Trailed, p.17
Trailed, page 17
Brenda raised her eyebrows at this. “Then the hate crime angle doesn’t make a lot of sense,” she offered.
By then, it was nearly 5:30 p.m. Tim needed to get home and make dinner for his son. He offered to return later that evening if we thought of anything else or to chat on the phone the next day. As we got up to leave, he hesitated for a moment, shaking his head.
“That crime scene was so precise,” he said. “We know Rice had started to fall apart well before May of 1996 and that he had serious mental issues. The dilemma in my mind is, How does this guy who’s so mentally unstable pull this crime off? That is something I’ll go to my grave never understanding.”
That night, Brenda and I met up with her family at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Her eleven-year-old niece had just come from dance class, and she taught me some clogging steps in the parking lot before we went inside. Our party filled up a large table, and I was seated across from Brenda’s two older sisters. Both had lived their entire lives just outside the park—a place they still refer to as “up the mountain,” as do most people who come from this area. When the park was conceived in the early 1930s, the federal government began evicting homesteading families in order to claim land through eminent domain. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened the park with a grand speech on July 4, 1936, dedicating Shenandoah “to this and succeeding generations of Americans.” It was a platitude that came across as cruel irony to the more than one hundred families who had already received eviction notices. By the time the park was completed, more than five hundred families had been displaced, just some of the untold numbers of people, many of whom were Native American, forcibly removed from their homes during the establishment of our national parks. Countless others had also lost hunting and foraging privileges as well (national parks prohibit both activities). For some of the descendants of those who lost their homes in the Shenandoah Valley, the injury is still very real.
Brenda and her sisters were circumspect about the ethics behind the creation of the park, although they did joke with a knowing wink that their father’s beloved hunting dogs sometimes tended to wander off and “get lost” inside park boundaries. But the women grew serious at mention of the 1996 murders. Both of Brenda’s sisters said they’d followed news of the crime closely, along with coverage of the other killings that year. It had affected the tenor of their community considerably, they agreed.
“Why do you want to go up there and get involved in that kind of thing?” one of them asked me. “Are you crazy?”
Maybe, I told her. Brenda just laughed.
The two of us left not long after finishing dinner. Our plan was to get up early and return to the crime scene. We woke up before dawn and packed up our shared hotel room. As we were walking out of the room, Brenda pointed at the two double beds. Even though we’d only been there one night, multiple head hairs were clearly visible on both sets of pillows and sheets.
“There should have been so many,” she said. I agreed.
Up at the park, she and I drove past the head of the Bridle Trail several times without finding it. I finally relented, texted Tim Alley, and asked him to send me a pin. As Brenda and I walked down the trail, I kept looking over my shoulder. It was one thing to visit with a platoon of rangers and FBI agents. Just two people felt a lot more threatening, even if one of those people was a newly retired police officer. I asked Brenda what her preliminary thoughts were, having spent the previous day listening to Tim.
“I keep going back to Rice’s mental state and what a mess even his truck was,” she told me. “How could he have pulled off such a bold, organized crime?”
In the world of law enforcement, “organized” has a particular meaning. Criminologists use the term to distinguish between it and “disorganized” crime, which is often marked by a notable absence of logic or rationality. Disorganized criminals are spontaneous, impetuous, and driven by an immediate reality we can’t see or know—often because they suffer from psychosis or another significant mental illness. It rarely, if ever, occurs to a disorganized offender to plan a crime in advance or to make any attempt to hide evidence. Like their homes and vehicles, the crime scenes of disorganized criminals are sloppy. They tend to kill in what criminologists call a blitz attack—a sudden shower of violence that often leaves their victims ravaged far beyond the fatal wound. Outside the crime scene, disorganized criminals have difficulty maintaining relationships and work, mostly because they are regularly disruptive and have a hard time understanding social cues and norms.
