Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: That makes me Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Hi still simmering with righteous indignation over here.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 4: Very short sentences?
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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?
Speaker 3: Again?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 2: Gel?
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: They're really going to like, I'm sure they are.
Speaker 4: And you know they're wearing t shirts that say we
heart Bill. Kristen and Kate.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: Look, if they won't check their work, as Kristen says,
I guess we're going to have to check it for them.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: There's something very workman like about preparing the strips of tape,
and that is what he does for a living.
Speaker 4: He is a.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: Wearing their blood on you.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: GHLS cover el?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: Oh, I noticed the same thing.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: Eight, I noticed the exact same thing that was real.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: Lots of questions remain.
Speaker 4: Dear FBI, please answer these questions.
Speaker 3: We agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment.
Speaker 4: Dear FBI, please answer these questions and show your work.
Please help us trust you, Please help us believe in you.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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 thoroughly appreciated.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Thank you and thanks to 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 and it's a cliche,
but I'm going to say it again. It takes a
village to do this work. And I am so grateful
for the number of sort of citizens sleuths out there
who want to take this on with all of us.
Speaker 3: So please keep at it, folks.
Speaker 4: We need you all so much.
Speaker 3: That is going to do it for this episode of
mind Never Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder,