Jacob Beard grew up a busy farm kid—pigs for Future Farmers of America, calves for 4H. When he turned sixteen, there was a new car waiting for him. School was easy; he dated girls, chiefly Linda, a majorette—all that twirling. It was 1964 when Beard graduated from Hillsboro High School, placing twelfth in a class of twenty-three. Most people who could afford some other kind of education left the county after high school. A lot of the guys went into the service. A lot of the girls looked for husbands. Some guys would go to West Virginia University in Morgantown to study farming or how to teach school, but if they were lucky, they found jobs back home.
Beard moved to Nashville and enrolled in a technical school specializing in automotive mechanics and welding, then got a job an hour north of Philadelphia at a factory where they made box trailers. But the chemical fumes hurt his eyes, even with the goggles, and a doctor told him he’d soon go blind if he kept it up. In the first of what would be a long string of returns, Beard drove home to West Virginia and started working construction. In 1965, he and Linda married.
The marriage was rocky and short-lived. Beard wanted to be gone again; he started taking trips to the Washington, DC, area, one of which ended in an arrest for drunk and disorderly conduct, and soon moved there. In 1967, he and Linda divorced. Beard took a job as a mechanic at a Chevrolet dealership in Arlington, Virginia, until 1969. His parents, as the Pocahontas Times was fond of chronicling, wintered in Florida near Daytona Beach. During the winter of 1969, Beard went down to visit them. It was 70 degrees in December, and he found work as a mechanic, again at a Chevy dealership, and soon became its service manager too. On a visit back to West Virginia, Beard called Linda up, and they were soon back together; in 1971 they remarried, and in 1974 Linda became pregnant with their first daughter, Teresa.
While Beard had been traveling, Linda had gone back to school to become a nursing assistant and easily found work in Florida. But in 1976, just as they were feeling rooted, Beard’s dad called to say he and Beard’s mother were getting older and they needed Beard to come back to Pocahontas County to take over the farm. Back he and Linda and their daughter went.
Now Beard was feeding and tending the cattle, putting up hay, chopping grass for silos, and also tending the big garden abundant enough to feed both his young family and his aging parents. In 1978, he took a second job at Greenbrier Tractor Sales in Lewisburg. Sometimes this hustle was too much to handle alone, and Beard was forced to hire help, local guys who could make hay or cut posts.
Beard wanted to quit working in town and open his own shop on the family land, but he hurt his ankle badly and could barely hobble. He hired members of the nearby commune to rebuild a sagging barn and paint the kitchen. Another Back to the Land couple had a horse farm just above the Beard land, and Beard liked them just fine.
Beard drank—too much by his own standards and the law’s, catching another charge for drunk and disorderly during Pioneer Days, Marlinton’s summer version of Mardi Gras. But these are not uncommon crimes in the mountains, where police have little else to do but park outside the bars and wait.
When the Rainbow people came to town the following year, they came into Marlinton, the other side of the county from Beard’s home. He may have seen a few hitchhiking on the road, but he doesn’t think he picked any up. Linda worked at the hospital down the road from their farm and occasionally worked Saturday night into Sunday morning. If Linda was working, Beard would take his two daughters to church and then take them out for a Happy Meal. Any empty moments were swallowed up by the farm—there was always a cow that was sick or a field that needed to be cut for hay.
But wherever he went that summer, talk followed of the two “Rainbow” girls who had been shot up on Briery Knob and who might have done it. Not just at the Marathon gas station, but at the grocery store, the river, the beer joint, at church. Who had seen whom out driving that day. Who beat his wife. Who was frustrated because he had lost his job. Like Alkire, many citizens of Pocahontas County talked about how the killer had to be local.
Beard spent most of his working hours out on service calls to fix farm equipment in nearby Virginia counties, but he’d often run into people from Pocahontas or Greenbrier County on the job, and they’d want to talk about it too. Still Beard didn’t think too much about the killings. As with most rural areas in the early 1980s, sudden death was not completely foreign to Pocahontas County—usually there were one or two deaths each year by accidental gunshot or suicide or bar dispute. But one day in 1982, after the murders had largely fallen out of the pages of the Pocahontas Times, Beard was sitting outside the office where he worked eating a sandwich when a neighbor from Droop Mountain stopped by to wait on a piece of machinery that was being fixed. Beard listened to the man discuss the case—what they knew about the dead women and what they didn’t, what the investigation had revealed and what it hadn’t. For the first time, Beard really let his mind linger over the killings, and they started to work on him. It just didn’t fit, that two girls would be dead on isolated Briery Knob. He started thinking about it every day; it would pop into his mind while he was working and driving and at odd moments. It was a mystery.
The years rolled by. He and Linda had another daughter, Tammy.
“Jacob, when he was sober, was a fine guy,” a county official told a Long Island weekly paper. “When he was sniffing gas or smoking pot, he was meaner than hell.”
“If you look into his background,” former Pocahontas County Sheriff Jerry Dale told me, “he’s a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
The story goes that the idea for the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a fever dream while he was swarming with tuberculosis. His lungs were hemorrhaging blood and drowning in mucus. He would create a character, he saw—a man—who would struggle aboveground with the things he and so many other men suffered with below it. “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence,” Stevenson writes, “the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth…that man is not truly one, but truly two.”
The idea to call Vicki’s dad came to Jacob Beard with a similar kind of urgency. July 2, 1982, was a Friday night. Beard had worked all day and was hot, tired, thirsty, numb. He says he had had a few drinks that night but wasn’t drunk. There on the coffee table, he says, was a copy of the Pocahontas Times with an “anniversary” article about the Rainbow Murders. Two years. It was just really bothering him, and no matter the television program he watched or the beer he drank, thoughts of the murders wouldn’t leave him.
Beard says he called the Durians in Iowa instead of the Santomeros in Long Island because it was an hour earlier in Iowa. Plus he didn’t know how to pronounce “Santomero.” He made the call from his home, which he says he wouldn’t have done if he had been trying to hide his identity. He also says he called only once.
Whether once or twice, Beard put calling the Durians out of his mind so much so that when, a few weeks later, he stopped to talk to a friend at the Marathon gas station and a sheriff’s deputy squad car pulled up alongside his red truck, he says he was completely surprised. Even when the deputy told him that the state police wanted to speak to him and could Beard please follow his car, he still did not connect the dots.
In the examination room sat a small officer with a square head, hook nose, and chlorine-blue eyes who introduced himself as Corporal Robert Alkire. Come on in, the officer said to Beard. You must know what this is about.
Beard was bigger than Alkire had expected—tall and wide with a head like a potato and seventies-style aviator glasses without the tint.
No sir, Beard replied. I’ve no idea what this is about.
At first Beard denied making the phone calls to the Durians, but then he admitted it. Sure, okay, he told Alkire. It was just that I felt so bad for those girls and their families.
Why didn’t you give your name, then? Alkire asked. Can you see how that seems odd, even suspicious?
I don’t know anything, Beard
said. So I didn’t want to make it seem like I did, or get too involved.
Alkire was interested in Beard’s whereabouts on the late afternoon and night of June 25, 1980, since the medical examiner put Vicki and Nancy’s time of death around 6 or 7 o’clock in the evening. So where was Beard?
Beard told Alkire that he left work at Greenbrier Tractor Sales in Lewisburg, made a house call to work on a piece of farm machinery until about 5:15 pm, stopped off at his home near Droop Mountain for a sandwich and a change of clothes, and then headed to a school board meeting with Linda, arriving by 7:00 or 7:30 pm. He wasn’t in the habit of attending all the school board meetings, but this had been an important one: the board was voting on whether to close the Hillsboro school where Beard’s two daughters would go. The proposal was to consolidate a few grade schools into a single school, which would mean busing kids from the southern part of the county, where the Beards lived, farther north each morning. Beard was dead against it, as were many of the other parents, and he had said so at the meeting. But they lost—the school was closed anyway. After the meeting, Beard continued, he went home with Linda’s cousin, the cousin’s wife, and another friend; Linda had to work the night shift at the hospital and left separately.
Had he seen any Rainbow girls on June 25? Alkire asked.
No.
Did he know anything or had he heard anything at all about the Rainbow Murders?
Local people did the killings, Beard said. That’s what everyone is saying.
Without anything concrete to hold him, Alkire let Beard go, but told him to stay in touch. In case you remember anything, he said.
Beard’s alibi seemed to hold after 7:30 pm; witnesses told Alkire they had seen him at the school board meeting, though one, Sis Hively, said he seemed drunk—red in the face, alcohol on his breath—and agitated, that as he addressed the school superintendent, he had yelled. Beard’s cousin by marriage, Roger Pritt, confirmed that Beard had left the meeting with him and his wife.
Before 7:30 pm was squishier. Beard couldn’t remember where he had gone on the service call, and by 1982 he wasn’t working at Greenbrier Tractor Sales anymore. Alkire went and got Beard’s old time card, which did indeed say that Beard had finished a house call at 5:15 pm, but it didn’t say to whom and the time was handwritten in pencil. Common practice, Beard’s old boss said, as many of the guys would go out on calls not knowing how long they would take, then fill in the time the next morning when they got back.
But Beard had lied to Alkire at least once in that first interview, Alkire discovered. Beard had a mistress, a teacher who lived in Greenbrier County named Patricia—a “fling,” Beard says, that his wife knew about. He didn’t leave the school board meeting in 1980 in a car of four people, but rather five—the extra passenger was Patricia, though Beard says they didn’t go home together.
Alkire discovered the lie on December 26, 1982, when he got a call from the Pocahontas County magistrate’s office. A Patricia had just filed a complaint against a Jacob Beard for animal cruelty. Did Alkire want her number?
On Christmas Eve, Patricia said, she was getting her four daughters ready for church when Beard called and said he was coming over. They had been seeing each other off and on since 1979, but things had started to go downhill, particularly since Alkire had summoned Beard for questioning about the Rainbow Murders.
Beard sounded drunk, Patricia said, and she told him not to come. He insisted—he really wanted to see her, needed to see her. No, Patricia said again. She told Beard that it was over and hung up the phone. Before she left, she checked on her English sheepdog and tabby cat, then buckled her kids into the car. When she returned from services, she found her dog, bleeding from a stab wound to its back. Her cat lay in her bed, still alive but snuffling in its own blood; it had been sliced from chin to tail. Her dog lived, but her cat did not.
A Pocahontas County sheriff’s deputy arrested Jacob Beard for animal cruelty on December 27, 1982, knocking on his door that night. Beard denied the charge, but the magistrate found sufficient cause to hold him and set bail at $1,100, which Beard paid. He says he went home without spending the night, though official records reflect that he wasn’t released from jail until December 28.
Several days into the new year in 1983, Beard drove back to Marlinton to meet with the county prosecutor at the time, a man named Steve Hunter, to see what might be done about the charges. Instead of Hunter, Beard found his assistant, a pale, round-faced man in his thirties who introduced himself as Walt Weiford and whom Beard vaguely recognized from growing up together around Pocahontas County.
The matter would go to trial, and Beard should get a lawyer, Weiford told Beard. A good one.
3
IF YOU WERE LOOKING FOR Walt Weiford, you might find him on the Blue Bridge that spanned a place in the Greenbrier River near Buckeye, just south of Marlinton. “I have crossed that bridge many, many times with various intentions…:),” he once wrote on Facebook, including but not limited to meditating, fishing, drinking, and rereading the Constitution of the United States.
Weiford was a “great man,” a “good man,” “one of the good guys,” a “true man,” say his friends and neighbors; he was “there for you,” he “had your back,” he “always knew how to say things”; he “offered words of wisdom” and “always pointed you in the right direction.” He was “refreshing,” a “straight shooter,” “not political,” “saw things from all sides,” and “told it like it is.” He had red-blond hair that he wore shaggy but a full beard and mustache that he kept groomed and even as a lawn. He was open, even effusive with his feelings of love and gratitude to be alive and to be a West Virginian and to have married his wife and have created his only child, a daughter, who was his favorite person. He wore dark blue denim overalls when he played three-finger banjo with his bluegrass band and tailored suits when he lawyered. He adopted rescue animals, liked lost causes and underdog stories. A self-identified liberal, he also read conservative news websites and didn’t like when people “went too far” or “got out of hand.” He believed that most conflict could be solved if people in this world could decide to “just be human.” He liked to be outside, to sit on the hood of a car listening to the crickets buzzing in summer, to build a bonfire in the fall and stay out with it alone until it died.
Weiford was born in Marlinton and graduated from the high school there in 1969. Before he wanted to be a prosecutor, he wanted to be a spiritual warrior, to minister somehow to the sick and suffering. He left Pocahontas County for Marshall University in Huntington, where he copied down psychological diagnoses on yellow legal pads and memorized their symptoms. Becoming a case worker for Child Protective Services let him see the things that every CPS worker across America sees and some things unique to the Mountain State: the couple feeding their twin toddlers only dilly beans they’d meticulously canned over many summers, the second-grade teacher at the local school who had begun taking her students home with her so their parents could work overnight shifts as coal mine security guards.
Weiford got tired, got fed up. What good was it to minister to the suffering if you could not protect them, if their suffering would just keep repeating and repeating, ad nauseam and forever?
Weiford had an energy, a bounce, and struggling against what he perceived as injustice was its greatest fuel. Law school in Morgantown plugged him in and charged him up. He was two years a married man in June 1980, and it was the summer between his second and third years, when he came home to intern for then-prosecutor Steve Hunter for nothing but experience. He came into work one day, and Hunter told him there had been a double homicide up on Briery Knob and that was all they were going to do that day. Weiford was twenty-eight.
Weiford got into the car with his boss, and they drove 219; the summer fog had lifted by midday, and the sun shone hot and dry. Hunter turned sharply right onto Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park road and then kept on through. The lush trees blocked out the sun, and the rhododendron bushes dripped onto
Weiford’s arm, slung out his window, when Hunter steered the car too close.
It was easy to spot the place where the women had been found—perhaps ten officers were walking the scene, combing the grass. Weiford walked with them and listened. He trailed behind Prosecutor Hunter and wrote down what Hunter said and how he said it. The bodies were gone by then, but their blood was still there in the grass.
When the summer ended, Weiford went back to school in Morgantown. He should have been studying—torts, civil procedure—but instead he was calling home, calling Hunter. What was happening on the case with the two Rainbow girls? Had their backpacks been found yet? He came back to Pocahontas County every break.
When Weiford graduated, he came home for good, this time as assistant prosecuting attorney, a volunteer part-time position he accepted with pride, though it paid zero dollars. To live, he went into private practice handling the divorces, wills, and deeds of Pocahontas County and even picked up a third job as counsel for a local bank.
When Alkire called the prosecutor’s office with updates on the Rainbow case, it was often Weiford who answered. They’d talk for twenty, thirty minutes. Alkire was new to town and a little awkward; people around the county still considered him a city slicker. Weiford felt sorry for the guy and sometimes invited him out to eat by the river or to bring his sons to the drive-in movie theater.
1982 became 1983. Pocahontas County has the highest average elevation of any US county east of the Mississippi, and the snow was especially relentless that year. Alkire and Weiford shoveled their cars out every morning, again if they had a meeting after lunch, and again before the black drive home. Some kids—like Alkire’s and Beard’s—lived down one-lane back roads that school buses struggled to navigate dry much less in snow, so Pocahontas County kids missed weeks of school days, days they would have to pay back, sooner or later.
The Third Rainbow Girl Page 10