The Colonial Parkway Murders, the Route 29 Stalker and the Shenandoah Park Murders in Virginia - Could There Be a Connection? Labyrinth13.com

The slayings along the Colonial Parkway, a scenic route in the State of Virginia that stretches from Yorktown to Jamestown, marked the beginning of a series of killings in what is known as the Tidewater area of Virginia in the late 1980s. Six people were killed and two others are missing and presumed dead. The notorious slayings - dubbed the Colonial Parkway murders - have perplexed detectives for years. As the Morgan Harrington murder, the Shenandoah National Park slayings, and Route 29 Stalker cases remain unsolved, authorities are taking a new look at the most horrific serial killings in Virginia history.

After Julie Williams and Lollie Winans were killed at their Shenandoah National Park campsite in June 1996, the FBI noted "striking" similarities to the slayings of two other young women found dead in another national park in Virginia a decade earlier.

The next month, an FBI supervisor said the two cases would be compared to see if the four women were victims of the same killer.

But 14 years later, 24 years after Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski were found dead in Colonial National Historical Park, information from law enforcement sources, government documents and victims' family members reveals that those forensic tests were not conducted.

Families of the victims are shocked not only that the evidence in the two cases was not compared, but also that some men who fit the FBI profile for Thomas' and Dowski's killer and who were suggested as suspects in the Williams and Winans case were not fully explored.

"I am horrified that after publicly maintaining that they saw strong parallels between my sister's and Rebecca Dowski's deaths and Julie Williams' and Lollie Winans' deaths that they failed to do what they said they were going to do," said Bill Thomas, brother of victim Cathleen Thomas.

He and other family members of victims want the cases forensically compared and all suspects thoroughly evaluated.

"Even for their own protection, why don't we rule these people out?" Thomas said.

The FBI has renewed its investigation into what's known as the Colonial Parkway murders, sending 130 pieces of evidence to its lab at Quantico for retesting earlier this year. And FBI supervisor A.J. Turner, who is in charge of that probe, said the Shenandoah slayings would be reviewed for possible links.

But he stopped short of promising lab comparisons of evidence from the two cases, saying the tests would be requested only if investigators believe it would be "fruitful."

Given the FBI's failure to follow up in the Shenandoah case on a possible link to known serial killer Richard Marc Evonitz, victims' families question whether their loved ones will ever receive justice.

In October 1986, Rebecca Dowski, 21, and Cathleen Thomas, 27, had begun a romantic relationship.

Dowski, a college senior in Williamsburg, and Thomas, a stockbroker living about 75 minutes away in Virginia Beach, often drove to the Colonial Parkway to find some privacy.

That's where they were found dead on Oct. 12, 1986, inside Thomas' Honda Civic hatchback. The car sat on an embankment near the York River off the Colonial Parkway, a 23-mile federal road linking Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown in Colonial National Historical Park.

Both women had been bound and then cut across their throats, nearly ear to ear. Neither was sexually assaulted.

Almost 10 years later, on May 19, 1996, Julianne "Julie" Williams, 24, and Laura "Lollie" Winans, 26, arrived at Shenandoah National Park.

They had also begun a romantic relationship and had traveled to the park from Vermont to hike and camp.

When they hadn't returned home by the end of the month, Williams' father contacted park authorities.

The young women were found dead June 1, 1996, at their campsite, about 500 yards down a trail that begins at Skyline Drive--the main roadway traversing the park--and across from a parking lot for the busy Skyland Lodge.

Like the other pair of women, Williams and Winans had been bound and their throats cut ear to ear, and there was no evidence of sexual assault.

Both pairs of victims were athletic women in their 20s whose bodies showed no signs of a struggle.

And both pairs were found on national park land, just off the main roadways that run through them.

Thomas' and Dowski's deaths in 1986 were the first of four pairs of slayings that came to be known as the Colonial Parkway murders. But theirs was the only Colonial Parkway case involving two women.

The other three pairs of slayings occurred one per year over the next three years. They included a couple whose vehicle was found along the Colonial Parkway but whose bodies have never been found, another couple found shot to death near Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge in Isle of Wight County, and a pair whose remains were found near an Interstate 64 rest area in New Kent County.

In July 1990--10 months after the fourth case--Virginia State Police and the FBI held a news conference to say the slayings might be linked. They said they suspected they were the work of two people, and that the weaker person should come forward for his safety.

But victims' family members remain open to the possibility that the cases are unrelated.

Investigators have never claimed they have forensic evidence to link the cases. What they have is a similarity of circumstance.

Vehicles of the Colonial Parkway victims suggest they may have been approached by someone claiming to be in law enforcement. Some windows were partially down, keys were in the vehicles, wallets were out and glove compartments were open as if the victims were getting out IDs and registrations.

Bill Thomas, now 53 and living in Los Angeles, vividly recalls the autumn day in 1986 when FBI agents came to his parents' home in Lowell, Mass., to talk about the death of their only daughter.

Thomas, his two brothers and their parents gathered in the dining room and listened to the shocking news.

"From the very beginning, police said it appears it was likely someone in authority approached my sister, someone like a park ranger," he said.

Statements from the FBI and state police four years later at their July 1990 news conference remained consistent with that.

They said they suspected an "authority figure" could be responsible. They encouraged people to stay away from isolated locations and to be cautious when approached by someone claiming to be with law enforcement.

But they also acknowledged that anyone with a gun could readily control a situation.

News reports from over the years show that the list of 130 or so suspects in the Colonial Parkway killings has included current and former police officers from a variety of agencies, including sheriff's deputies, former state troopers and National Park Service rangers.

Though Park Service personnel are generally thought of as naturalists or historians, some investigate crimes and others patrol park grounds and roads.

Months into the Williams and Winans investigation, a National Park Service ranger suggested he and other park personnel be given polygraph tests.

He noted that some colleagues had worked at Colonial National Historical Park in the 1980s when the killings occurred there and then were working at Shenandoah National Park when Williams and Winans were killed there.

"Coupled with the four murders at Colonial, [he] believes that someone close to the investigation is involved in murdering the two women [at Shenandoah National Park]," an FBI agent wrote in his report after polygraphing that ranger.

That ranger's recommendations weren't ignored, but they weren't fully investigated, either, according to FBI reports obtained by The Free Lance-Star.

FBI agents interviewed approximately 120 Shenandoah National Park employees, sought polygraphs from at least three and gathered physical evidence from at least two, the reports show.

Agents obtained fingerprints and hair samples and vacuumed two pickups of some employees, sending the items to the FBI Lab in early 1997.

Fingerprints from one of those people didn't match prints found at the scene and one person passed his polygraph test, but not all evidence exams were completed.

One polygraph test suggested deception, but that man denied involvement and agents felt he had a "credible alibi," according to the FBI reports.

Then, 13 months into the investigation, with forensic exams unfinished, the focus of the Williams and Winans case shifted.

On July 9, 1997, FBI and National Park service investigators converged after 29-year-old Columbia, Md., resident Darrell David Rice frightened a woman bicyclist inside the park.

Rice was arrested shortly afterward and eventually charged with attempted kidnapping. Investigators immediately began questioning him about the slayings of Williams and Winans and the death of 25-year-old Alicia Showalter Reynolds, who disappeared while driving through nearby Culpeper County two months before the Shenandoah slayings.

The lead FBI agent in the Williams and Winans case left "urgent" messages with the FBI Lab, asking examiners to "expedite" all forensic comparisons involving Rice, an October 1997 lab memo shows. Because of that, a lab scientist got the agent to agree to "discontinue" some other exams, the memo states.

In April 2002--despite five years of forensic tests failing to establish any link to him--Rice was indicted on federal capital murder charges in the deaths of Williams and Winans.

He was weeks from trial and the threat of a death sentence when the FBI Lab delivered a bombshell.

Additional testing couldn't rule out serial killer Evonitz as the source of two head hairs found at the Shenandoah scene--one on a glove located near Winans' body and the other within layers of duct tape wrapped around her wrists.

Evonitz had killed himself in June 2002 while fleeing police after his last victim escaped. Later that year, the FBI Lab conclusively linked him to the 1996 and 1997 slayings of three girls in Spotsylvania County.

But they didn't request additional forensic exams to determine whether Evonitz killed Williams and Winans, even though the FBI, state police and local authorities had earlier vowed to check Evonitz against other unsolved slayings nationwide.

Evonitz lived in Fredericksburg at the time of Reynolds' killing and in Spotsylvania at the time of the Shenandoah slayings.

He was in the Navy at the time of the Colonial Parkway slayings and trained in nearby Norfolk, but not on the dates of those killings.

FBI supervisors now overseeing the Shenandoah and Colonial Parkway cases weren't assigned to them when the slayings occurred. They said they couldn't comment on what happened in 1996, when a supervisor said the cases would be compared.

But late last fall, Norfolk FBI supervisor Turner assigned cold-case Agent Crosby Brackett to review the voluminous files on the two Colonial Parkway cases the FBI is investigating.

In January, Brackett resubmitted 130 pieces of evidence from those cases to the FBI Lab at Quantico in the hope that applying the latest forensic science could yield information not available when the cases were examined two decades ago.

Turner said Brackett would also check for any similarities between the Colonial Parkway slayings and any unsolved murder cases across the state, including the Shenandoah killings. But he made no promises about forensic comparisons.

"If it is deemed fruitful by the investigators and it hasn't been done, it will be done," he said.

Michael Morehart took over as supervisor of the Richmond FBI office in February and now oversees the Shenandoah case.

Like Turner, he made no promises of lab comparisons of the Colonial Parkway and Shenandoah evidence, nor did he commit to further tests for a possible link to Evonitz in his case.

When Evonitz was identified as a serial killer in August 2002, a predecessor of Morehart's said Evonitz would be evaluated against unsolved crimes across the state and nation. When The Free Lance-Star revealed in a special report five years later that testing had not been done even for cases in the region, that supervisor reiterated that tests should be done in the Shenandoah and Reynolds cases.

When asked specifically if he would now order a complete forensic evaluation of Evonitz in his case, Morehart refused to commit.

"If it's appropriate, we're going to take whatever steps are necessary for the investigation. If it's not, we won't," he said.

Pressed as to why the FBI wouldn't want to test a known serial killer in a case that remains unsolved after 14 years, he said: "I feel confident if something needs to be done, we're going to do it."

The fathers of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans have pressed unsuccessfully in the past for forensic tests to determine if Evonitz killed their daughters in Shenandoah National Park. Now Tom Williams and John Winans want possible links to the Colonial Parkway slayings checked, too.

"I would certainly encourage and ask authorities to pursue every avenue in the hopes of finding my daughter's killer," Williams said.

Bill Thomas feels the same way about the probe into his sister's slaying on the Colonial Parkway. He wants every suspect, including law enforcement personnel or impersonators, ruled out scientifically.

"I'm not alleging anybody did anything wrong, but you'd sure think [the FBI] would want to get to the bottom of this," Thomas said.

John Winans was more critical in his assessment of the need to check for a link between his daughter's case and that of Thomas and Dowski.

"If the two girls were around the same age and were murdered in the same way, I don't think it takes a mental giant to know it at least needs to be looked into," he said. "It ought to at least be investigated."

Retired detective delivers report to families of Colonial Parkway murder victims

A Cold Case Heats Up: The Colonial Parkway Murders
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Source: The Virginian-Pilot, April 18, 2010 article by Kristin Davis

Annamaria Phelps' frayed denim shorts are folded in the closet where she kept girlhood things, like a box of love notes and shiny balloons from an old boyfriend.

The air has long gone out of those foil relics, and Annamaria has not stepped into the cutoff shorts since she disappeared two decades ago. Her family keeps the unicorn flag, the powder-blue canopy and the poster of the hair-metal band Poison on the bedroom walls where the 18-year-old hung them. She is gone but still here, the girl with blue eyeliner and frosted hair who smiles and stares flirtatiously in framed photos over the living room couch and next to the kitchen spice rack and on the bathroom door.

On this cold day in late January, sitting around the big dining room table where investigators recently sat, Jewel and Bill Phelps thumb through an album stuffed with more snapshots. They show off her things. This was Annamaria's tiny gold ring. It was still with her when the bow hunters found her wrapped in a blanket in the woods with her friend, Daniel Lauer. It spells "love." Her mother wears it now.

This is Annamaria's ID. It was found next to their bodies. For the first time in years, the Phelpses speak with tempered hope. Eighteen months ago, a stranger discovered photos from the crime scene had been made public. It felt like a second death. But it brought life to their daughter's cold case.

DNA evidence untouched for more than a decade is back in a lab, where it will be tested using new technology. The results could be back by year's end, and the implications reach far beyond this table in rural Amelia County where the girl on the walls grew up. The killer who took their lives may have taken six more. This could be the last chance to find him.

The investigation's new life started with Fred Atwell.

In October 2008, Atwell was introduced to a man who owned a law enforcement training school in Hampton. The school had an old FBI slide show of crime scenes from four double killings long referred to as the Colonial Parkway murders. Two occurred along the ribbon of road connecting Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. The two others were lumped in because the circumstances were so similar.

The school's owner wanted Atwell to speak to a few classes about the murders. Atwell worked as a Gloucester County sheriff's deputy in the years leading up to the crimes, and he'd amassed all sorts of material on the cases. He knew some of the investigators, and he knew the family of one of the victims. He said he shrugged off the first invitation. Then the owner told him about the FBI photos the school used for training.

The 84 images featured detailed shots of the cars from which victims had disappeared - glove box open, a wallet out, clothes in the back, a beer can tucked behind the passenger seat. Then there were the victims: shot, strangled, slashed. One was nearly decapitated; the bodies of two others decomposed beyond recognition. Photos from unsolved crimes should be under lock, Atwell remembered thinking. He has been both cop and criminal in his 60 years. After two burglary convictions, he went to the other side, tipping off law enforcement and turning in bad guys. Burly with a white beard, Atwell looks like Santa Claus, but he didn't act the part when it came to business. "I can really be a son of a bitch," he would say. "Some people don't like me because I voice my opinion."

For now, though, Atwell kept his indignation to himself. He gave the talks, then asked to borrow the Kodak box with the Carousel tray and the slides so he could make copies. Then he made two phone calls - one to the FBI and one to a family friend. Joyce Call-Canada had lost her brother to the Colonial Parkway killer two decades earlier. She still lived nearby.

Nearly a year later, the Call family plotted over dinner. The family had tried for years to stir up new interest in the Colonial Parkway killings. But public curiosity had long since waned, until now. The FBI had recovered the crime scene photos more than nine months after Atwell reported them. Call-Canada believed they'd acted only after Atwell went to the media. Call-Canada's brother, Doug Call, was frustrated. "If this is the way they take care of the pictures," he thought, "what the heck are they doing with the case?"

Their 20-year-old brother, Keith, vanished from a Colonial Parkway overlook in April 1988 while on a first date with Cassandra Hailey. Dogs followed scents, nets dragged the York River and helicopters tried to detect the heat from their bodies. They were never found. A mutual friend introduced Atwell to the Calls shortly after Keith and Cassandra's disappearance. Atwell and the Calls became friends. Call-Canada summed him up this way: "He's big and gruff. But he's soft-hearted."

Keith's father died in 1996 and his mother followed a few years later. The siblings picked up where their parents left off. "There was no question," Call-Canada said. The case became as much a part of their lives as Keith might have been. She talked about it whenever anybody asked. She continued to phone the FBI. Mostly, Call-Canada said, her messages went unreturned.

Still, hope persisted. Call-Canada knew Keith was probably dead before the park ranger called in his abandoned car the morning after his date. But the killer might still be caught. The Calls created the Facebook page "Whatever happened to Richard 'Keith' Call and Cassandra Hailey?" They filled it with photos of their brother, some sepia-toned with age. Years before, many close to the Colonial Parkway victims channeled their grief into an anti-crime group. They met twice a week. They hounded investigators. They gathered before cameras at the picturesque places their relatives died or disappeared. "We needed to band back together again," Call-Canada said.

The Calls still spoke to the Haileys. The families met in the days just after, when FBI agents asked questions and panicked mothers tried to reconstruct the couple's last night. Now they'd track down the others. They'd hold another fundraiser, for a private investigator or to add to the reward money. Atwell and his wife, Judy, would cook up burgers and hot dogs in their concession trailer. I wonder how we'll find the Thomases and the Dowskis, Call-Canada wondered aloud to her husband, Stephen, as they drove home from the family dinner. She was thinking of the first victims.

The Thomases lived in New England 25 years ago. But they were a military family. No telling where they'd moved to since. "You'll never believe this," Doug Call said over the phone as Canada walked into her house after dinner. "You've got to look at Facebook." "I am the brother of Cathy Thomas, one of the first two victims in the so-called Colonial Parkway Murders case," Bill Thomas had written. "Thinking of Keith and Cassandra today." Thomas had been thinking of Cathleen, in fact, when he Googled "Colonial Parkway murders" in his Los Angeles office after hours that evening.

The Thomases had not spoken publicly or reached out to the other families, and they had not heard from investigators in more than a decade. Cathleen, a Navy-lieutenant-turned-Norfolk-stockbroker, would have turned 50 that summer. She did not live to see 30. The anniversary of her death was less than two weeks away, and Thomas wondered whether there was any news his family had missed living on the West Coast. The Google search turned up dozens of hits. Sites on unsolved murders and serial killers expounded. Crime buffs and conspirators finger-pointed and theorized. A private investigator claimed she had connected the Colonial Parkway killings to a murder-suicide in Florida and to a series of unsolved slayings in Vermont and New Hampshire. Others linked the cases to the 1996 murders of a pair of hikers in Shenandoah National Park and a young woman found dead in a field near Culpeper that same year. All remain unsolved.

Thomas read until long past sunset. Then he found a seven-minute news report posted on YouTube and realized the crime scene photos had been made public. Thomas knew the killer strangled his sister and Rebecca Dowski. That he cut their throats, pushed Cathleen's car down an embankment and tried to set them on fire. He didn't need to see the photographs, Thomas thought, and except for investigators, neither did anybody else. "On some level," Thomas wrote after introducing himself on Keith and Cassandra's Facebook page, "I guess we are all in this together."

Thomas might have stopped there, if not for the Calls' thank-you note. He wrote back. They did, too. Phone calls followed. The FBI said the cases remained open and are reviewed regularly. But to the families, it sounded perfunctory. What about DNA testing? What about the phone calls that went unreturned for years and the crime scene photos that walked out of their office who-knew-when? What about the mistakes and the complications - vehicles moved before investigators got to them, contaminated crime scenes and battling jurisdictions? The FBI took charge of two of the cases because they happened on federal property. Virginia State Police investigated the others. Late last year, the families did what they'd done in the early 1990s. They sounded off to anyone who would listen. "That," Thomas said, "seemed to get the FBI's attention for the first time in two decades."

On Dec. 18, Alex Turner, special agent in charge of the FBI's Norfolk Division, stood behind a lectern in a nondescript room at the Corporate Boulevard field office and spoke into a trio of microphones. Turner talked about the search for a serial killer: Agents had questioned suspects, chased leads and followed tips, he said - hundreds of them. Eventually, all those leads and tips were exhausted and there was no where else to go. Turner switched gears and got down to the business of the crime scene photos.

His office learned about them earlier in the year, Turner said, but the information was vague. Details followed later, and an investigation revealed that an FBI photographer had taken a duplicate set of slides before retiring in 2001. As an instructor at the Hampton law enforcement school, he'd used them in training. The FBI had recently recovered them, Turner said. The employee who took them was dead.

Turner announced that the FBI planned a "top to bottom" review of the cases, which included advanced nuclear DNA testing of certain pieces of evidence. They were doubling the old reward to $20,000. They were combing through more than 3,500 reports and a list of 130 suspects. Atwell said he just learned he is one of them. He's angry; the families think the accusations are far-fetched.

Turner was briefed on the Colonial Parkway murders after he arrived at the Norfolk office two years earlier. He'd directed his staff to begin digitizing the inches-thick files for quick, easy searches. He wanted to find the time and the money and the people to put back on the case.

But the photos ramped up all of that. Turner agreed to meet with the families in early January. Thomas asked the restaurant manager for a room in the back, where nobody would hear what they were talking about. It was a reunion of strangers: A doctor, a Broadway producer, a bus driver, a business owner, all linked by 20 years of letdown and loss. The next morning, Friday, Jan. 8, the Calls, Haileys, Thomases and Dowskis - the families of the victims who died or went missing on federal property - would spend three hours with Turner.

The special agent in charge would tell them about the evidence already at the FBI lab in Quantico, about the agent and analyst assigned to the pair of double murders. He would promise regular updates.

The families would watch a PowerPoint presentation documenting a set of crimes that started with a Honda Civic hatchback suspended in a tangle of branches off a Colonial Parkway embankment on Oct. 12, 1986, and ended in the woods beyond a New Kent County rest stop three years later. In each of the cases, wallets were out or glove compartments stood open, as if the victims had reached for their license and registration. They seemed to emerge willingly from their cars, as if they had acted on an order from an authority figure or someone pretending to be. But no one could be sure. The people digging into Mexican food that Thursday night in Newport News had imagined a thousand scenarios. Now they introduced themselves. The Phelpses' meeting came 12 days later.

The State Police crunched up their driveway as they'd done the day hunters found Annamaria and Daniel's remains 2-1/2 miles from the rest stop where they disappeared. Rosanna Sedivy still remembers the police cruiser that pulled in behind her on Oct. 19, 1989. She can't remember what happened when the officer told them her sister was dead. They'd shared secrets and a bed. She'd been her maid of honor. Sedivy became a vigilant mother who never dropped her kids off at movies like their friends' parents did. She wouldn't let her son use a public restroom unless he reported that it was empty first. Bill Phelps looked up and shook his head as he listened to his daughter. "When I hear things like that," he said, "it brings it back and slams you in the face. This is going to follow us to our graves. Something will bring back the hurt."

Bill Phelps had scoured the woods beyond the rest stop in the weeks after Annamaria's disappearance. Now he takes an hour-long detour to avoid it. Annamaria was his youngest daughter. She'd left that place of sprawling fields with the water tower and its promise of a bright future. She wanted a life in Virginia Beach with her boyfriend; in September 1989, her boyfriend's brother was joining them, too. Daniel Lauer packed his things, and he and Annamaria stopped by the Phelpses' for a quick visit before striking out after the 11 o'clock news. Jewel Phelps told her to roll up her window and lock her door. She never saw her again.

When the Phelpses learned that the FBI planned to retest evidence in its two cases, the family told the State Police they wanted the same treatment for Annamaria. On Jan. 20, that's what she got. A captain and a special agent from the Virginia State Police arrived mid-afternoon, joined them around the dining room table and asked for a fresh start. The Phelpses asked about the evidence they were retesting. They asked whether any suspects stood out. If there were, the police said, we couldn't tell you.

The FBI, working alongside State Police, had this to say: Old alibis no longer mattered. Anyone crossed off that list 20 years ago was getting another look. The murderer could well be dead, Sedivy thinks. Investigators have considered that, too. Serial killers don't stop, but the Colonial Parkway killings did.

Sedivy wants him identified anyway. She wants him to have a name and a face so she can tell her 2-year-old daughter, Gracianna, and her nephew with the tattoo of an angel called Anna on his back.

"People think it goes away after time," Sedivy says. "But it doesn't."

