Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilley and I'm Bill Thomas. We're
back for episode two about the Root twenty nine stocker and mister Thomas, it's
time for a quiz. Just like that, you didn't give me the answer
in advance. All right, what's the quiz, mister Thomas? Where is
Root twenty nine located? Route twenty nine is located? It's stretching from Florida
to Virginia. Based on your notes that I had studied earlier and memorized very
carefully, Am I correct to Maryland? But that's okay, okay, that's
pretty close with that. I didn't cheat. I didn't look at the notes,
and now that I am looking at the notes again, Route twenty nine
stretches one thirty six miles from Florida to Maryland. And why are we concerned
about Route twenty nine today, mister Thomas, Because we're trying to start on
an upbeat note before we get back into this serious business of discussing the Route
twenty nine stalker case. As we had discussed in last week's episode, we
are now beginning to narrow the discussion to the cases that we think probably do
belong under this moniker of the Route twenty nine Stalker. As we discussed last
time, many cases over the years, some of which happily have been solved,
were linked at least for a time, to the Route twenty nine Stalker
cases, which unfortunately all remain unsolved at this point. Perhaps Kate Miles' new
book Trailed may lead law enforcement and other concerned parties to take another look at
some of these cases, which would be a fantastic outcome. Now we begin
to focus on the cases that we think are core to what we call the
Route twenty nine Stocker case. Those are the cases of Alicia Schowaltz Reynolds,
whom we briefly discussed last time, Thelmas Kroggins, and Anne McDaniel. Main
core of the twenty nine Stoker killings took place in and around a town called
Lignum, which the Daily News Leader from Stanton, Virginia calls a rural crossroads
of only six houses in a post office. It also describes it as a
hamlet, which I think we were deciding that last time, is about the
smallest that a town can get as a hamlet. Yes, I think if
you are too small to be a village. Then I think you become a
hamlet. I like the reporting from the Daily News Leader in Stanton that also
said this, all three cases apparently involved a trusting woman and a mysterious killer.
I think it's a pretty good way to characterize it. So all of
these took place in and around Lignum, which is a rural crossroads, only
six houses in a post office. It is about twenty miles west of Fredericksburg
and it contains farmhouses, an abandoned store, a post office which is actually
a true room trailer, which is all next to a hayfield. This is
really just a blip on the radar. It's a bump on the map.
And Anne McDaniels, Alicia Shoaute Reynolds, and Thelmas Croggin's were al found in
that area, which is why several investigators have posited that they are all the
work of the same killer. Let's jump into these three murders, all of
which took place during nineteen ninety six. In March of nineteen ninety six,
we have that murder of Alicia's Showalter Reynolds, age twenty five. Alicia was
from Baltimore or she was based in Baltimore when she was going to Johns Hopkins
for her master's work, and she was driving on her way to Charlottesville to
meet with her mother so that they could go shopping for dresses for her brother's
Unfortunately, she never made it to the mall where her mother was eagerly waiting
for her and staid. We have those eyewitness reports that placed Alicia peering under
the hood of her car, her little white Mercury Tracer, and then climbing
into a dark pickup truck with someone who appeared to be helping her, although
I very much doubt that's what he was trying. Her car was found three
miles outside of Culpeper. It had that white napkin under the windshield, which
signals car trouble. She was gone without a trace until she was found two
months later in May of that same year, covered in brush off of a
seldom used gravel trail about fifteen miles from her car. One of the things
I noticed in reviewing some of the other reporting on her disappearance was beyond Alisia
Showalter Reynolds being a no show to meet her mother to go dress shopping,
there were reports that her credit card had been found dropped on the street in
Culpeper, which obviously was a signal that at minimum she had lost her credit
card. And at the beginning of the mystery of her disappearance, she's not
there to meet her mother, her credit card is found, and then she
seems to disappear, only to be found two months later. And in that
intervening time is when women started coming forward to police and said, oh,
there was a guy who stopped me on the road. He said my car
was malfunctioning, but it wasn't. There was nothing wrong. And of course
when police looked at Ms. Reynold's Mercury Tracer, there was nothing wrong with
it. Everything was completely fine. So she was apparently taken in by the
ruse of this good Samarita who took her and ultimately murdered her. Last year,
there was coverage of the twenty fifth anniversary of her disappearance and murder.
