Trailed, p.10
Trailed, page 10
No, no, it was suicide, they said. Our families saw it on the news.
The reporter apologized—and disagreed. He said he’d been to the crime scene and watched the investigators working. There was no doubt about it: this was definitely homicide. The Annes were shocked and angry and terrified all at once. The reporter sat with them on a bench outside the lodge. He was kind, they say: he didn’t push to get a quote for his story, and it seemed like he was more interested in making sure the group was okay.
Eventually, the reporter left to phone in his piece. The Annes remained on the bench, dumbfounded.
Holy crap, one of them finally said. What do we do now? It was what they all had been thinking.
For starters, they all agreed they’d lost their appetites. Instead, they spent their time at Panorama strategizing. The group’s two cars were miles away—one back near the park’s north entrance; the other a two-day hike south—at least. They thought about booking rooms at the lodge, but it had no vacancy. They decided to take a chance and return to the trail, where they could spend the night at one of the conservancy’s three-sided shelters. At least, they figured, they’d be amid other hikers. The group arrived at the shelter midafternoon, only to discover that it was already packed with hikers looking for similar cover. The fivesome reluctantly set up their tents nearby, where they joined a handful of thru-hikers and a couple of dads who had been camping with their kids. As folks milled around the shelter, setting up tents and preparing early dinners, everyone seemed to be eyeing one another with an air of suspicion.
As the afternoon and evening wore on, hikers began to share stories they’d heard on the trail. One thru-hiker said he’d been told the women were stabbed to death for their gear and that they were definitely on the AT when it happened. He told the Annes to be on the lookout for someone carrying a pack that looked like it didn’t fit. What does that mean? the Annes wanted to know. And how would we possibly be able to tell whether or not a pack fit? The hiker just shrugged. The Annes returned to their tents. One of them began walking ever-widening circles around their site. When another hiker asked what she was doing, she told him she was trying to memorize every sound. That way, if someone approached her tent in the night, she’d at least know how close he was—and how much time she had left.
By Wednesday morning, paper notices began appearing around the park, reminding hikers always to hike in groups and to be wary of strangers. They urged hikers to refrain from telling anyone other than close family members their itineraries and also to always avoid camping near roads or developed areas. What they didn’t say was why these warnings suddenly seemed relevant.
Meanwhile, newspaper wire services across the country had picked up the story of Julie and Lollie’s death, making it national news. So too was the delay in notifying park visitors. At the now-daily press briefing, journalists focused again on why news of the homicide had been so late in coming. The park’s spokesperson repeated what he had said before: “It took us a while to figure out exactly what we had. It is not all that uncommon to find deceased people in the park,” he said. “It’s taken us quite a while to determine the deaths were homicides, rather than suicides or accidents.” Reporters grilled him about what had led park authorities to the eventual conclusion that a crime had occurred. He declined to comment but stressed again that there was no danger to other visitors. The Washington Post covered the presser and reported it this way: “Spokesperson Paul Pfenninger refused to explain why officials think other visitors were not in danger, other than to say that ‘something investigators found at the site led them to believe it was an isolated incident.’ He would not say what that was.” Off the record, rangers on hand told reporters they weren’t sure what Pfenninger was referring to either. Another reporter asked when the women were murdered. “We can’t pin down the time of death,” replied an FBI spokesperson standing at the lectern.
After the press conference, AP journalists scoured the park for visitors who had been notified of the murders, but they could find none. Two female backpackers, identified only by their ages (twenty-three and twenty-seven), told one reporter they were “shocked” to hear about the crime. When asked if they’d been approached by rangers providing information about the crime, they said no. “No one has said anything,” one told the journalist. “I’d much rather know.” Another hiker told a reporter she’d always been cautious on the trail, but spotty news of this crime had created a real terror for her. She said she and her companion had decided to forego camping on the AT and instead were trying to reserve a cabin at one of the park resorts. “We’ll feel safer behind locked doors,” she explained. Another said she had grown so frustrated trying to determine if she was safe that she’d decided to leave the park altogether. “They won’t tell us anything,” she said. “We don’t know the whole picture.”
The Annes had reached a similar conclusion. When they arrived at Skyland, yellow crime scene tape still littered the area. Dozens of reporters and camera crews were competing for footage and hunting for hikers willing to be interviewed. It was chaos. The Annes decided they had had enough. They vowed that as soon as they could get to their car, they would leave the park. They’d go whitewater rafting, find a beach rental, something. Anything that got them out of Shenandoah.
8
On a cool August evening in 2018, two of the Annes sat down with me to talk about the Shenandoah murders and their own time in the park. I found their names in a nationally syndicated news story that had been written the week after the murder, and I wanted to hear their perspective firsthand. Now in their midfifties and residing in the Upper Midwest, they are smart, funny, and affable. That evening, as we talked, they repeatedly called each other by their longstanding nicknames, Kozzie and Mags, and made friendly conversation in Kozzie’s pumpkin-colored dining room that looked out onto a terraced patio and backyard. So much about the scene was warm and cozy and familiar to me. But there was also a palpable heaviness as the two women talked about the continued impact of the 1996 killings. Kozzie’s large dining-room table was covered with dozens of newspaper clippings about the crime, along with scrapbooks from their trip and articles they had preserved about Julie and Lollie, all labeled with the date and publication name written in blue ink by a tidy hand.
“This is just a snapshot of all the information we kept,” Kozzie told me. “Our experience in Shenandoah truly changed my life.”
Mags nodded in agreement. “We were so excited to be hiking and meeting thru-hikers and learning about their backstory. That evaporated almost as soon as we set foot on the trail. The whole scene there turned into paranoia and anxiety. All the hikers were looking at one another and thinking, ‘Is that the guy?’ You could tell: even the thru-hikers were completely freaked out. For all any of us knew, we were hiking straight toward a murderer.”
They say that, even today, they remember every noise they heard outside their tents at the AT shelter, from the sound of rain on the fly to someone turning over in their sleeping bags. They’ve never forgotten that sensation or the real fear they experienced. Mags admitted that she hasn’t camped since and that she worries each time her nieces head out into the woods.
Kozzie says she’s been back out on the trail but only with her brother or a couple of male friends. “If it were just us girls doing it, I don’t think I could go,” she admitted. “Even hiking in state parks with my husband, I’m still like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ I always think about those two women, and it brings me back to that terrible week.”
They asked what I had learned about the case. I told them about my long conversations with Tim Alley and the stacks of paperwork relating to the case that I had requested from the NPS, which included the incident command logs from the preliminary investigation. Reading the files, I could see both the chaos and the urgency of those first days and weeks. In no time at all, the rangers had amassed a truly disturbing list of potential suspects, all of whom were in the park around the time of the murders. That list included a felon who had escaped a New York mental institution, where he had been serving time for stabbing his mother. During his months at the facility, he’d secreted away a stash of cash and hatched a plan to disappear on the trail. He’d made it from Harpers Ferry to Shenandoah when hikers in the park reported him after he harassed them, demanding food and gear. Another hiker was arrested just outside the park after confronting multiple women on the trail with a large survival knife. A Knoxville, Tennessee, police officer phoned to say that two male thru-hikers stopped at a cafe just outside the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, where they had threatened to rape and kill a female hiker. Meanwhile, a hiker arrived at a motel in Harpers Ferry with scratches on his face and arms. The next morning, a maintenance worker found a large knife stashed in the woods behind the motel. A restaurant owner in a Pennsylvania trail town told authorities there that another hiker had been acting disruptively and had bragged that he killed two women on the trail in Virginia.
I admitted to the Annes that while I still believed the overwhelming majority of hikers are good people, reading report after report of these individuals left me feeling overwhelmed and exposed. So too did the reports of the number of convicted sex offenders, pedophiles, and wanted criminals who were in the park the week Julie and Lollie were killed, which made me wonder just how many dangerous sadists hung out in national parks and whether the rest of us ought to avoid public lands entirely.
That feeling only intensified when I found the reports concerning Shenandoah employees. Within a week or so, reports of violent individuals and potential evidence bubbled up throughout the park. I tried to summarize them for the Annes in the least distressing way possible. But the sum total of stories was still overwhelming and disturbing. Multiple resort employees had a history of brutal behavior toward women, and their offenses ranged from domestic abuse to attempted murder. Coworkers came forward with reports of harassment, of drug deals gone bad between employees, of stashes of bloody sheets and uniforms and all kinds of weapons. When I had first visited Shenandoah, one of the rangers quipped that the best hiring day at the park’s lodges was Thursday, when the nearby prison released inmates. I’d assumed that the joke was just cynical law enforcement humor, but now I had begun to see the park through their eyes: rangers weren’t just policing visitors; they were also policing their own staff—and sometimes for good reason.
Early on in the investigation, all these individuals—the wanted criminals who were visiting the park, the suspicious and harassing hikers, the offenders working in and around Skyland—had been suspects in the murder of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans. The Annes wanted to know if the bizarre thru-hiker they’d encountered was on the list. As far as I could tell, he never had been.
“Why?” asked Kozzie. “What made them so sure he was irrelevant when they didn’t even take the time to hear about our experience?”
The Annes say they spent months trying to get the attention of the FBI, once they realized the time line of the crime. There was, they say, no reasonable explanation for how and why that man could have known about the murders. They wrote letters and made phone calls explaining that they had his photo, along with their own detailed journals about the events, but they say it seemed like none of the authorities cared.
“It felt like they wrote us off before they even heard what we had to say,” said Mags.
It was a sentiment I’d already heard from other people associated with the case, particularly within the AT community, where insiders felt like no one in the investigation was advocating for hikers that summer or concerned about their safety on the trail. When I read the internal memo justifying the decision to withhold information about the murders from the media and park-goers, I began to understand why they felt that way. Despite everything they said at the time, park administrators had no reason to believe the killer had deliberately targeted Lollie and Julie, nor did they have any proof the murderer was no longer in Shenandoah, nor was there any reason to believe that the thousands of other visitors streaming in each day were safe from another violent attack.
During our conversation that August night, I read the confidential park memo to the two Annes. In a way, I didn’t really have to hear their response: the sense of hurt and betrayal showed all over their faces. It took several minutes before either one of them spoke. And when they did, it was with the halting, fragmented disbelief that comes with processing something big and upsetting.
“They had a responsibility to take care of us,” began Kozzie.
“Especially since we were so vulnerable,” agreed Mags. “We were miles from our cars, from civilization. We were stuck in the wilderness with no ability to just say, ‘We’re done, we quit.’ ”
They said that what bothered them the most was that park officials felt no duty to warn hikers so that they could make their own decision about whether to stay or go—that hikers could have been in real danger without even knowing it or having the opportunity to prepare. Not doing so, they said, seemed more than irresponsible: it felt to them like a deliberate cover-up that could have cost them their lives. Who was telling that story, they wondered.
I became a reporter because I believe in the sanctity of the fourth estate: that it is the responsibility of journalists to require powerful institutions and organizations to show their work and to be held accountable when they do not. I have also come to believe that telling other people’s stories is one of the most important ways to build empathy and connection in a world that can often feel divisive and factioned. That includes the narratives of the lives not fully lived or those at risk of being forgotten altogether. If I can write those stories in a way that makes readers care, then I feel like I have done a job worth doing. After having spoken with Tim Alley and some of the other investigators and lab scientists involved in the Shenandoah case, I knew there was a book to be written about the unsolved investigation and the significance not only of the two extraordinary women who lost their lives but also of our country’s first federal capital hate crime case and what it meant for contemporary questions about social justice. After speaking with the Annes, I came to realize just how little of this narrative I really understood. As far as they were concerned, the real story was about what hadn’t happened in the investigation—and all the hard work that still remained to be done in the Shenandoah case.
The problem was, I didn’t want to write that book. I had just finished two years of research and reporting on Gerry Largay, a sixty-six-year-old grandmother and retired nurse who had vanished without a trace while completing a flip-flop hike on the AT. It took more than two years before authorities were able to retrace her final days and discover her body. In the intervening months, I had become consumed by the case, staying up late into the night poring over police records and eyewitness accounts, scrolling through discussion boards, and hiking the section of trail where Gerry had been last seen. Along the way, I’d learned a lot about the importance of empathy and victims’ rights and how backcountry investigations unfolded, as well as the seductive allure of believing you can find answers in a case that has otherwise stumped experts. But I’d also found the dark side to that kind of work as well. I have never been someone adept at compartmentalizing my feelings or differentiating which of those feelings are mine and which belong to other people. When the Maine State Police accidentally sent me photos of Largay’s decomposed body, I was unable to sleep for several days afterward. Instead, I sat at my computer, fixated, obsessively scrolling through the images and trying to make sense of what I saw there. In the weeks that followed, I spoke and visited with the Largay family often. As lovely as they all were, and as admirably willing as they were to share intimate aspects of their love and their grief, I soon discovered that I was unable to prevent myself from absorbing that anguish and dragging it wherever I went, an invisible weight.
Unpacking the murders of Lollie and Julie, I knew, would be far worse. I worried I didn’t have the emotional strength and resolve to not let it eat me alive. I’d seen what had happened to other writers who had undertaken similar projects: the growing reliance on sedatives, the breakdowns, the failed marriages and emptied retirement accounts. But I, like a lot of other people in this country, had also been raging against a culture of intolerance and misogyny that was allowing violence to continue, seemingly unpunished. I’d watched along with everyone else when the #MeToo movement gave voice to so many and also endured its own backlash, even among women. One afternoon, I sat with an elderly family member in her living room as a story about the movement sprawled across her television. They should just learn to be quiet and take it, she complained. That’s what I had to do.
It took her assertion to make me think about just how dangerous it can be to remain quiet. At the time, I had also just published an editorial about my own experience with sexual assault—the first time I had ever made any public mention of it. That decision had strained some of my closest family relationships, but it had also prompted dozens of women to write me and share their own previously untold stories. It had always been clear to me that the Shenandoah case was a complex one, but hearing firsthand from the Annes about the trauma they still carry and the ways in which they felt abandoned by the people sworn to protect them was the first real moment I understood how much of this story still needed to be told. By this point, I’d spent hours interviewing former rangers and nursing pints of beer with some of Julie’s and Lollie’s closest friends. They all had their own anecdotal grievances and theories about why the case had never been closed and how they felt underserved by the process. Now I was beginning to feel underserved as well. For years, the Annes had quietly questioned how the narrative of the Shenandoah murders had been constructed. They doubted whether everything had truly been done to solve the case—and to keep people like them safe in the meantime. Like a lot of Americans who had followed the story, it had never occurred to me to ask those questions. But once I heard the conviction with which the Annes posed them, I knew I would never rest until I tried to find the answers myself.
