Chesterfield County

620 Fern Meadow Loop

3:45 PM

Asphyxiation

Unknown

Woman’s death viewed as homicide / Chesterfield police didn’t suspect foul play; autopsy showed she was strangled
By Mark Bowes
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
Saturday,May 10, 2008

The death of a Midlothian woman is being investigated as Chesterfield County’s eighth homicide of the year and the second of the week.

The body of Heidi P. Cunningham, 38, of the 600 block of Fern Meadow Loop, was found about 3:45 p.m. Monday after police received a call from her parents, who live out of state, to check on her welfare, said Chesterfield police Capt. Paige Foster.

Investigators initially did not find anything that would lead them to suspect foul play, but after an autopsy, they learned the woman had been strangled, Foster said.

Cunningham lived alone in the apartment, which is in a relatively new complex between Coalfield Road and Charter Colony Parkway and near the Midlothian YMCA.

Cunningham had been married but Foster wasn’t certain whether she was separated or divorced from her husband, whom police have located and interviewed.

“We don’t have any reason to believe it’s domestic-related at this point,” Foster said. “But [the case] is not even remotely finished being investigated, and I’m sure we’ll be talking to family members, her husband [again] and these other individuals we need to locate.”

Her death was followed by Tuesday’s killing of Lonna R. Gregory-Moorman, 37, who was found dead about 6:20 a.m. in a bedroom of her home in the 3500 block of Oregon Oak Drive in the county’s Meadowbrook area.

Although the investigation is continuing, police believe the victim’s husband, Walter Eugene Moorman, 41, fatally stabbed his wife and then drove to the top of the Pocahontas Parkway bridge, where he leaped to his death. His body, with slashed wrists, was recovered later that day in the James River.

Cunningham is the second woman to be strangled in Chesterfield in six months. On Nov. 30, Zaundra Zaneta Gray-Stofel, 40, a former flight attendant and mother of a 2-year-old daughter, was found dead in a stairwell of the InTown Suites off Huguenot Road.

She was strangled with a ligature that was left around her neck.

Gray-Stofel, who lived with her mother in Richmond, had been inside a room at the InTown Suites and had been staying at the nearby Holiday Inn Express at 1021 Koger Center Blvd. Her killing remains unsolved.