Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

by Kathryn Miles

“Far too often, women are prey in our culture,” she told me. “And there are more guys than we’d like to admit who go out in the wilderness to hunt them.”

admitted to the Annes that while I still believed the overwhelming majority of hikers are good people, reading report after report of these individuals left me feeling overwhelmed and exposed. So too did the reports of the number of convicted sex offenders, pedophiles, and wanted criminals who were in the park the week Julie and Lollie were killed, which made me wonder just how many dangerous sadists hung out in national parks and whether the rest of us ought to avoid public lands entirely.

to be governed by your admirations rather than by your disgusts;

“Crime is never senseless from the criminal’s point of view,” Burgess reminded her students.

How, I wondered, could the case have ever made it so far if Rice was innocent? “It happens all the time,” said Gerry. As far as Zerkin is concerned, there is a direct correlation between the notoriety of a case, the stakes for the prosecution, and the pressure they feel to get a conviction—sometimes at any cost.

I still thought long and hard about contacting the man and asking if my memories of that night were all wrong. But I knew in my heart they weren’t. And in the end, I decided I didn’t want to hear anything he had to say. What really mattered was that I had somehow managed to find my own voice in spite of him.