Assault on bicyclist puts Rice in the spotlight

Date published: 11/18/2007

When Darrell Rice drove his bright blue pickup into Shenandoah National Park on a summer day in 1997, his life was in turmoil.

He had recently been fired from his job as a computer programmer. And he had been battling mental health problems and exhibiting odd behavior for more than a year.

But the Maryland resident whose chief passion was following the Grateful Dead could have had no idea just how bad his life was about to become.

That day, just two months shy of his 30th birthday, Rice’s actions thrust him into the center of two high-profile murder investigations in central Virginia that were languishing.

Instantly, when Rice was arrested in the attempted abduction of a female bicyclist in Shenandoah National Park on July 9, 1997, federal law enforcement officers converged.

Immediately, questioning began about the March 2, 1996, abduction and subsequent slaying of 25-year-old graduate student Alicia Showalter Reynolds just 40 miles away.

Immediately, queries began about the May 1996 slayings of 24-year-old Julianne “Julie” Williams and 26-year-old Laura “Lollie” Winans in that same park.

Authorities would have been foolish not to pursue him.

They had just caught him—nearly in the act—trying to accost a woman inside the park where two young women had been killed 14 months earlier.

He was driving a pickup, as had Reynolds’ abductor—a man dubbed the “29 Stalker.”

He even looked like one of the composites that were circulated across the state after Reynolds disappeared from U.S. 29 in Culpeper County.

And federal officials would soon learn that Rice’s father lived in Culpeper.

Building a case

Over the next five years, federal officials pursued Rice as the prime suspect in the slayings in Shenandoah National Park.

They questioned him, interviewed jail and prison cellmates, employed an undercover agent and conducted dozens of forensic exams.

They interviewed park visitors, volunteers and staff.

Eventually, they claimed the Shenandoah slayings and the 29 Stalker cases—incidents where a man in a pickup flagged down women drivers suggesting they were having car trouble—were committed by the same person.

And ultimately they assembled a circumstantial case.

On April 10, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced capital murder indictments against Rice, claiming he targeted Williams and Winans out of a “hatred for women and homosexuals.”

Date published: 11/18/2007