You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas. It's a hot one here in coastal Virginia, and apparently
it is up there too. And what do we call it? Northwest Connecticut?
Okay, sort of an our version of hot for our listeners across the
country and around the world. Is eighty six degrees fahrenheit. And what's it
doing in Virginia? It is ninety five actual degrees fahrenheit with a heat index
of one hundred and ten, which means I'm not going running for the foreseeable
future. No, unless you go early in the morning when it's cool,
and not even then because it's also unfortunately way too humid here. Ye,
there is nothing good about this weather. Unfortunately. No, it is summertime.
I was talking to somebody this morning who has a house in Arizona into
Scottsdale, and they said it was one hundred and fifteen degrees in Scottsdale.
They're here in Connecticut for the summer. There are people that are fortunate enough
to be able to split their time between beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona seven months of
the year, and then the northwest corner of Connecticut, which is I think
equally beautiful for five months of the year. It's all civilized for our friends
in the southwest part of the United States. Out one hundred and fifteen degrees.
I was complaining about the heat earlier on social media, and a friend
of mine said, wait, aren't you from Arizona. I said, no,
I'm from here. I lived in Arizona, and because I have lived
in both places, I can tell you it does not matter that it is
a dry heat one hundred and fifteen degrees is still awful. And it is
possible, by the way, because when I got to Arizona, I did
check. You can bake cookies in your car. It is possible, really
bake cookies, Yes, it is. It is possible to bake cookies in
your car if you leave them in a closed car long enough, it is
possible. I tried to frying an egg on the sidewalk. That does not
work nearly as well. But you can make cookies in your car. Well.
On that curious note, I guess we should get started. We had
some very interesting case breaks here in the last month or so, especially when
we learned about the identification of a now deceased suspect in the nineteen ninety six
murders of Julie Williams and Lolly Winans. That case took an even more unexpected
turn just a couple of days ago, when, seemingly out of the clear
blue sky, we received a link from a close colleague to an article that
stated that Darryl David Rice, who had long been a main suspect in the
murders of Juli Williams and Lolly Winans, had very unfortunately been struck and killed
by a car mere days after his exoneration in this case, and that is
news. I think that threw both of us for a loop, completely unexpected,
and we have to thank Courtney Stewart, a longtime journalist in Charlottesville,
friend of the pod, and I've also appeared on her podcast and done radio
interviews with her. She's a radio host in Charlottesville. I think there was
some local coverage of Daryl David Rice's untimely demise, when we'll get into details
in a second. As far as I know well, Courtney was the first
person to break the news in Virginia. It hasn't gotten as much coverage as
I would like to have seen, and I still find it really shocking that
Darryl David Rice was struck and killed by a car while on his bicycle in
Missouri, and it was reported to have taken place the evening of July fifth.
