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

by Kathryn Miles

Lollie, age twenty-six,

Julie, twenty-four, had already traveled the world, volunteering in hardscrabble communities in South America, sifting through archaeological sites in Greece and Italy, surveying some of our most remote wilderness areas.

voters in Colorado approved measures to declare homosexuality abnormal and perverse.

1996

two years before Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die

year after the Olympic diver Greg Louganis sparked panic in public pools across the country after announcing h...

Lollie’s mother brought home a new spouse

that that’s when the sexual abuse started.

her life’s passion: leading sexual assault survivors like herself on wilderness expeditions as part of their healing process.

Lollie

Not even her closest friends had any idea she came from unbelievable wealth—that she would one day inherit millions.

Those studying conservation law were repeatedly reminded that barely 13 percent of all rangers and other law enforcement officers within the Department of the Interior were women.

Of those female rangers, a full three-quarters reported experiencing job discrimination; over half said they had been sexually harassed by colleagues and supervisors.

Darrell David Rice, a thirty-four-year-old computer programmer

known mental health issues and was currently in prison for another crime in Shenandoah National Park: in 1998, he had pled guilty to assaulting a female cyclist

2004 the feds had quietly dismissed their case against Rice, citing insurmountable challenges that included contradictory DNA evidence.

“without prejudice,” which allows prosecutors to retry

As federal and private watchdog groups have noted, the NPS and other federal land management agencies have a long history of not fully documenting illegal activities, including violent crimes.

They also don’t include the people who disappear from parks without a trace.

my own archival research finds that the majority of reported murder and rape victims in our national wilderness areas are female,

despite both the fact that we still constitute the minority of backcountry users

Department of Justice estimates there are currently around 500,000 backlogged requests for forensic analysis, while an estimated 170,000 DNA samples from crime scenes haven’t even been tested at all,

many of which are DNA samples taken from rape kits.

with each completed retest, there’s less of the sample to preserve for later examination,”

rain can wash away blood or erase a fingerprint, particularly if the area is experiencing warm temperatures and high humidity.

“it’s next to impossible to lift fingerprints from porous surfaces like boulders or trees.”

late 1970s that the Department of the Interior began distinguishing between two types of rangers:

interpretive, who are responsible for programming and education,

law enforcement rangers, who are cops with all the powers of st...

But maybe, just maybe, when two selfless, joyful, beautiful humans die in a place, what is left behind is not the agony of their deaths but the brilliance of their lives.

Nationwide studies by multiple independent organizations determined that national parks needed an additional twelve hundred rangers, including 615 law enforcement rangers, to adequately protect

studies also listed Shenandoah as one of the country’s five most dangerous, in large part because of its awful radios and communication system.

nationwide, fewer than 10 percent of all murders are premeditated.

Most, instead, erupt sloppily and from a quick, unplanned chain of events: a robbery goes bad; a bar fight escalates; a domestic abuser arrives home drunk and belligerent.

no evidence either women had a regular drug habit, let alone a problem; nor was there any evidence either woman had any issue with alcohol.

Stiles concluded that any lingering danger to park-goers was unlikely.

sat a white cylindrical vibrator about five inches long. Officers agreed it seemed deliberately placed. Staged, crime scene investigators call that sort of thing: a calling card left by a murderer

“Spokesperson Paul Pfenninger refused to explain why officials think other visitors were not in danger, other than to say that ‘something investigators found at the site led them to believe it was an isolated incident.’

Multiple resort employees had a history of brutal behavior toward women, and their offenses ranged from domestic abuse to attempted murder.

They said that what bothered them the most was that park officials felt no duty to warn hikers so that they could make their own decision about whether to stay or go—that hikers could have been in real danger without even knowing it

I became a reporter because I believe in the sanctity of the fourth estate: that it is the responsibility of journalists to require powerful institutions and organizations to show their work and to be held accountable when they do not.

In 1884, Edward H. Clarke, a physician and one of Pickering’s Harvard colleagues, published Sex and Education.

Clarke maintained that both physical and educational exertion came with a heavy price for women, including, but not limited to, uterine disease, hysteria, chorea (an involuntary movement disorder),

increased menstrual cramps and hemorrhaging, along with “a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an appearance of...

Clarke contended that women should be...

his theories became pervasive in American thought and defined expectations about access to wilderness for generations.

wilderness pursuits also faced a proliferation of sexually charged names for climbing and paddling routes,

(Throbbing Labias, Gang Bang, One Last Bitch), as well as continued and pervasive instances of sexual harassment.

Kristin told them. But she’d also been afraid. A female friend of hers had tried to become a ranger and very quickly decided national parks weren’t a good place to be a gay woman. Maybe the trail wasn’t either.

‘You weren’t sure it was a homicide . . . with their wrists bound?’ ‘And their throats slashed?’ chimed in another reporter. ‘That is correct,’ said Stiles. ‘That baffles the mind,’ observed a third reporter.”

Claudia Brenner, the author of Eight Bullets who had lost her partner and had braved the brutal trek out of the woods while nursing her own gunshot wounds.

Take Back the Night, the global campaign to end violence against women. Begun in the early 1970s