Photos by Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Giles County investigators (from left) Mark Skidmore, Thomas Gautier and Lt. Ron Hamlin look over the scene Wednesday where two fishermen were shot the night before. The site, in the Dismal Creek area of the Jefferson National Forest, is near where Randall Lee Smith killed two hikers in 1981.

Shelia Miller (left) and her sister, Melissa Miller, aided the shooting victims who came to their home Tuesday evening in Giles County.

Mark Skidmore (left) and Thomas Gautier take fingerprints from a vehicle used by the shooting victims to escape from a gunman in the Jefferson National Forest. A suspect in the crime faces two counts of attempted capital murder.

Sean Farmer (left) was shot in the shoulder and face. Scott Johnston was shot in the neck and back. Friends said Farmer was released from the hospital. Johnston is in serious condition.

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• Pearisburg man never shook reputation as AT killer
• Hikers' killer going home - Sept. 26, 1996

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• Discuss the 1981 case and Tuesday's shooting

Timeline

• May 19, 1981: Appalachian Trail hikers Susan Ramsay and Robert Mountford Jr., both 27-year-old social workers from Maine, were last seen at a Bland County store.
• May 30-31, 1981: Ramsay’s and Mountford’s bodies were found buried near an AT shelter near the Giles-Bland county line. It was the first double homicide on the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail.
• June 11, 1981: Randall Lee Smith was charged in the killings after an incriminating note was found in his abandoned pickup truck in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
• June 22, 1981: Smith was arrested after he was found hiding in a wooded area in Myrtle Beach .
• March 23, 1982: Smith pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in both deaths and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
• Sept. 27, 1996: Smith was released from prison on mandatory parole.
• Sept. 26, 2006: Smith was taken off of probation.
• Tuesday: Authorities said they apprehended Smith after he crashed a pickup truck that belonged to one of two fishermen shot in the Dismal Creek area of Giles County.

GILES COUNTY -- A man who befriended, then killed, two hikers on the Appalachian Trail in Giles County 27 years ago may have returned to the same section of the trail and shot and wounded two fishermen Tuesday night.

Giles County investigators said Randall Lee Smith, 54, of Pearisburg, Va., is suspected in the shootings at the campsite off Lions Den Road near Dismal Creek, just more than two miles from Wapiti Shelter, where Smith committed an infamous double murder in May 1981.

Smith was captured Tuesday night after he wrecked a pickup truck that belongs to one of the fishermen, Giles County Sheriff Morgan Millirons said.

Officials haven't named the victims, but friends and family members identified them as Sean Farmer, 33, of Tazewell, Va., and Scott Johnston, 37, of Bluefield, Va.

Millirons said one of the victims was shot three times and the other twice.

Brian Johnston, Scott Johnston's brother and Farmer's best friend, said he talked with Farmer from the hospital Wednesday.

Farmer told him that he and Scott Johnston met the gunman at the campsite and offered him some trout they'd caught.

They had a dinner of trout and baked beans, Sheila Miller, who with her sister later helped the men, said the victims told them.

The three men talked, and after a while the gunman said to them, "Guys, I got to get out of here," Brian Johnston said.

He pulled out a .22-caliber pistol and shot Scott Johnston in the neck and back and Farmer in the shoulder and face, Brian Johnston said.

Scott Johnston ran into the woods and the gunman chased him. Farmer got into his Jeep. Scott Johnston ran back to the Jeep and got in, and the pair sped out of the forest.

The gunman tried to shoot Farmer once more but had run out of bullets, Brian Johnston said.

"My best friend saved my brother's life," Brian Johnston said Wednesday afternoon.

Sheila and Melissa Miller were sitting in Melissa's bedroom in her house a couple of miles away when the victims showed up in the Jeep.

"We heard somebody beating on the door real loud and they said, "I've been shot, I've been shot, please let me in,'" Sheila Miller said.

When they opened the door they saw a man holding his neck, blood dripping from his fingers. Farmer, whom the women know, was behind him, Sheila Miller said.

The sisters called 911 and got the men blankets and pillows "and we just made them as comfortable as we could," Sheila Miller said.

Farmer was sweating profusely, Melissa Miller said, "so I got a wet washcloth and wiped his face."

The Millers became nervous as Farmer and Johnston described what had happened and got up to lock their doors and windows.

A rescue crew arrived about 45 minutes after the men got there, they said, and worked on them for about an hour. A rescue worker called for a helicopter to fly them to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

Rescue workers asked what had happened and asked Farmer and Johnston to describe the man who had shot them.

As they described the man and his black-and-white dog, a rescue worker said it sounded like the man whose pictures had been posted around the areas of Giles and Bland counties that surround the Jefferson National Forest.

The Millers knew the man's picture -- on a flier that listed him as missing -- was posted inside nearby Trent's Store. But Trent's was closed, so Melissa Miller's son went to the owner's home and asked him to open up the store so they could get the flier.

When Melissa Miller's son took the flier back to Farmer and Johnston, they confirmed that was the man who shot them, she said.

