Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

This was the home of Randall Lee Smith, who was suspected in the shootings at a 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.

Courtesy of Giles County officials

Smith as he appeared in his 1973 driver's license photo.

PEARISBURG -- Disturbed loner. Harmless liar. Confused. Cunning. Killer.

Who was Randall Lee Smith?

The decades of mystery surrounding the man who pleaded guilty to a notorious double slaying on a Giles County section of the Appalachian Trail only deepened last week as he was accused of returning to almost the same spot and opening fire on two fishermen.

The unsettling similarities to the 1981 killings had Pearisburg residents -- and observers up and down the 2,160-mile, Georgia-to-Maine length of the Appalachian Trail -- scratching their heads.

"It's such an atypical case," said Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia. "It wouldn't be reasonable to say, 'In cases like this, this is what typically happens' -- there are no typical cases like this."

Questions of why

On Friday, Smith, 54, was charged with two counts of attempted capital murder, two counts of using a firearm in commission of a felony, possession of a firearm as a convicted felon and grand larceny in connection with the Tuesday night shootings of Sean Farmer of Tazewell and Scott Johnston of Bluefield, Va.

The men were fishing and camping along Dismal Creek, just off the Appalachian Trail, when a visitor stopped by their campsite, police and Johnston's brother reported last week.

They fed the man a dinner of fresh trout and beans, after which he told them, "Guys, I got to get out of here" -- and pulled out a pistol and opened fire, Brian Johnston said. Both fishermen were wounded but escaped.

The victims identified a man shown on a local missing-person poster as the one who had shot them, according to one of the women who helped the fishermen that night.

Smith, the man whose photo was on the flier, was apprehended later that night when he crashed a pickup truck that belonged to one of the fishermen. By Saturday he would be dead.

The 1981 murders of Robert Mountford Jr. and Laura Susan Ramsay seemed equally senseless. Smith pleaded guilty to two charges of second-degree murder before the case went to trial, so details, including a motive, were never presented publicly.

Smith's neighbors in the Ingram Village subdivision outside Pearisburg last week wondered why he would attack strangers. He'd had plenty of disagreements, although not violent ones, with the people he lived near, said Sherman Smith, who is not related to Randall Smith but has known him since boyhood.

The late Hezekiah Osborne, who prosecuted Smith for the hikers' deaths, theorized that Smith's lack of experience with women -- he was never known to date anyone -- led him to become obsessed with Ramsay because she was friendly when he met her at a store near the trail, said John Spauer, a Pearisburg garage owner who was a friend of both Osborne and Smith. In Osborne's theory, Smith made a pass at Ramsay, Mountford intervened, and Smith returned to their camp later to kill them.

A book written about the 1981 deaths, "Murder on the Appalachian Trail," by Giles County native Jess Carr, hypothesized that Smith retreated into a fantasy life after a hard childhood. Smith is portrayed as a loner who spent much of his time in a sort of fog and who both craved companionship and lashed out at anyone who got too close.

The book is described on the cover as a novel but is based on investigators' records and numerous interviews -- although none with Smith, who declined to talk to Carr. Several people familiar with the 1981 events said last week that although the book might not be exact in every particular, its account is generally accurate.

The way the book lays it out, Ramsay and Mountford, who were both social workers from Maine, incurred Smith's anger because they saw how troubled he was and tried to draw him out.

Neither Cornell nor Joseph Allen, a UVa psychology professor, both of whom have studied issues of violence and adolescence, found the book's theory particularly convincing.

With Smith implicated in another attack in almost the same location 27 years later, Allen wondered if the place, more than factors such as experience with women or fear of intimacy, was significant in some way.

June Tangney, a psychologist at George Mason University who studies issues involving moral decisions and crime, agreed.

"Criminals often do go to places they are most comfortable with," Tangney said, noting that she was speaking generally and not about the specifics of Smith's case. "Crimes don't just happen in random spots."

Mike Eads, who lived a few doors away from Smith, had a similar thought, saying he thought Smith viewed hikers as interlopers, a view stated in "Murder on the Appalachian Trail," and made efforts to clean up litter around Dismal Creek.

"I don't know if he thought he was the keeper of the mountain or what, but he seemed drawn to the place," Eads said.

'Stayed too much to himself'

Records from Smith's 1982 court proceedings indicate his mother and father divorced when he was 6 months old. Except for the 15 years he spent behind bars, he lived with his mother until she died in 2000.

Loretta Smith worked at Giles Memorial Hospital, eventually becoming a nurse's aide. The Smiths lived in several small houses around Ingram Village, settling while Randall Smith was still young in the four-room, single-story home in which he lived until earlier this year, neighbors said.

In a community where children congregated in yards or played games in the nearby forest, Randall Smith stayed apart.

Smith "stayed too much to himself," said Virginia Smith, Sherman Smith's wife. "For a child not to ever have a friend, that's unusual."

He developed a lifelong interest in collecting arrowheads and seemed to most enjoy being out in the woods by himself. Loretta Smith's sister lived next door, and her husband, Randall Smith's uncle, took him camping, neighbors said.

Smith left school after 11th grade and made several trips to Newport News, Va., to work welding jobs in a shipyard.

At least people assumed he'd gone to Newport News. By the mid-1970s, as Smith left his teenage years, his habit of telling wild stories was well known.

"We called him 'L.R.' all the time -- Lying Randall," Spauer said last week.

Smith often spoke about girlfriends and even children he claimed to have, but no one knew him to actually have a romantic relationship of any kind, Spauer said, echoing others who had known Smith for decades.

