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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer The Nightstalker VTK Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening. In May nineteen ninety six, two skilled backcountry leaders, Lolly Winans and Julie Williams entered Virginia's Shenandoah National Park for a week long backcountry camping trip. The free spirit and remarkable young couple had met and fallen in love with the previous summer while working at a world renowned outdoor program for women. During their final days in the park, they descended the narrow remnants of a trail and pitched
their tent in a hidden spot. After the pair didn't return home as planned, park rangers found a scene of horror at their campsite, their tent slashed open, their beloved dog missing, and both women dead in their sleeping bags. The unsolved murders of Winans and Williams continued to haunt all who had encountered them or knew their story. When award winning journalist and outdoors expert Catherine Miles begins looking into the case, he discovers conflicting evidence, mismatched timelines, and
details that just don't add up. With unprecedented access to crucial crime scene forensics and key witnesses, and with the growing sense of both mission and obsession, she begins to uncover the truth. An innocent man, Miles is convinced has been under suspicion for decades, while the true culprit is a known serial killer. If only authorities would take a
closer look. Intimate, page turning, and brilliantly reported, Trailed is a love story and a call to justice, and a searching and urgent plea to make wilderness a safe place for women. The book we're featuring this evening is Trailed, One Woman's Quest to solve the Shenandoah Murders, with my special guest, journalist and author Katherine Miles. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Katherine Miles, and thank you for having me.
Thank you so much. Let's talk about as you do. Right in the very beginning of your book, you talk about August two thousand and one, and you're a professor and you find yourself at Unity College in Central Maine. Tell us about Unity College and what you find there in regards to the memories of Lully and Julie.
Yeah, you know, Unity College was such a wonderful special place. I had arrived there when I was twenty seven years old. It was my first college teaching job. I had a really sort of vested in our tulated interest in environmental justice and environmental studies, and that was really the backbone of this little college. It was a very intimate place.
About five hundred undergraduates all were there because they wanted to study some aspect of the outdoors, and it really was a community in the best sense, and the relationships
there were very long lasting. Lolly Winans had been a student there when she was murdered in nineteen ninety six, and it was immediately obvious to me from the moment I arrived at the college, not only what an impact she had left on the community there and just how cherished she had been, but also just how deeply her murder continued to affect that entire community.
So what do you find out about Lollly Winings.
You know, she and her partner, Julie Williams, were both very skilled outdoor leaders. Lollie had grown up in Gross Pointe, Michigan, to a very affluent family. She had also been a sexual assault survivor and had really found a sense of strength and security and sort of therapeutic rebirth, if you will, with backpacking and outdoor leadership. She had arrived at Unity planning to create an outdoor wilderness program.
For other sexual assault survivors.
She was doing an internship at a really wonderful outdoor organization called Woodswomen when she met Julie. The two of them fell in love, and they both had already accomplished so much in terms of social justice, volunteering, outdoor leadership when they had met at the very young age of twenty four and twenty two, respectively.
Tell us about Julie Williams.
Julie grew up in Minnesota to a very tight knit family whose Catholic faith was very important and continues to be very important. She very early on developed a real interest in social justice issues. She was fluent in space, and while she was a high school student, she worked as an interpreter for domestic assault survivors. She also was a sexual assault survivor as well. She was an introvert to Lally's extra version, so they were a really great sort of yin and yang partnership in that. And she
also was a geologist by training. She had done a lot of backcountry work in northern Minnesota on Native American reservations. She had worked in Central and South America and Europe as well, and she had also arrived at Woods Women with an interest in becoming an outdoor leader.
This is quite important to the story obviously, but what we're in the nineties and at this college, and a big issue running through this book as well. In the story, it was the attitudes about gay and lesbian and transgender at that time.
Yeah, and I really appreciate you asking that question.
I think we tend to forget now in twenty twenty two how difficult it was to be LGBTQ plus in the nineties. This murder, which took place in nineteen ninety six, was three years before the murder of Matthew Shepherd, which is a case I think a lot of people are
familiar with. You know, it was an era, as I say in the book, when you know, Olympic swimmer Greg Luganis had come out and not to a positive public appearance, and so I think for a lot of people, keeping your sexuality very hidden was still very very important, and it was not a safe place to come out, as
we learn later in the book. You know, I think tragically Lolly and Julie didn't know how well received they would have been by their closest friends and family had they had the chance to come out to them then, but certainly in terms of the larger culture of America, it was not a safe space, and so they, I think, like a lot.
