The Reston Caper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Gwen Ames' body was found strangled a mere fifty
> feet away from the front door of her house, next
> to a little decorative bridge over a side estuary
> of artificial Lake Anne in the center of town. The
> narrow estuary separated Gwen's exclusive
> neighborhood from Lake Anne Plaza, the commercial
> and social heart of Reston, where on that day the
> annual three-day Reston Festival was winding down
> with the main and final show. The Festival was
> being organized that year, like every year before
> and since then, by Gwen's mother - a Ms. Priscilla
> Ames, one of the socially leading and most likely
> also the richest citizens of Reston. (Gwen's
> father never enters the picture and my sources had
> no idea who he was, Priscilla was a single
> mother.)
>
>
> Gwen was only 18 when she died, yet she had
> evidently been a regular user of heroin for
> something like two or three years already. This in
> itself is a bit unusual but not overly so - as
> teenage users of heroin are known throughout the
> US. Gwen however, did not hail from the ordinary
> social strata of young users, who come mostly from
> poor working-class or welfare families and
> inner-city ghettos. Not a rich and exclusive
> suburban household like Gwen's.
>
>
> Remember we're talking about Heroin here, the
> "killer drug", well known as such among all drug
> users. It's nowhere near the same as other "social
> drugs" which were much more prevalent among many
> groups of young people in the late sixties and
> seventies - mostly marijuana and LSD. Aficionados
> of the latter two had always been completely
> different people than the heroin users, and the
> two groups seldom intermix, despite the lies being
> spread about this by the "war on drugs" people.
> Most everybody is aware of how dangerous and
> deadly heroin can be, and relatively few actually
> try it, usually only those who don't really care
> about life so much.
>
>
> Gwen's body carried no other signs of violence, so
> this was a "straight murder", not an attempted
> rape or robbery. The perpetrator was never caught,
> and according to the reports I heard, the murder
> was never properly investigated, but instead was
> apparently rather hastily moved back from the list
> of urgently pending cases. This was a bit strange,
> because Gwen's mother certainly had the social and
> political pull to see the investigation all the
> way through, had she really wanted it. On the
> other hand, she also had the pull in that little
> town to slow it down or shut it up altogether.
>
>
> Therefore, my initial reaction when I first heard
> about this affair four years ago, was that
> Priscilla Ames didn't really care if the affair
> was investigated. The junkie Gwen may have become
> a serious embarrassment to her wealthy socialite
> mother. Maybe relations between the two had really
> grown strained towards the end and no love left
> between them at all, and it deteriorated to the
> point where the mother was actually relieved to
> see her go before things got really bad. Moreover,
> maybe the socialite mother got pregnant by mistake
> in the first place and never wanted this girl to
> begin with, which is what led fatherless Gwen to
> start using the death drug at an early age.
>
>
> I even played around with the idea that Priscilla
> herself may have engineered the "unwanted
> daughter's" removal, hired some contract killer.
> That was of course far-fetched and had no evidence
> for it except the curious lack of investigation.
> Nonetheless, I felt that my psychological theory
> about the mother-daughter relationship here seemed
> to be reasonable and I would've left it at that,
> except for one little thing. It seems that little
> Gwen was far from being the only one with this
> problem in Reston.
>
>
> The town of Reston is a very special case in
> Virginia, and in the entire US. It happens to be
> the "first planned suburban community" planned
> from scratch as such, and it formed the basis of
> thousands of like places throughout America. It
> was founded in 1961, when a New York investor
> named Robert E. Simon bought all the farm-land in
> the area for 13 million dollars, and decided to
> build a "model community" there. (By the way, this
> was not the first attempt to build a planned
> community on the spot - in 1892 a "Dr. Carl
> Wiehle" also drew big plans to create a Utopian
> Town there, which never properly took off.)
>
>
> According to what the history books say, the name
> of Simon's town was created from his initials RES,
> which he turned into a clever pun on the word
> "rest", as the town was supposed to be a place of
> refuge for busy Washington DC people returning
> home from work. So this particular town is named
> after its owner/founder. (It's said that he
> originally played with names like "Simontown", and
> it's unclear who suggested the Reston pun to him.)
>
>
>
> In any case, it turns out that this Robert Simon
> also had a young daughter, named Margot. And from
> what I've been able to ascertain, Margot Simon had
> also died in the year 1972 at the age of 18. Her
> death appears to have been entirely veneered over,
> and nobody can tell me anything about it. My main
> informant about these events said that back then
> everyone thought for the longest time that Margot
> had gone away to a boarding school.
>
>
> How's that for a coincidence - the daughters of
> the two leading citizens of this "model town",
> both dead the same year in the prime of their
> youth, when they should've been becoming very
> welcome debutantes at social parties around the
> high-ranking DC crowd. But unfortunately the
> coincidence did not end there. Margot Simon was
> also a heroin user, a fact known around town, and
> she was found in her apartment dead of a heroin
> overdose.
>
>
> The apartment was located on the 13th floor of the
> famous "Heron House." Robert Simon started his
> "Reston Dream" by building this tall apartment
> building, and it's widely considered "the first
> existing example of Modern Virginian
> architecture." Simon said he was not superstitious
> and lived on the entire thirteenth floor, where
> his daughter also had her separate place. The
> Heron House stands on the south-west side of the
> Lake Anne Plaza "harbor", on a wide embankment
> leading south of the Plaza which is for some
> reason called "the Boardwalk" (though it's not on
> boards, just a regular paved avenue.) The House is
> located not two hundred yards away from the
> cottage in which Priscilla and Gwen Ames lived.
>
>
> So we have the two leading young ladies of this
> little town, both of them hooked on heroin and
> dead the same year at age 18? Even if my witnesses
> got some of the facts wrong after all this time
> about the dates and ages of the victims, it was
> still a very chilling coincidence, to say the
> least. I began asking some more questions about
> the town and its residents, and quickly discovered
> that Gwen and Margot were merely the tip of the
> iceberg.
Interesting theory, and there are some important points that you make. The mother was prestigious in the Reston Community and yet the investigation went nowhere and there's very little information about the murder at all. Almost like it was swept under the rug.
I read in this Washington Post article that Fairfax County's chief prosecutor for 40 years, Robert F. Horan Jr. was retiring.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/14/AR2007041401319_3.html
"Of those that have not been solved, the one that bothers him the most is the death of Gwen Ames, 17, who was found strangled near Lake Anne Plaza in Reston in 1972."
Very sad, I'll bet he and the investigating officers have alot of information, but probably just not enough for an arrest or conviction.