Trailed, p.29
Trailed, page 29
She wrote down the names of the leading manufacturers during the 1990s and suggested I give them a call and ask about what, specifically, they were marketing then. It was a great suggestion. I thanked her for her time. She came out from around the counter with her hand outstretched. “I’m Heather,” she said. We shook hands. “My mother was murdered twelve years ago,” she told me. “We’ve never gotten any answers.”
Of the companies Heather jotted down for me, only the folks at Adam & Eve were willing to help. They were particularly high on my list, given that Evonitz subscribed to their catalog in the mid-1990s. The director of public relations offered to send me a copy of all the company’s catalogs for that decade. They arrived by FedEx just a few days later. There, I found multiple versions of what looked like the vibrator found at the campsite, leather leg restraints with the same pattern of stitching as what appeared on the UV image taken from Julie’s sleeping pad, and all manner of lubricants and oils.
I next contacted Lynn Comella, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas and author of Vibrator Nation. She confessed to being a true crime fan and said she loved the idea that talking about vibrators could help solve a murder. She offered to look at photos of the one at the crime scene, along with images of dozens of vibrators and dildos taken from Evonitz’s apartment. “These products from the serial killer are very, very basic, very cheaply made sex toys, ones that you’d be able to get at the most generic adult store (which weren’t known for carrying high quality products, because most of their money still came from porn and video booths),” she wrote back. “Certainly by the mid-1990s, better made, prettier and higher quality sex toys were available and many women already owned them.” She also said she was particularly curious about what seemed like modifications made to many of Evonitz’s props, basically that he was refurbishing them beyond their original specifications to serve his own kinks. One of the things no one could explain to me is what looked like a lanyard or tubing on the vibrator found at the Shenandoah campsite. Comella noticed it as well. “Could he have hacked that one, too?” she asked. “It certainly looks like others in his collection. Has anyone compared it to those?”
Later that day, I phoned Tim Alley and posed Comella’s question. He said he didn’t think any kind of comparison had been done.
It also appears that the FBI did not compare the outline of what appeared to be the leather restraints on Julie’s sleeping pad to similar restraints found at Evonitz’s house. According to the FBI lab reports, the agency also requested that the oily residues found on Julie’s sleeping pad and during the posthumous medical exam be tested against only Neosporin and Blistex, both of which had been found in the women’s backpacks. The lab ruled out those products. As far as I can determine, the samples were not tested against anything else.
After each of these discoveries, I’d phone Deirdre from my office back in Maine. She reported on her own detective work. By that point, she had begun phoning some of the women listed on Evonitz’s scraps of paper. With each call, Deirdre would begin with a variation of I can guarantee this is going to be the weirdest call you receive all day before explaining why she’d dialed them. She was warm and candid, and the women always talked to her. Some agreed to speak with me as well. They admitted to having begun flirtations with Evonitz, usually on online dating sites. Others said they cut off contact after he began appearing at their places of work or pressuring them to meet him at interstate motels. They experienced shock and shame and embarrassment learning they’d given their telephone numbers and addresses to a serial killer. Most said they’d never been contacted by the FBI.
Every month or so, I’d purchase another round-trip ticket to Charlottesville on my already stressed credit cards. I’d make feeble excuses to get out of social engagements and paying writing assignments and, instead, hole up in my now familiar hotel for a few days or a week, mostly living on pilfered snacks from the law school faculty lounge. Each day, the Innocence Project team and I locked ourselves in our secure conference room and combed through box after box, looking for previously unnoticed evidence that might finally solve the case. We read countless pages of transcripts and summaries of interviews with Evonitz’s two wives, his extended family, his coworkers and friends. His father, we learned, had been abusive. According to family members, when Marc was a young boy, his father tried to drown him after Marc splashed water on some hamburgers at a family cookout. After his parents divorced, his mother remarried a man serving a life sentence for the brutal rape and murder of a twenty-four-year-old woman. That union lasted twelve years.
According to his sisters, Marc began making obscene phone calls at the age of thirteen. Two years later, he began breaking and entering. He had rage issues and was prone to physical violence when angry. At a young age, he began watching sadistic pornography with his father and had a particular fondness for snuff films. He sexually molested his sisters and tried to persuade them to have sex with each other. He claimed to have killed a prostitute in Florida. His first wife told similar stories, that he was particularly interested in rape fantasies and had an explosive temper. He would punch holes in walls and break tables when he was angry; he’d go after drivers who cut him off in traffic. His violence became worse with his impotence in early 1996, and his behavior became more erratic then as well. In September of that year, he abruptly announced to his wife that they had to sell their Volkswagen Beetle, which had been his beloved car. He insisted they trade it in for a Taurus.
At that same time, Evonitz was working for a German-owned grinding company, which sold machines used to sharpen drill bits and other tools. His colleagues said Evonitz was obsessed with Ted Bundy and would regularly pontificate about what he thought the famous serial killer had gotten wrong and right when hunting women. They said Marc regularly made lewd and offensive comments about raping women or wanting to murder one while having intercourse. He stole underwear from the dressers of his coworker’s teenage daughters. Even the therapist who counseled Marc and his first wife at the end of their marriage called him “so creepy.” She told police she felt uncomfortable and always avoided being alone with him—that she’d diagnosed him as having both a narcissistic and personality disorder, along with multiple adjustment issues.