In a new effort to crack the case, The Washington Post reports authorities are reexamining dozens of pieces of evidence, including the hair, using today's technology. Results are expected in a few weeks, FBI officials said. Investigators also are putting fresh eyes on a list of about 130 suspects.

When the attacker confronted Cathy Thomas more than two decades ago, putting a rope around her neck and cutting her throat, she reached out and grabbed some hair. Her brother said he hopes that it will be the evidence to point police to a suspected serial killer.

Thomas, a vibrant redhead who was among the U.S. Naval Academy's earliest female graduates, is one of as many as eight people slain in southeastern Virginia in the late 1980s in cases believed to be linked to a single killer or a team of them. The notorious slayings -- dubbed the Colonial Parkway murders -- have perplexed detectives for years.

In a new effort to crack the case, authorities are reexamining dozens of pieces of evidence, including the hair, using today's technology. Results are expected in a few weeks, FBI officials said. Investigators also are putting fresh eyes on a list of about 130 suspects.

The FBI, which has jurisdiction over two of the cases, said that evidence including clothing, blood, hair and fibers is being reexamined. Agents are reviewing more than 3,500 reports generated by the case. And FBI spokeswoman Vanessa Torres said the agency has asked America's Most Wanted to feature the information. A tipster could provide a fresh lead.

"We're committed to the families," Torres said. "We don't want to create false expectations; however, there is always hope."

Thomas's brother Bill said he hopes that the renewed interest will produce results. "We have always wanted answers," he said. "A lot of the families feel like this is our last shot, because so much time has passed."

It was an October night in 1986 when Thomas, 27, and Rebecca Ann Dowski, 21, who she had recently started dating, left a computer lab at the College of William and Mary, where Dowski was a student. Days later, a jogger spotted Thomas's white Honda in brambles on an embankment near the York River.

The women had been choked with a rope and their throats were cut, Bill Thomas said. Their purses were in the car, which the killer had unsuccessfully tried to torch.

The slayings along the Colonial Parkway, a scenic route that stretches from Yorktown to Jamestown, marked the beginning of a series of killings in the Tidewater area. Six people have been slain and two others are missing and presumed dead.

No physical evidence has conclusively linked the crimes, but similarities in the cases have led authorities to suspect involvement of the same attacker or attackers. In each case, two victims were targeted simultaneously. All were young people traveling in cars.

Larry McCann, a retired Virginia State Police profiler who worked the case and is now is a consultant to law enforcement, said he thinks a team of killers is responsible. One person could victimize two, he said, but it wouldn't be easy.

"There is, more likely than not, a leader and a follower," McCann said. "There's one person to maintain control while the other commits the act."

Dowski's brother Robert agrees. Thomas was trained in martial arts and Dowski played softball. Thomas had some defensive wounds on her hands, but there was nothing to indicate a significant struggle.

At first, it seemed as though the attack was an isolated incident, that the killer probably was someone who knew one or both of the women. Then, nearly a year later, the bodies of David Knobling, 20, and Robin Edwards, 14, were found at the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge on the James River in Isle of Wight County. Both had been shot in the head and Knobling's truck was parked at the refuge.

More killings followed, sparking a massive investigation in which FBI and Virginia State Police investigators tracked hundreds of leads and interviewed many suspects. Authorities never got a break. Attention faded, there were few new clues and the case grew cold.

It might have stayed that way, but for an embarrassing mistake by the FBI. Last year, a Hampton Roads television station reported that grisly crime-scene photos from the killings had been used in training sessions run by a private security company. A former agency photographer, who has since died, took copies of the photos when he retired, FBI officials said later.

News of the leaked photos upset victims' families, and the FBI vowed to restart the criminal investigation with a "top to bottom" review.

"If it wasn't for the FBI losing control of those crime-scene photos, this would still be a cold case," said Chris Call, brother of victim Richard Keith Call.

Call said he last saw his brother in April 1988 when he stopped by to borrow a shirt. The Christopher Newport College student had a first date that night with fellow student Cassandra Lee Hailey and he wanted to look good.

The next morning, a park ranger found Keith Call's red Toyota Celica at a Colonial Parkway overlook. The glove box was open and Call's wallet was on the console, his brother said. Hailey's bra, purse and a single boot were inside the car. Authorities have found no trace of the couple.

One theory investigators have considered is that the killer was a law enforcement officer -- or somebody posing as one. That would explain how the attacker could easily approach victims and then subdue them.

"It had to be someone posing as an authority figure," Call said. "The glove box was open like they were trying to get the registration out."

In September 1989, police found another abandoned car at a rest stop along Interstate 64. Annamaria Phelps, 18, and her boyfriend's brother, Daniel Lauer, 21, had been headed to Virginia Beach. The driver's window was cracked open, said Phelps's sister, Rosanna Phelps Sedivy.

A month and a half later, hunters found the pair's remains in the woods about a mile away. Both had been stabbed. Phelps, a feisty free spirit who liked to go barefoot, was wearing Lauer's socks and shoes, her sister said.

Then the killings stopped. McCann, the former profiler, sees only two possibilities: "They are either dead or in prison," he said. "People like this don't stop."

The FBI is offering a $20,000 reward in the case, hoping that the killer or an accomplice confided in someone at some point.

"I want this solved," Sedivy said. "Our lives are forever changed. If they [the killers] are dead, they should be labeled a killer."

Unsolved Murders of Young Lovers Get New Focus in Virginia

Source: AOL News, March 30, 2010 article by David Lohr

The victims, eight in all, came in pairs. Many were young lovers who apparently met their fates mid-assignation. Each of the homicides occurred along the scenic 23-mile route between Jamestown and Yorktown in Virginia, giving them a ready name: the Colonial Parkway murders.

Due to the shared location and other similarities among the deaths, law enforcement officials viewed them as the work of a possible serial killer. But since the first one took place in October 1986, the murders have all remained unsolved.

Now, the cases are getting renewed attention, and officials say that new tools give them a shot at finally solving the two-decade-old puzzle.

"We are very hopeful that today's technology -- advancements in DNA testing and analysis -- and a fresh look at the evidence will lead to a successful conclusion," Alex J. Turner, special agent in charge of the FBI's Norfolk, Va., division, told AOL News. Along with sending fingerprints and trace evidence for testing, the bureau has doubled the reward it is offering for fruitful tips.

The Virginia State Police are also re-examining the cases and the pathological agenda that may link them.

"Any time you have multiple crimes within close geographic proximity and there are similarities between those crimes, you have to be open to the possibility that those crimes are related," said Virginia State Police Special Agent Keenon Hook. "You pursue every reasonable hypothesis and logical conclusion, and that is what we are doing."

When investigators first started digging into the Parkway Murders, said Turner, they put together a suspect list that eventually ran to 100 people. "Many of those were eliminated initially. But we are starting with the entire list of individuals and going back through them again," he said, as officers search for the killer, or killers, responsible for the chilling crimes that took place two decades ago in a historic corner of the Old Dominion State.

Bodies One and Two

Cathleen Marian Thomas was a 27-year-old native of Lowell, Mass. She had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and was working as a stockbroker in Norfolk.

"I know people use the expression 'the best and the brightest' pretty frequently, but my sister was that kind of person," Cathleen's brother, Bill Thomas, told AOL News. "She was brilliant and beautiful."

According to Bill, Cathleen had recently started dating Rebecca Ann Dowski, a 21-year-old business management major and standout softball player from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.

"Rebecca was a lot like Cathy," Bill said. "She was very attractive, very accomplished."

On the evening of Oct. 9, 1986, Cathleen and Rebecca had been hanging out with two friends at a computer lab when they left to spend some time together. What happened to them after that remained a mystery until three days later, when a jogger running along the York River by the Colonial Parkway spotted Cathleen's white Honda Civic on the edge of an embankment.

"When the first officer on the scene reported there, he thought they were dealing with a traffic accident," Bill said. "So he went down and smashed the back window. It was then that he saw the mess inside the car."

Rebecca was found in the back seat. Cathleen was stuffed in the hatchback's storage area. Both women had been strangled, and their throats were cut. The injuries to Cathleen were so extreme that she was nearly decapitated.

The perpetrator had attempted to set the Honda on fire using kerosene or diesel fuel -- several matches were found scattered around the car -- and when that failed, he apparently tried to push the vehicle over into the river, only to have it snag on the brush.

Both victims' purses and money were found inside the car, and the county medical examiner found no signs of sexual assault.

The possibility that they had been targeted for their sexuality led to speculation that the killing might have been a hate crime. But less than a year later came evidence that another motive could have been at play.

"That Was How We Found Out: Watching TV"

Virginia authorities found themselves in the middle of a second double homicide when the bodies of David Lee Knobling, a 20-year-old man from Hampton, and Robin M. Edwards, a 14-year-old girl from Newport News, turned up in the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge the following fall.

"On Sept. 19, 1987, my sister had gone out on a date with David's cousin," Janette Santiago, Robin's sister, recalled in an interview. "They were supposed to go see a movie, so I guess David volunteered to take them. He had a little truck, so the boys let Robin sit upfront. They must have hit it off, because David dropped her off at the house and then came back to pick her up after he took everybody else home."

As in the case of Cathleen and Rebecca, a jogger alerted police to the scene.

David's pickup was found near the wildlife refuge at the foot of the James River Bridge. The keys were in the ignition, and David's wallet was on the dashboard. Items of clothing belonging to both David and Robin were also in the car.

There was no sign of struggle at the scene, and it was unclear whether the couple had met with foul play until their bodies washed ashore downstream. Both had been shot in the back of the head.

"Earlier that day, my parents had given an interview to the media, asking my sister to return home, so we were all sitting around the TV expecting to see that interview," Janette recalls. "Then, boom, here comes the headlines. ... That was how we found out: watching TV."

While there were some differences between the killings of Thomas, Dowski, Knobling and Edwards -- particularly in the killer's methods -- the commonalities meant a connection could not entirely be ruled out.

A Tragic First Date and a Deepening Mystery

Roughly six months later, the headlines would once again be dominated by another, and similar, case.

Richard "Keith" Call was a 20-year-old college student on April 9, 1988. He had big plans for the night: He was embarking on his first date with Cassandra Lee Hailey, an 18-year-old woman from Grafton.

"They shared a class or two at college," said his sister, Joyce Call-Canada. "Keith picked her up, and they headed over to a cookout in Newport News. They stayed there until sometime between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m."

Approximately eight hours later, on April 10, Call's vehicle was found abandoned at the York River Overlook on the Colonial Parkway.

Keith and Joyce's father, Richard W. Call, was one of the first people to spot the car as he passed it on his way to work. Not noticing anything overly out of the ordinary, he figured Keith might have left it there to jump into a friend's.

"His mind just didn't go to something terrible, and he went ahead to work," Call-Canada said.

Later that day, Keith's father received a call from park rangers, who had encountered a very different scene.

"The rangers said the door was wide open and the keys were lying in the car," Call-Canada said. "They also found Keith's wallet, glasses and watch in the car, along with Cassandra's purse, bra and just one of her shoes.

"We just don't know how that stuff got back in [the car]. The only thing we could think of was that the killer came back and put them there," she said.

Multiple searches were conducted for Keith and Cassandra, but no other trace of them has ever been found.

Less than two years later, two more families would lose loved ones in the same area.

Found Side by Side

"My sister, Annamarie Phelps, had just turned 18," Rosanne Phelps said. "She had a boyfriend who was a little younger, and he had a sister who lived at the beach, and they wanted to move to her house."

A friend of Phelps' boyfriend, 21-year-old Daniel Lauer, was also moving into the beach house, and over Labor Day weekend in 1989 she helped him pack up his belongings.

"We didn't hear anything from them the next day," said Phelps. "We tried to contact them, [and then] we learned that Daniel's car had been found parked at a rest area on the westbound side of I-64."

The case fit a pattern investigators had encountered before: Lauer's keys were found in the ignition, and items of clothing belonging to both of them were found inside the car. Annamarie's purse was left untouched.

Several searches were conducted but failed to uncover any signs of the young couple.

"I remember the weather was really bad, and there was a lot rain," Phelps said. "I remember praying and crying, 'Please don't let my sister be out there in the rain.'"

That October, a hunter came upon the couple's skeletal remains less than a mile from the rest area where Lauer's car had been found.

"They were found side by side," Phelps said. "My sister was wrapped in a blanket. They had been stabbed, and my sister had defensive wounds, suggesting she had fought very hard for her life."

Controversy Yields New Momentum

As the Colonial Parkway Murders went unsolved, they became a source of controversy.

In 1997, Phelps' parents filed a lawsuit against best-selling author Patricia Cornwell, who at one time had worked at the medical examiner's office that had handled the killings of Lauer and Phelps. They claimed that she'd obtained a copy of the autopsy report and included previously unreleased details of their daughter's death in her novel "All That Remains," which Cornwell's Web site describes as the story of a killer who targets "attractive young couples whose bodies are inevitably found in the woods months later."

The couple said the book violated their privacy and caused emotional pain. A judge later dismissed the case.

The unsolved slayings made headlines again in 2009, when authorities were notified that a number of crime scene photographs regarding the Colonial Parkway homicides had been "inappropriately taken" from the FBI's Norfolk office. The photographs were being used as a training tool for a security company, and a number of the images had been leaked to the media.

"There were 84 graphic photographs in all," Bill Thomas, brother of Cathleen Thomas, said. "This security school, for whatever reason, apparently felt that students in their security program could benefit from viewing them."

An investigation was launched, and in December 2009, Special Agent Turner held a press conference during which he said the photos had been taken without approval by a "former non-agent" employee. Turner added that the employee had since died but that the FBI had seized all copies of the photographs from his estate, the civilian training agency and two other individuals.

As unsavory as the crime scene photos revelation was, it appeared to kick the investigation of the homicides back into high gear. Almost immediately, Special Agent Philip J. Mann announced the FBI was conducting a "top-to-bottom" review of the cases in its jurisdiction: those of Cathleen Thomas, Rebecca Dowski, Richard "Keith" Call and Cassandra Lee Hailey.

Other Gruesome Connections Explored

Over the years, some have speculated that there could be a link between the eight Colonial Parkway murders and still other killings.

One is the Route 29 stalker case from 1996, in which a man in a pickup truck flagged down young women, told them something was dangerously wrong with their cars and offered them a ride. One, Alicia Showalter Reynolds, apparently accepted, and wound up murdered.

A second -- and, experts say, more credible -- candidate is the Shenandoah Park murders.

"There are striking similarities," said Chris Yarbrough, a computer programmer who operates a Web site devoted to the Colonial Parkway murders.

In 1996, the bodies of two women, Julianne Williams, 24, and Lollie Winans, 26, were discovered in one of the park's campgrounds. As with Dowski and Thomas, their throats had been slit. As with the earlier victims, both were strong athletes, yet there were no signs of struggle.

Special Agents Turner and Hook won't comment on individual cases, but both agree anything is possible.

"[It] is purely conjecture," Turner said. "[But] I will tell you [that] our investigator, along with the investigator from all of these homicides, have and will continue to share notes and determine whether or not there are any ties."

Profiling the Possible Killer

In an effort to determine if all of the Colonial Parkway cases are indeed connected and whether some of the other cases could be tied in, AOL News asked an expert to look them over and share her opinion.

"What I find particularly unusual about the murders is that, each time, there were two victims," said criminal profiler Pat Brown. "This is quite rare for serial killers; they usually pick one isolated, smaller individual whom they can overpower. This killer or killers had to deal with two, which is much more work.

"Clearly, the killer was armed. Even if we did not have evidence that anyone was shot during the assaults, a gun would be necessary to control two people. One person can control two people with the right words, weapon and tools."

Brown said an important clue in the cases is that in some of them, the driver's window had been rolled down.

"This would indicate someone approached the vehicle and was likely thought to be a police officer," she said. "It would seem, considering the cars were pulled off the road in isolated places and the victims were in various stages of undress, that the killer liked to pull up to cars he believed had couples in them, involved in some manner of lovemaking."

Since rape does not appear to be a motive, Brown said she believes the perpetrator wanted to "teach the couples a lesson."

"Most likely, the killer was jealous of their activities," she said. "The couples were killed because they were having too much fun, and the murderer put a stop to it. This kind of ideation, this anger toward the trysts of lovers, the lack of robbery or rape, indicates that the crimes were more likely committed by one person with a very specific focus. If two [killers] were involved, the other individual would likely offer more criminal expressions than simply eliminating the couple."

Brown said the perpetrator could be involved in law enforcement or, more likely, "wished he were."

"He wanted authority and probably did not have it," she said. "His crimes gave him this feeling: He was able to surprise, control and punish 'wrongdoers.'"

The only one of the other Virginia killings Brown finds potentially related is the Shenandoah Park case, because it involved "an individual noting two persons engaging in a physical relationship and moving in to stop the action."

Holding Out Hope, Together

It has been 20 years since the last Colonial Parkway murders. The renewed investigative push, aided by advances in DNA, may finally bring some answers. But Special Agent Turner said it will take at least six months for his office to get the results of the materials it is having tested -- and even then, the mysteries may remain unsolved. And so the wait continues.

Meanwhile, Joyce Call-Canada said her hopes aren't pinned on new technology but on an old-fashioned bout of morals.

"My hope is that someday, somebody will get a conscience," she said. "Somebody has to know something. If it is not the person who did it, then somebody that knows that person and knows they did it."

In their shared losses, the families of the victims have been forever bonded. With the renewed investigation, they have been reunited again.

"The [victims'] families have been brought back together again," said Janette Santiago. "Unfortunately, the murders are the reason, but we are together, and we are all united in hope. Even if we can get just one case solved, it would be a great victory for all of us."

Source: April 19, 2009 article from Storyline, citizen journalists, William and Mary blog.

Behavioral scientist explores why crimes stopped, and why they could still be solved

Behavioral scientist and criminology expert Larry McCann hasn’t given up. Even though the murders happened over 20 years ago, there’s no telling when the right piece of information will come along to solve the case.

“The state police never let these things go,” McCann said. “They solve routinely cases that are really, really old.”

The police and the FBI often come to McCann with cases old and new for his 39 years of expertise as a behavioral scientist. In 1996, he stopped counting the number of homicides he’s worked on when the total hit 2,000.

Since he retired 10 years ago, his title has changed - now he’s a “violent crimes consultant” - but his work hasn’t.

“I’m doing exactly the same thing I was doing before I retired,” he says, which includes researching and analyzing violent crimes, homicides, sexual assaults for police departments, prosecutors, and corporations around the world. He is currently looking into a 40-year-old homicide.

When he investigated the killings that have become known as the Colonial Parkway murders, McCann quickly latched on to the theory that these crimes were committed by two people, not one.

“It just seemed like it’s hard for a single person to really maintain control of two robust individuals concurrently,” he said.

A friend of Rebecca Dowski, one of the murdered victims, was also puzzled by the serial double murders. “One of the greatest mysteries to me was how someone could subdue two people at the same time,” said the friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Rebecca was athletic and Cathleen was in the Navy. These were not women who I would think would easily back down.”

McCann was able to compile evidence from the crime scenes into a psychological profile used by the FBI to help determine which types of suspects to look for “The crime is a reflection of the criminal,” he said. He believes there was a leader - the murderer - and a follower - the accomplice. The separation of the pair could be why the murders stopped, he suggested.

While working on the case two decades ago, McCann hoped the accomplice, the psychologically weaker of the two personalities, would turn in the leader with a little prodding.

Working in conjunction with the FBI and state police, McCann applied pressure by giving press conferences that exposed the theory and said that the second person might be in danger, hoping the accomplice would read the resulting articles and fear that the killer might turn on him.

“You get to the point that if you keep applying pressure and the leader keeps hearing that kind of stuff in the news, then he kills the follower,” McCann said.

The follower could very well be dead, which would explain why the crimes stopped. But just as plausibly, something happened to the leader.

“I think the killings stopped because the offender, the leader, either went to prison or is dead,” he said. “Because lions don’t stop killing once they’ve tasted blood.”

Either way, there is no proof. According to McCann, these calculated killers were good at covering their tracks. The reason there were such huge gaps between the murders, almost a year between each one, is because they kept their cool, he said.

“The gaps were because they were waiting for the right victim. Otherwise, if you spring your trap too soon and things aren’t quite right, if there are other people in the area, if it’s too early, if there’s too much light, there’s a possibility that you will be apprehended. They only killed four times in four years, but how many times had the offenders been driving up and down the parkway or up and down 64 looking for someone?” McCann said. “This was their hunting ground.”

Since the killings stopped, the FBI and police have been using an online program called VICAP, or the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which collects information from homicides worldwide and connects them to other similar homicides, to rule out the possibility that the Parkway Killers may have simply packed up and moved somewhere else.

McCann says it is highly unlikely that they could slip through the system by using different tactics.

“Once you’re successful at doing something so audacious as serial homicides, you’re going to stick with what works.”

So far, VICAP has had no luck. The system has identified one connection, but law enforcement officials investigated and determined the incidents were separate.

Some think the longer a case remains unsolved, the more likely it’s going to stay that way. But there are reasons why FBI and police continue to fan the flames on cold cases.

As forensics technology advances, new ways to link evidence to suspects become available.

In September 2008, for example, chemists at the University of Leicester developed a new method for detecting fingerprints on cartridge cases. According to the university’s press release, “The technique can enhance – after firing – a fingerprint that has been deposited on a small caliber metal cartridge case before it is fired,” which will likely lead to countless cold cases being reopened and possibly solved.

“Every five years the world just totally turns over,” said McCann. “Allegiances have changed, boyfriends, girlfriends have changed, husbands, wives have changed, and people that were afraid to talk about somebody are no longer afraid.”

McCann believes the knowledge to solve the case is out there. It’s just a matter of piecing it together.

“I’m always looking for avenues to get the information out because somebody, somewhere, is going to read this and think, well I know a little bit about that case and I think I know who did it,” he said. “The right tidbit of information could come to light, who knows, this afternoon.”

But in Florida he’s still haunted by the memories. He remembers the unusual things he saw that day - FBI agents, Navy SEALs, hound dogs. He remembers investigators questioned him, again and again. He remembers they told his family they had leads, suspects. He remembers when they thought they’d found the bodies.

But to this day, Call’s younger brother, Keith, is missing. He disappeared April 9, 1988, and is now presumed dead, considered a victim of the notorious Colonial Parkway Killer. “I always have hope - you have to have hope,” Call said. “But realistically I don’t think they’re coming back. “It’s always in the back of my mind,” he added.

Keith stopped by Call’s Gloucester Point apartment that night, the night he disappeared, just to chat. The brothers were close, as Call was only a couple years older — 24 or 25 at the time, he recounts. Keith was going on a date with a fellow student at Christopher Newport University, so he left his older brother’s apartment. It was the last time the two would ever see each other.

Keith’s date, Cassandra Lee Hailey, has also been missing since that night. It was the first time the two had gone out together — a curly-haired brunette from York County and a clean-cut, dark-haired boy from Gloucester.

Early the next morning, Call was driving on the parkway when he spotted what looked like his younger brother’s car, with the driver’s seat door wide open. He thought nothing of it and kept driving. But soon others saw the car, and eventually someone called the police. A ranger inspected the 1982 red Toyota Celica at 9 a.m. The front seat was folded forward. Several witnesses said the keys were still in the ignition. Clothes and underwear were found in the back seat.

