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 back to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin
Dilly. That makes me Bill Thomas. We're joined for a second episode by
Kate Miles, author of Trailed, One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders,
which is getting quite a lot of interest considering that there was just a
big announcement made in this case. Kate, thank you for joining us again.
Hi still simmering with righteous indignation over here, as you should be I'm
always looking for some good news when we talk about these cases, and obviously
getting some degree of information and a potential offender named and some answers, at
least some, I would say, is good news. One other piece of
good news, I think that's in the mix here. I struggle with the
pronunciation of the attorney general's name, but I'll do my best and do it.
Kristin will help me if I stumble. Virginia Attorney General Jason Mieris,
I got to think back to my life in Los Angeles and get a little
bit more Latino going on. There has made funds available for sexual Assault Kit
Initiative grants. These are being given around the country, but in Virginia in
particular. The backlog at the State Lab in Virginia and at Quantico, the
FBI lab, also located in Virginia, is horrendous, particularly at Quantico,
because they handle the FBI's cases and they handle cases for other law enforcement agencies.
There are seventeen thousand different law enforcement agencies across the country, and the
smaller ones definitely don't have their own labs. So the FBI's backlog is incredible.
And I don't mean that in a good way. We've been waiting in
some cases with the Colonial Parkway murders evidence for a year or more just for
let's say three pieces of evidence to be tested. If the results are not
what they want them to be, they might send in more evidence, but
then we're literally waiting another year for test results. The good news is there
are private labs around the country, many of whom we've talked to here on
Mind over Murder, and with these Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grants, they are
able to test untested rape kits, evidence from unsolved homicides, help identify unidentified
remains, etc. One of the things that came out was the recent news
in the Colonial Parkway murders is directly as a result of a SAKI grant,
and this result is also partially as a result of another one of these SAKI
grants. I want to make sure that we're thanking the Attorney General and the
people that run the SAKI initiative around the country. It's really important and this
is a bright spot because this allows us to use taxpayer funds to take the
evidence to the private labs who have the state of the art equipment and can
turn around things in a matter of weeks or months instead of literally years.
I noticed that after the FBI press release came out, I noticed that the
Virginia State Police, who were also essential to helping solve this case, they
issued their own press release, and then the Attorney General sent out his own
press release, and they all deserve credit for or helping to move this case
forward. I know there's lots of places where we're frustrated, but that's actually
a bright spot, and I think it's good news for families who are waiting
answers in cases across the country. Yes, absolutely, and we know that
there is a tremendous underfunding of this kind of work which needs to be resolved.
It should not be the case that the FBI lab takes a year or
more to be able to process. It should not be the case that they
have such a backlog that they're not able to do their work, which is
good work, we should say. The three of us were talking off air
earlier. We were trying to pin down the number of untested rape kits in
the US. We can't even pin that down. We were finding statistics as
variable as twenty five thousand to one hundred thousand. It may even be more.
Those are all people and their families and their loved ones who deserve justice,
who haven't had justice because again, the kits haven't even been initially tested,
let alone retested. That's an epidemic in this country, and it's something
that needs to get resolved immediately. Absolutely could not agree more. Last episode,
Kate, we were talking a little bit about what we know so far
and also what we don't know about Walter Leo Jackson Senior aka Leo. One
of the things that you had mentioned that I thought was particularly interesting was the
fact that the FBI said this guy's an avid hiker. I don't really know
how they know that. I would be very interested to know how they know.
I'm curious if you could take a couple of minutes before we get into
some more information about Walter Leo Jackson, can you explain a little bit about
the kind of hiking culture around the at and the sort of people not only
that we're hiking the trail, amazing people like the ants that were hiking the
trail, but also one thing that you mentioned in your book was the number
of alarming people who were also hiking the at around the time that Lally and
Julie were on their trip to Shenandoah. Can you get to that a little,
because that was probably one of the most alarming parts of your book for
me, is the sort of characters who also end up on the trail who
may not be as upstanding as the rest of us. Sure, and this
was one of the culture clashes that really made a lot of this investigative work
difficult. The first and primary culture class was whenever a violent crime happens in
the National Park, that crime investigation becomes the joint purview of the FBI and
the National Park Service law enforcement rangers. And as I say in the book,
those are two very different cultures. And we saw a lot of the
infighting that happened just between those two cultures just when it came to how are
we going to bag and catalog and process the evidence from this particular crime scene.
