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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And finally, there was a note in Randall's handwriting. "The note said he had been kidnapped by two people and he was going to be killed," Lawson recalls.

Investigators didn't believe a word of it.

'Bam, We Had Him'

Days passed without a sign of Smith. Some law enforcement officials wondered if he had committed suicide. Lawson needed a break from the manhunt and took his family on vacation to Myrtle Beach in late June of 1981. Shortly after he arrived in South Carolina, however, authorities there called Giles County looking for him. They had arrested a man they thought might be Smith. Giles County deputies said Lawson happened to be in, of all places, Myrtle Beach, and passed along the name of the motel where he was staying.

"This squad car pulls up, lights flashing," Lawson says.

He was hurried to have a look at the suspect. While en route, officers told Lawson that the individual being detained was claiming to have amnesia and could not remember his name or even how he got to Myrtle Beach. Lawson took one look at him -- haggard and with blotchy insect bites all over him -- and knew: It was Randall Smith.

Outside the interview room, investigators hatched a plan.

"We told him those bites were quite serious," Lawson says. "Told him if he didn't get medical attention, they'd get worse."

The detained man nodded furiously. He had scratched some of his bites raw.

But in order to get medical attention, the man was told he'd have to sign a consent form. As soon as the form was placed in front of him, he scrawled out "Randall Lee Smith." "Bam," Lawson says. "We had him."

Smith, then 27, was extradited to Virginia, where authorities explained the evidence they had accumulated in hopes he might discuss what had happened on the mountain. "He'd just say, 'I don't want to talk about it,' " recalls Al Krane, who worked on the investigation as a special agent with the Virginia State Police.

'Never Did Have a Life'

Hezekiah Osborne was commonwealth's attorney for Giles County when Smith was returned to Virginia. Smith was charged with two counts of murder and many were clamoring for a tough sentence. There was strong suspicion that Ramsay had been raped, but authorities could not prove it because of the condition of the body.

Then, on the eve of the trial, Osborne accepted a plea bargain from Smith's attorneys. Smith pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. Both the Ramsay and Mountford families agreed to the plea bargain, which would result in a 30-year sentence. "If the Ramsays went along with it, we were going to go along with it," says Mountford Sr., who is an Episcopalian minister now living in Florida. "We didn't want him to get the death penalty. But we also didn't want him to ever get out."

Mountford was struck by Smith's personal background. He had heard about the lifelong fabrications. "I don't want it to sound like I sympathized with him. After all, he was a murderer. But he really never did have a life. And what life he did have, he made up."

The plea bargain, however, caused anger in the community. "Everybody was outraged, particularly police officers," remembers James Hartley, who was a local attorney at the time.

Osborne, now deceased, had told fellow lawyers he didn't want to risk a trial because he had been unable to discover a motive for the killings. "He said he thought the case was weak," Hartley recalls. "I think everybody disagreed with that."

Hartley drove by the courthouse one day and noticed it was being picketed. "And many of them were hikers."

When Osborne came up for reelection, he had an opponent: James Hartley, who trounced him.

After serving 15 years -- accounts differ as to whether his mother visited him once or twice during that period -- Smith was paroled in 1996. "He had been a model inmate," Lawson says. "Never caused any problems."

He returned to the home he was raised in and to doing odd jobs. He also went back to telling tall tales. "He said he now had a girlfriend in Daytona Beach," remembers Gerald Smith, Randall's neighbor. "Said he went down there to see her. It was a lie. Also said he had a house in Daytona Beach and one in Las Vegas."

As the years rolled by, Randall Smith became more and more of a recluse. There were times, however, when he was spotted yakking with hikers up on the Appalachian Trail.

Smith's appearance had changed noticeably. Now 54, he was no longer the beefy young man who had been sent to prison. He was gaunt and walked with a slight stoop. It seemed as if the hard winters on the mountain had settled into him, freezing his emotions. "I would see him on the road and would wave, and he wouldn't wave back," says Gerald Smith. "So I stopped waving."

When his mother died in 2000, Randall lived off the small amount of money she left him. But this March the money ran out. He took all the pictures off the walls of his home. He packed a few belongings. Then he walked up into the woods.

He took his fishing gear. And his dog, Bo.

When six weeks' worth of mail piled up at the Smith home, it drew attention. Some thought he might have become sick on one of his forays into the woods. There were also darker thoughts.

Police put posters of Randall up around town. They taped one up at Trent's, the country store at the bottom of the road that leads to Dismal Creek.

On May 6, Scott Johnston and Sean Farmer went fishing at their usual spot on Brushy Mountain. The weather was beautiful, yellow diamonds falling through the trees. A man with a slight stoop strolled upon their campsite and introduced himself as "Ricky Williams." An unwritten code along the Appalachian Trail calls for camaraderie, sharing. Johnston and Farmer invited the man to have dinner with them.

It was Randall Smith.

And he was carrying a .22.

Tomorrow: More blood on Brushy Mountain.