Chesterfield County police Lt. Doug Mooney was named Farmville’s new police chief yesterday. Farmville’s Town Council voted unanimously to appoint Mooney, said Town Manager Gerald J. Spates. Mooney is a 22-year veteran of the Chesterfield Police Department who lives just outside Farmville in Prince Edward County. Mooney attended Longwood University for three years before graduating from Bluefield College. His wife graduated from Longwood, and their son and daughter both go there now.

Chesterfield County police Lt. Doug Mooney was named Farmville’s new police chief today. Farmville’s town council voted unanimously today to appoint Mooney, a 22-year veteran of the Chesterfield Police Department who lives just outside Farmville in Prince Edward County. Mooney and his wife attended Longwood University, and their son and daughter both go there now.

Juggalos, Wiccans, Satanists and vampires are all subcultures of the occult that are on the periphery of the mainstream. But the recent quadruple homicide in Farmville at the home of a Longwood University professor has thrust these lifestyles into the headlines. Don Rimer, a retired member of the Virginia Beach Police Department who studies ritual crime and the occult, spoke yesterday about these cultures and ritual crime to about 100 people at Farmville United Methodist Church.

A ball-peen hammer and a wood-splitting maul were used to bludgeon four people found dead inside a Longwood University professor’s home in September, a source close to the investigation confirmed yesterday.

A new state historical marker recognizes Farmville’s Israel Hill, a community of free blacks settled in the early 19th century and saluted for its lasting contributions amid adversity. The Farmville-Prince Edward County Historical Society joined with local officials and descendants in a recent recognition ceremony. Israel Hill was settled by about 90 people in 1810 and 1811 who had received their freedom and 350 acres from Judith Randolph, the widow of Richard Randolph, who had directed the emancipation in his will.

A fire damaged multiple units at an apartment complex in Prince Edward County yesterday morning. There were no reports of injuries, but it appeared 30 people were displaced, including five Longwood University students. The fire broke out in the predawn hours at Poplar Forest, an apartment community near U.S. 460 just south of Farmville.

Mark Niederbrock was on the phone with his 70-year-old mother in Illinois when he got a call on the other line that would lead to his death. It was Kathleen Wells, calling from West Virginia, and she couldn’t get in touch with her daughter, Melanie, who was in Farmville visiting Mark’s daughter, Emma.

Monday, Sept. 6: Richard Samuel Alden McCroskey III, 20, of Castro Valley, Calif., leaves on a flight to Richmond International Airport. He’s picked up by girlfriend Emma Niederbrock, 16, of Farmville, whom he met online through their common interest in horrorcore music, and her mother, Longwood University professor Debra S. Kelley.
  Thursday, Sept. 10: Kelley and her estranged husband, Mark Niederbrock, leave town with McCroskey, Emma Niederbrock and her friend, Melanie Wells, 18, of Inwood, W.Va. The parents take them to Southgate, Mich., for the Strictly for the Wicked Festival, an all-day horrorcore show Sept. 12.

Horrorcore, little known until Farmville slayings, is called by one critic a “ventilation system for those with a generallly more sinister mindset.“

A graveside service is scheduled this morning for Mark Alan Niederbrock, one of four victims found slain in a residential Farmville neighborhood Friday. Niederbrock, 50, will be remembered at 11 a.m. at Walker’s Presbyterian Church in Hixburg in Appomattox County, where he had served as a supply minister for the past six years. Niederbrock, a native of Illinois, was a graduate of Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond and was in the process of becoming an ordained minister.

Plato was right. If, as Congreve wrote, music has charms that can soothe the savage breast, then it also has the power to enrage and pervert. The slayings in Farmville are immensely sad. Sadder still is the world in which the principal suspect, Richard Samuel Alden McCroskey III, spent much of his life. McCroskey styled himself Syko Sam and was affiliated with Serial Killin Records, a label of—fortunately—little renown. He was an aficionado of horrorcore, a genre of music (we use that term loosely) that dwells on sadism and brutality. Mario Delgado, one of the horrorcore artists (we use that term loosely as well) McCroskey enjoyed listening to, focuses on rape and murder.

Farmville police now say they were inside a Longwood University professor’s house with a California man less than 24 hours before officers would find four bodies in the home and pinpoint him as a suspect.

The Prince Edward County prosecutor this morning officially confirmed the identities of four people found slain Friday in the home of a Longwood University professor and said the cause of death for each was blunt force trauma to the head.

“I’m thinking this guy could be a big creep,“ said Pappas, who uses MySpace and Facebook. That didn’t turn out to be the case, and they dated for a year. But Pappas, like many Longwood students interviewed yesterday, is rethinking her relationship with the Internet in the aftermath of a quadruple slaying in the home of a Longwood professor that has been tied to a MySpace relationship between the suspect and the professor’s daughter.

The sister of the California man suspected in the slayings of four people near Longwood University said she failed her younger brother and wishes she could ask him what happened.