When Kathryn Miles came to Crozet last year to talk about her most recent book, Trailed, she explained how she came to write it, what she learned, and why the double homicide of two young women skilled in wilderness survival had yet to be solved, partly because of the recalcitrance of the authorities involved in the case over a span of almost 30 years.
At Bluebird & Company, Miles told a full house about her own experience finding comfort in nature and her sorrow that the 1996 crime affected others who felt protected and inspired by our beautiful woodlands and mountains. Unlike other true crime writers, Miles said she was not one to seek out darkness or evil, instead pursuing––as she has in her other books––in-depth reporting on dramatic natural occurrences.
Of course, she found the murders abhorrent, even more so as she got to know the families and friends of Julianne “Julie” Williams and 26-year-old Laura “Lollie” Winans, who were found dead near Skyland Lodge early that summer. Miles was angry: angry at the killer, angry at the way a combination of Park and FBI officials handled the case; angry at the way a feckless pothead named Darrell Rice was railroaded, reviled and continually hounded in the almost three decades since he was first accused of the murder. This was in spite of mountains of contradictory evidence, including several items that bore the DNA of the male attacker, DNA that was definitely not from Rice.
Earlier this month, evidence that’s been available for fifteen years proved the real killer was a serial rapist named Walter Jackson, who died in jail, but Miles is still angry.
“They’ve had this technology for more than a decade,” Miles said. “Jackson could have been prosecuted, the families could have had some closure, and Darrell could have had a normal life.”
Darrell Rice was no angel. He terrified a female bicyclist in the Park and served 10 years for this offense. While in jail, he was given an undercover cellmate whose only job was to somehow goad him into admitting to the more serious crime. Later, law enforcement and an assortment of prosecutors tried tirelessly to connect him to the murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds, a victim of the “Route 29 stalker,” a murder for which there was even less evidence of Rice’s guilt. Law enforcement even went so far as to fabricate a fake Washington Post page designed to push Rice into a confession.
Why did authorities continue to focus on Rice rather than using what evidence they had to find the real killer? “It was confirmation bias,” Miles said. “They just couldn’t admit they had been wrong.” The bias became institutional. As different staff members came and went over the decades, the certainty of Rice’s guilt remained entrenched.
Dierdre Enright, a professor at UVA’s Law School and head of the local chapter of the Innocence Project, has investigated the crime from the start, including sorting through evidence long since stored in a shed, and she did manage to correct some of the faulty assumptions. She found an item identified as a sock was really a glove full of DNA and asked the government to test it back at a time when Jackson was still alive.
Enright, along with Rice’s lawyer, Gerald Zerkin, said in a recent news conference that when they’d asked for a DNA test, the answer was “No, Rice just has to come in and confess.” Meanwhile, Rice, who had served his lengthy sentence, could find no peace. When he stayed with his sister, the neighbors objected. Everywhere he went, he was hounded, until he disappeared from normal life. For a while, he kept in touch with Zerkin or Enright, but eventually all communication lapsed.
Neither Miles nor Zerkin nor Enright know why the FBI decided to go ahead with another DNA test. Although glad that Rice has been exonerated, Enright said this kind of thing happens too often.
This case had all the earmarks of a justice system gone awry, said Enright: a defendant who had committed a lesser offense, bad prosecution, uninterested defense attorneys, a jailhouse informant, elaborate lies designed to trick the defendant, intense hours spent trying to wring out a confession, and millions of our tax dollars spent to prove a point.
“How can we stop it?” Enright asked rhetorically. Zerkin pointed out that four attorneys working over many years couldn’t stop it. They asked journalists at the conference to help hold law enforcement accountable. They praised Miles, a long-time journalist, for bringing this problem to the public in Trailed.
In a later interview, Miles said she now sees that as part of her role. “I’m not anti-law enforcement at all,” she said, “but we need more transparency. And, as journalists, we are the ones to bear witness.”