So what we'd like to do is we would like to anchor our coverage
with a story from The Daily Progress by reporter Has Spencer. We're going to
go through walk you through the particulars here. We'll both offer color commentary as
wanted and needed and required, and we'll go from there and talk about the
ins and outs of this and why this is so very odd. One thing
I'll mention too, Hawes Spencer is a name I've known for years but had
only recently connected with. He's a longtime journalist himself in Charlottesville, and those
of you that are from Virginia may remember the the newspaper The Hook, which
was a weekly alternative newspaper in Charlottesville which did some really good coverage of a
number of issues. In particular, when you go back and look for older
articles on the Julie Williams Lolly Winen's murder, the Shenandoah murders, as well
as the Roe twenty nine stalker case, many of those articles are written by
Courtney Stewart and the editor at that time was Hawes Spencer. So both of
these journalists have long histories with this case and know it quite well. Very
interesting to reconnect with Haes Spencer just in the past few weeks before the news
about Darryl Rice's passing, and now he's writing about this case again after a
number of years. We should also mention that we have been doing guest shots
on some of our other podcast Colleagues podcasts with regards to not only the Shenandoah
case, but also what happened to Daryl David Rice. We are going to
include links on our Facebook pages and our show notes to Crame Analyst and to
Real Crime Profile where we've been doing guest shots on both of these. If
you want to get to double the coverage, we will make sure that we
have links to all of those in our show notes. We'll go ahead and
kick this off. This is from the Daily Progress from Haz Spencer. This
is from July eighth, twenty twenty four. The headline reads, weeks after
he was exonerated in Shenandoah murder case, Darryl Rice struck and killed by car
and the subhead a mere fifteen days after his exoneration. It's unclear if he
even knew his name had been cleared. One interesting observation, people like Kristin
Dilly and Bill Thomas, Haes, Spencer, Courtney Stewart and other journalists and
of course his legal team are using the word exonerated. Kristin, you pointed
out in our last week's episode, where were discussing the lack of clarity in
these recent press conferences. We're using the word exonerated or exoneration. It's quite
notable that the FBI refuses to use words like exonerated. I think that compounds
the tragedy of Daryl Rice being hit and killed in the middle of a significant
development. I think that's fair. In the Shenandoah case, his name has
been attached to that case for over twenty years. There's a real tragedy mixed
in here, which we'll get into as we take a look at the article.
Hey, the article begins just fifteen days after he was cleared of culpability
in the nineteen ninety six shenando A National Park double slaying that clouded his life
for twenty two years. Daryl Rice died on a dark highway halfway between Saint
Louis and Kansas City. The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported that the fifty six
year old was riding a bicycle when he was struck and killed a car on
Friday evening that would be July the fifth. It's just difficult to wrap your
brain around it. Rice's longtime defense attorney, Gerald Zerkin told The Daily Progress
it is obviously difficult to accept the extraordinary coincidence that he is killed within days
of being exonerated, but that would appear to be the case. I like
his use of the word extraordinary coincidence. When the story first dropped the other
night, my first thought was, this guy has just been cleared and suddenly
hit by a car. I don't know. I'm not one to buy into
conspiracy theories, because I don't think that's a path that lends itself to anything
good. However, the fact that this guy was just cleared but then somehow
ends up dead, it made little tiny alarm bells in my head start ringing.
I've builded it, do the same thing for you. And there's so
much about this case. And I'm referring now to Darrell David Rice's death in
a cycling accident that just seems off. Rice is killed almost eleven hundred miles
away from his last known address, which is a small town outside Durango,
Colorado, And in our communication with journalists and other people that have worked with
Rice, no one's clear on what the heck he was doing in Missouri,
almost eleven hundred miles away from his home. He was an avid cyclist his
entire life. He had actually ridden across the country from Colorado to Maryland,
where he had family and he had lived there at one point. He had
done that at least once before, but no one was aware of him leaving
Colorado and riding across these adjoining states, which would have taken him through Missouri.
The whole thing just seems so bizarre, and let's get into the details
of the article. I think there's so much about this that just doesn't feel
right. And I'm not a big conspiracy theorist either. There's something truly tragic
about this, And I'm not the biggest fan of Darryl Rice personally, I've
never met the man. But while I understand that he was absolutely not guilty
and was never guilty of any involvement in the Julie Williams Slolly Winon's murders,
which are truly horrible, I do think he was guilty of other crimes,
and I think he had serious mental health issues and a lot of personal internal
challenges that resulted in his sometimes bizarre behavior. Something about this whole thing just
is not sitting right with me. It almost strains credibility and a number of
our listeners. When we put up some of these early articles from Courtney Stewart
and other journalists expressed real skepticism. I'll let you continue. In early two
thousand and two, Rice was indicted by a Charlottesville based federal grand jury,
six years after twenty four year old Julianne Julie Williams and twenty six year old
Laura lay Winans were found dead at a campsite near Skyland Lodge in Shenandoa National
Park shortly after Memorial Day in nineteen ninety six. Passionate about the wilderness and
each other, the couple was found naked, bound and gagged, their throats
cut. It was then US Attorney General John Ashcroft, who named Rice as
the suspect, and, under the belief that the two women had been targeted
because of their sexual orientation, announced that the murders had been elevated to a
federal hate crime, meaning Rice was eligible for the death penalty. When another
man's DNA was found on the devices used to bind the two women, the
government dropped the charges against Rice, but reserved the right to reinstate them.
