Hi Mark enthusiasts, I'm your host Dilya DeAmbra. The case I'm going to tell you about today is actually two cases.

Two murders of men, the exact same age, who died under eerily similar circumstances, and the exact same national forest lands, just eight years apart.

The cases take place in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests.

These two forest lands are huge and are home to hundreds of miles of trails, including 325 miles of the Appalachian Trail.

They also house a lot of natural waterways, eight major river basins to be exact.

Many of those bodies of water feed thousands of streams and waterfalls throughout the area, and according to the National Park Service, together the landscape and water systems connect three U.S. states, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

The murders that happened here in 2011 and 2019 left everyone in these surrounding states terrified.

And forever connected, the three stories of Scott Lillie, Chad Austin, and an unknown murderer or murderers.

This is Park Predators.

On Friday, August 12, 2011, a group of hikers walking along the old hotel trail in George Washington National Forest stops dead in their tracks.

There, lying partially buried off to the side of the beaten path, they saw a man's decomposing body sticking out of the dirt.

The body was in rough shape, but the hikers believed the corpse belonged to a man who looked to be in his 20s or 30s.

The path where they'd stumbled upon the gruesome scene intersects with the Appalachian Trail. The spot was in a remote location, in an area known as Mount Pleasant National Scenic Area.

It's in northwest Amherst County, Virginia, and is encompassed by 7,500 acres of forest. The closest town is about 10 miles away in Buonavista, Virginia.

Because the man's body was technically found inside the boundary of the National Forest, the case fell into federal jurisdiction, so the FBI became the lead investigating agency.

Agents responded to the scene, along with Amherst County Sheriff's Deputies, National Park Service Rangers, Virginia State Police Troopers, and the U.S. Forest Service.

Investigators quickly looked over what was left of the man's body and realized they were going to need to excavate it and transport it out of the area.

They had to do that in order to get a positive ID. The body was taken to a County Medical Examers Office in the nearby town of Roanoke, Virginia.

The doctor there determined that the remains had significant signs of advanced decomposition. It appeared that whoever the man was, he'd been dead for days if not weeks.

Because of that, the medical examiner couldn't actually make a definitive ruling on cause of death, and they were forced to label the death as suspicious.

A few days later, on August 19, the FBI released a statement, officially identifying the man as 30-year-old Scott Lilly from South Bend, Indiana.

There isn't anything in reports that states exactly how they made this ID, but I have to assume it was dental records or something on the body that told them who it was.

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