Trailed, p.1
Trailed, page 1
Trailed
One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders
Kathryn Miles
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2022
For Camille and Suzanne,
who saw us through
Border Woman
Walls her own lands
With her own soul
In communion
With her own spirits
Between two lands is where my heart is.
The land is not mine any less than
It is yours.
I am me you are you. And we are we.
Stop and listen.
Flow and ebb with me.
I bleed. I breathe. I live.
—Julie Williams, journal entry
December 12, 1995
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Preface
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part III
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
Notes
Author’s Note
Trailed is based on four years of reporting, which includes reviewing court transcripts and motions, archival news stories, and scholarship, along with the author’s interviews with over a hundred sources. All dialogue rendered in direct quotations was either independently verified or recorded. Dialogue in italics has either been paraphrased for the sake of clarity or because it is based on a person’s recollection and cannot be independently corroborated. Whenever possible, I have used the full names of individuals. In some cases, where people have reasonable expectations of privacy, I have opted to identify them only by their first names. In a few cases, people have asked to remain anonymous because of safety concerns or fears of reprisal. In those cases, I have changed their first names. These changes include the name of my partner at the time, who has asked to be referred to by his nickname, Ray.
This book includes multiple references to violence, including sexual assault and murder, that some readers may find upsetting or otherwise triggering. Every effort has been made to approach these subjects with sensitivity and respect.
Preface
They must have been followed. That’s the thought I return to after all these years.
They must have been tracked as they left the Skyland lodge and stepped across Skyline Drive, the well-traveled backbone of Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. He—for murderers are almost always hes—must have been prowling Skyland’s parking lots and public areas, hoping he’d find the right target. Perhaps he studied the two young women as they lounged in the grass outside the lodge, oblivious as they consulted a map or warmed themselves in the afternoon sun. Maybe he bumped into one of them as she was leaving the restroom or grabbing a drink in the taproom. Something about their countenance and mannerisms must have caught his eye, made him decide he’d found what he had been hunting for.
He was calculating and confident. He would have thought little about following the women as they left the lodge area and descended that lonely, overgrown path. He must have felt emboldened once he realized how easy it was to hide there. Spring had come early to the Shenandoah Valley. Up near the lodge, grass had already become meadow: blades waved high and were bowed over by seed; wildflowers stood in ostentatious clumps. Along the Bridle Trail, the gnarled stems of mountain laurel and rhododendron had erupted in glossy, deep leaves, creating a sea of dark shadows. Towering above them, a canopy of wizened hickories and chestnut oaks made the corridor feel close and tight, blocking everything but the immediate present from view. The foliage was so thick, in fact, that days later searchers looking for the women would repeatedly walk past their hidden campsite without even noticing their brightly colored tent.
But not him.
He must have hung close, stalking them as they turned off the trail and bushwhacked back to their campsite. The roar of the nearby stream would have masked the sound of his footfall as he drew near. And even if the women had time to scream, he knew no one else could hear them.
Julianne “Julie” Williams and Laura “Lollie” Winans were skilled backcountry leaders. By May 1996, they’d each led dozens of trips: orchestrating ten-day expeditions in unforgiving landscapes like Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and New Hampshire’s White Mountains and taking inner-city women and their children on their first camping experiences in urban parks and recreation areas. Just one semester separated Lollie, age twenty-six, from a college degree in outdoor leadership at Unity College in Maine. She was confident, egoless, and a unique combination of gregarious and fiercely protective: always glad to meet you but also cautious to trust. Julie, twenty-four, had already traveled the world, volunteering in hardscrabble communities in South America, sifting through archaeological sites in Greece and Italy, surveying some of our most remote wilderness areas. She was quiet, big hearted, self-assured.
They’d met the previous spring while working at a world-renowned outdoor program for women. They’d also fallen in love there. But this was 1996: the same era when the US Supreme Court determined that antisodomy laws did not violate the Constitution and when voters in Colorado approved measures to declare homosexuality abnormal and perverse. It was also two years before Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die in a coarse prairie field dotted with sagebrush and a year after the Olympic diver Greg Louganis sparked panic in public pools across the country after announcing he was both gay and HIV-positive.
Julie and Lollie were all too aware of the repressive zeitgeist of that time. And so that new, crazy love they felt was also something they kept almost entirely private. Out in the world, they traveled as good friends—just two young women who happened to share a passion for wild places.
That passion was what had taken them down Shenandoah National Park’s Skyland Meadows Bridle Trail in May 1996. Located just two hours from our nation’s capital, Shenandoah National Park feels a lot more remote. On a map, its 196,000 acres of forest look like a lizard sprawled along the narrow ridge of Virginia’s Shenandoah mountains. Slicing through the middle of this long stretch of green is Skyline Drive—the only significant paved road in the park. During the height of the summer season, Skyline Drive is thronged with visitors, who flock to its postcard-perfect overlooks, resorts, and picnic areas. But get a mile beyond the drive on either side, and the park can seem as wild as any remote western landscape.
