Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders
Kathryn Miles
Algonquin Books
In May of 1996, two young women, both skilled hikers, entered Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to begin a weeklong wilderness trip. Their sojourn came to a grisly end when they were brutally attacked and killed, later found bound and gagged in their sleeping bags. Portland journalist and author Kathryn Miles writes about this still unsolved tragedy in Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, published in paperback last month. In the course of her investigation, Miles also uncovers evidence potentially linking the murder of the two backpackers with one of the most notorious crimes in Maine’s history: the kidnapping, torture, rape and killing of 12-year-old Sarah Cherry in Bowdoin 35 years ago.
Miles’ narrative is a searing indictment of law enforcement incompetence, a cri de coeur for the senseless deaths of the two hikers, and a lament for the loss of our modern sense of wilderness as a place of sanctuary.
In the summer of 2001, Miles began teaching at Unity College, a small ecology school in the foothills of Western Maine. Miles describes it as “a place where students … thought nothing of cutting class to chain themselves to logging equipment or to follow a blood trail after shooting a deer.” It’s also where one of the hikers, Lollie Winans, pursued a degree in adventure therapy a few years prior to Miles’ arrival. Winans, a free spirit beloved by faculty and fellow students, made a deep and lasting impact on the college community. She met Julie Williams, the other hiker, at an outdoor program for women and the two fell in love.
Five years after the murders, Miles found the Unity community still grieving the loss of Lollie and Julie. As Miles dove into the details of the case, she began to question the findings and conclusions of the local authorities and the FBI. Their competence was in doubt early on, when authorities promoted the absurd theory that the case was a murder-suicide.
Numerous substantive leads went cold for lack of follow-up, while law enforcement instead focused on a suspect, Darrell Rice, whom Miles describes as “a stooge for [the authorities’] campaign to seem tough on hate crimes.” The evidence linking Rice to the crime was circumstantial, at best, yet law enforcement harassed him for years, culminating in a post-9/11 news conference during which then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Rice’s arrest. Rice was subsequently convicted of the murders, but the conviction unraveled after the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia introduced DNA tests that exonerated Rice and pointed toward another suspect: serial killer Richard Evonitz.
Evonitz’s methods of kidnapping, torture, sexual assault and murder closely aligned with those involved in the killing of Lollie and Julie. As authorities closed in on him in 2002, he called his sister and confessed to having “committed more crimes than I can remember” before he took his own life with a gun.
Here’s where the story takes an unanticipated turn, back toward Maine. Miles’ investigative work reveals that Evonitz was in the Portland area, working as a welder for Bath Iron Works, when Cherry was murdered. BIW’s headquarters is about 20 miles from the murder scene, and Evonitz, who lived alone during his time here, knew how to steal cars.
As with Rice’s conviction, the evidence linking Dennis Dechaine to Cherry’s murder is largely circumstantial, though some of it is compelling. Miles and others — notably Colin Woodard and his colleagues at the Portland Press Herald — have identified several other potential suspects who got scant scrutiny during the investigation of Cherry’s killing, including Evonitz. Dechaine is currently seeking a new trial based on recent DNA tests that continue to put his guilt in doubt.
Miles’ reporting and criticism of the Shenandoah investigations clearly struck a nerve. While on her book tour promoting Trailed, she was provided with security due to credible threats from a law enforcement official. As Deirdre Enright of Virginia’s Innocence Project has observed, “The idea that prosecutors and investigators hunker down on their original dumb theory is not news at all. Sometimes it just becomes more and more impossible for them to admit they made a mistake.”
Miles’ spellbinding book strongly suggests the last chapters of the Shenandoah and Cherry murders have yet to be written.
