Paul David Crews died in a Pennsylvania prison last month at age 70 of natural causes without ever revealing why he killed a young couple on the Appalachian Trail nearly 32 years ago in a notorious crime that rippled fear across the country.
The former drifter died July 6 at SCI Fayette, and the facility held a memorial service in the chapel on July 15, where other inmates could attend. The facility holds such services for all inmates who die.
Crews did not have a next of kin listed, and no relatives could be found, so his remains were cremated by a funeral home contracted by the Department of Corrections, according to spokeswoman Maria Bivens.
Crews spent more time behind bars than his victims were alive, after he robbed them of their promising futures by slaughtering them in their sleeping bags at an overnight shelter along the trail in Perry County.
Geoffrey Hood and Molly LaRue, 26 and 25, respectively, and both working as teachers, had been southbound on the trail and were about halfway through their 2,180-mile trip from Maine to Georgia when they paused to rest in Pennsylvania. She was from Ohio and he was from Tennessee, but they had met in Salina, Kansas when they both worked at a church-sponsored camp for at-risk youth.
The day before they were murdered, they had been seen by other hikers and employees in several stores in Duncannon where they had purchased supplies.
The next morning, Sept. 13, 1990, LaRue was found tied, raped, and stabbed, including wounds to her back and neck.
Hood, her boyfriend, had been shot three times with a revolver.
The killings shocked the trusting community of hikers and left many questions that were never answered despite Crews’ long incarceration.
Why did things take such a horrible turn at the Thelma Marks shelter, 18 miles north of Harrisburg?
Geoff and Molly most likely died between five and seven in the morning, according to reporting by Earl Swift, a hiker who met the couple. Little else about the event is certain, Swift wrote.
“Were they in trouble from the moment they met Crews? Unknown. Were they attacked as they slept? Unclear,” Swift wrote for Outside magazine. “Did they have a conversation with him? The killer’s own words, to others he met in the days that followed, suggest they talked and that he stole their story along with their gear.”
He said he’d started hiking in Maine around the first of June and was trying to catch up with Skip “Muskratt” Richards, another hiker, which was what the couple had been doing, not Crews.
Police at the time said Crews refused to answer questions about the trail killings and another murder of which he was accused in Florida.
Four years earlier, he was charged with killing and nearly decapitating a 58-year-old woman who had given him a ride home from a bar in Florida. He had been on the run from police ever since, using the alias Casey Horn.
He took a bus from North Carolina to Gettysburg, where he visited a library and asked for a map of the trail. Crews had been on the trail just two days, during which other hikers noticed he didn’t fit in with his flannel clothes and military boots, before he encountered the couple.
The bodies of Hood and LaRue were found by other hikers who had hoped to meet up with Hood and LaRue at the temporary shelter, a three-sided lean-in surrounded by trees. Instead, the trail acquaintances made the horrific discovery and hiked an hour back to Duncannon to report the killings to state police.
Police then struggled for three hours to reach the shelter, where they found Hood lying in a back corner, his head still on a makeshift pillow. At the other side, LaRue was lying face down in a pool of blood.
It took four hours for police to get their equipment and vehicles to the remote site, with troopers chopping down trees to clear a path. The deaths kicked off an intensive manhunt for the killer.
Police said at the time that Crews took advantage of the couple when he happened across them and was soon arrested with help from other hikers who noticed he seemed odd and wasn’t carrying his backpack correctly. The 38-year-old Crews was arrested wearing Hood’s clothing, and carrying their belongings and both murder weapons in a bag, police said.
For most of his life, Crews was deeply troubled--severely depressed, a drug user, prone to threatening behavior, according to federal officials, relatives, teachers, classmates and coaches interviewed by the Los Angeles Times.
“He had mental problems. He had signs of being manic-depressive,” his adopted mother Susan Crews, told the newspaper.
She said the 6-year-old boy was bitter about being forced to leave his natural family. He was angry at his natural father, Edward Horne, who had abandoned him and his seven brothers and sisters, the newspaper reported.
A poor student, he ran away from his adoptive parents several times and quit school his senior year. He disappeared but eventually returned to finish school, then joined the Marines, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Marines kicked him out for going AWOL after showing signs of severe depression and a suicide attempt. He also had two failed marriages, including with his second wife who accused him of sneaking up on her in bed and threating her with a knife.
During his trial for killing the young couple on the trail, Crews’ defense team presented a psychiatrist who testified that he had a schizoid personality and suffered from an organic aggressive syndrome aggravated on the day of the killings by the consumption of alcohol and cocaine.
A jury sentenced him to death. But Crews appealed and continued to fight Perry County prosecutors on technical questions, until prosecutors in 2006 agreed to drop the death penalty in exchange for two consecutive life sentences if he would stop his appeals.
The Appalachian Trail Conference renamed a part of the trail in memory of Hood and LaRue.
In 2000, the Mountain Club of Maryland built a partially-enclosed timber-framed shelter at the top of Cove Mountain, elevation 2,500 feet. It serves as a refuge from bad weather and a campsite for hikers and replaced the Thelma Marks Shelter, where the killings occurred.
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