Organized criminals, on the other hand, are driven by logic and planning. They’re like Hollywood’s depiction of the classic serial killer, often motivated by years of fantasy and the rush they get mentally rehearsing each step of their crime. They target their victims based on criteria like age or appearance or lifestyle. They practice surveillance of both victims and potential crime scenes. They bring with them rape or murder kits, the contents of which have been refined through experience and assessment. They know not to leave evidence and to avoid detection or anything that may link them to the crime. Another reason they are hard to catch is that no one suspects them: organized criminals are great at maintaining the illusion of a normal, well-adjusted life. They’re often married or even have children; they hold down regular jobs. Take Cary Stayner, who killed four women in and around California’s Yosemite National Park in 1999. Stayner grew up a celebrity by association. His younger brother, Steven, was kidnapped at age seven by a known pedophile named Kenneth Parnell. It was only after Stayner hit puberty and Parnell sought out a new, younger victim, that Steven escaped, famously telling police, “I know my name is Steven.” His reunion with his family was televised nationally. He and his parents appeared on morning shows; their lives became the plot of lightly fictionalized films.
Through it all, Cary Stayner appeared the all-American teen. Underneath, however, he was already suffering in ways no one could imagine. He was first molested by an uncle at age eleven, who also introduced him to child pornography. At that same time, Cary’s father had begun sexually assaulting his own daughters—Cary’s sisters. Stayner began suffering from bouts of anxiety, pulling out his own hair. He began peeping on his sisters and other young girls, surreptitiously recording them and taking photographs. He quickly advanced to molestation offenses of his own. He stole his uncle’s collection of pornography and began masturbating to it. Meanwhile, he began constructing his own detailed fantasy: a sexual encounter in which he would be in complete control. He wanted to watch two young girls submit to his demands and then feel what it was like to strangle the life out of them. He told investigators that once he settled on his plan, he spent every waking moment looking for his first victim. By this point, he’d begun traveling with a murder kit: at first, just a tire iron he figured he could use to knock someone unconscious. Later, he realized he’d need more to be safe. He started carrying a backpack containing a gun and knife, along with a roll of duct tape and a camera. He studied the methods of other serial killers, watching true crime shows to figure out how not to get caught and how best to throw investigators off the trail. He even knew to get rid of trace evidence.
Stayner was calculating in his choice of victims. He thought he had found them when he began dating a woman with two young daughters, ages eight and eleven, who fit his profile. He fantasized often about killing the mother so that he could rape and molest the daughters—maybe even persuading them to have sex with each other. And on multiple occasions, he arrived at their house prepared to enact this plan, but something always got in the way: an unannounced visitor, newly installed floodlights, or one of the girls away on a sleepover. Foiled, Stayner began stalking teenagers at the lodge where he worked, which was located just outside Yosemite. He eventually settled on Carole Lund, her fifteen-year-old daughter, and a sixteen-year-old family friend, all of whom were staying in a nearly vacant section of the lodge early in 1999. After the three women settled in for the night, Stayner knocked on the door and announced himself as a lodge handyman. He said the guests above them had called about a water pipe leak and that he’d have to access it from their bathroom. Lund initially resisted—she said they’d already turned in for the night and that they didn’t want to be disturbed. Stayner told her that was fine but that the lodge would have to move them to another room. By then, Carole and the girls were tired. The prospect of packing up and stepping out into the cold seemed inconvenient. So Lund unlocked the door and allowed Stayner to enter. Once inside, he pulled a gun and told the women he intended to rob them. He ordered the two teenagers into the bathroom, bound and gagged them both with duct tape, then shut the door behind him. Next he strangled Carole Lund and placed her body in the trunk of her rented Pontiac. Back in the hotel room, Stayner tried to force the two teenagers to have sex with each other. The girls were too terrified to do anything other than cry. He dragged one into the bedroom, then strangled the other in the bathtub and placed her body in the trunk of the car as well. Stayner’s fantasy had been wrecked—the girls were supposed to please each other and then him. But he convinced himself that he could still have an encounter with the surviving girl. That night in the hotel room, he attempted to rape her several times. When Stayner was unable to maintain an erection, he removed her gag and forced her to perform oral sex. Afterward, he moved her to an adjoining room and gathered all the evidence from the original room, including sheets and bedding, which he piled into the Pontiac’s trunk. Stayner then staged a morning scene, leaving wet towels in the bathroom so it would look like all three of the women had showered and left of their own accord. He also shaved all his own body hair, thinking it would make it impossible to obtain an evidence sample if he was eventually caught. Then he wrapped the surviving teen in a bedspread and led her to the car. He drove her to a nearby wilderness area and carried her down a remote trail. As Stayner would later recount in his confession, he laid her down on a wooded hillside, told her he loved her, and then slit her throat. Then he returned to the car, drove it a hundred miles, and parked it on a disused logging road at the other end of Yosemite. There, he lit the car on fire, but not before first removing Carole’s wallet. Later that day, he scattered her identification and credit cards in a town several miles away. In the weeks that followed, he sent law enforcement fake clues implicating other people.
That is the behavior of an organized killer.
Brenda and I paced out the area surrounding the Shenandoah crime scene, trying to reconstruct a scenario in which a single individual with no known criminal history could subdue two women.
“He must have had a gun,” speculated Brenda. “Did Rice?”
“Not that anyone knew of,” I told her.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” she concluded.
We talked about the location of the campsite. The duct tape roll was found on the trail heading back toward Skyland. Had the killer really been so brash as to walk back to the lodge after murdering two women? Wouldn’t he be afraid he’d be noticed?
“And wouldn’t he have been . . . bloody?” I asked.
“Not if he brought a change of clothes,” Brenda replied.
“And how did he ever find the women here,” I asked. “That’s what I keep coming back to.”
As an experiment, Brenda walked back to the trail. Before she’d reached it, she’d disappeared into the foliage and was invisible. I waved. She waved. Neither of us could see the other. I joined her. We walked farther down the trail, to the place where investigators had found the beer can and cigarettes. It was the one place with a clear line of sight to the campsite. We could see even the backpack I’d left on the ground as a placeholder. Once I’d retrieved it, we continued down the trail to the fire road. From that intersection, there were multiple ways to leave the park.
“That’s how I’d do it,” Brenda said. “And if I was really clever, I’d leave the duct tape roll going the opposite way to throw off the cops.”
We stood and thought about that for a few minutes. From everything we knew, it just didn’t seem like the same person who was so sloppy in his assault on Malbasha could have been so sophisticated just a year earlier. As we were mulling it over, two women about my age came hiking by. I stopped and asked them if they knew about the 1996 murder. Both did and said they’d grown up in this area.
“Do you ever worry about your safety hiking here now?” I asked.
“Definitely not,” one of the women replied. “They caught the guy years ago.”
On our way back to the airport, I phoned Tim Alley. I told him about our visit to Skyland and the Bridle Trail and the surrounding area. I mentioned that both Brenda and I remained hung up on what a sophisticated crime Julie and Lollie’s murders had been and how that just didn’t square with everything he had told us about Darrell Rice. I asked Tim what he would say to a person who said it seemed so unlikely that whoever had perpetrated such a sloppy attack on Yvonne Malbasha could have succeeded in such a calculated crime the year before.
“I’d tell that person that Rice was smoking pot the morning he attacked Malbasha,” he said. “That he knew he had to hurry because he was on Skyline Drive and it was broad daylight. And then you go back to all of the things we know that he did do: attacking her, throwing the rock at that car, slashing tires.”
As far as Tim was concerned, Rice’s legal team had managed to destroy a legitimate case against a guilty person. He was especially angry with Deirdre Enright, a well-known capital defender who had worked doggedly on Rice’s team, systematically calling into question each aspect of the prosecution’s case and befriending Rice along the way.
After Bondurant announced that he was suspending his murder case against Rice, state and federal officials pursued Rice for the Route 29 stalking cases. Enright represented Rice there as well, and she was unapologetically aggressive in her attempts to vindicate him. After Rice was released from prison in 2007, having served his prison term for the assault on Malbasha, he returned to eastern Maryland. There, community members raged and fretted about his appearance, certain that a murderer was in their midst. Deirdre Enright, along with several other members of Rice’s defense team, had written a letter to the editor at the local newspaper. In it, they reiterated their belief that Rice posed no threat and that they counted him as a good and trusted friend. Tim believed this was an overstep, professionally speaking. A few years later, Alley showed up at the park early one morning to find Darrell Rice just outside the entrance, sleeping in his car. That struck the ranger as wantonly brazen behavior.
“And Rice is still out there, acting strangely,” Tim told me over the phone. “Every once in a while, we get wind of a report where some officer somewhere has stopped him for some random shit. He’s driving someone’s car and says enough random stuff that the police leave with their heads spinning. My biggest fear is that we’re going to get one of those calls one day, and they tell me they found a body in the trunk.”
I asked the question that had been plaguing me since I began this project. “Do I need to be worried about Rice?”
“I don’t know what he’ll do when he finds out you’re writing a book,” Tim replied.
“Do you know where he is?”
“I don’t, but I can guarantee you Deirdre Enright does. I know for certain that they are in regular touch.”
“Should I contact her?”
The line went silent for a few beats. “My fear for you is, if Deirdre is still in touch with Darrell, the minute you call her, he’s going to be the next call she makes. And who knows what she would say.”
I laughed nervously at that. Tim did not. “I’m serious about this,” he said. “She would have no problem giving up your name and your address and your phone number and who knows what else.”
When I returned home, I sent a request for all the court documents that had been generated in Rice’s case and now lay in a federal archive outside Philadelphia. I needed to know what had made Bondurant and the FBI so certain about Rice and his motives for committing the crime. I next called Tim with a few follow-up questions about the crime scene and the presence of the vibrator there. He said he’d send me a PowerPoint presentation he’d given at some law enforcement conferences about the case. The presentation had a photo or two of the vibrator in it, Tim thought.
“I don’t know that there’s anything useful there, and I’m sure you’ve seen everything, but just in case,” Tim added.
It was just before 7:00 p.m., and I was about to meet my partner, Ray, and the Blonigens at a neighborhood restaurant to thank Brenda for her time. But as soon as Tim and I hung up, a message from the ranger popped up in my email. Without thinking, I opened the slide presentation. One of the first images was a close-up of Lollie’s bound arms, still duct-taped behind her back. It was the first photograph I’d seen of either woman at the crime scene. Lollie’s fingers were slender and pale, with just the slightest dark discoloration under the nails. She still wore her sports watch. However, it was the streaks of blood that had trickled down through the downy hair on her forearms that knocked the wind out of me. I sat in my dark office, staring at the image for a long time and studying the way the dried blood had pooled around each tiny follicle and pore, magnifying the texture of Lollie’s skin. Minutes ticked by as I fought back tears, still unable to look away from the computer screen. Suddenly everything about the case felt so real and so very tender. And there I was, paralyzed with grief for a woman at once a stranger and now so very familiar. Twenty minutes later, I arrived at the restaurant late and still shaken. I ordered two strong cocktails, even knowing they’d make me sloppy and sleepless.
Later that night, I awoke sometime around 2:00 a.m. with an icy start. Someone was in the house, I was sure of it. I lay motionless, wondering if the intruder had already made his way into our room. It was hours before I fell back asleep. The same dream woke me up the next night. And the one after that. During the intervening days, I was neurotically edgy. When a washing machine repair man tried to let himself in the back door, I panicked and ran upstairs, shut myself in our bedroom, and called Ray, a full-time military officer. When he didn’t pick up, I left a mostly unintelligible message as I hid behind our window blinds, peeking out at the driveway and the unmarked repair van. Ray called back right away from the base and offered to drive home. Embarrassed, I tried to assure us both I was okay.
