“Peace be with you.”. “To die doing something you love is not the worst thing in this life. 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. She would say, ‘If you love me, get over it. Peering down the steep mountainside toward the invisible Thelma Marks shelter, Butcher decided not to stop in and hiked on to Darlington. They even paused to do some counseling. (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Howell). “It’s beyond eerie,” said Mark Glazerow, known on the trail as “Doc.” “If the (perpetrator) would have been a day earlier, this trail would have been about my death.” A Baltimore area jeweler, Glazerow had slept at the shelter Sept. 12, 1990. I know what most people envision, as far as safety, when I say “thru-hiking”. 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. He flipped through his trail journal, started reading. Two fisherman were shot on the Appalachian Trail by Randall Lee Smith. Crews had been on that state’s most-wanted list since disappearing from that state in 1986 after being indicted by a Polk County, Florida, grand jury in the death of a 56-year-old Bartow, Florida woman. Back outside we split up: Greg and I decided to hike an old section of the AT, while the others backtracked to the rerouted trail. “They’re probably sleeping right through it.”. Sunshine splayed through the trees to dance at his feet. “I wish that you and I can now find peace. There are no guarantees.”. He’s also a Southern Baptist minister. Hikers were on hand to testify, and others, like me, had simply shown up. But we covered close to 16 miles that day, far more than they did. That night, while feasting on shrimp and mushrooms, the couple signed the Doyle’s register, countering a previous hiker’s claim that he was the last of 1990’s southbounders. There was a problem saving your notification. Connie LaRue, also a nurse, volunteered at a hospice on the shore of Lake Erie. Why he stabbed her eight times in the neck, throat, and back. Granola and I reunited a couple of days later. Instead, they reached an agreement with his attorneys that Crews would serve two life sentences without parole in state prison. “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. Karen Lutz has achieved an uneasy peace. 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. They would have had plenty of room to unroll their sleeping gear and spread out a bit. 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. I was still on the trail, hiking in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, when a pair of day-hikers told me a couple had been killed on the trail up in Pennsylvania five days before. Last evening I whispered “I think there’re less bugs.” It’s tall and airy and skylit, with a deep porch, two tiers of wooden bunks, and a picnic table. Biff Bowen had the same frightened thought: “Had we hiked a little faster, it might have been us.”. Molly, Geoff, and I talked about Salina, where I’d interviewed for a job once. The climb over lichen-flaked stone and loose scree ended at Hawk Rock, a promontory offering a sweeping vista of the town, rivers, and rolling farmland below. A thousand miles south of Katahdin, I crossed the Susquehanna River and walked into the old ferry town of Duncannon, Pennsylvania, following the trail’s white blazes on telephone poles up High Street past churches, a hardware store, and simple, sturdy houses on well-tended lawns. They were certainly more patient than me, and far better equipped to defuse trouble. In part 1 we covered the multiple characters who interacted with Molly and Goeff as well as the timeline that … It was very real. The trail’s caretakers had worked for years to reroute the footpath into forest they had acquired piecemeal. They'd met in Salina, Kansas, where both worked for a church-sponsored outfit that took at-risk youngsters into the backcountry to salve their troubles with adventure. Well north of 11, she encountered the stranger again. (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Howell). Bob Howell, a Pennsylvania state police investigator at the center of the inquiry, offers a straightforward take. Yuck! The stuff that resembles butterscotch fudge. 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. James L. Jordan, 30, of West Yarmouth, Mass., was charged in the fatal stabbing of one person and the wounding of another on the Appalachian Trail. Funny. My family and friends aren’t so concerned with the natural hazards that I will be encountering as they a… Please subscribe to keep reading. Jim LaRue found comfort in an idea offered by one of Molly’s college friends—that Molly, ever artistic, was now adding her touch to each evening’s sunset. 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. So he was hiking, she realized. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court automatically reviews death penalty cases. Those crimes shared traits with what transpired at Thelma Marks. We sped over the high, wild Presidential Range and down the 2,000-foot Webster Cliffs, setting up camp at the bottom two nights behind Geoff and Molly. (Photo: Earl Swift). “I said someone has been murdered.”. Our rendezvous came on Friday, July 20, at the Jeffers Brook shelter near Glencliff, New Hampshire, after we’d crossed an above-tree-line peak in a crashing thunderstorm. The three-sided structure was nestled among birch, poplar and oak trees on the south side of Cove Mountain about 30 feet below the trail that runs from Maine to Georgia. It was close to 5 p.m. when they started climbing and about six when they reached the turnoff. And in June 1992, when Geoff’s sister, Marla, set out to finish the couple’s hike, I went along for her first week. “He never wanted to talk about this incident, or any of his alleged murderous incidents.”. The air smelled fresh, and all about him the woods seemed renewed. If chaos could find them, I realized, it could find anyone. Molly LaRue and Geoff Hood in Duncannon, Pennsylvania, on September 12, 1990, with Cove Mountain in the background. They divorced, too. Shortly after midnight, as I snored in my tent and Greg slept in his bivy sack, we were startled awake by a concussive thud: a rotted tree had toppled into the four-foot space between us, coming within inches of my head. I was in the courtroom. Outside Online aims to deliver readers the world, dispatching our writers and photographers to the ends of the earth to report the one-of-a-kind stories that have inspired and informed generations of readers. Smith murdered two hikers on the Appalachian Trail in May 1981. Two hikers walking the Appalachian Trail in West Virginia saw a man who matched the description. Abandoned in childhood, he was adopted at age eight by a couple in Burlington, North Carolina, but he ran away frequently. It’s a loss she emphasized at a December 2006 hearing where Crews’s death sentence was replaced with life in prison without parole. Biff and Cindi Bowen slowed as they approached the lean-to's rear. Sometime that night a 38-year-old drifter on the run from law enforcement killed both of … The double slaying of lesbian hikers along the Appalachian Trail remains unsolved. But it’s no longer sustainable for us to give it away for free. “This week is always a tough one,” Lutz said. By the time I reached central Pennsylvania, they trailed me by eight days. “We got a phone call from her one day,” Molly’s father, Jim LaRue, recalls. “And I didn’t do anything.”, Earlier that day, Geoff and Molly had broken camp at the tiny, squalid Peters Mountain shelter north of the Susquehanna River. Cindi, an elementary school teacher, and Biff, a jeweler, knew they were close on Geoff and Molly’s heels. Geoff was laid to rest near his home in Tennessee, in a plot overlooking Signal Mountain. Since 1974, there have been 11 Appalachian Trail murders. My first reaction was: How can this Nalgene person be so obnoxiously happy? I missed my girlfriend. Polsom was murdered at the Low Gap Trail Shelter along the Appalachian Trail in the Chattahoochee National Forest. 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. So it was that when Biff and Cindi finished their hike that summer—having avoided shelters every night—Glenda Hood picked them up at the trail’s southern terminus at Springer Mountain, Georgia. As I exchanged handshakes with Clevis and Nalgene, I told them that I felt like we’d already met. By Steve Marroni | smarroni@pennlive.com For news … Glenda Hood promised to bring two pumpkin pies, his favorite. Still, none drew the attention, or generated the angst, of the incident here. Glenda continues to grieve not only Geoff, but also the future he might have had with Molly. There are also many other hazards and dangers of thru-hiking: rattlesnakes, dehydration, hypothermia, fractures, strains, to name a few. 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. And to have their lives snuffed out at that age—it’s a tragedy beyond words.”. “Well, we had one of those days.” Geoff’s next entry whimpered: “Our bodies have had almost as much as they can take.”. I drove to Duncannon, slept at the Doyle, then swore my way uphill to the clearing. 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. But he took a step toward the righteous path late in his hike, he told me, and he could remember the night it happened: Wednesday, August 28, 1990, at the Thelma Marks shelter. I was stinking, blistered, and covered in mosquito bites. “Some of Geoff and Molly’s register entries impressed me so much, I wrote them down,” George told us. In his opening statement, Perry County District Attorney R. Scott Cramer said it was important for jurors to understand the subculture spawned by the Appalachian Trail and how Crews was an outsider who didn’t fit in. Became a father the following month. His name was really Paul David Crews, and he was a suspect in a murder. When I visited this past spring, saplings and tangled brier so colonized the old shelter’s footprint that I might have missed it, had I not slept there myself. Black flies kamikazed into my eyes and mouth. Birds trilled. They imagine murder, foul play and kidnapping. Another southbounder was already there: Marcus Macaluso, a.k.a. (Photo: Courtesy of Glenda Hood), They ventured onto the AT, as many do, at an unsettled juncture in their lives: they’d learned that, come May, they’d be laid off, and a six-month hike seemed a good way to decide what to do next. But that’s not the way it played out.”. 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. They live in a home on rolling woodland that they share with school groups exploring the natural world. 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. They continued to dawdle through meals. 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 … One morning he crawled into bed behind her and held a bayonet to her throat. “I want to spend my time caring about things my daughter cared about. They left upbeat log entries at every shelter. They gave shout-outs to other hikers, including one named Skip “Muskratt” Richards, whom they’d met in Monson. He kept his head down as he trudged past, headed north toward U.S. 11. “Hey Greenhorn you most certainly are not the last entry of the season,” Geoff wrote. 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. They met a stranger there, too. (Photo: Earl Swift). Listed below are a few of the most recent murders along the Appalachian Trail. “He would take a quart of Jim Beam and a cigarette pack full of powder cocaine, and that’s how he would hike.”, Crews shared little information with him, Philpott says. It was god-awful.”. And near as anyone can tell, they did everything right. Granola, of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, a long-haired, deep-thinking Grateful Dead fan, 18 years old, who carried bongos in his pack and left clever register entries that I’d enjoyed for weeks. Then beyond two. Greg and I pushed on but reunited with the other four southbounders that evening at a Dartmouth Outing Club bunkhouse. “They were settling down for the night,” he says. Molly had tackled two Outward Bound courses and spent a year providing wilderness therapy to kids in the Arizona desert. Glenda Hood held her hand shortly before she died in July 2006. The couple had been dead 12 to 16 hours before The Lone Moccasins came upon the murder scene. Murder on the Appalachian Trail. Their deaths seemed a terrible accident of time and geography. And now, late on the afternoon of September 11, 1990, he found his way to the Appalachian Trail. He came upon the scene, and something happened. Ferns and wildflowers carpet its floor. The next morning, he stepped out of the shelter and into the clearing. This is something I just can’t handle. From the darkness of the shelter’s west wall, Molly yelled, “I’m not sleeping through it!” A chorus backed her up. A blue-haired troll doll dangled from her backpack. Get over it, Jimmy.’ ”. Maybe it was the sheer savagery of the act. He crunched the empties into makeshift candleholders. Granola had pulled ahead of me, and I lay alone in a shelter that night, stunned and scared. The Sentinel on Oct. 18, 1990 reported how Crews was wanted on a first-degree murder charge in Florida. Lawmen in Pennsylvania began putting together their case. $294.57. Better bring soap and brushes, Geoff told his mother, so that we can scrub the smell out of our packs. This was the last photo taken of the couple before they were murdered on Cove Mountain by a wanted drifter named Paul David Crews. 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. “Bingo. Help the Mollys of this world learn who you are, and try to enlist the help of other inmates to help in this effort. Now he wore a big green Gregory. 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. Luckily the pair survived, but Smith was charged for attempted murder and murder of two hikers back in 1981. He joined the Marines in 1972 and married in January 1973. Then it fell quiet. I’d hear of a crime and do a little calculus to separate myself from the victim: I wouldn’t hang around a crack house. 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. We stood together under a tall sassafras tree, songbirds chatty in its branches, and eyed the careworn and mouse-infested Thelma Marks for the last time. The proceedings offered only roundabout, unsatisfying clues as to why the killings had happened. From Karen Lutz, they learned of the stranger with the red gym bags. A gunshot wound was clearly visible in the center of his back. 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.”. The shack he left behind was piled with garbage and empty beer cans. “If someone were murdered in God’s cathedral, then murder could be committed anyplace.”. “They were caught off-guard and somebody attacked them ... sometime before dawn,” Perry County Coroner Michael Shalonis told reporters after the bodies were found on Sept. 13, 1990. 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. They were self-deprecating, funny, kind. The library note Flat Feet had discovered gave them a name. Eight Bullets: One Woman's Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence by Claudia Brenner (1995-04-04) 4.4 out of 5 stars 23. The author (left) with Greg "Animal" Hammer. I hiked with him for several days, lost him near the New Jersey border, caught him again near Palmerton, Pennsylvania, lost him again. With the sun setting, he yanked six Old Milwaukee tallboys from his pack and chugged them in quick succession. 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