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| Description: On May 19, 1996, a young lesbian couple traveled to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia for a hiking trip. The women were named Julianne Marie Williams and Laura “Lollie” Winans; Winans also brought along her pet golden retriever. Nearly two weeks later, after neither of the women’s families had heard from them, the authorities were notified. When park rangers launched a search on June 1, they came upon a campsite and discovered that Williams and Winans had been brutally murdered. Both women were bound and gagged before their throats were slit. Winans’s golden retriever was also found wandering around the area, unharmed. Given the women’s sexual orientation and the brutal and calculated nature of the murders, authorities wondered if they were victims of a hate crime. In 2002, an incarcerated man named David Darrell Rice was charged with murdering the two women along with two counts of committing a hate crime. Rice was already serving an 11-year sentence for attacking another young woman in Shenandoah National Park in 1997 and was known for expressing his hatred toward women and homosexuals. It was believed that he deliberately targeted Williams and Winans because of their sexual orientation. Two years later, the charges against Rice were dropped once it was determined that DNA and hair samples from the crime scene did not match him. However, suspicion eventually turned to a serial killer named Richard Evonitz. In June 2002, Evonitz was about to be arrested for an unrelated crime but shot himself when police tracked him down. Forensic evidence eventually linked Evonitz to the unsolved murders of three teenage girls from the mid-1990s. Since these crimes also occurred in Virginia around the same time Williams and Winans were murdered, Evonitz is considered a suspect but thus far nothing has connected him to the crime. |
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