Of couples, kept their sexuality very hidden.
Tell us about how they both came to Unity College and their stay there.
Lollly had bounced around a fair amount. She you know, was this sort of free spirit. She loved the grateful Dead. She you know, kind of wandered a little bit, which I think a lot of Unity students did. But once she found that calling of really wanting to work in the world of what we now call adventure therapy, she started looking for schools that really would set her up in a place where she could sort of immediately start doing that kind of work, and that was really one
of the articulated specialties of Unity. That's what brought her there, and she really thrived at that campus. And when I arrived in two thousand and one, that was abundantly obvious to me. You know, the college had an Outdoor Leadership Award that.
Was in her memory.
Every year, there's a large stone fireplace and the welcome center that was dedicated to her. And so the lasting impact she had there was really significant. When she was
a student there, Julie would come over and visit. Julie took some outdoor leadership classes and a wilderness first responder class as well, and so it really was I think home in the sense of a larger community for both of them, and for Lally certainly, I think it was one of the first time she really truly felt like she had a community around her.
You didn't leave Unity College until twenty and sixteen. But I know this is sort of compressing a lot of things quite quickly. But at what point and under what circumstances do you get involved in this investigation as you find out?
Yeah, and it's a really long story actually, you know, I was Lolly and Julie's contemporary. I was the same age as Julie, and they were murdered we think the weekend of my college graduation, and I really identified with them as soon as I had learned about this case. I am also a sexual assault survivor, and like Lolly and Julie, had really found a sense of strength and a way to kind of get back into my body
by way of backpacking. And so when I learned very shortly after the crime that these two outdoor leaders had been murdered doing what I loved and what I felt most safe doing, it really shattered my sense of security in the world wilderness. So I had been aware of the case since then, and I was aware when I took the job at Unity that that had been Lolly's
alma mater had she graduated. But then, you know, September eleventh occurred, i think during the first week of our college class schedule that year, and you know, like the rest of the nation, the college was really significantly impacted
by that event. And then in the spring of two thousand and two, then Attorney General John Ashcroft made this very public statement at a nationally televised press conference that he was going to indict an individual in Lolly and Julie's murder, which at that point was almost six years old, and he made this very strange conflation between using brand new enhanced hate crime legislation to prosecute this case as a way to somehow redeem or soothe the country in
the wake of September eleventh, It was a very strange of these two events, and it brought the national spotlight right back to the college and we were inundated with reporters and journalists who were coming now to investigate what had all of a sudden become the first federal hate crime.
In the nation.
And seeing that impact and seeing the way that it brought up so much sort of painful memories and also hope in the community was really arresting for me, especially as a brand new and very young professor.
When you talk about Ashcroft, and when you spoke to people later they spoke of it as a just political theater. Was that part of the reason why you knew that some of the more important, obviously more important facts about their lives and the crime and the killer would rather be overshadowed by this political theater and this issue that Ashcroft was trying to make some kind of political hay with.
Yeah, and I think that realization was a long time in coming. Elli and Julie's case had been politicized from
the very beginning. They were very publicly outed by a Presbyterian minister who had worked with Julie while Julie was living outside of the University of Vermont, and on the day of their funeral, they were very publicly outed in the national media because this woman, who was part of an lgbt Q rights community, had publicly petitioned Janet Reno to treat this as a hate crime then and so, as I write in the book, the family and friends of Lollie and Julie learned of their relationship and their
sexual orientation literally an hour before their funeral.
And it was a really jarring moment for them.
And at that point the family felt like they had been very politicized. Certainly at Unity College in the spring of two thousand and two, no one really understood how it was that Lollie's case had anything to do with September eleventh.
That didn't make any sense to us.
It wasn't until much later when I began my formal investigation at the case and talked to some of the lead investigators who they themselves felt really blindsided by John Ashcroft's announcement, which came as a complete surprise to them. And then I really started thinking like, Okay, well, if the investigators themselves, if the prosecutors themselves weren't viewing this case in this way, then why was the leader of the Justice Department.
So at what point do you talk to these people or get access to these people? And you talk about that you went to the Richmond FBI office was and met up with d Rybinski, public affairs officer, and another person named Scott. What was that meeting like and how did you get access to this information? Tell us about that process.
