For women and queer people, the American wilderness offers a double-edged sense of freedom. There is a long history of going to the woods听蹿辞谤 adventure, solace, or social connection that is hard, if not impossible, to find in regular life. But the woods, in their distance from laws and safety personnel, can also be places where bad actors take advantage of the most vulnerable.

One of the most infamous examples in recent history is the murders of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans, two young white queer women whose 1996 deaths in Shenandoah National Park remain unsolved. I鈥檓 a queer woman in my mid-thirties, and though most of my friends can not recall the murdered women鈥檚 names, they hold the ambient sense that this crime occurred. In 2020, I published a book, The Third Rainbow Girl, that explores how the notorious 1980 murders of two middle-class women hitchhiking in a West Virginia county forever changed the fabric of the local community. Many people I interviewed told me their vivid and jumbled memories of what seemed to be the murders of Williams and Winans. It seems like this crime was enough to wound a generation of women and queer people, taking from us the joy of solo or couples hiking and reinforcing the message once again: Don鈥檛 be women alone in the woods. And definitely don鈥檛 be queer women alone in the woods.

Journalist Kathryn Miles鈥� new book, , is a deeply empathetic and rigorously researched investigation into the murder. It鈥檚 also an exploration of the anxiety the crime instilled in so many people and an attempt to temper it鈥攁 goal that lands in some parts but misses in others. 鈥淢ore than a few people have told me that the murder of Julie and Lollie ended their time in the backcountry, that even though they鈥檇 never known the two women personally, news of what had happened to them was scary enough,鈥� Miles writes. 鈥淢aybe, if I could tell the story of what really happened to [Williams and Winans] and who was responsible, I could ameliorate some of that collective pain and help make the woods feel safer for all of us.”

Trailed also provides the most comprehensive accounting of outdoor spaces that nurtured feminists and lesbians in the 1980s and 1990s that I鈥檝e yet to read. It鈥檚 an important contribution to American outdoors nonfiction for this, if for no other reason.

Williams, 24, and Winans, 26, met and fell in love in the backcountry in the mid-1990s through one of these spaces, an organization called , which Miles calls 鈥渢he heart of a revolution in the outdoor industry鈥� and a 鈥渃orrective鈥� to the sexist and dangerous experiences that most women had in other organizations like Outward Bound. Woodswomen gave the two women, who were both survivors of sexual assault, a renewed sense of physical embodiment, power, and autonomy.

Departing from other books in which murdered women are flattened, people-shaped characters鈥損retty or smart or shy or outdoorsy鈥揗iles fully develops Williams and Winans and brings them to life. In a scene that shows both the extensiveness of Miles鈥� reporting and her profound compassion for her subjects, we get to watch as Williams and Winans write to each other and form a rich and complicated queer love story: 鈥淟ollie admitted that she feared being publicly affectionate as two women and that the strain of a gay relationship in an intolerant culture would pull them apart. Lollie wrote down that she was bisexual. They both wondered what would happen if one of them ever wanted to be with a man. They put an asterisk by the question 鈥榃hat does a relationship mean to us both?鈥� The biggest word on the page is 鈥楾RUST.鈥� It鈥檚 the one word I can鈥檛 tell who wrote, almost as if it came from them both.鈥欌��

The bodies of Williams and Winans were found by Shenandoah National Park rangers on June 1, 1996, at their isolated campsite near Skyland Resort in central Virginia. In an effort to minimize public relations damage and mitigate a sense of panic during the peak summer season, the National Park Service handled the case slowly, and the FBI handled it, Miles argues, ineptly. As a result, no one was prosecuted for the so-called Shenandoah Murders until 2002, when Darrell David Rice, a Maryland man who had served time for an attempted abduction of a woman in Shenandoah National Park, was indicted for the killings.

The state鈥檚 theory was that Rice, who allegedly made misogynistic and anti-gay comments during his interviews with police, killed Williams and Winans as a homophobic hate crime. The case was tried as such under a brand-new post-9/11 federal hate crime statute. But Miles explains that DNA evidence eventually cleared Rice and destroys the idea that Winans and Williams were murdered because they were lesbians by showing that this theory was the political invention of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and local prosecutors. They were under enormous pressure to solve the murders after the National Park Service and FBI badly botched the crime scene and dangerously withheld news of discovering the women鈥檚 bodies for reasons that seem almost certainly about politics and public relations.

Miles goes on to show that publicly protected wilderness land is the worst place to get murdered, if there is to be any hope of finding the perpetrator. Many publications, including this one, have reported that a national park is the worst place to go missing because of issues relating to jurisdiction and databases; some people estimate the number of people missing on public lands today could .

Miles鈥� reporting still makes a convincing case that the likely perpetrator is Marc Evonitz, a man with a long history of raping and murdering women and girls around the Southeast. Evonitz, Miles lays out, may have killed Williams and Winans for reasons that are much harder to define but have to do with a history of childhood abuse, mental illness, and sexual sadism.

But Miles鈥� project grows more complicated when she reveals that Williams and Winans were two of eight women and girls killed in a specific section of central Virginia over a 14-month period in the late 1990s. The book also begins to consider the murders and attempted murder of four other lesbians on protected forest land: Becky Dowski and Cathy Thomas in 1986 along the Colonial Parkway Scenic Highway in Virginia, and Rebecca Wight and her partner, Claudia Brenner, who survived, in Pennsylvania鈥檚 Michaux State Forest in 1988.

By expanding her focus, Miles begins to make a wider argument that women and queer people are at heightened risk of violence in the outdoors. 鈥淔ar too often, women are prey in our culture,鈥� writer and violent attack survivor Terri Jentz tells Miles in the book. 鈥淎nd there are more guys than we鈥檇 like to admit who go out in the wilderness to hunt them.鈥� It is as if Miles鈥� excellent reporting goes in one direction, while her analytical mind goes in another. The notion that women and queer people are exceptionally vulnerable to violent attack and murder in the backcountry becomes a central thread of Miles鈥� book, even though it interferes with her ability to argue that the Shenandoah murders shouldn鈥檛 discourage women and queer people from outdoor adventure. 鈥淲hile it might be tempting to say that crimes like the murder of Julie and Lollie are isolated incidents, statistics prove otherwise,鈥� writes Miles, offering that there were 15 homicides in national parks in 1996, the year the two women were killed, and 30 rapes鈥攖hough it鈥檚 likely crimes in the backcountry are underreported.

I understand both of Miles鈥� allegiances but ultimately think it does women and queer people a disservice to overstate the dangers against us. In my own reporting, I found that there were and 6,425 sexual assaults in the United States in , making the numbers Miles offers less significant given that national parks make up about 5 percent of . If anything, Miles鈥� book convinced me that young white women in central Virginia in the 1990s were the demographic group at the most increased risk of violence. It might have been better to see a fuller examination of crimes in the Charlottesville/Route 29 area at that time and what forces may have collided to make that area particularly dangerous for women and girls.

In the end, Miles鈥� book is a rich and nuanced meditation on the danger of manipulating messy contradictions to serve a politically expedient or emotionally fulfilling purpose. Perhaps she is simply asking us to grapple with the contradiction at the heart of her inquiry鈥揵eing in a wild place can heal you, and being in a wild place can kill you.

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