The Murder of Michelle Gardner-Quinn (Vermont)

why talk about a case that was solved years ago because the answer to who did it isn't the only thing that matters one night in october 2006 a college student needed to borrow a phone she happened to ask a stranger with violent intentions what makes that even harder to sit with is what investigators learned about this man afterward there were red flags everywhere allegations that reached back years but none of it stopped him from being there that night that's part of why this story still matters yes but the other part is even more important this young woman's story did not end with what happened to her the work she cared about continues the people who love her carry it forward and 20 years later her legacy is still very much alive i'm kylie lowe and this is the case of michelle gardner quinn on dark down east if you've never stepped foot on the campus of a classic new england university in the fall let me take you there brick buildings sit against a backdrop of maples turning red and gold leaves skitter across the walkways and the evenings dim a little earlier every day by october students are fully back and downtown has its rhythm again the bars coffee shops and late night hangouts along main street fill back up after the quiet of summer there's a special kind of warmth to it despite the chill in the air that comes on faster than anyone ever plans for speaking from experience as someone who went to a new england university and walked the downtown streets of my college town in the mid-2000s there's a sense of security knowing that you're in a place with a bunch of other students and for the most part an agreement that you're all there for the same reason to go to class study sleep and then have a good time with your friends that was burlington vermont in the first week of october 2006 which was also parents weekend at the university of vermont according to associated press reporting the times argus john charles and diane quinn had traveled up from virginia to spend time with their 21 year old gardener quinn michelle was a recent transfer to uvm and in a lot of ways burlington seemed like the place she had been working toward john riddle reports for the university of vermont's the view that she had attended several colleges before landing there and she had built an education for herself that stretched well beyond a traditional campus studying and working in places like south africa brazil and costa rica along the way by the fall of 2006 her focus had been on environmental studies michelle had already interned with a climate change program and she transferred to uvm specifically because she wanted to study the environment in a place where that work was taken seriously she had only been on campus for about six weeks but the people around her said she was happy there and very intentional about what she wanted from the experience on saturday october 7th 2006 michelle and her parents had plans for dinner maybe they would have been catching up on those first few weeks of school the visions she had for her studies the new friends she was making but michelle never made it to dinner at first there were any number of benign explanations you could imagine but as saturday wore on no one close to michelle was hearing from her they didn't waste any time her parents reported her missing that very night and police began working backward through the hours before she disappeared michelle had gone out in downtown berlin and she had been in the city for a long time she had been in the city for a long time she had been in the city for a long time she had been in the city for a long time to celebrate her friend dorsey's 21st birthday they'd gone out for dinner in a small group together and then moved on to several bars downtown as the night continued sometime after 1 30 that saturday morning michelle broke away from the group with plans to meet another friend near the ski rack on main street she made it to the area but the meetup never quite came together and then her phone died so she borrowed a phone from a stranger according to an associate press report by john curran published in the rutland herald michelle called her friend tommy and asked him to help find dorsey whose phone was on vibrate inside her jacket and she wasn't answering at one point tommy called michelle back on the borrowed phone the stranger answered before handing it to michelle making a comment about the brunette standing beside him tommy spoke with michelle again still trying to coordinate where everyone could meet but neither tommy nor dorsey saw her again that night the man who lent michelle his phone didn't stay a stranger to the case for long he was 36 year old brian rooney he acknowledged meeting michelle and letting her use his phone but told police he and michelle eventually parted ways and he didn't know what happened to her after that michelle was believed to have been heading back in the direction of campus an early reporting placed her last known whereabouts near main and south union streets not far from uvm as the hours became days michelle's absence became harder to explain away her photograph began appearing on flyers around burlington uvm sent email alerts across campus asking students and staff for information search dogs were brought in helicopters joined the effort the fbi eventually became involved and the vermont national guard assisted as the search expanded beyond the university and burlington police four days into