FBI announces findings on murder of two women in Shenandoah Park in 1996

Authorities now believe that Walter “Leo” Jackson Sr., who died in an Ohio prison in 2018, bound Williams and Winans’ hands with duct tape, sexually assaulted them and slit their throats. The murders shocked the LGBTQ community and raised fears that the women had fallen victim to a hate crime.

“There can be no mistake that this crime was brutal,” said Christopher Kavanaugh, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. He said there was no evidence that the couple’s murders were motivated by hate, as authorities had initially believed.

Over the years, investigators have targeted at least two other men, one of whom was charged with capital crimes. After prosecutors dropped the case, court documents provided detailed evidence potentially linking the murders to a dead serial killer. He, too, was ruled out.

“We now know who is responsible for this heinous crime,” said Stanley M. Meador, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Richmond field office, naming Jackson. He said new DNA testing of evidence had matched Jackson’s profile in a computer database. Authorities said the likelihood that the The odds of a genetic match with Jackson are 2.6 trillion to 1, or more than 300 times the world’s population. In the realm of DNA testing, therefore, the probability of a connection is extraordinarily high.

Meador said, “We can’t imagine how difficult it is for the family members to get this information. They have been searching for answers for far too long.” Williams and Winans were last seen on May 24, 1996; their bodies were found on June 1 of that year about a half-mile from an inn on Skyline Drive.

At the time of her death, Winans, who grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, was graduating from Unity College in Maine and working toward becoming a nationally certified outdoor guide. Williams was from St. Cloud, Minnesota. They met at a women’s outdoor program and both were described as experienced hikers.

Efforts by The Washington Post to reach relatives on Thursday were unsuccessful.

Kathryn Miles, author of a 2022 book The author of her case, “Trailed: A Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders,” said in an interview Thursday that she continues to hear from people who have stopped hiking or camping because of the murders.

“For a whole generation of hikers and backpackers, particularly women and people who identify as queer, the impact of this crime was so great that it basically took the wilderness away from them and made them very afraid,” she said. In that sense, Miles said, she considers it a hate crime, even though federal investigators don’t use the term.

Violent crimes against women in the open triggered fears then – and continue to do so today, says Jaime Grant, former policy director for the National LGBTQ Task Force. “Whether or not that person who attacked women saw them as queer is secondary to me,” Grant said. “Queer women face the violence that all women face.”

Miles said she watched Thursday’s news conference live and then spent most of the afternoon talking with family and friends of the victims. “You really have mixed emotions here,” she said. “On one hand, I think there’s a sense of relief, but I think it’s clouded by the circumstances and there’s a lot of frustration.”

Because Jackson is dead, the families will not see closure or all of the evidence presented, she said.

Miles took issue with investigators not conducting this type of test sooner. Meador said Thursday he requested a full review of the case in 2021 after he was appointed special agent in charge of the Richmond office. Authorities weren’t sure the same tests could have been done long ago. At the time, investigators were examining hair found on tape used to bind victims. Defense attorneys warned at the time that the evidence might be too weakened to produce conclusive results.

When Williams and Winans were murdered in 1996, DNA analysis as a law enforcement tool was in its infancy. Less than a decade earlier, U.S. courts had begun allowing the use of DNA evidence in criminal trials. But since then, science has advanced significantly, allowing technicians to extract ever smaller samples of genetic material from increasingly old pieces of evidence and create DNA profiles of the people who left that material behind.

Authorities spent “countless hours” as part of a comprehensive review to determine which pieces of evidence from the 1996 crime scene “would be suitable for re-examination,” Meador said Thursday. “After we identified those items,” they were sent to an accredited private DNA testing lab, he said. Those items were not described; it could not be determined if they were the same items tested years ago.

DNA was successfully extracted from several pieces of evidence, Meador said, and the resulting genetic profile was compared to genetic profiles of offenders in a federal database called CODIS (Combined DNA Index System). The CODIS system, established in the late 1990s, has grown over the past quarter century and contains DNA profiles of more than 17 million people accused of crimes, according to the FBI. Given his guilty plea in a 2011 rape and kidnapping and his 2014 conviction for two kidnappings and rapes that occurred in 1996, Jackson would have been a candidate at the time to have his DNA profile entered into CODIS for possible future use.

Jackson, who was 70, was originally from the Cleveland area and worked as a house painter. Authorities said Thursday that he was convicted as a serial rapist in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, as part of a long criminal history that also included kidnapping and assault.

On Thursday, authorities described Jackson’s violent crimes, including a prison sentence on unspecified charges from 1984 to 1989. This excludes him from unresolved Serial murders along the Colonial Parkway in the Williamsburg, Virginia area from 1986 to 1989. He was again behind bars in 1994 and released the same year, less than two years before the murders of Winans and Williams.

Four days after the Authorities say a woman was kidnapped and raped in the Cleveland area. Several weeks later, another woman was abducted from her home in the Cleveland area and raped at knifepoint, according to police. A third woman was raped in the area in 2011.

In 2012, police charged Jackson with the 2011 assault. He later pleaded guilty and was imprisoned. While in prison, authorities said, DNA testing linked him to the two 1996 rapes. He was later convicted and sentenced to an additional 20 years in prison.

Federal authorities initially arrested another man in connection with the Williams and Winans murders, bringing felony charges in 2002 against Darrell D. Rice, a Maryland computer programmer. They said at the time they believed the attack was motivated by homophobic and misogynistic anger. Authorities cited mounting evidence: Surveillance video twice showed Rice entering the park around the time of the murders. A year later, he attacked a woman in the park, and he had previously committed violence against women and admitted to the incident to prisoners. Rice denied the charges.

Then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the indictment against Rice. This was the first time prosecutors had used a 1994 law that provides for increased penalties for crimes based on prejudice against homosexuals. Ashcroft said at the time that Rice could face the death penalty.

But charges against Rice were dropped in 2004, shortly before his trial, after forensic tests showed that hair found at the crime scene ruled him out as a possible suspect and could instead incriminate another man, convicted serial killer Richard M. Evonitz, who took his own life in 2002 before becoming involved in the murders of three men in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Girl.

The FBI’s Meador said they directly compared the victims’ evidence with a preserved saliva swab that contained Jackson’s DNA.

Authorities said Jackson was known to visit Shenandoah National Park and was believed to be driving a maroon 1984 AMC Eagle at the time of the murders. They said Jackson often used temporary or altered license plates and frequently changed vehicles.

Meador said their work is not over, even though Jackson is dead. He said authorities are “compiling a timeline of Jackson’s movements to provide to our partners and assist them with unsolved cases.”