Julianne Williams & Lollie Winans

Case background and investigation

Julianne "Julie" Williams, 24, and Laura "Lollie" Winans, 26, were killed while on a backcountry camping trip in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, in May 1996. According to ABC News, the two women had met through an organization that ran outdoor programs for women, and they entered the park on May 19, 1996, accompanied by a golden retriever.

CBS News reported that park personnel last saw the women alive on May 24, 1996. NBC Washington reported that Williams's father reported them missing on May 31 after they failed to return, and that rangers found their bodies the next day, June 1, at their campsite near Skyland Resort. According to news accounts of the FBI's findings, both women had been bound and gagged and their throats had been cut; CBS News reported that they had also been sexually assaulted.

The investigation produced one prosecution that did not go forward. Darrell David Rice, who had pleaded guilty in 1998 to the attempted abduction of a female cyclist in the same park, was charged with capital murder in the case in the early 2000s. According to WTVR and CBS News, the charges were dismissed after forensic testing of hair evidence excluded him, and ABC News reported that DNA pointed to an unidentified male. Rice was never convicted of any offense connected to the deaths of Williams and Winans.

In 2021 the FBI's Richmond field office assigned a new team to re-examine the file. According to reports of the FBI's announcement, a private laboratory extracted DNA from several items of crime-scene evidence, and the resulting profile was run through the national CODIS database. It matched Walter "Leo" Jackson Sr., a residential painter from the Cleveland, Ohio, area who, the FBI said, was an avid hiker and a frequent visitor to the park. A retained buccal swab confirmed the match, and officials put the odds of the DNA belonging to someone else at one in 2.6 trillion.

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia announced the identification on June 20, 2024. Jackson had served several prison terms for kidnapping, rape and assault, and ABC News reported that he abducted and raped a woman in Ohio on June 5, 1996, days after the Shenandoah killings, and committed a similar attack about a month later. He died in an Ohio prison in March 2018 at age 70, so no charges can be brought and the evidence will not be tested at trial.

The deaths had long been discussed as a possible anti-gay hate crime because the victims were a couple. U.S. Attorney Christopher Kavanaugh said at the announcement that investigators had no evidence the attack was motivated by bias. WVTF reported that the FBI found no link between Jackson and Rice, or between Jackson and the Colonial Parkway murders.