CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – A retired forensic psychologist who examined longtime Shenandoah Park murders suspect Darrell Rice says he never believed Rice had committed the 1996 double homicide of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans.

“I didn’t believe he was capable of doing that,” Jeff Fracher said in an interview on Charlottesville Right Now a month after Rice was exonerated when DNA identified an Ohio man, Walter “Leo” Jackson Sr., as the killer. Rice was killed less than two weeks after that match was announced when he was struck by a vehicle while riding his bike in Missouri.

Fracher was hired by Rice’s defense team to conduct a forensic evaluation after Rice was charged in a 1997 attack on a female cyclist in the park. Rice was convicted in that crime and served 11 years. In 2002, then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that Rice had been indicted in the murders of Williams and Winans. The indictment made history as the first time a hate crime statute was invoked for victims allegedly targeted for their sexuality. It attracted intense media coverage that would haunt Rice for years after his release from prison in 2007.

“Rice had to go into hiding after the allegations that he killed the two women in the park,” Fracher said, recalling his conclusions after his evaluation of Rice.

“He was a strange guy, don’t get me wrong. He had lots of quirks. He had a very significant drug history,” Fracher said. “So his cognitive function and judgment was not the greatest, but he also did not strike me as someone that was in any way, based upon my formal evaluation, capable of a double homicide.”
That assessment was borne out with the DNA match to Jackson, who died in prison in 2018 while serving a sentence for violent sexual assaults on women. At the press conference announcing the match, authorities said he was a hiker with a history of travel to the Shenandoah National Park.

Fracher did not examine Jackson but said his history of violence towards women gives him an idea of what likely happened.

“My guess is that he ran into them … in the park, and there was some, probably some interaction was escalated and that was the trigger.”

The recent DNA matches in the Shenandoah murders and the Colonial Parkway murders were funded by the Virginia Attorney General’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.

Listen to the full conversation with Jeff Fracher here: