They imagine murder, foul play and kidnapping. I was stinking, blistered, and covered in mosquito bites. “I wish that you and I can now find peace. Glenda continues to grieve not only Geoff, but also the future he might have had with Molly. Geoff was lying in a back corner, his head on a makeshift pillow. The trail is about 2,200 miles (3,500 km) long, though the exact length changes over time as parts are rerouted or modified. On Dec. 26, 2006, The Sentinel reported how Perry County prosecutors announced they would stop fighting the appeals associated with the Crews case. A day later he stepped off a bus in Winchester, Virginia, and embarked on a zigzag course of hitched rides—west to Romney, West Virginia, north into Maryland, northeast to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—until, six days after leaving the farm, he walked into a library in East Berlin, Pennsylvania, halfway between Gettysburg and York, looking for hiking maps. A hiker who’d embarked on a freelance search for the killer recognized Geoff’s pack on his back and sounded the alarm. A Massachusetts man who federal authorities said brutally attacked hikers on the Appalachian Trail in Southwest Virginia will make his first appearance in court today on murder … By the time I left Monson, I’d gained three days on them, and I was no speedster. It reminded me of when she was little and scared and couldn’t sleep, and going into her room to give her a hug.”. It’s a loss she emphasized at a December 2006 hearing where Crews’s death sentence was replaced with life in prison without parole. Three southbounders—Brian “Biff” Bowen and his wife, Cindi, of Amherst, Virginia, along with Gene “Flat Feet” Butcher, a retired soldier I’d camped with in Vermont—were trying to catch Geoff and Molly, who were trying to catch up with Muskratt, who was now just behind me. Including his own hike. It is a quiet, restorative place, this clearing high on a Pennsylvania ridge. Not long after, according to law-enforcement records, Crews had turned up at his older brother’s place in Polkville, North Carolina, driving the woman’s bloodied Oldsmobile. “It was one of the most wonderful gifts,” Jim says. Animal and I resolved to catch them. Usually ships within 1 to 2 months. Lawmen in Pennsylvania began putting together their case. This morning, BRING ON THE SLUGS. The Associated Press reported how relatives of the two victims wept on hearing the sentence and how a courtroom spectator exclaimed “Yes, thank God.” Juror Gaythol Hefner told reporters “The evidence was so overwhelming.”. Gene “Flat Feet” Butcher decided not to dally and hiked up Cove Mountain shortly after Crews had descended the same path. I’d never known a murder victim. Little else about the event is certain. Earl Swift is the author of five books, including Auto Biography: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream. On Saturday, May 25, 1991, a Perry County jury decided that Crews, a former Marine and South Carolina farmhand, should be put to death for murdering LaRue and Hood. Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device. “I was really scared, but you have to keep the faith.”. “I think most of the conversation was curse words,” recalls Pennsylvania state trooper Bill Link. Black flies kamikazed into my eyes and mouth. When they finished, nothing remained of the old hut but a bald patch in the forest floor, not even its name. HARRISBURG, Pa. -- A suspect in the double murder on the Appalachian Trail has been arrested in West Virginia, officials said Saturday. “If she knew I was wallowing in grief, she would kick my ass. Yuck! At this point a chase was under way. During their 2,200 mile hike of the Appalachian Trail, going by the trail names of Clevis and Nalgene, the couple arrived at the Thelma Marks Shelter on top of Cove Mountain at about 5 p.m. on September 13, 1990.. It was very real. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court automatically reviews death penalty cases. Prosecutors also cited the “risks” associated with continuing to appeal, including the possibility that Crews could be ordered a new trial or a new sentencing hearing. The news came as a relief to many of the estimated 200 enthusiasts who attended a ceremony to celebrate the opening of a new route near Boiling Springs. Karen Lutz has achieved an uneasy peace. Funny. Between May 1991 and December 2006, Crews had appealed his case to the state Supreme Court three times, to the U.S. District Court twice and to the U.S. Third Circuit Court once. “Some of Geoff and Molly’s register entries impressed me so much, I wrote them down,” George told us. He was arrested wearing the boots and backpack of one victim. Testimony in the trial started three days after Glenda’s hike, on May 15, 1991. But that’s not the way it played out.”