In an emotional verdict last year that left his family in tears and his lawyers wondering where they went wrong, Wyatt Ward Hollar accepted with a calm, soldierlike presence a jury’s decision that he had shot and killed his girlfriend. On Oct. 31, the Virginia Military Institute graduate and Iraq war veteran, 29, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being found guilty of second-degree murder and a firearms violation. He had told a Henrico County jury that the young woman had committed suicide.

A Dinwiddie County jury seemed to have little doubt yesterday about the guilt of a mother accused of drugging and stabbing to death her young son in the family’s bathtub in 2006. After a two-day trial that included testimony from 20 witnesses, the jurors deliberated a little more than an hour before convicting Julie E. Futrell of first-degree murder in the Thanksgiving slaying of 6-year-old Shawn A. Futrell.

A Chesterfield County jury should decide today whether Joseph Wayne Garrard intentionally or accidentally shot to death his daughter’s ex-boyfriend after the two clashed in a 4 a.m. encounter inside Garrard’s home. Prosecution witnesses testified yesterday that Derek Stringfellow Best, 19, went to Garrard’s home with his brother and two friends to essentially end the teen’s emotionally tortured relationship with Garrard’s daughter and retrieve some of his belongings.