CARLISLE, Pa. — A Cumberland County grandmother is facing up to 20 years in prison for her role in the murder of her husband.
Virginia Hayden, from Carlisle, pled "Nolo Contendere" to third-degree murder and tampering with public records or information. Nolo Contendere is a sentence where the same fundamental consequences of a guilty plea are enforced, but there is no official admission of guilt.
Hayden could serve seven to 20 years for her role in the murder of her husband, Thomas Hayden Sr., who went missing in 2011.
She was charged with homicide more than seven years after some of Thomas Hayden's remains were found in a plastic Food Saver shopping bag near the Conewago Creek in Dover, York County.
At the time they were found, investigators did not know who the remains were because there was no DNA match until 2021 when the victim's brothers volunteered samples to be tested against the contents of the bag.
The request for the DNA samples came four years after Thomas Hayden’s biological daughter, Kim Via, called state police in Carlisle to ask them to check on her father.
Via had been estranged from her father since 2005, later trying to call him only to be turned away by her stepmother, Virginia.
When police went to the first block of Eastgate Drive in Carlisle to do a welfare check and stop by Virginia’s apartment, they found that Thomas Hayden had apparently been missing since 2011 when the couple still lived in York County.
In police interviews, Virginia told police that Thomas had left Pennsylvania one night in 2011 to seek medical treatment for ALS. However, Virginia provided two different accounts of his departure.
During the investigation, it was also found that Virginia Hayden had forged Thomas' signature on legal documents multiple times since his disappearance, including on the transfer of the deed to their home and a title for their trailer.
Virginia Hayden had allegedly also been collecting her husband's Social Security benefits in the couple's shared account years after his disappearance. In 2021 she was accused of collecting $113,471 in his benefits until 2017.
Police charged Virginia Hayden with homicide after experts and FBI analysts examined the bloodstained items found in the FoodSaver bag and a medical expert analyzed Thomas Hayden's medical records, police reports, the items found in the FoodSaver bag, and photographs of Hayden.
Police also obtained records from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that showed that Virginia had bought a .357 caliber handgun from a store in York on October 2, 2011. When police asked her where the gun was, she told police that she had sold the gun through a dealer, but there are no ATF records of a sale.
Police executed a search warrant on Virginia’s home and also found a lock box that contained Thomas’s driver’s license, Social Security and Medicare cards along with his passport.
