Jailed in Murders, Buried in Honor

When the cremated remains of Russell Wayne Wagner, a 52-year-old U.S. Army veteran who served for three years during the Vietnam War, were laid to rest last week in Arlington National Cemetery, he was honored with military pallbearers, a bugler playing taps and a three-shot volley from a firing party.

After that, things got complicated.

Wagner was honorably discharged from the Army in 1972, but he spent the last 2 1/2 years of his life serving two consecutive life sentences for the 1994 murders of an elderly couple in Hagerstown, Md.

The couple's son, Vernon G. Davis, said he did not believe it when first his niece, and then a reporter from the Herald-Mail of Hagerstown, told him this week about the July 27 Arlington burial.

"I said: 'Nah, that ain't true. That ain't right,' " he said. "I just didn't want to believe it."

A veteran himself who served in an honor guard for President John F. Kennedy, Davis, 66, said that knowing someone was buried at Arlington would connote certain things for him.

"As a veteran, I would think that he loved his country, that he loved the people, that he loved the United States and was willing to die for it -- not to do what he done to Mom and Dad."

"There's no sense in him being down there like that," Davis added. "Not with the heroes we've got coming back from the war."

Wagner was convicted in 2002 in the stabbing murders of Daniel Davis, 84, and Wilda Davis, 80, in their Hagerstown home. A previous trial ended in a hung jury.

Wagner died Feb. 2 at the Maryland House of Corrections Annex in Jessup. A prison spokesman said that Wagner was found unresponsive in his cell and that foul play and medical conditions had been ruled out. Steven Kessell, deputy state's attorney for Washington County, said the cause apparently was a heroin overdose.

All that cemetery officials knew was that the sister of a deceased veteran had requested that her brother be buried there and that she had hand-carried the ashes to the cemetery.

Lori Calvillo, a spokeswoman for the cemetery, said that she first heard about Wagner's criminal past Wednesday and that Army officials were gathering details of the case and would decide whether his burial was appropriate.