The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  If change had been slow to come to West Virginia directly after the Civil War, by 1900 the lumber industry was cooking with gas. To turn a profit, companies needed to harvest the timber from enormous tracts of land—and fast. For this kind of productivity, they needed lots of capital and took on heavy debt. To remain solvent in the face of all this debt, they had to be constantly producing; it was often cheaper for them to continue cutting even at a loss than to stop production for a single day.

  As the machine of big lumber churned, reaching its peak in the first decade of the twentieth century, the result for West Virginians was the slashing and burning of their forests without the benefit of any lasting economic infrastructure. The land of West Virginia was skinned at a staggering pace. This was not a lumber industry, in which trees were cultivated as a crop and cut as more were planted; this was mining. A company stayed a few months, extracted the trees, and moved on.

  Jobs followed the decimation—once a forest had been cut, those holding the axes and operating the mills were out of work. Some West Virginians became migratory, following the work; others would spend their lives trying to match the wages they’d made for a few months. Some tried to turn back to the farms they’d worked before, but they were gone—the forests where farmers had let their livestock roam and from which they’d drawn wood, water, and food were wastelands now. From 1880 to 1920, many West Virginia families who had previously made a good living from their farms were forced off their land and into wage labor. Or they left.

  Enter coal. Of the 24,230 square miles that make up West Virginia, a total of 9,500 square miles, or 39.2 percent, is underlaid with coal—forty-three of the fifty-five counties, in whole or in part. Small-scale coal mining had been happening sustainably in pockets of the state since before the Civil War, but as the logging industry died, perfectly good railroad track was left behind, and coal rose up to take its place. Out-of-state industrialists began approaching local mining companies and offering to expand their operations, or they stole their methods and drove them out of business. Soon the great coal fields of southern West Virginia were accessible by rail, and coal towns sprang up, consisting of a mine, whatever housing the coal company decided to provide for its workers, and a store where they were obligated to buy all their goods. From 1880 to 1917, the number of miners in West Virginia grew from about four thousand to ninety thousand; the state had swapped one extractive economy for another.

  “Today,” say the writers of the 1941 West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, “the State has no self-sufficient communities.”

  The lumber and mining booms would not be the last times Appalachia was “rediscovered” by outsiders; there were several more such occasions. When the Mine Wars raged in West Virginia from 1912 to 1922, the sophisticated organizational tactics of the coal miners and the violence of the Battle of Blair Mountain, called “the largest insurrection in US history outside the Civil War,” attracted national attention. In the mid-1960s, President Kennedy’s trip to the region and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty meant photographs of real or perceived Appalachian destitution blanketed kitchen tables across America. Finally, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as reporters and pundits sought to explain the surging enthusiasm for Donald J. Trump, writers and cultural critics, me included, considered Appalachia with renewed interest. Again, reporters zoomed in and out and had days to construct a totalizing story. If Appalachia was “the heart of Trump country,” as it was called in a flurry of articles and think pieces in 2016, it was suddenly urgent for us to understand its beating. Yet, as has been true all along, whatever blood pumps through Appalachia pumps through all of us. “The nation awoke on November 9,” writes Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, “to the news that we were all now residents of Trump Country.”

  2

  WITH THE ARRESTS OF SEVEN local men in the spring of 1992, the Rainbow Murders drew their first in-depth media coverage from outlets outside West Virginia. Reporters visited Pocahontas County for a week at a time, and citizens could spot their New York plates driving too slow on 219 or parked outside Dorie’s lunch counter in Marlinton, which only fueled the community buzz over the crimes. The articles wove a narrative of drunken backwoods hicks and sexy hippie women, of two profoundly separate value systems that had touched because of the Rainbow Gathering, then wished they hadn’t.

  “The culture clash was thought to carry the potential for violence,” a September 1992 article in the St. Petersburg Times declared.

  “The women were outsiders,” wrote a Newsday reporter in 1992, and “the suspects were locals.…A lot of people in Pocahontas County didn’t want the hippies there, and many thought the women should know better than to hitchhike unescorted.”