As of yet, twenty five years on, her family still has no answers.
I've had some lengthy conversations with the show walters, Mister and Missus.
They've had a number of disturbing things to say about how the Virginia State Police
have handled this investigation. I know that I've spoken to Sadie show Walter on
a number of occasions over the years, and they have been extremely critical of
the way the Virginia State Police have handled this investigation and shockingly how adversarial VSP
detectives have made the relationship with this show Walter family, particularly the parents.
The Virginia State Police seem obsessed with any public comment that Sadie and her husband
Harley Showalter have made, particularly anything that's critical of the pace of the investigation.
As the brother of a murder victim, your frustration builds when there's no
communication from your law enforcement investigators. When you're hearing nothing and receiving no updates,
and then anniversary dates are coming, media requests are made, and you're
being asked questions about what's the latest in your daughter's disappearance and murder. It's
very difficult not to tap into that reservoir of hurt and struggle to maintain a
positive attitude for these family members. Sadie has told me some stories that just
curled my hair about how rude and antagonistic these investigators were, including senior people
at the Virginia State Police attacking them. I think the way they've handled this
case has been completely lacking, and I think their relationship with the Showalter family
has just been horrible, and I will publicly call them out on this.
I'll add that several years ago, when we receive tips that tied into the
Route twenty nine Stocker case, at least potentially, I'd been approached by a
woman who felt that her estranged husband could be involved, and she provided highly
credible information regarding her husband and the behaviors that she had witnessed. He fit
the physical description. There's a sketch which is well known that's appeared in Virginia
media for years of the man they think could be responsible for the Route twenty
nine Stocker case. And I will say this guy looked remarkably like the sketch.
And I have to tell you approached the Virginia State Police in the most
respectful manner possible with this information, and it was a mighty struggle to get
the investigators to return calls follow up. It got so frustrating that the original
tipster, the woman that had approached me with concerns about her estranged husband,
and as I said, she provided a tremendous out of detail, much of
which lined up with what they said they were looking for in the Route twenty
nine Stocker case. I'm not saying this man is responsible, but when she
gave me as much detail as she did, and I passed all of this
on to the investigators, it was so frustrating for them to just come up
with every excuse under the sun. Oh, I have to go next week
for training. Oh, I don't have time to follow up on this.
Oh. She didn't return my calls. And then in the meantime, the
woman that approached me because of our visibility with the Colonial Parkway murders grew increasingly
frustrated because she said, can't you get someone from the Virginia State Police to
contact me and come and see me and I'll give them this information about my
ex husband. I do not think this woman was crazy. I do not
think she was just trying to settle a score with her estranged husband. She
really was afraid of him, and she was afraid he was involved. I'm
not an expert on all things for twenty nine Stocker, but he checked a
lot of boxes in this case, and even driving similar vehicles, and I
remember actually challenging the investigators. He was talking to me about the vehicles.
And I said, that's not what you guys said in nineteen ninety six.
And he said, how do you know, And I said, because I
went back and read the newspaper articles and at the time your predecessors, I
know this particular investigator wasn't handling the investigation all those years before. I get
that. But I thought to myself, am I the only one that has
any sense of history of this case? Because he said, oh, we're
looking for this particular type of pickup truck. And I said, wait a
minute. Your predecessor said publicly with photographs in such and such a newspaper in
nineteen ninety six nineteen ninety seven, that you're looking for the kind of pickup
truck. You're describing to me a dark blue Ford Ranger or Mazda pickup truck
as well as a green Nissan pickup truck with these very stinctive zigzag gold decorations
on the side of the truck, which were extremely distinctive. And he said,
I don't know where you get that, And I said, from the
newspaper. It just the amount of foot dragging and excuses that I received to
the point where this woman grew frustrated with me because it didn't seem like I
could get the Virginia State Police to do their jobs. Quite frankly, it
was very frustrating, and so I feel like I got just a little taste
of the kind of attitude that Sadie and Harley Showalter had told me about.
