THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, June 4, 1996 TAG: 9606040298
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN AND TOD ROBBERSON, THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 67 lines
Two young women were slain at a secluded campsite near the Appalachian Trail in Shenandoah National Park, authorities said Monday after finding the hikers' bodies over the weekend.
The women were found by park rangers Saturday night within three miles of the popular Skyland lodge along Skyline Drive, about 10 miles east of Luray, Va. They had planned a five-day hike through the park to end on Memorial Day, park officials said.
The victims were Julianne Williams, 24, of St. Cloud, Minn., and Lollie Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine, a law enforcement official close to the investigation said Monday.
Rangers and administrators at the park, about 80 miles southwest of Washington, revealed few details about the slayings, saying that doing so might compromise the criminal investigation. They will not discuss a cause of death until a coroner finishes examining the bodies.
``It's clear this is a homicide,'' said Robert Marriott, a National Park Service law enforcement official in Washington.
The women were not shot or stabbed, Marriott said. He declined to say whether they were sexually assaulted.
The bodies were found at 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Marriott said. He said the women appeared to have been dead for 12 to 15 hours, but other officials said they may have been killed several days earlier.
Greg Stiles, the park's chief ranger, said officials did not notify the news media as soon as the bodies were discovered because they wanted to determine first whether the deaths were a homicide. `Usually it's an accident or a suicide'' when someone is found dead in the park, Stiles said.
Both victims were affiliated with Woodswomen Inc., a Minneapolis-based group that provides outdoor adventure and education programs for women, said Denise Mitten, the group's executive director. Williams and Winans had worked as interns for the group last summer, leading outdoor programs in Minnesota, Mitten said.
The two struck up a friendship that continued over the year as Williams worked in Vermont and Winans attended Unity College in Maine, Mitten said. Their trip to Virginia was not related to the outdoors group, she said.
``It's an absolutely awful tragedy,'' Mitten said.
Williams had previously worked as a park ranger at Big Bend National Park in Texas. Winans was studying outdoor recreation, Mitten said.
Rangers began searching the park on Friday after receiving a telephone call from the father of one of the women who told them his daughter was late in returning from a hiking trip, a law enforcement official said. The FBI has joined park rangers and the Virginia State Police in investigating the deaths.
The women had back-country camping permits, one for the area where they were found and the other for Nicholson Hollow, about five miles northeast, park spokeswoman Robbie Brockwehl said.
They were supposed to have traveled from the Skyland area to Nicholson Hollow by May 26 and to have left the park the next day, Brockwehl said.
The women are the eighth and ninth people to be killed along the Appalachian Trail in the last 22 years, said Brian King, a spokesman for the Appalachian Trail Conference, a nonprofit group based in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., that maintains parts of the trail.
The last slayings along the trail occurred in 1990 near Harrisburg, Pa. A drifter from Florida shot one hiker in the head and stabbed another as they slept in a camping shelter. ILLUSTRATION: Map
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KEYWORDS: MURDER APPALACHIAN TRAIL by CNB