Instead, that was the day the lifeless bodies of Williams and Winans were found about a quarter-mile from Skyline Drive off the Appalachian Trail. The killer had stripped the women of their clothes, bound and gagged them, and slit their throats.

Although the case remains unsolved, there was at least one strong suspect: Darrell David Rice.

In July 1997, Rice, a Maryland resident at the time, was arrested after an attempted abduction of a female bicyclist in the Shenandoah park. He eventually served a 10-year sentence for the abduction attempt.

Investigators continued to investigate him in the double homicide, and in April 2002, Rice was indicted on capital murder charges in the Shenandoah park killings, with authorities claiming he targeted Williams and Winans out of a hatred for women and homosexuals.

But, because they lacked forensic evidence against Rice, federal prosecutors’ case fell apart and the charges were dropped. (A forensic test failed to rule out known serial killer Richard Marc Evonitz, who killed three Fredericksburg-area girls in 1996 and 1997, as the source of two key head hairs found at the park scene, according to a 2007 investigative report by The Free Lance–Star. Evonitz killed himself in 2002 as police closed in on him.)