So we saw that there's another major culture clash that's happening, and that's
between both the FBI and the National Park Service police and the hikers on the
Appalatian Trail. We should say, and I really always need to do this
strongly, especially for my friends at the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which is the
nonprofit arm of the trail that stewards and manages that Lolly and Julie were not
on the at, they were just off of the AT. I think that
gets misrepresented a lot of the time. They had spent significant amount of time
on the trail. At that time in particular, and still today, there
were certain cultural things that happened on the trail. For instance, folks there
rarely go by their given names. They almost always have trail names. Those
trail names change over time, and they're given to you by someone else.
As I say it in the book, at the beginning of a hike,
you may be a little hapless on the trail, and maybe you leave your
stuff all over the place. You may be given the trail name yard Sale,
and then that may evolve into something else, so yard arm or whatever.
And so just tracking down these people who may have had multiple trail names
was really tricky, and the folks doing this investigation didn't come from that culture.
One of the really interesting things to me is that the Appalachian Trail Conservancy
sent some of their own people down, both because they weren't getting information about
this crime and so they didn't know how to keep their people safe, and
also because they realized really quickly that both of these law enforcement agencies were way
out of their element when it came to parsing this out, so they went
to advocate for the trail and the people on the trail. The other thing
that I think is really important to keep in mind here is again nineteen ninety
six, long before cell phones, long before any smart technology, what hikers
on the trail have always done is use trail logs to keep each other safe.
We saw this and the very tragic murder of Ron Sanchez just a few
years ago. The individual in that case responsible for that murder had already been
known to people on their hikes, and so they were leaving notes to each
other in these trail logs saying watch out for this, he's no good,
or whatever else too. So that's how they're communicating with each other, and
that's the lifeline of hikers, especially pre cell phones. One of the first
things that happened after this murder was at the National Park Service investigators and the
FBI came in and took all of those trail logs. So the three hikers
didn't have a way to communicate with each other, and they were understandably terrified.
So there's a lot to that. You mentioned the number of people who
were reasonable suspects because of their unsavory past. That was a little bit more
Shenandoora National Park than it was the trail so far as we know. But
there were cameras at the entrances to the park that were recording license plates that
then investigators were then running against registrations to figure out who was in the park
at the time. And as an avid trail user and an avid National park
visitor, I was highly disturbed by the number of sex offenders, people who
were evading, people for whom there were warrants for their arrest, who were
in Sherenandoah just that weekend of the crimes as well too, and so that
created a very big pool of potential suspects that I think was really hard to
work through. The other thing that for me became very clear very quickly is
the lack of accounting system for crime in the national parks. And this continues
to be true today. Yes, each park is it is at the purview
of the superintendent if how and when crime gets recorded and investigated. So we
still to this day, despite internal inspector general reviews by the Department of the
Interior. Despite Government Accountability Office reviews, we have no codified reporting system for
crime in our national parks, and we cannot say with any certainty at what
rate it happens, how many murders happen in a year, how many rapes,
how many violent crimes, how much malfeasance occurs at the hands of rangers.
And this again is information that the American public needs to know. We've
been dealing with the National Park Service in the Colonial Parkway murders for thirty seven
years. There's no question that the National Park Service doesn't want you to be
thinking about crime when you're enjoying your time in the national park. Even what
we talked about in our last episode, I have still never been able to
get over the fact that Julie Williams and Lolly Winans were brutally murdered. It
wasn't a bear attack, it wasn't a murder suicide, it was none of
those things. It was clearly a double homicide, and yet they never informed
the thousands of people that passed through there that there had been a double homicide
of these two women hiking in camping at the Shenandoah National Park. I've never
been able to get over the fact that the National Park Service got away with
not even telling their visitors that an extremely violent crime had taken place, and
they had no way of knowing whether those other visitors would still be at some
risk. They didn't even know if the offender had left the National Park.
It still shocks me to this day. There was an internal memo that I
quote in the book in which there was a very deliberate decision made to withhold
this information and if asked to deny it. And it was really because of
the intrepid reporting of local reporters, including the Washington Blade and LGBTQ plus publication
in Washington, DC. And it was really the work of these local reporters
who kept at it and kept saying, how could this have been a bear
attack? How could this have been a murder suicide? What are you telling
us? And why are you not telling us? It was because of that
bootstrap reporting that the truth came out. And I owe so much of my
work to them and what they were doing day in and day out again and
again from nineteen ninety six onward. One of the things that I love the
most about your book is that there is so much healing back the layers of
what has previously been hidden for so long, and it's just one bombshell after
another for the first two hundred pages. I'm sitting there and I've been highlighting
and annotating this even more than I did the first time around when I read
it, and I've got whole entire pages where I'm like, oh my gosh,
this is crazy. I can't believe this actually happened. There is so
much You'd use the term mouthfeasance in our last episode, and I think that
is true on so many levels, not just with the FBI, with the
NPS as well. This is really just appalling and revisiting the book now for
this reporting, I'm still appalled by it. What if anything can our listeners
do to tell NPS and FBI, Hey, we want some more accountability here.
Is there anything that we can do as National Park users and hikers and
things like that, or do we just have to let this be what it
is. I'm really glad you asked that question, and I think there's so
much that we can do. We feel I think a lot of us feel
disempowered right now, and I think more than a few people feel pretty cynical
about politics in America right now for some pretty good reasons. But yeah,
no, we need to be doing a lot more. And as somebody who
really loves to be outside in the wilderness, I really take to heart what
Roosevelt first said, and that ken Burns echoed that the National Park System,
if it was not America's best idea, it was a really great idea that
America had, which is, let's make sure that the wilderness is accessible to
everyone here. That was a great idea that has not happened. The wilderness
is not accessible to differently abled people. It is not accessible to people who
identify in what we call socially subordinate groups, so people who identify as queer
or non binary or bipoc or differently abled or whatever else. And we have
not shorn that up. We have not made the wilderness accessible to folks.
So one of the things we can do is insist upon that. The other
thing we can do is we can insist upon better funding for the National Park
Service so that there are qualified rangers and they have the equipment they need to
do the work. We saw a real spite in visitors to the park during
COVID, and that has not abated. So we have even more visitors than
ever, and yet the Park Service continues to atrophy in terms of its funding
that's available to it. And the other thing. One of the most shocking
things to me during writing the book was beginning to realize that while there are
many very service oriented, diligent, talented individuals doing law enforcement work in the
parks, it is also true that there are people who are not that doing
law enforcement in the parks. The great work of Paul Berkowitz, who has
written several books on the subject and who was a whistleblower as a law enforcement
ranger for the part, he identified this very real problem that occurs in these
parks, which is very similar to what we saw with the Catholic priest abuse
that was happening in New England, and that is rangers and their bad behavior
are ultimately rewarded by these lateral transfers and promotions. One of the rangers who
played a prominent role not only in Kathy and Becky's investigation, but also Lolly
and Julie's later went on to take evidence without a warrant to put it in
an evidence locker when his supervisor insisted that he return it because it was illegally
captured. He responded by changing the lock on the evidence locker, and for
that he received a lateral move. That kind of stuff is just not okay.
Policing that and holding the park Service accountable for that, that's really important
as well too. Everybody deserves to feel safe on any National Park Service land,
regardless of any identification or orientation they have, and as a country we've
really sat down on that in ways that are not defendable. One of the
questions that has been asked, not only for Kate but also too, and
I think this is a good time to address it, is whether or not
there is any possibility that Leo Jackson might be involved in the Colonial Parkway murders,
because there are substantial similarities between Julie and Lalli's murder and Kathy and Becky's
murder ten years previous. And Bill, I'll let you go into that here
in one second. So the question that I think a lot of people rightfully
have is could Leo Jackson have been responsible for Kathy and Becky and then graduated,
if you will, onto the travesty that he enacted upon Julian Lalli.
We did find out some information about Leo Jackson, and I'll let you guys
get into that, So whoever wants to start can start on that. Some
of the dates of his incarceration I'm talking about Jackson now would preclude his personal
involvement in the first three of what we call the Colonial Parkway murder. So
he's incarcerated in Ohio for one of the many rapes that he involved in.
