Gil Harrington: Morgan Harrington Murdered and Dead for Good
In her hands, Gil Harrington held both the abomination of her daughter’s
gap-toothed skull, and the mother of her daughter’s killer, blessing them both.
The phone rang that bright October morning: "Hello, this is the Charlottesville Police Department calling. We've found your daughter's purse on the ground..." For exactly 100 nights, Gil Harrington and her family stumbled, agonized, and learned to function in the uncharted hell of the Missing. Twenty-year old beautiful college co-ed Morgan Harrington, chock-a-block full of potential and promise, had gone to a concert and vanished. This is the story of a devastated mother crawling out of blind grief to become America's most skilled huntress. With love, eloquence, and social media as her only weapons, Gil Harrington pursued her daughter's murderer for five years until he was unmasked as the marauding serial murderer, the Back to School Killer who had hidden in plain sight as a genial, lumbering Charlottesville, Virginia cabbie.
Morgan's mother was so crucial in the pursuit of the Back-to-School Rapist and Killer, Jesse Matthew, that Crime Stoppers recognized Gil and her non-profit foundation, Help Save the Next Girl, in solving what prosecutors called "the Super Bowl of Crime Cases." But Gil Harrington, this mother of a murdered precious daughter, is something very different from an investigator. Hers is one of the rare, intimate voices needed in our world right now, when fear and hatred are rampant. Her voice marries the pragmatism of an incisive oncology nurse and the originality of an authentic, raw prose-poet to give the world the tool kit we all need to forge hope.
Harrington’s voice is joined by artist, Jane Lillian Vance, who attended Matthew’s trials. Vance’s essays witness Gil’s grace, and the stunning alchemy of darkness into freedom.