In the fall of 2005, a college freshman disappeared off the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. The investigation proceeded down a path that took investigators to dark, twisted corners.
Taylor Behl was born to parents Janet and Matt on October 13th, 1987 in Vienna, Virginia. Taylor was their only daughter, and was fairly doted on. When Taylor was barely 2 years old, her parents divorced. Despite this,Taylor remained extremely close to both of her parents, and had really good relationships with them both.
As a senior in high school, in the school year of 2004-2005, Taylor was considering her options for post-secondary education. Virginia Commonwealth University really seemed to draw her eye. It was only a couple of hours away from home, in Richmond, and it offered the big city adventure that Taylor was hoping for, while not straying too far.
Taylor visited the campus twice – in February and April. During the April visit, Taylor’s father, Matt, dropper her off at her friend Mike’s apartment. Mike was a friend of the family, and a Virginia Commonwealth University (also known as VCU) student. He offered to have Taylor stay the weekend, and he would show her around the campus, and the larger city of Richmond, so she could get a feel for the environment.
Matt was a little uneasy. He knew Mike, but he didn’t know his roommate, Benjamin Fawley. Upon meeting Fawley, Matt figured he was also a young man in his 20s, attending the university. He seemed very personable. Feeling at ease, Matt allowed Taylor to stay with Mike and Fawley.
Taylor was an avid user of social media. In the early 2000s, this was the realm of MySpace, MyPlace, and LiveJournal. Taylor was very active, and chronicled her weekend at VCU online for her friends and followers to see. She also had a new friend and follower in Fawley.
The campus visit made up Taylor’s mind. In August of 2005, at the age of 17, Taylor moved to Richmond in order to attend VCU. Prior to this, she spoke of her excitement online, encouraging other VCU students to reach out to her to chat. She wanted to ensure that she had a solid social circle for when she arrived.
Two weeks later, on Labour Day weekend, Taylor had gone skateboarding on Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 with a friend named Kevin. Kevin didn’t know Taylor very well, but he liked her well enough. He thought of her as a nice, normal, trusting girl.
They were out skateboarding until around 2:45 AM. Kevin asked her to join him the following night, but Taylor told him that she would be back in Vienna for the holiday, to spend some time with her mom.
After spending Sunday, and most of Monday in Vienna, she returned to campus late on Monday afternoon. At around 6:45 PM, she called her dad to let him know that she’d gotten back to campus safely.
Following this, she went out to dinner with Jacob Cunningham, a young man, and VCU student, that she’d been dating. They left the dinner on good terms.
At around 8:45 PM, Taylor’s skateboarding friend Kevin ran into Taylor alone. She told him that she was excited for her upcoming birthday, and that she was planning on doing ‘something illegal’. Kevin had no idea what this meant. It could be speculated that Taylor simply planned on drinking underage in order to celebrate her birthday. Anything more wild than that would have been greatly out of character, as she wasn’t a partier, and tended to follow the rules.
At around 9:45, Taylor spoke to someone on her mobile phone. Past this point, there were not incoming or outgoing calls to or from her phone.
At around 10:20 PM, Taylor returned to her dorm room, and found her roommate had company over. Wanting to give them some privacy, she grabbed her car keys, phone, and some cash, and told her roommate, Emma, that she would go skateboarding, and would be back in three hours.
Taylor was last seen on her residence building’s security cameras as she was walking out at 10:24 PM on Monday, September 5th, 2005.
On Tuesday, Emma went through her daily routine. She didn’t see Taylor, but didn’t think anything of it. On Wednesday, when she still hadn’t seen Taylor, Emma went to campus police to report her missing. She told them that she’d last seen Taylor roughly 36 hours prior, on Monday night, but that nothing of Taylor’s has been moved or touched since she’d seen her.
The VCU police began searching for Taylor and her car, as Emma had told them that Taylor had taken her car keys with her. They also contacted Janet and Matt, Taylor’s parents, and informed them that their daughter was missing. Immediately, both made arrangements to drive the two hours from Vienna to Richmond in order to search for their daughter.
As the community was alerted to Taylor’s disappearance, VCU students began putting up missing person’s posters with Taylor’s photo, a description of her appearance, what she was wearing when she was last seen, and her general information. Janet spoke out to the media, hoping at the media attention would bring in leads. The case garnered national media attention, and VCU police began running down leads.
On September 11th, 2005, the VCU police department announced that it was consulting with the FBI on the case. They issued an Amber Alert for Taylor and her vehicle, as she was still a minor. Soon after, an 11-person taskforce of local, university, and federal investigators was brought together to try to locate Taylor in what they were now calling ‘a criminal case’.
Investigators soon confirmed that Taylor had not used her credit card, or her mobile phone since she’d gone missing.
As they were made aware that Taylor had a prolific online presence, police soon began going through her pages and posts, allowing them a glimpse into her life. This also allowed them to start putting together a list of person’s of interest. Through her social media posts, investigators were more or less able to determine what she’d been doing, and where she’d been going.
One of the first people that the taskforce spoke to was Jacob Cunningham – the young man Taylor had been dating. He told them that they’d had dinner on Monday night, and had left the restaurant on good terms. They held hands as they walked down the street, and then they parted ways. When Taylor left him, she told him she was going skateboarding. Investigators were unable to track down anyone who’d seen her skateboarding, or who had been skateboarding with her.
They did, however, find Kevin, and he told them about their encounter. Investigators found it a little odd, But otherwise didn’t believe Jacob of Kevin to have been involved in Taylor’s disappearance.
On the morning of Saturday, September 17th, 2005, an off-duty officer found Taylor’s vehicle parked on a quiet residential street as he was out walking his dog. The car was positively identified as Taylor’s, but it had different license plates on it. The plates had been taken from the vehicle of an Ohio resident who had reported their car stolen. They were living in Richmond while attending VCU. They had no idea who Taylor Behl even was, let alone that she was missing. Residents of the neighbourhood indicated that the car hadn’t been there the entire time that Taylor had been missing.