He's in jail in eighty six, eighty seven, in eighty eight, Thomas
Dawski, Edward Snobling, and of course now we have an identified suspect in
Robin Edwards, David Nobling, and the disappearance of Keith Colling, Cassandra Haley
in eighty six, eighty seven, and eighty eight are precluded because he was
incarcerated during that time. He was out of jail in time for the last
of the Colonial Parkway murders, which is happening over Labor Day weekend nineteen eighty
nine, and that's the murder of Anna Maria Phelps and Daniel Lauer. Not
ruling it out, but the investigators that are currently working the case have some
pretty strong suspects in that last one of the Colonial Parkway murders, as well,
I don't think that Jackson is involved in the Colonial Parkway murders per sale
at Kateway in as well. I think that it would be difficult, but
not impossible, to make a case that he was somehow able to leave this
incarceration during the period of Kathy and Becky's murder to commit this. I think
we've all gone back and forth, probably in terms of the degree to which,
first of all of the crimes under the category Colonial Parkway murders are in
fact connected or perhaps by the same perpetrator. I think that's obviously been a
big question for people. I think we've maybe all gone back and forth a
little bit on the degree to which Kathy and Becky's crime is connected to Lolly
and Julie's crime. Certainly, it's true that there are some astounding and disturbing
similarities between the two crimes which make it, i think, very tempting,
if not easy, to assume that the same person was involved. But we've
never been able to parse that out or unpack that, and so I think
that's probably going to be a question mark until we have some more answers,
particularly where Kathy and Becky are concerned, and the FBI did say in nineteen
ninety six publicly that they were exploring the possibility that the Thomas Dowsk murder not
necessarily the other Colonial Parkway murders, that individual double homicide could be related to
the murder of Julie Williams and Lolly Wining. So they all got the parallels.
And I know we don't want to get two graphic here and mindo for
murder, but there are a lot of substantial similarities. When you've got healthy,
athletic, outdoorsy lesbian couples killed in a national park on our three day
weekend knives are used, there are definitely similarities. As Kate says, sometimes
an investigator might think, wow, we got to check that out. If,
for example, all these years later, now we've identified as suspect in
the Shenandoah case, I think that moves the Colonial Parkway murders, and specifically
Kathy and Becky's murder onto the much less likely list. It's going to be
difficult, if not impossible, for Jackson to be incarcerated in Ohio and killing
couples in Virginia. Some of the other Virginia cases. However, there are
gaps in his time in prison, so he's in and out, which is
That's probably the whole discussion for another day. Why is this serial rapist and
kidnapper? Very short sentences? Yes, remarkably disturbingly short sentences for extreme sexual
violence. And when you look at his dates in and out of prison,
you're like, why is he only serving a couple of years for what sound
like absolutely heinous crimes? But in some examples that are worth talking about,
he is out of jail during key periods where there are other unsolved murders in
Virginia. And the wrinkle for me, again that we don't know is was
Jackson acting alone in the case of Lolly and Julie? And if Jackson was
not acting alone, if for instance, Jackson was potentially being groomed by a
killer, is it possible and again the likelihood of this, I'm going to
say is small. But is it possible that if he was not acting alone,
was that other individuals somehow involved with Kathy and Becky? Again? Probably
unlikely at this point I think we can say. But until we know the
answer, I don't think we should rule anything out. Last time you talked
with us about the ANNs and the two men that they met. There's the
one guy. They were interested in him as a character because he was a
through hiker, and it sounds like through hikers are considered cool on some level
when day hikers or weekend hikers meet people that are actually doing the full length
of the Appalachian Trail. We suspect that the second man, the one in
the car, could have been Jackson, and certainly physically resembles their recollection nearly
thirty years later. Of course, do we know who the first man is,
the so called thru hiker. We do not. We know who he
is not. We know he is not markovon Its, we know he is
not Daryl Rice, but we do not know who he is. One of
the things I'm trying to do right now to trying to unpack other potential crimes
that Jackson may have been involved in, is trying to track down who this
individual is or was. Why this person knew things that no one else knew.
That's always been a big question, That's always been something that readers have
keyed in on, and I think until we have those answers, it is
fair to think that it is a possibility that these two individuals were somehow involved
together We don't know to what degree, but it certainly seems like there was
a distinct connection. They have information they should not have had, and it
certainly is something that bears additional research for sure. You're listening to Mind over
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As always, thanks for your support. Now back to Mind over Murder.
One of the things that I was particularly interested in was the report from the
Behavioral Science Unit that you quoted from. Regarding this report, so that our
listeners can hear it too, and then have you assessed okay, given what
the BSU said back then, and given what we know about Leo Jackson,
now how well did these things? Gel? I think we're doing what you
said last time. We're letting the FBI check their work, only we're going
to check it for them. They're really going to like, I'm sure they
are. And you know they're wearing t shirts that say we heart Bill.
Kristen and Kate. Right, we've been telling people for a while that we're
off the FBI's Christmas card list, and this is just going to cement that.
