When they went to college, the brothers worked as a team to further Terry Kilgore's political ambitions. Terry, laid-back and gregarious, ran for student government president. Jerry, who took math courses and studied electoral maps for fun, managed the campaign and wrote the speeches. He edited the student newspaper and toyed with the idea of becoming a reporter.
Friends describe Jerry as organized and meticulous. Never an outdoorsy type, when he worked two summers as a counselor for Upward Bound, he tutored the youths in math and arranged to be busy when they went on camping trips.
"Jerry is detailed and organized," said Vernon Williams, who grew up with the brothers and is in Terry Kilgore's law firm. "Terry is the outgoing one who likes to be out shaking hands. Jerry would rather be sitting at a desk making sure things run right."
Jerry Kilgore recalls it as an intense period.
"I was very focused and very driven in college," he said. "I had to have good grades to go to law school. It goes back to my grandfather. He's the person that always taught us nothing's ever given to you -- you're going to have to work for it. I always felt if I let up, that I wouldn't get to go to law school."
So he did not drink alcohol, though he says he is a social drinker now. Raised on a tobacco farm, he never smoked. Extracurricular activities included meetings of Young Republicans and Christian Fellowship. When the brothers were in law school, their parents drove to Williamsburg to bring them homemade canned goods that the brothers took turns preparing.
"Jerry Kilgore still has every brain cell he was born with," said John Owen Alderman, a law school classmate whose father was U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia in Roanoke.
Learning the Law
Alderman's father hired Kilgore after he finished law school in 1986. Jerry ended up not far from home in the U.S. attorney's Abingdon office. Terry returned to Gate City to start his law practice.
The area was being flooded with cocaine and marijuana imported by drug cartels from South America and Florida. Kilgore reached out to Tim McAfee, then the commonwealth's attorney, to form a regional task force that targeted the drug traffickers. Local and state investigators put together the cases, and Kilgore brought them before a federal grand jury.
"He and I, over the course of about two years, prosecuted probably 125 to 150 individuals," McAfee said.
In 1992, Kilgore quit the U.S. attorney's office and returned to Gate City to work for his brother, who had been elected commonwealth's attorney.
The Kilgore brothers were the only prosecutors in the office. They tried several murder cases together, sitting at the prosecution table. None involved the death penalty, which Kilgore says he advocates on principle.