By then, it was nearly 5:30 p.m. Tim needed to get home and make dinner for his son. He offered to return later that evening if we thought of anything else or to chat on the phone the next day. As we got up to leave, he hesitated for a moment, shaking his head.
“That crime scene was so precise,” he said. “We know Rice had started to fall apart well before May of 1996 and that he had serious mental issues. The dilemma in my mind is, How does this guy who’s so mentally unstable pull this crime off? That is something I’ll go to my grave never understanding.”
That night, Brenda and I met up with her family at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Her eleven-year-old niece had just come from dance class, and she taught me some clogging steps in the parking lot before we went inside. Our party filled up a large table, and I was seated across from Brenda’s two older sisters. Both had lived their entire lives just outside the park—a place they still refer to as “up the mountain,” as do most people who come from this area. When the park was conceived in the early 1930s, the federal government began evicting homesteading families in order to claim land through eminent domain. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened the park with a grand speech on July 4, 1936, dedicating Shenandoah “to this and succeeding generations of Americans.” It was a platitude that came across as cruel irony to the more than one hundred families who had already received eviction notices. By the time the park was completed, more than five hundred families had been displaced, just some of the untold numbers of people, many of whom were Native American, forcibly removed from their homes during the establishment of our national parks. Countless others had also lost hunting and foraging privileges as well (national parks prohibit both activities). For some of the descendants of those who lost their homes in the Shenandoah Valley, the injury is still very real.
Brenda and her sisters were circumspect about the ethics behind the creation of the park, although they did joke with a knowing wink that their father’s beloved hunting dogs sometimes tended to wander off and “get lost” inside park boundaries. But the women grew serious at mention of the 1996 murders. Both of Brenda’s sisters said they’d followed news of the crime closely, along with coverage of the other killings that year. It had affected the tenor of their community considerably, they agreed.
“Why do you want to go up there and get involved in that kind of thing?” one of them asked me. “Are you crazy?”
Maybe, I told her. Brenda just laughed.
The two of us left not long after finishing dinner. Our plan was to get up early and return to the crime scene. We woke up before dawn and packed up our shared hotel room. As we were walking out of the room, Brenda pointed at the two double beds. Even though we’d only been there one night, multiple head hairs were clearly visible on both sets of pillows and sheets.
“There should have been so many,” she said. I agreed.
Up at the park, she and I drove past the head of the Bridle Trail several times without finding it. I finally relented, texted Tim Alley, and asked him to send me a pin. As Brenda and I walked down the trail, I kept looking over my shoulder. It was one thing to visit with a platoon of rangers and FBI agents. Just two people felt a lot more threatening, even if one of those people was a newly retired police officer. I asked Brenda what her preliminary thoughts were, having spent the previous day listening to Tim.
“I keep going back to Rice’s mental state and what a mess even his truck was,” she told me. “How could he have pulled off such a bold, organized crime?”
In the world of law enforcement, “organized” has a particular meaning. Criminologists use the term to distinguish between it and “disorganized” crime, which is often marked by a notable absence of logic or rationality. Disorganized criminals are spontaneous, impetuous, and driven by an immediate reality we can’t see or know—often because they suffer from psychosis or another significant mental illness. It rarely, if ever, occurs to a disorganized offender to plan a crime in advance or to make any attempt to hide evidence. Like their homes and vehicles, the crime scenes of disorganized criminals are sloppy. They tend to kill in what criminologists call a blitz attack—a sudden shower of violence that often leaves their victims ravaged far beyond the fatal wound. Outside the crime scene, disorganized criminals have difficulty maintaining relationships and work, mostly because they are regularly disruptive and have a hard time understanding social cues and norms.
Organized criminals, on the other hand, are driven by logic and planning. They’re like Hollywood’s depiction of the classic serial killer, often motivated by years of fantasy and the rush they get mentally rehearsing each step of their crime. They target their victims based on criteria like age or appearance or lifestyle. They practice surveillance of both victims and potential crime scenes. They bring with them rape or murder kits, the contents of which have been refined through experience and assessment. They know not to leave evidence and to avoid detection or anything that may link them to the crime. Another reason they are hard to catch is that no one suspects them: organized criminals are great at maintaining the illusion of a normal, well-adjusted life. They’re often married or even have children; they hold down regular jobs. Take Cary Stayner, who killed four women in and around California’s Yosemite National Park in 1999. Stayner grew up a celebrity by association. His younger brother, Steven, was kidnapped at age seven by a known pedophile named Kenneth Parnell. It was only after Stayner hit puberty and Parnell sought out a new, younger victim, that Steven escaped, famously telling police, “I know my name is Steven.” His reunion with his family was televised nationally. He and his parents appeared on morning shows; their lives became the plot of lightly fictionalized films.
Through it all, Cary Stayner appeared the all-American teen. Underneath, however, he was already suffering in ways no one could imagine. He was first molested by an uncle at age eleven, who also introduced him to child pornography. At that same time, Cary’s father had begun sexually assaulting his own daughters—Cary’s sisters. Stayner began suffering from bouts of anxiety, pulling out his own hair. He began peeping on his sisters and other young girls, surreptitiously recording them and taking photographs. He quickly advanced to molestation offenses of his own. He stole his uncle’s collection of pornography and began masturbating to it. Meanwhile, he began constructing his own detailed fantasy: a sexual encounter in which he would be in complete control. He wanted to watch two young girls submit to his demands and then feel what it was like to strangle the life out of them. He told investigators that once he settled on his plan, he spent every waking moment looking for his first victim. By this point, he’d begun traveling with a murder kit: at first, just a tire iron he figured he could use to knock someone unconscious. Later, he realized he’d need more to be safe. He started carrying a backpack containing a gun and knife, along with a roll of duct tape and a camera. He studied the methods of other serial killers, watching true crime shows to figure out how not to get caught and how best to throw investigators off the trail. He even knew to get rid of trace evidence.
Stayner was calculating in his choice of victims. He thought he had found them when he began dating a woman with two young daughters, ages eight and eleven, who fit his profile. He fantasized often about killing the mother so that he could rape and molest the daughters—maybe even persuading them to have sex with each other. And on multiple occasions, he arrived at their house prepared to enact this plan, but something always got in the way: an unannounced visitor, newly installed floodlights, or one of the girls away on a sleepover. Foiled, Stayner began stalking teenagers at the lodge where he worked, which was located just outside Yosemite. He eventually settled on Carole Lund, her fifteen-year-old daughter, and a sixteen-year-old family friend, all of whom were staying in a nearly vacant section of the lodge early in 1999. After the three women settled in for the night, Stayner knocked on the door and announced himself as a lodge handyman. He said the guests above them had called about a water pipe leak and that he’d have to access it from their bathroom. Lund initially resisted—she said they’d already turned in for the night and that they didn’t want to be disturbed. Stayner told her that was fine but that the lodge would have to move them to another room. By then, Carole and the girls were tired. The prospect of packing up and stepping out into the cold seemed inconvenient. So Lund unlocked the door and allowed Stayner to enter. Once inside, he pulled a gun and told the women he intended to rob them. He ordered the two teenagers into the bathroom, bound and gagged them both with duct tape, then shut the door behind him. Next he strangled Carole Lund and placed her body in the trunk of her rented Pontiac. Back in the hotel room, Stayner tried to force the two teenagers to have sex with each other. The girls were too terrified to do anything other than cry. He dragged one into the bedroom, then strangled the other in the bathtub and placed her body in the trunk of the car as well. Stayner’s fantasy had been wrecked—the girls were supposed to please each other and then him. But he convinced himself that he could still have an encounter with the surviving girl. That night in the hotel room, he attempted to rape her several times. When Stayner was unable to maintain an erection, he removed her gag and forced her to perform oral sex. Afterward, he moved her to an adjoining room and gathered all the evidence from the original room, including sheets and bedding, which he piled into the Pontiac’s trunk. Stayner then staged a morning scene, leaving wet towels in the bathroom so it would look like all three of the women had showered and left of their own accord. He also shaved all his own body hair, thinking it would make it impossible to obtain an evidence sample if he was eventually caught. Then he wrapped the surviving teen in a bedspread and led her to the car. He drove her to a nearby wilderness area and carried her down a remote trail. As Stayner would later recount in his confession, he laid her down on a wooded hillside, told her he loved her, and then slit her throat. Then he returned to the car, drove it a hundred miles, and parked it on a disused logging road at the other end of Yosemite. There, he lit the car on fire, but not before first removing Carole’s wallet. Later that day, he scattered her identification and credit cards in a town several miles away. In the weeks that followed, he sent law enforcement fake clues implicating other people.
