Trailed, p.5
Trailed, page 5
Investigating a violent crime—even one twenty years old—is difficult for the people who remain, too. So few people are granted an intentional death and an opportunity to really get our emotional affairs in order. Most of the time, we never know when we’ll last see someone or have a chance to say goodbye. Our parting memories can be filled with regret over harsh words or petty squabbles or missed opportunities. None of the people in Julie and Lollie’s circles had any idea they would lose them that May. And for many, there are deep wounds not only about the loss of these two individuals but also from unresolved issues or words and conversations. Embarking on this story would mean asking people to dredge up that hurt as well.
I woke up the next morning feeling the weight of all those considerations. I dressed for the field and checked out of my hotel long before I was expected at the Richmond FBI office. It was the first day of March. Back in Maine, a blizzard was raging. But here in central Virginia, spring had arrived along with all the splendor wrought by magnolias and cherry blossoms.
It took some doing to find the Richmond FBI field office building, which is tucked between an industrial cleaning equipment warehouse, an auto repair place, and an Asian spa. One story tall, with mirrored windows and no arches or embellishments, the building housing the FBI’s offices had been rendered almost invisible by its lack of anything architectural. Only the traffic barrier and black Palisade fencing surrounding this property suggested that anything of note might occur there.
Once inside the compound, I met up with Dee Rybiski, the division’s public affairs officer, and Scott, a senior evidence response team agent who asked that I only use his first name. The three of us climbed into a massive black Chevy Suburban with tinted windows, and we headed out. As we sped westward on I-64, the landscape quickly became rural. Neither Scott nor Rybiski seemed to notice the SUV’s radio, which hopped between Bruce Springsteen and a Christian preacher. Instead, Rybiski invited me to begin my interview. Scott cheerfully agreed. A former navy helicopter pilot with a strong jaw and enormous biceps, he looked right out of central casting. After they age out, many navy pilots go work for the commercial airlines. Scott explained that he, instead, went to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Part of his curriculum included a two-week course on crime scene investigation, which covered such topics as processing blast areas, excavating mass graves, and documenting fingerprints. From there, he joined the Richmond office’s Evidence Response Team (ERT). One of the first in the country, Richmond’s ERT was formed in 1995. The program itself was conceived shortly after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed at least five people, injured more than a thousand, and left a massive hundred-foot crater in the center’s underground parking garage. More than three hundred FBI investigators spent weeks combing through the rubble, looking for clues.
That, Scott tells me, is the typical kind of work the FBI envisioned for the ERT: serving on joint terrorism task forces, investigating plane crashes, that sort of thing. Most of their investigation of violent crime is in built, urban environments. Wilderness scenes, he said, present a whole set of different challenges.
“We’re hardly ever the first ones on the scene. We’re arriving six, eight hours later—sometimes even more,” he said. “In the meantime, evidence outside can blow away, get washed away, be affected by weather. And then there are the environmental conditions. You don’t know who else has been at the crime scene, whether that’s humans or animals. So you’re also dealing with a potential scatter pattern that could go on for a mile or more.”
ERTs also receive next to no training about the particulars of backcountry investigations. “They’re a different beast altogether,” Scott conceded.
To understand why, he said, consider the Department of Justice’s codified protocols for homicide investigation, which were issued just a few months before the 1996 Shenandoah murders. These procedures mandate that investigators should begin by documenting the crime scene’s building name and address. They should then determine the entry and exit point of the crime scene and check door handles, telephones, windows, and light switches for latent prints. After that, they should be sure to collect witness statements from neighbors. None of these steps make any sense in the backcountry.
Even getting to the crime scene can seem all but impossible. Conditions and weather are big factors there as well. Some field offices, like Denver’s, are staffed by agents proficient in mountaineering, rappelling, and other backcountry skills, but most agents don’t have such special training. If a crime scene is down a crevasse or tucked deep within a slot canyon, the agents might not be able to reach it. And if weather conditions prove threatening or particularly precarious, supervisors might decide not to send them for days or weeks, if at all. In the meantime, rain can wash away blood or erase a fingerprint, particularly if the area is experiencing warm temperatures and high humidity. Plus, said Scott, “it’s next to impossible to lift fingerprints from porous surfaces like boulders or trees.”
And then there’s the difficulty ERTs have in determining what even constitutes evidence in the backcountry. Say a victim appears to have been killed by blunt force trauma on the side of a mountain, offered Scott. A rock could have been used as a murder weapon. But which one? The deceased individual is surrounded by thousands of them. Do you pick up each one and look for blood or hair? And if it rained the day before, what’s the likelihood you’d even see any evidence, assuming you managed to pick that one rock out from all the others?
When talking about solved murder investigations, law enforcement officials and scholars often refer to their “clearance rates”: the number of cases solved in any given year. Nationally, clearance rates have been declining steadily over the past fifty years. They are particularly low for wilderness crimes. A study completed by Washington, DC’s Justice Research and Statistics Association reveals, at least in part, why that is. They found that murder cases are more likely to be solved when the crime occurs in private residences or bars and stores rather than in open public areas. Those cases are also more likely to be closed if detectives arrive at the crime scene within a half hour of that crime being reported and if those investigators are followed by the prompt arrival of medical examiners and crime lab technicians. Other factors for success include the rapid interviewing of witnesses, the careful securing of the scene, and the swift retrieval of a murder weapon.
“Good luck doing any of that out in the woods,” Scott concluded.
About an hour after we departed the Richmond field office, Scott pulled our SUV into a multiuse office building on the outskirts of Charlottesville. Inside, placards for medical labs and child support enforcement offices directed visitors to the various floors. We headed, instead, to a cramped office space with the lights already out. There, Jane Collins, who has served as the lead FBI agent in Julie and Lollie’s case since early 2000, greeted us with a Diet Coke in one hand and the handle of a small roller-board suitcase in the other. If Scott is straight out of central casting, Jane is anything but: salon-perfect blond hair, pink nail polish, skinny jeans. The only thing giving her away as an FBI agent was the pistol holstered at her hip. We said our hellos and agreed that we’d follow her to Shenandoah.
Once inside the park, our little caravan was joined by a cadre of park rangers. Among them was Tim Alley, fifty-seven, the original lead law enforcement ranger in the case. Since retired and working as a private detective, Alley was dressed that day in cargo pants and a navy blue fleece pullover commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the park. With his thick goatee, short cropped gray hair, and reflective Ray-Ban sunglasses pushed back on the top of his head, he looked as much like a high school football coach as he did a longtime law enforcement ranger—a persona further enforced by his gruff colloquialisms. Within just a few minutes of chatting, he was referring to the NPS as the “park circus” and Lollie and Julie as “our girls.” I liked him right away.
The group of us briefly consulted maps, and then our caravan, now five vehicles long, made its way northward on the park’s fabled Skyline Drive. We were headed for Skyland, the park’s largest and most well-known resort complex. Widely considered the crown jewel of the Shenandoah, the twenty-seven-acre Skyland resort includes dozens of freestanding cabins and blocks of rooms and suites, along with conference buildings, an amphitheater and horse stables, and lodging for about sixty-five staff members (mostly dishwashers, cooks, and waitstaff but also groundskeepers, stable hands, and maintenance workers). The AT crosses right through the property, making it a favorite stop for backpackers.
At the center of it all sits the Skyland lodge itself, a sleek stone and wood building with panorama windows and sweeping views of the valley. On a summer weekend, the place is hectic: there’s a coffee bar with takeaway sandwiches and salads; the main dining area often has wait times of well over an hour. The pub, which opens in the late afternoon, hops with live music on the weekends. And then there are the restrooms with rows and rows of stalls, and the gift shop and plush couches and coffee tables stacked with coffee-table books dedicated to the park.
In the summer and fall, Skyland can feel as crowded as any major airport; however, few visitors venture to the park in early spring, when snow is still common and the trees bare. The lodge is shuttered until late March, as are most of the other amenities here. So it’s no real surprise that the Stony Man parking lot, located just north of Skyland at mile 41.7 on Skyline Drive, was empty when we arrived. We parked, and once outside our vehicles, the group seemed somber, standing in a tight circle, making small talk about the weather.
A few minutes later, we left the parking lot on foot, crossed Skyland Drive, and then descended down the remnants of the Bridle Trail. Without this crew, I doubt I ever would have found the overgrown path: even without the camouflaging effect of summer foliage, the trailhead was all but invisible.
Walking beside me was Tim Alley, who was quick to note that he’d heard I live in Maine. He told me he grew up on a small island there, and within just a few minutes we’d found a handful of shared acquaintances, including his first cousin, whom I had first met when we were both competing in a trail marathon. Tim graduated from the University of Maine in 1980 and immediately began his career as a park ranger. In 1986, he was one of the law enforcement rangers working on the NPS’s Colonial Parkway, which connects historic Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown in eastern Virginia. That same year, Cathy Thomas and Becky Dowski, a young lesbian couple, were found in Cathy’s car, just off the parkway. Both women’s throats had been slit. The impact of working that case, Alley told me, had left an indelible mark. “The whole crime investigation thing was relatively new for all of us,” he said. “We were still trying to find our way.” The mere presence of law enforcement rangers, he continued, was something the NPS was still very much trying to get used to by the time Lollie and Julie were killed.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the Department of the Interior began distinguishing between two types of rangers: interpretive, who are responsible for programming and education, and law enforcement rangers, who are cops with all the powers of state police officers. It took another twenty years to establish hiring and training rules for the latter. Even today, most visitors to our national parks don’t realize that there are two types of rangers. That lack of understanding creates all kinds of public confusion—and ultimately adds to the perils of the job, already considered one of the most dangerous in all of law enforcement. Between 1990 and 2020, eight FBI agents and six park rangers were killed in the line of duty, a staggering number when you consider that FBI agents outnumber rangers by a scale of ten to one.
The rangers walking alongside us on the Bridle Trail that day agreed that the murders of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans only intensified concerns for their own safety. “The terribleness of this crime changed our collective view of the woods and our profession,” one ranger told me. “It took a place we all loved and filled it with horror. I don’t think any of us will ever really get over it.”
