By Tonia Moxley and Shawna Morrison
The Roanoke Times
May 09, 2008
Summary: Officials reopened a section of the trail closed after two men were shot.

PEARISBURG — The Appalachian Trail reopened in Giles County on Thursday, two days after a pair of fishermen were shot and wounded in a crime that hauntingly resembled two gruesome killings committed near the same spot in 1981.

Officials removed the yellow crime scene tape that had cordoned off a 28-mile stretch of the trail while investigators searched for clues and other potential victims Wednesday, and hikers again began trekking through.

Perhaps, though, they had more to talk about than in any year since 1981, when Giles County native Randall Lee Smith Jr. killed two trail hikers at Wapiti Shelter, just a few miles up the road from where two fishermen had set up camp when police say Smith shot them Tuesday night.

“Man, I’m out here having the time of my life,” said Nathan Adcock, a 31-year-old nurse from Asheville, N.C. “And then somebody’s out there shooting.”

Adcock — trail name “Superchunk” — and other friends he met along the trail spent the night Tuesday at Jenny’s Knob shelter not far from the campsite where Smith is suspected of shooting Sean Farmer, 33, of Tazewell and Scott Johnston, 37, of Bluefield.

The pair were at their camp on Lions Den Road when a man Giles County investigators believe was Smith walked up and struck up a conversation. He hung around for about three hours, staying to have a dinner of fresh trout and baked beans with the men.

After they ate, the man reportedly jumped up and pulled out a gun. Farmer was shot in the face and chest. Johnston was shot in the neck and back.

The men fled out of the forest in Farmer’s Jeep Cherokee and sought help a couple of miles away at the home of Sheila and Melissa Miller, two sisters who live on Dismal Creek Road.

Farmer has been released from the hospital, friends said. A spokesman for Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital said Johnston was still in serious condition Thursday.

Smith was captured about 9:40 p.m. after crashing Johnston’s pickup truck on Sugar Run Road near Eggleston, police said. He also was taken to Roanoke Memorial, where investigators said he was in stable condition and being guarded by a deputy.

Giles County Lt. Ron Hamlin said Smith will be charged with two counts of attempted capital murder, grand larceny and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

By Thursday afternoon, the Lions Den campsite had been dismantled by investigators. The tents and lawn chairs Farmer and Johnston had set up were gone. The clothes that had been draped across a line strung between two trees a day earlier had been taken down.

But investigators were still trying to find clues in the case, including a campsite where Smith may have stayed in the two months since he went missing from his home near Pearisburg.

On Wednesday, officials with the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service split up into three groups, with each group assigned to search stretches of the closed-off trail that was thought to be 25 miles long, said T.J. Mullins, a law enforcement officer with the U.S. Forest Service.

“One group wound up with 10″ miles, Mullins said. Its members had Thursday off “and I owe them a steak dinner,” he said.

The trail sees a lot of through-hikers this time of year, he said, and officials wanted to get the trail searched so it could be reopened.

Thursday, he said, the search had shifted to a four-mile radius surrounding the trail, and there was talk of bringing in a helicopter to view the forest from the air.

“Yesterday we didn’t want folks walking up on something” like a piece of evidence or a potential victim, Mullins said.

Nothing was found, though, and officials have no reason to believe there were any other victims, he said.

“We’re keeping it in mind, but we’re not actively looking,” he said.

The search has taken investigators as far as 45 miles from the campsite, he said.

“The big effort is coming to a close right now,” Mullins said, “but we’ve got a lot of small pieces of information to follow up on, and that’s going to take months.”

In 1982, Smith pleaded guilty to the brutal stabbing of Susan Ramsay and the shooting of Robert Mountford Jr., two AT hikers from Maine.

He is said to have befriended the pair and spent part of the day with them before returning to the shelter, where he killed them and buried their bodies in shallow graves.

Investigators said he befriended Farmer and Johnston, too, before repeatedly shooting them.

Smith spent 15 years in prison for the killings, then returned home to his mother’s house just outside Pearisburg where neighbors said he led a mostly reclusive life until Tuesday evening.

Josh McClellan, who goes by Beartrap, a through-hiker from Gainesville, Fla., camped near Trent’s Store not far from the shooting site Wednesday and was the only hiker left there Thursday afternoon.

He said he was waiting for his girlfriend, who was driving up from Florida to spend some time with him before he moved on.

“Scared? No. As long as they got the guy,” McClellan said. The shootings “aren’t going to change the daily routine” of the hike, he said.

He described that routine the past 48 sometimes-chilly spring days as “wet socks, frozen shoes, good times.”