That is the behavior of an organized killer.
Brenda and I paced out the area surrounding the Shenandoah crime scene, trying to reconstruct a scenario in which a single individual with no known criminal history could subdue two women.
“He must have had a gun,” speculated Brenda. “Did Rice?”
“Not that anyone knew of,” I told her.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” she concluded.
We talked about the location of the campsite. The duct tape roll was found on the trail heading back toward Skyland. Had the killer really been so brash as to walk back to the lodge after murdering two women? Wouldn’t he be afraid he’d be noticed?
“And wouldn’t he have been . . . bloody?” I asked.
“Not if he brought a change of clothes,” Brenda replied.
“And how did he ever find the women here,” I asked. “That’s what I keep coming back to.”
As an experiment, Brenda walked back to the trail. Before she’d reached it, she’d disappeared into the foliage and was invisible. I waved. She waved. Neither of us could see the other. I joined her. We walked farther down the trail, to the place where investigators had found the beer can and cigarettes. It was the one place with a clear line of sight to the campsite. We could see even the backpack I’d left on the ground as a placeholder. Once I’d retrieved it, we continued down the trail to the fire road. From that intersection, there were multiple ways to leave the park.
“That’s how I’d do it,” Brenda said. “And if I was really clever, I’d leave the duct tape roll going the opposite way to throw off the cops.”
We stood and thought about that for a few minutes. From everything we knew, it just didn’t seem like the same person who was so sloppy in his assault on Malbasha could have been so sophisticated just a year earlier. As we were mulling it over, two women about my age came hiking by. I stopped and asked them if they knew about the 1996 murder. Both did and said they’d grown up in this area.
“Do you ever worry about your safety hiking here now?” I asked.
“Definitely not,” one of the women replied. “They caught the guy years ago.”
On our way back to the airport, I phoned Tim Alley. I told him about our visit to Skyland and the Bridle Trail and the surrounding area. I mentioned that both Brenda and I remained hung up on what a sophisticated crime Julie and Lollie’s murders had been and how that just didn’t square with everything he had told us about Darrell Rice. I asked Tim what he would say to a person who said it seemed so unlikely that whoever had perpetrated such a sloppy attack on Yvonne Malbasha could have succeeded in such a calculated crime the year before.
“I’d tell that person that Rice was smoking pot the morning he attacked Malbasha,” he said. “That he knew he had to hurry because he was on Skyline Drive and it was broad daylight. And then you go back to all of the things we know that he did do: attacking her, throwing the rock at that car, slashing tires.”
As far as Tim was concerned, Rice’s legal team had managed to destroy a legitimate case against a guilty person. He was especially angry with Deirdre Enright, a well-known capital defender who had worked doggedly on Rice’s team, systematically calling into question each aspect of the prosecution’s case and befriending Rice along the way.
After Bondurant announced that he was suspending his murder case against Rice, state and federal officials pursued Rice for the Route 29 stalking cases. Enright represented Rice there as well, and she was unapologetically aggressive in her attempts to vindicate him. After Rice was released from prison in 2007, having served his prison term for the assault on Malbasha, he returned to eastern Maryland. There, community members raged and fretted about his appearance, certain that a murderer was in their midst. Deirdre Enright, along with several other members of Rice’s defense team, had written a letter to the editor at the local newspaper. In it, they reiterated their belief that Rice posed no threat and that they counted him as a good and trusted friend. Tim believed this was an overstep, professionally speaking. A few years later, Alley showed up at the park early one morning to find Darrell Rice just outside the entrance, sleeping in his car. That struck the ranger as wantonly brazen behavior.
“And Rice is still out there, acting strangely,” Tim told me over the phone. “Every once in a while, we get wind of a report where some officer somewhere has stopped him for some random shit. He’s driving someone’s car and says enough random stuff that the police leave with their heads spinning. My biggest fear is that we’re going to get one of those calls one day, and they tell me they found a body in the trunk.”
I asked the question that had been plaguing me since I began this project. “Do I need to be worried about Rice?”
“I don’t know what he’ll do when he finds out you’re writing a book,” Tim replied.
“Do you know where he is?”
“I don’t, but I can guarantee you Deirdre Enright does. I know for certain that they are in regular touch.”
“Should I contact her?”
The line went silent for a few beats. “My fear for you is, if Deirdre is still in touch with Darrell, the minute you call her, he’s going to be the next call she makes. And who knows what she would say.”
I laughed nervously at that. Tim did not. “I’m serious about this,” he said. “She would have no problem giving up your name and your address and your phone number and who knows what else.”
When I returned home, I sent a request for all the court documents that had been generated in Rice’s case and now lay in a federal archive outside Philadelphia. I needed to know what had made Bondurant and the FBI so certain about Rice and his motives for committing the crime. I next called Tim with a few follow-up questions about the crime scene and the presence of the vibrator there. He said he’d send me a PowerPoint presentation he’d given at some law enforcement conferences about the case. The presentation had a photo or two of the vibrator in it, Tim thought.
“I don’t know that there’s anything useful there, and I’m sure you’ve seen everything, but just in case,” Tim added.
It was just before 7:00 p.m., and I was about to meet my partner, Ray, and the Blonigens at a neighborhood restaurant to thank Brenda for her time. But as soon as Tim and I hung up, a message from the ranger popped up in my email. Without thinking, I opened the slide presentation. One of the first images was a close-up of Lollie’s bound arms, still duct-taped behind her back. It was the first photograph I’d seen of either woman at the crime scene. Lollie’s fingers were slender and pale, with just the slightest dark discoloration under the nails. She still wore her sports watch. However, it was the streaks of blood that had trickled down through the downy hair on her forearms that knocked the wind out of me. I sat in my dark office, staring at the image for a long time and studying the way the dried blood had pooled around each tiny follicle and pore, magnifying the texture of Lollie’s skin. Minutes ticked by as I fought back tears, still unable to look away from the computer screen. Suddenly everything about the case felt so real and so very tender. And there I was, paralyzed with grief for a woman at once a stranger and now so very familiar. Twenty minutes later, I arrived at the restaurant late and still shaken. I ordered two strong cocktails, even knowing they’d make me sloppy and sleepless.
Later that night, I awoke sometime around 2:00 a.m. with an icy start. Someone was in the house, I was sure of it. I lay motionless, wondering if the intruder had already made his way into our room. It was hours before I fell back asleep. The same dream woke me up the next night. And the one after that. During the intervening days, I was neurotically edgy. When a washing machine repair man tried to let himself in the back door, I panicked and ran upstairs, shut myself in our bedroom, and called Ray, a full-time military officer. When he didn’t pick up, I left a mostly unintelligible message as I hid behind our window blinds, peeking out at the driveway and the unmarked repair van. Ray called back right away from the base and offered to drive home. Embarrassed, I tried to assure us both I was okay.