. From there they faced an easy two miles of ridgetop to Thelma Marks—which waited, dark and droopy, its back to the AT, at the bottom of a steep 500-foot side trail. I met a stranger in the old lean-to, talked with him under its low roof as we fired up our stoves and cooked dinner. We ate lunch at the top of a fire tower and shared a shelter with a pile of northbounders on day three, visited an emergency room when Marla pulled a knee on day four, and reached the Maryland line on day six. One more thing, Geoff said—we have something to tell you when we all get together. The double slaying of lesbian hikers along the Appalachian Trail remains unsolved. The next morning, he stepped out of the shelter and into the clearing. The senseless happened. “I want to spend my time caring about things my daughter cared about. Please subscribe to keep reading. Birds trilled. The clearing was dead quiet. The irony was the same weekend Crews was apprehended, the victims’ families had planned to meet up with LaRue and Hood at Harpers Ferry to celebrate the midpoint of their trek down the Appalachian Trail. They were two young lovers engaged to be married who were sharing an adventure down the Appalachian Trail until they crossed paths with Paul David Crews. They burned the wood in a bonfire, scattered the rock foundation. Better bring soap and brushes, Geoff told his mother, so that we can scrub the smell out of our packs. “Well, we had one of those days.” Geoff’s next entry whimpered: “Our bodies have had almost as much as they can take.”. Instead, they reached an agreement with his attorneys that Crews would serve two life sentences without parole in state prison. Eleven days into my hike, I stumbled out of the woods and into Monson, Maine, where I met Greg Hammer, an Army vet in his late twenties whose Virginia home was just a short distance from mine. 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. “This event really seemed to mark the end of the trail’s innocence,” Lutz told me. “I consider that Geoff and Molly were murdered in God’s cathedral,” she says. That night, detectives who’d never set foot on the trail struggled for three hours to reach Thelma Marks. “From that day forward,” he says, “there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t see a spectacular sunset and think: Ah, Molly’s at work.”, Molly crossing a stream. Story: The first recorded murder on the Appalachian Trail was Joel Polson. We caught up with them that afternoon as they took a break at a road crossing, chatting about the strange night we’d shared and our relief that Rubin was northbound. “This week is always a tough one,” Lutz said. I noticed that he carried one of the best packs around at the time, a mammoth green Gregory, and that both of them handled their gear with an expert nonchalance. Or the questions that lingered when the man responsible would not say why he shot Geoff three times or why he tied Molly’s hands behind her back and looped the rope around her neck. At one point, trail officials had warned hikers to bypass the Pennsylvania section of trail until police had a suspect in custody. At the same time, the trio of southbounders chasing Geoff and Molly walked into Duncannon. Maybe it was the sheer savagery of the act. Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Two hikers found the bodies in a three-sided log shelter. “If someone were murdered in God’s cathedral, then murder could be committed anyplace.”. Do you want to know something about the friend?’, “I said, ‘Are you announcing a relationship?’. Geoff had rock-climbed in Colorado and taught climbing at New Mexico’s Philmont Scout Ranch. In all honesty, there have been instances of murder and foul play on the trail. Please support Outside Online today. Thelma Marks Shelter Murder – Appalachian Trail, South East Pennsylvania SEPTEMBER 13th, 1990 – Two young outdoor enthusiasts, Geoff Hood (26) and Molly Larue (25), learned they would be losing their jobs in May (1990) and decided to take the opportunity to fulfill a life goal together; complete a 6 month hike through the Appalachian trail. Find more newsletters on our. His name was really Paul David Crews, and he was a suspect in a murder. “This might have to do with my age, but I find I get more emotional about it now,” says former Perry County, Pennsylvania, prosecutor R. Scott Cramer, who tried the case in 1991. Irritated, Greg told the newcomer, whose name was Rubin, that he’d have to make do with the shelter’s middle. He kept his head down as he trudged past, headed north toward U.S. 11. “They’re probably sleeping right through it.”. Near Manchester Center, Vermont, both Muskratt and Animal pulled ahead of me, and no matter how far or fast I hiked, I couldn’t catch up; they seemed to stay a shelter ahead through the rest of New England, until, after a hell-for-leather sprint, I managed to catch Muskratt just inside New York State. At the New Hampshire line I’d picked up a week. The families arranged for memorial services while police searched for the killer. Were they attacked as they slept? Tired they stopped for the night at the Low Gap Shelter where they met Ralph Howard Fox. Greg was confident that what had happened to them was part of a divine architecture, that the world’s sin, its evil, is no accident—that everything is “part of God’s sovereignty.”. During the sentencing hearing, Dr. Gene L. Cary, a psychiatrist from the Penn State Hershey Medical Center, testified that Crews had consumed nearly a quart of whiskey and a “heavy amount” of cocaine just prior to committing the murders. Polsom was murdered at the Low Gap Trail Shelter along the Appalachian Trail in the Chattahoochee National Forest. The killer’s own words, to others he met in the days that followed, suggest they talked and that he stole their story along with their gear: he said he’d started hiking in Maine around the first of June and was trying to catch up with Muskratt. Trail Safe: Averting Threatening Human Behavior in the Outdoors, Auto Biography: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream, our entire suite of free newsletters here. Unknown. The universe had no plan. Biff Bowen had the same frightened thought: “Had we hiked a little faster, it might have been us.”