Look, if they won't check their work, as Kristen says, I
guess we're going to have to check it for them. This is talking about
the fact that the NPS in Richmond, FBI Field Office had exhausted every lead
and ruled out every suspect. They had worked with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit
viaure Today to construct a profile of the killer. The subsequent report concluded that
the murder of Julie Williams and Lelly Whinings was a sexually motivated crime perpetrated by
one offender acting alone. The offender, the reports authors surmised, had previously
demonstrated behavior consistent with sexual offenders, most likely the assailant saw the attack on
Lelly and Julie as an opportunity to act out a personsonal fantasy that linked physical
aggression with sexuality. The report also stated that, based on the crime scene
and evidence collected so far, the offender had re selected Julian Lawley as his
victims. He had conducted scrupulous planning to ensure that the crime unfolded based on
his fantasy and with minimal risk of being discovered. Probably, the report concluded
he'd been traveling with a murder kit for some time, most likely in his
vehicle. He was probably a prolific consumer of violent pornography. He liked to
keep tokens from his crimes personal items like underwear, jewelry, or wallets to
enhance his fantasies after the crime. He also probably retained records of the crime,
including his written plans, photographs or drawings, and newspaper clippings, which
he would keep hidden and stored in a way that provided both security and ready
access. I know we're not going to get all of the answers to all
of that, but did the BSU back then do a pretty decent job of
profiling Leo Jackson. Yes, but I think one of the questions that has
always been I think a very important one is how did the perpetrator find Lolly
and Julie. They were camping on a disused trail that used to be the
Bridle Trail, and that's bridle as in horses, not wedding attire, and
so they were camping on this disused trail that was very hard to find.
Their tent was not visible when you were descending the trail. The National Park
Service rangers responsible for patrolling this area walk past Lolly and Julie's campsite multiple times
when they were searching for the women and did not see the tent. Big
question is how did this person find Lolly and Julie. One potential answer is
that either one or both of them had walked up the third of a mile
to the Skyland Lodge and Resort, where they might have gotten a drink or
used the bathroom or the phone or something like that, and the person had
either followed one or both of them back to the campsite. That's one potential
scenario even if, and something I thought about in the case of Jackson is,
so far as we know, Jackson had only ever perpetrated rape and kidnap
using one woman at a time, right, it's a lot to take on
two. One potential scenario is Jackson followed, for instance, Julie back from
the lodge. Julie perhaps went up by herself, which we know they were
not always together, So maybe Julie went up to use the phone or get
a cup of tea or something like that. He saw her and thought she
was acting alone or by herself, and then he followed her thinking he was
following a single woman. That's possible, but still he would have then very
quickly realized that she was camping with another woman and a dog. So whoever
it was, saw the scene and still decided it was a good risk for
them, or he might have been committed to it. In other words,
if he had followed her back and then he had decided he was going to
attack this woman for whatever reason, continues to plunge forward, even with to
women and a dog. From everything I've ever read about Tie, she sounds
like the sweetest dog around. Yeah, so I don't know that he would
necessarily attack someone, even if they were attacking his favorite person. We talked
about escalation last time. This could be part of that. And then maybe
he's committed to it. He has attacked her, and then the second woman
shows up. There's a lot of different scenarios here that he's clearly prepared himself
to commit this act, because you mentioned a murder kit in our last episode,
and I have no doubt that he came equipped to rape and kill.
The Bau mentions it as well in their profile that they thought he would have
brought a murder kit with him in his vehicle, and I think they may
be right about a fair amount of this. As a matter of fact,
when Kristen was reading them, I was taking them off, and probably for
the first eight or so of the data points that they had mentioned, I
actually was thinking yep. H. As we got a a little further into
the list, I thought, I'm not sure I could answer that question necessarily,
but I couldn't rule it out. So you could see a couple of
scenarios. Sure. One of the things that's always been very strange about this
particular incident, in addition to the fact that the women were pretty fundamentally unfindable
unless you had followed them back from Skyland Lodge, was the staging of the
vibrator, and this was a rabbical that I went down at great length with
some really smart and fabulous feminist scholars who are vibrator experts, and holy how
are they amazing. So this was a vibrator that everybody who knew Lali and
Julie said didn't belong to either one of them. We don't know that conclusively.
