Lonely, Dark and Deep

Her son, Randy, 20, joined her on the porch and then dashed back inside on his mother's orders to get some towels. They called 911: An ambulance would be coming from Bland, a town about 20 miles away.

"I was just shocked to think that two people might die right in front of my eyes," Randy says.

At first, Melissa Miller thought that maybe these two strangers had been in a fight and shot one another. But when Randy returned, he recognized Farmer. He had seen him in town, and Farmer had dated a friend of his.

The wounded men sat on the porch, the Millers applying wet towels. Melissa listened for an ambulance climbing the mountain roads. "I called them again and said, 'Where y'all at!' " she says.

Twenty minutes passed. Blood had soaked the towels. Randy went to get more.

Johnston wanted to talk to his parents. "I thought I wouldn't get to talk to them again," he says.

Melissa lit up a smoke and dialed the number; it was now 9:30. Thelma Johnston, Scott's mother, answered.

"They told me Scott had been shot. And an ambulance was on the way," she says. "I could hear Scott talking in the background." He got on the phone and assured her he was going to be okay. He was more worried about Sean.

When the ambulance arrived at the Millers', so did a police officer.

The officer asked Johnston -- Farmer couldn't talk because of the swelling in his mouth -- for a description of the shooter. He was gaunt, Johnston said, and he had some gray hair.

Randy's grandfather, who was also living at the house, knew about Randall Lee Smith. He told his grandson to fetch the picture of Smith down at Trent's grocery store, placed there because he had been missing from his home in Pearisburg for more than six weeks.

Randy Miller dashed for his car and sped the mile to Trent's to get the picture. The store was closed, but Randy knew where the owner lived. Soon he was banging on the door. "I yelled, 'We got an emergency!' " Randy says.

Picture retrieved, he tore back up the road to his house, where Farmer and Johnston were getting medical attention.

The picture was shown to Johnston as he was being helped into the ambulance. "Is this the man who shot you?" the officer asked.

Johnston stared at the photo. Blood was oozing through the gauze on his face and neck. "I'm 100 percent sure that's the man," he said.

The ambulance raced Johnston and Farmer through the mountain dark to Hollybrook Community Center in Bland, where there was a big enough field for two helicopters to land.

When the ambulance arrived, the helicopters were whirring in the dark field. But when medical personnel got a look at Farmer, they immediately knew they had a problem: He was too big to fit inside his helicopter. So they quickly decided to take him about 20 miles by ambulance to the small hospital in Wytheville, where a larger helicopter would pick him up.

Johnston was loaded into one of the copters. And was convinced he was going to die. Why else would they have to rush him into the air? He had thought Sean's injuries -- a bullet to the head and another in the chest -- were more serious than his. Now he thought otherwise.

As the helicopter rose and slanted away from the mountains in the direction of Roanoke, Johnston heard voices inside the helicopter, then others on a radio.

"Blood started to come out of my mouth," he remembers. "And I hear a lady say over the radio, 'I'm not sure he's gonna make it.' And then I'm thinking again, 'I might be dead and just might not know it.' "

But when they landed in Roanoke, a blast of cold air hit him. "And I knew I was alive."

Meanwhile, the Millers called Lena Farmer, Sean's mother, who owns a small hair salon in Bluefield. In the middle of the night, she was on her way to Wytheville, about 30 miles away.

"I can't even tell you how I got there. I mean, I know I drove. I'm a single mother. I'm used to doing things on my own," she recalls. "But I don't remember much about the drive."

When she reached Wytheville, she was told Sean already had been airlifted to Roanoke, an hour's drive away.

Upon reaching the hospital in Roanoke, both Farmer and Johnston were immediately rolled into surgery.

'Coldest Eyes . . . Ever'

Violent crime is rare on the Appalachian Trail, and there have been only eight murders since the 1970s, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, a group that helps manage the trail. That May evening, just like 27 years ago, police put out an all-points bulletin for Randall Lee Smith and closed the trail in the area above Pearisburg. But unlike in 1981, when the victims' bodies weren't discovered for weeks, Smith did not have much lead time to get away.

He was still in the woods above Dismal Creek. And he was driving Scott Johnston's truck. A camper would later report that he had heard a man screaming and cursing higher up the mountain that evening. Investigators would later discover a spot in the area where Smith had stashed some of his belongings. "Being dark that night, he just couldn't find the stuff," says Lt. Ron Hamlin of the Giles County Sheriff's Office.

Later that night, a state trooper was driving along Sugar Run Road in Staffordsville, about eight miles from Pearisburg, and spotted the gray truck stolen from Johnston going in the opposite direction. When Smith saw the officer, he sped off. But he soon ran off the road and flipped over.