. But they also wrote in the logbooks left in shelters, which, in the days before cell phones, were the most reliable means for through-hikers to connect. (Photo: Earl Swift). Three came at trailside shelters. Originally ordered to die by lethal injection, Crews is serving two life sentences in state prison without parole for murdering the couple. He’d left his own gear at the scene, some of which was traced back to the tobacco farm in South Carolina. Randall Lee Smith (June 29, 1953 – May 10, 2008) was a convicted murderer from Pearisburg, Virginia. With over 3 million hikers visiting various sections of the trail per year, there have only been 9 murders along the trail since 1974, and according to the ATC an average of about 1 … And it reverberates still, all these years later, because what befell Geoff Hood and Molly LaRue at the Thelma Marks shelter is a cautionary tale without lesson. Murder on the Appalachian Trail. “I expected it to be a dark, sinister place, and it wasn’t,” she says. Throughout his babble, Geoff and Molly—who wrote in their journal that they’d “had a very poor night’s sleep due to the noise pollution”—treated him with quiet tolerance, never rising to his bait, just letting him be. And in June 1992, when Geoff’s sister, Marla, set out to finish the couple’s hike, I went along for her first week. They left upbeat log entries at every shelter. A storm rumbled in the distance as he pulled a Bible from his pack, along with his journal. It prompted outdoorsmen and trail officials to rethink conventional wisdom long held dear: that safety lies in numbers, that the wilds offer escape from senseless violence, and that when trouble does visit, it’s always near some nexus with civilization—a road, a park, the fringe of a town. To inspire active participation in the world outside through award-winning coverage of the sports, people, places, adventure, discoveries, health and fitness, gear and apparel, trends and events that make up an active lifestyle. The funeral director told them, “I thought you might like to hold her.”, Jim, Connie, and their son, Mark, three years older than Molly, dropped to the floor and wrapped their arms around her. They even paused to do some counseling. He walked out and told her, “I think this is going to be the longest day of our lives.”, It was, and the days that followed were not much better. As Molly predicted in one log entry: “If you’re behind us you will pass us.”. Help the Mollys of this world learn who you are, and try to enlist the help of other inmates to help in this effort. His companions were still eating when Glazerow announced that he had more hiking to do, wished them luck, and groaned his way up to Thelma Marks. They were stopping to take pictures, to study plants, turtles, and salamanders, to bake bread. The suspect in the May 2019 Appalachian Trail murder case has been considered "not competent" to stand trial, according to a report from CBS affiliate WJHL. “Paul, I am here today to offer forgiveness for what you have done,” he told his daughter’s killer—at which point, he says, Crews locked eyes with him and held the connection. The most recent occurred in 2011 when a hiker from Indiana named Scott Lilly died from “asphyxia by suffocation”—in an apparent homicide.The murder remains unsolved to this day. By the time I reached central Pennsylvania, they trailed me by eight days. Granola had pulled ahead of me, and I lay alone in a shelter that night, stunned and scared. I missed my girlfriend. A few days later, we caught up with Muskratt at Vermont’s Happy Hill shelter. He put down Casey Horn. And they were slow. Hood, 26, of Signal Mountain, Tennessee, was shot three times in the head, back and abdomen by a .22-caliber pistol fired from about 4 feet away, based on gunpowder residue found at the scene. And so, on June 4, 1990, having climbed the day before to the AT’s northern terminus on the peak of mile-high Mount Katahdin, they set off on their long walk—and found it surprisingly arduous. You have permission to edit this article. She thinks they planned to announce their engagement. Any hopes for respectable mileage already shot, we settled for an easy seven-mile stroll to the Darlington shelter. In what seemed a trance, he chanted, wailed, and danced in the middle of the shelter for one hour, then two. History and education reporter for The Sentinel. By then she and Geoff were close to inseparable. By Steve Marroni | smarroni@pennlive.com For news … Attempted suicide, went AWOL, and got discharged from the corps. Geoff and Molly walked two blocks to the Doyle Hotel, the crumbling fossil of a once grand inn. Officials investigate the scene of a double murder on the Appalachian Trail near Duncannon in September 1990. Our conversation was halted by the approach of a short, bearded man in a baggy black suit and large-brimmed hat, staggering under a pack that towered high over his head. $25.95. Then beyond two. It was dark.” The crime scene unfolded piece by piece in the beams of their flashlights. “It was summer—it would have been pretty light. Molly had tackled two Outward Bound courses and spent a year providing wilderness therapy to kids in the Arizona desert. “This is a brain on cocaine and a quart of Jim Beam,” Philpott says of Crews. “I love you forever, I like you for always,” he wrote in April, when he was off in the backcountry. “There’s a certain quality of the light this time of the year, and the temperatures suddenly get cooler and the humidity drops off, and it all comes right back.”