When Taylor started college, she became fond of a school mate, Jake Cunningham. She liked him enough to tell her girlfriends, including her roommate, and her mother, Janet Pelasara, about him. On the day Taylor disappeared, her roommate sensed that Taylor was "down" because the relationship with Jake was not going as she'd hoped.

"I saw her later," Ellsworth told the Virginian-Pilot. "She was walking away from the dorms with the boy." Then later she saw Taylor and Jake together again, possibly going to dinner at the Village Café. Then again later that evening, Ellsworth saw Taylor for the last time at their dorm room after Jake had walked her back from the Village Café. "Taylor came in. I said, 'So, you got back with that guy.' She said, 'Kind of.' "

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From that last night that Taylor was seen alone, the facts are few and stark. Her skeletal remains were found lying in a remote area in Mathews County and Ben Fawley has admitted to causing her death by restricting her intake of air. Fawley claims that they were having consensual sex when she accidentally died. Fawley says he panicked and left her body on an isolated farm near the property owned by parents of Erin Crabill, a former girlfriend. What really happened that night, if it is known by anyone other than Ben Fawley, is not been made public and may be left for the courts to decide.

The medical examiner's report on cause of death, if it is complete, has not been made public. Considering Taylor Behl's youth and the decomposition of her remains, two very possible causes of death — strangulation and suffocation — may not be verifiable. Renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden has indicated that in the case of suffocation, fiber evidence that would initially be present on Taylor's face may have disappeared considering the amount of decomposition and the open environment in which her body was placed. Also, it is possible for a younger person to be strangled and not have the hyoid bone broken. The hyoid is the U-shaped bone of the neck that is fractured in one-third of all homicides by strangulation.

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