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June 16 - June 19, 2024
Lollie had taken a meandering route to campus. She spent her childhood in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Lollie was born directly into Ford’s massive inheritance. Her mother, Laura, for whom Lollie was named, graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, returned to Grosse Pointe, and married John Winans, a stockbroker. They established themselves at Wingford, one of the Ford family’s grandest compounds.
Her parents divorced, and her father quickly remarried, then moved to Boca Raton with his young wife. Lollie’s mother brought home a new spouse as well. Lollie would later reveal—and only to a few of her closest friends—that that’s when the sexual abuse started. According to those same friends, she tried once—and only once—to tell her mother what was happening in her bed. The response she got was harsh enough to never try again. (Laura Winans and her second husband divorced after Lollie’s death. Laura died in 2011; he died a few years later. Shortly thereafter, Lollie’s father was diagnosed
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What is perhaps more troubling is the systemic underreporting of crimes in our wild places. As federal and private watchdog groups have noted, the NPS and other federal land management agencies have a long history of not fully documenting illegal activities, including violent crimes. 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.”
Follow-up reports found that the NPS and other Department of Interior agencies failed to rectify the underreporting of crime stats.
The statistics that are recorded also only reference those incidents that clearly occur within delineated national park, forest, or wilderness areas, so 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
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And let’s be honest. Even if the true number of murders in our wilderness areas is the annual figure actually reported, it is still way, way too many. Think about it this way: Eighteen million people visit Disneyland every year. If I told you that, on average, three people are murdered in that park every year, would you think twice about taking your kids? I would.
It includes women like 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. He held her hostage in his van for three days, threatening her with a knife and beating her repeatedly. He eventually tied her to a tree and bludgeoned her to death before decapitating her.
Between 1990 and 2020, eight FBI agents and six park rangers were killed in the line of duty, a staggering number when you consider that FBI agents outnumber rangers by a scale of ten to one.
They told him the crime scene was complex. Preliminary evidence suggested a double homicide. Stiles thanked them. He sat down and penned a confidential memo outlining his thinking on the case, along with possible scenarios that would explain how two people had come to die in his park. Probably, he concluded, “one woman killed the other, then had committed suicide,” he wrote. “This was considered the most likely scenario as they were apparently in a romantic relationship, and one of the women allegedly had previous drug and alcohol problems based on other information developed as a result of
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Without naming her, he stated that one of the women in this case
had just ended her romantic relationship with a man and, as a result, was about to move out of the residence she shared with him. This final justification was, of course, also false: Julie and her roommate were not in a romantic relationship and had lived together platonically. Lollie, who had been briefly engaged two years earlier, hadn’t lived with her former fiancé, Ken, in over eighteen months.
After listing all these reasons, Stiles concluded the memo with his final determination: Decision: wait until news organizations discovered the incident on their own before making any announcement.
The climate of the press conference was tense. Journalists present were incredulous that nearly two days had passed since women had been found murdered less than a half mile from the park’s most popular resorts. When asked about the delay, the park’s spokesperson replied, “We weren’t sure a crime had been committed.” The reporters pressed for clarification. He listed some of the previous theories: natural causes, an animal attack, murder-suicide.
Stiles interjected. He told the reporters that park authorities were certain the crime was an isolated incident.
One member of the media asked what the authorities were doing to keep park visitors safe. Stiles assured them that additional rangers were being dispatched immediately to all major trails in the park. They would alert backpackers to the situation and maintain extra patrols. It was a well-intended reassurance. But there hadn’t been any additional rangers since the budget cuts back in January. And not a single hiker ever recalled receiving this notification.
That same NPS spokesperson told the AP it appeared that the women were the victims of a homicide. The AP ran that information in its story. But back in the park, authorities were still saying they had reason to believe that the event was a murder-suicide.
One of the Annes called her brother back in Minnesota. He told her the story was already on the news and that national channels were calling it a double suicide. Anne felt horrible for the women and their families, but she also felt safer with that news.
The park’s spokesperson repeated what he had said before: “It took us a while to figure out exactly what we had. It is not all that uncommon to find deceased people in the park,” he said. “It’s taken us quite a while to determine the deaths were homicides, rather than suicides or accidents.”
After the press conference, AP journalists scoured the park for visitors who had been notified of the murders, but they could find none.
A Knoxville, Tennessee, police officer phoned to say that two male thru-hikers stopped at a cafe just outside the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, where they had threatened to rape and kill a female hiker.
That feeling only intensified when I found the reports concerning Shenandoah employees. Within a week or so, reports of violent individuals and potential evidence bubbled up throughout the park. I tried to summarize them for the Annes in the least distressing way possible. But the sum total of stories was still overwhelming and disturbing. Multiple resort employees had a history of brutal behavior toward women, and their offenses ranged from domestic
abuse to attempted murder.
In Vermont, FBI agents and Shenandoah law enforcement rangers were focused on Julie’s roommate, Derek, and Lollie’s onetime fiancé, Ken. They still assumed Julie must have had a sexual relationship with the former—why else would the two of them be living together? They also assumed that relationship must have ended badly—why else would she be moving out?
Lollie confided that she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted and had barely begun to unpack the trauma it had caused, so any kind of sexual intimacy was a struggle. She suffered from endometriosis, which left her anemic and just wanting to stay in bed. That made keeping a job hard, too: she’d last just a few days cleaning hotel rooms at a resort on Lake Champlain, a few weeks pulling weeds on an organic farm, before she was too depleted to continue.
