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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Investigators fanned out farther along the Appalachian Trail in an effort to reach more hikers who had passed through the stretch above Pearisburg and might have seen Mountford and Ramsay. They found two more people who remembered seeing the couple along with a third, male figure near the shelter. "They had said he acted very eerie," Lawson recalls.

Investigators descended upon the Wapiti Shelter. It was now May 30, 11 days after the last sighting of the couple. Lawson noticed nothing unusual, until his eyes dropped to the floor. "It looked like something had run down between the floorboards," he says. "So I run my knife down between the boards. It was a thick and red substance down there. I said, 'We need to tear this floorboard up. I think there's blood here.' "

Analysis later revealed it was Mountford's blood.

The investigators strode 30 yards in all directions, whacking weeds and kicking over logs. They came upon a small open area and noticed a mound of leaves -- as if someone had tried to cover up something. They started digging and discovered a cloth sleeping bag. Inside it was Susan Ramsay.

The next day, extra help arrived on four legs -- a dog trained to search for bodies. The dog stopped several hundred yards from the shelter, poked its nose around and sat near a stump. "I thought maybe he was tired," says Lawson. "One of the other officers didn't think so. So we moved the dog and started digging."

They found Mountford right there, also buried in a sleeping bag.

Lawson says that Ramsay and Mountford had shared an evening meal before they died. "It was heavy food," he says. "So it would have been a last meal for the day. They wouldn't have eaten that type food and continued hiking." They'd each also had a drink of Bacardi rum.

Mountford had been shot in the head. Ramsay had defensive marks on her hands. "She fought him very hard," Lawson says. "He used a piece of iron to hit her in the head. He also stabbed her with a long nail. She had 13 puncture wounds. As well as wounds with a knife."

The bodies had been dragged from the shelter. Investigators found Ramsay's camera but were disappointed to find the film had been ripped out. But then they came across her backpack, which yielded a valuable clue: a paperback novel that Ramsay had been reading, "Mountolive," by Lawrence Durrell, had bloody fingerprints. One of the prints inside the book belonged to Randall Smith, which were on file from his time in the Norfolk shipyards.

Giles County investigators put out a nationwide APB, or All-Points Bulletin. And they closed a Virginia portion of the Appalachian Trail to hikers.

Investigators went to Smith's home. In the basement, they discovered some blood-soaked jeans "and some stuff that belonged to the hikers," Lawson says.

There was also pornographic materials and hospital instruments, possibly pilfered during times he had gone to see his mother at the hospital where she worked. "He had fashioned them into sex toys," says Lawson of the instruments.