Escape from Brushy Mountain

Scott Johnson and Sean Farmer had just pulled off something of a miracle: They escaped a gunman, drove down a mountain road while wounded and bLeeding, and found help. But it was too early to celebrate. They both needed immediate medical attention, and were Medavac-ed to a hospital in Roanoke.

Sean Farmer: So, I was-- to me, I was just trying to maintain just-- I guess the pain and-- ya know, just won-- wondering about him. I mean, that's the main thing I was wondering about. 

Scott had lost a lot of blood, and realized he was fading fast.

Scott Johnston: The people in the helicopter told me, they're like, "You're in critical condition." So, they sedate me. My body was, like, paralyzed.  And all I could do was see and hear.

In fact, as the flight went on, Scott himself thought he was not going to make it.

Scott Johnston: I hear the woman say that I don't have a pulse. And then I'm sitting there thinking, well, maybe I am dead right now.

Chris Hansen: This is it.

Scott Johnston: This is what it feels like to be dead. 

Scott Johnston: But then I remembered the helicopter landing.  And when the door opened up, I felt that cold air, like, whish across my body.  I knew then I was still alive and I-- I was happy.  I was, like--

Chris Hansen: I should say so.

Scott Johnston: --well, man.  Ya know, I-- I made it.  Ya know, and-- and I told myself, I'm, like, hang on, hang on. 

While the two friends were fighting for their lives at the Roanoke hospital, 30 miles down the road, a retired sheriff's deputy, Tom Lawson, heard about the shooting. And for him, it was spine tingling, déjà vu moment: He realized the attack on Scott and Sean was eerily similar to a bloody, double murder he had investigated years earlier.

Tom Lawson: It was the most brutal thing I'd ever seen. It devastated people. No one could believe anyone in our community would be so capable of so-- so much damage and so much horror. 

Those murders took place back in 1981, and yet Tom Lawson had a gut feeling that there was a connection between that crime, and the attack on Scott Johnston and Sean Farmer. In both shootings, the victims were attacked without warning -- and for no apparent reason. And both attacks took place at virtually the same location here on the Appalachian Trail.

Tom Lawson took us back the scene of that 1981 crime. For him, it is still sacred ground. 

Tom Lawson: I'm flashing back to 1981. I see the-- the shelter as I did then.  The surroundings are all basically the same. I feel like I'm just re-living it all over again.

In May of 1981, social workers Susan Ramsay and Robert Mountford had been hiking the Appalachian Trail. They were reported missing after they didn't show up as scheduled in the nearby town of Pearisburg, Va.

Chris Hansen: Now, is it unusual for you here in these parts to have people reported missing hiking on the Appalachian Trail?

Tom Lawson: Actually, it is.  We-- because the trail is so very well-marked, and most of the people who walk that trail are-- are experienced hikers.

Lawson and his team went to check the Wapiti shelter -- near where Scott and Sean would camp years later --- because it was the closest campsite to Pearisburg. Almost immediately, he saw something suspicious.

Tom Lawson: The flooring, which was brand new, was very black, like someone had rubbed a substance on the floor. I kind of bent over to kind of look down between the boards and I could see a red substance through the cracks. And once the boards came up-- we saw that there was a large puddle of blood.

Lawson now feared the worst. Police began combing the woods surrounding the shelter, and one searcher noticed something peeking through the leaves: a sLeeping bag.

Tom Lawson: The cloth sLeeping bag was lying out this way. And the pieces were up above the leaves. As we uncovered it, that's when we saw the torso.

We just kept staring down at her, and it was almost like we were in denial of what we just found. Because we just trying to convince ourselves this is not going to happen. That they were just going to walk up anytime and say, hey, you all looking for us? But, it just didn't happen.

Susan Ramsay was dead. But police still didn't know what happened to her hiking partner, Robert Mountford. The next day, they brought in search dogs to comb the woods.

Tom Lawson: The dog comes over to this big stump, this big trunk of the tree --and he just sit. All of a sudden we came upon Kevlar bag.

Robert Mountford had been shot in the head, but police couldn't find the gun. Susan Ramsay had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, and hit in the back of the head with a blunt instrument. Lawson found those murder weapons.

Tom Lawson: We discovered a-- a piece of-- angle iron, wrought iron that was in the fireplace that was used for a poker to stir the ashes up. I did see a large, spiked nail that had-- was used to put the shelter together.

Based on the forensic evidence, Lawson and his colleagues believe the killer attacked after the two hikers went to sLeep. First, he shot Robert Mountford in the head.

Tom Lawson: It does not penetrate the skull. As Mountford turns over and starts to get up, he shoots him in the cheek.  That round goes in, up, and into the brain.  That's the-- that's the round that killed him.

Then the killer turned his attention to Susan Ramsay.

Tom Lawson: She runs, he chases, grabs the-- the wrought iron poker as she's running.  He's taking the spike nail that was on the ground, he's stabbing her. As she went down, he hits her in the back of the head. At that point, she's at his mercy because she's out of it.

Police could not determine if she had been sexually assaulted, because of the condition of the body.

Tom Lawson: I don't know. It's amazing what human beings can do to other human beings.

The murders triggered a wave of horror and outrage, and national headlines.

Chris Hansen: I mean, it had to be massive fear out there that some kind of a killer, perhaps a serial killer, was stalking hikers on the Appalachian Trail.

Tom Lawson: That's the first stories that started circulating. We basically felt we needed to shut the trail off.  

Chris Hansen: What did you think you had on your hands in terms of a-- a profile of a killer?

Tom Lawson: We-- we had absolutely no idea. 

A large section of the Appalachian Trail was shut down for weeks, but there were no arrests. The only leads were items the police found near the murder scene...including items belonging to victim Susan Ramsay.

Tom Lawson: We found evidence in tree stumps, in-- in knot holes in trees, under rocks.  We found two paperback books that belonged to her. One of the paperback books, when we were thumbing through the-- the pages, we found a fingerprint-- bloody fingerprint in the book.

Now, the police had some solid evidence, but no suspects.

Tom Lawson: And this went on for several weeks and we kinda got to a point where we basically just were kind of at a stalemate.

Chris Hansen: No hot leads.

Tom Lawson: No hot leads.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, the police got a break.

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