John Grisham denies recent reports his latest novel, The Associate, was inspired by a Charlottesville case.
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

Although a January 26 Washington Post review of John Grisham’s latest book, The Associate, leads with a description of the infamous UVA 12-step apology case and says the case is “central” to Grisham’s new story, the author himself disputes that claim.

In a statement sent to local media on January 29, Grisham says, “I did not fictionalize the UVA case nor base any part of my novel on it.”

According to the review and a January 27 interview with Grisham on NBC’s Today show, Grisham’s latest protagonist is a recent law school grad who is blackmailed with a cell phone video purportedly showing him in a room three years earlier when two of his college friends have sex with a college freshman who may or may not be conscious.

The real-life 12-step apology case involves a 1984 sexual assault in a UVA fraternity house, and the assailant’s decision to (more)

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Greg Roberts (right) will succeed the late Jack Blackburn (left) as UVA’s Dean of Admissions.
PHOTOS BY DAN ADDISON

In the end, UVA didn’t have to look far and wide to find a replacement for its longtime and beloved Dean of Admissions John Blackburn, who died January 21 after a lengthy battle with cancer.

Yesterday, the university announced that Greg Roberts, Blackburn’s right hand man for the past six years, has been selected to fill the role– a hiring decision Blackburn himself had urged the University to make in a letter to the hiring committee before his death.

In a release announcing the decision, UVA president John Casteen called Roberts “the logical choice,” and described him as  “seasoned, thoughtful, respected by colleagues here and nationally.”

While it’s a plum promotion to be savored, for Roberts, climbing to the top rung on UVA’s admissions department ladder is “bittersweet” as he grieves the loss of his “fair, honest and humble” mentor whose legacy, he says, he hopes to carry on.

Roberts says he got his first taste of Blackburn’s generosity and humility while he was working in the Georgetown University admissions office and applying to work at UVA. After having one interview in Charlottesville, he says, Blackburn called him wanting to (more)

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Workers connect an electric engine on the northbound “Cardinal” January 23, in Washington.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Charlottesville’s proposed rail link to New York, enjoying the support of the governor and over 20 localities, was widely considered a done deal— until the alleged “vindictiveness” of a single state senator.

A budget amendment by William C. Wampler Jr., based in the far southwestern part of the state, threatens to deny funding for the new twice-daily Piedmont passenger trains until similar service is available all the way to the Tennessee border-straddling city that lies in Wampler’s district.

“It’s a good example of provincialism,” says Meredith Richards, the president of Virginians for High-Speed Rail. “If we can’t have it, nobody can.”

In November, the state’s secretary of transportation, one of the governor’s cabinet members, endorsed a three-year plan to extend an existing round-trip Amtrak train between Washington D.C. and New York south to Lynchburg. By covering the expected $1.9 million gap between annual passenger revenues (more)

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Waldo Jaquith ran for City Council in 2002.
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

Waldo Jaquith, the creator of Charlottesville’s longstanding news blog, cvillenews.com, was subpoenaed last week by the man suing the Hook.

Publicist and chicken farmer Tommy Garrett demands that Jaquith provide any communications that mention Garrett, a person Jaquith says he never heard of until Garrett filed $10.7 million defamation suit against the Hook for its coverage of 15 forgery counts filed against Garrett in Buckingham County.

In a plea agreement in April, the publicist was found guilty of one misdemeanor count of entering the property of another with the intention of damaging it and ordered to pay $3,500 in restitution. Through attorneys, Garrett has maintained his innocence, and the 15 felony counts were dismissed.

In what Jaquith calls “an incredibly overbroad” subpoena, Garrett demands the IP addresses of those who commented on Jaquith’s December 23 account of the lawsuit against the Hook, as well as the IP addresses of viewers of the blog post, which drew 81 comments.

According to cvillenews.com, Jaquith will act as his own attorney.

“The requested information appears to be variously irrelevant, unnecessary (more)

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The task force met in the County Office Building in October.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

A task force created to help save the shrinking Rivanna Reservoir has finalized a  24-page report but decided— ironically, its critics contend— that no major dredging should occur anytime soon. The news came on the eve of a key meeting, about a month after the group missed its own self-imposed deadline.

