For more than three years, the family of slain Virginia CEO Gret Glyer has been waiting for his murderer to stand trial.

A grand jury indicted Joshua Danehower in 2023 on first-degree murder for breaking into Glyer's home just before 3 a.m. in June 2022 and fatally shooting the 32-year-old nonprofit founder ten times while he was sleeping in bed next to his wife. The couple's two children — both under two years old at the time — were in the home at the time of their father's murder.

In recent days, the Glyer family been dreading the next step: Fairfax County prosecutors' long-feared decision to move forward with an insanity plea agreement that would allow Danehower to escape a life sentence. Rather than move forward with a jury trial, prosecutor Kaitlin Morgan made clear in a January 23 status hearing that the prosecution will side with the defense in favor of a "not guilty by reason of insanity plea" during a February hearing, and a judge will then decide how to proceed. Glyer's family is shocked that prosecutors are willing to indulge an insanity plea given the ample evidence of pre-meditation implicating Danehower, who allegedly penned a manifesto mapping out his murder plot.

The family has been told that if all proceeds as the prosecution desires, Danehower is likely to end up being committed to Western State Hospital, a mental asylum in Staunton, Virginia.

Last week's status hearing began a terrible new chapter in this years-long nightmare for the Glyer family, whose frustrations with Fairfax County's Democratic Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano's office run deep. Since Gret's 2022 murder, the slain Northern Virginia CEO's family alleges long-running problems with the office's prosecutorial staff, arguing that the office failed to demand a quick trial, repeatedly dismissed the family's concerns, and caved to the defense's push for a not guilty by reason of insanity plea rather than going to trial to push for life in prison.

The family also speculates that prosecutors are more preoccupied with another high-profile "au pair affair" double homicide case. As the late Gret Glyer's sister, Gizan, sees it, chief deputy commonwealth's attorney for Fairfax County Jenna Sands is now brushing her own family's case to the wayside as a result.

"She doesn’t care about us, so she’s just going to do whatever she has to do, even if it means letting a murderer go free to get her out of this mess," she told National Review in a wide-ranging interview about her brother's case.

The stakes are high. Glyer's case was originally scheduled for a December 2023 trial but was delayed amid concerns about the defendant's fitness to stand trial. But now that Danehower looks destined for hospital commitment, the Glyer's family fears that upon yearly reviews, a committed Danehower may be released someday, if medical professionals determine that he is no longer a threat to the public.

The family's public criticism of local prosecutors' handling of the case are part of a broader set of frustrations many Northern Virginia residents have with Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano, the subject of a damning investigative report written by former Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares late last year. Miyares concluded that Descano's office has a penchant for "committing Brady and discovery violations, violating crime victims' statutory and constitutional rights, entering into improper plea agreements, demonstrating prosecutorial incompetence, and enacting unlawful or unconstitutional policies," according to the report, which was based on police incident reports, victim testimony, and media reports.

According to several commonwealths' attorneys in the state, Descano has a reputation for being soft on crime, sloppy with investigations, disrespecting victims' families, and mismanaging his office. Sources say that Descano also has a history of losing staff and often struggles to maintain cases.

Long-running issues with Descano are compounded by serious competency concerns involving Eric Clingan, a former lead prosecutor on the case who was discovered drinking in public during work hours.

In August of last year, an animal shelter employee called 9-1-1 on Clingan for drinking beer in a Fairfax County parking lot around 8 a.m. According to ABC7 News, this episode was part of a pattern for Clingan: "Five different employees at businesses within the strip mall told 7News they'd also seen Clingan on several occasions, drinking and smoking in the parking lot during weekdays in the early morning hours, around 7:30 a.m. or 8 a.m., dressed in what appeared to them to be business attire," the outlet reported in September.

Clingan was not given a sobriety test the day he was caught, even though the charging officer recognized Clingan and could be heard on body camera footage telling his superior he could "definitely smell alcohol coming off his breath," according to footage obtained by ABC7 News. The officer then implied that Clingan was being given a break because of his position. "What has happened over in that parking lot is done. OK? What I mean is there's no arrest. I'll put it that way," the officer told Clingan. "I immediately recognized you, because if we had a newer officer show up and they don't recognize you, you'd have been done."

A judge later dismissed the charge in October following a motion from the charging officer, and he remains on payroll in Descano's office. Clingan is no longer on the Glyer case, which is now being handled by chief deputy commonwealth's attorney for Fairfax County Jenna Sands, according to the family.

