Christine Cook took the stand next. Pee Wee Walton had said in police statements that he saw Cook on Droop Mountain that day talking to the Rainbow girls, so she was an important element of propping up one of the main eyewitnesses to the crime. By now she lived in Morgantown, working as a unit clerk for the army and even had a new name, having separated from Paulmer Adkison. She now said that she “could not swear to it,” but she thought that Johnnie Lewis was there, riding with Arnold Cutlip. Later, she said, a “bunch of people” ended up on Droop Mountain. “I think Bill McCoy was there. And Richie [misspelling in transcript] Fowler. I think Gerald Brown may have stopped by.” Cook said that everybody was talking about the Rainbow family and wondering why they had come to Pocahontas County. Some of the men had been out to the Rainbow camp to check out the scene. When asked if she knew Beard or had ever met him before, she said she didn’t think so and didn’t think he had been there that day on Droop.
Cook was equally vague on the sequence of events. She said she thought the latest she was on Droop was 5 pm, but again she was not certain.
“Did you see any girls there that day there at the park?” asked Walt Weiford.
A: I don’t believe so. Again, I couldn’t swear to it, because it’s a long time ago. And I don’t believe there was any girls in the van…
Q: Was there drinking going on there at the park?
A: Yes, there was.
Q: A great deal?
A: Yes. They always drank a great deal.
Q: What was being consumed?
A: Seven and seven—and I forgot what all they drank. A lot of liquor and a lot of beer.
Q: Do you recall advising Sergeant Alkire that this was a time of your life that you wanted to forget?
A: Yes, because it’s a lot of bad memories. I am sure people like to put their pasts behind them.
On the morning of the third day, locals William Scott, Sis Hively, and Steven Goode testified to seeing Beard racing his truck up the road at the entrance to Droop Mountain State Park, Beard’s intoxication at the school board meeting, and his presence at Gerald Brown’s trailer that night on Droop Mountain, respectively. Pamela Wilson, narrow, with power bangs, read into evidence her 1992 statement that she’d seen two “hippie-type girls” get into a blue van driven by Richard Fowler.
Bobby Lee Morrison was thirty by now, work-strong and handsome in a flannel shirt, with a thick mustache and hair that hung down past his collar. When the Court TV footage aired, the anchor asked the guest commentator if Morrison was dressed appropriately for court. She would have thought not, the anchor said, “but hey, you’re in West Virginia.”
Weiford needed Morrison to testify that Jacob Beard had bullied and threatened him into making false statements; Farmer wanted to offer Morrison as a possible alternative suspect—after all, he had once given a detailed murder confession that lined up with some of the facts.
During cross-examination after the lunch break, Farmer took Morrison through every element of his later recanted 1983 confession against Gerald Brown, demanding to know where Morrison “got” various details—how much each of the women had to drink, the mud puddle he had described, the brush under which their backpacks were found. Morrison again claimed that Beard had told him key pieces of evidence about the events so that his statement incriminating Brown would be more believable. But Morrison gave conflicting information about the source of his facts—he had told the grand jury that the police gave him the information that one of the women had drunk more alcohol than the other, but at trial, he said that Beard had told him that. As Farmer cross-examined him, Morrison’s jaw, set in anger, clicked back and forth. His knee, where his baseball cap rested, jiggled up and down.
Q: You also told them that you just made that information up out of the whole cloth, didn’t you?
A: I don’t think so.
Q: “Answer: I was—that was made up.” “Question: Who made it up? Answer: I did.” Nobody told you that information, did they?
A: Mr. Beard told me that one of them was supposed to have drunk and the other one wasn’t supposed to have drunk.
Q: Then why did you tell the grand jury in 1983 that you just made it up?
A: I think that was recanted wasn’t it?
Q: That’s what you’re saying here.…That’s what you said isn’t it?
A: I don’t remember…
Q: If Sergeant Alkire and Trooper Lanham would say that you were threatened in jail by Gerald Brown to change your story would that be a lie?
A: I don’t think so, because I don’t think I was threatened in jail by Gerald Brown.
Q: Did you tell these law enforcement people that the reason you were changing your story to implicate Jake Beard after being in jail with Gerald Brown…was because Gerald Brown had threatened you, would that be a lie?
A: I don’t know, cause I don’t think I was ever threatened in jail by Gerald Brown.
Q: Did you tell these gentleman, these law enforcement people, that you were threatened by Gerald Brown to change your story to implicate Mr. Beard?
A: I don’t think so.
Q: You don’t remember?
A: No, I don’t.
Q: How many murders have you witnessed?
A: I have never witnessed any murders.
Q: How many murders have you given statements on and confessed to?
A: None, that I know of.
Q: This is the only one?
A: Yes.
Q: And you don’t remember?
A: No I don’t.
