Trailed, p.11
Trailed, page 11
Back at home, I sat down and handwrote a letter to Julie’s surviving family, explaining why Julie’s story had resonated with me for so long. I told them about the experience of visiting her campsite with the investigators and the raw emotion those individuals clearly still carried. I told the Williams family I wanted to understand who we are in the backcountry and why women continue to be targeted there. And I explained that I wanted their permission before I proceeded. Tom Williams emailed me the same day he received my letter, saying that his initial reaction was that he would be pleased to help but that he first wanted to review some of my published work and talk over the matter with his family. I sent the stories I had written about Gerry Largay and waited to hear back.
After receiving my clippings, Tom wrote back and asked if we could schedule a conference call with him and one of Julie’s siblings. It was the first day of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before Congress regarding her accusations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and I was holed up in a Colorado hotel after a speaking engagement the night before. Our call began shortly after the Republican-appointed prosecutor had begun her examination of Ford, and I couldn’t breathe as I sat on the edge of the hotel bed, watching this proxy interrogate and critique every aspect of Ford’s memory.
Julie had been a sexual assault survivor, a victim of high school date rape, Tom told me. In a lot of ways, hers mirrored my own experience of high school sexual assault. For my part, it had taken several weeks for the physical injuries to heal; the emotional ones lingered far longer. That September morning, as the prosecutor sought to poke holes in Ford’s recollections, invalidating her account because of the few details Ford couldn’t remember, I was catapulted back to my own imperfect memories. Had we been in his bed or on a sheet he’d lain on the floor? I could no longer say for sure. I wondered how my own story would be critiqued by pundits and how many women were making the choice to remain silent after asking the same questions of their own stories. I thought about both Julie’s and Lollie’s individual struggles to make sense of their experiences with sexual assault and what the congressional inquiry would mean for narratives like theirs. As we spoke, Tom and his surviving daughter were emphatic that they didn’t want Julie’s life politicized. I agreed. I told them one of the conditions Tim Alley had made before committing to be a part of the book was that I dedicate a portion of any proceeds to an outdoor organization that would honor the memories of the women. The Williamses agreed that that seemed like the right thing to do.
A week later, I received an email from Julie’s mom. She wrote about the advocacy work she has done since Julie’s death, particularly surrounding gender and safety on trails. “I would be happy to answer any questions you may have about Julie and to tell you a lot of stories about my spunky girl.”
More than anything, I wanted to hear them.
9
Tuesday, June 4, 1996
2:00 p.m.
The Virginia Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had released the bodies of Julie and Lollie. Tom Williams couldn’t bear the idea of his daughter in the cargo hold of a commercial plane, lying there in the cold and the dark with mail and luggage and whatever else. He chartered a small jet so that he could stay close. He contacted Laura Winans to see if he could deliver Lollie to her as well, but she didn’t seem to understand what he was offering; she sounded so far away.
Back in St. Cloud, Tom Williams accompanied Julie’s body back to his own funeral home. He and Patsy picked out the casket they thought their daughter would like the best. The whole time, all they could think about was the fact that even after a lifetime career in the funeral industry, they had no idea how to do so much of what was required of them. And while Tom Williams didn’t realize it at the time, for the rest of his career he’d stumble each time he entered the showroom of sample caskets, always thinking to himself, That one is Julie’s.
As the Williams family finalized their funeral arrangements, FBI agents began fanning out up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Joined by park rangers and AT ridge runners, they collected the logs from all the shelters along the trail, leaving the remaining hikers with no way of communicating with one another. The agents posted checkpoints at popular trailheads and road crossings, where they interviewed every backpacker who passed by, ticking through a preset list of questions:
Were you in the Shenandoah area from the nineteenth of May through the first of June?
Did you see two white females and a golden retriever?
Did you talk with them?
What were they wearing?
Where were they?
Were they with anyone?
Did you see anything unusual?
But getting usable information proved nearly impossible. Most hikers knew one another only by their trail names, and those were constantly changing. You might start the trek and give yourself a cute moniker like Amtrak, but after a few nights of leaving your gear all over the shelters, your fellow thru-hikers will rename you Trainwreck or Yard Sale. Sundial can become Sundown halfway up the trail. Some hikers get off the trail for a month and hop back on with a whole new nickname. The ridge runners who tried explaining this to the agents felt like they were illuminating an entirely foreign universe.
NPS and FBI agents also traveled to Vermont and Unity, looking for information and additional suspects. They combed through Lollie’s apartment and storage unit. There, they boxed up six cartons of potential evidence: journals and letters, computer disks, photo albums, and bank records. They appeared at the college’s administrative offices with subpoenas for her academic files and all medical records, including her meetings with the campus mental health counselor.
While there, they requested yearbooks, copies of the campus newspaper, and class rosters, along with a list of her friends and coworkers. One Unity College student told the agents she had seen Lollie and a male classmate exchanging numbers at the end of the semester. That classmate was added to the growing list of possible suspects. A former faculty member lived in the Shenandoah Valley and sometimes gave rides to students on breaks. He went on the list as well. Lollie’s roommate and classmates were shown student directories and asked to mark the names of her closest friends. Those individuals were added to the Rapid Lead file, too.
Eventually, the agents began drilling down on Andrea and Emily, two of a handful of other Unity college students who’d been in Shenandoah at the same time as Lollie and Julie (no evidence has ever linked these two women to the murders; therefore, and although their full identities appear in court and FBI documents, I am only using their first names). According to mutual friends, Lollie and Andrea had had a brief fling shortly after Lollie had moved to Unity. Would that be enough to set off Andrea now that Lollie was in love with someone else? Andrea said no way. But the agents kept at her. They had her backcountry permit: at times, she and Emily had been just a mile or so away from the same route Lollie and Julie had recorded.
Agents tracked down Andrea at her boyfriend’s home in Connecticut. In their subsequent report, they noted that Andrea seemed distrustful of law enforcement. That deepened their suspicion. They observed that she did not want to be fingerprinted or photographed. They also recorded the presence of her nose ring, though of what significance they thought that accessory merited, they did not say.
Agents interrogated mutual friends of Lollie and Andrea’s for hours, often arriving at the parks and camps and gear stores where those survivors worked. That summer, several of Lollie’s friends were raft guides in Maine’s western mountains. There, the agents separated the Unity students and interviewed each individually in the backroom of one of the guide companies. Once reunited, the friends all agreed the agents were pitting them against one another, hoping someone would make an accusation. But the real focus of the agents’ inquiries, they also agreed, was clearly Andrea. As far as the student guides could glean, the agents thought Andrea had killed the women because she felt rejected by Lollie and jealous of Julie. Even longtime friends began to wonder about her guilt: I mean, the agents wouldn’t have told us they thought it was her if they weren’t sure, right? Factions formed: those who believed the agents; those who trusted Andrea. Tensions rose. Bitter arguments erupted. Even then, the friends knew those rifts would never heal.
In Vermont, FBI agents and Shenandoah law enforcement rangers were focused on Julie’s roommate, Derek, and Lollie’s onetime fiancé, Ken. They still assumed Julie must have had a sexual relationship with the former—why else would the two of them be living together? They also assumed that relationship must have ended badly—why else would she be moving out? Mutual friends said, yes, there’d been an argument that spring. Agents began surveilling Derek’s home and his movements around town.
But the real focus of the Vermont inquiry was Lollie’s former fiancé, Ken. Greg Stiles was right: most women murdered in America are killed by someone known, often someone close, to them. Surely, the agents concluded, that was the case here. And so, with the documents removed from Lollie’s storage unit, along with the interviews conducted thus far, they began to piece together a backstory that might prove them right.
Soon after graduating from Sterling College, Lollie met Ken, another alum. He was a decade older and worked as a mason. Everyone thought he was at least as cool as Lollie. He knew where to find the best weed, how to get the best Grateful Dead bootlegs. The two fell hard for each other and soon began sharing a small apartment. In time, he proposed. She said yes. But the relationship was tricky. Lollie confided that she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted and had barely begun to unpack the trauma it had caused, so any kind of sexual intimacy was a struggle. She suffered from endometriosis, which left her anemic and just wanting to stay in bed. That made keeping a job hard, too: she’d last just a few days cleaning hotel rooms at a resort on Lake Champlain, a few weeks pulling weeds on an organic farm, before she was too depleted to continue. By then, Ken was working for Vermont’s Department for Children and Families, operating a kind of foster home for kids looking to become independent. The couple agreed to take in a teenage boy, an abuse survivor who’d been in the system for molesting his younger sister. In hindsight, everyone agreed it was a terrible idea. The kid couldn’t be left unattended, and he had an explosive temper. Life in the tiny apartment became fraught. Everyone’s emotions flared. There wasn’t enough space to contain it all.
Ken and Lollie began dividing their time supervising the boy into shifts. Each adult would have a full day off to run errands, take a class, or whatever else they needed to stay on track. Lollie spent part of hers with a therapist. It was her first real foray into counseling; she told Ken and her closest friends that the process terrified her. Together, though, she and her therapist began unpacking her sexual abuse. Lollie was hopeful that the therapy was working, but it was clearly not going fast enough to keep up with all the memories now surging to the surface. She began canceling dates with friends and picking fights with Ken. She told him she couldn’t be alone with their charge. When Ken would try to leave for an appointment, Lollie would run outside and park herself in the driver’s seat of his car, knowing he’d never break state protocols and leave the boy alone. She’d say later that she knew she was being unreasonable and destructive. She just couldn’t stop herself.
Her community of friends worried. They began calling one another, fretting about what to do. One of them worked at the Burlington animal shelter. A litter of ridiculously fluffy Labrador and golden retriever mixes had just been dropped off there, and the friend brought Lollie to see them. As the two women approached the kennel, all the puppies leaped forward, standing up on their tiny paws and begging for attention. All but one—the smallest female. She hung back warily. And that, Lollie said, was how she knew the puppy was her dog.
