The Alexandria Assassin: The Strange Descent of Charles Severance
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In December 2003, Nancy Dunning, wife of Alexandria, Virginia Sheriff James Dunning, was shot and killed after answering a knock at her front door, launching a cold case homicide investigation that would remain unsolved for over a decade. Ballistics, eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence eventually linked the murder to Charles Stanard Severance, a Virginia mechanical engineer and failed political candidate who was also convicted of murdering transportation planner Ronald Kirby in November 2013 and music teacher Ruthanne Lodato in February 2014, earning multiple capital murder convictions and consecutive life sentences.
Charles Severance was a Navy Admiral's son with a University of Virginia engineering degree who somewhere between a custody ruling and a decade of solitary drift rewrote his entire reality and started knocking on doors with a .22. He had a list, a manifesto, and a philosophy he called wisdom. Three people in one of America's most outwardly stable cities answered their doors on ordinary afternoons and never walked away from them. This is that story, and it is stranger than you are expecting it to be.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Most of us answer our front door without really putting much thought into it at all, unless |
| 0:06.6 | you're me and you never answered the door unless you're expecting company. |
| 0:12.0 | Middle of the day, your own neighborhood, a lot of people just opened the door. |
| 0:16.1 | Three people in Alexandria, Virginia, did exactly that between 2003 and 2014, and none of them walked away from it. |
| 0:24.7 | This is the story of the Alexandria assassin. |
| 0:27.7 | The Most of the population, myself excluded, will answer the front door without thinking much about it at all. |
| 0:56.6 | Somebody knocks, you walk over, let's see who it is. |
| 1:00.0 | Middle of the day, your own neighborhood, nothing really feels off. |
| 1:03.3 | It's probably your neighbor. |
| 1:04.9 | You just opened the door. |
| 1:06.8 | Three people in Alexandria, Virginia, did exactly that, and all three of them are no longer with us. |
| 1:12.8 | The man responsible was Charles Standard severance. |
| 1:16.8 | And what's going to make this case stay lodged in your head is that his starting point looked |
| 1:21.7 | completely ordinary. |
| 1:23.8 | He was born September 25, 1960 in Fairfax County, Virginia. |
| 1:28.6 | His father was a retired Navy Admiral. |
| 1:31.3 | He grew up in Oakton, attended Robinson Secondary School, |
| 1:34.8 | and he earned a Bachelor of Science and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 1986. |
| 1:41.0 | His dad was a Navy Admiral. |
| 1:42.6 | He had a UVA engineering degree, and he grew up in suburban |
| 1:46.0 | northern Virginia without any obvious warning signs, right? This is not a serial killer |
| 1:51.8 | origin story that you hear me tell all the time. That's kind of a LinkedIn profile, and a firm |
... |
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