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

by Kathryn Miles

Unity College’s environmental studies focus evolved out of necessity, mainly because the campus had plenty of outdoor spaces and not much in the way of classrooms or technology. But by the time I arrived to teach, it had become a bona fide leader in the field. Even then, the campus population was small: about five hundred students and thirty faculty members.

In 1997, the year after Lollie’s death, Unity administrators erected a massive stone fireplace in the college’s welcome center and dedicated it in her memory. The college also endowed a women’s leadership award in her name.

Eventually, she settled on her life’s passion: leading sexual assault survivors like herself on wilderness expeditions as part of their healing process. That led her to Unity College, where she pursued a bachelor’s degree in outdoor recreation and leadership, or what we now call adventure therapy.

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.

I had no idea that, eight years earlier, a drifter and wanted man named Paul David Crews had shot to death twenty-six-year-old thru-hiker Geoff Hood, then raped and fatally stabbed Hood’s girlfriend and hiking partner, twenty-five-year-old Molly LaRue. Crews had then stolen their gear and left both hikers to bleed to death where I now sat eating my snack.

Claudia Brenner’s Eight Bullets: One Woman’s Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence, a firsthand account of the attack just off the AT in Pennsylvania’s Michaux State Forest that killed Brenner’s partner, Rebecca Wight, and seriously wounded Brenner. Unbeknownst to either woman, they had been followed by Stephen Roy Carr, a local man, as they hiked down a spur trail and began setting up camp next to a remote stream. Carr repeatedly fired his .22 caliber rifle at the women.

The fact is that it wasn’t just the friends and family of Julie and Lollie who had been traumatized by their brutal deaths. It was also thousands of individuals like me who identify as female or queer or any other marginalized identity that makes them potential targets in the wilderness.

Julie Williams and Lollie Winans were two of eight women and girls killed in the rural Shenandoah Valley over the course of just fourteen months.

In a 2002 study, rangers revealed that they didn’t report crime information in order to “protect their image” or because “no one ever asked them to.” The authors of the resulting report concluded that the collective failure to maintain and study crime information was a serious and ongoing problem within the Department of the Interior and that most senior park administrators were unaware of the crime rates at their parks.

Meredith Emerson, twenty-four, who was abducted in 2008 just after she and her dog completed a hike on Georgia’s Blood Mountain, part of the AT. Her kidnapper, Gary Hilton, had already murdered two other female hikers, along with an elderly couple who had been camping in a national forest, when he came upon Emerson.

“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.”

The police then asked every male resident of their village—about five thousand men in all—to contribute a DNA sample of their own. Subsequent lab analysis eventually found their murderer. A year later in the United States, Tommie Lee Andrews, a serial rapist, became the first American convicted based on mtDNA evidence and testing.

But here’s the thing about those sorts of shows and stories: they are as aseptically presented as meat in a grocery store. Ratings standards and broadcast regulations usually strip these programs of what is most grotesque about violent crime: the blood and feces and battered tissue; the awkward and often humiliating ways bodies come to rest.

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.

credit cards lying on the side of a road back in the town center of Culpeper. Two days later, a woman discovered Showalter Reynolds’s size 2 jacket lying in the mud near a remote pond about ten miles away. There was still no sign of Alicia. State police escalated their missing-person’s search.

Atop the pile, perfectly centered on a black canvas bag, 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 to make a statement or to confuse investigators. Investigators weren’t sure what kind of message

When I had first visited Shenandoah, one of the rangers quipped that the best hiring day at the park’s lodges was Thursday, when the nearby prison released inmates. I’d assumed that the joke was just cynical law enforcement humor, but now I had begun to see the park through their eyes: rangers weren’t just policing visitors; they were also policing their own staff—and sometimes for good reason.

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.

One afternoon, I sat with an elderly family member in her living room as a story about the movement sprawled across her television. They should just learn to be quiet and take it, she complained. That’s what I had to do. It took her assertion to make me think about just how dangerous it can be to remain quiet.

Sex and Education. In this book, 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 Amazonian coarseness and force.” For that reason alone, Clarke contended that women should be kept inside.

I also wanted to understand the impact of their deaths on the outdoor industry. Mitten and I talked on the phone for multiple hours over the course of several days. She spoke at length about the pressures and harassment encountered by women, gay, and nonbinary people in the field of outdoor recreation during the 1970s and 1980s.

Julie and I were just two years apart and had grown up in remarkably similar midwestern communities. In so many ways, flipping through those books was like looking at my own childhood: First Communions, backyard fish fries, snowy Easter egg hunts.

Randall Smith, who had pled guilty to the 1981 AT murders of Robert Mountford Jr. and Laura Susan Ramsay in Virginia’s Washington and Jefferson National Forest, was about to be released from prison.

They’d call it Take Back the Trails and host hikes and other consciousness-raising events the following May to mark the one-year anniversary of the Shenandoah murders.

Staff members of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy objected to the plan. They thought the initiative was incorrectly implying that Lollie and Julie had been murdered on the trail. They worried that focusing on Lollie and Julie’s gender excluded the men who had been killed on the trail. They pointed to the fact that more than seventy-seven million people had safely hiked the trail, so what exactly needed taking back?

disorganized criminals are sloppy. They tend to kill in what criminologists call a blitz attack—a sudden shower of violence that often leaves their victims ravaged far beyond the fatal wound.

Organized criminals, on the other hand, are driven by logic and planning. They’re like Hollywood’s depiction of the classic serial killer, often motivated by years of fantasy and the rush they get mentally rehearsing each step of their crime. They target their victims based on criteria like age or appearance or lifestyle. They practice surveillance of both victims and potential crime scenes.

In 1993, the US Supreme Court heard the case of Wisconsin v. Mitchell. Todd Mitchell had been part of a group of young Black men who, after watching Mississippi Burning, had decided to seek retribution against white oppression. They targeted a white fourteen-year-old boy and beat him until he was unconscious.

In 2018, Brenner collaborated with documentary filmmaker Austin Bunn on the short film In the Hollow, which commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the attack.

Becky Dowski and Cathy Thomas were the first of four couples killed on and around the Colonial Parkway between 1986 and 1989.

Currently, at least 250,000 active murder investigations in the United States don’t just remain unsolved; they have also gone cold, which is to say that they are no longer being investigated.

the NPS has the lowest clearance rate among law enforcement agencies nationally. One big problem, Mains told me during a break, is the lack of resources for law enforcement.

“Far too often, investigators who have worked a case for a while will become entrenched in their own theories. As a result, they’ll literally funnel every new piece of evidence through their account of the crime. And if a piece of evidence seems to call that theory into question, they’ll downplay or even disregard it.” It’s a phenomenon known as confirmation bias—as humans, we are predisposed to favor any information or opinion that affirms our preconceptions.

A recent study found that 80 percent of all wrongful convictions occurred because of demonstrable confirmation bias on the part of both investigators and prosecutors. This bias included everything from misjudging witness reliability to preventing laboratory testing of evidence

“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.”

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

It’s what theorist Kate Manne describes in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny as an extreme example of the policing and enforcing of women’s subordination by punishing those who flout “patriarchal law and order.” Misogyny, she contends, works by creating threatening consequences for women who violate or challenge those perceived patriarchal norms.

the opportunist, who often put little planning and forethought into the crime (and thus often leaves plenty of evidence), and the power-assertive criminal, who prowls like a predator, constantly looking for excuses to use force. She explained the power-reassurance offender, who is motivated by feelings of inadequacy and a robust fantasy world, and the sexual sadist, who just really gets off on thinking through different ways to torture people.

only a fraction of the key documents involved: one document would reference another not included in the files, or a twenty-seven-page file would be missing half its pages. Enright began keeping a list of what was missing.

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.

“noble cause corruption,” which Berkowitz described to me as “an approach to law enforcement where a desire to put bad guys in jail is used as justification for bending the rules.”

That’s so typical of women that they can be so nice when they need something from you and then turn around and hurt you after they get it.