by LISA PROVENCE published on 8/30/2007 in the Cover Stories category

Don Howard sits in his well-appointed new house, a house his daughter Danielle has never come to-- and he's lived there almost a year. Asked how he's doing, Howard replies, "I'm doing. That's all I can say."

Howard is trying to be strong for the sake of his three other kids, but his life has been a nightmare from which he can't awaken-- ever since February 22, 2006.

That's the day his vivacious second child, 22-year-old Danielle Howard, was shot in the back on a quiet residential street just past the northeast tip of Albemarle County, driving a Saab she'd just bought. She died on the pavement.

Don Howard works at the Food Lion in the center of Gordonsville and has a part-time newspaper route. He was delivering the Daily Progress early that morning, and found Cadmus Drive blocked off.

"He woke me up and said, 'Something terrible happened in Gordonsville-- the street's blocked off,'" his wife, Sheri Gauthier, remembers. "He still didn't know." 

He went to work at Food Lion, and called again to tell Gauthier, "It was a female with Pennsylvania tags,'" she says. "Then later he said, 'I think it's Danielle.'"

More than a year later, no arrests have been made.

Dani-Boo

The portrait of Danielle widely circulated in the media was taken a few months before her death, and it depicts a serious young woman. Maybe it's the glasses. "The right side of her car always was a little damaged from hitting mailboxes," chuckles her big brother, Michael Howard. "She couldn't see very well and was always squinting."

Friends and family describe a generous, outgoing young woman who made friends wherever she went and who was making changes to get her life together at the time she died. "As in leaving dumb guys alone," specifies Michael.

Her father, Don, went to Albemarle High with Debbie Umstadter. After he graduated in 1976 and she in 1977, the high school sweethearts married. Dani was born on New Year's Eve, 1983.

"She was a surprise," says Howard, "a pleasant one."

Her parents split up when Dani was three or four. She was always close to her older brother, Michael, who's 29 now. "She idolized her brother," says Gauthier. "She really looked up to him." 

When her now-divorced parents both moved to Orange, Dani lived with her grandparents and with Michael so she could continue going to Monticello High. 

"She was always concerned about her grandparents," says Gauthier. "She was always going, 'Grandma, Granddaddy, anything I can get for you?'" 

One thing she did was help with chores around the house: "Her voice has been on [her grandmother's] answering machine since she was 16," says Michael. "Then after she died, it was too painful for Grandmother to have on there." While living with them, she joined Union Run Baptist Church.

At Monticello High, she was on the step team. And talking on the phone was practically an extracurricular activity as well, her stepmother laughs. Dani loved to swim, but otherwise she wasn't athletic or an outdoors girl, according to her brother.

She always made good grades and was on the honor roll, say her family, but something happened her senior year. "She started hanging out with friends," says Michael, and she didn't graduate in 2001 because she'd missed too many days. But before that, "Her entire career had been excellent," he says.

In her last year in high school, Dani lived with Michael and risked his wrath to help out a friend. "We had an extra bedroom," he recounts. "She had a friend in distress-- " a friend with a child. Dani moved them in, "even though she knew I wouldn't be happy," says Michael. "I was pretty hard on her, but that's the way she was, even with the tongue-lashing she got from me."

She did extra work around the house and got a job to help pay the phone and electric bills. She baby-sat for the friend so she could go to work, and would do that for other friends, too, her brother says.

Dani worked for a while at the now-defunct Charlottesville restaurant Maverick's and at Lowe's. After Monticello High, she moved with her mother and her mom's boyfriend to Orange County and started working at a restaurant in Orange called Foxtails, which became Cape Porpoise Lobster House. Dani was promoted to manager, and that's where its chef, Jerusalem Marston-Reid, met her in 2001.

"She was one of a kind," says Marston-Reid. "Truly flawless. She was much more than a friend. If you needed something, she'd give you the shirt off her back. If you needed help, even if she didn't know you, she'd help."

Even after Dani stopped working at Cape Porpoise Lobster House, she still popped in. "I saw her a week before she was murdered," says Marston-Reid. "She said we should hang out. We'd chat, reminisce."