Besides, the 29-year-old said, “you’re never alone on the trail.”

Many hikers headed out early, but Adcock planned to stay at the Holiday Motor Lodge in Pearisburg until today to wait out forecasts of bad weather.

Some hikers will likely be jumpy for the next month as they pass through the area, said Jack Noll of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.

He called awareness of the surroundings “the biggest weapon you have out there.”

Copyright 2008 The Roanoke (Va.) Times

By Tonia Moxley
The Roanoke (Va.) Times
Jan. 15, 2009
Summary: Blacksburg’s vice mayor was the only vote cast in favor of razing the old Taylor’s Frames & Things.

BLACKSBURG — The old Taylor’s Frames & Things building on Main Street will remain standing — for now.

On a 4-1 vote, Blacksburg Town Council upheld a previous Historic Design Review Board decision to deny a demolition permit for the historic structure, also known as the Bennett-Pugh House.

Councilmen Don Langrehr and Derek Myers were absent for Tuesday’s vote. Vice Mayor Leslie Hager-Smith, the former Downtown Merchants of Blacksburg director, cast the lone vote to approve the demolition permit.

“I know we’ve all been tormented over this,” Hager-Smith said.

She urged the council to grant the permit and then order the salvaging of the building’s architecturally significant materials for use in other historic structures. She also argued that documentation of the historical aspects of the building and site could preserve much of its value to the historic district.

A dozen supporters in attendance spoke on Taylor’s behalf. At one point, about two-thirds of the nearly full council chambers stood in support of her appeal. But it wasn’t enough to sway a council majority.

“We can’t base our vote on what’s best for Ms. Taylor,” Councilwoman Susan Anderson said. Instead, Anderson said the decision must be based on the town’s ordinances.

Taylor and her late husband, Addison, operated a framing business in the house beginning in 1982. They bought the property in 2002. After her husband died unexpectedly in 2007, Taylor shuttered the business to care for her ailing mother, who died later that year.

A historic district is not just one building, Mayor Ron Rordam said. Rather it is like a tapestry woven of many threads. Taking out one thread can damage it slightly, he said. But putting the wrong thread back in can do significant harm.

Rordam supported a suggestion put forward by Councilman Tom Sherman, who appealed to interested buyers of the property to come forward. Sherman called it an opportunity for the council to “resolve problems associated with this structure as well as to have some say in the property’s future.”

The house, built in 1900, and the 0.3 acres on which it sits have been on the market since 2005 and is assessed for tax purposes at $419,300.

Taylor has said every potential buyer balked at purchasing the building, which requires $300,000 or more in structural repairs. In its current condition, under state building codes no one may inhabit the property or run a business there, Blacksburg Building Official Cathy Cook has said.

According to Taylor, two interested buyers have said they would purchase the land if the building were removed. Because it is listed in the town code as a “contributing structure” to the downtown historic district, demolition of the building requires approval from the Historic Design Review Board.

Taylor said she faces dire financial consequences if she does not soon sell the property. Friends who spoke to council on Taylor’s behalf said she is withdrawing her retirement savings to keep up with mortgage payments on a building she can’t use and can’t sell.

Officials say the Historic Design Review Board ruled against demolition to avoid setting a precedent of destroying historic buildings that fall into disrepair. Such a precedent could pose a grave threat to the future of the historic district, and, officials say, to plans to revitalize the downtown as an arts and cultural center.

Two doors down, the old National Bank building has sat vacant since it was closed to the public several years ago. An old dry cleaning building beside the Taylor house has sat dark for decades.

Council members have quashed hopes that the town might take ownership of the Bennett-Pugh house, as it did with the Alexander Black House in 2002. The town already owns a handful of vacant historical buildings and is struggling to find money to rehabilitate them.

The Taylor case has also brought to light a loophole in the town code. If the council had overruled the Historic Design Review Board’s decision Tuesday, the code allows little regulation of what could replace it.

So Rordam, with the support of the council, has asked the planning commission to draft new regulations that would give the board authority to modify or deny redevelopment proposals. It is hoped this change could further protect the integrity of the historic district.

Taylor’s son, Will Armstrong, said after the vote that his mother has not decided if she will appeal the council’s decision to Montgomery County Circuit Court. She has 30 days to do so.

She has already notified the town that the house and property is again for sale, however. If it hasn’t sold within a year, under town code the demolition request must then be granted.

Of her future plans, Taylor said: “And we go and we pray and we put it back in the hands of God. I’m not defeated. And we are not hopeless.”

Copyright 2009 The Roanoke (Va.) Times