On Saturday, November 20, 2004, John and Irene Powers drove up the long, wooded drive to their daughter’s secluded apartment outside Manassas. Two nights before, they had seen her at Outback Steakhouse, where they had eaten dinner and chatted as usual. But when someone found their daughter’s open, abandoned cell phone on the side of the road, the parents started to worry. Sarah Crawford was 33, had just moved out of the apartment she shared with her husband, had taken out a protective order and was trying to start over after an abusive relationship.
Crawford’s maroon Hyundai Sonata wasn’t in the driveway, and the lights were off. When the Powers knocked, the only one to greet them was Crawford’s cat. They would return several more times over the weekend only to find the same—a hungry cat left alone, no one at home.
 Crawford asked for a room "on the quiet side" of the Quality Inn Hotel on Emmet Street, a hotel clerk testified. He dumped his wife’s naked body in room 118 and calmly drove to Florida to visit relatives. |
About 80 miles away, Crawford was already dead, her body left in room 118 at the Quality Inn on Emmet Street in Charlottesville. She had died of a single gun shot wound to the chest that severed her spinal cord. She was found naked, with bruises around her neck, posed with legs in a frog-like position. The air-conditioning was turned up and a “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on the door.
Police picked up her estranged husband, Anthony Dale Crawford, in Jacksonville, Florida, driving his wife’s car. They found her blood on the seats; they also found his semen in her body at the crime scene. The hotel room was registered in his name. Last week, his defense team, Rhonda Quagliana and Denise Y. Lunsford, argued the couple had consensual sex and that Crawford accidentally shot his wife while trying to kill himself.
A jury trial that lasted four days in Charlottesville Circuit Court wasn’t the first time Crawford was in court for violence against women. In 1992, another wife, Trish Crawford, filed rape charges in South Carolina. A videotape showed the couple having sex, with Trish’s hands and feet bound and duct tape covering her mouth and eyes. Crawford was acquitted and even did an interview on “Larry King Live.”
During their 11-year relationship, Crawford’s second wife, Sarah, filed several protective orders against “Dale.” In 2004, she testified that “Dale gets violent when he uses drugs,” saying he’d drink a fifth of Jack Daniels per day and used crack. Dale had previously beaten her so badly she’d needed stitches and a cast, and she said he sometimes forced her to have sex with him. On October 30, 2004, he allegedly called Sarah and told her he “understands why husbands kill their wives.” Sarah filed the last protective order just weeks before her death.
The exhaustive trial brought in nearly 100 pieces of prosecution evidence, including grisly photos of Sarah’s dead body and a video of Crawford, with flat affect, talking to investigators about his dead wife.
On February 8, prosecutors Jon R. Zug and Joe Platania asked a jury to give Crawford his day of reckoning. Platania told jurors, “Finish it.”
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Finish it they did. After over a half day of deliberations, a jury of six men and six women found Crawford guilty of capital murder, abduction with intent to defile, rape, grand larceny (for stealing the car) and use of a firearm in the commission of two felonies. He was acquitted of use of a firearm in the commission of a rape, suggesting the jury found that his wife was already dead when Crawford raped her.
Prosecutors opted not to seek the death penalty, but the jury recommended two life sentences plus 67 years. Crawford will spend the rest of his life behind bars, without the possibility of parole.
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