Suspect focused on one hiker, attorney says

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – Prosecutors said a Columbia, Md., man was pursuing one of two female hikers before binding both with duct tape and slashing them to death in Shenandoah National Park.

Darrell David Rice, 35, kept Julianne Williams alive longer than Laura “Lollie” Winans, and he tortured her before she died near a creek-side campsite in 1996, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Bondurant said at a hearing in federal court on Monday.

“Julie was the object of the attack,” Bondurant said afterward. “Her personal belongings are still missing.”

Dressed in a black and white jail jumpsuit, Rice sat quietly during the court hearing as lawyers discussed his previous altercations with women.

Lawyers agreed to drop two of four murder counts against Rice that accused him of slaying Williams, 24, of St. Cloud, Minn., and Winans, 26, of Unity, Maine, because of their perceived gender or sexual orientation.

The counts would have allowed prosecutors to seek enhanced penalties for Rice if he was convicted. But now that the prosecution is seeking the death penalty against Rice, Bondurant said they no longer are needed.

“If for some reason the jury recommends a lesser murder conviction, then those enhancements would be added again,” he said after the hearing.

Winans was a student at Unity College, majoring in outdoor recreation. She also worked as a volunteer at a rape crisis center in nearby Waterville, Maine. Williams had been living in the Burlington, Vt., area for about a year.

Their bodies were discovered about a quarter-mile from Skyline Drive off the Appalachian Trail about a week after they set out on a camping trip in May 1996. Their throats were slit, their mouths gagged and their hands bound.

U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon closed portions of Monday’s hearing, saying that psychiatric records and other evidence presented by prosecutors would taint potential jurors who might determine Rice’s fate.

“The evidence would be so prejudicial to be associated with the defendant in the public’s mind,” Moon said before sending out of the courtroom three reporters and a victim witness coordinator working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Before the courtroom was closed, Bondurant said that sometime between May 24 and May 25, 1996, Rice came in contact with the women. He said Williams and Winans were stripped of their clothes, and their hands were tied and retied – at one point with hair ripped out from one of the victims.

“We don’t know how long this took,” Bondurant said. “It could have been hours or even a day.”

The Roanoke Times sought to keep the hearing open Monday. Stan Barnhill, a lawyer representing the Times’ publisher, told Moon that the defense had to prove that potential juries would be prejudiced by the information presented before the court could be closed.

“If you close these doors, the public will never know whether justice was served,” Barnhill said.

Defense attorney Gerald T. Zerkin argued that the information from the hearing probably will be released to the public sometime.

“There’s going to be a trial at some point,” Zerkin said. “The public will not be denied this forever, but it will be denied now.”

Barnhill said afterward he might seek to appeal Moon’s decision to close the hearing and force the court to release transcripts of the portions that were sealed.

Rice has been in jail since 1998, when he was convicted of abducting a female bicyclist in the Shenandoah National Park the year before. In that case, Rice was accused of verbally and physically assaulting the woman, trying to kill her by running her over with his truck.