STONY MAN MOUNTAIN, Va. – 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, secluded among the ferns and huckleberry bushes, that Julianne Marie Williams of Minnesota and Laura “Lollie” S. Winans of Maine were tortured and slashed to death in an attack that woke nearby campers with dreams of screaming in the night.

The killings on old Bridal Trail sent a seven-year chill 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 Williams and Winans were murdered simply because they were lovers.

The mystery may end soon in Charlottesville federal court. Prosecutors say they’ve found the killer: Darrell David Rice, a 36-year-old Grateful Dead enthusiast from Columbia, Md., with a history of violence toward women, faces capital murder charges in a trial that begins Monday.

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 the trial is a lack of biological evidence connecting Rice to the slayings.

Defense lawyer Fred T. 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 found on gloves at the campsite 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 killed three girls in Spotsylvania County near Fredericksburg, Va., in 1996 and 1997, according to police. 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,” he said.

Prosecutors argue that Rice was in the park just before the murders on Memorial Day weekend and had a twisted reason to attack Williams and Winans.

Rice, a computer programmer who grew up in Severna Park, Md., enjoyed making women uncomfortable, prosecutors said in court documents.

While writing computer disks at MCI Systemhouse Inc. in Columbia, Rice verbally abused women 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. “I said, ‘What did you do to them?’ He said he slit their throats.”

Rice’s sister, Dawn Metcalfe, said she couldn’t explain her younger brother’s guilty plea in the 1997 attack on the bicyclist. But she said prosecutors are getting him wrong when they characterize him as a violent homophobe.

“My brother has got tons of friends – some of them happen to be gay,” said Metcalfe, 38. “He does not hate gay people.”

Metcalfe described her brother as a quiet man who’s extremely loyal to his friends. Rice followed the Grateful Dead for several years, she said, trailing the tour from city to city.