Within a day or two, Call said, the family realized Keith’s disappearance was connected to a string of murders that had occurred along the parkway.

A William and Mary student and her girlfriend had been discovered in a car two years earlier, strangled and stabbed. The next year, a couple was found dead in Isle of Wright County, both shot in the head. Now, Keith was missing, his car abandoned in the hunting grounds of a killer who remains at large two decades later. “It didn’t take long to realize they were connected,” Call said. “It all seemed so surreal the day it happened. I was talking to the FBI about something you never thought would happen to your family.”

When investigators couldn’t produce any bodies or a killer, Call’s mother turned to the supernatural. Because of the reward - $50,000 or $60,000, Call said - many self-proclaimed psychics contacted the family, willing to examine the case for free. Call remembers how they wanted to visit the crime scene, sit in Keith’s room, in his car.

He remembers how they enticed his mother with signs of hope, signs that led nowhere.

Emotionally, Call said, Keith’s disappearance left the entire family damaged beyond repair. Both of his parents died at age 60. “I can tell you this expedited their lives,” Call said. His two other brothers still avoid talking about the disappearance. But Call is more open about it. So is his sister, Joyce.

“We don’t want it to die,” Call said. “I still have so much anger and rage toward this person because this person destroyed our lives and our family.

“It put a wedge between every one of us,” he added. “Nothing good has come from this.”

He holds out hope that one day he’ll achieve some closure, that one day the killer will be brought to justice. But he thinks law enforcement officials have all but given up.

He said that in the past year, theories about the killer have popped up on the internet, and people have contacted him to offer new information. He said he called the FBI to pass this information along, but nobody called him back.

Two decades ago, a series of murders along the Colonial Parkway shook the greater Williamsburg community. Over a span of three years, beginning in 1986, eight people were victims to a serial murderer. Today, these unsolved crimes are still the subject of television shows, internet conspiracy theories and urban legends.

The affected families never received closure and are still haunted by these tragic events. The murders began in October, 1986 and the last occurred September, 1989. Over that period, six people were confirmed murdered and two remain missing, assumed dead - all the victims of an assumed serial killer. To this day no killer has been identified.

Yet, most William and Mary students aren’t even aware that they occurred. Today, the students and community use the Parkway and surrounding areas to enjoy the natural beauty and to take in the view, and even swim in, the James and York Rivers. But, just 20 years ago, the murders had the Williamsburg area residents in fear.

On Oct. 12, 1986, the slain bodies of Cathleen Thomas, 27, and Rebecca Ann Dowski, 21, were found inside their Honda Civic. The car had been pushed into the shrubs down an embankment, away from the road, near the Ringfield Plantation, just off the Colonial Parkway some six miles outside of Yorktown, according to a source that wishes to remain anonymous. Their bodies were found doused with a flammable liquid, and several matches were found outside the car, which investigators believe was a failed attempt to set the vehicle ablaze. There were no signs of sexual assault and the women’s purses and wallets remained in the car, showing no signs of an attempted theft. Both victims had been strangled and their throats slit.

The next murders occurred on Sept. 21, 1987, almost a year after the first. David Knobling, 20, and Robin Edwards, 14, were found murdered in the Ragged Wildlife Refuge, on the south shore of the James River, in Isle of Wight County, near Smithfield, Virginia. Knobling’s Ford truck was found, engine running, radio playing, and unoccupied at the foot of the James River Bridge. Two days later, on Sept. 23, their bodies washed up on the river’s northern side. This time, both victims had been shot in the head.

Only seven months passed before the killer struck a third time, again along the Colonial Parkway. On April 9, 1988, Cassandra Lee Hailey and Richard Keith Call were reported missing. They had been on their first date. At 7:30 the next morning, Call’s car was found unoccupied along the Parkway at a York River pullover. Clothing, underwear, and watches were found inside the car, but neither body has been discovered. A theory that the two had been swimming in the river was posed, yet, according to the FBI, the river water was around 40 degrees that night, and Hailey was afraid of water. Both are presumed dead.

The final known set of murders took place Sept. 5, 1989 - 17 months after the last reported crimes. The Chevrolet Nova that Anna Marie Phelps, 18, and Daniel Lauer, 21, had been riding in was found abandoned in a rest area along Interstate 64 in New Kent. Six weeks later, in October, their corpses were found by a hunter at a nearby rest area. It was determined that Phelps was stabbed to death. Lauer’s cause of death has not been officially determined.

Many criminal investigators have developed theories; some speculate that the suspect might have been a law enforcement officer, someone impersonating one, or perhaps a rogue agent from the Central Intelligence Agency, which has a training facility nearby at Camp Peary in York County. The rolled down driver’s side window on many of the victims’ vehicles provide support for this theory. This evidence creates the possibility that the victims thought they were being approached by someone they could trust - like a police officer.

The FBI and police also make note of other military facilities in the proximity such as Cheatham Annex, a supply depot, and the Yorktown Naval weapons station. Other investigators believe the killings were committed by two people working as a team.

Behavioral scientist Larry McCann, who worked on the case with the FBI and state police for many years, says that the murders could not possibly have been committed by one person alone - the victims were young, able bodied individuals and would have been too much for one person to handle.

After the final murders, nothing happened. The investigation seemed to go nowhere. This led to the development by investigators, and propagated on the internet, of a theory connecting the parkway murders and a set of murders occurring in 1996 in another Virginia National Park. Two female hikers were slain in Shenandoah National Park - Julianne Williams, 24, of Burlington, Vermont, and Lollie Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine - on a hike that was supposed to last five days. Their bodies were discovered June 1, 1996. The two were lesbians who were romantically involved and, like the murders of Thomas and Dowski in 1986, both had their throats slit. Investigators noted the similarities between the two cases, and did not rule out a connection. Bo McFarland, a spokesman for the FBI’s Norfolk office, which investigated the 1986 Colonial Parkway murders, said that while the FBI is “considering everything,” that theory is “just speculation.”

For nearly six years this case remained a mystery, but in April of 2002, a man already in prison in Virginia, Darrell David Rice of Columbia, Maryland, was charged with these murders, based upon his assault of a Canadian female in July of 1997, 14 months after the Winans/ Williams killings. The State’s case was weak, however, and it could not be shown he was in the Park, nor even in Virginia, when the crimes were committed. In 2004 Rice was exonerated of the charges.

A number of forums have developed on sites such as Facebook.com for people to share information, get in contact with one another, and present theories.

In addition, a number of made-for-TV movies and novels are based on the killings. In 1992, Patricia Cornwell published a novel titled “All That Remains,” about four couples murdered in Richmond, Virginia. In the novel the corpses were discovered weeks later with their only their shoes and socks missing. Parents of the murdered Colonial Parkway victims filed suit against Cornwell for illegally obtaining autopsy records of their murdered daughter, Anna Marie Phelps, according to reports in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Another interpretation of these murders was “the unsolved case of the Colonial Parkway Killer,” which aired in 1996. It was presented on national television on Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, a series that aired from 1993-1999.

The case remains unsolved and is still open in the FBI databases. According to Larry McCann, the behavioral scientist who has worked with the FBI and state police department, the case remains open until an answer is found or the criminal(s) are brought to justice. He believes the case will one day be solved.

Today the Colonial Parkway seems as peaceful as ever. Seniors from the College of William and Mary will be graduating in less than four weeks, but few of them remember the story of Rebecca Ann Dowski - who never got to graduate.

During the winter of 1996, an unknown man driving a dark pickup truck was stalking, harassing, and attempting to abduct women along the Route 29 highway in central Virginia, a series of crimes that culminated in the kidnap and murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds.

Area's Unsolved Mysteries: Are Killings Related?

Source: The Free Lance-Star, March 9, 2002 article by Donnie Johnston

It was six years ago last Saturday when the murders that continue to shock and worry Fredericksburg-area residents began.

On the morning of March 2, 1996, a Saturday, Alicia Showalter Reynolds was driving from Baltimore to Charlottesville when she was apparently pulled over along U. S. 29 in Culpeper County, abducted and killed. Within the span of 14 months seven more murders -six still unsolved - would occur. Five of those crimes were committed within about six months of Reynolds' disappearance. All the victims were women.

In late May of 1996 two hikers, 24-year-old Julianne Williams and 26-year-old Lollie Winans, were found brutally murdered at their camp near Skyland in Shenandoah National Park (near Madison County).

On the night of July 13, 74-year-old Thelma Scroggins was killed in her Lignum, Virginia home.

Sixteen-year-old Sofia Silva disappeared off her front porch near Fredericksburg in early September and killed. Her body was located in a King George County pond a month later.

In late September 20-year-old Anne Carolyn McDaniel disappeared from an Orange street and was murdered. Her body was found near Mount Pony in Culpeper County.

On May 1, 1997, teen-age sisters Kristin and Kati Lisk disappeared from their Spotsylvania County home and were found dead in a river five days later.

To date, only the Scroggins murder has been solved and many who sat through the trials of the three teen-aged suspects accused are far from convinced that authorities got the right men - at least in two cases. The rest of the murders remain unsolved mysteries.

Are all these killings related? Investigators I have talked to contend they are not. Common threads in these cases, however, lend credence - at least in my mind - to the theory that the same man committed all these murders and that the killer may have been a policeman. What are these common threads?

First, if you look at a map, you will find that it is almost a straight line from the spot where the Shenandoah National Park hikers were killed to King George County where Silva's body was found. Second, there is a Lignum connection to five of the murders. Third, all the victims were women. Fourth, all disappeared or were accosted mysteriously, as if they were not alarmed by the presence of their killer. Fifth, the killings started and stopped within a 14-month period.

The first common thread being obvious, let's look at the others. Alicia Showalter Reynolds' body was found near Lignum on May 7, 1996. Thelma Scroggins lived and was murdered in Lignum. Anne Carolyn McDaniel's body was found within four miles of Lignum. The pond where Silva's body was found was reportedly within sight of a greenhouse that at the time had a strong connection to greenhouses three miles from Lignum. The Lisk sisters' mother worked at Germanna Community College, three miles from Lignum.

Coincidences? Investigators that I have discussed my theory with dismiss them as just that. What about the name Showalter? Alicia Reynolds' maiden name was Showalter. Patty Lisk, mother of the slain sisters, was also a Showalter before she married. Both families are from the Shenandoah Valley where that name is very common.

The fact that all the victims were women is also obvious. So what about the police connection? That seems obvious, too.

Who would Alicia Reynolds, while driving down U.S. 29, have instantly and without question pulled over for? A policeman or someone with a light (perhaps removable) atop his vehicle.

Who would Williams and Winans have instantly trusted and made welcome into their mountain camp? Someone pretending to be a park ranger or a policeman.

With whom would the mildly retarded Anne Carolyn McDaniel have left an Orange street without ever questioning where she was being taken? A policeman.

Who would Thelma Scroggins, known to be an extremely cautious woman who would not let anyone in after dark, have opened her door for without question on the night she was killed? A policeman.

Who would teen-agers like Silva and the Lisk sisters have allowed to take them from the security of their homes without any protest? A policeman.

We are trained from birth to both respect and obey policemen without question. If a policeman tells a law-abiding person to do something, he does it. All the victims were law-abiding citizens.

There other little subtleties in these cases, too. The Lisk kidnappings took place almost exactly on the anniversary of the discovery of Reynolds' body. These two girls were also abducted while police had a suspect in the Silva murder in custody. It was almost as if the killer was trying to show authorities that they had the wrong man. The suspect was cleared a month after the Lisk girls were slain.

Thelma Scroggins' cousin and closest friend said she and the Lignum woman drove down back roads in search of the wooded spot where Reynolds' body was found as soon as they heard it had been located. Did the killer suspect that Scroggins, a retired mail carrier who often traveled these roads, knew something?

My theory that a policeman could be the killer is based on the fact that a man with a badge - or one pretending to be a cop - could have easily used his authority to lure his victims into a false sense of security. Was he actually a policeman at the time? I doubt it. I suspect that the killer may have been a young wannabe cop who, for some reason, could never get a job with a badge. Maybe he wanted to show those who spurned him that he was really smarter than the police.

So why did the killings stop? Serial killings often stop because the murderer is arrested and kept in jail. This situation could very well have been just the opposite. Maybe the killer finally got hired as a cop. That, friends, is a chilling thought but one not out of the realm of possibility. Have authorities crossed-checked those who took police science courses with job applicants who were rejected before March 1996 and then hired after June of 1997? I don't know.

What I do know is that there is still a killer walking around somewhere out there who may strike again. And I know that, after sitting through three trials in the Scroggins' case, I wound up with more questions than answers.

To say that three drug-crazed teen-agers could have talked their way into that old woman's house, killed her in a frenzy and then made off without leaving a single thread of evidence is a hard theory to swallow. A Mafia hit man or a CIA agent couldn't have done that. A ballistics expert also testified that the gun used to kill Scroggins was a rifle while the state's key witness insisted it was a pistol. A deputy sheriff testified that he was in the presence of one of the suspects when he was supposed to be getting high and planning the murder.

Then there was the testimony of the key witness, confessed killer Eric Glenn Weakley, about dreams he had about a body in a pond and a body being dismembered with a hatchet. Could those "dreams" be related to these other murders?

I have discussed my policeman-single killer theory with several investigators working these cases and each time I get a smile and a polite "keep thinking" response. Maybe my theory is wrong, but what better place for a serial killer to hide than behind a badge?

Checking all the usual suspects sometimes doesn't get the job done.

Video: Alicia Showalter Reynolds - A man, pretending to be a helpful motorist along Route 29 in Virginia, abducts and murders a young woman.

On March 2nd, 1996, Alicia Showalter Reynolds of Baltimore, Maryland, said good-bye to her husband and left her home. It was a Saturday at about 7:30 A.M. Alicia planned to drive more than 150 miles to spend the day shopping with her mother in Charlottesville, Virginia. She left early, giving herself plenty of time to be at the mall by 10:30. Alicia's mother arrived on time, expecting her daughter at any moment. But when Alicia was late, Sadie Showalter became worried:

Sadie continued to wait. An hour passed, then two, but Alicia never showed up. At 6:00 that evening, a Virginia state trooper found Alicia's car abandoned along a highway near Culpepper, Virginia, 50 miles from the shopping mall. A white paper napkin had been tucked under the windshield wiper, a commonly used signal of car trouble. When the car was examined, however, there were no mechanical problems.

The next day, the local news began broadcasting reports of Alicia's disappearance. Police set up a roadblock where Alicia's car was found, hoping to track down people who may have seen something. At least three people claimed they saw Alicia talking to a clean-cut white man with a dark-colored pickup truck. Close to 20 women called to say that they had recently been approached on the highway by a man fitting that exact description. Police began to realize that whatever had happened to Alicia might have been a plot that had been evolving for weeks. According to Special Agent Thomas Carter with the FBI in Fredericksburg, Virginia:

At that point, the helpful stranger usually offered to drive the woman to the nearest phone. At least two women accepted his offer and nothing happened to them. Other women found the stranger to be anything but courteous. Agent Carter:

Rick Jenkins with the Virginia State Police believes the stranger was performing dry runs:

One week before Alicia disappeared, a woman driving in a neighboring county apparently fell for the same trick. Master Det. Leo J. McDonnell with the Prince William County Police spoke to her:

The woman broke her ankle, but she got away. Seven days later, Alicia Reynolds was not so lucky. On May 7th, 1996, two months after she disappeared, her body was found in a wooded area 15 miles southeast of Culpepper. She had been murdered, perhaps on the same day she disappeared. Rick Jenkins with the Virginia State Police suspects Alicia’s killer may be doing the same thing somewhere else.

The man known as the “Route 29 Stalker,” who twice told victims his name was Larry Breeden, was acting out a sexual fantasy and probably did not intend to kill Alicia Showalter Reynolds, experts from the Virginia State Police said yesterday.

But now he has killed once - police still believe Reynolds was his first victim - the experts say he will kill again.

The 25-year-old Reynolds, a graduate student from Baltimore, was lured from her car by the killer and found two months later in a shallow grave near Lignum, Va., a small town in Culpeper County. Her killer may have approached up to 25 women along Route 29 before abducting Reynolds March 2, police said.

Yesterday police released parts of a 13-page profile of the man whom they believe killed Reynolds, hoping the information will bring witnesses forward. The information will also be featured Friday night on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries.

Police described the man whom they believe killed Reynolds as shy and helpful. “He's the guy next door,” said special agent Larry McCann, a behavioral sciences expert from the Virginia State Police who helped develop the profile. “People want to think a murderer looks different, looks crazy,” McCann said. “This is an average guy of average intelligence. That's what makes him so hard to pick out.”

But McCann said yesterday he's confident someone not only knows the killer, but probably knows that the person killed Reynolds. McCann admitted police do not have a strong suspect. “In these cases there is always somebody who has more than a hint what their neighbor, mate, boyfriend is up to,” McCann said. “From what we're talking about today someone will recognize the individual. We need them to call us. We've been doing a traditional investigation up to this point. Now we've decided to reach out further.”

Reynolds' killer lured her into his pickup truck with a story that her car was malfunctioning, police said. The killer would drive behind would-be victims and flash his lights, hoping they would pull over. Police said two witnesses saw Reynolds in the truck with the killer. Although the truck had Virginia license plates, none of the witnesses got the tag number.

Police believe the man who killed Reynolds also approached a woman on Route 234 in Dumfries, Va. The killer threatened the woman with a screwdriver and the woman suffered a broken leg escaping from the truck. Reynolds, unfortunately, was exactly what the killer was looking for: a petite, young, white woman who believed his story, police said.

Police think they know how Reynolds died but will not release the information. They will not say whether she was sexually assaulted. “There has to be something we hold back for when we interrogate the suspect,” McCann said. “Something only the killer would know.”

Although the killer's methods may change - he may not, for example, attempt to find another victim along a country road - the type of victim he chooses will not, McCann said. “This guy has got his victimology down,” McCann said. “He knows what he wants and he goes for it.”

In the course of the investigation police have interviewed every Larry Breeden they could find, McCann said, though they don't believe it's the killer's real name. There are more than 1,000 pickup trucks licensed in Virginia that fit the description released months ago in a flier, and police are investigating all of them, McCann said, adding that the trucks' description, as well as that of the killer, are accurate.

According to information released by the Virginia State Police, the Route 29 Stalker is a white man, age 35 to 45, with light to medium brown hair and a medium build. Police believe he has a blue-collar job, that he has a high school education or perhaps a few years' training from a trade school.

Information, taken from the police profile, is consistent with information witnesses provided about the contents of the killer's truck: There was a dark toolbox on the truck's floor near an object that could have been a green tarp or pair of overalls. Witnesses don't remember any aroma in the truck nor any speech patterns of the killer that are unique or recognizable.

The killer wore a wedding band, but police do not know if he really is married or uses the ring as a prop. Police think he was living with a girlfriend or wife at the time of Reynolds' killing and suggest that the murder would have strongly affected the relationship.

Police say the killer would have sought reasonable ways to withdraw from his daily life after the murder, perhaps a transfer from his job to cool off for awhile. “People are people,” McCann said. “If you do something horrible it upsets you. But he got over it.” When asked if the killer felt remorse, McCann said, “I don't know. Maybe the reality didn't live up to the fantasy.” But McCann stressed that the killer's behavior would have been “all wrong” after the incident. Police are asking people to look for this type of behavioral changes.

One aspect of the case that puzzles police is how the killer could have known Culpeper so well without Culpeper knowing him. If the killer was a lifelong Culpeper resident, police speculate, they probably would have caught him quickly. But police say the killer would have had contact with many in the area: store clerks, residents and others.

The killer is shy in his approach to women who are strangers, police said. He is reserved in what he does, reluctant to talk about his private life but helpful to others. He is probably dependable. Still, witnesses have seen his anger. Women who would not stop their cars when the killer tried to pull them over have said that he lost his temper, began swearing, screaming and pounding the steering wheel inside his truck. Police say he is a man who internalizes his anger but flashes of anger, often inappropriate to the situation, will show.

Police don't believe the killer has approached anyone since killing Reynolds. He is strongly aware of the media and probably follows news stories about the case. Renewed coverage of the murder and Friday's episode of Unsolved Mysteries will worry the killer, McCann said, who doubts the killer will stalk any other women until attention dies down. “This killer is your next door neighbor,” McCann said in a statement released to the press. “You may not think so, but if he has access to a similar truck, resembles the composite, and you have valid suspicions, call the Virginia State Police.”

WASHINGTON - It was a case that gripped the region for weeks: the disappearance of a 25-year-old graduate student traveling from Baltimore to Charlottesville. Now, ten years later, Alicia Showalter Reynolds' killer still remains unknown.

Reynolds disappeared on March 2, 1996. Her remains were found two months later, 15 miles away from where her car was located in Lignum, Virginia in Culpeper County. During the investigation, there were numerous reports of a white male flagging down women. The investigation later become known as the Route 29 Stalker case. Several people were investigated as possible suspects, but no one has been charged with her murder. Virginia State Police Sgt. Les Tyler says they are hoping the anniversary of Reynolds' murder will jog someone's memory. "We've even had calls as recent as last week on this case," Tyler says.

Police say the suspect is a white male, age 35 to 45 with a medium build. The suspect is approximately 5 feet, 10 inches tall with light to medium brown hair.

The suspect may have been wearing a flannel or striped shirt and blue jeans at the time of abduction, and may have had access to a small, dark-colored pickup truck, police say.

Source: Cold Case?, article by Barbara Nordin, published May 17, 2007 in The Hook, a Charlottesville, Virginia weekly.

This week's story is mostly about the terrors on Route 29, a series of illicit pull-overs that culminated in the 1996 disappearance and murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds. (Next week: the Shenandoah National Park murders).

The white wooden cross has broken free of the guardrail and lies on the shoulder as cars rush past; its red bow and artificial greenery, buffeted by blustery spring winds, have flipped over and come to rest in the gravel and dust.

As cars flew past that spot on a March day in 1996, some drivers noticed a young woman standing near her white Mercury Tracer on the shoulder and talking to a man whose pickup truck was parked nearby. The hood of the car was up, and the man and woman were studying the engine; some observers saw her getting into his truck. She was never seen alive again.

Since then, her name - Alicia Showalter Reynolds - has been etched into the minds of many Central Virginians because of what happened to her that day. But the man was never found. Or was he?

Some believe the man at the side of the road was Darrell David Rice - and federal prosecutors believe that less than three months after Alicia disappeared, he murdered two women in the Shenandoah National Park.

Rice, who has been held nearly 10 years for another crime in the Park, will be released from federal prison in two months, and his attorneys say it's unfair to link his name to other crimes. Indeed, 11 years after Alicia's disappearance, State Police have yet to

charge anyone with her murder.

Even so, Darrell Rice continues to be a suspect in the three killings in 1996 - which, for women in Central Virginia, was a very bad year. As soon as Alicia's disappearance was announced, calls began flooding Virginia State Police headquarters in Culpeper from other women reporting that they too had been stopped along Route 29, usually in the Culpeper area, by a man in a pickup who would flash his lights and gesture. If the woman pulled over, he would park nearby and tell her that something was wrong with her car - usually, that sparks were coming from underneath. Then, saying it wouldn't be safe for her to drive, he would offer a ride.

The man quickly became known as the "Route 29 Stalker," and fear began to spread. Wireless phone companies in Central Virginia reported that interest in cell phones went up in response: For many women, Route 29 no longer seemed safe, and residents of the region worried about female family members and friends who drove alone, especially at night.

According to a press release issued by the State Police two months later, the abduction fit a pattern. The women described the suspect as white, age 35-45, 5'10" to 6' tall, 189-190 lbs, and clean-shaven with short, light-brown hair longer in the back than on the sides. He was also well-spoken, with a "clean, casual appearance."

All of the victims said the man was driving a pickup, but accounts of the size and color varied. "Suspect may have had access to more than one vehicle," the police briefing stated, "not to exclude a Ford Ranger/Mazda or a Nissan pickup truck. He may also have recently purchased, sold, or otherwise changed vehicles during the course of these contacts." Based on calls from drivers who claimed to have seen Alicia and the man on the shoulder of the road, State Police investigators felt confident that the truck had been dark-colored with a "splash" or streak in a lighter color, possibly teal.

The incidents began on January 17, 1996 and ended on March 2, the day Alicia disappeared. There were 23 stops during those 46 days, including one for which the date is unknown [see outline below], with the great majority located along a 20-mile stretch in the vicinity of the Culpeper exits.

Most of the women rebuffed the man and drove away, but in addition to Alicia, three got in his truck. Two were dropped where they requested. The third, Carmelita Shomo, was attacked, but she survived - in fact, she did more than survive. Nine years later, she faced Darrell Rice across a courtroom and identified him as the man who had abducted, attacked, and left her beside the road, screaming for help.

It was raining and cold when Carmelita Shomo headed south on Route 234 the night of February 23, 1996. She was driving home to Quantico after her Friday-evening shift as a custodian at the Manassas Mall. Near a crossroads called Independence Hill, she noticed flashing lights in her rear-view mirror. This account of what followed is taken from her March 5, 1996 interview with FBI Special Agent John Zero.

Shomo pulled onto the shoulder, and the man parked behind her. As he approached, she thought he might be a friend of her husband and rolled down her window and asked, "Do I know you?" But he was a stranger, and he said he had seen sparks under her car, perhaps from "a loose bolt" or "the CV joints going bad." He said it wouldn't be safe for her to drive, because the brakes might give out. Then he offered to drive her home, and she accepted.

He suggested that she hang something from a window of her car to identify it as having broken down. (As was the case with all the women who were told something was wrong with their cars, Shomo later learned that her car was fine.) She hung a rag, locked up, and climbed into the truck.

The man drove her approximately three miles down 234 - which, in 1996, was two lanes instead of four - through an area that was less populated than it is now. Three times, the man said that headlights from the cars behind were causing glare on his windshield, and pulled over until the vehicle had passed.

They talked as they headed south in the rain. The man asked her to show him where she lived; she asked his name, and he said it was Larry. He wanted to know how she'd get her car home, and she replied that her husband could tow it himself. Then he asked whether it was an automatic or stick shift, and when she said it was an automatic, he suggested that they go back; he would drive her car, and she could drive his truck to her residence. She said that wouldn't be necessary.

By this time she was getting uneasy and asked him to drop her off at an all-night gas station near the intersection of 234 and the Montclair subdivision. Instead, he pulled over for a fourth time and, again complaining about glare on the windshield - which she couldn't see - asked her to hand him a tissue from the pocket on the passenger-side door.

Then he attacked. Grabbing her neck, he shoved her head toward his lap. In his right hand, Shomo stated, he held a screwdriver pointing at her neck. He told her to "shut up and put your head down in my lap," but she fought back, elbowing him in the chest as they struggled. Somehow, the passenger door came open; Shomo thinks the man must have opened it, because by then he was yelling at her to "get out of the truck."

As she slid toward the door, they both grabbed for her purse, and she fell out of the truck - with the purse left behind and one foot tangled in the seatbelt as he pulled back onto the road. She was briefly dragged before she could wrestle her foot free, breaking her ankle in the process.

Shomo told investigators that cars had passed her on the side of the road as she screamed for help, but no one stopped. Finally, an off-duty ranger for nearby Prince William Forest Park and his wife, whose house faces Route 234, heard her and came out. The ranger used his police radio to call for help.

Raised in the Philippines, Shomo was not fluent in English, and the communication gap would prove critical. Officers and emergency-room personnel assumed that Shomo's husband had been her attacker, and Prince William County police didn't assign a detective to the case until the next day, when Shomo finally got someone to understand that she had been abducted, attacked, and robbed by a stranger.

The misunderstanding meant that during the hours that followed, no alert was issued for a vehicle matching the description Shomo provided - hours during which three more women were stopped. (None, however, got in the truck.)

Beginning two days later, on February 26, there were five more stops before March 2, when Alicia was abducted: one on Monday, two on Wednesday, one on either Monday or Wednesday, and one on Thursday. The frequency suggests that by Saturday, March 2, 1996, the man was determined to find a victim.

At about 10:15 a.m., he attempted to stop a woman heading north on the other side of 29 from where he would soon stop Alicia. Shortly after that, heading south on 29, a man in a truck stopped Alicia. She was his final victim.

Three weeks later, Detective L.J. McDonnell of the Prince William County police wrote: "After reviewing the State Police reports, I have isolated 15 points that link [the Shomo] investigation with the reported incidents in Culpeper County." In addition to driving a truck and always choosing petite female victims (Shomo was about 5' and 100 pounds) who were driving alone, the suspect would flash his headlights and signal the driver to pull over, tell her something was wrong with her car and that it wasn't safe to drive, and offer her a ride. Women who accepted rides and survived also said the man told them "to leave a white item on the vehicle to signify that [it] was disabled," to step on a jacket on the passenger-side floor of his truck, asked them "to search for an item in the door pocket," and said his name was Larry.

The State Police had reached the same conclusion - that the Prince William attack was linked to the Route 29 incidents - and they ended their May 13 press release with this statement: "After a thorough review of all the victims' statements, police believe that all the incidents involved are the same person." The statement they needed the most, of course, was the one they could never have.

Perched atop a hill, Harley and Sadie Showalter's spacious home in Harrisonburg is surrounded by well-tended garden beds and lush green grass sloping down to the street. The living room is dominated by two bold paintings of flowers the Showalters bought on a trip to Quebec, but most compelling is a portrait of Alicia that hangs in one corner: It would be hard not to sense the fierce emotions that surround it.

Harley sold his insurance agency in downtown Harrisonburg last year, and he now offers financial services. Sadie, who taught elementary school before their children were born, later helped set up the first computer lab at the junior high. They met as students at Eastern Mennonite College (now University). Although the branch of the Mennonite Church they belong to is pacifist - like almost all branches of the church - it largely resembles other mainstream Protestant denominations.

The Showalters are gracious to reporters, which isn't always easy. In the media crush that followed Alicia's disappearance, Harley says, some were "not considerate." And the Showalters remain bitter that when the horrific outcome was finally revealed, the news was leaked to the media before investigators contacted them.

As Alicia's image smiles down from the corner of the room, her parents tell the story.

"It was a gorgeous day," Sadie Showalter says - a gorgeous day to drive east from Harrisonburg across the Blue Ridge and south to Charlottesville, where mother would meet daughter at Fashion Square Mall and hear about life as a fourth-year graduate student in pharmacology at Johns Hopkins.

They'd planned to meet at 11 a.m., but Alicia, driving down from Baltimore, was always early. So her mother left home in time to arrive at 10:30 at the women's petite section at Leggett - now Belks - and began looking through the formal dresses. Their mission was to choose a dress for Sadie to wear to the May wedding of Alicia's brother, Patrick.

When 11 a.m. passed without Alicia, Sadie called her son-in-law, Alicia's husband, Mark. He planned to study all weekend; with Alicia's support, he had decided to leave his career as a CPA and enter dental school at the University of Maryland. This weekend, he was working on science prerequisites. Mark told his mother-in-law to give Alicia a few more minutes, then call again if she hadn't arrived. When Sadie called him again at 11:30, he had gone online via a dial-up connection and couldn't be reached.

For the next two and a half hours, Sadie sat on a bench inside the Leggett entrance that looks out on Route 29 and tried to will Alicia's car to turn into the parking lot. Periodically, she called Harley on her cell phone (which was so new to her that when Alicia had asked for the number the night before, Sadie had had to go in search of it and call her back).

After two hours of trying "desperately" to get hold of Mark, Harley finally succeeded at 2 p.m., and Mark immediately began calling the State Police. This was no easy task, since in 1996 there was no communication system linking the various divisions. This meant that he had to call each of the Maryland and Virginia State Police divisions between Baltimore and Charlottesville.

At that point, Sadie abandoned her vigil, left the mall, and headed up Route 29 to drive home. Just as she was about to turn left onto Route 33, she had the impulse to keep driving north on 29. But she pushed it aside and drove west instead, home to Harrisonburg to wait.

"The first two weeks were the worst," Sadie says. Every morning, someone from the State Police would come to make a report - but there was rarely anything to say.

Evidence pointing to foul play quickly emerged. At 1:15 that first afternoon, a woman on Clay Street in Culpeper, which is about five miles from where Alicia had been abducted, found her Citibank MasterCard and called the number on the back to report it. And at 6 p.m., Alicia's car was found three miles south of Culpeper.

The family gathered quickly. Patrick - who was not only Alicia's brother but also her twin - came from Nashville, where he was in his last year of medical school at Vanderbilt, and their younger sister, Barbara, arrived from Indiana, where she was a senior at Goshen College. Mark was there, along with Showalters from around the region and relatives on Sadie's side of the family from Ohio. The phone rang nonstop, mail flooded in, reporters hovered nearby - but nothing changed.

Also recovered the afternoon of March 2 - but not turned in to the State Police until March 8 - was a black parka, later identified as the one Alicia had been wearing. It was found in Madison County on Route 626, less than a mile east of Route 29, at about 2:30 p.m. On March 9, the last items - several more credit cards - were found in Culpeper.

The time came when Mark, Patrick, and Barbara had to return to school, and at some point Sadie told herself that life had to go on. But those departures didn't render the day-in/day-out silence any less agonizing.

It ended on Tuesday, May 7, when a man walking along a country road outside Lignum, in a rural part of Culpeper County, saw buzzards circling over a field that was being cleared of trees. When he went to investigate, he glimpsed a body under several fallen logs in a gully that was invisible from the road.

"Thank God for buzzards," Harley would later tell reporters, explaining that the birds had put an end to nine weeks of waiting: A long-indrawn breath could at last be released. And the next part, where Alicia came home to her family, could finally begin.

"It was pouring rain that night," Special Agent Stan Gregg says, which made an already difficult crime scene even harder to process. A State Police investigator in the Violent Crimes Unit, Gregg worked in the muddy field throughout the night of May 7 and for two or three days in his other role, that of crime scene technician. Nearly fours later, he officially joined the investigation as a detective.

The body was in a state consistent with two months' decomposition, which meant that Alicia had almost certainly died quickly. Between the heavy rain and the fact that two months had elapsed since her murder, the scene didn't yield many clues - and what clues it did give up, such as the cause of death, are closely guarded by Gregg, who is now the only investigator officially pursuing the case.

Roughly 10,000 tips poured into the State Police hotline; Gregg says he can tell when America's Most Wanted reruns its 1996 segment on Alicia, as he always gets another wave of calls.

Only later would one tip stand out in a way it hadn't at the time. The call came from one of Darrell Rice's coworkers back in Maryland, who called the hotline because Rice had been "acting strange." Gregg says that like all such calls, the tip was "given to someone to complete, and it was completed." "Completed," he explains, could mean many things, including that the person didn't resemble the composite sketch. In any case, all Gregg says he knows now is that the tip was considered completed and filed away.

Alicia's memorial service was held on Mother's Day. Twelve hundred people came to Park View Mennonite Church; they filled the sanctuary of the church she'd grown up in and overflowed into rooms fitted with monitors, rooms she had moved through hundreds of times for Sunday School and youth group and parties from the time she and Patrick had played in the nursery to New Year's Eve of 1994, when she'd come back to be married.

The Showalters buried their daughter in a small cemetery next to Trissels Mennonite Church in the rolling countryside outside Harrisonburg. In the weeks that followed, Patrick graduated from medical school, Barbara graduated from college, and Patrick was married.

Since the murder, her sister Barbara has also married, as has the young widower Mark, now a dentist in Greensboro, North Carolina.

All three - Patrick, Barbara, and Mark - have children. Alicia had told family she planned to weave her life as a researcher into her life as a wife and mother. She had been researching bilharzia, an often debilitating disease endemic in developing countries, and Johns Hopkins was so taken with its Alicia's enthusiasm that it created an annual award in her name. Instead, she looks out from her portrait in the corner, always young, always smiling - always gone.

Throughout Central Virginia, the discovery of Alicia's body and the knowledge that her killer was still free elevated fears of the Route 29 Stalker to new heights. Ironically, he has not struck again. Yet only three weeks later, the region was once more rocked by violence.

On May 18, 1996, the Saturday after Alicia was buried, two young women - Julie Williams and Lollie Winans - began driving south from Vermont to Virginia, where they planned to hike and camp in the Shenandoah National Park. Julie had to be home by May 29, but until then they would explore the mountains with Lollie's dog, pitch their tent wherever they liked, and explore the serenity and beauty of the mountains.

They never left the Park. Instead, two rangers found their bodies just past twilight on Saturday, June 1, at a secluded campsite near Skyland Lodge. Once again, Stan Gregg would be called in as a crime scene technician, this time alongside agents from the Park Service and FBI. And once again, like the field outside Lignum, there would be frustratingly little evidence.

Fifteen thousand leads would eventually be followed - to ends as frustrating as what the State Police found in Alicia's case. But then, in July of the next year, Yvonne Malbasha, a bicyclist in the Park, was stalked and attacked by a man driving a pickup. This time the investigation was over in a matter of minutes, because Malbasha was found by a ranger soon after her frustrated attacker sped off. The ranger radioed the man's description, and the attacker, in a blue Chevy S10 pickup, was stopped at the Swift Run Gap exit at Route 33. Malbasha identified him immediately, and he was arrested. It was Darrell David Rice.

Rice had been living in Columbia, Maryland, and, court documents indicate, had been fired from his job making software manuals for MCI Systemhouse (now part of EDS) a week and a half before the incident. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. Although he resembled some of the police sketches of the Route 29 Stalker, he was only 28 years old during the stalking incidents, a little younger than the police's stated age range of 35 to 45. And there was no evidence he was involved - even though, in the hours after he was taken into custody for the attack on Malbasha, he allegedly made statements to a federal marshal that Prince William County might have deemed worth investigating.

In an interview with Stan Gregg on March 4, 2003, U.S. Marshal Larry Carter (now deceased) claimed that Rice admitted to a "rage against women" that sometimes erupted when he was on the highway and that he liked to "run women off the road" on Route 29. When Carter asked what he did after that, Rice said he would "just keep going." To a question about Alicia Showalter Reynolds, however, he told Carter he "didn't know who that was."

In 2005, in a Prince William County courtroom, Carmelita Shomo took the witness stand and swore that Rice was the man who had abducted, attacked, and robbed her. Rice's defense team labeled her identification of Rice as unreliable, since six years had elapsed before she was shown the photo lineup. They also pointed to inconsistencies they claimed stretched back to her earliest statements to police. Sam Newsome, who is a Master Detective with the Prince William County Police, administered the 2002 photo lineup and claims Shomo has never wavered in her identification. "I have no doubt that Darrell Rice abducted Carmelita Shomo," he says. "Had I had any doubt, we never would have charged him."

Investigators also testified that according to Rice's employment records, he had been off work on all but one day during the period when 18 of the women were stopped. His defense team, however, disputes this. Also, in 1996, his father, Leon Emile Rice, was living in a rented house in Culpeper. Located at 600 Jaynes Lane, the dwelling is convenient to Route 29, which investigators believe Rice could have used as a base of operations.

The trial, which hinged almost entirely on Shomo's testimony, ended when Rice took a so-called Alford plea, in which he claimed innocence while admitting there was enough evidence to convict him. In a statement he made to the judge before being sentenced, Rice said, "I am not guilty of the crimes I was indicted for. This is all for strategic reasons. It is in my best interests to return to my family" - referring, presumably, to the fact that as part of his plea agreement, no time was added to the sentence he was already serving in federal prison.

The abduction of Carmelita Shomo marked the beginning of a series of crimes against women in Central Virginia, and the attack on Yvonne Malbasha marked the end. In between, three women lay dead. Alicia's murder has officially been linked to the other incidents along Route 29, including the attack on Shomo, and investigators from the Park Service and FBI believe that the Rice is guilty not only of the 1997 attack on Yvonne Malbasha, but of the 1996 murders of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans as well.

In April 2002, at a highly publicized press conference at Justice Department headquarters, then Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that Rice was being indicted for the double murder, but the indictment was withdrawn in 2004. Some - but not all - investigators believe the crimes along Route 29 and the crimes in the Park are similar enough to throw suspicion on Rice.

Rice has staunch defenders. In a letter to The Hook, Deirdre Enright, a member of Rice's defense team, stated, "We are confident that Darrell Rice is innocent of the Shenandoah National Park murders, the 'Route 29' crimes, and the murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds. We are certain we could refute any serious assertion the government might make to the contrary." Indeed, as they are quick to point out, the indictment for the murders in the Park was withdrawn when DNA evidence threw the case into doubt.

Rice, now 39, will be released from prison on July 17, after serving 10 of 11 years of his sentence. He'll be reunited with his truck, which for now is being stored at Enright's house on Saint Anne's Road in the Meadowbrook Heights neighborhood. He plans to move to Baltimore, where his mother lives, and will be required by the terms of his parole to seek work. But just as he won't be able to erase where he's been for the past 10 years, it's unlikely he'll escape the cloud of suspicion that continues to swirl around him.

Police still want tips. The Alicia Showalter Reynolds murder case is still an open investigation, and you can help if you know something. Call the State Police at 800-572-2260 or 888-300-0156.

Chronological List of Incidents

1. (Date unknown), 4:00 p.m.

2. January 17, 11:30 a.m.

3. February 12, 6:00 a.m.

4. February 14, 11:50 a.m.

5. February 14, 6-6:30 p.m.

6. February 16, 5-5:30 a.m.

7. Between February 17 & 21, 6:40 a.m.

8. February 21, 3:15 p.m.

9. February 21, 8:30 p.m.

10. February 22, 7-7:15 a.m.

11. February 22, 7:30-7:45 a.m.

12. February 23, 7:12-7:15 a.m.

13. February 24, 12:30 a.m. (Carmelita Shomo)

14. February 24, 2-2:15 a.m.

15. February 24, 4:30 a.m.

16. February 24, 7:20 a.m.

17. February 26 or 28, 6:45 a.m.

18. February 26, 2 p.m.

19. February 28, 6:45 a.m.

20. February 28, 12:30-12:45 p.m.

21. February 29, 6:15 p.m.

22. March 2, 10:30 a.m.

23. March 2, 10-10:30 a.m. (Alicia Showalter Reynolds)

It was near Mountain Run Road at 11:30 a.m. on January 17, 1996 that smooth-talking "Larry," the Route 29 stalker, first appeared on the Culpeper Bypass. He didn't pull over a woman again until 6 a.m. on February 12. He waited two more days before resuming his ruse twice on Valentine's Day.

And then things began to accelerate. Between February 16 and 21, he stopped four more women - then two on the 22nd, one on the 23rd, and three on February 24, in one case just an hour and a half after Carmelita Shomo was robbed and dragged near Independent Hill, about 40 miles away.

Darrell Rice later took an Alford Plea in the Shomo case. That means he acknowledged that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him, but he didn't admit guilt or serve any additional time on top of the sentence he was already serving for the attack on Yvonne Malbasha (that occurred a year later). There were five more Route 29 stops between February 26 and 29.

On March 2, the State Police received two reports of women being stopped. One of them was Alicia Showalter Reynolds. And then, police say, the series of pullovers ended.

On or about June 1, 1996, 24 year old Julianne Williams and 26 year old Lollie Winans were brutally murdered while hiking and camping along the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. Their killer has never been caught.

You meet a hardy lot along the Appalachian Trail, some of whom are intent on braving all the perils of 2,159 miles of woods and mountains on a hike from Maine to Georgia.

But the slayings of two women - both accomplished backpackers and campers - just off the trail in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park has shaken people who sought peace and challenge in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “I'm definitely going to be looking over my shoulder on this hike,'' said Cindy Clymer, 42, of Charlotte, who was hiking with her husband and their 21-month-old son near Dark Hollow Falls off the scenic Skyline Drive. “I don't know who's going to get me out there.''

Park rangers found the bodies of Julianne Williams, 24, of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Lollie Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine, Saturday in a backcountry campsite off a side trail within three miles of the popular Skyland Lodge. Autopsies revealed that the women died after their throats were cut, but investigators refused to say whether they had been sexually assaulted. A golden retriever named Taj, which had been with the women on the trail, was found unharmed in the woods nearby.

Knowledgeable hikers said it's important to keep the murders in perspective. The Appalachian Trail Conference, an organization based in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, that maintains and manages the trail, says 4 million people visit or hike the trail each year, yet there have been only nine murders on or near it in 22 years. “There is an expectation sometimes that the trail is a sanctuary from the creeps of the world, and it's not,'' said Brian King, a spokesman for the group. “People should always keep their street smarts with them,'' King said. “I think if people take normal precautions about strangers, that will serve them well.''

The enormously popular trail draws hikers from all over the Eastern seaboard, including Hampton Roads. “We have a very, very active hiking community here,'' said Lillie Gilbert, owner of Wild River Outfitters, an outdoor-supply store in Virginia Beach. Local hikers are “extremely concerned'' about the murders, she said. One of her employees, Kenny Harrah, is on the trail now. He set out from southwestern Virginia in early May, bound for the trail's northern end at Mount Katahdin, Maine. Harrah telephoned Gilbert on Tuesday from northern Pennsylvania. He hadn't heard about the murders in Virginia. But “he said it would not change his attitude about hiking the trail,'' Gilbert said. She said Harrah told her: “You've always got to be careful, stay alert and be aware of what's around you.''

Reese Lukei, past president of the Tidewater Appalachian Trail Club, said violence on the trail attracts disproportionate attention because it is so unusual. “The reason, I guess, it gets so much attention is that it's the last place in the world you'd ever expect something like this to happen,'' he said.

Both victims were trained wilderness camping and hiking guides. “They wanted to help other people learn to be in the outdoors,'' said Peggy Willens, spokeswoman for Woodswomen, a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based adventure/travel vacation organization for women. The women worked as interns for the group last summer, leading outdoor programs in Minnesota. “They were both very experienced outdoorswomen,'' Willens said.

Cindy Clymer was so frightened and angry about the slayings that she and her husband decided not to camp in the Shenandoah National Park on Tuesday night. “That person could still be lurking around,'' Clymer said.

Porter Teejarden, 23, of Providence, Rhode Island, and two of her girlfriends thought twice about continuing their hike in Virginia when they heard about the slayings. “For women it's real depressing because men don't have to worry about this half as much,'' Teejarden said.

