Effective August 11, 2006, I will only send E-mail alerts for new information of great importance. With the plea entered by the murderer in this case, we should not see many changes. There may be some information updates, so be sure to check back periodically. This website shall remain online indefinitely. If you have information that needs to be added to the email or to this website, please send it to me via E-mail to:
The following article appeared on dailypress.com out of Hampton Roads, VA, written by Matt Sabo on August 18, 2006:
MATHEWS -- In a rambling jailhouse confession, Ben Fawley said he "flipped out" while having rough sex on a Mathews County beach with 17-year-old Taylor Behl. Fawley told two Richmond police detectives on Oct. 12, 2005, that Behl, a Virginia Commonwealth University student, taunted him and caused him to snap, according to transcribed copies of the taped confession released by the court.
"And all I remember was her saying that she was gonna tell her mom and call the police and say that I raped her," said Fawley, a 39-year-old amateur Richmond photographer. He told the detectives he discovered Behl was dead after he "flipped out."
In court last week, Fawley received a 30-year prison sentence after he entered an Alford plea, which allows a defendant to acknowledge that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict him without admitting guilt. Mathews Commonwealth's Attorney John S. Gill rejected Fawley's story. If the case went to trial, Gill said evidence would have proven the case wasn't about sex, bondage and erotic asphyxiation, as Fawley contended. Only in Fawley's mind was Behl sex-obsessed, Gill said last week. Fawley "murdered Taylor Behl," Gill said.
Behl met Fawley while visiting Richmond in February 2005 and saw him periodically. When she returned to Richmond for college, she parked her car in front of his residence. She disappeared the night of Sept. 5 after telling her roommate that she was going skateboarding with friends.
Fawley soon became a suspect and was arrested in late September on unrelated child pornography charges.
Behl's decomposing remains were found in Mathews exactly one month after she disappeared.
Fawley was indicted in January on a first-degree murder charge in connection with Behl's death. As part of last week's plea deal, the pornography charges were dropped.
During the jailhouse confession, in which Fawley sobbed and stammered, he said Behl wanted him to help her commit a crime before her 18th birthday. Fawley recounted driving around Richmond having sex while rebuffing her requests to break into buildings. They ended up at the Mathews beach, where Fawley tied Behl's hands together and bound her legs to the car with duct tape before - at her request - sticking a plastic bag over her mouth, he told police. But Fawley claimed he took the bag off when Behl began choking, according to court documents.
"I'm pretty sure that's when she started cussing me out and saying I was just too much of a wimp," Fawley said, according to court documents. "That I just didn't have what it took to, you know, she said um, she said, 'Choke me, I want to gasp for air. I want to think I'm gonna die. I want to really gasp for air, you know.' "
Then Behl threatened to tell her mother that Fawley had raped her, he said. He said he doesn't remember what happened next. "All I remember, like I said, was the next thing I recall was trying to get her onto the seat," Fawley said, according to court documents. "I don't remember anything."
One of the detectives asked him if his failure to recall the events occurs when he gets upset. "I never - I remember ever since I was in elementary school, kids would tease me and I would flip out and I'd never remember what I did," Fawley said, according to court documents. "I just remember being in the principal's office. I remember the kids teasing me. I remember the kids taunting me, and I remember getting mad, and then the next thing I know I was in the principal's office."
Fawley drove her body to Richmond before returning to Mathews and dumping it in a ditch in the woods not far from an ex-girlfriend's family's house. He told the investigators he was unsure of why he dumped Behl's body in the Mathews woods. "I have no clue why there," Fawley said, according to court documents. "Um, I realized while I was talking to (a friend) one day - after all this - that because of there I was gonna get caught."
In his jailhouse letters to friend Katie Hildebrandt, he portrayed himself as a troubled child who became a man who remained haunted by personal demons. "People don't like me," Fawley wrote in a handwritten November letter. "They never do. As a child I had no friends ... I was a bother. In the way. A problem. So I spent most of my life alone." He later told her it was his fourth time in jail. "Not a good track record," he wrote.
Behl's Oct. 7 autopsy report - which wasn't signed until July 28 - listed her cause of death as homicidal violence. It was also released by the court. The clothes found with Behl's remains included a bra, a medium-sized shirt with sequins and, on the left arm, a hooded sweatshirt. The right sleeve was inside out and the left sleeve had duct tape on it, the report stated.
Other documents included copies of Behl's diary entries. In one dated Aug. 1, 2005, Behl wrote that in 19 days, she will be in her Richmond dorm room kissing her mom goodbye. "I have no comprehension," Behl wrote, "of the wonders Richmond will hold for me."
