Darrell Rice’s indictment for the 1996 Shenandoah Park murders was announced by then United State Attorney General John Ashcroft on April 10, 2002.

On the national stage, Ashcroft told the public Rice killed Julianne “Julie” Marie Williams and Laura “Lollie” S. Winans “because of his hatred of women and homosexuals.”

It took 22 years for the FBI to admit they got it wrong.

“That case was not built on forensic evidence,” U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia Christopher Kavanaugh said in an FBI press conference announcing a new suspect on June 20.

Why did it take so long to publicly exonerate Rice? Two of Rice’s attorneys, former director of the Innocence Project Deirdre Enright and attorney Gerald Zerkin, raised that question at their own press conference on Monday, Jun. 24.

“Responsibility is the watchword of federal criminal prosecution,” said Zerkin. “It’s time for the government, in this case, to exercise the sense of personal responsibility it expects of Darrell Rice, that it demands of every criminal defendant that it prosecutes. It can do that by making full disclosure, not the half-baked disclosures that we got in the government’s press conference. As much as we appreciate what they did, it’s not the whole story.”

Almost 20 years ago, a plea kept him from prison time but kept a target on his back

Deirdre Enright led Darrell Rice to a back room in the Prince William Courthouse.

It was 2005, during his jury trial for abduction with the intent to defile. According to a 2005 article from the Washington Post, Rice was identified by Carmelita Shomo as the person who abducted and beat her while she was driving home from work near Manassas. She had also identified two other men as that person, though.

Prosecutors were trying to link the attack on Shomo, and by extension her accused attacker Darrell Rice, to a series of incidents along Route 29, collectively dubbed the Route 29 Stalker case, but it wasn’t going well. According to the Washington Post, Shomo’s credibility tanked while she was on the stand.

“The government didn’t seem to realize that their victim had 12 to 14 charges for crimes involving honesty, reliability, credibility, which of course she denied on the stand,” Enright later recalled. “We had them verified, so they were hers. At that point, the jurors began laughing. The government started trying to throw together something.”

In the back of the courthouse in 2005, Enright was serving as Rice’s pro bono attorney. After Shomo’s credibility became a liability to prosecutors, the defense was offered six different plea deals, Rice turning down each.

This time was different. This deal came with what amounted to no time served.

“There’s nothing to talk about here, you have to take this,” Enright remembers telling Rice.

“I cannot believe you of all people would ask me to plead guilty to anything,” she remembers him saying back.

“I can’t believe it either, but we cannot take a chance,” she answered. “These people are insane and rabid, and we have to take the deal.”

According to the Manassas Journal Messenger, Rice pleaded guilty to unlawful wounding. He actually entered an Alford plea, which does not admit guilt but acknowledges the prosecution’s evidence could be enough to convict. It’s often a face-saving maneuver for both a prosecution and a defendant to end a court proceeding with neither side being forced to declare they lost.

Rice maintained his innocence in the media after the plea deal was reached. But he already had a strike against him: a guilty plea in a 1997 incident where he ran a biker off a park trail with his pickup truck and accosted her — in an area close to where the Shenandoah Park murders had occurred just a year earlier.

For a ‘strong new suspect’ for park murders, an ‘extraordinary’ sentence for a plea deal in unrelated case kept him behind bars

During the 2005 trial, Rice was already serving time for a 1998 guilty plea to attempted abduction.

According to Kathryn Miles in “Trailed,” her book on the Shenandoah Park murders and the subsequent investigation, Yvonne Malbasha was riding her bicycle on Skyline Drive in July 1997 when she noticed a blue pickup truck pass her. It turned around, then passed her going the other way. The truck approached again and she felt something hit her back. She looked around and saw a soda can on the ground.

The truck driver was Darrell Rice. He yelled obscenities at her, telling her to expose herself.

Malbasha turned onto Lewis Mountain access road, looking for help. Rice followed her, and forced her bike off the road. He got out of the truck and said, “I’m going to get you.” She threw a water bottle at him, but he continued to approach. She blocked him with her bike and screamed. Rice returned to his truck and left. Malbasha noticed there were no plates on his truck.

Park rangers arrested Rice seven miles further down Skyline Drive, now in a different shirt and with the license plate back on his truck. At first, he denied he had encountered Malbasha, but then admitted to being rude and threatening. He’d had little sleep, he said, having been up all-night smoking marijuana. He told the rangers he was hearing voices and had trouble at work.

Malbasha identified Rice when the rangers brought him back. Rice “appeared concerned and apologized to Malbasha, asking her if she was hurt,” Miles wrote. “The rangers would say later his concern for her appeared genuine.”

After his arrest, Rice “asked if they had ever caught the person who killed the two women the previous year.” Miles wrote, “At that point, the rangers had already decided that Rice was a strong new suspect in the 1996 murder case.”

The Shenandoah National Park murder investigation, and the pressure on law enforcement to find the killer, tainted the handling of Rice’s case, Zerkin said, even while no solid evidence pointed towards Rice’s involvement in the murders. After pleading guilty to attempted abduction and showing remorse, Rice was shocked to receive a sentence of 14 years. Zerkin said the sentence was “extraordinary, and no doubt was fueled by his being the suspect in the homicides.”

No evidence tied Rice to the murders. But now Rice was in custody. For investigators who were convinced Rice was the killer, time was on their side.

Operation Real Deal: jail-house informants, undercover agents, and a made-up cover of The Washington Post

The long sentence for Rice’s 1998 plea gave investigators the time to work on indicting Rice for the Shenandoah Park murders, despite the lack of evidence. They employed jailhouse informants and countless interviews to try to break Rice down.

Enright said the government spent “millions” on what she called “Operation Real Deal.” An undercover agent, Mike German, was planted in a holding cell and placed with Rice. “Mike McCarthy,” as Rice would know him, then visited and wrote to Rice for years after “getting out” of prison. As part of the operation, he prodded Rice for information about the murders. Rice never gave him any.

Undaunted, in June 2000, the FBI invented a new scenario. Miles writes in “Trailed” that McCarthy/German sent Rice newspaper clippings of a double murder in the park and a forest fire that had been started to destroy evidence of the crime. The articles he provided had actually been created by the FBI, and in his letter McCarthy hinted that he would have to leave the country soon. Later Rice received a postcard, seemingly sent from Copenhagen, so that Rice would believe his friend had indeed fled the country. There was no forest fire, no murder, but there was the hope Rice would sympathize with his vengeful friend and confess to the 1996 murders. The agent sent Rice a postcard from Denmark, alluding to having committed the crime.

Rice wrote back nine months later, saying he was “worried and dismayed” about the letter. They continued writing until 2002, when Rice was indicted for the murders.

Miles previously interviewed Enright for her book. When Enright told Rice his “friend” Mike McCarthy was an undercover agent named Mike German, Enright told Miles, “Darrell was crushed. It was one of the only times I ever saw him visibly emotional about the investigation.”

Homophobia accusation another of the investigation’s wrong turns

In the 2002 press conference announcing Rice’s indictments, Ashcraft said, “The government’s notice describes evidence of Rice’s hatred for homosexuals, including his statement that Julianne Williams and Laura Winans deserved to die because he believed they were homosexuals.”

Zerkin claimed the defense had the recording’s sound cleared up by “the guy who does the sound for Dave Matthews” so “you could actually hear what it said.”

The defense team included the entire transcript in a motion, giving Miles the entire conversation.

“Then they asked me if I hate lesbians,” Rice says, referencing the investigation.

“Lesbians?” asks the law enforcement informant.

“That made me angry. And I was like – nooooooo.”

“Oh they was trying to get you to open up to them and say ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, I killed them-‘”

“Yeah, like, ‘I hate gay people.'”

Zerkin called it “totally opposite of what the government had made it out to be. The government’s explanation for it was that, while the FBI had had the tape enhanced, we had had the tape quote ‘super enhanced.’”

A ‘thick blue line’ of influence against Rice

In 2005, federal prosecutors dropped the murder charges against Rice. State-level prosecutors still weren’t done with Rice. They charged him for the Route 29 Stalker cases.

Enright was critical of a “thick blue line” of federal agents telling state or local prosecutors Rice committed the murders but got away with it, despite the lack of evidence and dropped charges.

The result, Enright claimed, was a system-wide tainted view of Rice in his 2005 case, by law enforcement, the public, and parole officers.

“As the director of an Innocence Project, there’s red flags for innocence and he’s got every one of them, right?” Enright said. “Bad prosecutors, bad police, bad defense attorneys that plead you guilty to crimes that you should have been challenging, junk science, jailhouse informants.”

The actual culprit’s DNA, in the database by 2011, wasn’t checked for a decade

Enright and Zerkin began representing Rice as his defense team in 2002. At the joint press conference at the University of Virginia’s School of Law in June, Enright said they still represent Rice. “It appears, for the rest of our lives, it will be our calling.”

No forensic evidence linked Rice to the murders. Enright said “between 15 and 22 informants” made “the government’s case for them, because the evidence didn’t.”

During a grand jury hearing leading to the 2002 homicide indictments, Zerkin said one grand juror asked if there was any forensic evidence in the case. The answer given was no. Zerkin said that the prosecutor did not mention a glove found on the scene that did not appear to belong to either woman when it was recovered.

Zerkin noted that DNA from hair found in this glove did not match Rice when it was tested around 2005.

“Heaven knowns why so many years passed without the hair and those bloods being discovered or tested,” said Zerkin. “Years and years of investigation, of litigation, until, finally, it was tested.”

Enright told the media “I want you all to find out” why the DNA was not checked against a national DNA database before the 2020s.

“I theorize that the answer is because the agents were still saying that it was Darrell Rice in 2011,” Enright said.

That’s the year Walter “Leo” Jackson‘s DNA was entered into the database. His DNA match to the crime was announced in last week’s FBI press conference. Enright said the DNA from the crime scene wasn’t put into the database until after the investigation started over with a new team, after 2021.

Ten years after Jackson’s DNA was available. Four years after he died in prison. While the families of Julie and Lollie now have the name of a person who police believe killed their daughters, he’s not alive to prosecute.

“If I sound livid, it’s because I am,” Enright said.

Investigators ignored a witness and the likely timeline so they could place Rice in the park at the time of the murders

At the time of the attack, Rice was a “pothead” and fan of the Grateful Dead, Zerkin said, with “a thousand bootleg Dead tapes” and “600 tickets to Dead concerts” in his van when he was arrested for the 1998 case, according to Zerkin.

Investigators kept a timeline of when they thought Rice committed the murders. When they found a witness who saw the women alive after Rice left Shenandoah National Park, the timeline was not updated, and Rice was not cleared.

Instead, according to Zerkin, investigators told the waitress that the women she saw must not have been Williams and Winan. The waitress later gave the defense team “the most detailed description” of the women, allegedly including a calcium deposit in Julie’s teeth and an order of bacon for their dog Taj.

During the case, prosecutors did not claim the women were sexually assaulted, but Zerkin said it “seemed to us they had been.” This was confirmed during Thursday’s press conference. Rather than focus on this evidence, Zerkin claimed, investigators went to Rice’s friends and family and asked “about the possibility that Darrell had sex with their dogs.”

“The government spent more than a little time and money investigating the baseless theory that, although Darrell hated women, he loved dogs a little too much,” said Zerkin.

‘Home’ became hiding for Rice after he’d served his sentence

Rice left prison in July 2007, moved in with his mother, and worked at a vehicle emissions inspection station. While on probation, Enright said prosecutors wanted Rice to register as a sex offender despite not being convicted of a crime that “made him eligible” for the sex offender registry.

They avoided the registration, but some of the terms of sex offender probation were imposed. Because he lived on the water, the ankle GPS monitor did not work the way it normally does, so “he could not move more than six feet from his house for the entire time he was on probation.”

His probation was expected to end in July 2010. However, he was arrested and jailed again in March 2009 for probation violations around marijuana and pornography.

He moved after probation ended in April 2012. When locals found news coverage of the murders, “lynch mobs were formed to go find him.” Enright said she answered calls from sheriffs asking her to talk to the outraged locals.

“Everywhere he has ever gone, if they find out who he is, that happens,” said Enright. “He does not say his name, he does not tell people who he is.”

“Darrell’s life has been destroyed beyond what the prosecution did,” Zerkin said.

Coverage of the old case is harder to find as of Monday morning, buried by links to stories covering Thursday’s press conference exonerating him. This was the reason for the press conference, Zerkin explained, “Darrell has been wrongly persecuted in these cases” and “we can’t take the internet down, but we can put things on the internet.”

When asked if either Enright or Zerkin had spoken with Rice since Thursday, Enright said no.

“He is hiding, which is what he does,” explained Enright. “We tried, sent emails and stuff like that. I’ll be honest, knowing him as well as I know him, I’m not sure that he’s going have much reaction to this. I think he would think like, ‘You guys said it was going to be over 100 times,’ and I don’t know that it would mean as much to him as it means to us.”

Lyra Bordelon (she/her) is the public transparency and justice reporter at The News Leader. Do you have a story tip or feedback? It’s welcome through email to lbordelon@gannett.com. Subscribe to us at newsleader.com.

This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Darrell Rice’s defense team reacts to FBI exoneration for Shenandoah National Park murders