  These outlets also told the story that Pocahontas County was home to “both rugged physical beauty and a few rugged people,” characters that were capable of “backwoods intrigue.” The place was rural, and it was scary, they made clear. “The bodies turned up near the driveway to Arnold Cutlip’s home, an address so remote the television was powered by batteries.”

  Further, went the logic, the twelve-year lag between the murders and the arrests was because Pocahontas County’s central motivation was the protection of its own “clan” rather than rooting out the truth.

  “Local sentiment was that hillbillies killed a pair of hippies as an expression of anger over the Rainbow Gathering.…It has been suggested by several residents that the investigation dragged because the victims were from somewhere else.”

  “Weiford and the police deny that there was any xenophobia against the victims and point to their persistence in eventually bringing charges as proof of their lack of bias,” the Newsday article continued.

  “Jake Beard goes to a party with axes,” a Hillsboro resident was quoted as saying. Other neighbors told stories that he had chainsawed animals, that he had waved a pistol at a man who had damaged his fence. A Pocahontas County resident who had moved to the area as part of the Back to the Land movement offered this view to the St. Petersburg Times: “Everyone knew who did those murders. I’d say a big reason nobody talked is they were all afraid of Jake Beard.”

  Weiford brought charges against Beard first, since he was “the trigger man,” and the grand jury had found there was sufficient evidence to try him for two counts of first degree murder. In the state of West Virginia in 1992, premeditated intent could legally be formed in a tiny gap between the idea of killing someone and its execution—even a few minutes is sufficient.

  Weiford’s term had technically run out—he had campaigned for reelection in 1992 and lost again. But he’d spent his career steeped in the Rainbow case, so his successor deferred to Weiford, allowing him to remain on the case as a “special prosecutor.”

  During the winter of 1993, Pocahontas County got pounded by more than twenty inches of snow. The stream of cars that drove past Walt Weiford’s house and honked hello slowed to a glide, then a skid; soon it stopped altogether. Not even the guys who had plows strapped to the front of their trucks wanted to brave it. No school for Weiford’s daughter. Silent days, and Weiford spent them at home hunched over his desk, preparing his case against Beard.

  A persuasive story in a court of law turns out to mean pretty much the same thing as it does in literature. Echoing Aristotle’s rules for compelling drama, expert trial lawyers say that a good trial story is one in which people have reasons for the way they act, accounts for all the known facts, is supported by details, makes common sense, and is organized in a logical way, so that each piece of information naturally follows the one before it based on cause and effect.

  “Your case must have both a theory and a theme,” advises Steven Lubet, author of Modern Trial Advocacy: Analysis and Practice. A winning theory “has logical internal force,” and it should be simple and easy to believe. “Even ‘true’ theories may be difficult to believe because they contradict everyday experiences,” writes Lubet. “You must strive to elimi
nate all implausible elements from your theory.”

  The theme is the emotional center of the story that ensures that your theory will stick and persuade a jury. “Just as your theory must appeal to logic, your theme must appeal to moral force.…The most compelling themes appeal to shared values, civic virtues, or common motivations.”

  The hick monster story was certainly “simple” and “easy to believe” and offered more than a hint of moral force, but Weiford had his doubts about it, possibly because he himself did not believe it. “To me it wasn’t a hicks versus hippies sort of thing,” Weiford told the St. Petersburg Times. “It’s not that simple.”

  Vicki and Nancy had not been raped; there was no evidence of sexual assault or that they had had sex of any kind before they died. Yet the story that gender and thus sexuality had played an essential role in their deaths—a flavor in the groundwater we assume we taste whenever a woman is killed—had already solidified. Alkire had been telling it to himself since the first day their bodies were found; his earliest hypotheses included “the flasher: for sexual satisfaction.” Bobby Morrison told it—“Gerald Brown said something about going somewhere and getting some nookie or something like that.” Gerald Brown’s arrest report told it—“anger at being denied sexual satisfaction.” Pee Wee Walton told it, too—the men wanted to get Vicki and Nancy somewhere alone “to see if [they] would put out.”

  “[The men] decided they were hippies and you know they figured, ‘Hippie girls, free sex,’ so they picked them up,” a senior law enforcement official who asked not to be identified had also told Newsday. “There is no indication that these girls were interested in any kind of sexual activity, there is no indication that they were in any way ‘loose.’ Our impression is that [Vicki and Nancy] thought these were nice guys who were going to give them a ride to the Rainbow Gathering,” the source continued.

  Further, a great deal was made in the 1992 media coverage of the fact that Vicki and Nancy were not especially pretty. “The girls were not obese but they were bigger and heavier than average,” Pam Wilson, the witness who said she had seen the women getting into the blue van, told police. Vicki was frequently described in the press as “bucktoothed” and Nancy as a “tomboy.”

  “Her sisters were beautiful girls,” Jo-Ann Orelli, Nancy’s childhood friend says. “Not that Nancy wasn’t pretty, but she was stockier. Nancy was more regular [looking].”

  Nancy’s sister Patricia protests: “She was fine looking, she didn’t look any different than us, and she certainly wouldn’t have noticed or felt jealous.” But Patricia’s husband pipes up from the background: “Out of all of you she was definitely the least attractive.”

  “They were all very naturally beautiful girls,” Catherine Shea, who grew up next door to the Santomeros in Huntington, told me. “Great skin, blond hair. But they weren’t aware of it somehow. Their mother was the same way, able to look just wonderful without a lot of makeup. Nancy looked more like her dad.”

  Why do we care if a murdered or missing woman is pretty? I don’t know, but we care. In 2004, Gwen Ifill of PBS coined the term “missing white woman syndrome” to describe what happens when, as a nation, we become obsessed with following the case of a missing or murdered white girl. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post instructs that to qualify for the full treatment, the missing or murdered girl must be middle-class or higher and she must be white. “The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment,” Robinson writes. “She must be attractive—also nonnegotiable.”

  “It’s the meta-narrative of something seen as precious and delicate being snatched away, defiled, destroyed by evil forces that lurk in the shadows, just outside the bedroom window,” Robinson writes. “It’s innocence and optimism crushed by cruel reality. It’s a flower smashed by a rock.”

  When asked by the St. Petersburg Times in 1992 if he committed the Rainbow Murders, Jacob Beard responded by looking at photos of Vicki and Nancy and then, in a move that reveals the strange yet pervasive logic that a woman’s likelihood of being raped is equal to her supposed sexual appeal, replied, “They were definitely not the type of women I’d want to have sex with. They weren’t the slimmest, trimmest little things.”

  Vicki and Nancy were not ideal damsels then—a narrative problem, likely why the story of their deaths never became a consuming national media sensation. Weiford would have to find some other way to make them flowers and some other way to make their killer a rock.

  “Lawyers must therefore pay careful attention to the fact finder’s frame of reference, which in turn will be determined, at least in part, by his or her education, training, background, experiences, preferences, and biases,” Lubet, the trial expert, further advises.

  Weiford needed a story that would appeal specifically to a West Virginia jury—a jury that would be made up of ten West Virginia men and just two women. A bunch of guys drinking, a blue van, that straight stretch of road, went the story taking shape in Weiford’s mind. Two girls (they must be girls, not women, if they are to be innocents) murdered by a group of men (they must be men, not boys, if they are to be rocks).

  The theme would be how female naïveté inevitably gets smashed by male lechery and violence, and the consequences of dangerous masculinity. But not just any masculinity—specifically, local masculinity. The killer was local. The badness had come from within, and it was still within, Weiford felt. As long as Vicki and Nancy’s case went unprosecuted, that bad feeling would remain. The most appealing story was not only about men crushing women, but it was also about the redemption of Pocahontas County maleness: convict this one bad apple, and our community can be made whole again. Convicting Jacob Beard would be a cleansing, a return to moral correctness and safety, the way of the gentleman and the family. This was the story Weiford chose.

  3

  JACOB BEARD USED HIS PHONE call when he arrived at the Florida jail in April 1992 to call not his wife but his former boss—a powerful West Virginia farmer named Charlie Long.

  Long had heard rumors that Beard could be aggressive, but he never saw that behavior. Beard, he says, was sweet to his wife and young children. “If he needed a hammer, he would ask to use it before he used it. When he partied, he partied hard, when he worked, he worked hard.…I don’t know what his previous life was, but he was always good to me.”

  We’ll get you the best, Long promised Beard, the absolute best. And a couple days later, two men in suits from Charleston showed up to shake Beard’s hand. Robert Allen, who had once been an assistant in the US attorney’s office, was in his early fifties and had a large square face. He was the senior lawyer, and it was his name on the door. This is a witch hunt, he told Beard. Pure and simple.

  Stephen Farmer was a newly christened partner in Allen’s firm in his early thirties. He sat with his arms crossed at that first meeting and said little, but he would be the one to give up nights and weekends preparing for Beard’s case.

  Allen and Farmer promptly set about trying to secure a change of venue, arguing that because of the media coverage that had saturated Pocahontas County since 1980 and the surge of articles since Beard’s arrest, in which he was said to “go to parties with axes and chainsaws,” he could not possibly receive a fair trial at home.

  “I asked [a friend] what he thought [about the Rainbow Murders],” testified a defense witness at the hearing held to determine whether this change was necessary, “and he said, ‘Well, everybody knows Jake Beard did it.’ And generally speaking, I think that’s the consensus of opinion.”

  Weiford then asked the witness where specifically he had heard the case discussed.

  “Gosh, everywhere you go, Walt.…K.C.’s Bar. Miss Kitty’s. The Diner. Frontier Restaurant. Everywhere you go, it’s discussed.”

  “The community appears to harbor such a fear of Beard, bordering on hysteria, deserved or not, that Mr. Beard’s culpability in their eyes has already been established,” Farmer wrote in his succ
essful brief. “A change of venue must be granted, moving the trial to a location where Mr. Beard’s reputation is not an issue. Only then can it be reasonably guaranteed that fact will be separated from fantasy.”

  Weiford had bigger problems. In June 1992, Johnnie Lewis had been reinterviewed in preparation for trial, but instead of incriminating Beard, he recanted his April 16 statement, returning once more to the original story he had told investigators in 1980 and on April 15: he had been with Arnold Cutlip all day and seen no Rainbow girls.

  Then Walton told a West Virginia State Police officer that his statement had been coerced by Estep. By the middle of July, Weiford’s case was screwed. The state police superintendent called all the law enforcement officers involved to an emergency meeting in Charleston. Well, he asked Weiford, can you make the case or not? Weiford told the group he had no choice but to drop the charges. “Improper investigative procedures” used by the state police had “seriously compromised the case and were going directly to the credibility and sustainability of the evidence on which they were obtained,” Weiford told the Associated Press.

  Back home in Pocahontas County, Weiford called Alkire. The two of them talked a long time. What about hypnosis treatment? Alkire hadn’t heard of it, plus who knew if Walton or Lewis would consent to the procedure. One more time, Weiford asked, just pick them up one more time. Alkire agreed to do it.

  Once again that October, Alkire drove to the Walton home in Hillsboro. Once again they stood in the yard. Would Walton be willing to be hypnotized to help him remember things? He would. He remembered. Summoned one final time for questioning without his lawyer present, Lewis again said that he’d seen Jacob Beard shoot Vicki and Nancy. Weiford recharged Beard for the murders, as well as Fowler, Brown, McCoy, and Cutlip, and filed a “conspiracy to abduct with the intent to defile”—a sex crimes charge—against Beard. Walton and Lewis were both granted immunity for their testimony but remained incarcerated “for their own protection.”