EDITOR'S NOTE: This story started in one of the participating news publications that run the weekly Offbeat Oregon History newspaper column. If you have found your way here in some other way, the article might not make much sense, as the first 600 or so words will be missing!
Harington’s blood was tested at the morgue after his death; but the result was listed in the paper as “.017 percent.” If that’s correct, it’s less than the effect of one glass of beer. But I suspect it’s a misprint, because such a finding would have utterly destroyed Virginia’s case.
If, instead, the paper meant to print “0.17 percent,” well, that’s a significant level of intoxication. Most people lose consciousness and pass out at 0.20 percent; but experienced heavy drinkers can function fairly normally at such levels.
Was Harington such a drinker, as his wife testified he was? That, most likely, was the primary thing on the jury’s minds as they filed out of the courtroom to deliberate.
But the prosecution really didn’t have a lot to work with. Their case mostly rested on the oddness of some of the details — like the ninja-class trick shooting Virginia said she’d done, and the fact that the bed on which Harington’s body lay did not appear to be messed up as by a struggle. Their allegation was that she had simply waited for him to fall asleep, then stepped up beside the bed, squared off, took careful aim, and shot him twice in the head as he lay there.
In the end, the evidence to support that theory must have been very thin indeed, because the jury took less than two hours deliberating before they brought in a verdict of Not Guilty.
SO, WHAT REALLY happened? Only one person knew, and therein lay the problem. It’s hard to get “beyond all reasonable doubt” without some kind of solid evidence, and in this case, it was mostly a case of “he said, she said” — with the “he said” part lopped off.
It no doubt helped a great deal that in court, Virginia did not behave at all like a murderess is assumed to act. She was very worried about the two babies, while they were in state custody waiting for their grandmother to arrive from San Jose; and she was quite emotional in all the right ways during her testimony. Of course, some murderers are very good at that kind of acting; but it seems unlikely a 23-year-old would have acquired such skills.
And yet her account of how the shooting happened rings very false. To snatch a gun from the hand of a much stronger person, shift one’s grip on the gun without using the other hand (remember, she said he was holding her arm) and, firing unaimed in double-action mode with her wrist bent, punch two rounds dead center through the bull’s eye?
