Trivia

Agent Clay says this case is FBI jurisdiction because it occurred on the Appalachian Trail, the 2,200 mile long trail is managed by the National Park Service, about 60% of the trail is on land managed by federal agencies like the U.S. Forrest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Which means serious crimes committed on the trail fall under either full or at least joint federal jurisdiction, if a violent crime is committed on a part of the trail that isn't on federal land then the crime is jointly investigated by the FBI and the local state or county law enforcement.

Serious violent crime on the Appalachian Trail is uncommon but happens, there have been 13 known murders on the trail since 1974, including three separate double murders. The first was the double murder of Robert Mountford Jr. and Laura Susan Ramsay in 1981, the couple were social workers hiking the trail as part of a fundraiser, they were staying the night at a trail shelter in Virginia when they encountered a man later identified as Randall Lee Smith, Smith shot and killed Robert Mountford and stabbed Laura Ramsay to death. Smith was arrested the next day after harassing a female biker on the path, he pled guilty to two counts of murder in the second degree and was sentenced to 30 years but paroled after only 15; in 2008 Smith was again hiking the trail when he attempted to kill two more people near where he killed his first two victims, he shot two fisherman who had invited him to camp with them, thankfully both survived, Smith then stole their pickup which he crashed while trying to evade police and died as a result of injuries from the crash.

The second double murder was the killing of hikers Geoffrey Hood and Molly LaRue in 1990, they were thru-hiking (hiking the entire trail) along the trail in Pennsylvania and stayed the night at one of the trail's shelters when a man named Paul David Crews entered the shelter and shot Hood then stabbed him and LaRue to death. Crews was on the run from police in Florida where he was wanted for another murder, he was arrested eight days later by West Virginia State Police after hikers reported him acting strangely, he was arrested carrying a backpack belonging to the victim and had both murder weapons in it; Crews was convicted of two counts of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The third double murder is the 1996 rape and murder of Julianne Williams and Lollie Winans, they were found dead at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia less than 1/4 of a mile from the trail. Both women had been abducted and were found in the park bound and gagged, both women had been sexually assaulted prior to being killed. The case remained unsolved until 2021 when the FBI's cold case unit reopened the investigation, using a recently developed method they were able to get viable DNA from semen samples found in both women, the DNA samples had been too small and degraded for the analysis techniques available in 1996 to match. The DNA matched to Walter "Leo" Jackson Sr., a convicted serial-rapist from Ohio who was known to be an avid thru-hiker of the trail, he died in prison in 2018 while serving a sentence for kidnapping and rape.