The taskforce decided to stakeout the car overnight, in case whomever had placed it there came back. After 24 hours, they impounded the car for a thorough forensic analysis. They even brought in a tracking dog, who scented the car.
The dog alerted to a scent, and led investigators to 22-year-old Jesse Schultz. Jesse lived in the area where the car was found. He was not a student at the university, but he hung out around the school in order to pick up women. He told police that he didn’t know who Taylor was, and even agreed to a polygraph test. Eventually, Jesse was cleared.
After this breakthrough, police found another one. As they were looking through Taylor’s social media, they found interactions, conversations, and comments between Taylor and Benjamin Fawley – the roommate of the friend Taylor had stayed with when she’d visited the university campus back in April.
Fawley described himself as an amateur photographer, and a ‘goth/skater from the 1980s’, and at some point even claimed to be a male model.
He usually let people assume that he was in his 20s – he looked very young for his age. However, in actuality, he was 38 years old, with two children to whom he was estranged.
Fawley had dyed, surfer style hair, and was known around Richmond for being ‘quirky’. He owned a ‘creeper van’ that he was very proud of that was covered in bumper stickets. And he often boasted about his pickup techniques. As an amateur photographer, he often tried to lure women by telling them he would take their photo. He’d even boasted about using that line on Taylor.
Fawley and Taylor had hit it off during her visit in April, and had kept in touch until her move to Richmond in August. It’s unknown, though unlikely, that Taylor knew Fawley’s real age. At some point, Taylor had confided to her best friend that she’d had sex with Fawley, because she was drawn to him, and she wanted to try it. The online banter the two shared online certainly seemed to indicate that their relationship had gotten rather intimate.
When Fawley was questioned by police, he told them that he had last seen Taylor at around 9:30 PM on Monday, September 5th when she left his apartment after a hookup. Police were skeptical. And the more they looked into him the more suspicious he became.
As they began asking Fawley about his alibi, they became aware of his dark, dubious past. They found that many young girls who had known him had made reports that the’d either assaulted, or threatened them. In 2003, Fawley was also convicted of assaulting his ex-girlfriend.
Knowing this, police became more and more skeptical. But Fawley had an alibi. Before Taylor had been reported missing, Fawley had gone to the police station to report that he had been assaulted on the street by several men at around 5:00 AM on Tuesday, September 6th. He alleged that he had been hit, and the had a bag thrown over his head. Following that, he’d been thrown into a vehicle, and had been driven around before being released on the side of a dirt road. He’d had to hitch a ride home.
Fawley didn’t make the report until around 4:00 PM that Tuesday afternoon. He posited that it could have been the result of bad blood between an ex, or a rival photographer taking revenge over some photos.
Police were highly suspicious of Fawley’s story. They reviewed the security footage from Taylor’s residence on the night she disappeared once again. Something had caught their eye, and they wanted confirmation. Once again, they saw Taylor enter her residence building at 10:20 PM. At 10:21 PM, they saw another individual enter the residence, and begin pacing the lobby. This individual was Ben Fawley.
With Fawley’s alibi in question, police obtained a search warrant, and searched his apartment. While they didn’t necessarily find anything that tied Fawley to Taylor, what they did find was enough to arrest Fawley.
On September 23rd, Benjamin Fawley was arresed on 16 counts of child pornography. Police also found a plethora of seemingly random photos that were stored on Fawley’s computer. They also pored over his online profiles, and found long, intense, and awful messages to, and about, his ex-girlfriend, Erin Crabill. They also found photos of her on his computer.
Investigators brought Erin to the station, and showed her some of the photos. She recognized a few of the photos – they were of a small lean-to located on part of her family’s property in Mathews County, Virginia. Erin stated that she’d taken Fawley there on one occasion. Following the lead, police went to Mathews County where the abandoned lean-to was located.
There, they found the remains of a body in a shallow grave. Upon this discovery, Fawley drastically changed his story.
Fawley claimed that Taylor had gone over to his apartment that night, and the two indulged in drugs and alcohol, then drove out to Mathews County. Then, Taylor wanted to have kinky sex – she wanted to try erotic asphyxiation. Fawley claimed that he was hesitant, but she insisted. As he was trying to limit her breathing, he placed a bag over her head. And then she didn’t wake up. Panicked, Fawley said he drove home, and then returned to Mathews County the following day and buried her.
Taylor’s mother Janet called bullshit immediately. She said that Taylor had told her about the encounter in April, but that the creepier Fawley got online, the less she wanted to do with him.
As prosecutors were gathering their case together, they posited the theory that Fawley had approached Taylor, and then killed her when she rejected his advances. Fawley maintained his defence.
One day, as Fawley was being led back to his cell, he began chatting with the guard. He mentioned something that infuriated his defence team when the guard reported the conversation back.
Fawley told the guard that his statement to police was a lie. He’d fabricated the lie in an effort to throw off the investigation. He’d lied about Taylor’s death being an accident.
As a result of this, Fawley’s defence team met up with the prosecution in order to argue for an Alford plea. The Alford plea to second degree murder was accepted in August of 2006.
Benjamin Fawley was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He is scheduled to be released in 2031. He will be 64 years old.
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Sources:
How did Taylor Behl die? Who killed her? Where is Benjamin Fawley now? – The Cinemaholic
Murder of Taylor Behl: 17-year-old student was choked to death by 39-year-old Ben Fawley – Jerry Brown – Monsters & Critics
True Crime Garage podcast – Episodes 396 and 397 – Taylor Behl
Murder of Taylor Behl Wikipedia page