Stop you there for a second. One of the things that's really been bothering
me about the horrific lack of information from the FBI at these recent press conferences.
As we discussed on mind over a Murder last week, is open questions
like this. I remember when the other man's DNA was discovered on the bindings.
I think it was on the tape. There are a lot of questions
about whose DNA that might be. I think those questions could be resolved now
using advanced forensics. I'd like to see the FBI pursue these avenues whose DNA
was on the bindings. They've never said. Given how much of a big
deal they made about Rice and how they were going to see that case all
the way through up to and including his execution, you'd think that they'd go
back and revisit this and figure out, Okay, that DNA that we discovered
all those years ago, whose DNA is it? Now that we do have
a suspect, Walter Leo Jackson, let's go ahead and run that is that
Walter Leo Jackson's DNA? Is that someone else's. We are still trying to
figure out a lot of information about Walter Leo Jackson, and that is a
process that I think is going to continue, or rather, let me rephrase,
that is a process that I hope is going to continue. I hope
that the FBI does not just say we've got it and that's it. I
hope that they're going to continue Bill. For the record, Bill is making
a skeptical face there. I think that given amount of time, attention,
and resources that the Bureau has recently put back into this case, I think
that they owe it to everybody who may possibly have been impacted by Walter Leo
Jackson. They owe it to everybody to go through and really see this through
to fruition, check every single DNA source that was available, We'll check all
of his whereabouts. We know that this guy is a truly heinous and awful
kidnapper and serial rapist. They really owe it to anybody who may have been
impacted by this guy to see this investigation all the way through. And I
sincerely hope that they're going to continue to do that by testing every piece of
evidence that's available against Jackson. But I think only time is going to tell
on that. The other issue, of course, is that there could be
DNA from multiple sources, and there may be more than one offender, So
actually doing a complete job of analysis and review of all of the evidence might
lead them to conclude that Jackson had an accomplice. That's a question that should
be answered as well. I see lots of reason to move forward, and
I see right now little to know initiative being shown by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation in terms of actually pursuing all the the avenues in this case, at
least based on their remarkably short and light on information press conference of a few
weeks ago. The cloud over race only lifted on June twentieth, when the
FBI announced that a Cleveland based serial rapist who died six years ago, Walter
Leo Jackson, Senior, was the actual killer. The FBI said that multiple
DNA tests showed that Jackson raped and murdered both women. Zirkin said that a
factor compounding the tragedy of Rice's death is that he may never have learned that
forensic testing had cleared his name. He was very much off the grid as
the result of the government's unending persecution and the internet's perpetuation of the false cases
against him, said Zirkin. One of the things we've learned about Rice recently
is he was so off the grid that he didn't have a cell phone,
and he didn't have a computer. The folks on the Innocence Project, deir
N and Jerry Zirkin, his longtime attorneys, were actually trying to reach him
with this information. And we're not having a lot of luck because, if
you think about it, if you don't have a phone and you didn't have
a computer in the modern age twenty twenty four, you've made yourself difficult to
find. So they weren't even certain that they knew how to connect with him.
And if it turns out that he died in this bicycle accident without ever
learning that he had in fact been cleared exonerated, use whatever verb you think
is appropriate, although the FBI definitely isn't using either of those two. I
think that's an awful tragedy that compounds the awfulness of it, and I feel
truly terrible for Gerald David Rice. Rice came to the attention of law enforcement
in nineteen ninety seven when he attacked a female bicyclist along Skyline Drive, not
far from the scene of Williams and Winen's murder. He later pleaded guilty to
attempted kidnapping, and the woman whom he threatened and implored to get in his
pickup truck testified at his sentencing that she was certain he was going to kill
her. Charlottesville City Councilor Lloyd Snook wasn't so sure. He was Rice's defense
attorney in that case. I can't say I ever really understood him, Snuk
told the Daily Progress. Certainly what he was convicted of was very bizarre behavior.