Sure, So an individual, obviously in two thousand and two was indicted by John Ashcroft.
His name is Daryl David Rice.
And over the years that indict me which had reached jury selection, was very quietly dismissed, And it was very quietly dismissed through a process in the justice system that's called without prejudice. And basically what that means is we still think this is the guy, but we don't have quite enough evidence to ensure that we're going to have a successful prosecution. And so the case was dismissed, but
it can be brought back at any time. And so currently Darryl Rice is the only or possibly one of two individuals who are currently in the state of what is ultimately double jeopardy for a federal capital case in the country right now.
So that had all happened.
Meanwhile, I had left Unity College and was writing full time as a trail correspondent for Outside Magazine when the FBI made again a very public announcement on the twentieth anniversary that they were seeking information to close this case.
At that point was an.
Obvious sort of journalistic concern for Outside Magazine, and so I had pitched it to my editor there, and I was really curious about the language. There's usually boilerplate language that the FBI uses, which says something like we're looking for information that will lead to the successful arrest, indictment, and conviction of an individual, and they had left the first part of that out and they were like, we're just seeking evidence, looking for the conviction of an individual.
And what seemed very clear to me when I watched a few interviews with the lead investigator at that office was they were still completely convinced that it was Daryl Rice, and I went into the story thinking that they must be right, you know, because the justice system works, and so, you know, trained professionals had done their job, they had found the right guy. They just needed that one little thing to kind of get them over the hump. And so I approached the story from that angle and had
contacted the FBI. And I think the FBI probably saw in my coverage an opportunity to do some good pr in terms of both the evidence response collection teams, the forensic labs, the sheer investigations that they do. And so after a lot of back and forth, they granted me really fantastic access not only to their forensic lab at Quantuco, but also agreed to take me to the murder scene itself with the lead investigators.
In the case.
You say, initially you learned things that the back country as they call them, investigations are much different. And why tell us some of the things you learned about the differences in the kinds of crime scenes and crime scene analysis as a result the differences, and I think this is something.
That we as Americans don't really think a lot about, and that's the training that homicide investigators, whether they're federal, state, or local receive and it's actually a really codified training that takes place at a training center down in Atlanta, Georgia, and they all basically receive the same training about how
to investigate the homicide. And as I explained in the book, the process is very sort of urban centric, and so they're taught that the first thing they should do is secure the premises, you know, tape the door, get a sense of the building as a whole and.
Who came and went, you know.
But none of that makes sense in a back country crime where you don't know how wide the crime scene is, you don't know whether a rock is a rock or a murder weapon. You don't know to what degree animals have disrupted things, or even the weather, and so it's a completely different entity. And I think that's part of why the closure rate for these backcountry crimes are the lowest in the nation.
Now, you meet a woman named Jane Collins, and so what do you and her decide to do? And tell us about that decision and that trip.
So I had, as I said earlier, been offered access to the murder scene, and the SBI had curated this really impressive team of folks who included the lead investigator at the time, and that was Collins, as well as the lead investigators for the National Park Service. And one of the things that I think is really important to note is that any crime that occurs on National Park Service land, whether it's urban or you know, and the actual national park is the joint purview of the FBI
and the National Park Service law enforcement rangers. And those are two radically different entities. They're different cultures, they're different training, they're different missions in a lot of ways. And so what was also very clear to me from the start was that there was a big culture clash happening here. And the way that a National Park Service law enforcement ranger would approach a crime is different than the way that an FBI law enforcement agent would approach the crime.
I should say that, you know, the investigators that I met with that day had a really great relationship with one another, and it was very clear that they respected one another. But it was also very clear from interviewing that there was a lot of frustration on both sides about how this case had been handled.
One of the first things that you notice or that you discover when you go to the crime scene itself. Is when you look at the area that was determined to be where Julie and Lawley set up their tent, tell us about just your first impression's obvious conclusions.
And as as I say in the book, it was really sort of anxiety producing to go to this scene where I knew this incredibly brutal murder and sexual assault had happened. And I went in with a fair amount of trepidation, even though I knew I was going completely flanked by trade law enforcement officials. But you know, a few things really struck me when I visited. And the first thing is was that this crime scene was a backcountry campsite.
And when I say campsite.
I think it's really important for people to understand that this was not like a state park KOA pull your car up to a place, you know, where there's a picnic table and a fire pit. They had picked this site because it was so hidden. It was well off of a trail, and it was well off of a disused trail that hardly anyone in the park ever knew about. And so the first thing that struck me was was how sort of fundamentally impossible it would have been to
find them if you had gone looking for them. And in fact, in the days after they were reported missing, multiple rangers on a search for the women walked past the campsite and didn't even notice it. And so that was very haunting and chilling to me, was how was how it was that the murder or even found them.
But then the other thing I talk about in the book too, is just how surprised I was by what a beautiful, peaceful place it was and the tranquility, and not only had they picked that of the ideal spot, but as I was there now, suddenly for me personally, the horror of the scene kind of abated a little bit, and I was just really overcome with this sort of appreciation and admiration for these two remarkable individuals, and in that moment they really became kind of fully formed humans
for me, and I kind of found myself really rededicating myself to the importance of telling their story as well as telling the story of their deaths.
Let's talk about what actually you find out about what happens in this attack and what again you can surmise, hence the title trailed, but what exactly you can surmise from the evidence that was given to you, and you had access to tell us about the murders.
So Julie's father had reported the two women missing after they were overdue for several key appointments, and what resulted was then a multi day search which began kind of casually, which was appropriate. You know, National Park Service rangers very often receive reports of overdue people. Ninety nine percent of the time that people are fine, they just forgot to mention to someone they were going to go somewhere else, or that they were going to extend their trip a
few days. But as the days went on, it became very apparent that these two women had not done that. And then when some park visitors noticed this kind of frenzied golden retriever mix, it became very obvious, you know, that something very tragic had happened to Lolly and Julie that because they never would have left or certainly abandoned
their dogs. And so then the search really intensified, and it wasn't until several days later that their tent was found by a ranger, which is very peculiar to me too, and I talk about this in the book. You know, it was dusk was settling several other rangers had walked right by the site. This person keyed in on it, and then what he and his partner found was just undeniably horrific.
It was.
It was an incredibly sophisticated, well planned, and brutal crime. And as I talk about later in the book, I think the nature of this crime, as many investigators suggested to me and forensic psychologists suggested to me, this was the work of a trained and sophisticated killer. This was not a crime of passion, This was not the person's first violent crime.
This was someone who really knew what they were doing.
Now, how do the police proceed or the rangers proceed in the FBI, how does everyone proceed? You say that this crime scene was hampered by rain and just being out in the woods, So tell us how they proceed in this investigation.
And so by the time this crime scene has been found, the women are dead for and this becomes a big issue later on in the case the date of death. But certainly the women have been dead for at least three or four days, and so what had happened in the interim is not clear. What you know, had tajed the dog, maybe dug through some things we don't know had other animals.
Certainly we know that it had rained very heavily.
And so when the rangers and the FBI arrive, there's this fog of war happening where first of all, the park, which is in its busiest season, has to decide if and how and when they're going to announce that this very brutal double murder has occurred in the park and that a murderer may still be in the park. And then they also have to decide how they're going to
deal with the evidence. And this is where the decision making isn't just problematic, it's you know, I don't even think reprehensible is too strong of a word to use. That some of these decisions not only put park goers at incredible risk, but also really hampered the investigation and the ability to do DNA forensic testing.
So you talk about how Dennis David Rice somehow becomes on the radar of these investigators, tell us how that happens.
So, Daryl David Race was a young man, a computer programmer. His father had a house right outside of the park, and Daryl Rice would spend a lot of time cycling in the park. He had by his own admission, some very significant mental health issues, bipolar schizophrenia, which you know, sometimes he could manage with medication and other times he couldn't. And in the spring and summer of nineteen ninety seven,
his life had begun to completely unravel. He had lost his job, he was really battling to deal with these mental illnesses. And in July of ninety seven, he had been up for several days, he had been smoking marijuana. He was again just really unraveling mentally, and he was driving his truck through the park. He spied a female cyclist and he shouted obscenities at her.
He ran her off the road.
He threw a soda can at her, and she was understandably frightened. And certainly, at no time do I ever want to seem like I'm excusing what he did.
It was an assault. There's no other way to talk about it.
When this happened and it was eventually reported to the Rangers, the Rangers immediately suspected that Rice had committed the May ninety six murder of Lolly and Julie, and so at that point their focus really became kind of laser centered on Darryl Rice to the exclusion almost of everyone else.
You also say there was an investigation of the Colonial Parkway eighty six murders of Kathy Thomas and Becky Dawski. How are they at all connected?
That is a great question that remains such a question and such a topic of debate among all of us. Kathy Thomas and Becky Dowski another strong competent lesbian couple, very brutally murdered, also on National Park Service land and in a very similar way. One of the things that has always interested people is the Colonial Parkway murders.
And depending on.
How you consider them, there were multiple, you know, some people debate it, but let's just say five or six right now. People who were murdered considered the same killer, the Colonial Parkway killer.
Several of them had.
Been found with their windows rolled down, their driver's side windows rolled down, and a wallet open, and that had suggested that a law enforcement official or someone posing as law enforcement had been responsible for the crime.
Four of the.
Rangers who worked the Colonial Parkway murder had then been transferred to Shenandoah National Park and were also working the Shenandoah murder, and some people, including the FBI, immediately latched onto that, and in fact, at least two of the rangers of the flour were very strong suspects for the FBI in the months immediately after Lolly and Julie's death.
Tell me about some of the people that you meet and have access to and answer questions for you and help you in this investigation and in this book.
And this is the most wonderful part of being a journalist, especially this kind of journalism, is the sheer generosity of experts. And I talked to forensic psychologists. I talked to forensic anthropologists. I talked to former and president FBI and National Park Service investigators. I talked to anybody who would pick up the phone and talk to me to kind of figure out either what I needed to know about this case, or why cases don't get solved, or who they thought
about the person who had accomplished this murder. And what I thought was really interesting was, again and again and again, other than the two investigators most intimately involved with this initial investigation, no one wanted to point a finger at Darryl Wright.
Tell us about the Innocence project, and we're jumping ahead a little bit, but at least about the investigation into you needed to know why Dennis David Rice was accused and what was the evidence against them. So you took a look at bad evidence, tell us about that.
And because Daryl Rice's case was a federal case, I had access to a lot of documentation that I wouldn't have had otherwise. There's a concept in legal cases known as discovery, where the defense and the prosecution must exchange their evidence with one another. Because this case had gone as far as jury selection, all of that discovery had already occurred. And so just by you know, contacting the National Archives, I already had access to boxes of evidence that journalists normally don't get.
And as I was.
Looking at that, it was it became very clear to me that the case against Rice was so very thin and was based only on the most circumstantial evidence. And at that point I really had to begin to question myself and the suppositions that I had come in with, you know, which, as I said earlier, was assuming that the Justice Department had the right guy, because I I think we all want to think that the Justice Department
has the right guy. But as soon as I started going through those court files, it just it was so obvious to me that they no matter how hard they tried, they could not find any evidence that Rice had been
at the crime scene. And so at that point I really began to change my perspective and my approach, and I contacted Deirdre Enright, who is the head of the Virginia Innocence Project and who had also served on this all star legal team representing Darryl Rice, and she eventually gave me access to what amounted to about twenty two boxes of evidence which she had found because it became very clear to her during the pre trial that the prosecution was not in fact making available to her all
of the evidence, and in fact had been keeping a very large storage unit full of evidence and had been keeping it from the defense.
So I hadn't seen it before.
En Wright hadn't seen it before she found it, got demanded access to photocopied everything in it, and so then all of a sudden, I had access to twenty two boxes of evidence, which is something that you just wouldn't have happened otherwise, and certainly made reporting on this case much much easier and more detailed for me.
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off at ritual dot com slash murder. Now, Catherine, you had twenty two boxes of information provided by dedra enright, and this would be obvious to everyone you spoke to in yourself when you analyze this information that, of course Dennis Rice wasn't the person that was the culprit in the murders of Julie and Lawley, but you also found information that was very interesting when there was a controversy over the time of death, the actual day of the death,
and that lined up with it looked like the police trying to make the Dennis Rice very fit. Well, what did you find in the process regarding the actual in your mind killer?
And this date of death becomes very important because the FBI cannot place Darryl Rice in the park on the day that the medical examiner determined that the two women died. The medical examiner places the date four days earlier than what the FBI decides to go with. And this was just shocking to me, because there had never been a question.
And I found a series of internal memos in the FBI that had that had acknowledged, you know, the date that the medical examiner had determined, and they had said, you know, this is for internal use only.
Do not release this date to anyone.
And even in the storage locker there was a large sort of poster board that was hanging in the poster in there that said, you know, date of death, and it was the same day. But as soon as they arrest Rice, we know that Rice is in Baltimore on the day of the women's death, and so that excludes him as a suspect.
And so all of a sudden, there's this.
Very strange creep that begins to happen, which I can't account for, and which no one has been able to sort of satisfactorily explain, certainly from an ethical and a moral perspective.
You say that they can't explain it. But so the thing is is that once you realize that, what is your next step? And who are a couple of the people that aid you in this further investigation?
And it's funny, you know, earlier you said you use the word obsessive to describe by. Initially, I sort of rankled at that, and for a while it was part of the subtitle of the book, and I kept trying to tell the publisher to take it out because I was.
Like, that's I'm not obsessive.
But one place where I absolutely acknowledged that I became ridiculously obsessive was about this date of death. And I was really curious, first of all, about how medical examiners make this determination. And it's actually quite sophisticated, and the most reliable way they do is by looking at potassium levels in the eye that is not affected by things like temperature, precipitation, insects, things like that.
So I did this very deep dive.
Into the forensic work that these medical examiners do, and I still couldn't find any way of suggesting that the date of death was four days later than the FBI wanted to say. And so then I also contacted a series of forensic anthropologists who run what your listeners may
be familiar with. They're called body farms, and these are at universities where you know, people can donate their bodies to so that scientists can study things like decomposition, and you know, this grizzly stuff that's really hard to look
at but also really important to know. And so one well meaning forensic anthropologist has she justed, and I think very facetiously that if I really wanted to establish the date of death, what I should do is go get a couple of large bone in pork growths and kind of approximate the murder scene to see what happened. So I did, and it was disgusting, and the maggot activity.
Will be I think the nightmares that haunt me until the day that I died.
And so it is, as you say, unscientific. But did it prove anything to you whatsoever?
I mean, it certainly just seemed to reaffirm the original medical examiners findings, you know, I You know, medical examiners look at decomposition in a multiple ways.
They look at things like discoloration, they look at bloating, they look at insect activity, they look again at tassium levels. None of this suggested that Lolly and Julie died any day other than the day that was in the report. And certainly, you know, my very unscientific, disgusting work experiment certainly seem to prove that as well. And again this is so important because not only does the FBI have no DNA evidence that can link Rice, no eyewitnesses that
link Rice. They know without a doubt that he's not at the park, He's nowhere near the park on this particular day, and so it just it really makes their case against him impossible.
Are you and even further and did DNA analysis? You say, there's so much development in DNA analysis and techniques since its inception, and everybody every few years when there is some new developments is excited about the chance of retesting. So those tests were done, and so it is conclusive that it's not Dennis Rice. But you say that when I say conclusive, there has been development in DNA analysis. And so you talk about a term and I don't
have it in front of me, heratolplasmi, HETEROPLASMI. So explain that phenomena to us.
Sure, And you know, I think one of the things that's really interesting that's happening right now is the way
in which forensic evidence is being called into question. And rightfully, there are a lot of questions both in terms of the accuracy and the validity of forensic evidence and also the ethics involved with using, for instance, you know, the forensic genetics like twenty three in meters, and I talk a lot about all of that in the book, and certainly things like you know, bitemark hair analysis, things like that that used to be gold standards have been seriously
called into question, and you know, cases have been so called closed based on that, and we've never gone back to make sure that the person that was convicted based on this faulty forensic evidence isn't fact guilty. So that's a huge social justice problem for this country. It's also true, as you say that that DNA evidence has become increasingly more sophisticated in terms of our ability to analyze it.
Most of the forensic analysis that was done in this particular case was done between nineteen ninety.
Six and two thousand and two.
Two thousand and four, early on, the analysis available to the FBI was exclusively what's called mitochondrial DNA analysis. And what that does is it takes a look at eight hundred positions on DNA. So it would hold up eight hundred positions of my DNA next to eight hundred positions of your DNA, and we would go through and we would just see how many of those eight hundred match. The FBI's policy is that if there are fewer.
Than let's see, what's the right word to put this.