“It would be funny if it weren’t so outrageous,” says Betty Mooney, a citizen activist who has been urging dredging for about a year.

One of Mooney’s fellow activists alleged in June, upon the 13-member task force’s creation, that the advisory group was stacked with people trying to preserve a water plan rife with hidden environmental and financial costs. The group voted 11-2 to accept the report on Monday, January 26.

According to the approximately 11,000-word document, no dredging study should be undertaken until separate studies have been undertaken on emerging wetlands and recreational uses, and only after determining whether UVA should foot a bill for (more)

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John Grisham’s latest literary effort The Associate was reportedly inspired by a real Charlottesville case.
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

Every John Grisham novel has a Charlottesville tie— the author lives in Albemarle County and is a frequent fixture at various Downtown Mall establishments. But his latest effort, The Associate, due out tomorrow, is connected to Charlottesville by more than just its author’s home address.

According to a review in the Washington Post, Grisham’s 21st novel is inspired in part by what became widely known as the 12-Step Apology case, in which a former UVA student wrote a letter of apology to the woman he had sexually assaulted in a fraternity house more than 20 years earlier.

Grisham’s novel may be inspired by that case, but according to the review, it quickly differentiates. Grisham’s protagonist, a recent law school grad, is blackmailed with a cell phone video purportedly (more)

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Mike Svetz at the beginning of his five-year Director of Parks and Recreation term.
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

After overseeing five years and a handful of hefty overhauls, Charlottesville Director of Parks and Recreation Mike Svetz has stepped down from what has lately become a publicly prominent, and at times controversial, post. The man behind makeovers at McGuffey, Pen— and perhaps most notoriously, McIntire— concluded his tenure as Director on Thursday, January 22, and headed out west to take a Parks and Rec Post in the small town of Goodyear, Arizona.

“The decision was kind of a leap of faith,” says Svetz. “But at the end of the day, it’s an opportunity for me to meld a couple of passions.”

Svetz, a Cleveland native, came to Charlottesville five years ago after spending nearly fifteen years building up a hefty parks and rec resume. Bouncing around Ohio, he headed up several high-budget departments in the towns of Brunswick and Strongville. As parks director in Charlottesville, he continued to shoulder the requests of City Council by proposing and pushing through redesigns that did not always garner widespread popular support.

The post-modern remodeling of McGuffey Park, for example, unleashed opposition from community members who didn’t see the point in putting over a half million dollars into a tiny park which already had fans who liked it as it was. Supporters of the effort, however, praised Svetz for pushing through such an “ambitious design.”

There was also indignation from neighbors over an allegedly over-broad lighting of Pen Park’s tennis courts. Svetz insisted throughout that ordeal that the decision was made by (more)

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Sharron Diane Crawford Smith (seen left in her 1966 high school year book picture and right in her police mugshot) told police that she was a lesbian and that she killed High’s Ice Cream co-workers Carolyn Perry and Connie Hevener because of “taunting and teasing about my lifestyle.”
STAUNTON NEWS LEADER/STAUNTON POLICE DEPARTMENT

“He said he was gonna take care of the gun.”

With these words three weeks before her death from kidney failure, Sharron Diane Crawford Smith confirmed that days after April 11, 1967, the date she killed Carolyn Perry and Connie Hevener with a .25 caliber pistol at High’s Ice Cream in Staunton, she went to her “pretty good friend”– Staunton police investigator Davie Bocock– to tell him that she had committed the crime, according to records and transcripts released Friday, January 23 by the Staunton Police Department.

Additionally, Smith told police that she killed Perry and Hevener because the victims made fun of her for being a lesbian.

“Taunting, teasing,” Smith explained to police, “about my lifestyle.”

According to Hevener’s twin brother Carroll Smootz, the new information is painful, but necessary.

“It’s another nightmare,” says Hevener’s twin brother Carroll Smootz, “but the sooner we get the whole truth out the sooner this can be over.”

According to Smith in a December 30, 2008, interview, Bocock secured her gun in a metal box and then together they buried it on Bocock’s property.

“He said,” said Smith, “that he was digging a hole, putting it in there, and that (more)

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