by Kerry Dougherty
Meet one of Virginia’s most notorious murderers: Joseph Giarratano. If his name isn’t familiar, it may be because you weren’t in Virginia — or Norfolk — in the late 70s and early 1980s.
On February 4, 1979 Giarratano strangled and raped a 15-year-old Norfolk girl, Michelle Kline, and stabbed her mother, Toni Kline, to death in their apartment. Two days after the crime, Giarratano turned himself in to authorities in Jacksonville, where he confessed to the killings.
He confessed several more times, but later recanted.
Giarratano was convicted and sentenced to die, but in 1991 Gov. L. Douglas Wilder commuted his sentence to life in prison.
By then Giarratano had become the darling of the set-em-free celebrity set, who championed his innocence. Yet Giarratano’s conviction stood.
But in 2017 Virginia’s Parole Board – chaired by Terry McAuliffe-appointee Adrianne Bennett – decided Giarratano had spent enough time in prison and they paroled him.
According to news reports at the time, Bennett made it clear that this release was not due to any belief in the convict’s innocence.
“Bennett said the board cannot comment on communications with victims and victim family members. However, she said that, in general, the board does have the duty to use due diligence to obtain victim input.
She said the board’s decision — it would take at least four of the five votes to grant Giarratano parole — is not a comment on an inmate’s innocence claim.
“It’s also not an act of forgiveness,” Bennett said.
So, a man convicted of rape and double murder was returned to society at the age of 60 after serving 38 years of a life sentence that had once been a death sentence.
That’s bad enough.
Thanks to a stunning piece in Sunday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, by Patrick Wilson: “Former Parole Board Chair Violated Policy In Releasing Parolees From Supervision Records Show,” we now learn that Giarratano was one of the parolees set completely free by Bennett three years later when she took pity on 103 “deserving souls” who were required to meet with parole officers.
In an email obtained by the Times-Dispatch Bennett proudly called herself a “bleeding heart.”
Ordinarily, parolees stay under state supervision for the length of their sentences. That would be life in Giarratano’s case. If supervision is terminated, it’s usually at the suggestion of the parole officer.
But the bleeding heart apparently took matters into her own hands.
Parole board policy requires a recommendation from a parole officer before ending supervision, a step investigators found Bennett ignored in Anderson’s case and others.
The Anderson referenced in the T-D story is Anthony Anderson, a one-man crime spree back in 1985. At the time he was paroled, Anderson was serving two life sentences for killing a corrections officer and a Palestinian immigrant during a robbery attempt and for raping a nurse and robbing two Chesterfield businesses, according to the Times-Dispatch.
Anderson was one of 103 parolees — 69 of whom were serving life sentences or more — that Bennett discharged early “at her sole discretion” between April 5 and April 15, 2020, her last day on the job, according to an unreleased report by the Office of the State Inspector General obtained by The Times-Dispatch.”
This means the commonwealth cannot keep tabs on convicts such as Giarratano and Anderson.
Lucky us.
Whether they were aware of it or not, this is what Virginians voted for when they elected Gov. Terry McAuliffe and then Ralph Northam. They voted for an all-Democratic soft-on-crime-bleeding-heart parole board that sends killers back into society and then quickly releases them from supervision.
Elections have consequences. There is another election this November.
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