Along the way, the law school team and I found dozens of mistakes and omissions made during law enforcement’s original investigation into Evonitz. In April 1997, the same month Darrell Rice was sentenced for his assault on Yvonne Malbasha, Marc Evonitz printed out a page with contact information for MCI Systemhouse, the company where Darrell Rice had worked. Evonitz kept it in one of the locked chests where he also kept his other trophies, like women’s underwear. When I asked investigators about it, they said they’d never heard about it before. No one has been able to explain to me why it was there and whether Evonitz had any reason to be interested in or connected to Darrell Rice.
Rangers did run Evonitz’s plates against the spreadsheet of license plates they’d recorded entering the park in late May of 1996, but they ran his Taurus, which he of course had purchased months after the crime. They never looked at the Beetle. Nor, as far as we can tell, did investigators attempt to determine if any of the women’s underwear or scrunchies or locks of hair belonged to Lollie or Julie. It also appears that they never tested the fibers found in the duct tape against fibers belonging to Evonitz, nor did they compare the size of his palm prints to those left on Julie’s sleeping pad—or the fingerprints found on the Wal-Mart bag and the Mountain Dew bottle. Julie, say friends, didn’t care for Mountain Dew. But couldn’t her assailant have forced her to drink it, just as Evonitz insisted Kara Robinson drink Gatorade?
I called Evonitz’s former employer, a German national who did a good deal of his business in Europe, and asked if there was duct tape on hand at the company offices. He said no before abruptly hanging up. When I called around to other grinding companies, I was told by all that it seemed impossible a grinding company wouldn’t have tons of duct tape around. The owner of a small grinding company in Massachusetts seemed particularly willing to help after learning why I was calling. I asked him why someone in his industry would have 1.5-inch-wide duct tape, the size used to bind Lollie and Julie, instead of the standard 1.88-inch width readily available in stores. “That’s not 1.5 inches,” he corrected me. “It’s 3.8 centimeters, a standard metric size. Did your suspect have any ties overseas?”
In 2005, Douglas Deedrick, who served as the FBI’s chief of trace evidence for the special task force assigned to the Shenandoah Valley killings, told a circuit court judge that he had wanted to reexamine the evidence from the Alicia Showalter Reynolds case and compare it to Evonitz’s known forensic samples. Beginning in 2002, Deedrick had repeatedly requested that evidence be brought to the lab for testing. In at least one instance, agent Jane Collins requisitioned the DNA evidence and received it. According to court records, it was driven around in her car for a time, but it was never delivered to the lab or subjected to further testing. The judge chastised her for that, but it’s not clear if any internal action was taken. By the time Deedrick received the evidence in July 2004, he was just days away from retirement. As of that 2005 court hearing, the FBI confirmed the evidence had not been examined by Deedrick’s replacement. In 2007, the FBI responded to legal pressure by Pam Gould, the author of a series of investigative articles into the case against Darrell Rice. At that time, Gould wanted to know about follow-up investigations into Evonitz. The Richmond office confirmed Evonitz’s DNA was never checked against DNA obtained during the Alicia Showalter Reynolds investigation, despite Doug Deedrick’s repeated requests that the analysis be done. State police investigators also said in court they never checked Evonitz’s DNA against that from the Reynolds case. They also never confirmed whether or not he had an alibi for the morning she disappeared. According to a 2018 internal agency memo, an FBI supervisor issued a moratorium on any further testing of evidence related to Marc Evonitz. The FBI will not say why. All my FOIA requests regarding Evonitz’s DNA have been denied, including my request to ascertain whether his DNA has ever been checked against the male DNA found on the cloth gags used on Lollie and Julie, and which FBI experts stated they felt certain probably came from their assailant. I also asked if Evonitz’s DNA was ever listed on CODIS, the national database that allows for instant matches in new and unsolved cases. That request was also denied. In the letter explaining why my request had been denied, an FBI FOIA officer stated that that information “is not in the public’s best interest and thus does not meet the Freedom of Information standard.”
The Department of Justice does mandate the collection of DNA from individuals convicted of crimes like Darrell Rice’s. Most likely, then, his DNA was uploaded to CODIS. If it has been, it had not led to a match in any other case.
New methods for extracting skin cells and other trace DNA have emerged in recent years, including MVac, which is basically the world’s strongest wet vacuum. Multiple forensic experts who belong to the American Investigative Society of Cold Cases said that that would be exactly where they’d start if they were allowed to consult on the Shenandoah case. They all also said they’d be shocked if the process didn’t turn up previously undetected DNA samples most likely left by the murderer. When I asked if the technique had been used in this case, the case investigators willing to entertain my question on deep background said that it hadn’t.