In a legal maneuver to avoid spending live behind bars, Ben Fawley plead guilty on August 10, 2006, to second-degree murder. Without admitting guilt, Fawley accepted that the state had enough evidence to convict him had the case gone to trial. The plea lets Fawley off the hook on the child pornography charges he still faced in Richmond.
Below, I have posted articles from the area regarding this case.
The following article, written by Jim Nolan, appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch on August 11, 2006:
She strides into the dormitory with the carefree gait of a typical college freshman, recorded by a Virginia Commonwealth University security camera at 10:18:11 p.m. She leaves the Gladding Residence Center on Richmond's West Main Street at 10:20:08. The images of that September evening are not remarkable until you realize they are the last pictures of Taylor Marie Behl alive.
View The Surveillance Video of Taylor Entering Dorm and Fawley Lying-in-Wait
The court filings, obtained by The Times-Dispatch last night along with other evidence in the case,show the 17-year-old wearing a hooded sweatshirt. It is the same one VCU investigators would discover off a dirt road in Mathews County a month later -- attached to duct tape and found among shreds of plastic bags with Behl's skeletal remains.
And a disturbing image lurks between the video images of the last public coming and going of the Fairfax teen.It is a picture of her killer. Ten seconds behind her, at 10:18:21 p.m., Ben Fawley, clad in a black T-shirt, long black shorts and a backward baseball cap, comes into view. For the next minute, he paces outside the dormitory's secure entrance, at one point peering inside. He exits the frame at 10:19:16. At 10:20:08, Behl emerges from the dormitory and heads in the same direction. Within hours, she will be dead. Murdered, prosecutors say, in the early morning hours of Sept. 6 by Fawley about 75 miles away from Richmond, near the public beach in Mathews.
On Wednesday (Aug 10, 2006), Fawley, 39, pleaded to second-degree murder in Behl's death and received a 30-year prison sentence. As part of the plea arrangement, prosecutors agreed to drop unrelated charges of possession of child pornography.
Fawley's plea did not include an admission of guilt in Behl's slaying. Rather, the plea was based on the presumption that the evidence against Fawley probably would result in his conviction if the case had gone to trial as scheduled on Aug. 17.
The medical examiner's report on Behl's death said the cause was "homicidal violence, type underdetermined."
Even after Wednesday's hearing and sentencing, Fawley's lawyers said their client maintained that he did not mean to harm Behl. Fawley stuck to his story, outlined in a rambling two-hour jailhouse statement Oct. 12, that Behl died accidentally during a sex act involving bondage with duct tape and erotic asphyxiation.
Prosecutors say Fawley's version of the events that led to Behl's death -- and his characterization of his victim as aggressively promiscuous -- were deceiving. "He concocted his story to account for what he thought our evidence would be," said Richmond Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Christopher Bullard, who assisted Mathews County Commonwealth's Attorney Jack Gill in preparing the case against Fawley.
The prosecutors said part of Fawley's story and strategy involved besmirching Behl's character to make his own version of kinky-sex-gone-bad seem more credible. In some cases, they believe, Fawley substituted his own actions for Behl's, suggesting that it was she who wanted to experiment with sexual bondage and erotic asphyxiation with a plastic bag. In his summary of the case facts in court Wednesday, Gill noted that it was Fawley who had built his own bondage bed.
Gill also said there was no computer evidence to support another Fawley contention -- that Behl had gone online to read about kinky sexual practices, including erotic asphyxiation. It was a practice Fawley claimed that Behl berated him for not carrying out, saying she threatened to tell her mother she was raped if he didn't comply.
To be sure, there were points in Fawley's 50-page police statement that prosecutors found to be more revealing than he may have intended. After Fawley claimed Behl had threatened to tell her mother she had been raped, Fawley says on the tape: "I think I might of put my hands over her mouth and told her to shut up." And later in his statement, Fawley says:
"I don't know what happened when I flipped out at that point with Taylor. . . . All I remember, like I said, was the next thing I recall was trying to get her onto the seat. I don't remember anything," Fawley continued.
"Why I am here right now is because of what goes on in my head. What goes on in my head and it won't stop."
Several weeks after Fawley's statement to police, he wrote a series of letters to a female friend. Gill read the last paragraph of the letter dated Nov. 7,in court at Fawley's plea hearing Wednesday.
