Trailed, p.6
Trailed, page 6
I tried to ask a question about Darrell Rice’s possible involvement in the crime, but Dee Rybiski, the FBI public affairs officer, interrupted to remind us all that this is an open case and, thus, the particulars cannot be discussed. Everyone but Rybiski seemed to find that frustrating, if not a little absurd. We were standing, after all, at the scene of a murder. We had come here deliberately to unpack that murder. At her request, I began to channel all my questions through her. It felt a little like talking on a landline telephone with an international delay. I’d ask my question, we’d all wait for a nod or a shake of Rybiski’s head to know if the others could answer, and then they’d funnel their response back through her.
“Tell me about the campsite,” I ventured. Rybiski looked ready to censor but said nothing.
So the rangers walked me through where they found the tent and the packs, where they assumed the women had just begun cooking dinner.
“I can still see the dog food. I can see their pot of uneaten couscous,” one told me, tearfully. “It was all sitting right here, overflowing with rainwater.”
Many months later, I’d see in that emotional assertion the simultaneous power and frailty of human memory. After looking at dozens of crime scene photos, I’d come to understand that there was no dog food, no uneaten couscous sitting in a pot and drenched with rainwater. But that didn’t make that ranger’s memory any less real for him, nor did it mitigate the tangled briars of emotion he so clearly still felt these many years later.
Our walk back up the trail was mostly silent. By then, I’d run out of questions I could get past Rybiski. Tim Alley and Jane Collins, who had said little the whole trip, seemed visibly saddened by the return to the murder scene. The others had their hands stuffed in their pockets, heads down. Violence clearly leaves other kinds of traces, too.
“I still live it every day,” Alley admitted to me as we made our way back to Skyline Drive. “I decided early on that my real employers were the Williams and Winans families. I still believe that. It haunts me that we haven’t closed this for them—and for the girls.”
We walked in silence for a few minutes. Then he asked me about my interest in the case.
I told him I’d spent years backcountry hiking and picking stealth campsites exactly like the one we just visited. If I had stumbled on it, I would have thought myself the luckiest hiker in the park. I also would have believed I was the safest person in the world.
“You’re a backpacker?” Tim asked.
I nodded.
“Solo?”
“Yes,” I said. “Or at least I used to be.”
“Bear spray? Handgun?”
“Huh?”
“What do you pack?”
“Oh, right,” I said, finally understanding. “Nothing but my gear.”
He shook his head. “Just you and your big smile in the wilderness?”
“I guess.”
We both thought about that for the rest of the short walk up to the parking lot.
Once back at the vehicles, Alley offered to show me the site of a long-gone concession stand on the far side of the parking lot. We stepped away from Rybiski and the others. Just out of earshot, he handed me his card.
“Call me,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
4
Thursday, May 30, 1996
10:00 p.m.
Julie Williams had promised her roommate, Derek, that she would be moved out of their second-floor apartment by the end of the month. College friends, they’d spent time together in Washington State just after graduation. Afterward, she had gone to work as an intern at Big Bend National Park, and Derek had eventually made his way to Vermont. Not long after Julie and Lollie fell in love, the two women found themselves faced with the prospect of managing a long-distance relationship. Lollie still had a year and a half of schoolwork at Unity; Julie was toying with the idea of graduate school but hadn’t committed to any program yet. They agreed Julie had the most flexibility in her life, so she decided to move in with Derek. That fall, the old friends found a second-floor apartment in Richmond, Vermont, about fifteen miles outside of Burlington. It seemed like the perfect compromise: just five hours from Unity, and with enough social and cultural opportunities that Julie wouldn’t feel completely dependent on Lollie and her world at the college.
Now, with just one day left in the month of May, Derek was pissed. Julie and Lollie had left for Shenandoah twelve days earlier, and Derek hadn’t heard from them since. Before she left, Julie managed to box up some of her things, but when or how she intended to move them remained to be seen. If they wanted to get their security deposit back, the two roommates would have to clean the place, too. As far as Derek could tell, Julie had blown off multiple appointments and social plans that week as well.
Derek phoned Julie’s dad in Minnesota. Time was running out on their move, Derek said. Messages wondering where Julie was were piling up on their answering machine, too. What was he supposed to do?
A second-generation funeral director, Tom Williams had spent a lifetime learning patience and quiet compassion when faced with the emotions of others. He could tell Derek was angry, and Tom assured him that Julie would be back any time now. It wasn’t like her to miss an appointment. Even less so to leave a friend in the lurch.
Later that night, Tom and his wife, Patsy, a longtime registered nurse, revisited the call. It had been over a week since they’d heard from Julie: not entirely out of the ordinary—particularly when she was on a trip. But still. Something about Derek’s call didn’t sit right.
Julie had grown up in St. Cloud, a town of sixty-eight thousand people in the center of Minnesota. Patsy and Tom had raised their four children in a close-knit middle-class neighborhood defined by tidy ranches and two-story colonials perched on perfectly square blocks. Neighbors entered one another’s house with a simple hello instead of a knock. They took turns hosting block parties and Christmas get-togethers. In the summer, kids played kick the can until the streetlights came on. During the school year, those same kids spent weekends skating at the roller rink, the girls sporting white bell bottoms to catch all the neon lights. They had sleepovers and pajama parties and stayed up late in basement rumpus rooms, watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars and The Outsiders over popcorn and cans of Tab. Families regularly caravanned to Vikings games; the kids passed the backseat time with slug bug and staring contests.
Life couldn’t have been idyllic in all those three-bedroom homes, but whatever abuse or neglect might have happened stayed locked behind closed doors. And at the Williamses’ house, you could always count on the doors being open. Tom and Patsy just had a way about them that made every kid in the neighborhood feel like they belonged.
The family spent a lot of their summers and vacations at their extended family’s shared cabin on one of those classically deep, clear Minnesota lakes. There, Julie, her siblings, and scores of cousins fished and swam and told ghost stories on the back deck. They toasted marshmallows and stuffed themselves with sweet corn and fried walleye.
Back in St. Cloud, the Williamses’ lives revolved around their faith and their church. In many ways, that community was Julie’s second home. She belonged to her Catholic church’s youth group, as did most of her closest friends. She attended school, first at the neighborhood parochial grade school and then at Cathedral High School, where she always toted a Bible in her backpack. She’d argue theology with anyone who would listen, sometimes getting so heated she’d storm away.
After the church choir director heard Julie strumming a guitar, she asked Julie to perform at Sunday services. Julie tried it once or twice but didn’t like the spotlight. She was quiet, a true introvert: hilarious and often goofy when you knew her, but far more comfortable sitting back and watching any social interaction when among strangers. Growing up, tennis and basketball courts were her safe spaces—places where she could do and be without having to say much. She was a natural athlete, but she had also been a perfectionist, regularly lobbing balls against the garage door until her parents couldn’t take the noise any longer.
Julie’s grade school teachers repeatedly approached Tom and Patsy about promoting their daughter a grade or two, but they resisted: more than anything, the Williamses wanted their children to have a normal childhood with normal friends. Besides, Julie loved being the smart kid, her hand first in the air to answer a teacher’s question, always knowing she had the right answer. At night, she’d write in her journal about her accomplishments, her big universal questions, and what might hover beyond the cosmos. She wanted to know everything. Makeup, clothes, and teen magazines never did much for her. As long as anyone could remember, Julie’s real passion was geology. She’d harvest chalk from the ground behind her garage for hopscotch games; on the school playground, she was always rooting around for new quartz specimens when other kids were horsing around. Her friends didn’t really get the obsession, but they also saw why it was the perfect relationship: Julie was shy; rocks are quiet, one told me recently.
