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

by Kathryn Miles

Today, there is still a subset of white men who view the wilderness as exclusively their domain and actively employ misogynistic or racist techniques in a misguided attempt to maintain that. Each

Fuck those fucker

But it’s okay, I’m going to be fine, she wrote to her best friend from St. Cloud. Every now and then, God scrapes a little bit of frost off my windshield and peeks in to see if I’m okay.

At that observation, Deirdre grew uncharacteristically somber. “Pretty much everywhere I drive around here, I pass the site of a place where another woman’s body was found,” she told me. “It makes me so very angry.”

I still wake up with a start, but these days the precipitating emotion is the kind of anger I imagine people like Deirdre Enright experience all the time. I’m angry that amateurs like me or Bill Thomas need to police law enforcement and uncover the deficiencies and mistakes in their investigations. I’m angry that women like the Annes are still too traumatized to hike alone and that every year there is demonstrable evidence that women, African Americans, and nonbinary and LGBTQ people have good reason to wonder if they are safe in the wilderness, which in many ways is still considered a white male domain. I’m angry that since I began writing this book, other backpackers have been murdered and assaulted hiking our nation’s trails, including the AT, and that those killers have left grieving families behind. I’m angry about the other people who have been murdered in our national wilderness since I began this project, including a grandmother and granddaughter in Shenandoah National Park. I’m angry that Lollie Winans’s parents died before ever learning what happened to their daughter and that grieving parents like the Williamses and Showalters still go to bed at night praying for their own. Then I work my way through the now familiar catalog of women Marc Evonitz kept in his journals and secret chests, the stacks of hotel receipts he preserved from the places those women lived. I think about their families and worry that some of them may have been left to wonder what became of t...