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

by Kathryn Miles

Hatred is the enemy of justice, regardless of its source.

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.”

in many of our national forests and recreation areas, responsibility for investigating crimes actually falls to state and local authorities, who may not forward data to the federal government.

they don’t include crimes that occur in forests and deserts just outside of park borders, nor do they account for crimes in places like state parks, state forests, or locally conserved land. They also don’t include the people who disappear from parks without a trace. Most of these cases fly under the radar—so much so, in fact, that the NPS can’t even say for sure how many people have gone missing on its eighty-four million acres of public land.

“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.”

I’ve always been agnostic about notions of the afterlife or the presence of ghosts and spirits, but I do believe that violence leaves some kind of metaphysical trace.

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.

iconic essay “Walking.” In it, he advocates for “absolute freedom and wildness” gained when we see ourselves as a part of nature.

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

“Crime is never senseless from the criminal’s point of view,” Burgess reminded her students.

I hate all the things that make her great more than I love them right now. Her ease in talking with friends and casual manner of shooting the breeze—her presence and honesty. Those are all things I am now afraid of. I see how they work against me.”