Such behavior got Rice and eleven year federal sentence that stretched out to additional
time due to post release infractions, including failing to report to work, moving
outside prescribed geographic boundaries, and attempting suicide. However, the government's murder case
was based solely on snitches and circumstances such as being in the park that fateful
weekend. They had only tissue paper thin evidence against him, said Snook.
This is the origin of my disliked of Rice in and that I do believe
he was guilty of attacking this other woman, and I'm glad that she survived.
I'm not certain that case would have escalated to murder. He clearly was
disturbed, and he had a number of mental health issues over the years.
I'd gotten some pushback when we were talking with another colleague recently. I thought
I had read somewhere that Rice had attempted suicide at some point. Hawes Spencer
here is mentioning that, and I am fairly certain I've read that before.
When we get into the details of the bicycle accident, the idea that this
could have been a suicide attempt on Rice's part cross my mind. You'll see
more as the story unfolds. While the shenando A murder case against him was
dropped in two thousand and four, state prosecutors suggested with a subsequent indictment that
Rice may have been behind the mysterious disappearance of women along a stretch of US
twenty nine between Manassas and Charlottesville. The so called Route twenty nine Stalker was
blamed for the attempted abduction of at least twenty women in the mid nineties,
hailing them onto the side of the highway and telling them their cars were throwing
sparks. The figure also was blamed for the disappearance of at least nine women
into the twenty tens. Of those later cases, only three were ever closed,
resulting in the conviction of two different men on murder charges. Those,
of course, are the cases of Morgan Harrington and Hannah Graham, who were
killed by serial killer Jesse Matthew, and that of Alexis Murphy, who was
killed by serial killer Randy Taylor, who may also be responsible for the murder
of Samantha Clark. In nineteen ninety six, the same year as the Shenandoah
murders, Harrisonburg native Alicia Showalter Reynolds was found dead in Culpepper County after she
was last seen standing along US twenty nine with a man peering at her car
engine. Rice, his lawyers said, took a plee in one such stocking
case only because he won a deal with no additional jail time and because the
government seemed willing to reach across jurisdictions to convict Rice of something. Now,
this is the part that gets very frustrating, because once Rice was in the
crosshairs of the FBI and the National Park Service, it was like they couldn't
let go. And even though the evidence in the Shenandoah case clearly indicated that
it was not Rice who was responsible for those murders, and we know now
that it was Walter Leo Jackson, it felt like the FBI just turned into
Inspector Javert and just couldn't let Rice go. As a suspect, and it
was one charge after another, all of which seemed designed to extend his jail
stays and put more pressure on him even though they had the wrong guy.
We spent a little bit of time on this subject when we talked to Laura
Richards of Crime Analysts the other day. A Google search will take you to
some really interesting pieces of information with regard to Daryl David Rice, and one
of the things that I found was a notice of intent to seek the death
penalty against Rice. It lists a ton of evidence, a lot of which
our colleague Kate Miles has said is either overblown or completely fabricated. And it
lists all of these things, including the Route twenty nine stockings that they believed
Rice was capable of with tissue paper thin evidence. It is very frustrating to
see really how hard the government was gunning for this guy. And we'll put
links to that particular document in our show notes as well. Quote from the
beginning, the government manipulated the evidence against Rice and in some cases fabricated it,
said Zurkin during a June twenty four press conference after Rice's name was cleared
in the Shenandoah case. The preliminary accident report filed by the Missouri State Highway
Patrol indicates that Rice was riding a bicycle around nine fifty two pm Friday in
rural Cheriton County near the Missouri River. Although he was in Missouri, Rice's
address was listed as Montrose, Colorado at the time of his death. I
didn't know he was in Missouri, Sirkin said, nor did the local sheriff,
who saw Rice cycling near the town of Salisbury, a little more than
eleven miles east of the accident site earlier Friday. He was riding on the
shoulder at that point in daylight, so I didn't think much about it.
