File photos

Randall Lee Smith (center) leaves the Giles County courthouse in 1982. He was convicted of killing Susan Ramsay and Robert Mountford on the Appalachian Trail in May 1981.

When Randall Lee Smith first became eligible for parole in 1986, it dismayed the families of the young couple he was convicted of killing along the Appalachian Trail five years earlier.

Mitzi Daggett, the aunt of one of Smith's victims, said at the time: "The whole family fears for anyone else who may come in his way."

Those fears may well be realized.

Authorities said they apprehended Smith on Tuesday night after he crashed a pickup truck that belonged to one of two fishermen shot in the Dismal Creek area of Giles County.

Smith had not been charged with anything by late Wednesday. But word of his capture -- and of the violence that befell two more people who reportedly crossed paths with him -- spread quickly through the small town of Pearisburg, where he has lived since being released from prison in 1996.

The site of Tuesday's shootings was not far from the secluded area where, in 1981, Smith killed Susan Ramsay and Robert Mountford Jr. after coming across the 27-year-olds as they hiked the trail together.

Scarlet Ratcliffe, the county's now-retired Circuit Court clerk, said the latest incident has rekindled some of the anxiety that first surfaced in 1981.

"We just love the hikers, and this was the first time anything like that had happened," Ratcliffe said of the killings, the first double murder in the history of the Appalachian Trail. "We didn't know who it was at the time. ... And then to find out it was one of our own Giles County boys was heartbreaking."

After making parole and returning to Pearisburg to live with his mother, Smith again became as much of a loner as he was known to be before the killings.

"He's a very quiet fellow," said Ratcliffe, who recalled seeing him from time to time as he came to the courthouse to meet with his probation officer. "You don't know he's there when he's in the courthouse because he lets somebody else do the talking for him."

After staying out of trouble for 10 years, Smith was taken off probation in 2006.

While keeping a low profile in the community, Smith never shook the reputation he made for himself by committing a crime that received national news coverage and was the subject of a book, "Murder on the Appalachian Trail."

In late May 1981, the bodies of Ramsay and Mountford were found in shallow graves near a shelter on the trail. She had been beaten and stabbed more than a dozen times; he was shot three times in the head.

Both hikers were from Ellsworth, Maine, where they were social workers at a residential center for troubled teens.

A bloody fingerprint on a book belonging to Ramsay was later matched to Smith's right middle finger.

Smith was arrested the following month at a makeshift campsite in the woods near Myrtle Beach, S.C. Police found a disjointed note in his pickup truck. It began with a passage about how "this boy and girl have been so nice to me" and ended with the words: "I will be far far away before truck and these people are found."

With no clear motive for the killing and what then-Commonwealth's Attorney Hezekiah Osborne called scant physical evidence, Smith accepted a plea agreement that reduced his charges to second-degree murder and set his punishment at 30 years.

Although he became eligible for parole five years later, Smith was not released for another decade.

Bill Stables, a retired investigator with the Giles County Sheriff's Office who worked on the case, said many people were outraged by the plea agreement.

"If they had went on through with the trial, there's no doubt in my mind that he would have been convicted and two people wouldn't be shot today," Stables said Wednesday after hearing about the most recent incident.

James Hartley, a Pearisburg lawyer who defeated Osborne in the election that followed the plea agreement, said voters made the case an issue without his having to even mention it. "I think that was really one of the key things that cost him the election," Hartley said.

Osborne has since died.

Members of the Ramsay and Mountford families could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

In 1986, when Smith became eligible for release, they said in interviews with The Roanoke Times that they never thought he would serve such a short sentence.

"He's not even serving for one death, let alone two," said Robert Mountford Sr.