"I never liked the thoughts in my head," he wrote. "Taylor just didn't get I didn't like the bag idea due to the thoughts in my head. "People are right," Fawley continued. "Something is wrong with me. All the thoughts of death and killing in my head and now it's true. I've killed . . . "
The following article, appeared on CourtTV.com on August 11, 2006:
(Court TV) — An amateur photographer pleaded guilty Wednesday to murdering a university freshman, whose body was discovered in a remote Virginia woodland a month after her disappearance last year. Benjamin Fawley, 39, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the killing of Taylor Behl, who was 17 when she was last seen Sept. 5 at her dormitory in Richmond, Va.
As part of a deal with prosecutors, Fawley will serve 30 years in prison, instead of the 40 or more years he could have faced if convicted at his trial, which was scheduled to begin next week. Fawley bowed his head throughout the hearing at the Mathews courthouse. He closed his eyes and seemed to hesitate before quietly pronouncing the word "guilty." When asked if his guilty plea meant he was, in fact, guilty, Fawley shook his head while crying, and his lawyer indicated that the defendant agreed only that there was enough evidence to convict him of second-degree murder.
Fawley told police that he had accidentally suffocated Behl during consensual sex in which she had asked him to tie her up and put a bag over her head. He claimed he panicked and dumped her body, which was bound and duct-taped, in rural Mathews County about 75 miles outside of Richmond.
"Despite what everyone thinks, I did not kill Taylor Behl purposely," Fawley told reporters as he was led from the courthouse in shackles.
Prosecutors have maintained that Fawley, who admitted that he had alcohol and anger issues, killed her maliciously and intentionally. "A real man would have called 911 if it were truly the accident he would have us believe," Behl's mother, Janet Pelasara, told reporters outside the courthouse. "A real man would not have dumped Taylor in the ditch."
During the hearing Wednesday, Mathews Commonwealth's Attorney Jack Gill laid out the state's case against Fawley, which included the defendant's statements to police, surveillance video and phone records.
Fawley was arrested Sept. 23. He had initially told police that he had been abducted, but later admitted that story wasn't true.
As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dropped 22 unrelated child pornography charges against Fawley, each of which could have carried five years in prison. The judge sentenced him to 40 years with 10 years suspended.
Both Behl's parents expressed satisfaction with the plea deal, but also dismay at Fawley's insistence that the killing was unintentional. "In the truly cowardly fashion that he's exhibited since he brutally murdered and concealed the body, Ben Fawley has not admitted to murdering my daughter Taylor," Matt Behl said.
Behl, who had been at Virginia Commonwealth University two weeks before she disappeared, had just reconciled with a boyfriend Sept. 5. Later that evening, she met up with Fawley, with whom she'd had a previous relationship and who had taken her picture. Surveillance tapes showed her leaving her dorm near 11 p.m. that night. Two days later, her roommates reported her missing. Her body was found a month later on Oct. 5.
The following article, by John Cawley, appeared on the DailyPress.com website on August 11, 2006:
MATHEWS -- Ben Fawley was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in prison for killing Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Taylor Behl. The 39-year-old Richmond man pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Behl's Sept. 5 death. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop 16 child pornography charges that were pending against Fawley in Richmond.
The sentence was handed down after Fawley entered an Alford plea in Mathews Circuit Court. An Alford plea allows a defendant to acknowledge that the prosecution has enough evidence for a conviction without requiring the accused to admit guilt.
Behl disappeared Sept. 5, after telling her college roommate that she was going skateboarding with friends. Her badly decomposed body was found in a Mathews ditch a month later.
After hearing an hour-long summary of the case against Fawley, Mathews Circuit Court Judge William H. Shaw III concluded that the evidence was substantial and convicted Fawley of second-degree murder.
Fawley bowed his head throughout the hearing and appeared to sob slightly several times while answering Shaw's questions. In his hands, he clutched a picture that his attorneys later said was of his two daughters.
Shaw sentenced Fawley to a 40-year prison term, suspended 10 years and gave Fawley credit for time served in jail awaiting trial since September. Fawley would "likely serve all or most of that sentence," the judge said.
Fawley made no statements during the hearing and afterward shuffled, feet shackled, out of the courtroom. An unidentified member of Behl's family shouted, "Murderer!"
About 20 of Behl's family members attended the hearing along with her mother, Janet Pelasara. After the hearing, Pelasara told reporters that she was satisfied. She said, "My words could never express the heartache I've had to endure since Fawley murdered my only child, Taylor. "No mother should have to wonder how much of their child they are burying." Pelasara called Fawley a "subhuman" and directed the remainder of her statement to him: "I pray when you get to your new home, your new friends will treat you like you treated my daughter and you are loved to death," she said.
