If the remains found over the weekend in Virginia turnout to be those of missing UVa. freshman Hannah Graham, officials will perform a full forensic comparison with the remains of Morgan Harrington, another Virginia college student who disappeared in 2009, former prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer Daniel Hochheiser said Monday on
Newsmax TV's “America’s Forum.”
A search
team located the remains Saturday in a rural area in southern Albemarle County, just 5 miles from where 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington’s body was found three months after she vanished in 2009.
The lead suspect in Graham’s case, 32-year-old Jesse Matthew Jr., is being held on a charge of abduction with intent to defile, Hochheiser said. Harrington’s case was never solved.
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NBC News has reported that Virginia state police have said there was a "forensic link" between Graham's disappearance and Harrington's murder.
“These were two different female college student's bodies that were discovered about five miles apart in an area where Jesse Mathew grew up,” Hochheiser said.
“So the first step in making a case is to compare those two discoveries and see if you can link Jesse Mathew to both. And then you start the next phase of the investigation, which is to see if there are any signatures in the ways these homicides were committed,” he said.
“They need to do a full forensic DNA serological hair, fiber fingerprint review of all these investigations to see if his DNA, which is in their database now since he's been arrested, can be linked to these other cases.
“So far as I know at this point, the connections are somewhat soft. As you notice, Mr. Mathew is not charged yet
with murder in the Hannah Graham case. It doesn't appear that the authorities have the evidence to charge him with that crime yet.”
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