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

by Kathryn Miles

the park service’s mission and the kinds of “idealistic employees” it tends to attract. Some rangers, he said, think little of covering up incidents—including crimes—in order to protect their park’s image or to cover for someone who they believe is otherwise a “good guy.”

whistleblowers have come forward to say that their supervisors prohibited them from investigating crimes in national parks or later covered up evidence that crimes ever occurred.

Internal investigations in recent years have found huge deficiencies in training and oversight of NPS law enforcement officers and their supervisors.

Since the 1990s, the agency has increasingly been pulled in the direction of counterterrorism work, stretching its already thin staff.

FBI

recent study by the National Registry of Exonerations found that at least 2,663 innocent people have been exonerated of criminal convictions since 1980.

In more than 50 percent of these cases, official misconduct (including witness tampering, concealing or fabricating evidence, and inappropriate interrogation techniques), directly contributed to the false convictions.

different approaches between forensic archeologists like him and police work. “Law enforcement isn’t really trained to think of the outdoors like field anthropologists and archaeologists are.

most surprised me at the time were the lengths the FBI went in an attempt to elicit a confession from Darrell Rice.

At the heart of these efforts was a four-year-long sting operation that undoubtedly cost a significant amount of money, even by federal agency standards

June 25, 2002, an interstate all-points bulletin was issued for Richard Marc Evonitz, a thirty-eight-year-old white male from Columbia, South Carolina.

FBI said that Evonitz had received “only a cursory look” in Julie and Lollie’s case, despite the fact that he was not at work and no one could account for his whereabouts on May 26 and 27, 1996.

To date, according to the national Innocence Project, at least seventy cases involving people wrongly convicted of serious crimes were done so based, at least in part, on erroneous hair sampling.

“In almost every exoneration case, the only way to free a client is to prove someone else is guilty.

“They totally dropped the inquiry into Evonitz,” Deirdre explained. “And at that point, they had no reason to do that.

All my FOIA requests regarding Evonitz’s DNA have been denied,

I also asked if Evonitz’s DNA was ever listed on CODIS, the national database that allows for instant matches in new and unsolved cases. That request was also denied.

FBI FOIA officer stated that that information “is not in the public’s best interest and thus does not meet the Freedom of Information standard.”

something as simple as washing a load of laundry was enough to deposit those cells on other people’s clothing

Every other profiler, investigator, and scientist says that the preponderance of the evidence makes a strong case that Rice is innocent and that Marc Evonitz is a far stronger suspect.