When he started working at Cape Porpoise, he didn't realize that Debbie Umstadter, who's white, was Danielle's mother, and he got off on the wrong foot with her. "Danielle came up to me and said, 'You can't go off on my mom,'" recalls Marston-Reid. "I was embarrassed. Later, I became friends with her mom."

Debbie and Danielle were best friends, though prone to butt heads, says Michael. "They loved to watch Jerry Springer together. Mom was always wanting her to play the lottery. She'd say, 'You know Michael's birthday is coming up, better play 3-16.'"

Umstadter found a house for Danielle on Route 15, two minutes away from her own house. "Any way [Umstadter] went, she had to drive by," says Gauthier.

And Umstadter would walk right in the house, says Michael, and ask Dani why the dogs were inside when they weren't allowed. The dogs belonged to her boyfriend, and their presence caused Dani to be evicted, he says. 

Umstadter told the Hook that she just isn't able to talk about her daughter yet. 

"She's taking it the worst," says Michael. "The night Dani died, she called Mom and said she loved her, and not to worry about her, that she was coming home." That was about 10:30pm.

The boyfriend 

Protective older brother Michael wasn't too keen on Dani's 34-year-old boyfriend, Curtis "L.A." Waldron Jr., with whom she had broken up the week before her death.

Waldron is from New York and had lived in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area.

 "Who knows why he's here?" says Michael. "He was older, flashy, and had some money. She was an outgoing girl. She liked to meet people and party."

Dani lived with Waldron for over a year, but her father and stepmother never met him. "Not a whole lot of people met him other than [her mother] Debbie and Michael," says Gauthier.   

"I didn't even know she had a boyfriend," says Marston-Reid. "I thought she was living with her mom."

Dani had lots of male friends-- the "good kind," qualifies Michael-- and was seeing someone else when she met Waldron. "She wasn't ready to settle down," says her brother. "I'd joke, what are you doing with this old man?"

He's still perplexed about her relationship with Waldron. "No one approved... no one liked him. He tried to keep her away from us."

Michael blames Waldron for Dani's eviction from her house on Route 15 because of his two dogs. "He didn't take care of them," he says. "He didn't take care of her."

They moved a few miles south to a duplex at Shenandoah Crossing the beginning of February, but the relationship was coming to an end.

"She was talking about going back to school, moving away from her so-called boyfriend and in with her mother," says Don Howard.

After years of working in restaurants, Dani wanted to go to cosmetology school, says Michael. She had helped people with hair and make-up, and, "She thought it was a way to reach friends, the community," he says. "She thought it would be exciting to make money doing something she liked." 

Dani had a new computer and was also interested in selling products online.

The week before she died, Dani had moved her clothes and computer to her mother's, and had asked her brother to bring his truck to move the rest of her belongings. "It's a process she'd started a week before she passed away," says Michael. "There's a letter written to him. It said she was done."

And Dani had just bought a new car in Pennsylvania the day before she died, a blue 1999 Saab. Michael believes Waldron, who had lived around Harrisburg, had seen the car while driving by the auction where she bought it. 

"That was one reason she stayed in the relationship-- he owed her money," says Michael. Dani had a white 1995 Ford Windstar minivan that her uncle had given her that she had given to Waldron, according to Michael.

At 12:27am February 22, Gordonsville police received a report that shots had been fired from Cadmus Drive, a residential street two blocks off Main that Michael calls a cut-through. "It's not like it's a bad part of town," he says.

"It seems she was pulling over to talk to someone she knew," he says. "It seems someone flagged her down." Police said it was unlikely she'd stop her car after midnight if it weren't someone she knew.

"We know it wasn't a robbery," says Don Howard.

The window on the driver's side of the Saab had been shot out, and the engine was still running when police arrived. A TV news cameraman later recovered a .357-caliber shell casing, and police found a box that had contained a Glock .357 SIG pistol at her house. 

"She was shot in the heart," says Michael. "A kid heard the shots."

