ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 14, 1996 TAG: 9602140048
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on February 17, 1996.
A story in Wednesday's paper gave the wrong age for Theresa
Gillespie, a Virginia Tech graduate student who was found dead on
campus. Gillespie was 26.
The death of a talented young poet at Virginia Tech remained a mystery Tuesday, the day after her body was found by a passer-by.
Tech police and a state medical examiner said an autopsy on Theresa C. Gillespie, 27, was inconclusive. Her fully clothed body was found inside the fence around a rappelling tower. No evidence of trauma was discovered, said Tech Police Chief Mike Jones.
Blood and tissue samples are being sent to a toxicology lab for further evaluation, said Dr. David Oxley, deputy chief medical examiner for Western Virginia.
"I can't tell you a whole lot, because it's still a very active and ongoing investigation," Jones said. "We have a young lady who died on the grounds of the university of unknown causes, and we're proceeding from there."
Tech English professor Anne Cheney dined with Gillespie, a graduate student in the English department, and Gillespie's husband, Clyde, at Maxwell's in Blacksburg on Saturday night.
"Theresa left first, and I didn't think too much about that, because she was very tired," Cheney said.
That was the last time Clyde Gillespie saw his wife, according to his brother, Gene, who answered the phone Tuesday at Gillespie's house.
"She was a graduate student and had a whole circle of friends," and it "wasn't uncommon" for her to have been gone for a night, he said.
"It just seems like a terrible accident," Gene Gillespie said.
Clyde Gillespie said he was too upset to talk on the phone for very long Tuesday. But the real estate appraiser, who married his wife just more than four years ago, said their meeting was "kind of like love at first sight."
Theresa Gillespie was remembered Tuesday as a talented and sensitive writer. She recently was an associate editor and contributor to Cheney's book, "Dead Snakes, Cats, and the IRS: Poetry of Rock and Rebellion." A Richmond native, she graduated from Tech in 1993 and had begun graduate school this semester.
"She was a very sensitive, passionate kind of person, and her poetry was a poetry of extremes, really," said Tech professor Lucinda Roy, who had taught her when Gillespie was an undergraduate.
Her work was "a glorious celebration of poems that dealt with profound loss, and there really wasn't much that was in between with Theresa," Roy said.
Gillespie's writing "was really good to begin with, and then it really became exceptional," said Roy, who had lunch with the young writer from time to time to encourage her in her work.
Cheney also met Theresa Gillespie during Gillespie's undergraduate years. She said she now realizes there was "a quiet genius sitting there" in her class. Gillespie could have scaled the heights of the writing world, Cheney said.
"Pulitzer. No doubt in my mind about it. It would have taken her 10 or 20 years. We even joked about it Saturday night."
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB