Father found guilty of first degree murder for injecting stepdaughter with lethal dose of heroin
Wesley Hadsell, 43, a Virginia father was found guilty on Monday, February 7, for killing his 18-year-old stepdaughter by injecting her with a deadly dosage of heroin and then leaving her body to fester for a month in a ditch. A Franklin County jury found Hadsell guilty of first-degree murder. A charge of second-degree murder was rejected owing to a lack of evidence. On March 2, 2015, AJ Hadsell, a freshman at Longwood University in Farmville, went missing while on Spring Break at home in Norfolk. Her deceased corpse was discovered in a ditch near to an abandoned property in Franklin, Virginia, a month later, partially buried by a piece of plywood.
After being pinned down and injected with three times the deadly quantity of the narcotic, the Virginia college student died of homicidal violence and acute heroin intoxication, according to the medical examiner. A study of the victim's hair follicles indicated that she had no prior history of drug usage. Two weeks after AJ's disappearance, her stepfather was arrested on unrelated charges of breaking into a house, which he said he did while desperately searching for his stepdaughter.
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Hadsell's case was unfolded by tracking his and AJ's phones together through satellite data on the day AJ vanished, as well as GPS data from Hadsell's work truck, which led investigators to his stepdaughter's death. Hadsell told WAVY at the time, “I couldn't sit a minute away from where my daughter may have been.” Hadsell, who had a significant criminal record, was not prosecuted in connection with his stepdaughter's death until November 2018. A prosecutor testified during Wesley Hadsell's second murder trial that he treated his stepdaughter "like trash," according to The Virginian Pilot.
As the guilty verdicts were read, Hadsell bowed his head. AJ's sisters, who were present in court, cried after the verdict was announced. In 2020, Wesley Hadsell's first trial resulted in a mistrial. In January, he began his second trial, which lasted three weeks. The defense claimed that the 18-year-old college student was miserable and suicidal due to a breakup with her boyfriend, as demonstrated by sad memes on her social media sites, and that she killed herself by overdosing on migraine medicine. According to him, the medical examiner never tested for the prescribed medication Nortriptyline in her body. The defense's suicide theory was dismissed by prosecutors as "absurd." “We may never completely understand why this happened,” a prosecutor said before the jury.