Millirons said the shooter got away in a black Ford Ranger pickup truck belonging to one of the victims. It doesn't appear he took anything else from them, he said.

State police Sgt. Michael Conroy said a trooper patrolling on Sugar Run Road in the Eggleston area saw the truck about 9:40 p.m. and pulled out behind it. The truck ran off the left side of the curvy road, hit an embankment and overturned, he said.

Fingerprints positively identified the driver as Smith, Millirons said.

Smith was taken out of the truck and flown to Roanoke Memorial, where he is on a ventilator, Giles County Lt. Ron Hamlin said.

"We haven't been able to talk to him," he said.

Smith's coonhound, Bo, was with him in the truck. The dog was taken to the Giles County Animal Shelter, he said. A gun was recovered, Hamlin said.

He said Smith, who is being guarded by a deputy, is expected to recover.

He faces two counts of attempted capital murder and charges of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and grand larceny.

Hospital spokesman Eric Earnhart said Johnston was in serious but stable condition Wednesday evening. Friends said Farmer had been released.

A bullet was lodged in Farmer's nasal cavity and couldn't be removed, Sheila Miller said.

Wednesday afternoon, a section of the Appalachian Trail from Virginia 606 in Bland County to U.S. 460 in Giles County was closed to hikers while investigators searched for evidence and other possible victims. The sheriff's office was asking hikers to call home and let their loved ones know they are OK.

Rumors about what had happened had already spread among hikers, in part because the sheriff's office had posted the "missing person" fliers with Smith's picture along the trail.

"Mr. Smith was known to loaf around the hikers," Hamlin said. Also, he said, a woman told investigators that Smith told her he was going to the cliffs near Dismal Falls.

Jon Beckham of Atlanta said some hikers were sleeping off the trail, avoiding shelters because it was in a shelter that Smith killed two people in 1981.

Near Jenkins Shelter, Beckham saw a sheet of loose-leaf paper with a skull and crossbones and the words "You have been warned" drawn on it.

His father saw the same image and words on a rock, he said.

Hiker Danny Reed of Radford said he heard gunshots Tuesday night. When he later heard the shooter may have been Smith, Reed couldn't believe it.

"I was like, 'You got to be kidding. This guy's back again?'" he said, resting his chin on his walking stick as he looked toward Dismal Falls.

A forest ranger showed him a picture of Smith and asked if he'd seen him. Reed said he had only seen a couple of backpackers and a trout fisherman.

Before the 1981 killings, and after he was released from prison in 1996, Smith lived with his mother in Ingram Village, an old subdivision just outside Pearisburg.

On Wednesday, his small, one-story house at the end of Virginia Street sat closed up, black plastic wrapped around an air conditioner in a window above the high, cinder block front porch, and grass growing high around the red Dodge pickup parked in the yard.

Several neighbors said Smith always kept to himself.

"I ain't going to miss him," said Sherman Smith, who lives across Virginia Street and is not related to Randall Smith. "I tolerated him and talked to him because I've got a family."

A few neighbors went out of their way to forge some kind of connection with Randall Smith, especially after his mother died in 2000.

They would take him meals and try to reach out to him, they said, but Smith had little to say to them.

Mike Eads, a burly former Marine who lives down the street, said Smith "wasn't anybody easy to talk to."

Eads said when Smith returned from prison, he took over a copy of "Murder on the Appalachian Trail," a book written about the case, and asked Smith to sign it. "I thought it might be worth something," Eads said.

"And he slammed the door in my face," Eads added, chuckling.

Like other neighbors, Eads said he thought Smith got out of prison too soon. Fifteen years was too little time for taking two lives, he said.

The paperwork from Smith's release in 1996 lists welding as his occupation. He'd worked as a welder for a few years in a Newport News, Va., shipyard in the 1970s. But for the 12 years since his release from prison, Smith didn't work, neighbors said. They thought he received some kind of disability check.

For a decade, Smith wore an electronic ankle bracelet as part of the home monitoring requirement of his parole.

When he was able to take it off in September 2006, he was delighted, recalled neighbor Eugene Whittaker, one of the few people who said they got along with Smith.

Whittaker and other neighbors thought the last time Smith was seen in Ingram Village may have been five or so weeks ago when Whittaker walked past his house and Smith called to him from the porch.

Whittaker said he and Smith talked briefly and Smith seemed "weird as always."

Neighbors said they thought his public water was cut off and that he left home rather than have service restored.

Later, someone became concerned that Smith hadn't been seen for a while and called the sheriff's office. That report was made April 30, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said he believes Smith left about March 4.

"He and the dog walked off," he said.

On Wednesday, neighbors were trying to figure out how to bring Smith's dog back to the neighborhood.

Whittaker explained that he had given Bo to Smith, and that he would take care of shots or neutering or whatever it took to retrieve Bo from the animal shelter.

Sherman Smith repeated that his neighbor won't be missed.

"We like the dog better than him," he said.

Staff writers Marvin Anderson and Amanda Codispoti and staff researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.