I don't know how murder victims' families become the enemy in the minds of some
people in law enforcement, but the Virginia State Police has failed the Showalter family
without question. Wow, just awful. Following that March nineteen ninety six murder
and the discovery in May of Alicia's body, you have the July nineteen ninety
sixth murder of Thelma Skrogens. There is not a lot of information about Thelma.
Unfortunately, up until I started doing my own deep dive on the case,
I had never heard her name publicly associated with the twenty nine Stocker case.
So this was a bit of a surprise to me. Thanks to some
very astute researchers who had clipped some articles from newspapers dot com about this murder,
I was able to learn a little bit about Thelma Scrogens said. Thelma
Skrogen seventy four was found murdered in her home in Lignum on July fourteenth,
which happens to be my dad's birthday, after she failed to show up to
church where she was the organist on Sunday, friends, of course went to
go look for her, and when they arrived at her home the next morning
after church, they found that she had been shot to death, shot in
the head. A friend who had been talking to her on the phone the
previous night reported that she had said she needed to end the conversation because someone
was knocking on her door and she needed to answer it. And I can
only assume that whoever was knocking on her door is probably the person who killed
her. It seems like the most obvious thing to me. But unfortunately she
was found shot in the head and there have been no arrests in her case.
Her home is actually directly across from the post office, so if you
can say that there is a center of hamlet, center of life in Lignum,
it would be right there at the post office, and her house was
immediately across from it. When I read about Thelma Scroggin's murder in Lignum,
it occurred to me that, yes, there's a significant age difference. Miss
Scroggins was seventy four years old. Lisa Showalter Reynolds is twenty five, so
they seem outside the age range that we often see in other serial killings.
Two quick thoughts. One is that our profiler friends have told us that you
can't lock into these ideas that there is a type necessarily with a serial killer.
Sometimes serial killers will lash out for other reasons. It may be a
crime of opportunity, or when I first heard of Thelma Skrogins, perhaps in
this very small town where she lived in she might have seen something. It
took some time, for example, for the killer of at Last Showalter Reynolds
to figure out where Thelma Skroggins lived, and or some a conversation took place
where Ms Scroggins indicated that she might have information about the show Walter Reynolds murder,
and that might be enough of a triggering event to cause a kill to
lash out at her and eliminate her as a potential source of information. So
she's a traditional crime victim. It could be something completely random, or there
may be a tie in into the March nineteen ninety six murder of Alicia Showalter
Reynolds very well could be again, wouldn't have occurred to me. You're on
it today, sir, But I think that's because I am tired and ready
for spring break. That's a separate issue, Yes it is. And finally
we get to this September nineteen ninety six murder of Anne Carolyn McDaniel, who
was twenty years old. Anne McDaniel had been living in a group home for
physically and developmentally disabled adults in the President Madison in Orange, Virginia. And
Orange is also pretty small town and it is about twenty five miles from Lignum,
and McDaniel said she was going out to meet a mystery date that evening
and ultimately disappeared without trace. Her body was found four days later in Culpeper
County, near Lignum and an even smaller town called Mount Pony, and she
was found by some men who were out exercising their dogs in the woods.
The cause of death on Anne McDaniel was asphyxiation and her body was badly burned.
In fact, it was only through use of dental records that her body
was able to be identified. Her remains were actually found only five miles from
the location where Alicia's Showalter Reynolds had been found in May, so there is
a very direct connection between Alicia and McDaniel. A couple of observations on Anne
Carolyne McDaniel. One of the things that I was very struck by was that
Anne McDaniel had some development issues. Pretty convinced that Samantha Clark did as well.
When I first was reading about Anne McDaniel some years back, I thought
to myself, I wonder if she could have been a victim of Randy Taylor,
who was sometimes looking for young women that might not be able to have
the sophistication to understand that his goals were less than stellar. Yeah, it
occurred to me that Anne McDaniel could be a victim of someone like Randy Taylor.
