Trailed, p.16
Trailed, page 16
A partial inventory of items recovered from the crime scene.
A cylindrical, battery-operated vibrator believed to have been staged at the crime scene by the murderer.
Glove obtained at the scene and believed to have been worn by the women’s killer.
Deirdre Enright, founding director of the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, and just some of the dozens of boxes of evidence at UVA.
Darrell David Rice. Photo taken by authorities after he was apprehended in Shenandoah National Park in July 1997.
Richard Marc Evonitz, photo origin and date unknown.
FBI posters issued in June 2016, the 20th anniversary of the murders.
13
“You have to remember: we literally had no good leads,” Tim Alley explained to me in the breakfast area of yet another chain motel. It was a sparkling afternoon in October 2018, and I’d returned to Shenandoah. By then, Tim and I had spoken about the case by phone more times than either one of us could count. On this particular trip, I brought with me Brenda Blonigen, a career sheriff’s deputy who specialized in crimes against women and children and who had grown up on a homestead that sat in the shadow of the park. I’d known Blonigen socially for several years at that point. Shortly after meeting with the Williamses, I had invited her to lunch. I wanted to know how she managed to dedicate her professional life to investigating unimaginable violence while still retaining an enviable lightness and joy about her. Instead, we ended up mostly talking about the details of the Shenandoah case. I hadn’t known she and her siblings had grown up so close to the crime scene. And I didn’t know how familiar she already was with the specifics of the crime. She told me she’d been meaning to visit her family and asked if I wanted some company on my trip. Of course I did.
So there we were, the three of us, now wedged into a vinyl booth in an otherwise vacant breakfast area. Around us, several widescreen TVs were cycling through daytime programming, shifting from the applause of game show contestants to a celebrity chef’s enthusiastic instructions for making caramel apples. Tim Alley fidgeted, first with an empty cinnamon roll wrapper and then with my pen.
“Sorry,” he said, after realizing I wasn’t able to take any notes without it. “I’m usually on the other side of the table.”
After the three of us made polite chitchat, I asked Tim to walk me through the case once again. Rice, I knew, had been arrested and convicted for the 1997 assault on Malbasha. But before that trial had even begun, investigators were building a case against Rice for the 1996 murders. Over the next five years, they went to extraordinary lengths, not just relying on forensic analysis and physical evidence but also employing extensive psychological profiling, exhaustive interviews, and an undercover FBI agent whom they embedded in Rice’s cell. In the end, the evidence they had implicating Rice was, by Tim’s own admission, only circumstantial. Cameras at the park entrance stations recorded Rice entering Shenandoah several times in the days surrounding the murders. Two jailhouse informants claimed that Rice had confessed to them that he had committed the crimes (at least one of them agreed to wear a wire in an attempt to record Rice reiterating any such confession; however, once wired, he failed to persuade Rice to confess or claim any responsibility). Prior to assaulting Malbasha, Rice had thrown that rock and shattered the windshield of a car that was parked at Little Stony Man, the same area where Julie’s car had been found a year earlier.
The strongest piece of evidence against Rice was a one-minute call he made on Tuesday, May 28, 1996. Around 10:30 a.m. that morning, Rice dialed the direct extension of Janie Spahr, the director of the Spectrum LGBT Center, located in San Francisco. In November 1995, Julie had recorded in her journal Spahr’s name, along with an anthology she had edited, Called Out: The Voices and Gifts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Presbyterians. Spahr’s was one of several books, all selected by her church book club, that Julie included in that journal entry.
Investigators theorized that Julie then met Spahr at a conference or lecture in the spring of 1996. Although Spahr’s business card did not include her direct extension (and, in fact, Spahr said she did not give out that particular number), they speculated that Julie somehow had recorded that direct number and included it in the notebook she carried with her in Shenandoah. Their theory was that Rice had taken the journal with him as a souvenir. Once at home, he had become curious about the telephone number and dialed it but then hung up just after hearing Spahr’s voice mail greeting.
“Super cool lady, by the way,” said Tim at the breakfast booth. “I traveled to New York to hear Janie speak. She even signed a book for me.”
Although Spahr said she did not recall ever meeting Julie, and investigators were unable to establish that Julie ever attended any of Spahr’s talks, they continued to view this call as the keystone of their investigation. Alley and Peter Groh, Tim’s FBI counterpart, repeatedly pressed Rice about that call, including at a marathon interrogation in December 1999. To prepare, the FBI had reserved a block of rooms at a hotel near FCI Cumberland, the prison where Rice was being housed. They outfitted one room with cameras and microphones and set up recording and monitoring stations in the others, which were staffed by additional FBI agents. In the interview room, they displayed evidence collected from the campsite, including Julie’s sleeping pad and some of the women’s gear. Then, just after 8:00 a.m., they collected Rice from the prison.
As the interview progressed, Groh and Alley showed Rice a photo of Williams and asked if he thought she was attractive. He said she was. They showed him photos of the crime scene. They laid out pictures demonstrating that his father’s car was in the park on May 25 and May 26, 1996. They told him surveillance aircraft had recorded the identities of everyone who had walked down the Bridle Trail that week (to which Rice replied, That’s great, right? It means you should have footage and photos of the guy who did this). They asked Rice what he knew about the Spectrum Center. Rice said he had seen a few Grateful Dead shows there, apparently conflating the LGBT organization with the Philadelphia sports arena that shared the same name. They showed Rice his phone records, which proved that he had dialed the number. He said he didn’t remember calling, but it looked like he had maybe mixed up a couple of numbers.
Groh explained that he was retiring, that he needed to close this case. He told Rice that confessing would be the best Christmas gift he could give Lollie and Julie’s families. He told Rice they already had enough evidence to take him to court—that the only thing he could do was make it easier on himself.
“We brought all those bags of evidence,” said Tim. “We displayed Julie’s sleeping pad, a sleeping bag, everything.”
“And what did Rice do?” I asked. “Did he have a reaction?”
“None,” said Tim. “He must have known we didn’t have the smoking gun. But he also never denied doing it. I think he was toying with us.”
In the end, investigators never turned up any physical evidence linking Rice to the crime. Nevertheless, by the summer of 2001, Tom Bondurant, the lead prosecutor in the case, felt he had enough for an indictment against Rice. Early in the morning on September 11 that year—“the September 11,” Tim stressed to me and Brenda—he and Bondurant hiked down to the murder scene one last time. It was Julie’s twenty-ninth birthday, and Tim recalled Bondurant’s saying that he was hoping for just one more bit of anything to strengthen their case.
“Most US attorneys never would have attempted to prosecute that case with what we had. He’s a more aggressive guy who isn’t afraid to take a chance,” Tim told me and Brenda.
Alley recalled that on the morning of September 11, 2001, he and Bondurant spent hours at the scene walking through every detail—where they’d found the tent and the women, the leash and collar, the chaos of the gear, and that vibrator, sitting so front and center.
“Bondurant is a real Daniel Boone type,” Tim told us. “He has this big booming voice and wears scuffed up boots that never match his suit. It always plays really well with juries.” But that morning, Tim recalled, the attorney seemed hesitant. Their case against Rice was thin. Was there anything they’d missed? Anything at all that would put him at this secluded scene?
Tim Alley can’t remember how long they stayed down there, but he felt like it was a long time. Eventually, the two men hiked up the incline and back to their cars in the busy parking lot. By the time they returned, everything about the world had changed. And while neither could have imagined it that sunny September day, seven months later they would be standing next to Attorney General John Ashcroft as he made his high-profile announcement.
What I still didn’t understand was why Rice had become a suspect in the first place. What, I wondered, made the investigators shift their focus so entirely to Rice after the Malbasha assault?