A witness reported seeing a white or light-gray van leaving the scene after the shots were fired. Police found the white minivan registered to Danielle three weeks later in an office park in Culpeper. 

For the family, Waldron was an obvious suspect at first, but Michael says they were told he's been cleared-- to a point. "I think he had something to do with it," he adds.

"It wouldn't have happened without him," says Gauthier.

"I'm not going to say someone from this office didn't tell them that," says former Orange County Sheriff C. G. Feldman. "I'm not going to tell you he is not a suspect." 

"Her boyfriend is a coward," says Michael. "He didn't come to the funeral. He didn't return her dog. He didn't return her belongings. He's a coward. I have no way of finding him... I'm pissed off this guy is nowhere to be found."

The Hook was unable to reach Waldron, and Feldman declined to provide contact information.

Still investigating

"We're very happy with the way the investigation is going," says Feldman over a year after the slaying. "We're feeling very optimistic we're going to solve this."

The case has stretched the Orange County sheriff's department's resources. "We don't average one [murder] a year," says Feldman. "We've probably put more time and effort in this than any case I remember."

An ongoing federal grand jury has been hearing testimony in Danielle Howard's case, and investigators have been working with law enforcement in New York and Harrisburg. "When a case like this goes out of state, it slows down the investigation," says Feldman. Other jurisdictions have been helpful, he adds, but "These things take time."

Feldman is confident an arrest will be made, but that didn't happen before he retired in July.

Dani's family, however, is frustrated. "We're way beyond the one-year anniversary," says Gauthier. "We're getting a better idea. They tell us they're fitting the pieces together."

"They're not going to give us information until someone is charged," says Don Howard. He says he thinks police are "dragging their feet. I just don't think it's right."

Howard says his daughter was a good person. "Nobody deserves that. She didn't have a weapon. I don't know what the motive is. They won't give us any information."

But Feldman says the police have tried to be helpful. "They've been included in and kept abreast of the investigation," he says. "We're not at the point we can release more information."

Three months after Dani's death, Michael Howard organized a cookout and raised $7,000 for a reward, and the family was planning several more fundraisers. But then,  "[The police] told us not to raise any more," he says.

Why? "People would start calling with false tips if you raise too much money," says Don Howard, who wanted to have a golf tournament. "I didn't want to do anything to alienate the police."

Now he wishes he'd gone forward with the tournament. "You look at any other murder, and the reward is $100,000," he says ruefully.

There's another mysterious death in Orange County. On November 3, 2006, a 27-year-old kindergarten teacher named Justine Abshire was found dead on Taylorsville Road. Danielle Howard's family notes that the Abshire family is offering a $50,000 reward, and wonders why they were discouraged from raising more money.

Sheriff Feldman says he's unaware of anyone from his office telling the family to stop fundraising efforts. "When working a crime, our job is to investigate all tips," he says.

Like the loss of his sister, the Abshire case resonates with Michael. "Whenever I see a picture of the other young girl, it crushes me," he says and asks rhetorically, "What makes you think you can take another's life?"

Still grieving

More than a year after Dani's death, when a reporter calls Debbie Umstadter, she bursts into tears and refers the call to her son, Michael. He, too, starts crying, something he says he hasn't done in a while, but he's caught off guard by the call.

How has Dani's death affected his mother? "She doesn't leave the house," he says. "She doesn't talk to anyone. 

"It's terrible to see her," he says. "I've never seen anyone so distraught."

Michael Howard misses his baby sister. "She was so intelligent, so outgoing," he says. "An idiot took it away from her for no reason."

For Don Howard, the loss is never very far away. "This town has 1,500 people," he explains. "I work at Food Lion. I get the same questions every day: 'Have they found anything? How are you doing?' I think they mean well."

He struggles to express the effect of losing a child. "It's like a circle that's broken, and you can't put it back. You know you've got to be strong. But it's hard."

Michael doesn't worry about his sister's murder being forgotten, and he's confident she wants her killer brought to justice. "She wouldn't want these people out there," he says. "Danielle was a protector... It's a responsibility to find out who did this."

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