Now, certainly the proximity in terms of where Anne McDaniel's remains were found
and those of the least Showalter Reynolds only five miles apart, and again these
are in very small rural Virginia towns. There's certainly a potential relationship there.
But the Randy Taylor possibility is one that has stuck with me for all of
these years. Understandably, I think you're listening to mind Over Murder. Will
be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at Mindover
Murder. Are those three cases linked? I think it seems very likely that
they are. And Bill, I think you're on that same team with me.
Correct I am? And certainly the Alicia Showalter Reynolds's case ties into those,
perhaps as many as twenty different female motorists who mentioned that they were pulled
over by this man who flagged them down, usually driving a pickup truck and
gesturing that there was something wrong with their car. There is a woman who
survived an assault from this man. She said that she had been pulled over
by this man and that she was riding along in his pickup truck and he
lunged at her with a screwdriver. If I'm not mistaken, she managed to
extricate herself from the vehicle. She said that he referred to himself by the
name of Larry Breeden. There d n we think, and there was a
great deal of research looking for Larry Breeden or some similar name. But she
gave law enforcement investigators a very good physical description of the man and the pickup
truck he was driving, and it's her ability to escape this man's clutches that
resulted in the sketch which has so long been associated with this case. And
of course we'll include the sketch in our social media and in our podcast notes
for those keeping track. We have covered the cases of the women who have
been murdered by serial killers, namely Jesse Matthew, Randy Taylor and Mark Evanants.
We've covered crimes that probably fall underneath the Root twenty nine Stoker umbrella,
and now we are going to cover crimes that happened outside of the Route twenty
nine geographic area, but are still murders of women that have gone unsolved.
So here we get with that final category. And so the two cases that
we want to talk about are the case of Julie Williams and Laura Lolly Winans.
Because we are going to have our friend Kate Miles on the podcast in
the not too terribly distant future, we are going to save most of the
content about Julie Williams and Lolly Winan's for her. This is the case that
she has been so heavily involved with and she's done such an amazing job doing
research for. But just to give you a quick sketch of this information.
The Julie Williams and Lolly Winan's case is also known as the Shenandoah murders.
There may be some links to the Colonial Parkway murders as well. Bill,
I'll let you get into that in just one second. In May of nineteen
ninety six, Julie Williams twenty four and Laura Lolly Winans twenty six, we're
camping in Shenandoah National Park. These are women who were very familiar with the
outdoors. They spent a lot of time camping, a lot of times hiking.
They were murdered inside the Shenandoah National Park, near a place called Skyland,
which, even though I have lived here my entire life, I have
never been to. There are some pretty distinct similarities to their murder case and
the case of Kathy Thomas and Rebeccadowski. Would you like to go into that,
bell, Sure, We'll cover the basics. Kathy Thomas and Rebekkadowski are
an outdoorsy, athletic, lesbian couple killed in a national park in October nineteen
eighty six. In May nineteen ninety six, a very similar couple, Julie
Williams, and Lolly Winans are also murdered in a national park. Now it's
ten years later and about one hundred and eighty miles distant. They're within the
same state, Virginia, but they're not exactly next door to each other.
So it's three three and a half hours, Kristin, would you say,
yeah, just about Actually, maybe a little less than that. I can
probably get to Charlottesville in about two and a half hours if I speed,
which I never would no, never, now similarities. The FBI admitted publicly
and repeatedly in nineteen ninety six that they were exploring the similarities between Kathy Thomas
and Rebecca Dowski's murder with the murders of Julie Williams and Lolly Winans. There
are a few other boxes we probably need to check here. In addition to
the lesbian outdoor couples killed in a national park, they're both killed on three
day weekends. Julian Lowy were killed over Memorial Day weekend nineteen ninety six.