A summary of evidence against Fawley presented by Mathews Commonwealth's Attorney Jack Gill took all but about 15 minutes of the proceeding. In it, Gill painted two very distinct pictures of Behl: Fawley's version and that which Gill said refuted the effort to smear her reputation. Gill recounted various statements to investigators where Fawley said Behl explored bondage and erotic asphyxiation on the Internet. Fawley also said Behl wanted him to tie her up and put a plastic bag over her head until she passed out during sex, Gill said.
The prosecutor elaborated on a well-publicized statement that Fawley made to police where he insisted Behl died accidentally during rough sex where he constricted her breathing. Gill said Fawley told investigators that Behl choked to death with a plastic bag over her head while the pair had sex in her car near a secluded Mathews beach. Gill described Behl as a typical teenage girl infatuated with her college boyfriend, with whom she had reconciled a breakup the day she disappeared. Behl had "the same hopes and fears that all kids have," Gill said.
"The commonwealth's evidence would have proven that this was not a case about sex, bondage and erotic asphyxiation," he said. "The defendant murdered Taylor Behl. There would be no doubt. The details are horrific." Gill's voice was often shaky as he struggled to present the evidence against Fawley, and he paused repeatedly to regain his composure. After the hearing, Gill addressed those moments, confirming that he became emotional. "I can't help getting involved in a case like this with the death of a 17-year-old girl. It's every parent's nightmare," he said. "She was not some Lolita-esque sex fiend. That was in the mind of the defendant."
The plea agreement headed off a long trial expected to return Mathews to an unwanted national spotlight. Behl's saga played out daily on national news networks and on the Internet. Virginia State Police Sgt. Sammy Carr, who coordinated media arrangements for the trial, said he was expecting about 100 reporters and support staff.
Before Wednesday's hearing, several Mathews residents expressed relief that the trial ended before it began. "I think it would have been negative all the way across," said Edward Hutson, who lives in New Point. "I think people want to forget about it." Sarah Beckley, a kitchen manager at Bartlett's Cafe on Mathews' main drag, said restaurant staff was prepared for an influx of business from the trial. But Beckley said that there hadn't been much talk among locals and that she didn't think the county's character would be changed by the horrific crime. "I think people will always talk about what happened. I don't think it will be brushed aside," she said. "Especially now that it seems to be what we're on the map for. It's a shame. This is a quiet community."
The following article, by Jamie Stockwell, appeared on the WashingtonPost.com website on August 11, 2006:
MATHEWS COUNTY, Va., Aug. 9 -- A Fairfax County mother was mostly composed Wednesday during a 90-minute hearing in this rural county, until the man who killed her daughter was led slowly from the courtroom in shackles. "Murderer!" she screamed.
Moments earlier, Benjamin Fawley had stood up -- his head shaking back and forth, a photograph of his two young daughters in his left hand -- and entered a plea in the murder of 17-year-old Taylor Behl, just eight days before his trial was scheduled to begin.
It has been 11 months since Janet Pelasara last saw her daughter, who was a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Behl's mostly naked and decomposing body was found a month after she was reported missing, buried in a shallow ravine off a winding country road.
Fawley, 39, has repeatedly said that Behl died during a consensual sex act in which he restricted her breathing. But standing in the crowded courtroom, Fawley entered an Alford plea to second-degree murder. In doing so, Fawley did not admit his guilt but conceded that the state had enough evidence to convict him in Behl's killing. Circuit Court Judge William H. Shaw III accepted the plea and sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
The court action closed a case that garnered national headlines and was the focus of an intense manhunt last fall, a case that prosecutors said Wednesday was never about "sex or bondage or erotic asphyxiation." Simply, "this was a case about murder," said John S. "Jack" Gill, the county's chief prosecutor. "This was a girl going off to college with the same hopes, dreams and fears that all kids have," Gill said. "It's a tragedy she was taken in this manner."
Fawley sobbed at times during the hearing but offered no apologies. Under the terms of the agreement, 22 counts of unrelated child pornography charges filed last fall in Richmond will be dropped, each of which carried a minimum punishment of five years.
His attorneys said afterward that Fawley, a father of two young girls who live with their mother in Pennsylvania, was reluctant to enter a plea. He was "very emotional," said William E. Johnson, one of his attorneys. "He contends that he thought highly of Taylor. He contends that he never wanted to do her harm," Johnson said. "He is very depressed. But he's resolved to his fate."
Behl, a June 2005 graduate of James Madison High School in Vienna, was just two weeks into her freshman year when she vanished. Her body was found about 75 miles east of the Richmond campus. An autopsy determined last month that Behl's death was a homicide. But because her body was so badly decomposed, medical examiners were unable to conclude how she was killed.