. A Case of Murder on the Appalachian Trail H. Pohlman. Glenda Hood, at home in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, switched on the radio the morning of September 14, just in time to hear a news report that two hikers had been murdered near Duncannon. And to have their lives snuffed out at that age—it’s a tragedy beyond words.”. No way would I walk that street at three in the morning. While Perry County prosecutors maintained that Crews is guilty of the murders, they said continuing to fight the appeals would cost the small, largely rural county significant money. He was alone there. For years she would be haunted by that moment, by “tremendous guilt over the fact that I had seen him, and that I had sensed an evil aura coming off him. Did they have a conversation with him? “Molly had decided to devote her life to working with troubled children, like you certainly were,” he told him. They were going to make a difference. Glenda Hood, a pediatric nurse, threw herself into caring for ailing children. Cloistered from civilization by a steep 900-foot climb over loose and jutting rock, the glade goes unseen by most everyone but a straggle of hikers on the Appalachian Trail, the 2,180-mile footpath carved into the roofs of 14 eastern states. I was still trying to catch up with Greg, who had left word in Darlington’s register that he planned to end his hike in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a few days to the south. She ventured into the clearing. Not long after, the crew removed the old shelter’s corrugated metal roof, dismantled its log walls, and sawed them up. I couldn’t claim to know Geoff and Molly well, but they seemed far savvier in the woods than I was. (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Howell). Paul David Crews was responsible for the double murder of “If someone were murdered in God's cathedral, then murder could be committed anyplace.”. On this afternoon, the ATC’s Karen Lutz was surveying one such property when she noticed a bearded man plodding up the road behind her. “I thought a tornado was on the way,” Greg wrote. “These people are trying to sleep,” I said, nodding toward the others. Molly, Geoff, and I talked about Salina, where I’d interviewed for a job once. Both of us slept late and lounged at Thelma Marks, drinking coffee, until close to noon. Two of the four attacks were aimed at couples. One morning he crawled into bed behind her and held a bayonet to her throat. I have missed their children, who would be my grandchildren.”, “Geoff and Molly were murdered in God's cathedral,” Glenda Hood says. 1990: Geoffrey Hood and Molly LaRue were killed by Paul David Crews near Duncannon, PA. 1996: Julianne Williams and Lollie Winans were killed in Shenandoah National Park near the Skyland Resort, but not on the Appalachian Trail. “He went on the trail looking for an opportunity,” he says. I read this a few days south of Katahdin, which I’d climbed 12 days behind them. Eight nights later, a southbound couple I’d befriended early in my hike followed me into Thelma Marks. Perhaps the shelter’s remoteness—far greater than that of past trouble—played into our big-city uneasiness about what lurks in the woods at night. Two fisherman were shot on the Appalachian Trail by Randall Lee Smith. They live in a home on rolling woodland that they share with school groups exploring the natural world. “To die doing something you love is not the worst thing in this life. All the indicators suggested that. Afterward, they picked up mail, stopped at a small grocery, and, at 3:45 p.m., followed the trail into the woods and up Cove Mountain. Ten years later, in September 2000, I learned from Karen Lutz that the Thelma Marks shelter was to be replaced. So the police thought Crews might have killed before. He was described as a rough-looking, unkempt white man carrying two red gym bags. I hiked with him for several days, lost him near the New Jersey border, caught him again near Palmerton, Pennsylvania, lost him again. We lingered, talking and laughing, long after we’d gorged ourselves. District Attorney Cramer listed several aggravating circumstances, saying that Crews tortured LaRue and killed her, though Crews was never officially charged with rape. My first reaction was: How can this Nalgene person be so obnoxiously happy? Rubin needed no coffee to get up to speed. “Hey Greenhorn you most certainly are not the last entry of the season,” Geoff wrote. She would say, ‘If you love me, get over it. The Appalachian National Scenic Trail, generally known as the Appalachian Trail or simply the A.T., is a marked hiking trail in the Eastern United States extending between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. My visit got me thinking of my 158 days and nights on the AT, the people I’d met, the friends I’d made, and when I got home I phoned Animal to revisit our adventures together. 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