Kathy and Becky were killed over Columbus Day weekend nineteen eighty six. They are
similar in that Julie and Lawley were restrained with some sort of binding and their
throats were slashed. There doesn't seem to be any sexual robbery motive in either
of the two lesbian couples. There are these substantial similarities, and that's the
expression the FBI used in nineteen ninety six. Both sets of murders, Kathy
Thomas and Rebeccadowski, Julie Williams and Lolly Winans remain unsolved. They've both been
investigated by the FBI because they happen inside national parks by separate FBI offices,
the Norfolk and Newport News office in the Kathy and Becky example, the Richmond
office in the Julie and Llly example. There has been a great deal of
coordination between the two field offices, as they're called at the Bureau. The
idea that these two sets of women and their murders could be related does not
seem to be an idea that's in favor at this point with the FBI,
but it was certainly something that was discussed. One of the areas that was
explored, and I don't know that it was fully resolved, at least to
my family satisfaction. Is that there are four National Park Service rangers who were
working at the Colonial Parkway in nineteen eighty six, who were assigned to the
Shenandoah National Park in nineteen ninety six, some ten years later, including one
ranger who was a person of interest in the Colonial Parkway murders in nineteen eighty
six, who somehow and somewhat bizarrely, I would add, was permitted to
be one of the lead investigators in the Julie Williams and Lollywinan's murder investigation,
which I find completely unacceptable. How a person of interest in a substantially similar
case, I'm going to use the FBI's wording here from nineteen eighty six,
would be permitted to not just participate, but be a lead investigator in a
substantially similar murder ten years later. I question the judgment of the FBI and
the Virginia State Police in this regard. I do too, I do two
hundred percent. Now, we don't want to steal Kate's thunder by giving any
more information about this case, because she is going to come and talk about
her terrific book. I am of course reading it right now, and she
has a lot of great information that I know she's going to want us to
keep under our hat until she can reveal it to you. And she's a
terrific writer, and we cannot recommend Trailed, her new book coming out May
third enough. If the book is out, you absolutely should pick up a
copy. We're both really enjoying it. I think that our next true crime
bookshelf should lead off with Trail for sure, fair enough. It's wonderful.
And so finally, the other case of a murdered woman, and this is
a woman who has not yet been recovered, is the murder of Sage Smith.
And Sage Smith did not take place during the nineteen ninety six time frame.
In fact, her murder happened presumably in twenty twelve. Again, she
has not been found, so we do not know what precisely has happened to
her. But Sage Smith is a nineteen year old transgender woman from Charlottesville who
was working at a hair salon and was mispiring hairdresser. She was last seen
in Charlottesville in November of twenty twelve, getting ready to go on a date
with a man by the name of Eric McFadden. Twenty nine years old.
Sage Smith was last seen walking to the Wild Wings Cafe, which is next
to the Amtrak station in Charlottesville, near the Downtown Mall. Incidentally, the
Downtown Mall is the last place where Hannah Graham was seen or would be seen.
In twenty fourteen, Sage Smith was walking to meet McFadden and ultimately did
not arrive and has never been seen since. Eric McFadden is the only person
of interest in her disappearance. McFadden never actually showed up for his meeting with
Charlottesville police. He skipped town has since disappeared, presumably off the face of
the earth. No one has heard from him. His family has not heard
from him, nothing that the man has utterly vanished. There is currently a
twenty thousand dollars reward being offered for information leading either to the recovery of Sage
smith remains or leading to information that will lead to the arrest of Eric McFadden,
who is the only person of interest in her disappearance. I am rock
solid convinced that Eric McFadden is responsible for the murder of Sage Smith. Now.
They met through Craigslist Casual Encounters, which is admittedly a place where sex
workers often meet John's and I'm not sure if McFadden knew that Sage Smith was
transgender. I am highly confident that a meeting did take place that evening.
They texted on and off that evening. I think a meeting did take place.
I think things went south for whatever reason, perhaps McFadden discovering that Sage
Smith was not exactly what he thought he was getting into. I believe that
Eric McFadden is still out there somewhere. I think he killed Sage Smith,
disposed of her body, and bluetown. It's a shame that somehow McFadden has
never turned up again. I think an in depth search for Eric McFadden would
probably find him out there somewhere, living under a new name, having murdered
Sage Smith, brutally disposed of her body, and escaping justice. And I
think this is such a tragedy. I find the whole thing so disturbing.
Reading the reporting about Sage Smith and her sad disappearance and murder, I was
really struck by the fact that her murder ended up being overshadowed, really by
the fact that Hannah Graham disappeared later in November of twenty fourteen. I'm sorry
September twenty fourteen, and in fact, Sage Smith's family has gone on the
record as saying they feel a little upset by the fact that when Sage Smith
went missing, she received very little coverage, whereas when Hannah Graham went missing,
the whole entire world blew up. And in fact, Sage's sister was
quoted as saying that she was working in a restaurant down on the downtown Mall
area where Hannah Graham had disappeared, and people were constantly coming in and asking,
can we put up posters? Do you guys have surveillance footage, do
you have cameras? We've got to find this girl. And she said it
just felt like such a slap in the face that her sister had received so
little and Hannah Graham's coverage had received so much, And I can see why
they would be quite unhappy with that. And really I had to do a
lot of digging on this case because I don't remember it getting this kind of
coverage ever. In fact, the first I heard of it was when we
were doing research for one of our true crime Bookshelf episodes, and there was
a whole long form piece of reporting in a book that I had recommended about
Sage Smith, and it was excellent reporting. But I realized how have I
never heard of this. It should have been big Virginia news. It wasn't.
I think the examples that you're highlighting Kristin can be good examples of missing
white woman syndrome. Yeah, Sage Smith is African American transgender. That case
and her disappearance got very little publicity, with all due respect to everyone involved.
The Morgan Harrington and Hannah Graham cases both got a tremendous this amount of
publicity. In both examples, Morgan and Hannah are very pretty young college students
who went missing and whose bodies were later found and of course ultimately tied into
Jesse Matthew, who was a predator focused on a particular type of attractive,
blonde, hopefully impaired young woman, and that's he would troll these downtown bars
and places where he would find these young college students who were out having a
good time. Morgan attending a concert with Metallica, Hannah out with friends that
evening on a bit of a bar hop, and he would look for these
impaired young women. The families of Morgan Harrington and Hannah Graham, whom we
have nothing but wonderful things to say about, were able to use their communication
skills to increase the visibility of their originally missing daughter cases. Ultimately, of
course, they both proved to be homicide cases that didn't happen with Sage Smith.
And I think this is a Virginia example of what we're seeing across the
country, which is that people that are from more marginalized communities, like Sage
Smith, an African American transgender team, not getting the kind of publicity that
two young white college age women attending prominent Virginia colleges received all right around the
same time exactly. And as you were saying earlier talking about the show Alter
family and the amount of I hesitate to say abuse by law enforcement, that's
not quite right. It's pretty close. From what pretty it does sound pretty
close. Sage Smith's family has said that they have received very little that is
of help from the Charlottesville Police Department about this. They have repeatedly requested that
the FBI brought in, and they have been told will bring the FBI in
when it's time. When's it time. She's been missing since twenty twelve,
when is it time? They have described as having just a very hard time
getting as you have always said, time, attention and resources put into sat
Smith's case, and that's a tragedy, especially given the fact that Eric McFadden
has likely blown down and has moved elsewhere in the country under a new name.
This is a situation where the resources of the FBI could actually be quite
helpful. Her hearts go out to the Smith family for the struggles that they
are going through with law enforcement. And it is so difficult in a country
where we have two hundred thousand unsolved cold case homicides across the country, It
is so difficult to get that time, attention and resources that are required to
move a cold case like this forward. It's now been what coming up on
ten years since Sage Smith disappeared, highly confident that Sage was murdered that night
and that her body has been hidden somewhere and McFadden is in the wind.
I agreed we will continue to explore the cases associated with the Route twenty nine
Stoker Umbrella in upcoming episodes. We are of course going to be joined by
our friend Kate Miles to talk about her book Trailed, which we are very
much looking forward to, and we have several other episodes and guests up our
sleeve with relation to these series of homicides. As always, we cannot thank
you enough for listening to mind of or Murder. We'll see you next time.