"Murder on the Appalachian Trail" described Smith's collection of pornographic magazines, many of which he had laminated or put in plastic sleeves -- an accurate account, said Tom Lawson, an investigator in the 1981 case and now assistant superintendant of the New River Valley Regional Jail in Dublin.

Smith had few if any friends of any sort, said Spauer, describing himself as probably the person who was closest to Smith.

Spauer would offer Smith work when he was between jobs, which was often.

"He was a real good welder," Spauer said.

Smith would drop out of sight for weeks at a time, then stop by Spauer's garage as if he'd never left, joining a group that worked on cars and trucks for drag-racing or four-wheeling. But he rarely accompanied them to races or on four-wheeling expeditions.

"He'd say, 'It's my weekend to have the children,' " Spauer said.

"Murder on the Appalachian Trail" portrays Smith as a drinker and occasional drug user, but he had no criminal record prior to the slayings.

Then came the 1981 murders of Ramsay and Mountford, and the next year, a controversial plea deal that brought Smith a 30-year prison sentence, of which he served about half.

Back from prison

In "Murder on the Appalachian Trail" and in newspaper accounts of Smith's arrest after fleeing to Myrtle Beach, S.C., much was made of how disassociated he appeared and how he claimed to remember almost nothing of his life, even his mother's name.

Psychological testing concluded he was likely feigning amnesia, however, and that "Mr. Smith's reports of hallucinations and delusions are probably fabricated."

Lawson said he always thought Smith's vagueness was an act. "He's a sharp, cunning person ... very precise in what he does," Lawson said last week.

He noted that the possessions of the murdered hikers were buried and hidden in a complex pattern aligned with compass points, as if Smith wanted to be sure he could find them later.

Also, Lawson said, someone had removed log books -- which hikers sign and date -- from shelters for miles down the trail, making it hard for investigators to develop a timetable of Mountford and Ramsay's travel before their deaths.

Smith's solitude remained real, however. After pleading guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, Smith spent nearly 15 years in prison. In all that time, he had only one visit from his mother, according to a Roanoke Times account of his release in 1996 -- and none, apparently, from anyone else, said Brian King, a spokesman for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which filed an objection each year as Smith came up for parole.

After he reached his mandatory parole date, Smith returned to live with his mother at the edge of Ingram Village just below the Appalachian Trail, which runs along a nearby ridge.

He didn't work, leading neighbors to believe he drew some sort of disability check, and he wore an electronic monitoring anklet as part of 10 years of supervision by the Giles probation office. He spent nearly all his time at home indoors, neighbors said.

A few neighbors went out of their way to forge some kind of connection with him, especially after Smith's mother died in 2000. Virginia Smith said she baked him a pumpkin roll every Christmas, as she had done for his mother. He always seemed to appreciate it, but Virginia Smith said she never felt comfortable taking the food across the street herself. She sent her husband.

Randall Smith rarely spoke to anyone as he came and went. When he did talk, it was more hard-to-believe stories about having a girlfriend who was a doctor in Florida, and whose family gave him a home there when she died. Other times he talked about having a home in Las Vegas.

Spauer said in the past couple of years, Smith started coming by the garage again.

"His language had changed through prison," Spauer said. "He had got an eastern Virginia accent."

'Things he needed to do'

Robin and Jason Stephen owned the 98 acres of wooded mountainside between Smith's house and the Appalachian Trail.

The couple bought the property in 1999 and quickly learned about their neighbor, who told Jason Stephen, "You may hear some things about me that aren't true, that I killed some people."

Smith asked the Stephens if he could walk their property to hunt arrowheads and to get to the trail. They told him to stay away, Robin Stephen said, but he continued to be friendly. He regaled Jason Stephen with tales of Green Beret service in Vietnam and of having an advanced engineering degree.

Smith would call Jason Stephen if he saw people go onto their property, and he told them he'd once confronted some young people parking there. Smith told them to leave, Robin Stephen said, and when they refused, "he said, 'Why don't you go down to the sheriff's office and ask them who I am and what I did?'

"I don't know if that's a true story, but that's what he told my husband," Stephen said.

She said she never felt comfortable around Smith, who always seemed to ignore her but once told her husband he could see her coming "a mile away -- that jet black hair."

Throughout the years they owned the property, Stephen said, Smith asked if he could buy a parcel at the top of their land so he could put a trailer next to the Appalachian Trail and live there.

The Stephens declined.

Then, after they had sold the entire parcel to someone else, Smith approached Robin Stephen, who is a real estate agent, and asked her to list his house.

It was late last year, Stephen said, and Smith said he was planning to move in a few months. "He said he had things he needed to do," she said.

Stephen said Smith also told her he had been in the hospital "and his days of walking on the mountain were over."

Stephen said she would not be Smith's agent.

Not long after, early this year, Virginia Smith said she was home one afternoon and saw a strange sight from her window.

Randall Smith was making trip after trip from his cellar, which is accessed by an exterior door, carrying yellow plastic grocery-style bags filled with something up into the house.

She didn't think much of it then, but later she and her husband wondered if he was assembling canned goods and supplies for a camping trip.

On April 28, Randall Smith's public water was cut off. On April 30, a missing persons report was filed. Police checked Smith's mailbox and found that his mail appeared not to have been picked up since March 3.

Exactly when Smith left home, or where he went, is just another of the mysteries surrounding him.

Two months later, a pair of fishermen told authorities he was on Dismal Creek, eating their dinner of trout and beans.