The Glyer case underscores the often-frustrating process that surrounds insanity pleas for victims and their families. In this case, both the defense and prosecution opted for psychological evaluations, both of which concluded that the defendant was insane at the time he committed the crime.

That's a common defense in criminal cases. Over time, though, psychological experts often develop a reputation for recommending lighter sentences, Virginia commonwealth attorneys tell NR. Gizan Glyer alleges that in her brother's case, the prosecution opted for a psychiatrist with a lenient reputation.

Glyer's family was told by the prosecution team that the evaluation was conducted by Dr. Eric Drogin, a Harvard Medical School lecturer, and that the psychiatrist never met with the defendant in person but instead met with him over Zoom, a video conferencing platform.

A victim family member in another high-profile murder case seems to have had a similar experience. According to Gizan Glyer, a man named Fabio Andrade contacted the slain CEO's family to share his personal experience with Drogin, whose expert testimony resulted in his ex-wife being committed to a mental hospital rather than serving time in prison for the murder of their two-year-old daughter.

Gizan characterizes this third-party clinician's reputation as one that is "very pro rehabilitation" in recommending hospital commitments over criminal sentences for defendants with mental health issues. "The prosecution was working against us by choosing a defendant’s psychiatrist because then they got the result they wanted because they don’t want to go to trial," she said.

Making matters worse, the victim's family is completely in the dark about what kind of mental illness — or illnesses — Danehower has allegedly been diagnosed with. The prosecutors have told the Glyers that Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) bars victims from obtaining access to the defendant's medical records. But the family maintains that witness evaluations chosen by the court require the defendant to forfeit those rights in Virginia cases, meaning a judge has the discretion to unseal the documents if he wishes.

The Glyers also say that the psychological testimony cuts against evidence presented in the case, including a manifesto allegedly authored by Danehower and reviewed by the Glyer family that detailed the murder plot and how he planned to get away with it. According to local media reports, the Glyers said Danehower went on one date with the victim's wife more than a decade ago. The victim's sister told NR that Danehower posed as an interested investor in Gret's company and had a business meeting with him, and that the defendant attended the same church as her brother's family the year of the murder.

"This guy knew what he was doing was wrong, because he wrote a plan of not only how to kill my brother Gret, but how to get away with it," Gizan said. "So, he knew he was doing something wrong, and we saw with our own eyes the step-by-step plan that he hand-wrote about, how to get away, how to wear the dark clothes so he’s not seen going in the middle of the night, running away, getting on the fastest exit to get to his house."

"If you’re insane and you don’t know the difference between right and wrong, you’re not gonna go at night, you’re not gonna go at three in the morning, you’re not gonna tiptoe through the backdoor," the victim's father, Grid Glyer, said earlier this month.

According to Gizan Glyer, the prosecutors have communicated to the late Virginia CEO's family that they don't want to argue against their own psychological expert in court. So instead of moving forward with a criminal trial, the prosecutors have agreed to an insanity plea.

"The Glyer family's hurt and disappointment is completely valid and more than understandable,” Laura Birnbaum, chief of staff for the Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney’s office, said in a statement to NR. “Before [Friday’s] hearing, our clinical expert found the defendant to be legally insane at the time of the offense, which now makes two independent experts who have reached that conclusion—these findings mean the Commonwealth would be unable to meet our burden of proof at a trial. Individuals who are found to be legally insane are remanded indefinitely to a Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services facility.”

Pressed for comment on Danehower's psychological diagnosis and the manifesto detailing the alleged murder plot, defense attorney Bryan Kennedy told NR that "any criminal case involving a death is tragic for people on all sides," especially in cases involving mental illness.

"These cases are often complex and difficult to understand when one does not have all of the facts," Kennedy said. "The important information in the case is often limited to the legal teams for each side. I would caution anyone attempting to judge the decisions made by either party in a complex criminal case such as this when they are not privy to all of the important information at issue."

As the Glyers approach the next hearing, they're hoping a judge will consider a criminal trial over an NGRI plea deal. For now, justice has never felt so far away.

"My original hope, based on the evidence, was that he would be convicted of first-degree murder, sentenced to life in prison, and in Virginia there is no parole, so basically he would die in prison, and we would never have to worry about him again," Gret's father maintains. "But unless we get a trial, we will have to worry about him every year because he could be released at any time."

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Virginia Prosecutors Poised to Let CEO's Alleged Murderer Off on Insanity Plea, over Family's Objections

Joshua Danehower allegedly wrote a manifesto mapping out his plan before he broke into Gret Glyer's home and shot ... READ MORE

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