Park officials and trail organizations already have begun receiving calls from people worried about loved ones on the trail. “I've gotten calls mostly from parents who are nervous. This morning I got a call from a man in Vermont who was very worried about his 18-year-old daughter, who is hiking the trail alone,'' said Wilson Riley, director of administration of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. Nobody has canceled reservations for primitive cabins the club maintains along the trail, but hikers are much more safety-conscious, Riley said. “People are asking us, `What should we do,' and we tell them to take whatever precautions they feel are necessary,'' Riley said. “You are alone and out of sight of others and if someone has criminal intent, there's really no one around to witness it.''

Murder usually comes in pairs along the Appalachian Trail. Of the nine people killed on or near the trail since 1974, all but three died in double slayings, according to the Appalachian Trail Conference. In another case, two women were attacked but one survived. A list of the murders is as follows:

The Appalachian Trail occasionally has presented other perils. In 1990, through-hikers were warned not to camp along a 14-mile stretch of the footpath in Tennessee after fish-hook booby traps appeared there, apparently the work of local landowners embroiled in a dispute with the federal government. A trail shelter was burned to the ground along the same stretch of trail that summer.

Last year, there were 15 homicides in national parks, which cover 83 million acres, said National Park Service spokeswoman Anita Clevenger.

Lesbian hikers found slain in national park, couple planned to live together

The two female hikers slain in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park were lesbians who were romantically involved, according to sources who knew Julianne Williams, 24, of Burlington, Vermont, and Lollie Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine.

Investigators of the double murder would not say whether they are pursuing any gay-related motives or angles in the unsolved case, said Shenandoah National Park spokesperson Paul Pfenninger.

Park rangers found the bodies of Williams and Winans at a backcountry campsite near the Appalachian Trail at approximately 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 1st, the day after Williams' father reported the women missing. The bodies of the hikers, who had planned a five-day hike through the park, were found near Skyland Lodge, along Skyline Drive near Luray, Virginia. According to the medical examiner, the cause of death for both women was "an incised wound to the neck."

The investigation into the murders is being jointly conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Virginia State Police, and criminal investigators from the National Park Service. Many local law enforcement officials are also providing support, according to park spokesperson Pfenninger.

Pfenninger, who is acting as the public information officer on this incident, told the Blade that he asked investigators whether they were examining any gay-related angles but was told they would not comment on whether the murders could have been bias-motivated. "I asked [investigators] the question and they said they just can't talk about the investigation," Pfenninger said. "I explained why I needed to know, that the gay and lesbian community was concerned. One [investigator] I did talk to directly said we didn't have any evidence of that sort ... that they were lesbians."

Park officials said Tuesday that the slayings were "an isolated incident." According to the Washington Post, Pfenninger said that "something [investigators] found at the site led them to believe it was an isolated incident," but he would not say what this evidence was.

Pfenninger later said that park officials "do not know" if the murder or murderers will strike again, according to the Post, and by Wednesday, park officials were passing out fliers about the murder and warning campers to be careful. Pfenninger said he used the phrase "isolated incident" to mean investigators have no similar crimes at national parks to link the murders to. "I think the term 'isolated' is what everyone's getting hung up on," he told the Blade Thursday. "This particular case does not resemble any of the evidence [from] any other cases in the country. I think it was just a bad choice of words." John Donahue, spokesperson for the FBI's Richmond office, did not return a reporter's numerous telephone calls.

The Burlington Free Press reported Thursday that Donahue discounted a theory that the women might have been targeted because the killer believed they were lesbians. "There has been no indication that this is a hate crime of any particular type," Donahue said, according to the Free Press.

Tracy Conaty, a field organizer the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force who is an expert on anti-gay violence issues, said she had spoken with Donahue. According to Conaty, Donahue "said that they are looking at all the aspects. He did not understand why there was such a response from the gay and lesbian community [about the murders]. He said he's gotten over 200 phone calls since the murders."

According to friends and coworkers, both Williams and Winans were very active in the outdoors and shared an interest in women's issues. They met in the summer of 1995 while working at the Minneapolis-based organization Woodswomen Inc., a group that provides outdoor education for women, according to its executive director Denise Mitten.

The Shenandoah slayings reminded many gay activists of another attack on a lesbian couple eight years ago. In May 1988, a 28-year-old lesbian was fatally shot while camping with her lover near the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania. The victim, Rebecca Wight of Blacksburg, Virginia, was camping with her lover Claudia Brenner, 31, when the two were ambushed by Stephen Roy Carr, 28, who reportedly lived in an electricity-equipped cave nearby.

According to testimony provided by Brenner at a preliminary hearing, Carr surprised the two women after dark, shooting them while they were engaged in sex. Brenner, who was seriously wounded in the shooting, also testified that the women believed they were alone in the woods but that they had seen Carr at their campsite earlier that day and deliberately relocated in an effort to seek privacy. Carr was later convicted of first-degree murder in the Adams County Court of Common Pleas in Gettysburg, Pa. He was sentenced the following year to life in prison without the possibility of parole. "I feel like [Julianne Williams] was just getting her life together," said Stradler, whose church will hold a memorial for Williams on Sunday. "I'm reluctant to violate her reticence [to be openly Lesbian] and I want to be honest about who she was. It's important to celebrate who she was."

Claudia Brenner talks to the Matlovich Society in Portland Thursday about the shooting on the Appalachian Trail that wounded her and killed her companion in 1988.

Two weeks ago, the bodies of a Maine woman and her hiking companion were found on the Appalachian Trail, their throats brutally slashed.

Today, a woman who survived a similar attack will speak about anti-gay violence and safety on the Appalachian Trail at the annual Pride Rally in Portland.

Claudia Brenner of Ithaca, N.Y., will be the keynote speaker at the 11 a.m. rally in front of Portland City Hall. Brenner and her partner, Rebecca Wight, were blasted with a hail of gunfire on the trail on May 13, 1988, by a stranger who had seen them kissing. Brenner was shot five times, then managed to hike out four miles to get help. Wight took the rest of the bullets and bled to death under a tree.

Brenner says violence was the last thing she was expecting on that beautiful spring day in Pennsylvania. And she never imagined that it would happen again. But two weeks ago, it did. On June 1, rangers discovered the bodies of Julianne Williams, 24, of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Lollie Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine, in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. Williams and Winans were the eighth and ninth people killed along the 2,159-mile Appalachian Trail since 1974.

When Brenner heard about the recent murders, her reaction was "that it was horrible, and that it was somewhat depressing that the violence just continues."

There were some similarities between the two tragedies: Two women hiking alone on the Appalachian Trail. Same time of year. Speculation that the women were lovers. Brenner has chronicled her experience of murder on the Appalachian Trail in a book called Eight Bullets: One Woman's Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence.

Talking about her ordeal again and again to the media and the public hasn't had much impact on her personal healing process, Brenner says. But it has helped her feel she is making a contribution toward healing the hate that society directs toward gay men and lesbians. "What I've found is that there's a lot of compassion in the general public for me, for Rebecca, as there is for the two women that were killed just recently," she said. "I think it's an opportunity for me to remind people that compassion really needs to stretch across the spectrum . . . You not only feel compassion for someone whose life was taken," she continued, "but you also remember to feel compassion for the person who has (anti-gay) graffiti scrawled on their locker when they're in high school, or the young person who's family is rejecting them because they're gay."

Brenner and Wight met and fell in love at Virginia Tech University, where Brenner was studying to become an architect. When they set out on their fateful hike, Wight was finishing a master's degree in business and preparing to start working toward a doctorate at Penn State. Wight was "a very strong, centered person," Brenner recalls. "She was only 28 and had already achieved many goals in her life," Brenner said. "She was really happy outdoors, loved the outdoors, very physically fit."

If Brenner and Wight had been superstitious, they might have gone home that day instead of heading deeper into the Pennsylvania woods. The night before, they had parked their car near the trail, on a road with the foreboding name of "Dead Woman Hollow." That morning, Friday the 13th, they thought they were alone.

But someone was watching them. Stalking them. Stephen Roy Carr, who sometimes lived in a cave and carried a .22-caliber rifle, ran into Wight as she was getting ready for the day. She was nude.

"Got a cigarette?" he asked. Wight said no and hurried back to the tent. The two women quickly dressed and decided to find a more private campsite. As they left their camp, they ran into Carr again. "See you later," he said. "See you later," they politely replied and moved on. Later, when the women stopped to consult their map, Carr appeared again, his rifle over his shoulders. "Are you lost already?" he sneered. "No," Brenner said, "are you?"

By 5:30 that evening, the scary-but-brief encounters with the scruffy mountain man were a fading memory. But Carr had caught up to the two lovers and saw them kiss. He hated seeing women kiss, he later told police. So, from his hiding place in the woods, he started shooting.

Brenner was hit, and the two women ran to a nearby tree. Wight was shot in the head and back before she could make it to cover. Brenner - shot in the head, throat and upper body and bleeding badly - decided their only hope was for her to hike out for help. She managed to flag a motorist and make it to a hospital. Wight was not so fortunate. Bleeding and in pain, she lost her vision and died under the tree.

Carr ran, seeking shelter with a farm family who didn't realize he was a wanted man. Eventually he was captured and convicted of first-degree murder. He is serving a life sentence without parole.

Brenner, who turns 40 this month, rejects the notion that women might be safer if they take weapons on their hikes, to give them a fighting chance against someone like Carr. The idea of carrying a pistol on the trail "seems diametrically opposed to making it safer for all of us," she said.

And telling people they should simply try to be more alert to potential danger is akin to blaming the victim, she said. Besides, she and Wight tried to avoid Carr, and he still attacked them.

"The only protection against the kind of people that would slash throats and would shoot in the woods is to have a society that finds that behavior intolerable, unacceptable, and doesn't permit those kinds of attitudes to develop in their young people," she said.

"The guy who shot Rebecca and myself was a person who displayed anti-gay and basically dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors throughout his life, but he wasn't crazy," she said.

Four of the bullets that hit Brenner could have killed her. One shattered her back teeth. But other than some ongoing dental work, she has suffered no serious, long-term physical consequences from the shooting. Psychologically, she is more fragile. She has been treated off and on for post-traumatic stress disorder, which has manifested itself through sleeplessness, restlessness and anxiety. "It recedes in your life, but it doesn't necessarily go away," she said.

In the years following Wight's death, Brenner has tried to go backpacking again. "It hasn't been real fun for me, so it hasn't been something I've chosen to pursue. It hasn't been real relaxing," she said, laughing.

A Shenandoah National Park spokesperson said this week the murder of two women near Skyline Drive last week was an "isolated incident." He said something found at the site of the murders led investigators to this conclusion, though he refused to say what was found. But there is reason to believe the murders may not be "isolated."

At least four other couples have been murdered on park land in Virginia since 1986. Three of those four were at or very near known gay cruising areas. On of those four involved a female couple who, like the Skyline pair, were found with their throats slit.

In October 1986, the bodies of two athletic women, also in their 20's, were found with their throats slit on federal property known as the Colonial Parkway near Williamsburg, Virginia. The area was popular with couples as a "lovers' lane" site and was also situated very near a place known to be popular with gay couples. There were no signs that the women had struggled against their killer or killers and no sign of drug or alcohol use. Their bodies were fully clothed and there were no signs of sexual assault. Police ruled out robbery as a motive because their money was still with them. Their bodies were found in the back of a car belonging to one of the women; the car had been pushed down an embankment and into some thick shrubbery. Police found evidence that someone had attempted to ignite the vehicle.

Three other couples, all heterosexual, were found murdered in somewhat similar circumstances in the eastern Virginia area in 1987, 1988, and 1989. In 1987, a couple was found on Ragged Island, a place known for gay cruising near the James River in the Newport News area. In 1988, another couple's bodies were never found but their car was discovered at a pull-off along the same Colonial Parkway and about two to three miles from where the female couple's bodies were found. And in 1989, a couple's car was found at a rest stop on Interstate 64 between Richmond and Williamsburg and their bodies were found buried nearby. The rest stop had been the site of a brutal murder of a male nurse in 1986 by a group of Navy sailors. The FBI investigated the murders, but never identified suspects.

At left is a copy of a poster, released June 5, 1996, that was made by the National Park Service in conjunction with the FBI to offer a reward of $25,000 (later increased to $50,000) for information that leads to the arrest of the person or persons responsible for the deaths of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans. The murders of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans are still unsolved.

Their bodies were found at their backcountry campsite in the Shenandoah National Forest off Skyline Drive about a half-mile from Skyland Lodge in Virginia on Saturday, June 1, 1996. They were last seen alive on Thursday, May 24, 1996.

If you were in the Shenandoah Park or on the Appalachian Trail near Virginia between May 19 - June 1, 1996 and you think you may have seen either or both of these women and/or their dog, Taj, or any suspicious people in the area, please call America's Most Wanted at 1-800-CRIME-TV immediately. Or, if you were in the park during those two weeks and took any pictures or video tape, you could be holding crucial evidence without even knowing it. You are asked to call 1-800-CRIME-TV immediately. Sadly, it has been reported that there were signs of captivity at the crime scene, so these women may not have been alone when you saw them. Or, perhaps you saw their dog, Taj, with someone else? Somewhere, someone has information that could lead authorities to their killer(s).

The National Park Service waited two days to inform the public, including other campers and hikers in the area, of the murders. Shockingly, when the National Park Service did release the story, they quickly called it an " isolated incident" and simply urged hikers to "take precautions," but these women were outdoor group leaders for a group called Woodswomen, Inc. in Minneapolis, at least one of them was trained in self-defense, and they camped out of sight of other hikers, brought their dog, and did everything else that they were supposed to do! Few details about this case are being released, however, this case marks the fifth double-slaying on park land in Virginia since 1986. Read more about these "isolated incidents," including a frighteningly similar case which also involved two women who were found with their throats slit.

Transcript of the Saturday, July 20, 1996 America's Most Wanted segment about the murders of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans in Shenandoah National Park

[Host, John Walsh] The Shenandoah National Park, nestled in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains is a place where people come to get away from it all, to take in the scenic beauty of the Skyline Drive, to hike the Appalachian Trail. This peaceful setting is the last place Rangers expected to discover not one murder, but two.

[Ranger Clayton Jordan] This is the location where the Rangers found a campsite and found the bodies of Julianne Williams and Lollie Winans on June the 1st.

[FBI, Bill Falls] Their throats slashed and they were bound. It certainly was a brutal crime.

[Host, John Walsh] FBI and The National Park Service formed a task force, but a national forest is a hard place to locate a killer.

[Ranger Clayton Jordan] It certainly is very difficult to track a killer in this situation because we have hundreds of miles of backcountry trails and we're only less than a half of a mile from a road.

[Host, John Walsh] Finding witnesses in a park 105 miles long is proving even more difficult.

[FBI, Bill Falls] It makes for a tough investigation, for we have no witnesses at the crime scene itself, we really have no witnesses that can put people in the park with them.

[Host, John Walsh] With little else to go on, the task force is focusing on the victims to see if the killer was perhaps someone they knew. Twenty-four year-old Julie Williams was from Minnesota. Already an accomplished geologist, Julie worked for a time as a Park Ranger in Big Bend Texas.

[Julie's Father] What she liked to do and who she was, I think she probably gained some spirituality also in the woods and being outside. It was very important to her.

[Host, John Walsh] Twenty-six year-old Lollie Winans was from Michigan and finishing up college in Maine. Her dream was to work for Outward Bound, leading wilderness trips.

[Lollie's Father] Lollie was a caring beautiful young lady at the prime of her life and she was just in the midst of achieving a lot of the goals she had set out many years ago.

[Host, John Walsh] Julie lived in Vermont and often spent weekends with Lollie. They formed a special relationship and wanted to share their lives together.

[Julie's Roommate, Derek] When they were together it really seemed like they had a fantastic time together. They both really loved to spend time together outside, whether it was canoeing or hiking.

[Host, John Walsh] In June, Lollie was moving to Vermont, and both women were starting new jobs.

[Lollie's Friend, Ken] When I was talking to Lollie, she knew that she had a month between school and work, was looking forward to, you know, having some adventures, having some fun.

[Host, John Walsh] On May 18, the experienced back-packers decided to go exploring. They set off from Vermont and headed south to central Virginia to the Shenandoah National Park. Julie and Lollie arrived at the northern park entrance on May 19th, and got a camping permit for two nights. They stopped at Pinnacles' Overlook on Skyline Drive. Lollie's dog, Taj, went along on the trip. The FBI and Park Rangers retraced Julie and Lollie's trip and put together a timeline, using snapshots the women took themselves. May 20th, Julie and Lollie hiked down White Oak Canyon Trail to experience the spectacular waterfalls. Despite two days of rain, they got an extension on their camping permit at Thornton Gap on May 22nd.

[Ranger Barbara Stewart] They had registered to go backcountry camping from, I believe, the 22nd to the 27th of May. When I got a chance to talk to them about, you know, about other things, just in the few minutes, I liked them, and, I didn't know their names then, but they were nice folks.

[Host, John Walsh] On May 23rd, Julie and Lollie hiked to Pollocks Knob on the Appalachian Trail. They took this photo below Crescent Rock Overlook.

[FBI, Bill Falls] Friday, on the 24th, is the last day that we actually have pictures of them.

[Host, John Walsh] Julie and Lollie hiked up Hawksbill Mountain, the highest point in the park, and took a break with Taj at Bird's Nest Two. Tired from the trek, the women hitched a ride from Hawksbill, stopping near Skyland to find a campsite for the night.

[Ranger Clayton Jordan] One of our Park Rangers drove them to a parking lot located at the top of this trail and that is the last confirmed sighting of Julianne Williams and Lollie Winans alive.

[Host, John Walsh] The women set up camp off this hiking trail a half mile from Skyland Lodge. Some time between May 24th and June 1st, the wilderness that Julie and Lollie loved would become a witness to their murder.

[FBI, Bill Falls] Whoever did this, certainly went down there with the intention to murder these people. It was so cold-blooded, it was a methodical killing, he knew what he was doing, and I would almost say he did it without any conscience or remorse and went about his way.

[Host, John Walsh] On June 1st, Lollie's dog was found wandering near Skyland Lodge. Rangers who were already looking for the overdue campers zeroed in on the area and quickly made the gruesome discovery.

[Julie's Father] It was Sunday morning at 3:00, that we got the call, and that they had been identified, and that they were both dead.

[Lollie's Father] One just isn't able to believe that this would happen, and that it, in effect, was reality, and I was devastated, my heart was heavy.

[Host, John Walsh] For now, Julie and Lollie's deaths will remain a mystery. The killer's identity a secret held close by the wilderness.

[FBI, Bill Falls] We know that they were in the park, we know the last day that they were seen. Other than that, we don't know what really actually happened.

[Host, John Walsh] Now, there's not much to go on, but we can solve this case. The crucial time period is when the women were in the park between May 19 and June 1st. If you were in the park during that time, and saw these two women, agents need to know. Also if you took pictures or video tape in the park during those two weeks, you could be holding the clues that could solve this case. Two young women who were killed deserve justice. You could be the one to bring it to them. So please, if you know anything, anything at all, call 1-800-CRIMETV, and remember, you can remain anonymous.

Shenandoah Hikers', Parkway Murders Have Similarities, Investigators Are Studying Possible Connection Between Two Killings of Women

Noting a "striking" number of similarities, FBI agents in Norfolk are probing whether the recent slayings of two female hikers in Shenandoah National Park are possibly connected to the murders of two women on the Colonial Parkway 10 years ago.

The October 1986 murders of Rebecca A. Dowski and Cathleen M. Thomas became the first of four incidents FBI and State Police investigators believe may involve a serial killer and that have been dubbed by the media as the Parkway Murders.

On June 1 of this year, veteran hikers Julianne Williams and Lollie Winans were found dead in a back-country campsite in the Shenandoah park. "There are a striking number of similarities," said Supervisory Agent Bo McFarland with the FBI's Norfolk office. "We are looking into it to see if they are connected," McFarland said Tuesday.

Special Agent John Donahue, with the FBI office in Richmond, which is handling the Shenandoah investigation, said he knew of no investigation on his office's part, except that investigators have gone through the FBI database of murders to see if similarities exist. Other than what has already been released, Donahue would not elaborate on the specifics about the most recent murders, and McFarland declined to discuss the similarities in detail to protect the ongoing investigation.

However, from what investigators have released about both double slayings, similarities include:

(Labyrinth13 Note: The above article failed to note that all four murdered women were lesbians, a fact which may indicate an anti-gay bias in the murders).

The motive for the killings is unclear in each case. Robbery did not appear to be a motive because purses and wallets were still with the victims or their belongings. Investigators say Dowski and Thomas were found fully clothed and had not been sexually assaulted. Donahue refused to say whether Williams or Winans had been assaulted, pending further investigation.

Winans and Williams were good friends who planned to move in together, according to The Washington Blade, a gay newspaper in Washington which has called upon federal investigators to probe whether the killings were a hate-related crime.

Donahue said investigators have already gone through more than 500 leads since Williams and Winans were found June 1. Suspects were identified and then discounted, he said.

An FBI official said yesterday that the agency is studying similarities between the killings in May of two female hikers in Shenandoah National Park and a decade-old double homicide in eastern Virginia to determine whether the two might be connected.

Bo McFarland, special supervisory agent in the FBI's Norfolk office, said that no clear connection has been established between the two but that "the FBI has noted the similarities as just one aspect of the case. We're trying to pursue every angle possible."

On June 1, park rangers discovered the bodies of hikers Julianne Williams, 24, of St. Cloud, Minn., and Lollie Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine, at a remote campsite near the busy Skyland Lodge off Skyline Drive. Their throats had been slashed, and the FBI revealed last week that both women's wrists had been bound.

McFarland said FBI investigators are reviewing evidence to see whether there are links to the October 1986 killings of Rebecca A. Dowski and Cathleen M. Thomas, whose bodies were found on the Colonial Parkway in eastern Virginia. Dowski's and Thomas's wrists also were bound and their throats were slashed.

In both cases, investigators said, no evidence of robbery was discovered. Police said they found no evidence of sexual assault in the Colonial Parkway case. The FBI has declined to say whether the Shenandoah victims were sexually assaulted. If a direct connection is found, the Shenandoah case would mark the latest twist in what the FBI and Virginia State Police believe may be a serial murder case. It started with the deaths of Thomas and Dowski and involved three additional double homicides on the Colonial Parkway from 1987 through 1989.

McFarland said investigations of those cases yielded several suspects over the intervening years, but not enough evidence to make an arrest.

Murder of Hikers May Be Linked to 10-Year-Old Case; FBI: Shenandoah killings may involve more than one assailant

New information emerged this week about the investigation of the double-murder of a lesbian couple camping in Shenandoah National Park two months ago. An FBI agent investigating the case said the women's wrists were bound, indicating that whoever killed them most likely went to the women's secluded campsite with the intention of murdering them. Another FBI spokesperson said this week that the agency believes that the murders may have been committed by more than one assailant. And another FBI spokesperson confirmed this week that the agency is "considering the possibility" that the Shenandoah murders "might be" connected to the murder of a female couple on federal park land in Virginia 10 years ago. Appearing on a segment of the America's Most Wanted television program on Saturday, July 20, FBI investigator Bill Falls called the Shenandoah murders "brutal" and "cold- blooded" and said that the assailant appeared to kill without remorse.

The bodies of Julianne Williams, 24, and Lollie Winans, 26, were found on June 1st, with their wrists bound and their throats slashed. In an interview with the Blade this week, FBI agent John Donahue, who serves as spokesperson for the FBI's Richmond, VA., office, said the FBI believes the murders "could have been committed by more than one person."

If the women were killed by a lone assailant, Donahue said, "that person would have to have been very strong to have controlled the situation." Asked what he meant by "controlled," Donahue explained that "both of the women were experienced hikers, in excellent shape, well-conditioned . . . they were independent, confident, accomplished hikers. That brings us to the conclusion that more than one person could have been responsible for it."

Many of those same characteristics - including, apparently, that there were no signs of struggle at the Shenandoah scene - were true about the two women murdered together near Williamsburg, Virginia, in October 1986. Cathleen Thomas, 27, an Rebecca Dowski, 21, were found dead inside a car belonging to one of the, which had been pushed down an embankment on federal property along the Colonial Parkway in York, Virginia. A story in Norfolk's Virginian Pilot, a daily newspaper, noted that friends of the two women indicated that Dowski and Thomas were in a "budding relationship" and liked to go to the Parkway site for privacy. The area where their bodies were found was popular with gay couples. Both women were described by friends and coworkers as being very athletic. Investigators found their purses and wallets intact inside the car, and the brother of one of the women said the FBI found no signs that the women had struggled against their attacker or attackers. A medical examiner's report indicated that both women were found fully clothed, and there was no indication that either had been sexually assaulted or that either had used alcohol or drugs. The report also noted that the women had rope burns on their necks and wrists, that they had been strangled, and that their throats had been slashed deeply by a very sharp instrument.

The Daily Press, a newspaper for the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, reported Wednesday that "FBI agents in Norfolk are probing" whether the Shenandoah slayings "are possibly connected to the murders of two women on the Colonial Parkway 10 years ago."

Bo McFarland, a spokesperson for the FBI's Norfolk office, which investigated the 1986 Colonial Parkway murders, confirmed Wednesday that there are "a number" of similarities between the Parkway and the Shenandoah murders. "I didn't mean to imply that the FBI has made any connection between the two cases," said McFarland, just that we're investigating everything." He declined to answer any questions about the similarities or provide any direct answers to questions for details about the crime scene in Shenandoah, saying that release of such information could "compromise the integrity of the investigation."

But FBI investigator Falls said on national television Saturday night that whoever killed the women in Shenandoah apparently went to the couple's secluded campsite with the intention of murdering them.

In the Shenandoah murders, investigators mapped out a timeline of the couple's last days using photographs that the women had taken during their hiking trip to the park. On Sunday, May 19, they arrived at Shenandoah National Park with Winans' dog, which was found unharmed after the slayings. The last confirmed sighting of Williams and Winans was Friday, May 24, when a park ranger gave them a ride to a parking lot across from the trail that leads to the site where their bodies were found. More than a week later, Donahue said that other witnesses also reported seeing the women alive on May 24.

Donahue said there was a "strong possibility" that the women knew their killer or killers, though he said investigators have not yet been able to establish this connection. "Finding them [at their campsite] would be like finding a needle in a haystack in the Shenandoah Valley," explained Donahue. "It wouldn't be a coincidental murder."

Donahue also said that investigators were "having a hard time" with the medical examiner's results, which showed only that the women died between Monday, May 27, and Saturday, June 1.

"We can't pin [the time] down any closer," Donahue said. "If the murder had been in an apartment or car, it would have been different. The fact that it was in a heavily wooded area made it different." Asked if he meant that the bodies had begun to decompose, Donahue said yes, that the weather and climate complicated efforts to determine the time of death.

Last weekend, the Washington Post reported that Stanley Klein, special agent in charge of the Richmond FBI office, said that one body was found inside the women's tent and the other was found outside. He also said that investigators do not believe robbery was a motive and that there is no evidence suggesting any of the women's belongings were stolen during the attack. Neither Klein nor Falls returned repeated calls from the Blade. But the Daily Press noted that there were "few or no signs of a struggle in either case" and that this fact "has led investigators in both cases to speculate that more than one person could have been involved."

The FBI has also considered that the 1986 Colonial Parkway murders and the murders of three heterosexual couples in 1987, 1988, and 1989 on or near park land in Virginia might also be linked. In at least three of those four cases, a wallet was left open and untouched in the automobile. That, and the lack of any sign of struggle, has let a number of reporters and observers following the investigations to speculate that the assailant or assailants might be posing as law enforcement authorities in order to gain control over their victims. McFarland said that while the FBI is "considering everything," that theory is "just speculation."

According to Donahue, the FBI is investigating whether the fact that Williams and Winans were Lesbians was a motive in the murders. He also said that the possibility that the women were killed by a jilted ex-boyfriend "has not been ruled out." Similar theories were considered in the Colonial Parkway slayings, too. Donahue also said that the FBI has asked more than 500 people whether they heard, during the presumed time of the murders, people screaming in the vicinity of the Shenandoah crime scene, but "so far, no one has heard anything."

Eight FBI agents are still investigating the slayings seven days a week at the Shenandoah National Park, Donahue said, and there are more than 100 people from the FBI and National Park Service working on the case. He added that on Friday, July 19, Klein renewed his commitment to "devoting [sic] as much manpower as possible" to solve the case.

The investigation into the throat-slashing deaths of Lollie Winans and Julianne Williams continues a year after their bodies were discovered. FBI and National Park Service investigators have ruled out more than 200 potential suspects in the May 1996 slaying of two Lesbian hikers at a campsite in the Shenandoah National Park near Luray, Virginia, a Park Service spokesperson said this week.

The spokesperson, Lyn Rothgeb, said the investigation into the throat-slashing deaths of Lollie Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine, and Julianne Williams, 24, of Burlington, Vermont, continues nearly one year after the two women arrived in Shenandoah Park on a hiking and camping trip on May 19, 1996.

Rothgeb said investigators ruled out potential suspects by interviewing more than 200 people who were inside or had possible access to the park in the week leading up to and including Memorial Day weekend of 1996, the time when Winans and Williams were there. She said those interviewed included park employees, visitors who had registered for camping permits, and friends and acquaintances of the two women. "All we can say at this time is the investigation is continuing," Rothgeb said.

The women's bodies were found June 1, 1996, at a camp site about a half-mile from the park's Skyland Lodge, a commercial complex on Skyline Drive that includes hotel facilities, a restaurant, and a gift shop. Investigators said they have yet to identify a motive for the killings and have not ruled out the possibility that the motive was anti-Gay hatred.

Friends said Winans (pictured at left) and Williams (pictured lower right), who met in 1995 in Minneapolis, had become romantically involved and planned to share a home in Huntington, Vermont, soon after their Shenandoah camping trip.

Both women were experienced in hiking and camping in wilderness areas. Park Service officials said they

had registered and obtained permits for camping in several locations in the 105-mile long park, which stretches like a ribbon in a north-south direction from Front Royal to Waynesboro, which is located about 25 miles west of Charlottesville. They were last seen alive May 24 by a Park Service employee who drove them to the Skyland Lodge area, where the women said they planed to set up camp. Family members said Williams and Winans were scheduled to leave the park three days later, on May 27.

Park Service spokesperson Rothgeb noted that the murders most likely took place on or just before Memorial Day weekend, a time when the park is crowded with visitors. She said hundreds of people, including visitors on day trips, employees, and campers were in the section of the park where Winans and Williams' bodies were found. Rothgeb said those who set up campsites in areas of the park away from facilities such as lodges and picnic areas are asked to obtain a "back country" permit, which records their names, addresses, and itineraries inside the park. However, she said the registration system is voluntary, and anyone can embark on a camping outing in the park's remote reaches without obtaining a permit.

In addition, park officials do not record the names or license numbers of those entering the park by car along the Skyline Drive, a winding highway that runs through the middle of the park, from end to end. Rothgeb said there are dozens of places where people can walk into the park along the park's boundaries.

The FBI, which is leading the investigation, has refused to release any details of the investigation other than to confirm that the two women died from slash wounds to their throats. They have declined to say whether or not the women were sexually assaulted or whether or not there's evidence indicating more than one person was responsible for the slayings. Authorities have said they believe one or more people who were in the park at the time of the murders have information that can help in the investigation but have been reluctant to come forward.

Authorities have posted a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murders.

I was wondering if there is any new information about the investigation? In May of 2000 I was in Shenandoah National Park backpacking by myself (I have gone there many times), and stopped at the ranger station to ask if there had been any recent problems, and if there was anything I needed to be concerned about. The ranger mentioned the murders (I had read about them at the time), and I shared a story with her . . .

I told her that in 1993 I was backpacking with my sister in Shenandoah, and we hiked into Skyland on our fourth night (we were headed south). It was raining and we were sitting outside the lodge/restaurant making our dinner when a man who appeared to work at Skyland restaurant came out and started talking to us. He asked us general questions that we avoided answering such as which way we were headed on the trail, and how far we planned to go that night . . . then he asked us how long we had been together. We replied that we were sisters, and he seemed surprised and quickly lost interest and went back inside. It bothered us for a number a reasons, mainly because he was creepy, and it was odd that he came out in the rain to talk to us. It was also unusual that he was asking about our relationship.

As I told this all to the ranger last spring, she became very interested, and asked if I would mind sticking around for a few hours while they called the person who was in charge of the investigation, so he could come and get my statement. Of course I was happy to wait. As I waited for him to arrive, the ranger told me that they still had 2 rangers working full time on the case, and that they were very close to making an arrest. They also told me that "the danger was no longer present". I don't know if the information I provided was at all useful, but I thought I would post it here just in case it triggers anything for anybody.

Although I never had the opportunity to meet Julie or Lollie, I have mourned their deaths in many ways; and feel I have gotten to know them through the beautiful comments that are provided on this site and in the countless articles I have read about this tragedy.

Source: The Hook, a Charlottesville, Virginia weekly newspaper, March 8, 2003, by Chris Kahn

Prosecutors said Monday, May 5, that a Columbia, Maryland, man was pursuing one of two female hikers before binding both with duct tape and slashing them to death in the Shenandoah National Park.

Darrell David Rice, 35, kept Julianne Williams alive longer than Laura "Lollie'' Winans, and he tortured her before she died near a creek-side campsite in 1996, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Bondurant said at a hearing in federal court on Vinegar Hill. "Julie was the object of the attack,'' Bondurant said afterward. "Her personal belongings are still missing.''

Dressed in a black and white jail jumpsuit, Rice sat quietly during the court hearing as lawyers discussed his previous altercations with women. Lawyers agreed to drop two of four murder counts against Rice that accused him of slaying Williams, 24, of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine, because of their perceived gender or sexual orientation. The counts would have allowed prosecutors to seek enhanced penalties for Rice if he was convicted. But now that the prosecution is seeking the death penalty against Rice, Bondurant said they are no longer needed. "If for some reason the jury recommends a lesser murder conviction, then those enhancements would be added again,'' he said after the hearing.

U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon closed portions of Monday's hearing, saying that psychiatric records and other evidence presented by prosecutors would taint potential jurors who might determine Rice's fate. "The evidence would be so prejudicial to be associated with the defendant in the public's mind,'' Moon said before sending out of the courtroom three reporters and a victim witness coordinator working with the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Before the courtroom was closed, Bondurant said that sometime between May 24 and May 25 1996, Rice came in contact with the women. He said Williams and Winans were stripped of their clothes, and their hands were tied and retied - at one point with hair ripped out from one of the victims. "We don't know how long this took,'' Bondurant said. "It could have been hours or even a day.'' Rice, who was jailed on an unrelated kidnapping charge when he was indicted on April 9, 2002, allegedly said the women "deserved to die because they were lesbian whores.''

The Roanoke Times sought to keep the hearing open Monday. Stan Barnhill, a lawyer representing the Times' publisher, told Moon that the defense had to prove that potential juries would be prejudiced by the information presented before the court could be closed. "If you close these doors, the public will never know whether justice was served,'' Barnhill said. Defense attorney Gerald T. Zerkin argued that the information from the hearing probably will be released to the public sometime. "There's going to be a trial at some point,'' Zerkin said. "The public will not be denied this forever, but it will be denied now.'' Barnhill said afterward he might seek to appeal Moon's decision to close the hearing and force the court to release transcripts of the portions that were sealed.

Rice has been in jail since 1998, when he was convicted of abducting a female bicyclist in the Shenandoah National Park the year before. In that case, Rice was accused of verbally and physically assaulting the woman, trying to kill her by running her over with his truck. Investigators pursued the case for six years before charging Rice with the deaths of Williams and Winans, tracking 15,000 tips, including interviews with hikers who used the Appalachian Trail at about the same time.

After Rice: New Questions in Park Murders

Source: The Hook, a Charlottesville, Virginia weekly newspaper, March 18, 2004, by Barbara Nordin

When Tom Williams arrived at the place where his daughter had been murdered, he could not have known that eight years later he would still not know who had gagged her mouth, bound her hands, and slit her throat.

Now that all charges against Darrell David Rice have been dismissed, the identity of the man who killed Julianne “Julie” Williams and her hiking companion, Laura “Lollie” Winans, is as much a mystery as it was that June day in 1996, when Tom and his brother Mark - who had rushed to Virginia from their home in Minnesota - were escorted to a deserted campsite in the Shenandoah National Park. Mark later told investigators that they took several pictures of the site, that Tom gathered flowers, rocks, and tree sprigs and drank from a nearby creek. And then, Mark said, his brother sat down and cried.

Although investigators may never find the man who killed Lollie and Julie, recently unsealed court records raise tantalizing questions - not only about the gruesome Park killings, but about another murder as well: that of Alicia Showalter Reynolds.

The bodies of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans were discovered on the evening of Saturday, June 1st, at a campsite roughly one-tenth of a mile from the Skyline Drive and about half a mile from Skyland Lodge, which draws hikers and tourists to its bar, restaurant, and cabins.

Lollie was found inside the tent. Like Julie, she had been gagged, her hands had been bound with duct tape - duct tape that, oddly, had first been used to tape Julie's mouth - and her throat had been slit. Unlike Julie, her ankles were also bound. Both were partially undressed, yet neither woman had been sexually assaulted - or, at least no semen was found.

According to grand jury testimony by National Park Service lead investigator Tim Alley, Julie's body, along with her sleeping bag and sleeping pad, was “approximately 30-40 feet away, down a little embankment” and toward the creek her father would later drink from.

Almost as soon as the murders were announced, it emerged that Lollie and Julie had not only been hiking companions, but also lovers, something they hadn't yet shared with their families. Media coverage of the relationship threatened, at times, to overshadow the murder of two strong, healthy women less than half a mile from a busy lodge on a holiday weekend. No one, seemingly, had seen, heard - or even suspected - that anything was amiss.

In a move that was harshly criticized, the Park Service waited 36 hours after the discovery to announce the murders - even though the Park was full of visitors who, at least hypothetically, had been at risk. And when the announcement was finally made, acting Park Superintendent Greg Stiles called it an “isolated” incident - without providing any basis for such a statement. The FBI announced shortly afterward that the murders appeared to be “random.”

Flyers with Julie and Lollie's pictures went up around the park, reporters descended on the area and the families, and leads flowed in. U.S. Attorney Thomas Bondurant claims that the government investigated “more than 15,000 leads and more than 75 suspects.” But on Memorial Day weekend 1997, when Patsy Williams came from Minnesota to lead a “Take Back the Trails” walk, the first anniversary of the murders passed with no sign of a suspect. Then, one month later, everything changed.

Yvonne Malbasha had become separated from her friend, but there appeared to be no reason for concern as she cycled south along the Skyline Drive on July 9, 1997. The Park seemed like an ideal spot for a bicycling vacation for the two Canadians, and besides, they'd never heard of Julie Williams or Lollie Winans.

It was around milepost 57.5 that pickup truck-driving Darrell Rice came upon Malbasha and forced her off the road and off her bike. “The vehicle came so close,” she testified, “I could actually feel the heat of the engine.” She claimed that Rice threw a soda can at her, grabbed at her chest, and screamed, “Show me your titties.” She also testified thice got out and tried to wrestle her into his truck - but she threw her water bottle at him and used her bik a blocking device.

Enraged, Rice got into the truck and tried, four or five times, to run her over. Even though Malbasha was wearing bicycle cleats - which made running almost impossible - she managed to elude Rice by blockading herself behind a fallen tree. At that point, Rice gave up and sped away.

The first motorist to appear was a ranger with a mobile phone, who quickly sent out a description. When Rice was caught trying to leave the park, he had changed his clothes and reattached the license plates he'd removed while stalking Malbasha. It was a close call: Rice was stopped within sight of the Swift Run Gap exit, which offered anonymity and escape. Malbasha, however, identified Rice, who was arrested and taken into custody. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.

In an interview for this story, Dwight Colley, a forensic clinical psychologist in Charlottesville, describes the personality type usually involved in crimes such as the attack on Malbasha. While stressing that he had no personal knowledge of Rice, Colley describes common characteristics of men who prey on women.

First, this type of criminal usually suffers from a sense of inadequacy: He's a loner with “high social anxiety” who feels incompetent and fears rejection; he also has “very low impulse control.” Second, he “probably has a substance-abuse problem,” which serves “to keep the anxiety under control.” Most commonly, such men abuse alcohol or marijuana. Under the influence, inhibitions - especially social inhibitions - “go by the wayside,” says Colley.

And third, “More than likely, he's got a very infantile fantasy life” that offers seemingly easy solutions to complicated problems. “I'm sure,” Colley adds, that the man would have “deviant sexual fantasies” and is “probably a user of pornography - which gets boring, so he moves to progressively more deviant pornography.”

Newly unsealed documents provide information about Rice's history and attitudes. For instance, in 1999, the FBI placed an undercover agent with Rice at the Federal Corrections Center in Petersburg and taped their conversations. In one, Rice “admitted... that he has only engaged in two sexual relationships with women - the last occurring in 1991.” He was 31 at the time. Rice also allegedly stated on tape “that he was inadequate sexually, that he couldn't find a girlfriend, and that he substituted pornography for sexual relationships.”

Gary Barnett, a fellow inmate, claimed that Rice was “crazy into porn” and that his magazines were “kinky shit.” One, he said, featured a woman tied to a chair with “a ball in her mouth with tape over the ball.” Rice was treated for substance abuse at Health Management Systems Inc., in Annapolis, Maryland, in February 1996.

In a statement issued the day charges against him for Julie and Lollie's murders were formally dismissed, Rice claimed, “I don't hate gays or lesbians or women.” Although Rice's attitude toward homosexuals can't be determined from the court files, the files point to problems with women.

In June 1997, Rice was fired from his job at MCI Systemhouse in Maryland, where he made computer training materials. At his sentencing hearing, his mother, Lenna Mays, said that he had felt harassed at work: “They were talking behind his back and treating him badly. He said it made him feel very, very small and very hurt.”

Rice's co-workers, however - judging by what they told investigators - had reason to complain. In one incident, according to court records, Jill Romanoski claimed that “in the spring of 1997, she was walking back from the mall when she heard a voice behind her saying 'filthy slut.' She turned, saw Rice looking at the ground, and then he called her another profanity.”

Another co-worker, Melody Sies, stated that once Rice “followed her closely into a parking lot and yelled at her... Rice also did other bizarre things at work, she said, including punching a hole in the wall of the men's room, stealing people's lunches and hiding them, taking down one girl's picture and putting it in the trash can, and bumping into a girl to make her spill coffee.”

Rice's lawyers tried to downplay his hostility toward women by pointing to things he'd done to male workers. Rice once threw away a male worker's Day-Timer, call co-workers of both genders “slackheads,” and dubbed a male co-worker a “lard-ass” and “repeatedly coughed in his face,” documents show.

In a covertly taped conversation with a fellow inmate, Rice said, “...all I wanted was to get married [but] it seems like bitches are so independent... I know I used, I used to catch myself looking at tits and shit. But, after a while it was like, fuck, look... I ain't getting none. So, why not look at it... It's gotta be [a woman's] nature to manipulate. They're just looking for bigger dicks.”

In another covert taping, Rice told a fellow inmate that women are “twisted...[because of] some fuckin', some chemical in them.”

It wasn't necessary to secretly tape Rice, however, in order to discern his feelings; he has spoken explicitly to several of law-enforcement agents about his hostility toward females.

On the evening of July 9, for instance, during an interview by FBI agents about his attack that day on Malbasha, Rice volunteered that a week earlier he had thrown a rock through the windshield of a car in the Stony Man Nature Trail parking lot. Another time, he said, he had encountered a female jogger in Annapolis while riding his mountain bike. Although he admitted she had done nothing to provoke him, Rice yelled, “Go home and eat your children's shit!”

According to prosecution motion, Rice volunteered that he enjoyed “aggravating” women and violating their privacy due to their “vulnerability.” The prosecution claims Rice once shared a fantasy with a co-worker to “beat and fuck a woman.'“

The day after his attack on Malbasha, he told Deputy U.S. Marshall Larry Carter “how he had a rage against women and how he was upset with his female boss and another woman at work. He said this rage carries over when he is out on the highway and that he likes to run women off the road.” After forcing them off, “he would just keep going.” When Carter asked where he did this, Rice replied, “on Route 29.”

When questioned about Alicia Showalter Reynolds, however, Rice said he didn't know who that was.

Carter also claims that Rice's father came to the courthouse later that day and “said his son didn't like women and that a previous girl had broken up with him because he was mean to her.” After interviewing Rice and his father, Carter told a Charlottesville FBI agent that Rice should be investigated for another crime: the 1996 murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds.

After Alicia Showalter Reynolds disappeared, 15 women reported that they had been stopped by a man in a pickup truck while driving along Route 29. The man told each woman that something was wrong with her car and then offered to give her a ride. Of the 15 women making reports, only one got into the truck, and she managed to escape.

Alicia Showalter Reynolds didn't. The Valley native, then living in Baltimore, had been driving south on 29 to Charlottesville on March 2, 1996. She was last seen two miles south of Culpeper standing on the shoulder with a man who was peering under the hood of her car, after which she got into his dark pickup.

Reynolds never arrived in Charlottesville to meet her mother, who was waiting at Fashion Square; the two had planned to shop for wedding gifts for Alicia's twin brother. Several months later, her body was found in a field near Lignum. The attacks stopped.

Among the unsealed records in the Park murders case against Rice are several documents concerning the Route 29 stalking incidents, because the prosecution argued that evidence tied Rice to those crimes. One prosecution claim, for instance, was that “when 13 of the 15 women were accosted, including Reynolds, Rice was either on annual, personal, or sick leave from his job in Maryland and had no known alibis.” In addition, according to the prosecution, Rice had access to his father's home in Culpeper and his father was absent from the home “on most of the dates.”

The most serious evidence concerns the abduction of Carmelita Shomo, which is described in a July 2003 ruling issued by Federal District Court Judge Norman Moon.

On February 23, 1996, eight days before Reynolds disappeared, a man driving a pickup pulled Shomo over in Prince William County “by telling her that sparks were coming from beneath her vehicle.” When she got in his truck, he tried to force her head into his lap while threatening her with a screwdriver. Shomo leapt out - breaking her ankle in the process - and escaped. According to prosecution claims, “Shomo and seven of the women pulled over have identified Rice as the man who stopped them, according to the government.”

Rice has not been indicted in the Shomo, Reynolds, or other “stalker” cases, and defense investigators claim that when they showed Shomo a photograph of probable rapist-murderer Richard Marc Evonitz, “Ms. Shomo's eyes filled with tears, and she said, 'Yes. That's him, that is exactly him.'“

Forensic and circumstantial evidence points to Evonitz as the murderer of three teenaged girls in the Fredericksburg area - Sophia Silva in September 1996, and Kati and Kristin Lisk in May 1997. In Florida in 2002, while being pursued by police for kidnapping and raping a girl in South Carolina, Evonitz shot himself to death.

When Moon ruled in the Park case against Rice, he branded the notion that Shomo had recanted her identification of Rice “not credible.” In particular, Moon castigated the Winchester agency hired by the defense, Apple Valley Investigations, saying that one of its investigators, Michelle Cross, “gave misleading testimony.”

Moon ruled that Shomo testified “that she did not identify anyone else as her attacker, that she identified Rice conclusively, and that she still believes Rice was her attacker.”

Rice was not indicted in the Shomo case, and The Hook's calls to Prince William Commonwealth's Attorney to learn more were not returned by press time.

Eager as federal prosecutors were to link Rice to the Route 29 incidents - and, by extension, to Reynolds' murder: their main objective was to prove that Rice had murdered Julie and Lollie. On the surface, at least, Rice was a solid candidate.

“Rice became a possible suspect,” reads one prosecution document, “for a variety of reasons, including the obvious parallels in geographic location, the predatory behavior exhibited, and the exclusive selection of female victims.”

One piece of evidence, in particular, demanded attention: Rice's presence. He was videotaped entering the Park at Front Royal at 8:05 p.m. on May 25, and again at Rockfish Gap at 4:57 p.m. on May 26. He returned with his friends Caryl and Robert Ruckert on June 1.

Prosecutors claim that Rice vehemently denied he'd been in the Park on May 25 and 26 (which was uncomfortably close to the time the women may have been killed), but readily agreed that he'd been there on June 1 (which had been safely determined to be after the time of death).

Glaringly absent, however, was any mention of forensic evidence that implicated Rice - because, as the government conceded in October 2003, there wasn't any.

In the end, DNA evidence fatally crippled the government's case. In October 2003, in the words of U.S. Attorney Thomas Bondurant, there were “new revelations” from an FBI lab about hairs recovered from the crime scene.

Before October 2003, he explains, the only DNA prosecutors had was mitochondrial DNA from the cloth ligatures. Mitochondrial DNA can determine the person's sex - in this case, male - but cannot produce a specific profile. In October, however, prosecutors learned that an additional hair had been discovered on the duct tape used to bind Lollie's wrists, which was then subjected to a new type of DNA test called Y-STR.

Although the defense has stated that test results exclude Rice, Bondurant claims that “that's not a true statement.” And while those same results led the government to move that charges be dismissed against Rice, Bondurant stresses that they did that “not because we thought he was innocent, but based on ethical duty” - because they no longer believed a jury could convict Rice beyond a reasonable doubt.

Bondurant also stresses that the government took the initiative regarding the DNA. “The defense didn't do squat in this case,” he says, explaining that the government paid $11,000 “out of its own pocket, while the defense sat there and twiddled their thumbs.”

The only evidence left was circumstantial, and the defense was prepared to vigorously dispute each aspect of the government's case. In their February 19 motion, Rice's attorneys charged prosecutorial misconduct and argued that in addition to the DNA results, there were four major problems with the government's case:

The account supposedly provided by the campers is undeniably colorful. According to an earlier defense motion, camper Anthony Coyle told government investigators that “on the morning of May 25... while he was urinating, [he] saw a man in a clearing staring at him from 60-70 yards away. The man stared at him for three to four minutes.” (The motion notes dryly that “Mr. Coyle's testimony is ambiguous as to how many of those minutes he was urinating.”)

While Coyle chose Rice's picture from an array of eight, the government failed to raise the fact, the motion continues, “that he had been only 65-70% 'certain' of his identification.” The motion also claims that Coyle gave his description “more than eight months” after the murders, and was shown the picture array five years after that. Finally, the motion asserts that after Coyle had tentatively identified Rice, “the agent told him 'that's the guy,' that they 'have him,' and that they were 'not depending solely' on Coyle's identification testimony.”

Then there's Coyle's “unusual girlfriend,” who was widely reported to hear women “screaming” during the night. Although the government never called her to testify before the grand jury, her claim has appeared in several press accounts, including this one last month in The Washington Post: “[Coyle's] girlfriend said she had been awakened by screams.”

In fact, the defense charges, the girlfriend - “a professional animal communicator and horse whisperer” - only dreamt she heard screams.

“According to her statements to authorities,” the defense asserts, “she then left her body and astrally projected above the mountains and saw the murder scene. In the following months she went into dream states to 'collect data' about the murders. She referred the investigators to a fellow animal communicator and suggested that Taj, [Lollie's] dog, be interviewed.”

When asked about the woman, Bondurant laughs and says, “We weren't going to call her; we never even acted like we were going to use her.” Then how did her account end up in the press? He couldn't say. As to Coyle, however, Bondurant is emphatic: “The fellow did see Rice.”

In their motion to dismiss the charges, Rice's attorneys, federal public defenders Gerald Zerkin and Fred Heblich, alleged prosecutorial misconduct in connection with a phone call Rice made to the Spectrum Center, a gay rights organization in San Anselmo, California, on May 28. The government claimed, in its presentation to the grand jury, that Julie had had the number in a journal, and that Rice's later use of it therefore placed him at the scene.

The defense argued that Julie's journal, which didn't contain the number, was found at the crime scene and that Rice's call to the Spectrum Center was nothing more than a wrong number composed of pieces of numbers he commonly called.

The area code (415) and extension (457) were the first seven digits of the Grateful Dead ticket hotline, and no one disputes that Rice is an avid Dead fan. The last four digits (8644) were the same as his work number, which he called an hour later. Furthermore, the defense claims, “the government knew that the number [at the Spectrum Center] was to a private line that was never given out.” Julie, they argued, couldn't have known the number - much less recorded it in a journal.

The court ruled that there was no evidence that Julie had obtained the number, and, further, that it was “improbable” that she had. At the same time, the court rejected defense claims that the prosecution had misled the grand jury in regard to the phone call, “because the evidence does not unequivocally foreclose the possibility that Julie Williams had the phone number that Rice dialed.”

As for Rice's supposed statements that he hates gays and killed the two women “because they were lesbian whores,” the defense claimed the latter allegation was fabricated by a jailhouse snitch in exchange for a reduction in sentence.

The defense further alleged that claims that Rice hates gays were the result of creative editing of a taped conversation between Rice and a second jailhouse informant.

The taped evidence “has been discredited,” the defense motion says, “as the government itself has conceded. Whereas the government's transcription of the tape is '[unintelligible] I hate gay people,' Rice actually said, 'They [government investigators] were trying to get me to say I hate gay people.'“

Bondurant says the tape wasn't intentionally mis-transcribed, but rather, that the defense “super-enhanced” it.

The defense motion also alleges that government investigators pressured witnesses to change their testimony, especially if their testimony made it harder to match time of death with one of the days Rice was videotaped entering or leaving the park - i.e., May 25 or 26.

Two of them, the motion states, were Park Service volunteers who allegedly talked with the victims on the morning of May 27 while hiking the Stony Man nature trail. The third, interviewed less than a week after the discovery of the bodies, was a waitress at Skyland Lodge who said she had served breakfast to the victims on the morning of May 26.

However, one of the volunteers allegedly claimed government investigators tried to “shake her story” and “push her around” - and suggested that she could not have possibly seen the victims on May 27 because the coroner said they had been killed before that date. The [waitress] reported a similar experience with the agent.”

Bondurant says that investigators were correct to question the waitress's timing; the order ticket she produced to substantiate her account included sausage and coffee. Julie and Lollie “were avid vegetarians,” he says; “they probably didn't even like the idea of anyone eating sausage.”

It may be a moot point. An FBI document puts the approximate time of death at 10 p.m. May 28, plus or minus 30 hours - based on a state medical examiner's test of the women's eye fluid.

In any event, the waitress, according to the February 2004 defense motion, remembered a number of details about the women she served. One possible explanation for the discrepancy (if one exists) is that two women who were strikingly similar to Lollie and Julie were not only in the Park at the same time, but in the same Skyland area.

The two women, Emilie Carpenter and Andrea Iverson, were - like Lollie - students at tiny Unity College in Maine. Two day-hikers from Northern Virginia, Mickey Marche and Wayne Giles, met them along and around the White Oak Trail three times on May 23 and stopped to chat each time. When the two men heard about the murders the next week, they assumed that Carpenter and Iverson had been the victims. Only after they'd been thoroughly debriefed by an investigator did they learn that the women they'd met were still alive.

Bondurant spent a week at Unity in 1997, during which he spoke to everyone he could find who had known Lollie. He interviewed Carpenter and Iverson twice, and has no reason to read anything into their presence in the park. Unity's main focus is environmental science and outdoor recreation, he points out, and a high percentage of its graduates go on to work or volunteer in national parks.

On February 25, Judge Moon dismissed the charges against Rice but stopped short of dismissing them “with prejudice” - which would ban the government from ever reinstating them. “He's still a suspect,” says Bondurant of Rice. “We felt we had a good case.” As for Evonitz, when asked whether there was any reason to think he might have been the killer, Bondurant is emphatic: “None - absolutely none.” “We're not going to give up,” he stresses. “I feel an allegiance to Julie and Lollie's families. Maybe we'll have new people take a look at it - a fresh set of eyes.”

Since Rice, in light of current DNA evidence, seems to be outside the range of plausible suspects, perhaps it's time to revisit another double murder in a national park: In 1986, along the Colonial Parkway near Williamsburg, the bodies of Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski were found in Thomas' car. Like Julie Williams and Lollie Winans, they were in their 20s and athletic, their wrists were bound, their throats were slit, they had not been sexually assaulted, and there was no sign of a struggle.

One of Thomas' friends, Ruth Deussen, believes so strongly that the cases could be linked that when she heard the news of Rice's arrest in 2002, “I said, 'This isn't the right guy, because he's too young to have done the Colonial Parkway killings.'“

When Bondurant was asked whether there could be a connection to the Shenandoah Park murders, he replied, “I don't know - obviously, that was something we checked out.” Which presents one more puzzling aspect of the case. Rice's attorneys claim that during the investigation, one of the Park rangers said that he and two other rangers “might have been involved.” Bondurant explains this by saying that the ranger was “very active” in the investigation, and “it got to him to the point that it ate him alive and he had an emotional breakdown.” It was “just shameful of the defense to use that,” he says, adding, “Apparently they don't have any shame.”

Still, with so many dead ends in one national Park murder, looking hard at another park - and at exactly which rangers were stationed there in 1986 - may be as good a lead to follow as any.

At press time Rice was serving his sentence at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City. He is scheduled to be released July 17, 2007.

(Labyrinth13 Note: Since the above article was written, Rice has been released from prison).

Source: Letter to the Editor of The Post, published Saturday, January 15, 2005

The Jan. 3 Metro story on the trial of Darrell Rice devoted an inordinate amount of space to prosecution theories and innuendo before mentioning the evidence or the defense's case, which got three slim paragraphs out of a 35 paragraph story.

The story never made clear that the case against Rice in the Route 234 case is based on photographic lineups that took place six years after the assault. It also did not note that, according to a Dec. 16 article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the defense is asking to have that identification barred from trial because the victim identified three different men in photo lineups over the course of seven years - first a Virginia State Police officer, later Rice, and last, Richard Evonitz, who killed himself in June 2002 as law enforcement sought him for the slayings of three Spotsylvania County girls.

In the Route 29 stalker case - the one that dominated your story and in which Rice is being implicated but not charged - the basis of the prosecution's allegations comes 19 paragraphs in: "Eight of the women picked Rice out of photographic lineups as the man - or resembling the man - who pulled them over, the court records show." The prosecution has no hard evidence that Rice had anything to do with the Route 29 case - something not stated in your story but only implied by the prosecution doublespeak that was quoted. Unfortunately, Rice has been subjected before to such harassment.

In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft held a news conference to announce that he would seek the death penalty against Rice for the highly publicized murders of two women along the Appalachian Trail. Two years later, on the eve of trial, the government had to admit that it never had enough reliable evidence to even take Rice to trial, much less to put him to death. (Some DNA evidence has subsequently suggested that Evonitz may have committed that crime). Because of the prosecutorial embarrassment surrounding that case, it's wholly reasonable for the defense to contend that the current charges are more about finding Rice guilty of something than finding the real perpetrators of the Route 234 and Route 29 crimes. And stories such as The Post's only serve to promote the government's misguided cause.

Source: Article by Barbara Nordin, published May 24, 2007, featured in The Hook, a Charlottesville, Virginia weekly newspaper.

This story is the second of a two-part series that debuted last week with "Cold case?" a report on the 1996 murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds.

The search had been on for nearly two days, and it was almost dark when the rangers, moving down a wooded slope, glimpsed a yellow tent through the trees. The scene they saw as they stepped into a small clearing looked like the campers had been unpacking their gear and setting up camp. There was a dog leash tied around a tree, but the collar at the end was empty.

When they peered inside the tent it was clear that the search had ended. In the close, dark space, they saw a woman's body.

Their first thought was that it might have been a bear attack. But then, after radioing their grim discovery and moving deeper into the clearing, they saw a sleeping bag that looked as though it had been tossed headfirst down the bank of a creek. Inside was another dead woman, and her neck had been savagely slashed. No bear had dragged her, in her sleeping bag, from the tent to the creek bank. Fearful now, the rangers scanned the woods and reached for their guns.

On summer Saturday nights, Skyland Lodge (pictured at right) teems with hikers, campers, and day-trippers who have driven in along the Skyline Drive as it weaves north and south through the Shenandoah National Park. In the brightly lit dining room bustling with the clatter of tableware, voices, and movement, it might have been hard to believe that only half a mile away, two women had been slaughtered. Music spilled out of the bar and diners paid their bills as rangers hurried up and down a trail through the woods and the gruesome news raced upward through the chain of command.

Aftershocks from another murder were still reverberating throughout Central Virginia when the Park Service and FBI held a joint press conference to announce the killings on Monday, June 3, 1996.

Three months earlier, Harrisonburg native Alicia Showalter Reynolds had disappeared from Route 29 while driving from Baltimore to Charlottesville. Her car was found at the side of the road south of Culpeper on the evening of March 2, and when news of her disappearance broke, the Virginia State Police began hearing from motorists who remembered seeing Reynolds and a man standing by her white Mercury Tracer. A pickup truck was parked behind them on the shoulder.

The State Police suddenly got numerous calls from women who said a pickup-driving man had approached them as they made their way along 29. The man would flash his lights and gesture for the woman to pull over. If she stopped, he would tell her that something was wrong with her car - usually, that sparks were coming from underneath - and then he would offer her a ride.

The man quickly came to be known as the "Route 29 Stalker." Of the 23 women who claimed to have been targeted, the majority either didn't pull over or, if they did, rebuffed him and drove off. In addition to Reynolds, three women got in the man's truck. Two were taken to their requested destinations without incident; the third woman, in Prince William County, was attacked but survived.

As the weeks dragged by with neither a body nor a suspect, fear of the Stalker steadily rose. Then, on May 7, a man walking in a rural part of Culpeper County noticed buzzards circling above a field and went to investigate. The search for Alicia Showalter Reynolds was over. The search for her killer, however, has never ended.

The woman in the tent was Lollie Winans, 26, and the woman near the creek was Julie Williams, 24. They had been lovers, something their families hadn't known. At times, in the days that followed, their relationship threatened to claim more headlines than the fact that they had been brutally murdered in a national park - which, theoretically, was one of the safest places they could have been.

Lollie was one semester shy of graduating from Unity College in Maine, while Julie had graduated the year before from Carleton College in Minnesota. Both women had summer jobs waiting tables in Vermont - where Julie had been living in a small town near Burlington since January - and they planned to share an apartment. In the meantime, they drove to Virginia to ramble through the Park with Lollie's golden retriever, Taj, in tow.

They entered the Park in Julie's car at Front Royal, Milepost 0, on Sunday, May 19, and obtained a back-country camping permit. On May 22, they got a second permit for the nights through May 26.

The last pictures found in their camera were taken at Hawksbill, the highest point in the Park, on the afternoon of Friday, May 24th. In one image, Julie is seen writing in her journal while they waited out a rainstorm in the Hawksbill shelter. In another - taken by a fellow hiker - they're perched atop a rock, smiling, and Julie has her arm around Lollie.

It was still raining at 5:20 p.m. when a female ranger saw them in the Hawksbill Gap parking lot and offered them a ride north along Skyline Drive. Later, all the ranger could remember was that they sat in the back seat and studied a map. Around 5:30 she dropped them off near Skyland in the Stony Man Nature Trail parking lot.

They headed down what the maps identify as the Skyland-Big Meadows Horse Trail, but which Park regulars simply call "the bridle trail." About 500 yards down, they branched off to the left and descended the densely wooded slope to the clearing, where they pitched their tent and began setting up camp.

On Thursday, May 30, Tom and Patsy Williams of St. Cloud, Minnesota, got a troubling nighttime call from Julie's roommate: The always dependable Julie hadn't shown up to help the roommate, an old friend, clean their apartment before they moved out. The Williams family notified the Park Service early the next morning, Friday, May 31.

Julie's car was found in a parking lot near Stony Man Overlook at 10 a.m. on Friday, and Taj was found wandering in nearby White Oak Canyon around 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 1. The bodies were found about 8:50 p.m. that evening.

Both sets of parents - Tom and Patsy in Minnesota, John Winans in Florida, and Laura Ford in Michigan - received word of the devastating discovery in the early hours of Sunday, June 2.

Lollie was killed in the tent, her mouth sealed and her wrists bound with duct tape, and her ankles bound with long underwear. Julie was in her sleeping bag about 75 feet away. She was also gagged and bound, but not at the ankles. Neither woman appeared to have been sexually assaulted. Their throats had been slashed with such force that they were almost decapitated.

Tom Williams and his brother left immediately for Virginia. The next day they went to the campsite, where Tom gathered flowers and drank from the creek. Then he sat down near the spot where Julie's body had been discarded, and cried.

The killer - or killers - would prove just as elusive as the man who murdered Alicia Showalter Reynolds. Special Agent Tim Alley, who led the investigation for the National Park Service, says that in the months that followed, 15,000 leads were checked out - leads that led nowhere. "It was a large and complex investigation," Alley says, "that took us up and down the East Coast."

To add to its complexity, the Park had been full of campers, hikers, and tourists over Memorial Day weekend, and leads came in not only from across the U.S., but from around the world as well.

Thirteen months went by without a break in the case, and as the summer of 1997 began, it seemed unlikely that the killer or killers would ever be found. The State Police maintained control of the Alicia Reynolds investigation, and there was no public statement suggesting they might be linked.

But on July 7, 1997 everything changed. It was midmorning as Yvonne Malbasha bicycled south along Skyline Drive. She had come to the Park from Canada with a friend, and, because he was a faster cyclist, it was their habit to bike separately during the morning and then meet for lunch. Malbasha says she wasn't paying particular attention to the vehicles that passed her; it was just normal traffic for the height of the season.

So she didn't notice one particular vehicle, a blue Chevy S10 pickup with no license plates, that was repeatedly passing her - first on one side of the road, then on the other. Darrell David Rice was at the wheel.

Malbasha says Rice later admitted in court that he had been stalking her for about 45 minutes - and when she heard that, Malbasha realized he'd been waiting for the right moment to strike. She couldn't have handed him a better opportunity.

Around Milepost 57, she saw signs for the Lewis Mountain campground and turned off. As she got farther down the narrow access road, she realized there was a vehicle right behind her going "very slow." Rice passed her so close, she says, that she could feel the heat of his truck's exhaust, which caused her to lose her balance and come off her bike. Then he stopped and got out.

"I thought he was coming to apologize," she says - but as he rounded the front of the truck he began "yelling obscenities," and was clearly enraged. When he was within arm's reach, she feared he was going to attack her, and she hurled her water bottle at him. Then he grabbed her and shouted, "Get in the truck!"

Malbasha, a full-time paramedic, says she knew from years of training that she had to remain calm. She also knew that if she held onto her bike, he wouldn't be able to get her in the truck. She stayed focused on that because she had heard on America's Most Wanted that if an attacker succeeds in getting a woman into his vehicle, there's a 50 percent chance she'll be killed.

They struggled, but Malbasha refused to let go of her bike. Rice finally gave up and got into the truck - but not to drive away.

Hobbled by the cleats on her bicycle shoes, Malbasha made a frantic dash to barricade herself behind a fallen tree and heard Rice gunning his engine. As she watched in terror, he drove toward the log as if he meant to ram it. Stopping just short, he backed up and came at her again. He did this four or five times before finally driving off.

Several minutes later a passing ranger found her and radioed a BOLO - "Be on the lookout" - for the man and his pickup. Reasoning that the perpetrator would head for the nearest exit, another ranger positioned himself at Swift Run Gap. Shortly thereafter he saw a tour bus heading toward the exit - and behind it, a man in a blue pickup.

When Malbasha arrived, she identified Rice immediately. Two details, however, didn't match - details that would reveal a chilling level of premeditation: When he was stopped at the exit, Rice was wearing a different shirt, and his truck suddenly had plates. Rangers found the t-shirt Malbasha had described under the driver's seat; Rice later confessed that after attacking Malbasha, he had pulled into a picnic area to reattach the plates and change his shirt.

Investigators also found several 15 to 18-inch cable ties, locking plastic bands used by electricians to bundle wires - and also used in law enforcement as temporary handcuffs. Rice's attorney, Lloyd Snook, argued that Rice had the cable ties for legitimate reasons.

Malbasha, however, believes Rice intended to use them to restrain her. "I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever," she testified at Rice's sentencing, "that the intent of Mr. Rice was to sexually assault me and kill me."

Rice pleaded guilty to one count of attempted kidnapping in federal court (because national parks are federal property) and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. His conviction didn't mean that the Park Service and FBI closed their file on him, however; just the opposite. Almost as soon as he was arrested at Swift Run Gap, they began looking at him - long and hard - for much more than the attack on Yvonne Malbasha. For the next five years, they investigated Rice exhaustively.

Finally, in 2002, they were ready to make their move. At a press conference at Justice Department headquarters on April 10, 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft announced that a federal grand jury had indicted Rice for Julie and Lollie's murders. Because the two women had been lovers, Ashcroft called the killings "hate crimes" and sought the death penalty.

While gay-rights groups applauded the decision, raising what investigators agreed was a circumstantial case to a capital crime may have ultimately derailed it. Because he faced the death penalty, Rice was able to attract a high-powered and aggressive defense team that sought, with laser-beam intensity, to acquit him.

Deirdre Enright may be Rice's most vocal defender. Enright was appointed by the federal court to be the "mitigation expert" who, if Rice had been found guilty, would have presented the defense's case to the jury during sentencing. As Enright became more involved, however, and began to explore the thousands of pages of documents, she shifted into the role of investigator.