In England, the pastime was first known as “pedestrianism,” a term coined by the great Romantic walker William Wordsworth, who famously strolled, on average, twenty miles a day and wrote often of the splendor to be had roving past “endless woods / Blue pomp of lakes, high cliffs, and falling floods.”
The exclusionary nature of this pastime was something Thoreau only briefly acknowledged, lamenting in his essay “Walking”: “How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have grounds to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all.”
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.
James West, the Boy Scouts’ first chief executive, was emphatic that the Scouts and their camps remain the exclusive domain of males—a place for the kind of rugged masculinity Teddy Roosevelt espoused. And while West acknowledged that girls’ camps were also beginning to burgeon, he insisted that they remain wholly separate from male organizations. (While serving as the head of a national organization of camp directors, he also famously insisted that any director of a girl’s camp, regardless of that director’s gender, not be allowed admittance into his professional organization.)
Park administrators and FBI officials were also on hand to answer questions. Reporters asked them to concede that they had deliberately withheld information about the murders in the days immediately after they found the campsite. The park employees grew defensive. Assistant superintendent Stiles kept to his original story, which was that investigators had initially been certain they were dealing with a suicide. The Washington Blade reported on the subsequent exchange: “One [reporter] asked Stiles incredulously, ‘You weren’t sure it was a homicide . . . with their wrists bound?’ ‘And their
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Thelma Scroggins, seventy-four, was the village’s longtime mail carrier. She was also the Baptist church’s only organist. On the morning of July 14, 1996, Scroggins failed to show up for Sunday service. Her fellow parishioners knew that Thelma never missed a worship engagement. After the service, several of them walked across the street to Scroggins’s farmhouse. There, they found her lying in the front doorway, shot four times in the head. A subsequent autopsy revealed abrasions on her back, shoulders, hands, and feet. She also had contusions on her right shoulder and eyelids. Her purse and
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Local newspaper coverage at the time made repeated note of the fact that Scroggins’s house was just a few miles from the remote logging site where Alicia Showalter Reynolds’s body had been found.
On September 9, two days before what would have been Julie Williams’s twenty-fifth birthday, Sofia Silva disappeared from the front porch of her Spotsylvania home, about sixty miles east of Shenandoah. A sixteen-year-old junior at Cortland High School,
Not long after, Anne Carolyn McDaniel also went missing. McDaniel, twenty, had short brown hair and glasses. Born with cerebral palsy, she struggled to have the typical young adult experience she’d so desperately wanted.
She also told friends she’d recently started dating someone but was mysterious about the details. No one is quite sure when she disappeared, but the manager of the assisted living center reported McDaniel missing on September 20. Several of her friends said she’d told them she had a date that evening.
they found a body, badly burned and partially buried by branches and leaves. Investigators on the scene determined that the body was that of a young woman’s. Her head and neck were encircled with duct tape, which also covered her mouth and nose. Her wrists and arms were bound with the same tape. Investigators also observed decomposition, including insect activity, on her body, which had been disturbed by animals as well.
The state medical examiner determined that Silva had been strangled to death. She was wearing the same shorts and sweater her sister had last seen her in, but her bra and panties were missing.
Take, retorted Roberts, the San Francisco “trail side murders,” in which four women were killed while hiking between 1979 and 1980. Or the dozens of other women who had been killed hiking on federal and state lands. And then there was that 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. What about them? Roberts wanted to know.
On May 1, 1997, two sisters—Kristin Lisk, fifteen, and Kati Lisk, age twelve, were abducted from their home in Spotsylvania, not far from where the Silva family still lived.
Five days after they went missing, the bodies of the Lisk sisters were found in the Santa Anna River, about forty miles from their house. Both were partially clothed, and Kristin was missing her bra. Authorities would not reveal her—or Kati’s—cause of death. “The details are known only to us and the assailant,” said the Sheriff Department’s spokesperson.
When first questioned, Rice denied ever encountering Malbasha. The rangers told Rice she had identified him as her attacker. He then admitted that he had been “rude and threatening.” He said he’d thought about “going after her body” but checked himself before he did. He also said he had been up all night, had smoked marijuana, and was having trouble at work.
During the subsequent interrogation, Rice admitted to throwing a rock at the windshield of a car, which had been parked at Little Stony Man earlier that season. He said that the day before attacking Malbasha, he had been so angry at work that he slashed someone’s car tire. Johnson and Alley asked him about his assault on the cyclist: Did he think she was attractive? Was he hoping to have sex with her? No, said Rice. Mostly, he said, he was trying “to nerve-wrack her” and ruin her day. “I wanted to violate her privacy,” he told Johnson and Alley. “I was just trying to aggravate her, and I just
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When the park was conceived in the 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 “to this and succeeding generations of Americans.” It was a platitude that came across as cruel irony to the more than one hundred families who had already received eviction notices.
Take Cary Stayner, who killed four women in and around California’s Yosemite National Park in 1999. Stayner grew up a celebrity by association. His younger brother, Steven, was kidnapped at age seven by a known pedophile named Kenneth Parnell.
Through it all, Cary Stayner appeared the all-American teen. Underneath, however, he was already suffering in ways no one could imagine. He was first molested by an uncle at age eleven, who also introduced him to child pornography. At that same time, Cary’s father had begun sexually assaulting his own daughters—Cary’s sisters.
I’m an introvert who loves my quiet time and who becomes increasingly rude when I don’t get it.
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.
Despite huge advances in technology and investigation techniques, the murder clearance rate is still dropping: In the 1950s, the overwhelming majority—nearly 70
percent—of murder cases led to an arrest and conviction. Today, murder clearance rates are as low as 30 percent in some areas.