We do know that, as one expert told me, there were infinitely
better models out there by the time, and this was a pretty rudimentary truck
stop version. So there was the staging of the vibrator. So we always
assumed that by the sheer fact that this vibrator, whether it belonged to Lally
and Julie or perpetrator, that it was so prominently staged at the murder.
Saying that that alone said that there was a significant sexual component to this for
sure, telling that investigators always had that I frankly I think I agree with
and certainly see no reason to disagree with, was that Julie was probably the
primary target, that Lali was probably killed first, and again not to be
too graphic, but her body was found in her sleeping bag in the tent.
Julie was then taken about twenty yards away along with her sleeping pad.
When UV light analysis was completed. On the sleeping pad, there's a very
strange image of what appears to be Julie's calves and what looks like like a
BD S and M leather bondage device that's never been explained and certainly was not
among the things that were found at the scene. So all of that led
investigators, and I think rightly, to assume that Julie was more of a
primary target and that there was definitely a sexual component to that. I don't
know a lot of the details of how Jackson committed his crimes. I don't
know a lot about those things. I don't know to what degree all of
this tracks with him. Certainly it tracks with a serial rapist in general.
But I think until we know more about the specifics of how Jackson committed his
crimes, we won't know to what degree this might have been a progression or
regression or anything else. I would love for us to have an opportunity,
and it would be great to pursue this. The details of Jackson's other crimes
and how he proceeded. We know he was a house painter, which presents
a lot of opportunity to observe people's homes, both inside and outside. It
would be great if we are able to get some of the records of some
of these earlier cases back in Ohio where he has committed multiple offenses and served
remarkably short sentences. As we all noted with a groan, it would be
very interesting to find find out how he went about those other sexual assaults.
The bondage piece of equipment, could that be used for restraining purposes as well,
and that might prevent her escape if she was bound together in some way?
Yes, and both women were bound when they were found. We know
that this individual brought at least one and potentially two roles of duct tape with
them. We can even determine based on the way that the duct tape was
cut the duct tape was not cut in the same order that it was put
on the women, and so one of the FBI forensic investigators had supposed that
the individual, and this is again the chilling organized fashion of this particular crime,
that this individual had taken the time to cut and then hang these strips
of duct tape and then use them. There's some evidence that tape was used
first on one woman and then another and then they were also bound using their
own long underwear. So all of that advantage for all sorts of different reasons.
So we have all of that, We know that the individual used that,
We know that the individual obviously had a knife with them. There seems
to be some evidence that the individual had potentially another type weapon with them,
based on the contusions and bruises that the women had on their faces necks and
ears that they had been struck with something that had a very specific shape to
it. These are all ems we know in at least one case, Jackson
kidnapped and raped a woman at knife point. As I said on the last
episode, to me, that's a proof of concept here. If he was
kidnapping and raping women at knife point, I think that builds the connection of
him to this case. But yes, we need to know more about him
and his m I think to really understand the degree to which this is and
is not aligned with his other crimes. There's something very workman like about preparing
the strips of tape, and that is what he does for a living.
He is a There's something about I remember this from the book and earlier research,
the strips of tate and lining them up for use. It always struck
me as very workmanlike, and that is precisely what he does for a living.
Yes, and I will say, and this is very chilling for me
some of the questions I've always had. We should say that the FBI in
the National Park Service really mishandled this evidence. Right. There was a huge
debate about whether or not it was going to get processed at the crime scene,
whether it was going to get shipped to Quantico. In the end,
what they decided to do was load it up into wheelbarrows, take it up
to a ranger's cabin that wasn't being used where they and this just breaks my
heart. Hung it up to dry, so untold amounts of evidence fell out
of the sleeping bags and the tents and everything else like that, And then
they decided to process it at that ranger cabin. There may have been a
lot more forensic and DNA evidence than we know about. That said, there
was still not a lot. And one of the more chilling thoughts that I
had was, as a painter, are you very equipped with the use of
drop cloths? But then perhaps you took another question that I've always had,
and again without being too graphic, it was. This was such a violent
way to kill these two women. It would have been next to impossible for
you not to have been wearing their blood on you. This person somehow managed
to get out during We have always assumed this happened during daylight hours because of
how tidy everything was, and this person managed to leave this crime scene undoubtedly
somehow tainted with this woman, with the women's blood, with the murder weapon,
and move unseen. People have always speculated that perhaps he had a change
of clothes with him. Did he, for instance, have like a painter's
GHLS cover el? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Would he have known how
to do that because of his job? Again, that gives me the chills
to say out loud, but I think that I think it's possible, certainly,
knowing what we know about him already, and if we know anything about
sexual assault in America, how much you want to bet that he was involved
in a lot more sexual assault than he was charged in. What I'm getting
at is this guy is an experienced multiple offender. He knows what he's doing.
