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Seven-year murder mystery set to unravel in court
STONY MAN MOUNTAIN, Virginia (AP) -- The thick stands of red oak in Shenandoah National Park open up near the highway to an unmarked and overgrown trail that rangers would like to forget. It was here in 1996 that Julianne Marie Williams and Laura "Lollie" S. Winans were tortured and slashed to death in an attack that sent chills through the popular national park, where violence is rare. Rangers warned hikers about the dangers of camping alone. Women's rights groups wondered if it was a hate crime -- if the women were murdered simply because they were lovers. Now, prosecutors believe they've found the killer, but questions about recent DNA testing led a federal judge on Friday to delay the capital murder trial, which was to begin Monday. Darrell David Rice, a 36-year-old from Columbia, Maryland, with a history of violence toward women, will instead face trial Nov. 3. U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon ordered the two-week delay so both sides could have more time to investigate biological evidence. Rice's lawyer, Fred T. Heblich, said in a court motion that genetic tests on cloth gags used on the women excluded his client. The Richmond Times-Dispatch, quoting a report filed by an FBI expert, reported Saturday that DNA found on the gag used on Williams came from another man. The new developments could suggest someone else may have committed the crimes. Investigators began to look at Rice in 1997 when he was caught trying to run a female bicyclist off a road in the park. They've entered into the court record a mountain of circumstantial evidence and interviews with jailhouse informants. But what may become a central issue at trial is a lack of biological evidence connecting Rice to the slayings. Heblich said that for such a murder -- the women were bound and rebound with duct tape and probably were held captive for hours, according to investigators -- the attacker must have left behind some blood, hair or fingerprints of his own. "But there's no forensic information that indicates Rice," Heblich said. Heblich said investigators should have removed Rice from suspicion when the FBI found that hair discovered on gloves at the camp site and on duct tape used to bind Winans did not match either of the victims or Rice. Heblich said prosecutors should be looking at another man whose hair samples were not excluded in the FBI analysis -- suspected child killer Richard Marc Evonitz. Evonitz was accused of killing three girls near Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1996 and 1997. He committed suicide in June 2002 as police surrounded him. Prosecutors would not comment on evidence found at the campsite where the women were slain. During the summer, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tony Giorno said in a telephone interview that it's not uncommon to try a murder case without any biological clues, given the nature of the crime. "There are a lot of things to explain why there might not be any forensic evidence -- weather conditions ... the amount of time they were out there," Giorno said. Rice, a computer programmer and Grateful Dead groupie, enjoyed making women uncomfortable, prosecutors said in court documents. Rice verbally abused women at his job and made lewd gestures behind their backs, prosecutors said. Investigators also interviewed former cellmates of Rice's including Phil Robertson, who said Rice confessed to the murders. "He tied them up and he said that he hurt the one so that the other one would cooperate," Robertson said in court documents. "He said he slit their throats." Rice's sister, Dawn Metcalfe, said she can't explain her younger brother's guilty plea in the 1997 attack on the bicyclist. But she said prosecutors are wrong when they characterize him as a violent homophobe. Metcalfe described her brother as a quiet, loyal man. Williams, 24, of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine, knew each other from a Minneapolis women's organization, and later moved in together in Burlington, Vermont. On May 19, 1996, they began what was to be an eight-day journey through the park. Their bodies were found 14 days later near a creek-side camp site after Williams' family contacted park officials. Video cameras recorded Rice entering the park on May 25 and 26. Anthony Coyle, of Boothwyn, Pennsylvania, told authorities he saw a man who looked like Rice walking without a backpack about 2 miles from the murder scene. Coyle, who was hiking through the park that weekend, said his girlfriend told him the next morning she had dreamed about a woman screaming. Williams' mother, Patsy Williams, said she plans to drive from Minnesota to attend the trial. She said she didn't know her daughter was involved romantically with another woman until she read news reports of her death. After the slayings, she tried to learn as much as she could about the final years of Julianne's life. She hiked the same trail, tracing her daughter's final footsteps. Years later, during preliminary hearings, she made a point of driving through the park again. "It's still hard to talk about this," she said. "Something like this changes you as a person. The grief will never go away." Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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