the search investigators remained guarded about exactly what they thought had happened to michelle but the longer she was missing the harder it was to reconcile with the person everyone knew her to be michelle grew up in arlington virginia in a family that seems to have encouraged curiosity about the world well beyond her own backyard michelle's professors saw her family as an important influence on her sense of service and education she spent her middle and high school years at hb woodlawn in arlington a school that encouraged students to take real ownership of their education and interests that independence seems to have suited michelle she was someone who kept seeking out experiences causes and places that mattered to her friends who knew michelle going all the way back to elementary school told reporter brett zongler that she was encouraging and easy to be around her older brother described her as sharp compassionate and worldly michelle's path through college wasn't especially linear she attended goucher college and american university she was a student at goucher college and she was a student at goucher college and university before eventually transferring to uvm and along the way she seemed to keep refining what she wanted from her education at goucher she played on the women's soccer team and earned a place on the capital athletic conference's all-academic team outside of school she hiked and skied loved photography and sang in choir she spoke spanish and some portuguese and she kept going places in brazil michelle helped with a survey involving giant river otters in costa rica she lived with rural farmers working in the fields and wrote about sugar cane a longtime friend of michelle's family gail fensley told me that the initiative behind much of that travel came directly from michelle she figured out what she wanted to do handled the logistics those trips required and worked summer jobs along the way to fund it all it wasn't apparent pushing her into those experiences or mapping out those trips for her michelle was actively building them for herself she was intentional she was always putting herself somewhere unfamiliar learning directly from the people and environment around her and trying to connect what she was studying to something useful in the real world that included service work in new orleans after hurricane katrina gail was covering the aftermath through her work in television news and sometimes brought one of her children along to volunteer michelle was a student at goucher college and she was a student at the university of california and she had been working as a volunteer at the university of california and she was a student at the university of california and she was a student at the university of california helping with the difficult cleanup work left behind by the storm even the smaller things michelle chose to do followed a similar pattern one summer she volunteered pulling invasive plants in a park in northern virginia the kind of environmental work that isn't glamorous but makes a tangible difference when enough people do it her reasons for choosing uvm were practical too gail said the intervale center was a great place to work and she said it was a great place to work in burlington was part of the appeal michelle spent time at its food hub helping prepare food for distribution to local schools and older residents she had barely arrived in vermont before she was already finding a way to participate in the kind of community-based environmental work she cared about just a few days before she disappeared michelle wrote an essay for a project called this i believe titled a reverence for all life she wrote about the hours she spent as a child and how she felt about the work she was doing and how she felt about the work she was doing outside digging in the dirt studying insects and paying attention to the small changes that came with each season what began as a fascination with the natural world had grown into something much larger by the time she reached college a concern about biodiversity climate change and the responsibility people have to the environment around them and now at uvm those interests were beginning to line up with each other the travel the environmental work the design of the desire to learn by doing, sense that whatever career came next should mean something beyond herself. In a very real sense, Michelle's life was coming together. To willingly walk away from all of that was simply an impossible explanation for her absence. Detective Andrew Frisbee began canvassing businesses along Michelle's likely route through downtown Burlington, looking for any camera that might have caught her after she left the ski rack area. One of those cameras was mounted outside Periwinkle's Fine Jewelry on Main Street. Police and store employees went through the footage, and there she was. At around 2.15 Saturday morning, the camera captured Michelle walking along Main Street beside Brian Rooney. The footage itself didn't show anything that looked obviously alarming. Michelle and Brian appeared to be walking side by side, headed in the general direction of the UVM campus. There was no visible indication that she was being forced or physically restrained. But the video did something critical for the investigation. It anchored the timeline in a way witness memories alone couldn't. From there, police could compare that fixed time and location against Brian's account of when they separated, and where he said he went