Manassas Journal Messenger | Two men found dead in Manassas home

Two “young men” — one black and one white — were found dead inside a house at 9405 Fairview Ave. at 2:20 p.m. Monday, after the couple that lives in the house returned from a week-and-a-half long vacation, Manassas police said.

As of Monday evening, police hadn’t made a positive identification of either victim. The white man was found in the upstairs dining room, and the black man was found in the basement. Both died of apparent gunshot wounds.

The couple, described as being in their sixties, had been gone since May 22. A “young man in his twenties” was housesitting for them, Sgt. Bill Goodman, city police spokesman said.

City police were interviewing the man Monday night. It was unclear what his relationship is to the couple. Police called him a “person of interest,” but stopped short of calling the man a suspect. The two victims are acquaintances of his, Goodman said. Police would not say why they were in the home.

There are several guns in the house. Police will need to wait for an autopsy report to match the spent rounds with a particular weapon, Goodman said. Ballistics tests will be conducted by the Northern Virginia forensics lab utilized by regional law enforcement.

Police will also have to wait for autopsy results to determine when the victims were killed; they believe it happened within the last few days.

The bodies were still inside the house Monday evening, as crime scene technicians in special boots, wearing latex gloves combed the house.

Next-door neighbor Debbie Cain, 39, said she neither saw nor heard anything over the weekend, with the exception of a young man cutting the grass. She didn’t see lights on once throughout the weekend.

The couple, who she knew only as the Taylors, are “very to themselves,” she said. None of the neighbors interviewed had ever met the Taylors, including Dave Boynton, 58, who has lived two houses down on the other side of Fairview for 22 years. No one saw or heard a thing.

The house is barely 200 yards from the police station.

“This is nerve racking,” Cain said. “I always thought living down the street from the police station, you’re safe.”

The house is quaint, with cream-colored siding, black shutters, and a brown roof. A fountain garden adjacent to a small picnic area is at its right side. Thick, green bushes sit in front of the house at the edge of the freshly cut grass.