FBI names Ohio man suspect in 1996 Shenandoah double murder

(Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday named a convicted rapist from Ohio as the lone suspect in the long-unsolved case of two young women murdered in Shenandoah National Park 28 years ago.

Federal officials said they used DNA evidence to determine that Walter Leo Jackson Senior, who died in prison in 2018, killed 24-year-old Julie Williams and 26-year-old Lollie Winans near their campsite in southwest Virginia shortly after the couple was last seen on May 24, 1996. The women's bodies were found a week later.

U.S. Attorney Christopher Kavanaugh told reporters on Thursday that authorities saw no indication that Jackson targeted the women because of their sexual orientation.

Winans and Williams were in a romantic relationship.

"This crime was definitionally hateful," Kavanaugh said. "Nevertheless, we do not have any evidence ... that Jackson had any knowledge of or was otherwise motivated by their membership in a protected class."

Jackson's criminal history included kidnapping, rapes and assaults, and he served at least four prison sentences, officials said.

In 2014, while serving a prison sentence for a separate crime, Jackson was forensically linked to two rapes that occurred in Cuyahoga County, Ohio in June and July 1996, just weeks after Winans and Williams were killed, Kavanaugh said. The FBI described him as an avid hiker and frequenter of Shenandoah National Park.

A federal grand jury previously indicted Darrell David Rice for the murders in 2002, alleging that he had a history of anti-gay sentiment and had targeted the women because they were in a romantic relationship. The case was dismissed when DNA evidence from the case showed no link to Rice.

FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Stanley Meador told reporters that a new team of investigators had taken on the case in 2021. With funding from the Department of Justice's sexual-assault-kit initiative, the team submitted crime-scene evidence to a lab that was able to obtain DNA from the items, which Meador declined to describe.

The DNA sample matched almost exactly a sample Jackson had given during a prior arrest, and the findings indicated that both women had been sexually assaulted, Meador said.

"There was a one-out-of-2.6-trillion chance that it originated from someone other than Walter Leo Jackson," Kavanaugh said. "I've prosecuted many homicides and cold cases and I have never witnessed statistics that high."

(Reporting by Gabriella Borter; Editing by Rod Nickel)