“We were desperate,” Tim said. “Normally you can narrow in on a few leads. But by the summer of 1997, we had nothing.”
“But why Rice?” I asked again.
“He attacked another woman in the park. He threw a rock at a car where Julie’s car had been parked. He was bizarre as shit and dressed like a pervert for starters,” Tim responded.
“Dressed like a pervert?”
Tim laughed incredulously. “Short shorts and a T-shirt that says ‘Sticky Fingers’? I’d say so.”
I asked Tim if he was a Rolling Stones fan. He gave me a blank look.
“And Rice was schizophrenic?” I asked.
“I don’t remember if we ever got an actual diagnosis,” said Tim. “But it certainly seemed that way. He was talking about hearing voices and the government being out to get him.” Alley then began outlining the case again. “We always assumed the girls were killed the evening of May 24. One of our dispatchers had dropped them off at that parking lot where we met when you first visited. The theory was that Rice followed them down to the campsite and waited for them to set up camp.”
I told Tim I didn’t understand how Rice could have committed the crime without leaving any trace that he had been there.
“If I had a golden ticket to go back and change something, it’d be the way the crime scene was processed,” Tim told me and Brenda. “No doubt about it. Everyone was busting their ass, and we were leaning on the people with the most experience and training, but we should have slowed down and made sure we got it right.”
As Brenda and I listened, Tim described again his frustration with the FBI’s decision to process the evidence at the park. By the time investigators arrived, all the gear had been saturated with rain, so the first thing the ERT did was hang it up to dry in the Big Meadows ranger apartment. Tim shook his head at the memory. “We got so little back from the lab. You’d think we would have found plenty given the intimacy of the crime. Who knows what might have fallen out and been lost forever on the apartment floor.” Brenda looked as frustrated as Tim. He continued listing his objections. “Take the vibrator. You’ve got numerous places to find fingerprints. And then you’ve got the batteries inside, which should also have fingerprints. They overdid the supergluing and destroyed any opportunity to get prints.”
I interrupted. Supergluing?
Brenda translated. Known in the field as cyanoacrylate fuming, supergluing is a common technique in evidence analysis. Lab technicians place an object containing fingerprints into an airtight chamber, along with warmed superglue. The fumes from the superglue adhere to the oils comprising the fingerprints, permanently preserving the prints without damaging them. “Done right, it’s a very accurate technique,” Brenda told me. Tim snorted. “They used a coffee mug warmer and put it under a garbage bag. They were trying to do this shit on a picnic table.” Brenda looked dismayed. Even I knew enough to think it sounded like a terrible idea.
“They totally overdid it,” continued Tim. “Literally by the time we got stuff to the lab, we were hearing we’d get no results back. It was crazy.”
Tim said that the rangers and ERT had bagged over two hundred pieces of evidence. After it was all processed, the investigation was left with a total of twenty-one latent fingerprints and palm prints on various objects around the campsite, including eight latent fingerprints on a Wal-Mart bag and bottle of Mountain Dew found at the scene that did not appear to belong to Julie or Lollie. It also included an oily handprint on Julie’s sleeping pad, which investigators were able to photograph and measure. They of course had the duct tape that had been used to bind and gag the women, as well as the balled-up pieces in the stream and the empty roll that had been found on the trail itself.
Adhesive experts working for the FBI were able to determine that the tape had been cut with a serrated edge and that it was removed from the roll in a different order than it had been applied to the women. This fact, those same experts speculated, meant the killer had taken his time—that perhaps he’d cut the strips of duct tape and hung them from the side of the tent before applying them, one by one, to the women’s wrists. On the wadded duct tape found in the stream, they found two “forcibly removed” head hairs belonging to Julie, which had led investigators to conclude that the women’s assailant had first gagged them with tape before binding them with the long underwear. In the tape used to bind the women’s wrists, they also found two light brown Caucasian fringe hairs, which are hairs that grow in places other than the head or pubic area—places like a person’s arms, legs, back, or neck. They also found additional fibers in the tape—separate blue, red, and white cotton fibers, along with orange synthetic fibers, none of which appeared to match clothes or gear carried by Lollie and Julie, as well as several knuckle hairs found in the pair of black gloves at the scene.