Cheriton County Sheriff Eric Phillips told the Daily Progress. But at night, shortly
before the crash to Shareff's deputies noticed Rice peddling without lights or reflectors near this
cenate of the two lane US twenty four, the county's main thoroughfare. They
were going to turn around to check on him when a car came over the
hill and hit him, said Phillips. The sheriff said that one deputy witnessed
the impact and that both rendered CPR until medics arrived. Rice. He said
with airlifted to a hospital where he died. So much about this that just
isn't working for me. He's almost eleven hundred miles away from his last known
address. None of the people that he is close with, his attorneys,
his sister, and other people who had assisted him in the past. Remember
I mentioned he had once ridden across the country from Colorado to Maryland on a
bicycle. They provided financial assistance because Rice wasn't able to work, because he
was harassed everywhere he went. Because people would find out that he was a
suspect in in a brutal homicide that of Julie Williams and Lawley Winans. People
would get very upset about the fact that they thought there was a killer living
in their midst. As it turns out, he wasn't a killer. He
struggled mightily in the twenty two years after the FBI went after him so aggressively.
The strange thing is Rice riding a bicycle from Colorado, perhaps to Maryland
or someplace east is not out of the question. He wasn't able to do
those things without some form of financial assistance from his attorneys and his family.
None of them were in contact with him regarding a planned bicycle trip. So
there's something about this that, just as I said, it just doesn't sit
well with me. That this guy is almost eleven hundred miles away from his
last known address, and this is about eighty eight hours on a bicycle according
to Google Maps, which would be days and days of writing. It almost
feels like he might have headed out from his home near Durango, Colorado.
Perhaps he did have some way of knowing that there had been significant news in
the case that he had been charged in so many years ago. I just
don't know, and now we're not going to be able to ask him.
You're listening to mindover Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our
sponsors. We're back here at mindover Murder. Before we get back to the
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it if you could support us in any way that you can. Any donation
from five dollars to whatever you can afford is very much appreciated and will be
incredibly helpful. The link is in the show notes and in our social media
pages. As always, thanks for your support. Now back to mind over
Murder. Bill. One thing that I think our listeners are going to be
very interested in is the fact that you also are a cyclist. This isn't
a trip that you would take on your own and unsupported, correct, Like,
you would need to have a place to stay, you would need to
have resources available to you if you're taking your bike all that way. Would
you need to stop at various points for mechanical issues or anything like. I
am not a long haul cyclist, so I have no idea. But I
know that you said you we cycled, So would you make this kind of
trip unsupported with no financial resources or help? No, I don't think so.
And I would love to see the bicycle that he was riding and see
if it was set up properly for what would be referred to as long distance
touring. If he left Colorado and rode east, which would take him through
Missouri, he's about midway through Missouri at the place where he's struck by the
carts near Salisbury, Missouri. These are very rural highways, By the way,
the sheriff had mentioned in one of the articles I read that they are
only seven thousand people in the entire county. It's very spread out. Rice
might have been able to make the track on his bicycle. He's fifty six
years old and in good physical condition. He wouldn't necessarily have to stay in
hotels. I'd like to see the bicycle. Does it have panniers on at
pagnes, which are the bags on the back and front of bicycles to help
carry gear. I mean, at a minimum, he'd have to have food,
some clothing to change into. Perhaps it's a simple toolkit to keep his
bicycle going, a couple of spare tubes. If he's not staying in hotels
or motels as he rides along, and much more likely is camping out,
then he's likely got to have a sleeping bag, perhaps a lightweight tent.