In high school, geology was complemented by Julie’s growing commitment to social justice. She took enough Spanish courses to become fluent and would regularly volunteer to translate for Latinx women at shelters and police stations. She founded advocacy clubs and traveled to Bogotá, Colombia, for her senior project. She could have been valedictorian, were it not for her catastrophically bad grade in speech class: an A–, punishment for giggling every time she stood up in front of the class.
After high school, Julie enrolled at Carleton College, a small liberal arts school about an hour south of Minneapolis. There, she majored in geology. Her professors adored her. She challenged them in class and wore T-shirts bedecked with science jokes only rock jocks would get. overdressed for the ordovician, read one. During school breaks, she traveled across Europe, participating in geoarchaeology digs at ancient Roman settlements. Along the way, she’d phone home from weekend trips to Salzburg and Prague with stories about chatting up Peruvian musicians or splurging on a flamenco dress she knew she’d never wear. Back at home, she spent her summers in the wilderness: leading canoe trips one year; checking hunting and fishing licenses on tribal lands in northern Wisconsin; and conducting water-quality testing on the shores of Lake Superior. She took more mission trips, working with women and children in Madrid’s alleyways and tiny villages in the Huasteca region of Mexico. A one-woman Peace Corps, people began calling her.
A one-woman Peace Corps doesn’t leave their roommates hanging—at least, not in the way Derek was describing. Tom and Patsy decided they needed to alert the authorities. But who? The sheriff’s office seemed a logical place to start. Which one? Shenandoah National Park straddles eight different counties, each with its own jurisdiction. Tom made a best guess and dialed a dispatcher. Not our area, she told him. Try the park. By then, it was nearly midnight. After what seemed like endless rings, Williams finally got a tinny recording that listed the business hours for park headquarters and no other numbers. Troubled, he went to bed.
First thing the next morning, he tried again and was transferred to a ranger on duty. The ranger, in turn, reported Williams’s call to his supervisor, who initiated a lost- and missing-person’s file. The two rangers agreed that if the women didn’t turn up by nightfall, they’d launch a more thorough investigation the following day. In the meantime, they issued an ATL, an “attempt to locate” call for all on-duty rangers.
Friday, May 31, 1996
9:30 a.m.
Shenandoah National Park was struggling. A host of environmental challenges—damage from acid rain and a recent gypsy moth infestation, along with the worst air quality of any national park—stretched the park’s already thin resources. The park’s built infrastructure was faring little better, with a twelve-million-dollar maintenance backlog that had resulted in leaking pipes and roofs, broken down equipment and vehicles, and outmoded equipment. Similar budget deficits meant programming cuts, closed sections of the park, and furloughed staff.
Shenandoah was not the only national park struggling that season. By the end of 1995, the entire park system was in the midst of its worst ever budget squeeze. As a result, all fifty-four of the biggest parks were making cuts, from closing camping sites to cutting back on seasonal and backcountry rangers. Old and broken gear went unreplaced, including Shenandoah’s radios, which meant rangers often couldn’t communicate with one another. The dangers of that shortcoming became all too real when a standoff with an armed man in the park resulted in gunfire. As the first shot was fired, radios on the scene went silent. The remaining rangers didn’t know if the subject had shot himself or if a firefight had broken out.
We’re outmanned, outgunned, and desperately needing outside support, one ranger told reporters shortly after. He said he and his colleagues were forced to go to the Fraternal Order of Police to ask for help fundraising for new gear.
Nationwide studies by multiple independent organizations determined that national parks needed an additional twelve hundred rangers, including 615 law enforcement rangers, to adequately protect the resources and people there. The studies’ authors called the assignment of rangers in parks “patently illogical and erratic.” Those same studies also listed Shenandoah as one of the country’s five most dangerous, in large part because of its awful radios and communication system. Ken Johnson was a lead investigator and law enforcement ranger at the time. “There really isn’t time anymore to patrol the backcountry,” he told a reporter who interviewed him about the report. “A ranger now isn’t going to see the backcountry unless they are going back there to rescue somebody.”
By spring of 1996, Shenandoah National Park was short a full five law enforcement rangers. Park administrators had also been forced to cut 80 percent of its interpretive ranger services—programs that helped visitors understand the park’s history and ecology or just figure out where to get a meal or use the restroom. They’d furloughed trail maintenance crews responsible for removing downed trees and other hazards. Meanwhile, the private companies operating the resorts and lodges were struggling to staff concession positions. They ran ads in regional papers from Pittsburgh to Miami, promising big benefits and little experience required for busboys and dishwashers.
None of those factors had kept down visitor traffic, however. By May 1996, Shenandoah backcountry-use permits were at an all-time high, and the skeleton staff of rangers was struggling to keep tabs on the influx of backpackers. Finding two particular women presented a herculean challenge.
All backcountry campers are required to take out permits indicating their itinerary for each day they intend to be in the park. On Wednesday, May 22, Julie and Lollie had renewed theirs at the Thornton Gap entrance station, located at mile 31.5 on Skyline Drive. Barb Stewart, was the supervisory ranger there. That Wednesday had been cool and rainy, and Barb stopped in during the lunch hour to check on attendance numbers. Inside, Julie and Lollie had persuaded one of the entrance station attendants to let them wash their dirty camp dishes in a backroom sink. They’d made themselves at home, and Lollie had recognized a few Unity College friends in a collage of park employees photos hanging on the wall.
That Unity connection was what had first grabbed Stewart’s attention: several of her favorite interns had been students at the college. The two women struck up an easy conversation as the station attendant filled out their new backcountry permits. Stewart could tell right away that Julie and Lollie both seemed like experienced hikers: they’d already memorized the backcountry regulations and were able to recite them even before the woman working the desk asked. The two backpackers told the staff at Thornton Gap that they intended to stay in the central district of the park—an area that extends from Skyland around mile 40 down to South River at mile 62. They asked Stewart about good water sources in that area. Lollie seemed particularly concerned about what to do with leftover food and gray water from their dishes. Stewart advised her to fling both in as wide an arc as possible to avoid inadvertently attracting bears.
While Lollie and Barb chatted, Julie finished filing their new backcountry permits. She told the attendant they planned to head out of the park the following Monday, May 27. Their permits reflected that date, along with their plans to leave Julie’s Toyota 4Runner at the Stony Man Overlook parking area, located at mile 38.5 on Skyline Drive. On those same permits, Julie listed Taj as her primary method of travel. Lollie noted the dog in a column asking about pack and saddle stock.
In addition to their obvious humor and backcountry competence, what Stewart really remembered was the women’s persuasiveness. One of the women—she couldn’t remember if it had been Julie or Lollie—had admired a brightly illustrated poster advertising a wildflower weekend in the park the previous year. She’d asked if they could take it with them. Because it seemed like such a bold request, Barb considered it. Why not, she finally concluded. We can probably get another one from the gift shop. She and the attendant carefully peeled it off the wall and removed the Scotch tape from the back.
After Julie’s father had reported the two women missing, one of the lead rangers in the Williams/Winans case contacted the supervisors at each of the park’s four entrance stations and asked them to comb through all the permits submitted in the previous two weeks.
Barb Stewart’s husband, Ken Johnson, was the senior investigative ranger for the park by then. When Barb received the request to search permits that Friday morning, she sent Ken an email detailing her interaction with the women at the entrance station on May 22. Meanwhile, rangers were also on the lookout for Julie’s car. By 10:00 a.m. on Friday, May 31, a ranger had found it right where the permit had indicated it would be. The ranger left a note on Julie’s windshield, asking her to check in at an entrance station as soon as she saw the note.
By 1:00 p.m. that afternoon, the two women still hadn’t been located. Johnson assigned Tim Alley to head the case. By that point in his career, Alley had worked poaching stings, emergency evacuations, and hundreds if not thousands of searches—more than enough of them to know it was still too early to worry.
