Larry Bill Elliott: Woodbridge Murders, Trials, and Execution

Larry Bill Elliott was a former U.S. Army counterintelligence specialist who murdered Dana Thrall and Robert Finch at their Woodbridge, Virginia, townhouse on January 2, 2001, to clear the way for his obsession with a woman locked in a custody dispute with Finch. Convicted after a retrial in 2003 and sentenced to death, Elliott was executed by electric chair on November 17, 2009, at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, becoming the first person in the United States to die by electrocution in more than a year.

Who Elliott Was

Elliott spent twenty years as an enlisted counterintelligence specialist in the U.S. Army before moving into a civilian counterintelligence job at Fort Meade, Maryland.¹ He lived in Hanover, Maryland with his wife, Kathy Elliott, and had four children, including a teenage daughter, Kaitlynn, and three adult children from a previous marriage.² He also owned a small brewing company in West Virginia.³

In 1999, Elliott found a profile for Rebecca Gragg on an internet site and reached out. Gragg, who had previously worked as a stripper and private escort, told him she was not interested in a romantic or sexual relationship.¹ Elliott pursued her anyway, and pursued her expensively. He paid for a house, cars, credit cards, and breast augmentation surgery, running through roughly $200,000 of his wife’s separate assets. Kathy Elliott testified she knew nothing about the relationship or the transfers until after the murders.³

Gragg was in a bitter custody dispute with Robert Finch, the father of her two young sons. Elliott inserted himself into that fight and grew possessive. When Gragg told him she was in love with Finch again, Elliott said a shadowy figure named “Jerry,” whom he claimed to know through his counterintelligence work, was watching her, and that he would “take care of” the custody “issue.”¹

The Woodbridge Murders

Around 4:25 a.m. on January 2, 2001, police responded to reports of a disturbance and crashing sounds at 3406 Jousters Way in Woodbridge, Prince William County. They found Robert Finch, 30, dead in the foyer. Dana Thrall, 25, was alive in the kitchen but died later at Washington Hospital Center. Thrall’s two sons, ages four and six, were upstairs during the attack.⁴¹

Finch had been shot three times, in the head, back, and chest. Thrall had gunshot wounds to the head and chest, a defensive wound to her right hand, and blunt-force trauma to the back of her head consistent with being pistol-whipped. A firearms expert determined that all ten recovered bullets came from the same revolver-type handgun, meaning the shooter had reloaded during the attack.¹ The weapon was never recovered.

How Elliott Was Caught

A bloodstain on the inside of the townhouse’s backyard privacy fence gate matched Elliott’s DNA. His pickup truck had been seen in the area around 4:00 a.m. When detectives located the truck at Fort Meade, it had been deeply cleaned, with trace blood residue under the floor mats; inside were a flashlight, a cellular phone, and bandages.¹

After the killings, Elliott called Gragg and told her “all of our problems had been taken care of,” adding that he needed to dispose of “bloodied black trash bags from the mess that Jerry had made.” He kept her silent by leveraging the “Jerry” story, telling her the man would kill her or her family if she talked, and had her impersonate his wife on the phone to move money out of Kathy Elliott’s accounts.¹ Gragg lied to police in interviews between January and May 2001 before eventually cooperating. She was never charged.⁵

Elliott was arrested in Maryland on May 9, 2001, and charged with capital murder.¹

Two Trials and a Death Sentence

Elliott’s first trial, in Prince William County in July 2002, ended in a jury conviction and a death recommendation. The trial court threw the verdict out and declared a mistrial after learning that a juror had discussed the case outside of court.²⁴

The second trial began on March 24, 2003. In April, the jury convicted Elliott of the capital murder of Dana Thrall, the first-degree murder of Robert Finch, and two firearms offenses. At sentencing, prosecutors relied on Virginia’s “vileness” aggravating factor, which required a finding that the killing involved torture, depravity of mind, or aggravated battery beyond the minimum necessary to cause death.¹ Army co-workers testified about his twenty-year military career as character witnesses. The jury returned a death sentence for Thrall’s murder, life for Finch’s, and eight years on the firearms counts. The Prince William County Circuit Court imposed the sentences on May 22, 2003.

Appeals

The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed the convictions and the death sentence on March 5, 2004, in Elliott v. Commonwealth. Elliott had tried to introduce videotaped polygraph examinations of Rebecca Gragg to impeach her testimony; the court upheld their exclusion under Virginia’s longstanding rule barring polygraph evidence. The court also rejected his Eighth Amendment challenge to the vileness aggravator.¹ Rehearing was denied on June 17, 2004.⁶

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Elliott’s petition for a writ of certiorari filed in October 2004. He then filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the Eastern District of Virginia in May 2008, captioned Elliott v. Kelly, which was terminated in March 2009.⁷ The Supreme Court refused to intervene one last time on November 16, 2009.⁴

The Electric Chair Execution

Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine declined to halt the execution on November 17, 2009.⁴ That evening, Elliott was put to death at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, and pronounced dead at 9:08 p.m. He was 60, the oldest inmate on Virginia’s death row at the time.⁸

Virginia let condemned inmates choose between lethal injection and the electric chair, and Elliott chose electrocution.⁹ His was the first electric-chair execution in the United States in more than a year, following one in South Carolina in June 2008, and only the fifth in Virginia since lethal injection became available in 1995. The previous Virginia inmate to choose the chair was Brandon Hedrick in 2006.¹⁰

Elliott did not speak in the chamber. He left a typed statement for his attorneys to read in which he maintained his innocence and wrote, “The very system that I spent a lifetime defending has failed me.” He said he hoped opponents of capital punishment would use his case “as a launching pad for the elimination of the death penalty.”⁴¹⁰

1
Caselaw Findlaw. Elliott v. Commonwealth
2
Clark Prosecutor. Larry Bill Elliott
3
Virginia Courts. Elliott v. Commonwealth Opinion
4
NBC News. Virginia Man Executed by Electric Chair
5
Caselaw Findlaw. Elliott v. Warden
6
Jones Day. Elliott v. Virginia Petition for Certiorari
7
CourtListener. Elliott v. Kelly
8
Ocala Star-Banner. Virginia Inmate Who Killed Two Executed by Electric Chair
9
Jurist. Virginia Conducts First US Electric Chair Execution in Over a Year
10
Cape Cod Times. Virginia Inmate Who Killed Two Executed by Electric Chair