Behl's mother, who attended the hearing with about 35 relatives, said afterward that she was pleased with the outcome. "I'm happy that it's over," she said, adding that it does little to help her heal. "I don't know that I'll ever have closure. How do you have closure on losing your only daughter? I don't think there ever will be."
Fawley was romantically involved with Behl before she enrolled at VCU. He has been in jail since September, when he was arrested on unrelated pornography charges after police searched his home computers. Within days of the discovery of Behl's remains, Fawley told investigators that he had had consensual sex with her in her car, parked near a beach in rural Mathews County, the night of Sept. 5 and that he had accidentally choked her. He told police that he had panicked after she died and dumped her body in the shallow ditch off a narrow dirt road tucked behind sheds and farmhouses.
Detectives were led to the spot by one of Fawley's ex-girlfriends, who recognized the area in a photograph Fawley posted on his Web site. An amateur photographer, he had a gallery of his digital snapshots online, and the critical image showed a portion of his ex-girlfriend's family's property.
Fawley maintained numerous Web sites dedicated to his interests in art, Gothic culture and skulls, and he had a bumper-sticker-plastered van that he decorated with dozens of license plates that he had collected over the years.
He and Behl met early last year, and the two became online friends. They posted messages to one another on their blogs. On one trip to Richmond, Fawley took photographs of a fully clothed Behl and posted them on his Web site.
Behl, too, had a vast online presence with journals and profiles posted at the popular social networking sites http://MySpace.com and http://LiveJournal.com . On her MySpace page, which she last logged into the day before she disappeared, friends continue to post messages about their memories of her.
Little of Behl's online world was mentioned in court yesterday. Instead, prosecutors said she wrote in her journal about a new boyfriend she had met in Richmond. She was eager to delve into college, they said. And although Fawley told the police that Behl was crazy about him, she thought he was weird, prosecutors said. He later told police that he sometimes blacked out and that he remembers Behl choking before she took her last breath.
"I never like the thoughts in my head," Fawley wrote in a jailhouse letter to a friend that was read aloud Wednesday. "People are right. Something is wrong with me. All the thoughts of killing and death in my head and now it's true. I've killed someone."
The following article appeared on the NBC4.com website on August 9, 2006:
MATHEWS, Va. -- A judge has convicted an amateur photographer of second-degree murder in the death of a 17-year-old Virginia Commonwealth University student. Benjamin Fawley, 39, entered an Alford plea. That means he's not admitting guilt but acknowledging that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him in the slaying of Taylor Behl in September 2005. The judge in Mathews County Circuit Court ordered him to serve 30 years. The judge also agreed to drop unrelated child pornography charges.
"I wouldn't care if he got five, 10, 100, for several reasons," said Behl's mother, Janet Pelasara, on Tuesday. "One, it's not going to bring back my daughter. And two, I don't think he's going to last five years in jail."
Fawley became tearful in court Wednesday and answered the judge's questions haltingly, News4's Julie Carey reported. Judge William Shaw asked Fawley if he entered the plea willingly.
The plea agreement came just more than a week before Fawley's trial scheduled for Aug. 17.
Pelasara said that the plea agreement brings a welcome conclusion to a heart-wrenching year and saves many of her daughters' friends the pain of testifying.
Former northern Virginia prosecutor Stephen Shannon, who also is a friend of the Behl family, said the plea deal is a positive outcome for prosecutors and the community.
"Whenever somebody agrees to plead guilty to a sentence of 30 years, it means that they have taken a look at the commonwealth's case and believe it to be fairly strong," he said. "Practically speaking, with the defendant being 39 years old, he's going to spend the rest of his life behind bars with this plea agreement."
Shannon said that while plea agreements are a compromise, this one helps protect the community.
Behl's body was discovered in Mathews County, which is 70 miles east of Richmond, on Oct. 5.
Behl was reported missing from the VCU campus in Richmond by her roommate last Labor Day weekend. The Vienna teen's car was found two weeks later, less than 2 miles from her dorm.
An autopsy concluded that Behl was a homicide victim. But the post-mortem did not specify the cause of death. Dr. Deborah Kay wrote in her summary, "Homicidal violence, type undetermined."
"Due to the condition of the remains, the cause of death cannot be determined," the pathologist wrote.
Fawley said he did not murder Behl and claims she died accidentally during a sexual encounter.
Hampton Roads Daily Press
NBC 4 News
Hampton Roads Daily Press
Richmond Times-Dispatch
CourtTV.com
Washington Post
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.
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