Lollie agonized over what to name the retriever mix. She and Ken would drive around, listening to the radio, debating names. It all clicked when Taj Mahal came on the public access station. Lollie didn’t care that everyone would assume her puppy was a boy. The blues singer had soul. The puppy had soul. It was a perfect fit. And thank God, that puppy had nine lives. Lollie and Ken came home one day and found the dog nearly suffocated, an oatmeal container lodged on her head. Once, Taj was run over by a car; miraculously, the tire missed every major organ. She ate rat poison. After that incident, the vet sent Ken and Lollie home and told them to keep Taj sedated and rotate her every hour so she wouldn’t aspirate. Thirty-six hours later, the dog pulled through. Later, the vet told them Taj had had less than a 2 percent chance of making it.
But even with all that new puppy love, Lollie’s depression deepened. She called her friend Lyrica, another Sterling alum, one day and told her she was in trouble. Lyrica rushed over. Together, they sat on Lollie’s bedroom floor for seven, maybe eight, hours. Lollie told her entire life story in what felt like a single breath. It was the first time she’d ever shared the whole thing like that. It felt good to get it out, she said. She and Ken began the difficult process of examining their future. They both agreed they needed some space. Lollie wanted to finish college. She’d been thinking a lot about what she was gaining in therapy. She’d never stopped loving her time in the backcountry and had found a kind of salvation there. Maybe other abuse survivors could, too.
Once she settled on Unity College, Lollie loaded up Taj and her bongos and the few other things she owned. She found a roommate and a place to live. She and Ken had kind of broken up, kind of not. There was a lot of uncertainty that next fall. But somehow, Lollie thrived. Once again, she found her people: jamming with faculty and students at end-of-semester dance parties in the Tavern, completing grueling ten-day wilderness trips in the mountains. Back then, Unity College was a big, messy hippie culture, complete with a 1990s version of free love. No one paid much attention to sexual orientation or norms or anything else. It was a snuggly milieu with friendly stakes and plenty of space to figure out things for yourself. That first fall semester, Lollie and Ken decided they were better friends than lovers, but they still visited and wrote to each other. In one letter, Lollie described her first hookup with a woman. Ken wrote back that he was sincerely glad she’d found a way to make sex feel fun and freeing.
When the FBI agents arrived at his door, Ken told them all of this. The agents were immediately suspicious of his story. For the next several weeks, they surreptitiously shot photos of him entering and exiting vehicles and local stores; they took pictures of his friends and labeled them as “known associates.” They knocked on doors around Ken’s farmhouse and found and interviewed acquaintances from decades earlier. It was clear to Ken from early on that they were making a case against him. The weekend of May 25, he’d been working on his farm in northern Vermont, planting his enormous vegetable garden. He didn’t have much of a confirmable alibi other than visiting his sister for dinner one night. The FBI subpoenaed his phone records, saw that he’d only made one phone call—to a weather hotline. How did they know he wasn’t checking the weather in Shenandoah? agents challenged.
The FBI asked him to come to Burlington to take a polygraph test. He agreed. And passed it. They asked for hair and saliva samples. He provided those, too. Nothing linked Ken to the crime, but agents kept at him. They said they’d heard he lost his temper and shouted at a friend when a political discussion had gotten heated. Of course I did, Ken replied. The guy was spewing neo-con nonsense. They said a neighbor saw him at the hardware store with a scratch on his arm. She’s right, he said. I spent the weekend pulling brush on my farm. The agents remained skeptical. And Ken remained one of their top suspects.
Meanwhile, mutual friends learned that Taj was still in Virginia. They called a Unity classmate of Lollie’s, who was spending the summer not far from the park. He picked up Taj and drove the dog up to Vermont. When the classmate pulled down the long gravel road leading to Ken’s farmhouse, Taj jumped out of his car and walked with cautious, measured steps toward Ken. Once she reached him, she stuck her snout between his legs and stood there for an eternity, just shaking.
“If Taj could have talked, she would have told me everything that had happened to Lollie,” says Ken today. “Everything.”
Part II
10
South of downtown Minneapolis, and not far from the Mall of America, sits a small two-story bungalow decorated in red awnings and faux white stucco. A row of overgrown lilac bushes flowers against one side of the building; a crumbling wooden slat fence protects the other. In between rests a low detached garage and oversize parking area. The surrounding neighborhood blocks contain tidy homes, a brick-faced barber shop, and an old-timey hardware store built a century earlier and still advertising tackle and live bait. Were it not for the exhaust from municipal buses and the constant din of planes flying in and out of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, you’d think you were in any other corn-fed midwestern town. Today, that red-bedecked bungalow houses a State Farm insurance agency. For nearly two decades, it was the heart of a revolution in the outdoor industry, headquarters for an organization called Woodswomen, Inc.
Woodswomen was founded in 1980 as a place where women could find their own way in the wilderness. Theirs wasn’t the only organization to lead women on backcountry trips, but it was one of the first to buck the longstanding masculine model for getting women outside. The paradigm they sought to dismantle was centuries old. Take the history of hiking. In England, the pastime was first known as “pedestrianism,” a term coined by the great Romantic walker William Wordsworth, who famously strolled, on average, twenty miles a day and wrote often of the splendor to be had roving past “endless woods / Blue pomp of lakes, high cliffs, and falling floods.”
