Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 23, 1992 TAG: 9203230104
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: PEARISBURG LENGTH: Long
\ In hindsight everything seems like a clue, however baffling. Maddie Riggs' wanderlust, the car she allegedly stole, her endless cigarettes, the many rides she begged to town before the murders.
Maybe even the cigarette lighter trick the 14-year-old girl showed a relative, minutes after hiding a gun inside her shirt.
Riggs dropped by her great-aunt and uncle's house early on the afternoon of last June 2.
It was a stormy spring Sunday. She quickly bummed a cigarette, and cadged 50 cents to buy a soda.
She talked and laughed.
"Let me show you a trick," she told her aunt. Riggs held a lighter in her closed fist and made the flame shoot out underneath.
"I don't know how she did it," said Elsie Keffer, clearly amused even now. "You'd have to know her to know she was a case."
Later, when Riggs got up to go, Keffer saw the bulge in her clothing take shape and her heart tumbled.
"I told the judge my instinct was it was a gun she had in there."
Sometime after Riggs visited the Keffers that Sunday, authorities say the 14-year-old girl killed a quiet factory worker and his wife.
Lee and Shirley Hutchison, a churchgoing Giles County couple with grown children, were killed by a single bullet apiece to the chest. There were no signs of a struggle, authorities have said.
Ten months later, the motive for the murders remains a mystery.
Richard Chidester, the county's assistant commonwealth's attorney, said the Hutchisons may have refused to give the girl a ride to town to see a boyfriend.
But he isn't sure.
"There's only one person living, and she's told a couple of stories," he said. "I`m not sure which one is correct."
The girl was tried as a juvenile - as 14-year-olds must be under Virginia law. She was found "not innocent" - the double-edged juvenile court words for "guilty" - of the Hutchisons' murders.
Authorities have not released the girl's name. But witnesses who testified at the February hearing, as well as neighbors who peeped in through the courtroom window, said she was Maddie Riggs.
They said she chewed gum, blew bubbles and offered no defense during the trial.
"She just acted like she was bored to death, to me," said witness Sherwood McGuire.
In any case, it has been common knowledge in the hills outside Pearisburg ever since it happened that the girl who shot the Hutchisons was Maddie Riggs, who turned 15 the following month.
The same Maddie Riggs, they say, who knocked on neighborhood doors for months before the shootings - asking for food, to use the telephone, for a cigarette or a ride to town.
The same Riggs girl who took old Arlon May's car one day without asking - and then ran it into a ditch, according to May himself.
The same teen-ager who refused to mind her grandmother and guardian Edna Riggs, according to Elsie Keffer. The girl who often roamed the mountain roads alone.
"She'd just knock on the door and say, `I'm hungry, I want a sandwich,' " recalled neighbor Ethel Parr. "I'd fix her a sandwich and give her a pop."
Sherwood McGuire recalled how his wife, Rose, gave Riggs a ride home - apparently just after the shootings. McGuire, who lives two doors down from the Hutchisons' old house, said Riggs often came around.
Has he ever thought that it might have been him?
"Yeah," said McGuire, echoing the thoughts of several others. "A lot of times."
Today, Riggs - a resident of the Bane community in the mountains outside Pearisburg, and a former seventh-grader at King Johnston School - is expected to be committed to a state learning center for killing the Hutchisons with a .357-caliber handgun.
If committed to Bon Air Learning Center in Chesterfield County as expected, the girl will be released at the latest when she is 21, Chidester said.
\ Why did she do it?
\ The sentencing will close a grisly chapter of Giles County criminal history.
But the questions may linger as long as memory.
"I can't keep from thinking about it," said James Keffer, who opened his own door to Riggs on the day of the killings. The Keffers now believe Riggs took a gun from a relative's house just before coming to visit on Sunday. Authorities say the Hutchisons were killed sometime Sunday afternoon.
"You never know, do you?" Keffer said.
Efforts to find Riggs' parents, who are divorced and live in separate states, for this story were unsuccessful.
