Blood on the Mountain

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Blood on the Mountain

In 1981, Randall Lee Smith murdered two hikers along the Appalachian Trail in a crime that stunned the nation.

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After high school, Randall Smith did odd jobs, including a brief stint in the Norfolk shipyards. The unsteady work left him free to roam, and he often hiked up and down the Appalachian Trail. He had long, dark hair and his body was fleshy, like a football player who had given up training.

Sometimes, Smith vanished for days. Having never played sports, or joined a Scout troop or done any community-oriented things in which he would have become a presence, no one seems to have missed him.

'Strange-Looking Man'

The Appalachian Trail stretches more than 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine and draws thousands of hikers every year.

There are accidents on the trail and an occasional vandalized car, but violent crime is rare. "It is extremely safe," says Brian B. King, spokesman for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, a management group based in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. "You have more of a chance getting hurt driving to the trail in your car than you do on the trail."

There is about one assault a year and one rape every three years, on average, according to Conservancy figures. There have been eight murders linked to the trail since the 1970s, King says. The most recent was in January, when Meredith Emerson, 24, was abducted on Blood Mountain in Georgia and killed by Gary Michael Hilton, a 61-year-old drifter. Prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty if he would guide them to the body.

In the spring of 1981, Susan Ramsay and Robert Mountford Jr., both 27-year-old social workers from Maine, decided to hike the trail to raise funds on behalf of the mentally ill. Mountford left from Georgia. In early May, he met up with Ramsay in Virginia. They had befriended a female hiker on the trail, and all agreed to meet in the area above Pearisburg. When Ramsay and Mountford didn't show, the woman became worried and alerted authorities.

"My father-in-law at the time said, 'Bobby's too good of a woodsman to get lost,' " recalls Robert Mountford Sr. Still, the elder Mountford was worried. He got in his car in Maine and drove to Virginia.

Tom Lawson was a deputy sheriff for Giles County at the time. He and a couple of other investigators went up on the trail to ask hikers about the missing couple. One told them Mountford and Ramsay had been seen with a "strange-looking man" near the Wapiti Shelter, a small log structure that had been built the year before.

Investigators also went to a local country store, Trent's, and asked if anyone had seen the hikers. They had, indeed, been spotted there on May 19, which would prove to be the last sighting of the two. Lawson remembers one peculiar thing about the investigators' visit to Trent's: "Some people told me there was some man going around saying, 'Hey, I know what happened to those hikers.' "

Lawson asked the man's name.

"And someone said, Lyin' Randall."

Some nut case, he thought. And continued moving.