The Virginia Parole Board has denied the release of a 60-year-old Giles County man convicted in the 1987 murder of a Virginia Tech student. Last month, the board started releasing as many as 500 prisoners as part of a plan by Gov. Ralph Northam and approved by the Virginia General Assembly.
John David Lafon was charged with murder and abduction of 19-year-old Meredith Mergler whose body was found at the bottom of a well a year after her disappearance. He received a single-life sentence in the case and has been eligible for parole several times, being denied every time. The recent decision was made last month in the midst of reviews of over 2,000 current inmates.
The early release strategy was pitched by Northam as a way to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus in prisons, where inmates and guards spend much of their time in close quarters.
The board ruled Lafon needed to serve more of his sentence because of the severity of the crime.
According to police reports, Mergler had gone missing sometime during the early morning hours of Sunday, August 30, 1987, after leaving a restaurant in Blacksburg.
She was supposed to have met a fellow student later that day to travel to their parents’ homes in Northern Virginia but never appeared.
In October of 1988, a Giles County landowner discovered a well head on his property had been partially covered by a concrete slab. He looked into the well and spotted a body that would later be identified as Mergler’s. Her body had been exposed to a high concentration of lime.
Lafon was arrested in 1991 and convicted a short time later.