Decades earlier, the Bridle Trail had been well used: a thoroughfare for the nearby Skyland resort’s stables, a place where parades of families were led on trail rides day after day. In time, stable managers decided crossing busy Skyline Drive was too dangerous for novice riders, so they relocated their horse trail behind the resort complex. In the years following, Virginia’s abounding foliage—first serviceberry and interrupting ferns, then tickseed, wild blackberries, and poplar shoots—began to overtake the path. The trail slipped off park maps entirely. By the time Julie and Lollie arrived, all that remained was an unimpressive concrete marker on the edge of the park’s main road. No bigger than a Civil War gravestone, it floated half-submerged in a tangle of grass and weeds.
Despite the overgrown terrain and lack of obvious markers, Lollie and Julie somehow found their way to the hidden Bridle Trail trailhead. Weighed down by overstuffed backpacks, they slowly descended eastward. A quarter mile down the steep path, they, along with Lollie’s golden retriever mix, Taj, turned left and bushwhacked two hundred yards through the understory. There, they reached the northern fork of the Whiteoak Canyon Stream. The women set up their tent, stacked their heavy packs one upon another. They hung their water purifier; draped the tent’s blue-and-yellow rainfly and staked it to the ground. They were so far hidden even the bright nylon of that rainfly would have seemed barely a whisper through all the early-season growth: maybe a resting goldfinch or jay, if you noticed it at all.
He noticed. And he came prepared. He brought with him gloves, along with duct tape and at least one weapon. He bound and gagged the women, then separated them. He left Lollie in their tent. He brought Julie, along with her sleeping blanket and pad, to the edge of the creek. When he was done with them, he killed both women with a single, unhesitating knife stroke to their throats. And then he disappeared, seemingly without a trace.
Part I
1
More than Christmas, Ramadan, or Yom Kippur, Earth Day was the high holiday at Unity College, a small environmental studies college located in the foothills of central Maine. For several weeks each April, the campus celebrated with drum circles and shaman workshops, adventure races and hydroturbine construction contests, bike parades and recycled pageants.
I first arrived at the college in late August of 2001. It was my first teaching job after graduate school. I was twenty-seven, nervous, and certain that I needed to appear as cerebral and donnish as possible. Luckily for me, Unity College stood for none of that.
To some visitors, the college seemed like a glorified summer camp. To me, it was more a throwback to 1960s idealism, a pla ce where students proudly wore their beliefs writ large and thought nothing about cutting class to chain themselves to logging equipment or to follow a blood trail after shooting a deer.
Everything about the college was homegrown. The school itself was founded in 1965, when a printing snafu meant that the town of Unity, located about three hours north of the Maine–New Hampshire border, was omitted from the multipage atlas of the state. Outraged by the oversight, town elders launched a campaign to forever put Unity on the map. For reasons unknown, they settled on a new college as the best way to do so. An abandoned chicken hatchery became the school’s first official building. To it, they added a cinder-block gymnasium and an all-purpose building laid entirely by volunteers. The library was stocked by donations received at the town’s demolition derby, which that first summer offered free admission in exchange for two books.
Unity College’s environmental studies focus evolved out of necessity, mainly because the campus had plenty of outdoor spaces and not much in the way of classrooms or technology. But by the time I arrived to teach, it had become a bona fide leader in the field.
Even then, the campus population was small: about five hundred students and thirty faculty members. Pet dogs roamed the woodlot, waiting to be reunited with their humans during lunch breaks. The main hangout on campus was the Tavern: a kind of rumpus room with couches and foosball, a pool table, and a massive projection television and screen that covered the back wall. The Tavern also had the only beer taps in town: with the closest bar twenty-five miles away, early school administrators decided it was just safer for students to drink on campus. Before evening classes, students and faculty alike would all hang out there over Tater Tots and pints of PBR, talking about energy efficiency and disc golf and which singer-songwriter would be playing that week. Then, at the appointed time, we’d trudge up to our classroom and assume a tiny modicum of academic hierarchy.
I loved everything about it.
By April 2002, Lollie Winans had been dead for almost six years. But she was everywhere on that small campus. In 1997, the year after Lollie’s death, Unity administrators erected a massive stone fireplace in the college’s welcome center and dedicated it in her memory. The college also endowed a women’s leadership award in her name. Throughout campus, in framed photos and posters, she was often up front and smiling, forever memorialized in the ambitious wilderness trips she had once led or the campus-wide dances she’d attended.
Like a lot of Unity students, Lollie had taken a meandering route to campus. She spent her childhood in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The town, one of the richest in the nation, had been built with old Ford money. Not the Model T variety but rather from the descendants of John Baptiste Ford, who amassed a fortune during the late nineteenth century making soda ash and lye. That wealth multiplied a hundredfold when he entered the emerging world of chemical production.
