PEORIA MAGAZINE April 2022

Kathryn Miles (KM): In May 1996, Julie Williams and Lollie Winans were brutally murdered while backpacking in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, adjacent to the world-famous Appalachian Trail. The young women were skilled backcountry leaders and they hadmet — and fallen in love—the previous summer while working at an outdoor program for women. Despite an extensive joint investigation by the FBI, Virginia police and National Park Service experts, the case remained unsolved. In early 2002, in response tomounting political pressure, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he would seek the death penalty against Darrell David Rice — already in prison for assaulting another woman — in the first capital case tried under new, post 9/11 federal hate crime legislation. Two years later, the Department of Justice quietly suspended its case against Rice, and the investigation grew cold. In 2002, I was a newly minted professor at Unity College, the school Lollie was attending when she was murdered. The indictment rocked our small community. In subsequent years, I became the trail correspondent for Outside Magazine. Lollie and Julie’s story had always remained in my mind. On the 20th anniversary of their murders, I proposed a long-form feature story about the crime to my editor. I thought the piece would be a fairly straightforward account of the crime and the FBI’s attempts to solve it. It turned out to be anything but. PM: What was it about Julie Williams and Lollie Winans that so motivated you to tell their story? KM: I was sexually assaultedwhen I was 16 years old and really struggled with how to make sense of that experience. It wasn’t until I was in college and discovered backpacking that I really felt like I found a way to feel strong and powerful inmy own body. Backpacking was a kind of salvation for me. When I learned that two young women my age had been murdered camping off a national park trail, it really shattered my sense of safety in the wilderness. At the time of their murder, the Internetwas still nascent. I starteddoing

research and was shocked to learn how many others – particularly women and people who identify as LGBTQ+ — had beenmurdered while hiking on some of our country’s most popular trails. That awareness profoundly changedmy own relationship with the natural world. I resisted the idea of writing this book for quite a while. With the feature story, I knew I could skirt around the edges of what was most disturbing and painful … I’d seen how great a toll writing these kinds of books has taken on other authors, and I didn’t think I had the fortitude to go down such dark holes. But the more I began to understand just how solvable this case remains — and just how many individuals have been affected by it — the more I realized it would be selfish not to pursue the project. PM: What did you f ind in your investigation that the FBI, Virginia police andNational Park Service authorities did not, or at least did not act upon?

capital crimes. The overwhelming majority were the result of bias on the part of investigators and prosecutors. Couple that with the fact that there are currently over 250,000 cold murder cases in the U.S., and you begin to get a glimpse of just how big a crisis we have with our justice system. PM: You believe the man the police originally arrested for the crime was the wrong guy, correct? At the risk of declaring a spoiler alert, do we dare ask whodunnit? KM: I do. No evidence has ever been found linking Darrell David Rice to the crime, despite a lengthy investigation that included planting one of the FBI’s leading undercover agents in Rice’s cell and spending millions of taxpayer dollars. As part of my research, I partnered with the University of Virginia’s Innocence Project. Their director, noted attorney Deirdre Enright, has always said the only real way to prove

“I HAD TO SET VERY STRICT BOUNDARIES WITH MYSELF JUST TO MAKE SURE I COULD SLEEP AT NIGHT. ONE RULE I MADE WAS TO NEVER WORK ON THE PROJECT AFTER DARK”

Author Kathryn Miles

KM: A good part of the book is my attempt to recreate the amazing lives of Lollie and Julie and the great love they had for one another. But the main thread is the answer to that question. There were multiple missteps that ultimately prevented a conviction. I should say that many talented and dedicated law enforcement officials worked tirelessly on this case (and were a tremendous help in writing the book). That said, it is true that a lack of understanding of wilderness crimes, the culture of the hiking community, and most notably, real bias on the part of key investigators led to a wholly botched case. What is most disturbing is just how often this happens. Since 1980, over 2,600 people have been exonerated after being wrongly convicted of

someone’s innocence is to establish someone else’s guilt. We reinvestigated the case using all of the evidence obtained by officials and pursued multiple other leads. In the book, I make a case for what I believe is the strongest and most likely of these alternative suspects. PM: To what other conclusions did your research and writing bring you? KM: I think we all want certainty, particularly when something terrible happens…Wewant tobelievethat justice will prevail and that the perpetrator will be caught and punished. And in the era of crime dramas like CSI, we all want to believe that forensic science will lead us to that certainty. But that rarely, if ever, is the case. Forensic science is a highly subjective, fallible field of

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