Trace evidence is not the holy grail of criminal convictions that TV forensic dramas would have you believe. It is true that advances in science now allow labs to make genetic matches with as few as just a handful of cells. But that sophistication has also come with a problematic legal cost. A few years ago, a father was convicted of raping his young daughter after his semen was discovered in her underwear. Subsequent forensic work found his semen in the clothing of his other relatives as well. It wasn’t until experts determined that something as simple as washing a load of laundry was enough to deposit those cells on other people’s clothing that he was exonerated. A few years ago, European officials were convinced they had a continent-wide serial killer after DNA taken from more than forty evidence kits pointed to the same individual. It took months before one enterprising lab scientist determined that the DNA actually came from a factory worker who had packaged the swabs used to collect evidence.
However, hairs found in duct tape used to bind murder victims and in gloves found at a crime scene are not exactly trace evidence. And no one I have spoken with has any kind of explanation for how a man who is not Darrell Rice—a man who happens to be a known serial killer, in fact—might have come in contact with Lollie, Julie, a pair of their gloves, and the duct tape used to restrain them. I do know that emerging and even more precise means of comparing hair samples have been touted by the forensic community recently, including a process perfected by Ed Green, a paleogeneticist at the University of California–Santa Cruz. Green developed a workaround for the limitations of mtDNA matching by applying a sophisticated genetic sequencing system that allows him to extract the kind of DNA used in more in-depth analysis. It requires only about a centimeter of hair, and he already has a relationship with the FBI, having worked on previous cases for them. When I called him about the Shenandoah case, he asked to see the lab reports generated by the earlier testing. I sent them to him. We spoke on the phone a few days later. “This is exactly the kind of case we like to take on,” he said. “We have availability for a new one. Let’s see if the FBI will give us this one.” As of this writing, neither he nor I have heard back on that offer.
Similarly, objects like tire irons (which would leave the shape of contusions left on both women, along with the Lisk sisters and Thelma Scroggins and which were placed into evidence from Evonitz’s apartment and car) were never swabbed for DNA. I have asked the Virginia State Police what size duct tape was used to bind Anne McDaniels; they would not reply. When I spoke with Sadie Showalter, she was not aware that gloves and cigarette butts were found at the scene of her daughter Alicia’s disappearance and where her body was recovered. So far as she knows, neither was compared to Evonitz either, despite the fact that he was a known chain smoker.
I can’t say for certain that Darrell Rice did not kill Julie Williams and Lollie Winans. But of the hundreds of experts I’ve spoken with, only the three agents involved in the initial investigation say they believe he is the perpetrator. Every other profiler, investigator, and scientist says that the preponderance of the evidence makes a strong case that Rice is innocent and that Marc Evonitz is a far stronger suspect. I do know that if Darrell Rice is innocent, his life since 1996 can only be considered a tragedy. I don’t use that word lightly. The harshness of his sentence for the crime against Malbasha was in no small part predicated on the belief that he had killed Lollie and Julie. Since his release, he has been harassed wherever he has gone. As soon as residents realize Rice is in their town, rumors begin surfacing that he has done everything from hijacking a school bus and kidnapping the children to leading police on high-speed chases to stealing cars and murdering women. None of this has been substantiated. Much of it has actually been demonstrably disproved, thanks to the ankle bracelet he was forced to wear for several years after he was released. Nevertheless, public outcry continues. When word spread in Durango, Colorado, a few years ago that Darrell Rice had been seen there, social media outlets and local newspapers erupted with the story, citing “several dozen” calls from concerned citizens in less than a week. “All I know is he’s not wanted, and we ain’t looking for him,” the county sheriff told a local reporter working on the story, which was published on the front page of the Durango Herald.
Legally speaking, Darrell Rice has a presumption of innocence and the right to live the life of any other individuals who served their time after being convicted of a crime. Instead, public pressure has forced him almost entirely underground. As I write this chapter, he has been missing for nine months. His friends and family say they fear he may be dead: never has he gone more than a few weeks without being in touch with at least one of them. If he is alive, his existence remains clouded by the very real possibility that, at any moment, the government will reinstate his case. Meanwhile, as long as investigators continue to insist that he killed Julie and Lollie, further inquiry into their case appears to remain stalled. And that means neither their friends and family members, nor the many other people impacted by their deaths, will get the answers they want and deserve.
25
After the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020, the University of Virginia moved to a virtual campus model, which effectively disbanded the Rice Innocence Project team. Several of the students offered to continue working from their homes, and they’ve stayed active in the investigation, working with me on case research and sometimes even returning to the Stony Man parking lot and Bridle Trail on their own.
That summer and fall, Deirdre Enright and I continued sorting through boxes and burrowing down one rabbit hole and then another. In our own Hail Mary attempt, we summarized everything we had found, and Enright sent it in a letter to a former federal attorney she knew was sympathetic to the case. We never heard back. But we kept at it.
After one particularly grueling day, we sat on the Enrights’ back porch. The family had just adopted a new puppy named Elton John, and I commandeered him as my own that night, tucking him in next to me on my patio chair. As a sultry Virginia thunderstorm built on the western horizon, we ate guacamole made by one of Deirdre’s daughters and traded stories about our careers. Deirdre and her husband spoke passionately about their work on capital cases. I wondered aloud how they managed to remain in those very grim trenches for so long, especially knowing that they will watch some of their clients be put to death for crimes they did not commit and witness the emotional despair of so many families looking for answers.
