Nancy Reeder didn’t expect to meet the man who found the body of her cousin’s daughter.
But 20 years after Molly LaRue and her boyfriend Geoff Hood were murdered on the Appalachian Trail, that’s exactly what happened – on a cold night in a shelter, well into Reeder’s own southbound hike.
It’s the kind of coincidence that sounds constructed in hindsight.
In Unsheltered, her new book released April 17 by UBiQ Press, Reeder leaves it as it was: abrupt, disorienting, and impossible to ignore.
What began as a private act – finishing the trail Molly never could – became something else once she was on it.
Reeder, a storyteller and performer who has lived in Franklin since 2001, came to the project sideways. She and her partner Lonnie, an artist and writer, had been planning their thru-hike for years while she worked toward a master’s degree in storytelling at East Tennessee State University.
Somewhere in that preparation, the idea took hold: to hike south, as Molly and Geoff had in 1990, and carry their story forward.
Molly was 25, a poet and artist. Geoff was 26. While a student at Ohio Wesleyan University, she wrote and illustrated a book titled The Reds. The Yellows. The Blues., later published by her father in 2018. The two met while working with troubled pre-teens and planned to continue that work in graduate school in Ohio. Their hike ended in a shelter near Duncannon, Pennsylvania.
Reeder had always known the outline of what happened. It was family history, but distant – something told, then set aside. It wasn’t until years later, going through old papers with her mother and speaking more with her cousin Jim, Molly’s dad, that the details settled in. The hike became a way to engage with it, rather than keep it at arm’s length.
Unsheltered moves between those two timelines: Molly and Geoff’s in 1990, and Reeder’s decades later. Journal entries, family recollections, and newspaper accounts are woven through the narrative, often in italicized passages that allow Molly and Geoff to speak for themselves.
Reeder spent nearly seven years shaping the book, in part because she wanted to get that balance right. She also waited more than a year to locate Geoff’s mother in Chattanooga before including him by name, one of several decisions that slowed the process but steadied it.
And then there is the encounter.
Forced off the trail in late 2009 by snow, Reeder and Lonnie returned the following fall to complete their hike.
It was during that second stretch, in 2010, that they met a man who mentioned, almost casually, that he had left the trail in 1990 after a couple had been killed. He was the one who had found them.
There’s no way to prepare for a moment like that. Reeder doesn’t try to force meaning onto it. She lets it sit – an intrusion of the past into the present that refuses to resolve cleanly.
The man responsible for the murders was eventually identified and died in prison. Reeder acknowledges that but keeps him at the edges of the story. If anything, she notes, he was the kind of troubled young person Molly and Geoff had set out to help.
Instead, Unsheltered returns, again and again, to who they were – what they intended, how they moved through the world, and how their story continues to surface in ways that feel less like coincidence than continuation.
The Appalachian Trail, in Reeder’s telling, isn’t just a setting. It’s the thread that holds both journeys in place long enough for them to intersect – and then keeps going.
Reeder will appear at the Hudson Library in Highlands on July 15 from noon to 1:30 P.M., where she will discuss Unsheltered and have copies of both her book and Molly’s available.
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