Convicted serial rapist linked to Shenandoah park murders, FBI says (2024)

Authorities said they now believe that Walter “Leo” Jackson Sr., who died in an Ohio prison in 2018, bound Williams’ and Winans’ hands with duct tape, sexually assaulted them and slashed their throats. The killings frightened the LGBTQ community and raised fears that the women were slain in a hate crime.

“Make no mistake that this crime was brutal,” said Christopher Kavanaugh, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. He said there is no evidence that the killings of the couple were motivated by hate bias, as authorities had initially believed.

Over the years, investigators eyed at least two other men, one of whom was charged with capital murder. After prosecutors dropped that case, court documents detailed evidence potentially linking the murders to a dead serial killer. He too has been ruled out.

“We now know who is responsible for this heinous crime,” said Stanley M. Meador, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Richmond, naming Jackson. He said new DNA tests from evidence matched Jackson’s profile in a computer database. Authorities said the likelihood that the material found on evidence is a genetic match to Jackson is 2.6 trillion to 1, more than 300 times the world’s population, an exceedingly strong probability of a connection in the realm of DNA testing.

Meador said: “We can’t imagine how extremely hard it is for the family members to receive this information. They’ve been seeking answers for far too long.” Williams and Winans were last seen May 24, 1996; their bodies were found June 1 of that year, about a half-mile from an inn on Skyline Drive.

At the time of her death, Winans, who grew up in Grosse Pointe, Mich., was completing studies at Unity College in Maine and working toward being an accredited outdoor guide. Williams was from St. Cloud, Minn. They met through an outdoors program for women, and both were described as experienced hikers.

Efforts by The Washington Post to reach their relatives Thursday were not successful.

Kathryn Miles, author of a 2022 book on their case, “Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders,” said in an interview Thursday that she has continued to hear from people who won’t hike or camp because of these killings.

“For an entire generation of hikers and backpackers, particularly women and people who identify as queer, the impact of this crime was such that it sort of fundamentally removed the wilderness for them and made them very afraid,” she said. In that sense, Miles said, she considers it a hate crime even if federal investigators don’t use the term.

Violent crimes against women in outdoor settings raised fears at the time — and continue to do so, said Jaime Grant, a former policy director for the National LGBTQ Task Force. “Whether or not this person targeting women saw them as queer, to me, is an aside,” Grant said. “Queer women are subject to the violence that all women are subject to.”

Miles said she watched a live stream of Thursday’s news conference and then spent much of the afternoon talking to family members and friends of the victims. “They’re having a real mix of emotions here,” she said. “On the one hand, I think there’s a sense of relief, but I think it’s tempered by the circ*mstances of this, and there’s a lot of frustration.”

Because Jackson is dead, she said, the families won’t get the closure of a trial and won’t get to see all the evidence laid out.

Miles faulted investigators for not performing this kind of test sooner. Meador on Thursday said he requested a full review of the case in 2021 after becoming special agent in charge of the Richmond office. Authorities were unclear about whether the same testing could have been done long ago. At the time, investigators were testing hairs found on duct tape used to bind the victims. Defense lawyers cautioned then that evidence may be too degraded to get conclusive results.

When Williams and Winans were killed in 1996, DNA analysis as a law enforcement tool was in its early stages. U.S. courts had begun permitting the use of DNA evidence in criminal trials less than a decade earlier. But the science has advanced markedly since then, allowing technicians to extract ever-more minute samples of genetic material from ever-older pieces of evidence and develop DNA profiles of the people who left that material.

Authorities spent “countless hours” working to determine what items of evidence from the 1996 crime scene “would be suitable for retesting” as part of a comprehensive review, Meador said Thursday. “Once we identified those items,” they were submitted to an accredited private DNA testing lab, he said. Those items were not described; it could not be determined if they were the same items tested years ago.

DNA was successfully pulled from several items of evidence, Meador said, and the resulting genetic profile was compared to genetic profiles of criminal offenders in a federal database known as CODIS, for Combined DNA Index System. The CODIS system, established in the late 1990s, has grown in the past quarter-century to contain DNA profiles of more than 17 million people charged with crimes, according to the FBI. Given his guilty plea in a 2011 rape and kidnapping, and his 2014 conviction for two abduction-rapes that had occurred in 1996, Jackson would have been a candidate at the time to have his DNA profile entered into CODIS for possible future reference.

Jackson, who lived to 70, was originally from the Cleveland area and worked as a housepainter. Authorities said Thursday that he had been convicted as a serial rapist as part of a lengthy criminal history in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, that also included kidnapping and assault.

On Thursday, authorities described Jackson’s violent record, including a prison term on unspecified charges from 1984 to 1989. That rules him out in unsolved serial killings along the Colonial Parkway in the Williamsburg, Va., area from 1986 through 1989. He was behind bars again in 1994, and freed that same year, less than two years before Winans and Williams were killed.

Four days after the couple was found, authorities said a woman was kidnapped and raped in the Cleveland area. Several weeks later, police said another woman in the Cleveland area was abducted from her home and raped at knifepoint. A third woman was raped in that area in 2011.

In 2012, police charged Jackson with the 2011 attack, and he later pleaded guilty and was incarcerated. While in prison, authorities said, DNA linked him to the two 1996 rapes. He was later convicted and sentenced to an additional 20 years in prison.

Federal authorities had initially arrested another man in the killings of Williams and Winans, and in 2002 they filed capital murder charges against Darrell D. Rice, a computer programmer from Maryland. They said at the time that they believed the attack was motivated by anti-gay, anti-woman rage. Authorities cited mounting circ*mstantial evidence: Surveillance video twice showed Rice entering the park around the time of the killings. He had attacked a woman in the park a year later, and he had a history of violence against women and reportedly made admissions about the case to prisoners. Rice denied the charges.

The U.S. attorney general at the time, John Ashcroft, announced the indictment against Rice, the first time prosecutors used a 1994 law allowing for enhanced penalties for crimes motivated by bias against gay people. Ashcroft said then that Rice could be eligible for the death penalty.

But charges against Rice were dropped in 2004, shortly before his trial, after forensic testing showed that hairs found at the murder scene excluded him as a possible suspect and instead could implicate another man, convicted serial killer Richard M. Evonitz. He had taken his own life in 2002, before he was implicated in the slayings of three Spotsylvania County, Va., girls.

Meador with the FBI said they compared evidence from the victims directly with a stored saliva swab containing Jackson’s DNA.

Authorities said Jackson was known to visit Shenandoah National Park and was believed to be driving a 1984 chestnut brown AMC Eagle vehicle at the time of the killings. They said Jackson often used temporary license plates, altered license plates and frequently changed vehicles.

Meador said their work is not finished, even with Jackson deceased. He said authorities are “piecing together a timeline of Jackson’s movements to share with our partners to assist them with unsolved cases.”