next. Police continued questioning Brian over the days that followed. He said that after lending Michelle his phone, the two eventually went their separate ways. His account was that Michelle left to find a cab back toward her dorm while he went to retrieve his own vehicle. He repeatedly denied knowing what happened to Michelle after they separated. But deny it all he wanted, as the police said that he was the only one who knew anything about Michelle's whereabouts. At around 2.15 Saturday morning, the camera captured Michelle walking back to her dorm. The camera captured Michelle walking back to her dorm. After six painful days without Michelle, what had begun in Burlington was about to move outside the college town, to a rocky stretch of land in Richmond. On Friday, October 13th, around noon, two men were working in the Richmond area when their route brought them near Huntington Gorge, so they decided to take a look at the water. According to Gordon Dritschelow's reporting for the Rutledge, the two men were working in the Rutledge, so they decided to take a look at the water. The men parked and followed a footpath overlooking the rocks and water below. One of the men noticed something down among the leaves and debris that he thought might be trash. The other looked more closely and saw what appeared to be a shoe suspended in the moss. He reached down and pulled at the shoe. That was when he realized there was a body beneath it. The men called 911, bringing a large law enforcement presence to the scene. Investigators separated the two men to take stand-by. They made statements about exactly what they had seen and touched. One man's shoes were photographed as part of the effort to distinguish anything he may have introduced to the scene from evidence that was already there. The body was down in a rocky depression near the gorge, partially obscured by leaves and debris. Because of the steep terrain, investigators set up a rope system so they could work safely around the area while documenting and collecting what they found. The remains were identified as Michelle Gardner Quinn. Investigators documented evidence of a violent assault, and the medical examination later determined that Michelle died from blunt force trauma to the head and compression of the neck. Other findings indicated that she had also been sexually assaulted. The search for Michelle was over, and her family and the wider Burlington community were left to absorb the loss. For investigators, the focus shifted immediately to the evidence and whether Brian's story held up against it. As the investigation into Michelle's murder continued, a more complete picture of Brian Rooney was beginning to emerge. Some of what investigators were learning about this guy brought forward alarming allegations that reached back years and opened entirely separate investigations. But importantly, not every warning about Brian was surfacing for the first time. In 2000, Michelle's murder was reported as a murder of a young girl named Michelle. Six years before Michelle ever met him, Brian's then-wife had gone to court and obtained a temporary restraining order against him. According to Lewis Porter's reporting for the Rutland Herald, she alleged that she was afraid of Brian, that he had repeatedly drugged her before sexually assaulting her, and that he had threatened to kill her. That restraining order was not a criminal conviction, but it meant that long before Michelle needed to borrow his phone on Main Street, at least one woman had already formally documented serious concerns about Brian's behavior. As police dug further into Brian's history, the allegations kept mounting. James Jardine reports that in Caledonia County, authorities developed charges involving a girl who had been under 16 when Brian allegedly assaulted her in the 1990s. One allegation was that he used a chemical-soaked rag to render her unconscious. A different case was developed in Chittenden County involving a former girlfriend. She accused Brian of repeatedly sexually assaulting her between 2002 and 2005. Investigators also accused him of later trying to find someone willing to kill her after their relationship ended. That case included another allegation that Brian used chemicals to incapacitate a woman before sexual contact. Carla Ocazzo reports for the Times-Argus that searches connected to those investigations, turned up photographs and videos that appeared to show alleged sexual assault of unconscious people. Some of that material was linked to the Chittenden County investigation. Now there's no responsible way to say that a different response to the claims made in a restraining order application back in 2000 would have prevented Michelle's murder. We can't know that. And according to reporting by Lewis Porter for the Rutland Herald, allegations in a restraining order did not automatically translate into a restraining order application. That was intentional. The system was designed so someone seeking protection from abuse could describe what had happened without worrying that doing so would automatically set a criminal prosecution in motion, something advocates feared could discourage victims from coming forward at all. But it all changes the way you look at the randomness of the encounter between Michelle and Brian that night. Michelle had no reason to know anything about the man whose phone she borrowed. Other people, however, had already raised alarms about him. While those separate cases were developing, forensic work in Michelle's homicide was moving forward too. Testing on evidence recovered during Michelle's autopsy produced a DNA profile matching Brian. The statistical result was enormous. Analysts were able to determine that Brian was responsible for Michelle's death, and they were able to determine that Brian was responsible for Michelle's death, as well as finding out that Michelle had been found dead. Investigators also learned that Brian's home was only a few miles from Huntington Gorge, and that he knew the area where Michelle had been found. Still, he continued to deny knowing what happened to her after the two separated, though it seems no one was buying the story he was trying to sell. By the time police were ready to charge Brian in Michelle's death, he was already being held without bail on the unrelated sexual assault charges. And then on October 25th, authorities announced an aggravated murder charge against Brian Rooney, stemming from allegations that he killed Michelle while committing a sexual assault. The case against him now had a physical link to Michelle, his confirmed presence with her during her final known movements, and his familiarity with the area where her body was found. And the separate cases unfolding around him had added something else, a deeply troubling history investigators had only begun uncovering after Michelle was already gone. Even as investigators were building the case against Brian, Michelle's family and friends were building something very different around her name. Michelle had a particularly close group of friends from Arlington, people she had grown up with through school, soccer, and years of friendship. Her family friend, Gail Fenley, told me that the close-knit group, which included her son and Michelle's sister, had a very close relationship with her. They began gathering after Michelle's death, and they were looking for something constructive they could create in her memory. According to Gail, Michelle's This I Believe essay gave those friends a starting point. Days before her own life was stolen, Michelle had put her beliefs into her own words. They didn't have to guess what she cared about or what kind of work she hoped to do. Within months of losing Michelle, they turned her values into Michelle's Earth Foundation, which formally registered as a non-profit in January 2007. The foundation centered its early work on helping young people engage with environmental issues and supporting conservation and encouraging people to care for the places where they lived. By the spring of 2007, the foundation was already raising money and organizing projects in communities connected to Michelle. One of the foundation's first major projects returned to a place Michelle herself had volunteered, New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina, Michelle's organized volunteers to test soil in damaged neighborhoods and plant sunflowers in areas with elevated lead levels, something I didn't know until speaking with Michelle's friends. Sunflowers can mitigate lead and other heavy metals from contaminated soil. The project gave people mourning Michelle something tangible to do while continuing the environmental and community work she had already begun there. This was all happening while Brian's murder case was still working its way toward trial. Even as prosecutors prepared to tell a jury about the worst thing that happened to Michelle Gardner Quinn, her family and friends were making sure that wasn't the final word on who she was. By the fall of 2007, nearly a year had passed since Brian was charged with Michelle's murder, and his attorneys were challenging some of the evidence prosecutors intended to put in front of a jury. One major fight centered on Brian's own words. Between Michelle's disappearance and Brian's arrest, investigators had spoken with him again and again. More than 20 statements or conversations were eventually examined in court. His defense argued that some of those interviews had crossed a line, with investigators continuing to question him even after he had repeatedly raised the issue of wanting an attorney. A four-day suppression hearing was held in January 2008. Judge Michael Coopersmith ultimately allowed the vast majority of Brian's statements into evidence, suppressing only a portion of one lengthy October 11th interview after the four-hour and 20-minute mark. There was another problem looming over the case before a jury was ever selected. Almost everyone in the Burlington area seemed to know about it. The coverage had been extensive from the beginning, but one incident in particular gave the defense reason to argue that Brian couldn't receive a fair trial locally. In November 2006, an FBI agent who had participated in the investigation wrote an anonymous article about the case, using some pretty strong language to describe the man investigators believed was responsible. Brian's attorney asked the court to dismiss the murder charge over that publicity. The judge refused, but later imposed a gag order restricting people involved in the case from participating in the investigation. The judge refused, but later imposed a gag order restricting from speaking publicly about it. Eventually, the defense asked for something less dramatic than dismissal, just move the trial somewhere else. The judge agreed with that one. On March 31st, 2008, the case was transferred from Burlington to Rutland in hopes of finding jurors who had not been as immersed in the coverage. Jury selection began