Fifteen years after the 2001 death of Daniel Petrole Jr., Justin Wolfe admitted to murder.
The past 15 years for the Petrole and Wolfe families have been tumultuous. Petrole’s body was found in front of his home in Bristow, Virginia, in 2001, and police quickly arrested Wolfe and Owen Merton Barber IV. Barber, in exchange for a relatively lighter sentence of 38 years, agreed to testify against Wolfe, claiming the then 19-year-old was the mastermind behind the murder. Wolfe denied any part or connection with the murder, but the jury at the trial gave him the death penalty. By the time the trial began in 2002, the case was receiving national attention because Petrole, Barber, and Wolfe were all part of a drug-dealing ring based in middle-class suburbs throughout Northern Virginia, selling drugs primarily to high school students.
The conflict began in 2005. Barber, the principal witness in the case against Wolfe, revealed that he had lied on the stand and recanted his statement. He recanted his recanting a year later at one of Wolfe’s appeal hearings.
In 2011, U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson of Norfolk ruled that the case had to be retried, as the prosecution at the time, headed by attorney Paul B. Ebert and his assistant Richard A. Conway, had withheld evidence from Wolfe’s then defense lawyer (this lawyer, according to documents from the Washington Post, made various errors during the trial and eventually surrendered his license in 2003 after complaints from several clients). Ebert stated that the evidence was not open to defense because “when you have information that is given to certain counsel and certain defendants, they are able to fabricate a defense around what is provided.” Judge Jackson ordered that Wolfe be released in 2012, and the circuit court upheld his decision.
Mere days after the court’s decision, Ebert and his team visited Barber in prison and told him that his third recanting of his testimony violated his deal to only serve 38 years, threatening to pursue the death penalty for him. Barber, after repeated visits from the prosecution, hired his own lawyer and refused to talk to anyone from the case.
Ebert and Conway of the prosecution stepped down from the case, and, despite protests that he was too close to Ebert, attorney Raymond F. Morrogh of Fairfax County took over the case, and the commonwealth appealed yet again. In 2013, Morrogh brought new charges to Wolfe, including the accusation that Wolfe had been one of the leaders of the drug dealing ring and the renewed pursuit of the death penalty for Wolfe’s accused role in Petrole’s murder.
After being represented by numerous different lawyers and organizations, including the Virginia Innocence Project, attorneys Joseph Flood, Daniel Lopez and Bernadette Donovan took over Wolfe’s defense and began negotiating plea deals with Morrogh in order to avoid the death penalty. In March 2016, Wolfe wrote a four-page statement to the court which stated that he was responsible for the death of Petrole. In the letter, Wolfe apologized to the parents of Petrole, and expressed sorrow at “letting the people I love down.”
Is Wolfe guilty? A case filled with twists and turns, unreliable witnesses, a widely criticized team of prosecutors and a confession prompted by fifteen years of chaos and the threat of the death penalty certainly give many people a reason to doubt Justin Wolfe's involvement in the murder of David Petrole Jr. It is more than likely that the truth that the families involved want so badly may never come into the light.