When I heard about the accident and then got onto Google Maps to see where
the heck is this, my first thought was I was hoping his family could
see his body to confirm that it was him and how he died. And
the second thing is I would dearly like to see photographs of the bicycle.
What it looked like after the accident, and does it have any of the
gear that I've described which a long distance cyclist would need. The state report
indicates that the collision destroyed the car, a two thousand and one Nissan Maxima,
driven by a thirty one year old man. A twenty two year old
female passenger was taken to a hospital for the treatment of minor injuries. Now,
someone on our Facebook page did express some incredulity with the statement the collision
destroyed the car. They said, how does a bike destroy a car?
Would a car hitting a bike at the speed that they were going, would
that actually total the car? Can you give some information about that? Sure?
First of all, this article says destroyed. Some of the other articles
we said they use the word totaled. Now, this is a two thousand
and one Nissan Maxima, so it's an older car. It doesn't have a
lot of inherent value. If this person driving the car strikes Rice and does
enough damage to his car, I believe the driver's a mail that car could
be totaled by his insurance company. That doesn't mean the car has Spencer uses
the expression destroyed, I think it could mean for all intents and purposes,
the damage to the car exceeds the value of the remaining value of the car.
Now, a couple of things though. Let's just say I don't exactly
know how much Darryl Rice weighed, but let's say he weighs one hundred and
seventy five pounds. I'm completely making that up. He looks tall and thin
in the photographs I've seen of him, and he's on a bicycle, which
puts him in an elevated position. If he is struck by a car,
a man's body is then thrown by the car, it could do a significant
amount of damage to the vehicle. We've had incidents here in Connecticut recently where
people have been struck by cars, and large animals dear moose, etc.
Have been struck by vehicles and they've done a tremendous amount of damage. Now,
a moose is a whole other category because they can be twelve hundred pounds.
Daryl Rice and his bicycle were up over two hundred pounds, and it
might have some of the equipment that we talked about as well. He might
have bags and packs and things like that that he's obviously very badly injured.
They medivacked him out of there on a rescue helicopter and were unable to save
his life. I absolutely think that if you struck someone who they claim was
riding down the center line of the highway, which you may have been to
avoid the dark edge of the road where they might have been broken glass or
debris or things like that. This accident happened at nearly ten pm, so
it's well after dark. It's possible that Rice might have put himself in this
situation because he was trying to avoid the edge of the road. He might
have been riding after dark because it was cooler. We started off this episode
of Mind over Murder talking about how hot it's been. Now I can go
back and take a look at the weather for Missouri. It was only a
couple of weeks ago. My guess is it was pretty hot, and he
might have been trying to avoid the heat of the sun. That may be
another reason for him lighting at night now, the lack of lights and reflectors.
These are unfortunate choices, it would appear, but I am highly confident
that an older vehicle striking a grown man and a bicycle would do significant damage
to the cyclist and to the car before he was prosecuted for attacking the cyclist
in Shenandoa National Park. Rice was a computer programmer living in Maryland, but
the murder prosecutions and archives press reports kept Rice unemployed and on the move.
His lawyer said, Daryl has been forced to be off the grid due to
all the horrible media coverage of his case and what the government has done,
said Zirkin, He's just been trying to survive and can't get a job and
was driven into hopelessness. That is the great tragedy of false accusations. Jerry
Zerkin's got a lot of good points here, this crusade to go after Daryl
David Rice without ever proving that he was responsible for the murder of Julie Williams
and Lolly Winans. And they never proved that he was responsible for the murder
of Alicia Showalter Reynolds and the other victims in the Route twenty nine stalker case.
Yet they continued to harass him to the extreme. I believe for decades
is part of the reason why he gets killed out on this lonely highway at
ten o'clock at night, eleven hundred miles from his last known address. There's
a lot of very interesting questions here that I think we're all really looking forward
to having answers to. Some of those questions we may never have answers to.