Riggs has lived for several years with her grandmother, Edna Riggs. Their trailer sits on a hillside above Virginia 100, in a neighborhood of trailers mixed with tidy brick and frame homes.
Across the highway, the mountaintops roll across the county to Mountain Lake. The nearest town, Pearisburg, is several miles away.
Michael Riggs - Maddie's uncle from whose house the murder weapon was stolen - lives on a hilltop across a dirt road from the Keffers.
He said his niece has written to him since her arrest, asking if he was mad at her for taking his gun. They also have spoken on the telephone.
\ Relied on her neighbors
\ Maddie Riggs has been held at the New River Valley Juvenile Detention Home in Christiansburg since her arrest in June.
"She never did tell me what happened,' said Michael Riggs. "She just doesn't say anything about it. I don't think she realized what she did when she did it. I think she knows now that they're dead and gone."
In more than a dozen interviews since the shootings with people who knew Riggs - some slightly, some well - a picture took shape of a troubled young girl given to mood swings and "spells," who had trouble at school and at home and had knocked on nearly every door in the neighborhood asking for various favors.
"She ran away all the time," said Elsie Keffer. "If she wanted to go to Pearisburg, she'd go. . . . They'd get out and look for her. She'd hide, she'd run over the bank or something, but she'd come back."
Meanwhile, neighbors were opening up their homes - not to mentions their cupboards and their cars.
Some gave her rides to town. Ethel Parr gave her snacks.
Susan Sadler gave her a drink of water - while her 7-year-old daughter, Amanda, took her out back to show off their new puppies.
Several of her neighbors said Riggs asked to use the telephone to call boys. Ethel Parr refused, she said, because she knew Riggs' grandmother did not let her make such calls at home.
Arlon May, 81, talked to Riggs and gave her cigarettes when she asked - that is, until the day he said Riggs drove off with his car.
"I heard the car start. I looked up and it was going down the road," May told the Roanoke Times & World-News last summer. He said Riggs had snatched his keys off a table on one of her visits.
The car ended up in a ditch, May said. He also said the Riggs family paid the towing fee, and that the girl apologized.
\ Known for her temper
\ Chidester declined to discuss or verify her criminal history.
"I would say there were no indications from anything we know about her previous history that would indicate she had violent tendencies," he said.
But there was an angry Maddie Riggs, noted by some who knew her.
Eric Payne - a 15-year-old boy who once dated her - told reporters last summer that Riggs "was easy to get mad."
Johnson, the neighbor, once refused to give Maddie a ride to town - as the Hutchisons may have done on June 2.
"You could tell by her actions she didn't like it and it made her mad," Johnson said.
But there was another side to Maddie Riggs - indicated by the laughing girl who could do tricks with a lighter.
"She was a funny, gay person. It always tickled me to see her," Elsie Keffer said.
Riggs more than once visited the Hutchisons, who lived off Virginia 100 about a mile from her grandmother's trailer where she lived.
Neighbors have said the couple was kind to her. Elsie Keffer believes they liked having her come around.
On the surface, there seems little reason for the killings.
Lee Hutchison, 62, was an employee of Pulaski Furniture who enjoyed working in his yard. An acquaintance at the Burlington plant, where Hutchison once worked, recalled how he came to work early every day and sat reading his Bible in his car.
Shirley Hutchison, 57, was a graduate of Giles High School, where she later was a secretary, recalled Donald Johnson, who went to school with her.
Neither one, Johnson added, "would hurt a fly."
"They were the kind of people who would help anybody," said the Rev. Margaret Wood-Johnston, who had both the Hutchisons and the Riggses in her congregation at Pleasant Hill United Methodist Church. She said Riggs told her she loved her whenever they met, and liked to be hugged.
She also said Riggs had visited her several weeks before the shootings and used her telephone to call a boyfriend.
"In a way I prefer to keep the memory of the last time she visited me," Wood-Johnston said. "She just looked a lot like springtime. Very bright and pretty. . . . I told her what a pretty young woman she was growing up to be. She smiled. . . . The beautiful young lady who left my home - there's just no way I can comprehend her doing that. It really makes you cry inside to think that's possible."
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by CNB