The FBI's policy is that if there are fewer than two differences, So say our DNA matches at seven hundred and ninety eight places and there are just two positions where it doesn't match, that, they cannot exclude a suspect based on that. And so not only can they not exclude a person based on that, but the FBI's basic policy is this person should still continue to be a suspect and until this person can otherwise be ruled out.
So in two thousand and two, a known serial killer, Mark Avonnetz, had kidnapped a young woman who very heroically managed to escape, and what resulted was a high speed chase that resulted in avonnets taking his own life. At that point, Avonetz became a suspect in other cases involving young women, especially other cases involving young women in Virginia.
Lolly and Julie's murder was one of eight murders in this very rural part of central Virginia over the course of about eighteen months, which is part of why so many forensic psychologists had thought that this might be the work of a serial killer.
So after E.
Hoonness takes his own life, the FBI runs his DNA against DNA found at the crime scene, and in that eight hundred point analysis, it's different in only one place. And in the one place where it's different, there's a very common phenomenon known as heteroplasmy So if I took, for instance, two of your hairs and I set them side by side in this eight hundred place array, there's about a thirty five percent chance that your two hairs would be different in that location. So at that point,
you know everything. An FBI policy said, you've got to keep a Hoonness as a suspect.
You've got to rerun this and instead.
At that point, the FBI stopped running DNA tests against ev Honors and kept rerunning them against Rice at that point had been excluded because his DNA was so different in these eight hundred points.
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You talk about this advantage, but you also had the opportunity to see a lot of them and his signature involved with these other crimes. What was interesting to see when you thought of the possibility of him being involved in Julie and Lolly's murder.
It's really noteworthy to keep in mind.
I think that again, Lolly and Julie's murder in the spring of ninety six was one of multiple murders of young women in the spring of ninety six, And I include some maps in the book that show the distribution of these murders. It's really noteworthy how close they were, and it's also really noteworthy how similar they were.
In terms of them.
What we know about Evors from the three murders that have been successfully tinned to him is that he had a real pensiant for young women, women who had brown hair, brown eyes, slight build, that he would abduct them, that he would sexually assault them, but sexually assault them using objects. If I can say that that he would bind and gag the women, and that he tended to wrap their
bodies and leave them in wilderness settings. All of that, of course, sounds exactly like what investigators found at the back country campsite where Lolly and Julie were found. And so one of the things I lay out in the book. Book is a case as best as I can make it and as objectively as I can make it for the evidence against Rice, the evidence against the Bonnets, and obviously.
There are other suspects as well.
And it's really my hope that I've laid it out in a way that readers can make their own decisions and kind of play armchair sleuth as it was, and see who they think did it.
By the end of the book, you talk about some of the things, the way Julie and Lawley were displayed, and this marital aid or this vibrator was there part of this display, And then interestingly, the search of Ivonitz's place. During that search warrant had some very interesting things that at least suggested that he was involved, didn't it.
Yeah, there was this very sort of strangely placed displayed vibrator right in the middle of the murder scene, which investigators immediately decide and I think correctly decided, had been what's called staged by the perpetrator, that the perpetrator had left it as kind of a calling card, if you will.
There was also some very disturbing evidence that was also found in this hidden storage locker of evidence which also suggested that, in addition to being bound and gagged first with duct tape and then with their own long underwear, that Julie had also been bound with some sort of sexual assault like leather restraints that would be very common
in sort of like a fetish type catalog. What investigators found when they entered Avonitz's apartment was nothing short of a horror show of incredibly disturbing pornography, and it also appears that he liked to keep items, especially underwear, of his victims when he was on this high speed Chase.
He called one of his.
Sisters, and you know, she asked him some questions, and one of the questions was, you know, how many times have you done this before? And he told her more times than I can count. At one point after his suicide, the FBI had brought together this very detailed task force with the intention of investigating of on Its for multiple
other murders in the United States. He kept a very disturbing diary that listed the names and addresses of women, some of whom I talked to for the book, who had met him on online dating sites or things like that.
But he was pursuing. So we still.
Don't know what, if any other crimes of on Its perpetrated, because, for reasons that have never been explained, the FBI disbanded this task force very shortly after it was formed, and so there are multiple other cases that had originally been suspected as of on Its cases that have never actually been pursued by the FBI.
Beyond that initial sort of tiggy.