Unfortunately, I think that the tragedy of all of this is that this
man who had been persecuted, there's really no better word for it, in
a case that he demonstrably was not at fault for, has now died,
and it is entirely possible he did not know his name was cleared, and
I think that is just a tragedy of the highest order. I feel really
terrible about this. Like I said, I don't like to go down the
conspiracy well because nothing good ever comes from that. But it does feel a
little the timings a little odd, let's just put it that way. I'd
have to agree. It occurred to me that del Rice could have been in
a strong position to sue the FBI and the Virginia State Police. His decision
not something he would have ever discussed with us. We didn't have a relationship
with the man. I just knew about him for all these years. With
this just relentless pursuit of Rice for all of these years, certainly the FBI
and the National Park Service couldn't have known in two thousand and two when they
were charging Rice, But by the time their own forensic expert testified that it
was not Rice whose DNA was found on the edges of the bindings, which
I believe were duct tape. Certainly, by the time several more years had
gone by and more work had been done, it was very clear that Rice
was not the right suspect. Yet they kept going after him. And at
the same time, when we have FBI agents like Jane Collins driving around in
their vehicles, and this was widely reported in The Hook and other newspapers,
The Washington Post, a number of media sources reported that there seemed to be
resistance by the FBI in the National Park Service to conduct the additional forensic testing
that was required, which I believe would have cleared Rice much earlier. Rice
wasn't the right guy. Now we have an announcement in twenty twenty four that
Walter Leo Jackson raped and murdered Julie Williams and Lollywinings. By the way,
the sexual assault was news to all of us. There's a tremendous gap then
between two thousand and two and twenty twenty four that's about twenty two years.
I believe the FBI knew that Rice wasn't the right guy a number of years
ago. Well, do you want to share the conversation that you had with
one of the four were FBI agents on the Colonial Parkway murders case when he
mentioned to you in a phone call that they felt they had a good suspect
for Shenandoah. It seemed to me like the FBI just couldn't let go.
I recall a conversation that I had a number of years ago. This has
to be around twenty ten, because this was during the time frame where he
was handling the case. This is before our current case agent. He had
just attended a briefing at FBI Richmond. He was based in the FBI Norfolk
office, and he told me, oh, we have a suspect in the
Julie Williams Lalley Winen's case. And he was very confident about it. And
I said, if you tell me that the name of the suspect is Daryl
David Rice, I'm gonna spit. And he said it's Daryl David Rice.
And I said, good naturedly, I hope that's the sound of me spitting,
and I said to him at the time, you guys haven't been able
to prove that it's been Daryl David Rice for all these years. Why aren't
you more open to the idea that it could have been someone else. You've
been dragging around this evidence since nineteen ninety six, and you still can't prove
that it's Rice. Why aren't you open to other suspects? And of course
a great question here it is all these years later and it turns out it's
not Rice. I really do think that the FBI knew it wasn't Rice a
number of years ago, and when Stanley Meter came in as the new Special
Agent in charge in the Richmond office and ordered a top to bottom review of
this case. And I appreciate the fact that he did this. That led
directly to them re examining all the evidence, which should have happened before twenty
twenty one. But it is what it is. There's just a pattern here
with the FBI of foot dragging in these cases that I do not understand.
And now we have this situation where they're finally identifying suspects, all of whom
were conveniently dead. It's troubling that the FBI dragged its feet literally for decades
while these men were alive. We have situations like in the Colonial Parkway murders.
We have Alan Wade Wilmer Senior dying in twenty seventeen. Had he been
re examined earlier, he could have spent the last part of his life in
jail where he belonged. The same thing with Walter Leo Jackson. As we
were discussing on crime analysts, there's a very disturbing pattern, and we're going
to have to do some more digging on this one. Why was Walter Leo
Jackson Senior serving such short sentences for increasingly serious kidnapping and rape? Are there
other cases that he was involved in where he wasn't charged. There's just so
many odd things about this. But now conveniently he's dead and the FBI is
saying, Aha, we solve the case. But they're solving the case after
these people have died. I appreciate the hard work, but I can't help
but think if they had refocused their resources years ago, these people could have
been identified and appropriately punished. What I'll do is, once I've read a
book, Let's say I've read Kate miles trailed. I will sit and I
will annotate all throughout the book, as any good English teacher would do.