When Hamlin arrived on the scene, Smith was still inside the upside-down truck. A flashlight revealed a .22-caliber handgun lying just over his shoulder -- and the whites of Randall Smith's eyes. "They're the coldest eyes I've ever looked into in my life," says Hamlin, 58. "And I've been around this business for 30-something years."

Smith was taken to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, the same hospital as Farmer and Johnston. "He was pretty messed up," says Giles.

Smith was released from the hospital after two days -- he had been on round-the-clock police guard -- and taken to the medical wing of the New River Valley Regional Jail in Dublin on May 9. "He told us it was self-defense," Hamlin says of Smith's explanation for the shootings.

Tom Lawson, who had been part of the investigative team that had discovered the bodies of Ramsay and Mountford in 1981, is now assistant superintendent at the jail where Smith was taken. Lawson had been in Myrtle Beach in 1981 when Smith was arrested there after a nationwide alert. Lawson was not at the jail when Smith arrived -- he'd gone home for the weekend -- but he looked forward to trying to have a discussion with him as soon as he returned to work on Monday.

On the evening of May 10, a jail officer went to give Smith his dinner. He did not come to the cell door to retrieve his meal. The officer called his name, once, then twice. There was no answer. When the door was opened, Smith was unconscious. There was an attempt to revive him, but he was dead at the age of 54.

"Our investigators found no obvious signs of foul play in Smith's death," says Sgt. Mike Conroy, a spokesman for the Virginia State Police.

"Randall had no marks at all," says Lt. Jerry Humphreys of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation for the State Police. "He just died. Quite possibly of natural causes." The Virginia medical examiner's office said the autopsy results could take between 60 and 90 days.

About a dozen family members attended Smith's funeral at the A. Vest & Sons Funeral Home in Pearisburg. Taped music played at the private service, which was announced only after he had been buried. "A lot of people were angry with Randall," says Carl Vest, 74, who works part time at his family's funeral home. "They said they could have helped him if he had money problems. But he never did ask. He just closed up the house and went up into he mountains. And shot those two boys. Sad."

The service lasted 30 minutes. Randall Lee Smith was buried next to his mother at the Fairview Cemetery in Narrows. His dog, Bo, scratched in the dirt at the graveside ceremony. He has since been adopted.

Millimeters From Death

Doctors and family members constantly remind Johnston and Farmer how lucky they are. If any of four bullets had gone a millimeter in this or that direction -- "just a fraction," says Johnston -- the results might well have been far more grim.

They were both out of the hospital within a week, though there have been multiple return visits to doctors, as well as long physical therapy sessions.

They replay the night at Dismal Creek over and over. "If he had've pulled a knife out on us, we'd've crippled him in a heartbeat," says Johnston.

But it was a .22.

"And there's nothing you can do," says Farmer, "with a .22 pointed at you from behind."

Johnston still has a bullet in the back of his neck. Huge scars come together at the front of his neck, forming a red V. His girlfriend has been worrying around the clock -- "about to drive me crazy," he says.

Farmer's gunshot wound to the chest has healed. Doctors are still debating whether to leave the bullet fragments that are lodged in his sinus area.

Farmer used to drive a truck for a coal business but got laid off after the shooting. Johnston lived in Tampa for 14 years and moved back to Bluefield only last January. He lays tile to make ends meet, and even does that on his own terms so he can fish. His favorite Eagle Claw fly rod had been in the truck that flipped when Smith tried to escape. It was found in the wreck, snapped in two.

Johnston and Farmer have agreed to take a reporter up to their campsite on Dismal Creek. The day is beautiful -- the light like yellow diamonds in the air.

"Look," Johnston says, "there's a deer."

It bolts deeper into the woods.

"Been coming here my whole life," he is saying.

"I really believe if I'd've run into the woods," says Farmer, "he'd've hunted both of us down."

The only sound up here is the gurgling waters of the creek. "We might have been the nicest people this guy had ever been around since being released from prison," says Farmer. "And here he tried to take us out."

Neither man has undergone any psychological counseling. "But I might," Johnston says.

It grows quiet. Then: "I mean, it can't hurt anything," he says. "Yes, I just might. I mean, my insurance will cover it."

More quiet. Then: "How about you, Sean? You gonna get some counseling?"

"I don't know," Farmer says. "I just don't know."

On the ride down off the mountain, the humped hills in the distance look almost blue. "Lovely, isn't it?" Johnston says, curving around mountains that once were open and inviting before turning dark and hungry.