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07-30-2026, 04:32 PM
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 ★ ★ GENERAL ★ ★ Poster Rank:38 male Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 39,481
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The Murder of Julianne Williams and Lollie Winans
A dog came down the trail alone. That is how it started to come apart. Park rangers in Shenandoah National Park picked up a golden retriever wandering the paths at the beginning of June 1996, and followed the question of where she had come from back to a campsite, and to two women who had been dead for about a week. Who they were Julianne Williams, known as Julie, was 24. Laura Winans, known as Lollie, was 26. They were experienced outdoorswomen, camping together in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia in the spring of 1996, in the country near the Skyland area. They were a couple. They were killed at their campsite on or about May 24, 1996. Their bodies were found by park rangers on June 1. The wrong man What happened next took twenty eight years to undo. In 2002, federal prosecutors charged Darrell David Rice with capital murder in the killings. Rice was already in custody for attempting to abduct a woman on Skyline Drive, inside the same park. On paper he fit. In 2004, prosecutors were forced to drop the murder charges. Hair and DNA recovered at the scene did not match him. It belonged to an unknown man. Rice had by then spent years publicly attached to a double murder he did not commit. His attorney has argued that DNA evidence available as far back as 1996 was ignored. In 2024, when the FBI finally named the man the DNA did belong to, Rice was formally exonerated. Weeks after that exoneration, Darrell Rice was struck by a car and killed. He was cleared, and the record should say so as loudly as it once said the opposite. He was not the killer. He never was. The man the DNA belonged to On June 20, 2024, the FBI Richmond Field Office announced that DNA testing had identified Walter "Leo" Jackson Sr. as the man responsible for the murders of Williams and Winans. Preserved evidence, re-examined with technology that did not exist in 1996, gave up a name. The FBI says Jackson had a lengthy criminal history including kidnapping, rapes and assaults. He died in March 2018 while serving an Ohio prison sentence on charges related to kidnapping. News coverage has described him as a convicted serial rapist from the Cleveland area. He will never stand trial for the two women in the park, because he was already four years dead when the DNA came back. The details the FBI has published about him are strangely domestic. He was a residential painter by trade. He was an avid hiker. Around the time of the murders he may have been driving a 1984 chestnut brown AMC Eagle 30, and later a 1979 Ford Econoline 250 van. He was known to use temporary tags, alter license plates, and change vehicles often. The timeline that excludes him The most useful document in this case is a list of dates when Walter Jackson could not have hurt anybody. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction gave the FBI the periods he was incarcerated: January 1984 to February 1989, May 1994 to September 1994, August 2000 to May 2007, and May 2012 until his death in March 2018. The FBI published that timeline for a specific reason. Jackson is excluded as a possible suspect for any unsolved crime committed inside those windows. Everything outside them is the space investigators are asking other agencies, and the public, to look at. It is an unusual thing to see laid out so plainly, and it is the single most practical piece of the case: a dead man's calendar, offered up so that other families might get an answer. Theories Jackson was identified by DNA and never prosecuted for these killings, so what follows is theory and is presented as theory. For years the murders were investigated as a possible hate crime, because Williams and Winans were a couple. That framing drove a great deal of the coverage and some of the prosecution strategy at the time. It has never been established as the motive, and the man eventually identified by DNA had a documented history of attacking women that had nothing to do with who his victims loved. Rice's attorney has publicly argued that the prosecution ignored DNA evidence that existed in 1996, and that the years Rice lost were avoidable. That is one lawyer's position, forcefully stated, and the FBI has not adopted it. Where it stands The murders of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans are solved and closed as to who did it. What is still open is everything else Walter Jackson may have done between those prison terms. The FBI has said it will keep working with law enforcement partners to determine whether he is responsible for other unsolved crimes, and it is asking the public for anything that helps build his movements: where he painted, where he hiked, what he drove, who saw him. Anyone with information about Walter Jackson's movements can contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov.
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