But then I'll sit and I'll write my findings out on legal pads so that
I can have them right in front of me. And one of the things
that I was noticing the other day is the fact that Darrell David Rice was
convicted for his assault on Yvonne Malbasha, the cyclist in Shenandoah. And he
should have been convicted for that. He absolutely should have. That was not
anything that any one deserves to have done to them. He deserved to be
convicted. He'dn't serve to do crime. He was sentenced to fourteen years for
that attempted kidnapping and sexual assault. Meanwhile, you've got Walter Leo Jackson who's
convicted of truly heinous rape, kidnapping, and assault, and he's doing not
nearly that amount of time. And I just don't understand some of the sentencing
guidelines, and I realize they vary from state to state. I just I'm
looking at some of these things and asking myself, Okay, So Daryl David
Rice gets fourteen years in nineteen ninety eight for the assault on von Labasha,
and like I said, he did deserve to be sentenced for that. Absolutely,
I'm not saying that he didn't deserve that. At the same time,
you've got very different sentencing for two very different men and very different types of
crimes. Even once the case against Darryl David Rice was ultimately dismissed, it
was dismissed without prejudice. They could bring it back at any point and retry
it at any time, and I don't understand why they ultimately decided, you
know what, we want to reserve the right to bring this up again and
again and again. I just I don't understand what the thinking was here,
And I really do feel badly for Daryl David Rice. I am not,
as you said, I'm not a member of the Daryl David Rice fan club.
He was not necessarily the best guy in the whole entire world, but
he did not deserve what he got from the FBI at all, in any
way, shape or form. No one deserves to be persecuted like this,
and that is what it is. It was persecution. No one was served
well in this case, and I do truly feel very badly for Darryl for
what his life ultimately became. And now for how his life ended, and
the fact that, like I said, I know, I keep coming back
to it, but it feels almost like Greek tragedy to me. The fact
that he may not have even known at the end of his life that he
had been exonerated in this crime that had plagued him for so many years.
I'd like to think that he may have found out somehow that there was news
and that he had been exonerated. I can't help but think that's why he
got on his bicycle and started heading east from Colorado. Perhaps we'll find out
someday that he mentioned it to someone, or that he somehow found out even
though he hadn't yet spoken to his attorneys or his family, that he decided
to head east. And perhaps perhaps I'm romanticizing this a little bit, but
I almost pictured him as heading back towards his old life. We'll see if
we ever find out if there's any truth to this. But I understand your
analogy about the Greek tragedy. This is just so horrible. I think Jerry
Zurkin hits the nail on the head when he says that is the great tragedy
of these false accusations. Absolutely, so we did do some additional coverage on
this with crime analysts and with real crime profile, and so we will provide
links to both of those episodes when they drop in our show notes and on
our Facebook in social media pages. Obviously, the saga of Daryl David Rice,
Walter Leo Jackson, and the break in the Shenandoah case is not one
hundred percent closed. I'm hoping that we will hear more in the coming days.
If the FBI continues to do their work more about again Bill gets the
airol, you could probably hear it, but hear that you to hear it
through the audience. I'm hoping that we will have more information on Walter Leo
Jackson and any other potential victims. I sincerely hope that he is being looked
at as a potential Route twenty nine stalker suspect. I truly do, and
I'm hoping that maybe in the coming weeks or months, maybe we will get
a break in those cases as well. I sincerely hope that, for example,
Sadie Showalter and Alicia Showalter Reynold's family can finally know some piece and have
some answers as to what happened to Alicia, But I'm assuming that maybe that's
a couple of weeks or months down the road. We will see that is
going to do it for this episode of mind Over Murder. As always,
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a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill
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