on May 13th, and the trial opened the following day. Prosecutors laid out a relatively straightforward theory. Brian and Brian's attorney met at Huntington's Gorge, Huntington's Gorge, a processing of the scene, and the medical team at Huntington's Gorge, Huntington's Gorge, and the medical team at Huntington's Gorge, Huntington's Gorge, and the medical team at Huntington's Gorge, evidence. Vermont Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Shapiro testified that Michelle died from compression of her neck and multiple blunt force injuries to her head. He also testified that the evidence was consistent with sexual assault. But the most important physical evidence in the state's case was the DNA profile connecting Brian to Michelle. The match itself was extraordinarily strong. However, what the defense focused on instead was how little material the Vermont judge had. The defense said that the evidence was consistent with sexual assault, had to work with, about 0.24 nanograms of DNA. The state called scientists from the Vermont Forensic Laboratory to explain the testing process and defend the reliability of the result. Lab director Eric Buell acknowledged that the testing kit's recommended input was higher than the amount available in Michelle's case, but testified that the kit had successfully produced profiles from samples containing less than one nanogram before. The defense pushed hard in the other direction. Brian's attorney highlighted the tiny quantity of DNA and pointed to mistakes and irregularities the laboratory had made while handling evidence in other cases. He argued that jurors should not simply hear an enormous match statistic and assume the underlying testing was beyond question. On cross-examination, Dr. Shapiro also acknowledged the limits of what the autopsy alone could establish about the sexual contact between Michelle and Brian. Then there were Brian's own statements. Jurors heard portions of the recorded conversations investigators had fought to preserve before trial. One of the most striking came after Brian's arrest, while he was being held and recorded on video. At one point, he said, If I did it, I deserve to die. But the fuller statement was less clean than that single line might suggest. Brian's statement was less clean than that single line might suggest. Brian also said he didn't know what had happened and claimed he couldn't remember that night. Brian chose not to testify at all, but his mother and stepfather testified that they saw him asleep on their couch later that morning. The defense also introduced prior testimony from a bartender who said Brian already had cuts on his hands before he ever encountered Michelle, challenging the suggestion that those injuries necessarily came from a struggle with her. In closing, prosecutors urged the jury not to evaluate each piece of evidence in isolation. Their argument was that Michelle's final known movements, Brian's DNA, his familiarity with Huntington Gorge, and the statements he made afterward all pointed in the same direction when viewed together. The defense framed the case very differently. Brian's attorney argued that the state could tell jurors what happened before Michelle and Brian walked past the surveillance camera and it could tell jurors what happened before Michelle and Brian walked past the surveillance camera and it could tell them what investigators found days later at Huntington Gorge, but the most important stretch in between was still missing. There was no witness to what happened after they left Main Street, no murder weapon, and little physical evidence beyond the DNA tying Brian to the violent encounter prosecutors described. By the time both sides rested, the case was not really about whether Brian and Michelle had crossed paths. That much was established. The question was, did Brian and Michelle cross paths? Did Brian and Michelle cross paths? The jury began deliberating shortly before 1130 that morning. A little more than six hours later, they came back with a verdict. Guilty of aggravated murder. There was no special verdict form explaining which piece of evidence carried the most weight or how the jurors worked through the defense challenges, but their decision meant they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Brian had sexually assaulted Michelle. dealing with. with sexual violence, substance misuse, or bias-related incidents. There were also practical changes. By the first anniversary of Michelle's death, UVM had arranged for students to use their campus ID accounts to pay for rides with local taxi companies. A campus-wide emergency notification system was also being rolled out, developed in part in response to Michelle's murder and in part after the mass shooting at Virginia Tech earlier that year. Students themselves were pulled into the process too, identifying poorly lit areas and other spots around campus that could be made safer. The university marked the first anniversary of Michelle's death with a series of remembrance events, including a candlelight walk that retraced the route from downtown toward UVM, along with a memorial hike that benefited the environmental fund created for Michelle. While the university community was trying to learn from what had happened, Michelle's family and friends were continuing to learn from what had happened. Michelle's family and friends were continuing to learn from what had happened. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. I think Chuck would approve.