn and Glover both said VCU has dutifully kept the lines of communication open to students, expressing concern about Behl and providing information about counseling and safety issues.

Tsion Tesfaye of Midlothian, an 18-year-old freshman at VCU, commutes to college but has night classes in Latin twice a week that end at 9 P.M.

She said she isn't scared but always makes certain that she walks with a group or catches a shuttle bus to her parking deck.

Tesfaye said the only thing that has changed for her since Behl's disappearance is that her mother asked her to phone home after she leaves class at night and again when she reaches her car.

Although she doesn't think it's been intentional, Tesfaye wonders if a student's disappearance would have received so much attention had Behl not been white and good-looking.

She said one of her friends had called her to say, "She was a pretty girl. It's real sad."

Tesfaye added that Behl's disappearance has saddened everyone.

For Fuller, the sadness can't end soon enough.

"It's a child's life," he said.

Chris Collins is your classic denizen of Richmond's Fan District, an area as famed for its eclectic characters as it is for its fan-shaped layout. Just looking at him, he could be a judge (which he has been) or one of those guys on the street hitting you up for cigarette money.

Friday afternoon, he was wearing shorts and flip-flops, which fit the record heat but didn't quite mesh with the fact that he was on the scene of a high-profile arrest, representing a man who has been questioned in a nationally watched missing-person case.

A TV reporter assured Collins he would be shown just from the chest up during his interview, but the scene-setting footage on the 6 o'clock news showed the seasoned criminal-defense attorney looking decidedly beachy.

"There I am in my flip-flops," Collins noted Friday night with his sonorous, cigarette-lacquered voice. "I've already got calls from my friends - 'Your flip-flops are showing.'"

Here he is, 58 years old, with 89 capital-murder cases under his belt, a highly respected criminal-defense attorney who has defended some of the worst human flesh this state has ever produced, including the sexual predator whose crimes inspired Patricia Corn well's first best-seller.

But it's only now that Christopher J. Collins is getting the most intense media exposure of his storied 26-year career - for an unpaid gig representing a 38-year-old Fan photographer police have labeled a "person of interest" in this month's missing-woman hypefest.

Cable TV, network TV, The Washington Post - everyone wants to talk to him about his client, a bipolar amateur photographer and computer geek named Ben Fawley, who may not have had anything to do with the disappearance of Taylor Behl nearly three weeks ago.

"The National Enquirer called today," Collins said with a sigh as he sat on the curb across Hancock Street from his client's apartment, which was being searched again by investigators. He raised his hands like a conductor, palms out, and slowly spread them. "I can see the headlines now: 'Alien Photographer Abducts VCU Student.'"

The whole thing has steamrolled since the day he was walking out of court and "this frantic kid came up to me, saying the media and the police were all over him: 'Would you help me?'" Collins recalled Fawley saying.

He has never seen anything like it.

"The South Side Strangler is the only one who comes close," Collins said, referring to serial murderer and rapist Timothy Spencer, who terrorized the area in 1987.

Collins said the current "media-driven frenzy" surrounding the Behl disappearance is just a matter of timing.

The previous missing-woman case, Natalee Holloway, an Alabama teenager who disappeared on the Caribbean island of Aruba, was running out of steam when Hurricane Katrina arrived to dominate the news, he said.

The Behl case came during a little post-Katrina lull.

"If television wasn't involved in it, it would be just like any other" case, Collins said. "Lots of people are missing here every year."

Since the case reached escape velocity, some of Richmond's character has gotten widespread exposure.

National TV has shown the Village Café, a longtime mainstay of Richmond's counterculture, along with our downtown university and some of the interesting sights and sounds of the Fan.

This is very much a Fan story. Behl's dorm is on West Main Street across from Monroe Park. Her car was found on North Mulberry Street in the Fan. She and her friends hung out in Fan clubs and restaurants. A big hunk of her college, Virginia Commonwealth University, is in the Fan.

There's no other place like it.

"I like the charm and the life in the Fan - the street theater," said Collins, who lives with his wife and their rescued dog on Grove Avenue in the lower Fan.

Where else would a guy like Collins live?

This Milwaukee native wound up being a Navy corpsman during Vietnam, although he's quick to point out he spent most of the war in prime berths in Okinawa and Hawaii, with just a couple of quick jaunts in-country.

After the war, he had hoped to enter med school and become a doctor but was told, at 28, he was too old.

So he went to law school at the College of William and Mary and then hung out his shingle in Richmond after his wife was transferred here.

His first capital-murder case involved a medical student who had been shot and killed. At the time, defense lawyer Craig Cooley, now widely recognized as one of the region's finest attorneys, had asked Collins to help him on the case.

"I greatly admire his skills," Cooley said yesterday. "He is, in my opinion, the consummate trial attorney. He has the best courtroom instincts of any attorney I've ever worked with."

For the past several years, Collins and Cooley have team-taught a capital-murder-litigation class at the University of Richmond's T.C. Williams School of Law.

From time to time, Collins has also served as a substitute judge in the area.

The blunt-speaking lawyer has been at this kind of thing for a while.

"Too damn long, some might say," he said.

When police officials called his latest client a "person of interest," Collins said he considered that phrase a pussyfooter's way of saying "suspect."

He's a say-what-you-mean-and-mean-what-you-say kind of guy who doesn't lose any sleep over the killers he has helped escape punishment.

"It would bother me more if somebody I knew was innocent got convicted."

Part of the formidable Collins lore is the 1999 capital-murder trial of Melvin "Bug" Smith, who was accused of killing four men.

During his closing arguments, Collins realized he was having a heart attack. He asked co-counsel Michael Herring (currently a contender to become Richmond commonwealth's attorney) to dial 911 and then resumed his comments to the jury.

"I edited a little bit . . . but I finished," Collins recalled.

He wound up being taken out of the building on a gurney. Cooley remembers visiting him at the hospital that night.

That episode shows Collins' character and total commitment to his profession, Cooley said. "He's as passionate as anyone I know."

Times - Dispatch, Getting to Know Taylor Behl - 09/25/2005
Times - Dispatch, Interviews VCU's Police Chief & a Few Student, 09/25/2005
Times - Dispatch, About Ben Fawley's Attorney, Chris Collins, 09/25/2005
Times - Dispatch, VCU & Crisis Management, 09/25/2005

The links below are to the major network news and the stations in the area providing full coverage of Taylor's Case. These are the major source of the information provided on this site. Also included are links to the various Weblogs and other sites of interest.

The information on this page was obtained through public and private sources. The images may be updated, changed, corrected, or deleted by E-mailing me at willnotagz@aol.com. You may also view an updated version of this webpage at: http://taylorbehl.notagz.com/. You may use the pictures and host them on official or other private sites. Where possible give collage credit to E-mail me at willnotagz@aol.com. I also welcome messages regarding broken links, continuity, grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.

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