I was listening, but I was also distracted by the racing of my heart as we got closer to the spot where Lollie and Julie had set up camp.
I’ve always been agnostic about notions of the afterlife or the presence of ghosts and spirits, but I do believe that violence leaves some kind of metaphysical trace. The AT thru-hikers who stopped long enough to write in the Thelma Marks Shelter log noted that phenomenon again and again. Maybe it was just the power of suggestion. Maybe they saw what other hikers had written before them, and those words became their own, new reality. Or maybe they’d read about the place before setting out on their hikes and were anticipating a sinister feeling. I don’t know.
But here’s what I do know: as apprehensive as I was, as predisposed as I was to find something terrible and sad and stained about the place where Julie and Lollie died, I felt none of that. To the contrary, their little stealth campsite was undeniably beautiful. Even in the austerity of early March, when the canopy is bare and the forest floor is packed with dank and decomposing leaves, it is a lovely, peaceful place. The former tent site itself is the only level patch of ground in the area. It is surrounded by a horseshoe of trees that makes the place feel like a secret oasis. The only noise is the brook, running fast and strong with snowmelt. Had I been backpacking here, I would have selected this site for myself and thought I had hit the lottery.
When Julie and Lollie arrived here in May 1996, the ground would have been soft with early ferns and new grass. The spot was the perfect size for their tent and gear, along with room to set up a small outdoor kitchen and a place to sit and eat or write or just think the day away. The northern fork of the White Oak Run flows right alongside, so water for cooking and drinking was in easy reach. Best of all, because it was a backcountry spot, there was no sign announcing the place, no fire ring or picnic table. Just a delicious patch of ground tucked in the woods, with the comforting gurgle of a river’s headwaters nearby.
Today, no cross or drying wreath marks this site as the place where Julie Williams and Lollie Winans were murdered. The only memorial is a small scatter of brightly colored rocks that once formed a peace symbol on the ground not far from where Julie’s body had been found, a tribute left by her friends to commemorate her love of geology, and one that the intervening years have begun to dismantle. Standing there studying those stones from around the world and the scene that contained them, I struggled with the cognitive dissonance of admiring a place where something so unspeakably awful had occurred. I did not know Julie or Lollie. I cannot speak for them, nor do I want to seem so presumptuous as to say what they may have felt or thought. But maybe, just maybe, when two selfless, joyful, beautiful humans die in a place, what is left behind is not the agony of their deaths but the brilliance of their lives.
As pastoral and lovely a spot as the women’s final resting place was, neither the investigators nor I could figure out how Lollie and Julie found that little patch of ground in the first place—or how their killer knew they were there. “It doesn’t make sense that someone went down this trail randomly looking for someone to kill,” said Tim Alley. You’d go over to the next trail, Whiteoak, which is much busier, or you’d stay on the AT. Some interaction occurred that brought the killer here. I am a true believer that something went on between them.”
Bridget Bohnet, the backcountry ranger responsible for patrolling this section of the park in 1996, nodded in agreement. “This trail was never very popular. And after we moved the horse rides, it no longer served any real purpose. By 1996, it was basically nonexistent,” she said. “You’d really have to study the map to even know it was there.”
Bohnet said the few people she ever saw on the Bridle Trail during her regular patrols were day hikers looking for shortcuts from Old Rag Mountain, or Skyland employees looking for a place to party—mostly to play games like Dungeons & Dragons after a long shift. A couple of miles down the trail from the women’s campsite, two small cabins sit tucked back from the Old Rag Fire Road, basically a gated double track used by park maintenance employees and rangers. In late May 1996, the cabins at the base of the trail were occupied by college-aged women working for the Student Conservation Association. Could someone have come upon Lollie and Julie while returning from a visit to those cabins?
“Maybe,” said Alley with a shrug. “But doubtful. We interviewed those girls for what felt like hours. They would have mentioned it.”
I asked who else would have known the trail and campsite were here. Could someone have recommended it to Julie and Lollie? Alley gave an emphatic no to that as well.
“Years earlier, when I was a seasonal ranger, I lived in one of the cabins at the base of the trail,” he told me. “No one ever came down there. Ever.”
Bridget Bohnet agreed. “No one would ever suggest this trail because no one ever went down it. Not many people even knew about it.”
We spread out a copy of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy topographical map Lollie and Julie were carrying with them when they died. On it, the Bridle Trail isn’t even labeled: it’s just a narrow, easily overlooked line. Topo maps are valuable to hikers in part because they illustrate relief, which is to say elevation gain and loss, with contour lines. The closer the lines are to one another, the steeper the terrain. With even the most minimal understanding of how a topo map works, it would have been abundantly clear that the chance for a good stealth campsite would have been much better on the other side of Skyline Drive, behind the Skyland lodge and back by the AT, where the terrain was far more level. So how and why would Julie and Lollie have ended up here?
“We always assumed it was their last night in the park,” Alley said. “Their car was parked just a couple of miles from here. Maybe they just wanted an easy night before heading out.”
