Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 23, 1992 TAG: 9203230110
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHY LOAN NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: FLOYD LENGTH: Long
One of her last memories of that house 30 years later was cleaning her father's blood from the kitchen floor.
The bodies of Lee Hutchison, 62, and his wife, Shirley, 57, were found in the house near Pearisburg by sheriff's deputies last June 3, a Monday.
Lee Hutchison was found in the kitchen; Shirley Hutchinson was found in the living room. Each had been shot once in the chest with a .357-caliber handgun.
Authorities believe they had been shot sometime that weekend.
Today, Maddie Riggs, the 15-year-old girl convicted of murdering Darlene Carden's parents, is scheduled to be sentenced in Giles County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court.
Maddie Riggs was 14 at the time of the shootings, which precludes the state from trying her as an adult. The maximum sentence she can receive is confinement in a juvenile detention facility until she is 21.
Even though the court system has protected Riggs by not identifying her by name because of her age, her identity is widely known in the Giles community and has been used by the news media.
"I was really surprised and very grateful to see that they put her name in the paper and her face on TV," Carden said. "Under these circumstances, her age should not be a factor."
After the shootings, Carden began to try to piece together what had happened, why it happened, and just who Maddie Riggs was.
"She's taken my best friends away from me," she said.
"It helped me to be able to see her as a person . . . . I realize there has to have been something terribly wrong before this happened."
Carden, 34, didn't attend Maddie Riggs' juvenile court hearing in February. Most likely, she won't be in the courtroom for her sentencing, either.
"The circumstances being what they were . . . we knew pretty well what the outcome would be," Carden said Wednesday during an interview in the Floyd County library branch.
"I feel like I represent my parents every day," she said. "To me, it's much more than sitting in a courtroom for 2 1/2 hours. . . . I don't think they would want me to be miserable, and I was miserable for months."
She said she didn't feel like she could be in the same courtroom with her parents' killer.
"I hate what she's done. I hate her behavior," Carden said. But "that's not going to hurt her, she's not going to feel it . . . for me to sit around and hate her for the rest of my life."
\ Shortly after Carden's parents were killed, her husband, Allen, received his renewal notice for the National Rifle Association.
She normally took care of the household paperwork, but this time she hesitated. She told her husband she wouldn't tell him what to do, but she wouldn't renew his membership for him.
He didn't renew.
Darlene Carden has been around guns all her life.
"I grew up in a family of people who liked to hunt," she said. And her husband is a gun collector.
But the kind of guns her family used for hunting and the kind of guns her husband collects "are not the kinds these children are finding" and taking to school or elsewhere, putting lives in jeopardy.
Carden believes handgun laws are too lenient, especially when it comes to small handguns "that are only there to shoot someone with."
It is hard for Carden to understand how children can get guns so easily.
"Why doesn't somebody, somebody in the family, know that this is going on?"
She also would like to see changes in the state law that protects juvenile offenders. These laws probably were written with good intentions, she said. Lawmakers doubtless had in their minds pictures of rebellious kids up to teen-age mischief.
"I'm sure they couldn't even imagine" trying children for murder, Carden said. "I think the law probably should be changed when it comes to murder. Murder is murder."
\ The biggest question for Carden is why her parents were killed.
"It's a terrible question mark," she said.
Carden said she gets the feeling that Maddie Riggs' "victims that day could have been anybody in the neighborhood."
Richard Chidester, assistant commonwealth's attorney for Giles County, said in February that a motive for the killings still was speculative. He said the girl apparently took a handgun from a relative's house, then went to the Hutchison home to seek a ride into town.
Chidester said there may have been a struggle for the gun or for car keys.
Neighbors of the Hutchisons have said the girl sometimes came around trying to bum a ride to Pearisburg.
Several people believe Riggs was mad at a boyfriend and wanted to confront him. It's the whys of her parents' deaths that puzzle Carden.
"Why take it out on two people who apparently helped her before?" she said. "What sort of rage must she have had? And just why? . . . "
Darlene Carden didn't know Maddie Riggs. For that matter, she didn't even know her parents knew Maddie Riggs.
"They never spoke to me about her," Carden said. She spoke to her mother frequently on the phone. "She never mentioned her to me."
\ Carden describes her parents as two "very quiet people" who were old-fashioned and stayed home a lot.
Darlene's father had been an only child. He was a fireman in the boiler room at Pulaski Furniture. He enjoyed puttering around in the yard.
Shirley Hutchison, whose sister lives in New Mexico, was a housewife who didn't drive. She had just begun to be able to do things she enjoyed after raising Darlene and Bobby, 26.
Shirley enjoyed arts and crafts. She had started building dollhouses and outfitting them with homemade or store-bought furniture.
\ Carden has just been able to start a healing process, she said, after six months of living with her parents' deaths almost daily.
"It didn't end the day of the funeral, it just began," Carden said. ". . . It goes on forever."
Living in Floyd County was a big part of the healing, she said. She has neighbors who are the best kind - those who leave you alone when you need that, and those who are there with a shoulder to cry on when you want that.
Carden describes herself as not overly religious, but said she spent a lot of time thinking and praying.
It was only recently, she said, that she had become comfortable talking about the murders. The ripping of a calendar page to a new year was a tangible beginning for her.
"I just looked so forward to the first of the year," Carden said.
There was a lot to get through in the six months before that.
She and her husband had spent every weekend last summer cleaning her parents' house. Then there was the task of going through the furnishings and personal belongings, deciding what to keep and what to sell at auction.
And there was the house to sell.
There were the uncelebrated birthdays, her mother's in September, her father's in October. There were Thanksgiving and Christmas to get through.
Then the new year began.
"I'm not terribly unhappy now," Darlene Carden said. "I was miserable for months."
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