An act of friendship led to her murder

STUARTS DRAFT—When Jennifer Marie Bassett was 10 or 11 years old, she was walking with a friend, Hillary Layman, when they encountered a dead squirrel.

“She made me sit down on the curb and pray for this squirrel’s soul,” recalls Layman, now 25 and living near Los Angeles.

Bassett was always thinking about other people—lost souls, animals, the new kid in school—and often to her detriment, Layman and relatives say.

That need to nurture got Bassett killed April 25, 2004, while she was sheltering a young mother and her baby in her rented mobile home in Stuarts Draft. The mother had left an abusive boyfriend.

Layman recalls moving to town and attending her first day at Stuarts Draft Elementary in the fourth grade. As Layman worried about where to sit, Bassett sought her out and introduced Layman to her circle of friends. Later, they formed a quartet that would be inseparable through high school.

Bassett acted as the group’s better angel—the one who admonished her friends not to miss curfew.

“She was the good girl in the group,” says Layman, who graduated last year from the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore and hopes to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing at the University of Southern California.

“She’d never want to worry her parents,” she says of Bassett. “She was the nicest, sweetest girl I’ve ever known.”

Family and friends recall Bassett’s constant smile, her good nature, how she’d even laugh at bad jokes so the joke-teller wouldn’t feel bad.

Bassett and Layman graduated from Stuarts Draft High in 1999. Layman left for college in Baltimore, and Bassett attended Radford University for one year. When Bassett died at age 23, she was a certified nursing assistant at Augusta Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Fishersville and a part-time shift supervisor at the Verona Dairy Queen.

Those who knew her were struck by her innocence, which bordered on naiveté.

She would lend money to anyone who needed it, even if it meant going without.

Her mother, Dianne Bassett, recalls receiving a collect phone call from her daughter during her year at Radford.

“She was so excited,” Dianne Bassett says. “She said, ‘Mom, I’ve found a great way to call you, and it’s free!’ ”

Dianne Bassett just laughed and told her daughter, “When you call 1-800-COLLECT, it’s not free for me.”

Army Sgt. Mike Bassett, Jenny’s brother, built a memorial pond at his parents’ Stuarts Draft home so they could sit on their front porch and think about their daughter. He helped scatter his sister’s ashes at her favorite place - a South Carolina lake where she learned to kneeboard.

“She didn’t have a whole lot, but she was always helping out other people,” says Mike Bassett, 23, who is stationed at Fort Detrick, Md. “She always got hurt financially. She’s finally in a place where she can’t be hurt any more.”