1975
The area takes its name from Thomas Mason's 1975 wooden toll bridge, built to supplant the existing ferry and carrying Kings Highway traffic across the river.
about 0:06:09The story
He was drafted into the army in December 1970, after a couple of years in college, and spent about three years in military counter-intelligence, safeguarding communications and detecting enemy bugs before and during the Vietnam era. By the late 1990s he was working as a civilian counter-intelligence contractor for the army at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the passion had gone out of his marriage.
Her real name was Rebecca Grag, a 30-year-old former stripper with two young sons, whose electricity and phone had been cut off. She replied to his email and they met at a Ruth's Chris steakhouse in Crystal City. She told him she needed money to turn her life around and offered non-sexual companionship in return. Three days later he wrote her a cheque for nearly $7,000. He paid her rent, bought her a green 1996 Jeep Cherokee, gave her a mobile phone and an American Express gold card in her name, paid private Catholic school fees for her sons, paid for breast enhancement surgery and helped with her custody dispute. Over 18 months he spent about $450,000 on her, selling investments to cover her credit card debts.
Grag had two sons with Robert Finch, a 30-year-old contractor who ran RF Enterprises Inc, assembling products for Home Depot and Lowe's. Finch had been in a bitter five-year custody battle with Grag; in June 2000 he obtained custody of the boys, and a final hearing was set for the first week of January 2001. He had a new girlfriend, Dana Thrall, 25, who worked at Fairfax Foods, and they were building a house together in Woodbridge, Prince William County, where they lived in a townhouse at Jousters Way with her two sons and a large mastiff called Naughty.
In the summer of 2000 he professed his love; when Grag did not reciprocate he began turning up unannounced, making elaborate excuses to see her and following Finch around. He told her he was videotaping Finch as evidence for the custody hearing; she later said he prowled around Finch's property more than a hundred times. She began avoiding his calls and, in the first days of January 2001, took her children to Florida.
At about 4 a.m. on 2 January 2001 a newspaper delivery driver, Mary Bracewell, saw a man with a flashlight beside a pickup truck parked on Belfry Lane in Woodbridge and watched him walk between two townhouses. She called the police. Fifteen minutes later Officer Marshall T. Daniel of the Prince William County Police Department was sent to Belfry Lane; he found the truck locked, with a Department of Defense sticker on the windscreen and a mobile phone on the passenger seat. At 4.27 a.m. he was redirected to a reported domestic disturbance at Jousters Way, about 300 yards away. A neighbour, Tina Miller, had been woken by a crashing sound and then heard three or four hollow sounds and the most horrible scream she had ever heard. Tommy Young, walking his dog across the street, heard two banging noises, a female scream and three more bangs, then saw the front storm door swinging open and the blinds closed.
Robert Finch had been shot three times, including once in the back of the head. Dana Thrall was shot five times, three times in the head, once in the chest and once through a finger, and had been beaten over the head with the gun. Ten bullets were recovered, all fired by the same revolver, which was never found. Investigators believed the attacker may have run out of ammunition, pistol-whipped Thrall, reloaded and shot her again. Thrall was found alive in the kitchen by Officer Sheldon R. Kremer at 4.45 a.m. and died of her injuries on 4 January. Her sons, aged six and four, had hidden upstairs and were seen peering from a back window; they were later taken in by relatives.
Officers had left the pickup truck unguarded, and by 4.38 a.m. it was gone. A bloodstain on the inside of the back gate did not match either victim or the children.
On 3 January they went to Fort Meade. He said Grag was an employee at a brewing company he owned in West Virginia, that he had given her a credit card for business purposes, and that he had been travelling separately from her over the New Year. He admitted driving to her home on New Year's Day in case Finch turned up. He denied knowing Finch and said he had spent the night of 1 to 2 January asleep in his truck at a rest area in Maryland. Later he admitted the relationship, saying he met her on Adult Friend Finders in mid-1999, and that he had driven to Finch's neighbourhood after a 3.28 a.m. call to Grag from a pay phone, claiming his mobile battery was dead.
He said he had left his truck only to urinate by a guard rail, then walked past the townhouse, but denied going on the property and denied hearing shots or a scream. A detective photographed a cut on his hand. On 7 January he was interviewed again and admitted he had been in the neighbourhood hundreds of times, though he said he never went on the property. His truck was seized on 8 January; the interior had been recently cleaned, with wet carpet and seats covered in a silicone-based cleaner. Grag was given two polygraph tests, the first inconclusive and the second showing deception.
Virginia allows the death penalty for killing more than one person within three years.
Kaine refused. He asked that his last meal not be revealed.