FBI identifies serial rapist as suspect in gruesome double murder in national park

The FBI announced Thursday that one of the country’s most notorious serial rapists is the prime suspect in the mysterious double murder of a gay couple hiking in Shenandoah National Park in 1996.

Authorities said convicted rapist Walter “Leo” Jackson bound his victims’ hands with duct tape and sexually assaulted them before slitting their throats and hiding their bodies.

The brutality of the killings reverberated throughout Virginia and the nation, as fears spread that Julianne M. Williams, 24, and her partner, Laura S. “Lollie” Winans, 26, were victims of a hate crime.

Hordes of hikers canceled their trips to the Shenandoah area while police pursued one dead end after another in their investigations, which only petered out a year later.

The FBI said it reinvestigated the case in 2021 – which should have happened much earlier, according to Kathryn Miles, the author of a 2022 book about the murders. Forensic testing and advances in DNA analysis were cited as triggering the case.

“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 fundamentally took away their wilderness and made them very afraid,” she said. The Washington Post.

The FBI initially arrested another man in connection with the murders and in 2002 filed capital charges against Darrell D. Rice. They pinned the crime on him based on circumstantial evidence – he had entered the park twice around the time of the murders and had attacked a woman in the park a year after the murders. Rice faced the death penalty if convicted, but the charges against him were dropped a year later. He always denied the charges and was finally vindicated this week.

Three decades later, Williams and Winans’ relatives can finally put their past behind them, while Jackson does not have to fear further punishment for his crime – he died in 2018 at the age of 70 in an Ohio prison, where he was serving a series of long sentences for kidnapping, rape and assault.

Christopher Kavanaugh, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, stressed that the crime was “brutal” but said there was no evidence that the double murder was a hate crime. The FBI added that Jackson “was an avid hiker and was known to visit Shenandoah National Park.”

“I want to once again express my condolences to the Winans and Williams families and hope today’s announcement provides some comfort,” Kavanaugh said in a statement.

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