Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

RICHMOND, VA. - The joggers and dog-walkers were mostly still sleeping in on that chilly Saturday morning before the sun came up.

It was the day before Halloween, 2004, in a trimmed and spruced suburb of Richmond, Virginia.

But the coffee pot was perking in the kitchen of one early-riser on Hearthglow Lane.

The three kids were asleep upstairs as the single dad went to retrieve the newspaper in the driveway.

Ed Kelly across the street and down a few doors knew exactly what he’d heard as he lay in bed.

Ed Kelly, neighbor: “Bang bang bang,” and that rapid. And I thought, at first, perhaps, it was hunters over in the woods so I didn’t think much about it. I went on back to sleep.

But another neighbor also heard the shots—loud ones—and called 911.

When the officers responded and turned their flashlights on the trees and house fronts, they couldn’t find anything though the homeowner who’d called the cops told them he’d seen a figure, not much more than a shape, running down the darkened street.

The police drove away and Hearthglow Lane residents awoke to Saturday routines.

Or so they thought.

When Ed Kelly opened his door 45 minutes after he’d heard shots, this time the police were back, seemingly everywhere.

Kelly: The police surrounded. Closed off the road.

The neighbor who’d first called 911 had gone back outside at sunrise and spotted something awful the police had missed.

The man next door, Fred Jablin, a college professor in his early 50s, lay slumped next to his Ford Explorer in the driveway. He was dead, shot twice, by someone apparently lying in wait for him. He was murdered, probably, before his coffee finished brewing.

Kelly: He was a very methodical man. You could almost predict the time that he would come out and pick his paper up, which was approximately at 6:30 a.m.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: It doesn’t seem the place you’re going to have a shooting. A man killed in his own driveway?

Det. Coby Kelly, Henrico County police: It’s one of your nicer neighborhoods in the city. We’ve never had, to my knowledge, anything serious—other than maybe a few instances of vandalism.

Det. Kelly: I was on call for that weekend, so if anything major—homicide or anything serious—came out. I was the one to get the page.

By 8 a.m. that Saturday, Detective Coby Kelly of the Henrico County Police was standing in the yellow-taped driveway asking the responding officers what they had here.

Det. Kelly: The best we knew was that we’ve got a man in his bed clothes that was dead in his driveway. The newspaper was still at the end of his driveway at this time of the morning in that neighborhood, it’s unlikely that you have bands of bad people running around. So we then also kind of guessed that it might be somebody that knew him, knew his schedule that sort of thing.

Fred Jablin—the murdered man—was a highly regarded professor at the University of Richmond where he’d been teaching for the past decade.

The divorced man’s children, a boy and two girls, were upstairs sleeping while there father lay in the drive way dead.

The medical examiner ruled it’s unlikely that Jablin could have lived more than a few minutes, if that, after being shot with .38 caliber bullets in the arm and the back.

Who could have lain in wait for him?

Det. Kelly: We sent an investigator to the University of Richmond, where he worked, to try to determine if there were any threats or problems that he was having at the school. And we were open to anything early on.

It didn’t look like a botched home invasion robbery.  There was no obvious reason to believe it was about drugs.

This was a man who lived a quiet, ordered, suburban life.

Det. Kelly: The people that we talked to in the community said that he was a great father, very much concerned about his children, making sure they got to activities, attending soccer games and the sort of thing.

But the neighbors did approach Detective Kelly with some leads.

Det. Kelly: It was probably mid-morning.  I talked to at least a couple of neighbors. I talked to a former nanny for the children. And a recurring theme was you probably need to talk to his ex-wife.

The ex-wife was Piper Rountree, a former student of Jablin’s back at the University of Texas in the early ‘80s.  They’d been married almost 20-years when they divorced in 2002, two-years before.

Piper had a law degree, had worked once as an assistant district attorney, but in her years in Virginia she’d been a stay-at-home mom and faculty wife.

Now she was living back in Texas, Houston, trying to resume a career, after losing custody of her three children.

Theirs had been a messy split, an accusation that she had an affair, poison all the way around. That was the buzz police were getting from the neighbors on Hearthglow Lane.

Murphy: On the 10-scale of bad divorces, where did this one fit?

Det. Kelly: Probably at least an 8.

It’s not just on TV shows that detectives often have to rule out the spouse or the ex in a murder investigation.

It was one of the first orders of business for Det. Kelly and his team to find out if Piper Rountree had a reason to kill her ex-husband, find out where she was at the time of the murder.

They had to examine the classic trio of ingredients for any suspect: did they have the means, the motive and the opportunity.

Piper seemed to be ruled out as a suspect on opportunity alone. Her 12-year old son had talked to her just the night before the murder.

Det. Kelly: And she indicated to him that she was in Texas and said she was coming back from work and just a little bit of chit-chat back and forth.

Murphy: She’s 1200-miles away from the scene, so common sense would tell you, she couldn’t have been the suspect?

Det. Kelly: Sure.  But, of course, we wanted to verify that.

The detective reached Piper in Houston that Saturday night. She said a friend had already told her about Fred’s murder but her main concern hours later, now on the phone with the policeman, was the welfare of her three children.

Piper Rountree: I didn’t know what was going on, what was going on... they wouldn’t let me even talk to the children. And I was really concerned because they took the children into police custody.

It was all very puzzling, Fred Jablin shot dead in his driveway... but detectives were starting to fit some of the pieces together.

MORE FROM 'MURDER ON HEARTHGLOW LANE'

'Murder on Hearthglow Lane' Section Front

'Murder on Hearthglow Lane' Va. vs. Piper Rountree: Crime scene photos Va. vs. Piper Rountree: Timeline 'Murder on Hearthglow Lane' Section Front   Add 'Murder on Hearthglow Lane' headlines to your news reader: