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A Journalist Reexamines 1996 Murders Near The Appalachian Trail

In the summer of 1996 in Shenandoah National Park, two women, Julie Williams and Lollie Winans, were murdered not far from the Appalachian Trail. The case remains unsolved today. Journalist Kathryn Miles recently wrote about the murders in a new book titled, “Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders.” The book goes beyond true crime, and wraps in Miles’ personal experiences and the specter of violence in the outdoors.

This conversation originally aired in the March 19, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

In the summer of 1996 in Shenandoah National Park, two women, Julie Williams and Lollie Winans, were murdered not far from the Appalachian Trail.

The case remains unsolved today.

Journalist Kathryn Miles recently wrote about the murders in a new book titled, “Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders.” The book goes beyond true crime, and wraps in Miles’ personal experiences and the specter of violence in the outdoors.

Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams recently spoke with Miles.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Adams: For people who don’t know about the 1996 homicides, can you tell us what happened?

Miles: It was in Shenandoah National Park, just off of the Appalachian Trail. Lollie and Julie were both wilderness leaders. They had met the summer before at a really revolutionary outdoor program for women and fell head over heels in love.

I think it’s really important to remember that this was 1996. This was a long time before anyone really kind of felt comfortable coming out in a public way, especially somewhere like the Upper Midwest, which is where they were located. They had some challenges in terms of trying to figure out this relationship, whether or not they wanted to navigate a same-sex relationship, but they did really both commit to it. They spent the next calendar year in a long distance relationship getting to know each other, at the end of what had been Lollie’s last semester of her college experience. This is May of 1996. The two were living about five hours apart: Julie was in Vermont, Lollie was in Maine at Unity, the college that I would go on to teach at. The school year had wrapped up. They were both about to embark upon very busy summers.

They decided that what they really wanted to do was take an easy, breezy backpacking trip that would give them time to recommit, reconnect as a couple. They picked Shenandoah National Park, knowing that, first of all, the weather was a lot more reliable there than it is here in Maine in May, where snow is still a possibility. They also knew that not only did the Appalachian Trail run through the park, but there were also a lot of other trails that would allow them to have an experience where it wasn’t really about endurance. It really wasn’t about skill so much as it was about recreation.

About a week into their trip — we think five to seven days into their trip — they were brutally assaulted at their back country camp site. They were both murdered. We believe that Julie was sexually assaulted. Then that really led to this impossibly difficult and confusing and convoluted and flawed investigation that continues today.

Adams: Yes, the investigation has yet to conclude, in part, it seems because law enforcement authorities really singled out an individual early on and pursued a case against him. Your book suggests maybe they shouldn’t have been so quick to rush to prosecution. Can you talk a little bit about what you found?

Miles: In July of 1997, about 14 months after Lollie and Julie were murdered, a young man named Darrell David Rice was in Shenandoah National Park. His father lived right outside of the park, and he would regularly spend a lot of time cycling there. He had, by all accounts, including his own, several very severe psychological challenges and issues he was dealing with, most notably bipolar schizophrenia. His life had been completely unraveling. He was not getting treatment for the psychological disorders. He was at his wit’s end.

On one particular weekend in July, he had been up for two or three days straight, and was driving through the park. He saw a female cyclist. He drove past her several times.

He shouted obscenities at her, and at one point ran her off the road. She was understandably terrified about this, and got help, and rangers managed to get hold of him before he left the park. As soon as they apprehended him, the rangers were convinced that he had murdered Lollie and Julie the summer before. When violent crime occurs in national parks, those investigations are the dual purview of both the FBI and the National Park Service police.

Those two law enforcement agencies, which do not have a lot in common with each other and have very different cultural expectations, have to come together during these crimes. I think that’s part of what makes these crimes so difficult to successfully solve and close, are these culture clashes. Both the FBI and the Park Service began to focus on David Rice, and really began to shift their investigation exclusively to him at that point.

Adams: Darrell Rice was indicted in 2001. But ultimately, federal officials couldn’t gather enough of a case to really take him to trial. It was dismissed. And your investigation points in different directions. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned with your research?

Miles: In 2001, Darrell Rice was formally indicted. At that point, the attorney general for the U.S. was John Ashcroft under the George W. Bush administration. He saw in this particular case an opportunity to test out brand new hate crime legislation. It became the first official federal hate crime in the United States. At that point, it also became a hugely political and politically charged case. The FBI had one very small and very sort of strange piece of evidence that they thought might link Darrell David Rice to the crime, but they had no forensic evidence, no hairs, no DNA, nothing else. In fact, the DNA that they had taken from the crime scene had excluded Darrell Rice as a suspect in all of it, but had not excluded another known serial killer who was working in the area.

Eventually, faced with this mounting DNA evidence that continued to exclude Darrell Rice, they had no choice but to dismiss the case against him. What I should say, and this is very important, is that federal prosecutors used a not-very-well-known legal concept called “without prejudice.” Those are usually used in cases where prosecutors are convinced of the guilt of the defendant. They feel like they do have a strong case that could persuade a jury or a judge, but because of some sort of procedural error that occurred during the trial, they feel like they can’t get the conviction that they need to get. By dismissing a case in this way, the federal government basically reserves the right to bring the case back against a person at any time. In the case of Darrell Rice, they were on the eve of jury selection for his trial. At any point, the federal government can go, basically right back to that spot and continue the trial against him.

So he lives in the state of double jeopardy, which is how and why the Virginia Innocence Project became involved in the case. They saw this as a miscarriage of justice against an innocent person. And I was very fortunate to work with the Innocence Project reexamining this case and reinvestigating it from the beginning.

Adams: So you’re getting pretty deep into this research. I would imagine that stands in direct conflict with the view of wilderness and nature as a place for escape. It’s a place we go to get away from all of society’s troubles, and our personal troubles. What was that journey like for you?

Miles: Really difficult. I had started my tenure at Unity College in the fall of 2001, literally two days before September 11. I was barely 27. It was my first college teaching job. In the spring of 2002, when the formal announcement of this indictment took place, I saw firsthand how that indictment really impacted the Unity community. Lollie at that point had been dead for five years. But she was still very, very present on that campus. She was just such an extraordinary leader, and an extraordinary human.

My colleagues were her faculty members and professors, and her friends had become my friends. Seeing the residual trauma, not only of her very untimely death, but also how this indictment brought up all of that again, had made the case doubly personal for me. Not only did I really sort of identify with Lollie and Julie in very profound ways, and felt that impact as a secondary trauma as a female sexual assault survivor and backpacker, but then to see firsthand how this was impacting people who I had already grown to love really, really made this very real for me.

When I set out on the 20th anniversary to begin working on this as a magazine article, already the stakes and the emotions were pretty high. It does really feel like a personal story for me in some profound ways.

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Hear the entire interview on Inside Appalachia. Or click/tap the “Listen” button at the top of this story.

A Celebration Of W.Va. Books And An Anthology Focuses On Sense Of Place

Recently, NPR published a list of 50 books for 50 states to celebrate summer reading. The one they identified for West Virginia was “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry From West Virginia” edited by Doug Van Gundy and Laura Long.

It’s summertime. We go swimming, we travel, we see our friends, and many of us also love to read.

Twenty years ago, West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney edited an anthology of West Virginia fiction writers and poets called “Backcountry.” A few years ago, Van Gundy and Long — working with WVU Press — began a project to compile an anthology of West Virginia writing since Backcountry’s publication — that’s how “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia” was born.

This anthology features a collection of 63 fiction writers and poets talking about the unique sense of place they find in the Mountain State.

News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Van Gundy and Long about the process for creating the book. But before we get into that conversation, we asked to hear from you.

What are your favorite West Virginia books that you would recommend? The type of book that makes you think of the Mountain State.

We asked you on Facebook, and here’s what you told us:

Over a two-and-half-day period, we received 34 responses, ages 30 to 84. Most of you were from West Virginia: 85.71 percent from the Mountain State, and 14.29 percent of you from out-of-state.

Most of you recommended “Rocket Boys” by Homer Hickam, while “The West Virginia Encyclopedia” took second place.

All together, we received 19 book recommendations. You described these books as reminding you of your childhood, “beautifully written,” “chock full of information” about West Virginia, “inspirational,” “more than stereotypes,” “complicated,” “authentic,” “empathetic,” “historical,” and as one of you proclaimed, “it’s a great story!”

Here’s a list of all your book recommendations, in no particular order:

Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam
West Virginia Hollow Tales by John E. Jordan Jr.
When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant
In the Country Dark by Mike Mallow
Gauley Mountain by Louise McNeill
Shrapnel by Marie Manilla
Far Appalachia by Noah Adams
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Dark and Bloody River by Allan W. Eckert
The West Virginia Encyclopedia
The Miner’s Daughter by Gretchen Moran Laskas
Dismal Mountain by John W. Billheimer
So Much to Be Angry About by Shaun Slifer
Foote: A Mystery Novel by Tom Bredehoft
Another Appalachia: Growing Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia
Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina
The Unquiet Earth by Denise Giardina
At home in the heart of Appalachia by John O’Brien
The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant

This interview with Van Gundy and Long has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Which one of you came up with this idea? Or was this one of those projects that started over a couple beers during a conference somewhere.

Van Gundy: Abby Freeland, who was then the Acquisitions Editor at WVU Press, approached me. She was visiting the West Virginia Wesleyan low residency MFA program. And she said, “What do you think of this anthology, “Backcountry,” which was edited by Irene McKinney about 20 years ago?” And I said, “Oh, it’s essential.” And she said, “What do you think about updating it?” I said, “Oh, that would be great. You guys should do that.” She said, “What do you think about you doing it?” And [I said], “Oh, okay. Sure.”

We thought that Laura would be a great collaborator on this. And as Laura writes poetry and fiction, I’m primarily a poet, we thought it’d be great to have a couple of perspectives. And Laura and I are old friends and have worked together off and on for a long time. And we thought we could probably get along well enough to pull together an anthology. And it ended up being just a joy.

But the bones of the thing came together at an Appalachian studies conference in Huntington, where we all ducked out to have dinner together. And we sort of hammered out what we wanted for the book. And Laura brought her ideas, and I brought my ideas, and Abby brought her ideas. And by the end of dinner, we sort of had a mandate and direction.

Douglas: How did you solicit the writers? How did you edit down the content – that sort of thing?

Van Gundy: We each came up with suggestions for the list. We wanted authors that had books out from national presses, generally. And then we each brought lists. And when we went around and asked some of the people who were on our lists if they would like to be included, we always asked them, “Who do you think should be in this book?” So that way we were able to find writers that I didn’t know of, that I’ve since become a fan of. But just through the web of connectivity of West Virginia writers, we just kept getting more and more suggestions as we went on.

Long: We also divided the work up so that I did the fiction and Doug did the poetry. When we wrote to people, we asked them to send work that they felt connected to a sense of place, of West Virginia. So the authors themselves chose work that gave them a strong sense of place. And I think that’s a real strength of the book, that self-selection by the writers, of the things that they felt were very much West Virginia-centered or had that feeling for them in whatever way. So they each sent us more than one work. And then we chose among the pieces that each writer sent to us, so the book would balance out well. And what we felt was the strongest.

Van Gundy: I remember going back and forth for quite a while on how to sequence this thing, because the work is so various and so broad, such a broad reach and such a chorus of voices and perspectives. We finally settled on alphabetical. It just seemed the most egalitarian.

Douglas: Any big discoveries? Anybody that you didn’t know about or anybody that surprised you?

Long: There were a number of poets that I didn’t know their work. So I was surprised by many of the poets. I was just rereading it this morning and remember being surprised again, actually, because the poet’s are just amazing. And not many of them are that well known because people don’t read poetry that much. I can’t name just one.

Douglas: You said in your introduction to the book, and you both alluded to it, that you were looking for stories with a connection to West Virginia, or that sense of place of West Virginia.

Van Gundy: I remember a conversation that Laura and I had, where we said we wanted the book to represent the state of the state of fiction and poetry in West Virginia. And we wanted to be sure that it was not monolithic. We wanted to be sure that it represented as many various voices that are present in our literature as possible. One of the things that I love so much about my West Virginia, is that there’s room for everyone. I think there is, at its core, a kind of inclusivity that if you’re willing to put something into the community, if you’re willing to belong, then you’re welcome. And I think that this book reflects that.

Douglas: Laura, do you want to add anything?

Long: Speaking of poets that I didn’t really know before, Norman Jordan, who was associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s, was a writer that I didn’t know, even though he wrote five books of poetry. And his poem is about the Hawks Nest tunnel. And so the writers that are not at all stereotypical are deeply embedded and entwined with a sense of place.

So, the place does connect people who, in other scenarios, might not seem connected. Rajia Hasib, who’s an amazing writer in Charleston, whose work connects with others in these surprising ways. That’s another person that I didn’t know before [who] I’ve gotten to know because of the book. And, with people like Rajia Hasib, who was so happy to be part of the book, you realize how connected people feel, even when she came to West Virginia from Egypt. And we realize how many people are happy to make a home in West Virginia, as well as people who are born and raised here. People feel connections because they’re born here, but they also feel connections because they make a life here with their family. So I feel that the book does connect people in ways that West Virginia itself connects people.

Van Gundy: As you’re saying that, Laura, it makes me think that whether or not we’re born here, we have family histories here. Every one of us, and every one of the voices in this book, is a West Virginian and by choice, you know, we choose again and again to stay where we choose. We choose to write about the place, and so we are all West Virginians by choice.

And that’s something that unites us.