“And that was pretty much it,” Tim said with a brittle laugh. “If I ever have another homicide outside, I’m going to bring the lab to the woods. None of that shit is leaving until it’s packaged individually and taken straight to the lab.”
If anything was becoming clear in my conversation with Tim Alley that day, it was that investigators had exploited every possible avenue to tie Darrell Rice to the crime. They examined his truck with luminol, looking for blood splatters. They vacuumed it for hair and fibers. They obtained a warrant and did the same for his father’s car and house. “The place hadn’t been cleaned for eons,” said Tim. “There were wine bottles and dirty dishes everywhere.” But nothing agents found could link anyone in the Rice family to the murders. They compared Rice’s fingerprints to those taken at the scene. They ran his DNA against the hair. All negative. Investigators redoubled their efforts. There are rare moments of humor here and there—like when agents arrived at the home of a woman Rice had once dated to take hair samples from the woman’s golden retriever, Jed. In their subsequent report, agents wryly noted, “Jed did not respond to questioning, however, did permit hair samples to be taken from various areas of his body.”
But most of the investigative work was grim. In the spring of 1998, Tim Alley traveled to British Columbia with the long underwear that had been used to bind the women. Once there, he met with a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who was also an internationally recognized knot expert. “One of the reassigned rangers had said he thought the knots were the kind used to hobble horses. We thought if we could identify them as a particular type, we’d learn something about the suspect’s background,” Tim told me and Brenda. He said he and the evidence had flown on a commercial plane to Vancouver. After a tense interaction with the K9 unit patrolling the airport about what his luggage contained and why, Alley and the knot expert spent two days together painstakingly examining the long underwear and the knots used to tie them.
“Granny knots,” Tim told us. “Just ordinary overhand knots like you’d use to tie your shoes.” The knots did yield two additional hairs, but he didn’t know if the FBI ever had them tested.
“But as we prepared for trial, we still thought we had Rice with the untested DNA on the gags,” said Tim. “We sent it out for a hail Mary pass, and it bit us in the ass.”
A DNA sample taken from at least one gag was sent to an independent lab, where it was tested using the more sophisticated Y-STR analysis, which had by then begun to replace mtDNA testing (Y-STR examines short tandem repeats on the Y chromosome). Results from this test confirmed that the DNA did not belong to Rice. Nevertheless, the prosecution still felt they had a case. According to Tim, Bondurant was planning on calling an expert witness to explain away the presence of the hairs found in the duct tape and the black gloves. Employed as a scientist at the FBI lab, that expert witness was prepared to state under oath that the hairs might have belonged to a friend of Lollie’s or Julie’s roommate and had been unknowingly carried to Shenandoah in the women’s clothing or gear. But then, just one day before jury selection was set to begin, the expert witness changed her testimony and said she believed the hairs most likely belonged to the perpetrator.
“I was literally sick to my stomach,” said Tim. “I had to go outside when I got the news. I was sure I was going to throw up.”
I asked him if he thought this case could ever be solved.
“I think we did solve it,” he said. “But solving it and winning a court case are two different things.”
What, I also wondered, did he think about the decision to try the case as the first capital hate crime?
“Political theater,” said Tim, without missing a beat. “That sentencing rule was so new none of us down here had even heard about it. And I don’t think any of us ever thought that’s what this murder was really about.”
He referenced the attack on Claudia Brenner and Rebecca Wight and the fact that their assailant had never attempted to hide his disdain for their relationship.
“I never got a taste that Rice had any problems with gays,” Tim said. “His roommate was gay. Some of his friends were gay.”