Lollie was born directly into Ford’s massive inheritance. Her mother, Laura, for whom Lollie was named, graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, returned to Grosse Pointe, and married John Winans, a stockbroker. They established themselves at Wingford, one of the Ford family’s grandest compounds. There, Laura bred Labradors and volunteered with local gardening clubs. She and her family entertained friends at the guesthouse and spent weekends gunkholing on Galatea, Laura’s 140-foot motor yacht. In the winter, they’d decamp to Arrow Y, Laura’s Arizona cattle ranch, complete with cowboys and plenty of ponies for anyone who wanted to play the part. Proud Republican donors, her parents served as board members for everything from desert galleries to ladies’ riding clubs to Ducks Unlimited, a philanthropic group of hunters and conservationists. They reveled in their assured spot in the society pages.
Even as a young kid, Lollie felt like everything about this curated life was bullshit. At the age of five, she requested a tent so she could abandon her estate bedroom for the back lawn. She attended University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods and tried playing field hockey there. But team sports were never her thing, and she had absolutely nothing in common with the other students, save for the ability of their parents to pay a hefty tuition bill. Life at home had also become unbearable. Her parents divorced, and her father quickly remarried, then moved to Boca Raton with his young wife. Lollie’s mother brought home a new spouse as well. Lollie would later reveal—and only to a few of her closest friends—that that’s when the sexual abuse started. According to those same friends, she tried once—and only once—to tell her mother what was happening in her bed. The response she got was harsh enough to never try again. (Laura Winans and her second husband divorced after Lollie’s death. Laura died in 2011; he died a few years later. Shortly thereafter, Lollie’s father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease).
According to Lollie’s surviving friends, she dealt with the abuse by doing everything she could to escape Grosse Pointe. She found summer camps in the Blue Ridge Mountains where kids stayed for weeks, not days. She sent away for boarding school brochures and lobbied her mother to let her attend. She and Laura eventually compromised on one: Garrison Forest School in suburban Baltimore. Lollie liked little about the place. She made fun of the squash courts and polo team, the fashion collectives and pageant girls. But Baltimore was also a decent plane ride away from Grosse Pointe, and that was the kind of distance Lollie needed to feel safe. There, hundreds of miles away, she could bury the trauma deep down and try to act like a normal teenage girl.
Somehow, after graduation, Lollie found her way from Garrison to Sterling College, a tiny school in the equally tiny town of Craftsbury Common, Vermont, that offered an associate’s degree in environmental studies. Once a private high school, the college had found a niche for itself, first offering a kind of gap-year work experience: a place where wealthy kids who had struggled at prep schools could file down some rough edges by working on the school farm, hewing trees on the adjoining woodlot, and completing winter expeditions in the mountains of northern Vermont. Their motto was (and is) “Working hands, working minds.”
Wilson Hess was dean of students when Lollie arrived at Sterling in 1989. He was certain the place, with its strict rules, would never work for her. She’d immediately fallen in with a group of hard-partying older students who were notorious for divining every chink in the administration’s precepts: from using recreational drugs to flouting curfews and any attempts to limit sexual activity. Fearless, Lollie would scope out remote wooded spots for late-night parties at locations so secret revelers still won’t reveal them. On weekends, they’d change into their best tie-dye shirts and peasant skirts, then make clandestine drives to catch Phish at the University of Vermont. There was never coffee (way too corporate and the man). Instead, it was hand-rolled cigarettes and Mexican beer and at least one guitar. Sometimes someone would show up with weed or mushrooms. Any and all of this was cause for expulsion. But no one, not even Wilson Hess, could administer the punishment that kind of behavior warranted—at least not to Lollie.
“Lollie was always like, ‘Rules aren’t something I do,’ ” he says today.
After a disastrous and volatile visit from her father that first year, Hess began to understand why. There was so much dysfunction in that relationship—an observation confirmed by the school counselor. And even if it hadn’t been apparent that Lollie had real challenges at home, Hess and others probably would have found a way to save Lollie from certain expulsion anyway. She was just so . . . likable . . . with this tremendous life force that filled every room.
At Sterling, she and the other first-year students spent their time pulling carrots and beets. They learned to use an ax and maul to split wood and start a fire. They lugged water and built lean-tos. In December, they set out for a weeklong wilderness trip. Temperatures fell below zero, and snow blew most of the time. Lollie adored every minute of it. Hess says that expedition was a real epiphany for her and that she returned to campus with a new sense of purpose and drive. After graduating from Sterling College with an associate’s degree in 1991, Lollie and two of her classmates moved into the Woodbury House: a ramshackle place with cedar shingles, a tin roof, and a perfectly massive front porch, all located just steps from the Sterling campus. They hung hammocks and bought mismatched yard-sale chairs. Inside, they decorated with political broadsides decrying technological oppression and capitalism; they hung blocky posters printed by the nearby theater group, Bread & Puppet, espousing cheap art and the brilliant resistance inherent in growing flowers.