Enright took possession of Rice's blue Chevy S10 pickup - the one he tried to force Malbasha into - when it was released by the Park Service; she now stores it for him at her house on St. Anne's Road in Charlottesville. Her name is on the title, along with Rice's; she says she took custody of the truck in case the defense team needed access for any reason - such as future litigation - while Rice is in prison.

Enright believes that while investigating the murders, Park Service and FBI agents ignored evidence that didn't implicate Rice. An example of their alleged bias, she says, is the government's mischaracterization of Rice's actions when he attacked Malbasha.

Asked to explain, Enright begins by admitting that if she had been Malbasha, she would have been "terrified." But, she continues, the defense has always admitted that Rice had "mental health issues." The government mischaracterized the nature of Rice's behavior, she says, by telling Malbasha, "You narrowly escaped a killer" instead of saying, "You just had an encounter with someone who has mental health issues."

Asked whether such a statement would have changed her feelings about Rice, Malbasha is adamant: "absolutely not," she says. She also dismisses Enright's assertion that the government tried to influence her opinion of Rice. "They were at pains to make sure there was nothing that would prejudice me," Malbasha insists. "The guy tried to kill me."

Rice's mental health issues seem to center on women. Two weeks before he attacked Malbasha, he had been fired from his job at MCI Systemhouse in Maryland, where he made computer training materials, and his treatment of female coworkers may have been a contributing factor.

One female colleague said Rice had followed her closely into a parking lot and yelled at her. Another said he'd followed her as she walked to the office from a nearby mall and called her a "filthy slut."

The day after he was taken into custody for attacking Malbasha, Rice allegedly told Deputy U.S. Marshal Larry Carter (now deceased) that, in Carter's words, "he had a rage against women" and that "this rage carries over when he is out on the highway and that he likes to run women off the road," after which he would "just keep going." When Carter asked where he did this, he replied "on Route 29" - although he denied knowing who Alicia Showalter Reynolds was.

Carter also claimed that Rice's father said his son "didn't like women and that a previous girl had broken up with him because he was mean to her." After Rice was indicted for the Park murders in 2002, however, his father told a Washington Post reporter that Rice had always had healthy relationships with women.

Rice also told FBI agents that he had once encountered a female jogger in Annapolis while riding his bike and, although unprovoked, had yelled, "Go home and eat your children's shit!" As for Malbasha's behavior when he was trying to force her into his truck, the agents claimed Rice said she had been "disrespectful" by throwing her water bottle at him.

In 1999, after Rice had been imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institute in Petersburg, the FBI placed an undercover agent in the jail who taped Rice admitting, according to the prosecutors, that he was sexually inadequate, made heavy use of pornography, and had engaged in only two sexual relationships with women.

A fellow inmate allegedly told investigators that Rice was "crazy into porn" and that the magazines he got were "kinky shit," such as "a woman with a ball in her mouth with tape over the ball and tied down to a chair with rope and tape."

Even among his defenders, few would argue that Darrell Rice wasn't hostile toward women. But was he also capable of murdering them?

In the absence of any forensic evidence - such as DNA or fingerprints - linking Rice to Julie and Lollie's murders, prosecutors argued that circumstantial evidence, coupled with information they'd allegedly gathered from Rice's fellow inmates, would prove Rice was the killer.

Government investigators claimed they interviewed numerous inmates who volunteered information on Rice, but only a handful were considered credible. One of those, Phil Robertson, claimed that Rice had confessed to the murders and gave the following account of what had happened: After coming on the campsite, Rice initiated a conversation with the women that turned volatile when he asked whether they had boyfriends. One "spoke up and said they [weren't] interested in men."

At that point, Rice "decided he was going to rape them. He tied them up and hurt the one so that the other one would cooperate." One of the women started "hollering" at Rice, and Rice "hurt her." Robertson stated that when he asked what Rice meant, "He said he slit their throats."

The defense filed a motion in which they claimed that informants such as Robertson were offered inducements for their testimony, but the government denied the charge, saying that Robertson "never received any consideration nor acts of leniency from law enforcement nor the courts."

Another skirmish centered on a covertly taped conversation, one of the linchpins in creating the hate-crime case. The government's transcription had Rice saying, "[unintelligible] I hate gay people." The defense had the recording "super-enhanced," according to U.S. Attorney Tom Bondurant, which revealed that Rice had actually said of government prosecutors, "They were trying to get me to say I hate gay people." Rice's defense asserted that the tape had been intentionally mis-transcribed, which Bondurant denied.

Prosecutors continued to claim that Rice had been angered by the women's relationship. When asked what might have motivated the murders, Rice allegedly volunteered, "Well, as soon as you hear that they were maybe more than friends..."

The most heated debate, however, concerned the time of death. Prosecutors believe that the women were murdered shortly after they were last seen on Friday, May 24. Rice was videotaped entering the Park alone on both Saturday, May 25 and Sunday, May 26. This is significant, prosecutors argue, because murderers sometimes return to the scene of their crime.

Rice also returned to the Park on Saturday, June 1, the day the bodies were found, this time with friends Caryl and Rob Ruckert. The Ruckerts defended Rice, saying that the excursion had been their idea. Asked about their time in the Park that day, Rice told investigators, "We went hiking like right in the middle of the search party." Like many people in the Park June 1, the three were questioned by a ranger; ironically, their interview took place just as the dog Taj was found by hikers in White Oak Canyon.

It was Rice's time in the Park the previous weekend, however, that struck investigators as suspicious. He had been videotaped entering the Park at the northernmost point, Front Royal, around 8 p.m. on Saturday, May 25, a foggy, rainy night. The next day - Sunday, May 26 - he was videotaped entering at the southernmost point, Rockfish Gap, around 5 p.m.. Had he come, like so many others that Memorial Day weekend, simply to enjoy the Park - or to see whether the bodies had been found?

In a study sponsored by the FBI of 36 sexual murderers who had been convicted and imprisoned, 27 percent returned to the crime scene - but that also means that 73 percent didn't.

"The temptation is always to over-interpret," says William Stejskal, a clinical and forensic psychologist in Northern Virginia. Even so, Rice's movements on May 25 and 26 struck investigators as odd.

Rice has denied that he was in the Park on Friday, May 24. He wasn't videotaped at any entrance, although investigators believe that if he did enter the Park that day, he probably would have used Thornton Gap, which is the closest entrance to both the murder site and Culpeper, where Rice sometimes stayed at his father's house. The Park's videotaping system at Thornton Gap, however, wasn't working properly on May 24.

The medical examiner put the time of death at 10 p.m. on May 28, and Rice's defense argues that he couldn't have been the killer, because he returned to work on Tuesday, May 28. However, Map Quest puts the drive between Columbia, Maryland and Skyland at just two and a half hours. Moreover, the time determination came from measuring the levels of potassium in the women's eye fluid, a test that one of America's leading forensic pathologists believes to be unreliable.

"All the tests that I'm aware of that are done on eye fluid are questionable," says Werner Spitz, professor of pathology at Wayne State University and co-author of Spitz and Fisher's Medico-legal Investigation of Death, considered the authoritative text for forensic pathology.

Another weakness in the government case was the failure to collect insect evidence - for instance, the larvae that grow on dead bodies. Forensic entomologist Neal Haskell says it's "unbelievable" that such evidence wasn't gathered. "I was just really shocked," he says, "because we knew better 10 years earlier."

At a crime scene such as the one in the Park, where Julie's body may have been exposed to the elements for as long as a week, insects may be the only way to reliably establish time of death. In the absence of actual specimens, Haskell - who was consulted by the defense - studied videotapes of the crime scene but was unable to reach any conclusions.

Rice's defense team argued that a number of witnesses placed the women in the Park after May 24, but that FBI and Park Service investigators dismissed their accounts. For instance, Brandi Mumbauer, who was a waitress at the restaurant at Panorama, stated she had served breakfast to two women on the 25th or 26th. The women, she claimed, matched Julie and Lollie's descriptions and were traveling with a dog. Mumbauer produced a ticket for their meals, which included meat - even though both women were committed vegetarians. Defense investigator Enright dismisses this apparent discrepancy by saying they must have ordered the meat for Taj.

Government investigators contend that the women were murdered either on the evening of May 24 or in the early hours of May 25, and point to three main circumstances as proof. First, although Julie and Lollie had taken a steady stream of pictures throughout their time in the Park, the last were the ones taken at Hawksbill on the afternoon of May 24 (two or three frames remained on the roll, but were damaged by water). Second, neither woman wrote in her journal after that date, and while Lollie wasn't a daily writer, one investigator described Julie as "avid."

And third, their back-country camping permit expired on the morning of May 27. Julie had appointments in Burlington on the 29th, which means that they would have had to leave the Park on May 27 to be home by the evening of the 28th, assuming they intended to make the trip in two days, as they had on the way down.

No matter how confident the government might have been of the circumstantial evidence, however, in the fall of 2003 they realized they had a major problem.

Until then, investigators had believed that the only DNA recovered from the crime scene was mitochondrial DNA on the long underwear that had been used to bind Lollie's ankles. Mitochondrial DNA can determine only the person's sex - in this case, male - but it cannot be used to develop an individual person's profile.

In October of 2003, prosecutors learned for the first time that there was also a hair on the duct tape that had been used to bind Lollie's wrists. The hair, which had been mounted on a slide but never analyzed, had been discovered during a review of the evidence prior to Rice's trial. Only hairs that include the root - which this one didn't - possess the nuclear DNA required to pinpoint an individual. But the FBI had recently begun using a new DNA test, Y-STR, which showed that the hair could have come from 42 percent of the male population - but not from Rice.

His defense team asserted that Rice was therefore excluded as the killer. They also announced that the DNA could have come from a man who, even in death, could still elicit horror: Richard Marc Evonitz.

In September 1996, 16-year-old Sofia Silva was kidnapped and murdered in Spotsylvania, 10 miles southwest of Fredericksburg. Eight months later, also in Spotsylvania, 13-year-old Kati Lisk and her sister Kristin, 15, were kidnapped and killed. The cases remained unsolved until June 2002, when a 15-year-old girl Evonitz had kidnapped in South Carolina escaped and called the police. Two days later, during a high-speed chase in Florida, he shot and killed himself. Authorities said all three victims had been raped, and the DNA belonged to Evonitz.

Prosecutors in the Park murders reject Evonitz as a possible suspect because his preference for young girls was so pronounced, and they also point out that a dead man is an easy target for suspicion.

As for DNA evidence that Rice's defense insists excludes him as a suspect, the chair of the department of forensic science at George Washington University, Moses Schanfield, cautions against reading too much into a single hair on a piece of duct tape.

"It doesn't mean he didn't kill them," says Schanfield. Prosecutors argue that the hair could have come from a variety of sources, including an investigator at the crime scene.

Because they were faced with a death-penalty case, however, prosecutors concluded that the DNA evidence might prove to be insurmountable, and in April 2004, they withdrew the indictments. Even so, Rice's legal battles weren't over - any more than Central Virginia's memories of the Route 29 Stalker were gone.

Although Rice had been under scrutiny for those crimes since 1997, he wasn't charged in the Prince William County case until federal prosecutors dropped the Park case against him.

Carmelita Shomo was the only woman besides Alicia Showalter Reynolds who not only got in the Stalker's truck, but was attacked. Shomo, however, survived her 1996 abduction, and she identified Rice as her attacker. In his 2005 trial, Rice agreed to take a so-called Alford plea - in which the defendant claims innocence but acknowledges that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to convict him - in exchange for not having any time added to the sentence he was already serving.

It's impossible to say whether other suspects have been considered in the three murders, since investigators don't typically name suspects. One private investigator, however, believes that a former Charlottesville porn shop owner, Michael Nicholaou - who killed himself along with his wife and her daughter late in 2005 - should be linked to several Central Virginia crimes, including a brutal 1984 rape on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Evidence to implicate him in the Parkway rape is currently under study by Nelson County investigators.

As for Rice, he will be released on July 17. According to Enright, he plans to move to Maryland, where his mother lives in Stevensville, a small town on an island in the Chesapeake Bay. As part of Rice's three years of supervised release, he will be required to get a job, report to his probation officer within the first five days of each month, refrain from excessive use of alcohol, and meet 10 other standard conditions. Presumably, he will also be reunited with his truck.

The families of the victims remain solid in their support for government investigators. "They are on top of it," John Winans says - even though, nowadays, it doesn't seem there's much to be on top of.

"The real tragedy of Julie and Lollie is in my mind constantly," he adds. "You never have closure." As for Rice and the indictments that may never be reinstated, Tom Williams says, "I'll let time resolve the issue regarding Mr. Rice. I respect the system."

One condition of Rice's release sounds almost biblical: "The defendant shall not commit another federal, state, or local crime." It remains to be seen, beginning July 17, whether that's a commandment Darrell Rice will obey.

We are four of the lawyers who have been defending Darrell Rice for five years. Never - in our collective experience - have any of us had a client who has been more maliciously and falsely prosecuted and trashed by the press than Darrell Rice. We can completely understand your feelings, given that you are reading and circulating the irresponsible articles written by The Hook. We provided considerable information to The Hook about Mr. Rice's innocence, but they ignored most of it, and utterly misstated some of it.

DNA evidence at the Shenandoah National Park crime scene exonerates Mr. Rice completely. There was male DNA, hairs and fingerprints found at the crime scene, and none of it belonged to Mr. Rice. Three hairs were found that came from the same source, and could not exclude serial killer Richard Marc Evonitz. For reasons that we will never understand, the government has declined to compare the male DNA to Richard Evonitz, a known serial killer who was killing in central Virginia during this time period, lived within easy driving distance of the crime scene, and is unaccounted for on the likely day of the murders.

Forensic evidence also cleared Darrell Rice of the murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds. Relevant hairs, fibers and fingerprints from that crime scene excluded Mr. Rice as well. Twice, the evidence in the Alicia Showalter Reynolds case was sent to the FBI laboratory to be tested against Richard Evonitz, and twice, that testing did not occur. The federal prosecutor in the Shenandoah National Park murder case conceded in court that there was no evidence linking Rice to that murder.

Could it be that the government doesn't really want to solve those crimes, because then Darrell Rice - the man they had pursued relentlessly for years - would be exonerated?

The government interrogated Darrell Rice numerous times. They also used both jailhouse informants and undercover agents. Yet they never obtained any incriminating statements. When the tape the government claimed recorded Mr. Rice saying that he hated lesbians and they "made him mad" was enhanced, the government was forced to admit that what Mr. Rice actually said was the opposite - that the government was saying that he hated gays, and THAT made him mad.

The government has a 97% conviction rate, yet rather than give Darrell Rice his day in court after their seven-year "investigation," they dismissed the charges. That is because they knew they had no case.

The prosecution's case again Darrell Rice in Prince William crumbled before the jury's eyes. The "victim" had identified three different men as her attacker, including a detective. She only identified Darrell Rice after his photo had been plastered in the news as the alleged Shenandoah National Park murderer. She ALSO identified the known serial killer, Richard Marc Evonitz. Of course, no comparison of hairs and fibers was ever done. Her recounting of the alleged attack, her attacker and his truck changed markedly every time she told it.

Documents showed that Darrell Rice was two and a half hours away from Manassas with his counselor that night, and neither the Prince William prosecutors nor the AUSAs nor the FBI produced any evidence that he then drove to Manassas. The "victim" denied under oath having a criminal record, but documents demonstrated otherwise.

This is why in the middle of that trial, prosecutors began scrambling for a deal. They offered many, and Mr. Rice declined them all. But when they offered to allow him to plead guilty but deny guilt, and to give him no additional time, we as his attorneys felt we had to insist that he take that deal. He did so reluctantly.

Every story has two sides, and as you can see, the other side of Darrell Rice's story has yet to be told. We have been told that there may soon be some balanced and well-researched writing about all of these allegations, and we hope that you will at least withhold judgment (and action) until you have read more.

You have nothing to fear from Darrell Rice, and we hope that he has nothing to fear from you. After all these years, we count him as a friend as well as a client, and he is welcome in our homes and around our children.

Deirdre M. Enright, Esq., Gerald T. Zerkin, Esq., James G. Connell, III, Esq., Claire G. Cardwell, Esq.

As most of you know now, this community has been in an uproar about the fact that Darrell Rice has been living with his sister, her husband and his mother since July 17, 2007.

From July 17, 2007 until September 7, 2007, Darrell Rice had been living on Kent Island, and apparently was recognized by no one. During that time period, nobody on Kent Island (or anywhere else) reported having any problem with Mr. Rice.

During that time, Mr. Rice was doing all that was demanded of him by his federal probation officers. He was wearing an ankle bracelet, going to counseling, and trying to find gainful employment. At all times, his federal parole officers knew exactly where he was, and had approved in advance where he was going. They directed him to make a plan at the beginning of every week, in which he stated where he planned to go on each day, and at what time. The federal parole officers were free to deny any of these requests. His lawyers and his family and friends thought that this monitoring was excessive, unnecessary and counter-productive. But we were wrong. The ankle bracelet disproved all of these subsequent allegations made by the Kent Island community.

Sometime after September 7, 2007, when "someone" alerted the community to his presence on Kent Island, the alleged "sightings" began. Mr. Rice was "seen" everywhere, doing all sorts of criminal acts. Schools were rumored to be shut down. Track meets were rumored to be canceled. Women were attacked, of course. High speed chases occurred. People were attacked on the trail. Mr. Rice was driving a van, wearing a baseball cap. Mr. Rice was attacking children on a school bus.

All the while, Mr. Rice was wearing the GPS monitoring device that we object to - and he was at home. None of your community's "sightings" of Mr. Rice have been accurate - not a one. As soon as we learned that your community was in an irrational frenzy, we insisted that Mr. Rice stop attending counseling, and we insisted that he stop seeking employment - for his own safety.

Darrell Rice was publicly accused of the Route 29 stalking incidents only after the same photo that you have seen was released by Attorney General John Ashcroft, identifying him as the Shenandoah National Park murderer - which we now know he wasn't, due to DNA, additional forensic evidence, witnesses, documents, etc. But the government didn't care about the fact that the DNA wasn't Darrell's at that time, and they used John Ashcroft to plaster his photo everywhere.

Of the more or less 20 Route 29 Stalker "victims", most women did not identify Darrell Rice in 2002 as being the man who stopped them in 1996. Darrell Rice had alibis for nearly all of the Route 29 stops - and his alibis were known to the government, in the form of phone records, counseling records, probation records and work records. Two of the women who actually rode with "The Stalker" said that Mr. Rice was NOT the man that gave them a ride. Still, the government proceeded, praying that the drama of a few in-court identifications would overpower the less-emotional alibi evidence to most of the stops.

And so we thank the federal government for the ankle-bracelet he now wears, even though we continue to consider it unnecessary. It has proved our point. When you identify someone publicly as a serial killer, even falsely, you will invariably generate additional false accusations. The Kent Island Community has delivered countless eyewitness sightings of Mr. Rice, engaged in all manner of criminal activity, and every one of them has been wrong.

The man once suspected of being the Route 29 stalker is still in jail. Darrell Rice was arrested by U.S Marshals on a probation violation. Thursday he appeared in court to make a request for release.

The man once suspected of being the Route 29 stalker is still in jail. Darrell Rice was arrested by U.S Marshals on a probation violation. Thursday he appeared in court to make a request for release.

Darrell Rice will get to call the Central Virginia Regional Jail home, at least until April 6th. Judge Waugh Crigler denied his request for release. Darrell Rice admitted to violating his probation several times, by using marijuana and watching pornography. He's been in jail since that arrest. Thursday Rice asked the court to be released until his next court date in April.

Rice was worried about his job. He wanted to go back home to Maryland to straighten things out with his employer. The judge denied his request. Rice is no stranger when it comes to being in trouble with the law. In 1997 he was convicted for the attempted kidnapping of a woman at the Shenandoah National Park. Prosecutors once believed Rice was the man who attacked Alicia Showalter Reynolds and several other women along Route 29 in 1996. He was never charged with any of those crimes.

Rice told the courtroom how his life was improving before his arrest. He had a job that he enjoyed and he was gaining trust back from the community. Because of this probation violation Rice could face up to 10 years in jail.

Source: November 21, 2009 article from The Hook, a Charlottesville, Virginia weekly.

For Darrell David Rice, there may be something of a silver lining to spending the past nine months in federal prison: he has an airtight alibi for the night of October 17, when 20-year-old Morgan Harrington disappeared after attending a Metallica concert at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville.

After completing the prison term handed down for violating the terms of his probation on his 11-year attempting kidnapping sentence, Rice will be released December 18, and his attorney says Rice hopes his freedom won’t generate the kind of hysteria that erupted when he first left prison two and a half years ago.

“He just wants to live his life, not bother anyone, and not have them bother him,” says Fairfax-based attorney James Connell III.

In 2007, Rice left prison after serving his sentence for attempting to kidnap a female bicyclist in Shenandoah National Park in 1997. While that’s the most serious conviction on Rice’s record, he was also indicted for the 1996 double slaying of two female hikers in Shenandoah National Park, although the charges were dropped after DNA from an unknown male was found at the scene.

Rice was also eyed as a suspect in the case of the so-called “29 Stalker,” the still unsolved string of stalkings that authorities believe culminated in the murder of 24-year-0ld Harrisonburg native Alicia Showalter Reynolds, who was allegedly tricked into pulling her car over on Route 29.

Given that highly-publicized history, when Rice arrived on bucolic Kent Island in summer 2007, there was an uproar, with rumors abounding on message boards that Rice was stalking women on secluded trails, that he’d highjacked a school bus, and that he’d cut off his GPS-equipped tracking device, and involved in a police shootout.

Some people in Queen Anne County went “hysterical” that fall, according to the sheriff’s department spokesman. This time, the same spokesman says he’s not anticipating a similar response because Rice’s mother, Lenna Mays - Rice’s reason for living there - has moved away.

Mays’ former phone number has been disconnected, and attorney Connell says he, too, believes she has moved away from the spacious waterfront home on Plantation Lane. Although he could not provide a forwarding address, Connell confirms that Rice will be moving in again with Mays upon his release, wherever she lives.

Whether or not Rice discloses his new address, it will become public knowledge within 72 hours of his release, as he is required, as part of his probation, to place his name on the sex offender registry of whichever state he inhabits, according to Brian McGinn, spokesperson for the Western District of Virginia U.S. Attorney’s office. Such registries typically list home address and place of employment. In addition, Rice will be monitored by GPS device for 24 months.

Admittedly, those same conditions didn’t stop him from violating his probation previously. However, some court watchers wondered how seriously to take the probation transgressions that sent him back to federal prison in Petersburg: smoking marijuana and watching what prosecutors called “pornography” but which went unspecified in court other than being likened to the HBO cable network.

“The court has to decide if it’s Reefer Madness or it isn’t,” said Rice’s federal defender Fred Heblich during the probation violation hearing last March.

Rice’s supporters have long argued that he is a reformed offender who had nothing to do with any of the unsolved crimes of which he has been suspected.

In an open letter to the citizens of Kent Island at the height of the Rice frenzy, Rice’s former Charlottesville attorney Deirdre Enright wrote, “You have nothing to fear from Darrell Rice, and we hope that he has nothing to fear from you.” In an even stronger endorsement, she added, “After all these years, we count him as a friend as well as a client, and he is welcome in our homes and around our children.”

Whether that welcome still stands is an unanswered question, as Enright did not return the Hook’s repeated calls for comment.


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