That experience for him as a multiple offender could help prepare him for an
even more extreme act of violence, which is killing Julian Lawley at the Shenandoah
National Park. All of that previous experience for the charged and how much you
want to bet uncharged sexual assaults that he was involved in the years prior to
that. He's well prepared on some level, and he knows what he's doing,
and he's bold, and he's audacious, and he's controlled. This was
a very calculated, intellectual, cold blooded crime. In a lot of ways.
The terms that criminologists use is organized versus disorganized. A crime of passion,
a crime that begins as a rape and turns into a murder, are
usually disorganized crimes. They lack that level of sophistication. I think everybody agrees
that this was a very organized, very sophisticated crime, and that that requires
real planning and intentionality and the ability to keep it together. When two very
strong women who I'm sure did everything they could to fight for their lives and
the lives of their beloved, this was a surmountable challenge for someone. Yeah,
this reminded me of one of the cases that you talked about in your
book, Carrie Stainer. This reminded me actually a lot of Carrie Stainer in
his series of crimes, which, like we could do a whole entire other
podcast on I did want to ask about one other thing that the FBI made
a point of placing in their seeking information poster about Leo Jackson. They had
mentioned first that he had two cars. He was using this chestnut brown AMC
Eagle thirty and a con Aline van, which I'm just I'm being flippantly calling
the serial killer van, but like it is what it is. But they
also made a point of saying that he was known to use temporary tags ault
license plates can frequently change vehicles. I'm curious if you think they're going to
try to position him as a possible suspect in their Route twenty nine stockings because
they mentioned that information. You they tried awfully hard to position Darryl Rice in
that way, despite the fact that Rice had alibis. I think for almost
all of them, if not all of them, one of the things,
again, as I said on the last episode, as a journalist, I'm
always simultaneously listening to what is said and what is not said, and often
it's what's not said that's more interesting to me. During the press conference,
they made a point of saying when they knew Darryl Rice was in the park.
They did not say, oh, I noticed the same thing. They
did not say if and when Jackson was in the park. We have their
excel spreadsheet of all of the license plates of folks who we were in the
park that week. Now we should say that one camera at one entrance station
was broken, and so it is not a complete list. That said,
I found it very notable that at no time did they say we know that
Jackson was in the park. For instance, on May twenty eight, I
noticed the exact same thing that was real. In fact, they seem to
be saying, don't worry about the fact that you're not going to find his
license plate on this spreadsheet because he probably changed his license plate. And sure
he probably did. How much evidence do we have here would there have been
a conviction in this case? We don't know. Lots of questions remain.
Dear FBI, please answer these questions. We agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment.
Dear FBI, please answer these questions and show your work. Please help us
trust you, Please help us believe in you. Please please have said over
and over transparency and accountability or what we want from the FBI. So as
Kate said, dear FBI, please show it. Show your work. I
love that, Show your work. The book is trailed one woman's quest to
solve the Shenandoah murders. Kater, are you going to be writing a concluding
chapter, an epilogue or something for this? I feel like you would almost
have to. I think we still have to see how this is going to
play out. This is so new, and I think it's changing in real
time. I am very fortunate that the book was optioned as a streaming series,
and so I've been putting a lot of my attention into that, and
I think that's probably where a lot of this work is going to appear.
This is still very active to me. I'm still very much investigating that.
So stay tuned, hopefully for some more definitive news on the potential show,
and we'll keep unpacking things there for sure. Amazing. Thank you for joining
us, Kate. We appreciate it, and thank you for all the work
that you do on behalf of Julie and Lawley and their families and all the
other victims in these cases. Work is not unnoticed. It is very thank
You's a production of apps. Thank you and thanks for both of you.
Thank you to your listeners. You two are out there doing God's work each
and every single day, and so are your listeners. And being a part
of this community is I think really important. And I've said this before,
but I'm going to say it again. Takes this village to do this work.
And I am so grateful for the number of sort of citizens out there
who want to take this on with all of us. So please keep at
it, folks, need you all so much. That is going to do
it for this episode of Mind Never Murder. Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see an next