ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609230072
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MARION
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
JEAN ANDERSON'S death shook her small town to the core. So, when law enforcement agencies banded together to solve the case, the community wasn't far behind.
A rape-slaying has a personal impact on a community, especially when the victim is your neighbor, the woman who taught you in fifth grade, your Sunday school teacher.
Others in this small Southwest Virginia town knew Anna Jean Smith Anderson as a friend with whom they played golf, worked in a hospital auxiliary, or ate lunch the day before her death.
Jean Anderson, 68, had lived in Smyth County for more than 40 years when someone entered her home, probably Sept.4, robbed, raped and strangled her.
In a town of only 6,600 people, the crime immediately became the community's focus. She had taught fifth grade in the county for 32 years, from the time she graduated from then-Radford College until she retired in 1990.
Retirement hadn't slowed her down. She volunteered in schools and the auxiliary at Smyth County Community Hospital near her home. She played golf as a member of the Holston Hills Country Club.
She had been elected assistant Sunday school superintendent at First United Methodist Church. Marion Mayor Marshall Guy, who started as superintendent this month, had asked Anderson to take over for him on the opening Sunday. "Sure," she said.
"That was the first Sunday. The second Sunday, she was dead," Guy said. "Myself, it was just sort of like a bad dream. When you know somebody, and you know their death was so sadistic, it just tears you apart."
Anderson lived by herself. Other women alone worried after her death that they also could be prey for the killer, Guy said.
Guy happened to be outside his home Sept.11 when he noticed a commotion on an intersecting street. It turned out to be police surrounding a truck belonging to 23-year-old Harold David Davis, a Marion laborer, who is now charged with capital murder, rape and burglary. A conviction for capital murder could carry the death penalty.
Another arrest followed the next day. Joshua David Widener, a 17-year-old from Marion, was charged with breaking and entering plus attempted larceny at the Anderson home.
The two are being held on $500,000 bond each.
The community's intense involvement with the case may have helped solve it - that, and a rapidly assembled police task force, which may become the standard for such crimes in rural areas. The concentrated law enforcement effort was the first of its kind for the Marion task force.
"We talked to something like 90 people," said Sgt. David Whitley, investigator with the Marion Police Department. "We had a good response from the community. They went overboard."
Whitley's daughter had been a student at one of the schools where Anderson taught. "We get personally involved with it because we live here. We're raising our families here," he said.
On the day before police found her body, Anderson had lunch at the country club with friends because it was too rainy for golf. Her lunch partners remembered her mentioning baking a cobbler to deliver to a friend who was ill. The friend called her about 8 p.m. to say thanks.
She was to meet a relative in Russell County the next day but never arrived. Two neighbors found her kitchen door unlocked about 10:30 p.m., her telephone dead and items in her home out of place. They called police, who found her body in the house.
Whitley called the State Police Mobile Crime Lab. Its five or six technicians gathered, tagged and logged evidence for the crime laboratory in Roanoke. Other state police agents joined local authorities interviewing neighbors.
Jon Perry, a Salem-based state police investigator trained in criminal profiling at the FBI Academy, set up the task force of state, town and county members. "He's a super fellow," Whitley said. "He really helped us pull this thing together."
They set up an office in a former Board of Supervisors meeting room in the county courthouse basement, and installed a telephone hot line that brought in a lot of tips from the community.
"The whole group, we just came together as a law enforcement family. It really amazed me how things started clicking, once the task force was put in place," Whitley said. "We had meetings once in the morning and once about midday to go over all the evidence we had gathered and contact the lab and see what they found."
Within 24 hours, he said, they had focused on Davis.
"This is one of the things that is coming. You're going to see more of these task forces because of the training that's required," said Marion Police Chief Charles Overbay, another member. "No large city could have had more people on a case than we had when we started. When we have a major crime, we're going to work together."
The experience made Whitley a task force believer, too. "We're not bashful to ask for help. We've seen how well this worked," he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL DELLINGER/Staff Retired schoolteacher Jean Andersonby CNBled a busy life in her Culbert Drive home in Marion until she was
raped and strangled, probably Sept. 4. color. KEYWORDS: FATALITY