You found interestingly and then you it was confirmed with Tim ally, one of your first people that were people that led you into this investigation. When you talk to him about ivan Its, you were surprised at his reaction. What did he have to say and what was his reaction?
Yeah, and I should say Tim Ali, who was the lead investigator for the National Park Service investigation, is first of all a first rate ranger and investigator, and was an incredibly generous and patient source in this book.
He and I disagree on this matter.
I really appreciate the fact that you know, he knows full well, but I disagree with him, and he continues to be very supportive of me, and I think that's a real sign of his character. But you know, but what he and other investigators concluded, based on Evonnet's other known victims who were teenagers and in some cases very young teenagers, was that avon was a pedophile.
I disagree with that.
I take the classic definition of ophelia, which is someone who has, you know, an obviously abnormal and you know, kind of reprehensible sexual interest in young children who are not sexually developed. Of ho, it's as primary victims were all sexually mature. But that's been a sticking point, and I think part of why the federal investigators have been so loath to consider a honor and continue to consider Rice.
Interesting when we go back to the very beginning when you walked into Unity College to start teaching there, there was a fireplace memorial. Tell us about this memorial at the Unity Home.
You know, Lalie again was such a presence at Unity College, and you know, Julie obviously was such a presence at her college as well too, and so the community really wanted to find ways to memorialize and remember her, and so they settled on building this this very beautiful stone fireplace.
And you know, part of why I really want to call.
Attention to this in the book is because I think, you know, as fans of true crime, it's all too easy for us to really want to focus on the perpetrators. You know, I think we're understandably fascinated with that kind of deviant psychology and what it kind of means to us as a culture.
And I think sometimes along the.
Way, the victims and the victims friends and families kind of get lost in the shuffle. And it's so important to me that Lolly and Julie remain the main characters in this story and that we really understand the after effects and the implications of a murder that continue to reverberate twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven years later, you.
Had the pleasure I guess of I would say pleasure of reading the journals. Tell us what you did gain by reading those journals.
Yeah, that was a really actually I would say difficult and kind of heartbreaking experience to just sort of see the words and the writing of these two young women on the page, and to see how many plans they had. I mean, again, they were already so accomplished. They had been through a tough year in a long distance relationship. They had really re committed to their relationship, and again committing to a relationship that society was not at all
prepared to accept, right. So it was a real risk, you know, to commit to this relationship, you know, and to realize that you might be the target of violence because of who you happen to love. And there was a lot of that in the journals, and I think for me the hardest part of the journals.
Was just to see them forward looking.
You know.
Julie had this fantastic job doing water sampling on Lake Champlain. She had begun to apply to graduate schools to study geology. Lolly again was getting ready to launch this program for sexual assault survivors. You know, everything was lining up for these two to continue this remarkable journey they were on, and to see that and to realize that they were not going to have the opportunity to actualize any of that was a really emotionally powerful experience.
What has been the legacy of the plans that Lollie had and they both had.
That's a great question.
You know, this organization WOULDS Women, which is where they met, was one of the first outdoor experience organizations built with gender in mind, and built with rather than a sort of hierarchical model of wilderness experience, a very sort of holistic model. And certainly the people who founded that organization, who went on to become noted outdoor leaders, have i think, always held the story of Lolly and Julie quite closely.
One of them the year after their murder established Take Back the Trails, which is a really wonderful national initiative that looks to give people of all sorts of different subordinate groups, whether it's race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, equal access to the wilderness and to really kind of force this question about who gets to feel safe in places like our national parks and why and that's a question that I think we still really need to be confronting today.
Tell us about the publishing of this book, the publication date, and any way that people might take a look at other work. I have an author page, for example.
So the book launched officially on May third. It's published by Algonquin Books. I am a huge fan of independent booksellers and so I always love it when folks buy books there.
There's a really great website called.
Indie bound dot com which points you to a number of independent booksellers who sell books. And then my author page is my name Katherine kat h r Ynmiles dot net, and there are links there to events we have associated with the book, other writing and my other books as well.
Albana, thank you so much Katherine Miles for coming on and talking about your extraordinary book, Trailed, One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders. Thank you so much for this interview Katherine Miles and my pleasure.
Thank you for calling Julie and Lolly's kiss story into the spotlight.
Thank you so much. Have a great evening, good night,