Jesse Leroy Matthew, who is serving life sentences for the murders of University of Virginia student Hannah Graham in 2014, and Morgan Harrington, a Virginia Tech student who was killed in 2009 after attending a concert in Charlottesville, has been transferred to a prison with a lower security level, WTOP has learned.
Matthew was transferred on March 6 from Red Onion State Prison, in Pound, Virginia, to Keen Mountain Correctional Center, in Oakwood, Virginia, according to the Virginia Department of Corrections’ online inmate locator.
Red Onion is classified as a Security Level 6 facility — the “supermax” prison is the Commonwealth’s most secure facility. Keen Mountain Correctional Center is a Level 4, maximum-security prison.
Contacted by WTOP, Kyle Gibson, the chief communications officer for Virginia’s Department of Corrections, said he would research the circumstances behind the transfer.
Gil Harrington, whose daughter Morgan was killed by Matthew, tells WTOP she was notified by the corrections department digitally and by mail about the transfer, “but I don’t know the rationale about how these decisions are made.”
Harrington and her husband Dan founded the nonprofit Help Save The Next Girl to promote personal safety after their daughter’s murder.
“I don’t give Jesse Matthew much of my headspace,” Harrington said. “I will say it gave me some disquiet, to think it might be the beginning of plans to say he’s rehabilitated.”
Harrington said she doesn’t think Matthew, who is now 44, can be rehabilitated.
“He’s still young enough to hurt people,” Harrington said. “With someone serving seven life sentences, I don’t think that would even be in the starting blocks for something like a work release program — I would certainly hope not.”
Life in prison, but different prisons
Just over 10 years ago, on March 2, 2016, Matthew pleaded guilty in Albemarle County to Graham’s and Harrington’s deaths, and was sentenced to four life sentences.
At the time he entered his plea in Charlottesville, Matthew was already serving three life sentences for the 2005 rape and attempted murder of a woman in Fairfax County. Matthew was convicted and sentenced in that case in 2015.
In 2019, Matthew was transferred from the “supermax” Red Onion prison to Sussex I State Prison to receive cancer treatment, but has been at Red Onion for more than the past five years.
Contacted by WTOP, Matthew’s attorney, Douglas Ramseur told WTOP, “I hadn’t heard about it until you called. I don’t know what facilitated it.”
In a 2024 interview, Ramseur described Matthew’s conditions at Red Onion: “They have been keeping him in pretty isolated quarters out there, segregation for the whole time that’s he’s been there, except for a brief time when he was moved out, because he was being treated for some health issues.”
Upon hearing about Matthew’s transfer, Ramseur said, “I’m pleased to hear that he’s being allowed to move down a level” of security.
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