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

by Kathryn Miles

Park authorities were less than enthused. They wrote to Roberts and said they weren’t sure they could grant a permit for something that seemed so inherently political. Roberts was angry.

“Actually, I was really pissed,” she says now. “It’s like they were panicked that a group of lesbians were about to start protesting in the park and generating bad press.”

1995 report that had found that over half of all women working in outdoor industries had been sexually assaulted or harassed while in the field.

The FBI also began echoing the notion that Silva and the Lisks were most likely killed by a pedophile.

They forgot thst Shawcross killed chidren and adult women

Rice, I knew, had been arrested and convicted for the 1997 assault on Malbasha.

Tim described again his frustration with the FBI’s decision to process the evidence at the park.

FBI DESTROYED EVIDENCE ACIDENTLY

Results from this test confirmed that the DNA did not belong to Rice. Nevertheless, the prosecution still felt they had a case.

attack on Claudia Brenner and Rebecca Wight and the fact that their assailant had never attempted to hide his disdain for their relationship.

“I never got a taste that Rice had any problems with gays,” Tim said. “His roommate was gay. Some of his friends were gay.”

Rice had started to fall apart well before May of 1996 and that he had serious mental issues.

How does this guy who’s so mentally unstable pull this crime off?

early 1930s, the federal government began evicting homesteading families in order to claim land through eminent domain.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened the park with a grand speech on July 4, 1936, dedicating Shenandoah

By the time the park was completed, more than five hundred families had been displaced,

many of whom were Native American, forcibly removed from their homes during the establishment of our national parks.

“I keep going back to Rice’s mental state and what a mess even his truck was,” she told me. “How could he have pulled off such a bold, organized crime?”

It rarely, if ever, occurs to a disorganized offender to plan a crime in advance or to make any attempt to hide evidence.

Like their homes and vehicles, the crime scenes of disorganized criminals are sloppy.

tend to kill in what criminologists call a blitz attack—a sudden shower of violence that often leaves their victims r...

Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded federal hate crime laws to include any crime that causes—or attempts to cause—bodily injury because of a person’s race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force had issued a sobering report: Eighty percent of LGBT people surveyed said they had been verbally harassed or abused.

Nearly 50 percent said they had been threatened with violence. Seventeen percent said they’d actually been assaulted.

Theirs is not the only unsolved murder in the area. The FBI has also yet to solve the 1986 case of Becky Dowski and Cathy Thomas,

young women brutally murdered at a wilderness area on Virginia’s Colonial Parkway, about 150 miles southeast of Shenandoah

No signs of sexual assault or robbery were found; however, cigarette butts were discovered in Thomas’s vehicle (neither woman smoked).

parallels between their deaths and the killing of Becky Dowski and Cathy Thomas:

Becky Dowski and Cathy Thomas were the first of four couples killed on and around the Colonial Parkway between 1986 and 1989. Known colloquially as “the Colonial Parkway murders,”

Currently, at least 250,000 active murder investigations in the United States don’t just remain unsolved; they have also gone cold,

“Start at the beginning and investigate the case all over again. Assume they got it wrong the first time,” he said, finishing his coffee. “Doubt leads to inquiry. And inquiry leads to the truth.”

definitely enough similarities between these two cases for them to be at least considered together.

Colonial Parkway and the Shenandoah murders,

“In both cases, we have them being bound, being gagged, having their throats cut. These three acts together, the sheer togetherness of them, stands out to me as a linkage,”

it’s also about the omission,” she explained. “In both cases, you’d expect it to be sexually motivated.

most serial killers change their MO over time.

David Carpenter, the so-called Trailside Killer. Between 1979 and 1981, he murdered at least seven different women, all of whom were hiking on trails in state and national parks outside San Francisco.

Carpenter said he just got bored killing people the same way.

Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, managed to kill more than forty women in a twenty-year period

Ridgway’s efforts to throw off authorities by altering his crimes.

he always passed the requisite polygraph test.

Regarding Julie and Lollie’s case, Laura Richards felt confident that the murderer had become proficient over time.

“In our culture, the lives of women and girls seem to be not worth so much—particularly to law enforcement.”

to Ann Burgess. Born in 1936,

Her early research specialty was working with rape survivors.

At age eighty-three, Burgess was still teaching full-time at Boston College

TV show Mindhunter created lightly fictionalized versions of her, along with Douglas and Ressler, as their main characters.

I offered the students what Burgess and I had decided were probably the four most likely suspect scenarios,

(1) Darrell Rice had, in fact, killed the two women; (2) it had been a ranger or park employee; (3) a local poacher or homesteader was responsible; and (4) a yet unnamed serial killer murdered the women.

most students selected the park ranger or employee, followed by the unnamed serial killer.

landmark 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland requires federal prosecutors to disclose all exculpatory evidence prior to a trial.

The federal government was under intense pressure to solve the case and assure Americans they were secure in the nation’s wilderness areas.