To observers, including the Court TV commentators, it was hard not to wonder about the truthfulness of Morrison’s testimony. After a commercial break, the anchor turned to her commentator. “Let me ask you, Matthew, about what we just saw with the cross-examination of this witness who at one point snapped at the defense attorney there.”
“Well, I’m upset, and let me tell you why,” responded her guest. “[Morrison] remembers something from thirteen years ago, doesn’t remember something from yesterday. He says he’s been threatened by Mr. Beard.…What’s he holding back?”
In his closing argument, Farmer, too, would harp on Morrison’s hostility and strange demeanor.
“How many times did [Bobby Morrison] say ‘I don’t know’ to a difficult question? Did you notice that the entire time he was in the courtroom he did not look at you, he did not look at me, and most of all he never once laid eyes on Jake Beard? The entire time he testified he looked directly at that back wall and thought to himself, when is this hell gonna be over?”
Alkire’s testimony and cross-examination, with the aid of a big black binder of his notes, took up the better part of the trial’s second week, interspersed with other witnesses for scheduling reasons. Though only in his early forties, the hair on both sides of Alkire’s head was a distinctly lighter shade of gray than the top and front, which flopped, Bieber style, onto his forehead. His green, short-sleeved West Virginia State Police uniform was adorned with black and gold patches on both shoulders and the metal badges that marked him as a first sergeant. He looked attentive, eager, and exhausted—the dark areas underneath his small eyes were the size of quarters. He answered many of Weiford’s questions with a quick, courteous “yes, sir” or “no, sir.”
Alkire testified that Beard fell under suspicion because of the telephone calls he placed to the Durian house in 1982, but after that, Beard was an informant of sorts, providing investigators with ideas, none of which led to any evidence in the case.
“Local people did the killing,” Alkire quoted Beard as saying.
Stephen Farmer conducted a long cross-examination that pushed hard on Alkire. Farmer stood on Alkire’s left and very close, such that Alkire was obliged to turn his head to look at Farmer and answer his questions, and the cameras took Alkire mostly in right profile. Farmer was combative, aggressive even, while Alkire seemed calm, folksy, wrongly attacked. Farmer read Bobby Morrison’s confession back to Alkire.
Q: Did you provide him wi
th that information or did he provide it to you?
A: He provided it to me.
Q: You did not lead him or provide him with any of that information?
A: No sir.
Q: To the extent that he says that you provided him with any information, is he not telling the truth?
A: That I provided him with this information? I did not provide him with this information.
Q: Were you careful not to ask him questions in a manner that would give him the answer?
A: Well, absolutely, yes sir.
Q: So if he says that you intentionally or inadvertently asked him questions in a manner which would clue him into the answer, would that be a lie?
A: It would be an accident on my part, if I did. I can’t say that I don’t make mistakes. I could have asked a leading question, but I try to stay away from that, yes sir.
Farmer continued reading Bobby Lee Morrison’s statement and underscored that in 1983, Alkire had felt that Morrison had so much information about the case—including information not released to the public—that he had to have been there. Alkire agreed that he had felt that way in 1983 and had testified as such to a grand jury, but had since changed his mind and lost confidence in Morrison’s statement. Over and over, Farmer tried to show that Morrison’s story was specific and accurate, while Alkire tried to politely push back, asserting that it was more or less in line with the facts, if a little vague.
“If you’re going to vent your anger at a witness and you’re gonna try to prove that some sort of conspiracy had taken place, pick on Bobby Lee,” the Court TV commentator said later. “The jury would much prefer that than picking on nice old Officer Alkire.”
He also criticized Farmer’s overall strategy: “Why not start right out and say, ‘There are other people who had motives; there are statements that were made.…’ This is thirteen years later. They can’t go after the dead man [Gerald Brown], so why not go after Mr. Beard? Nobody likes him anyway!” He felt Farmer was not presenting a strong story, wholly separate from the story Weiford was telling, to the jury.
Liz Johndrow, now thirty-one and living in Vermont, traveled with her boyfriend for the trial. Walking through the hallway, she came face-to-face with Nancy’s dad. He took Liz in his arms. A lot of weeping.
Liz was sorry, she told Nancy’s dad, but she couldn’t give him what he was looking for.
Liz’s hair was cut short and held back by a thick black headband. She wore a beige suit jacket that was too big for her, even with its prominent shoulder pads. Her face and lips were pale too; the only color on her person came from her nose, which was red, and her eyebrows, which were dark and thin and perfectly horizontal. On the witness stand, she looked focused yet far away, determined to remember the truth, but with little access to it. She took long pauses after each question and a few times counted things out on her fingers.
After she had been sworn in, Weiford asked Liz where she lived now, and she answered him—but very quietly.
“If you would speak up so that everyone can hear you. You say you live in Brattleboro, Vermont?”
Weiford continued to struggle to hear Liz. Later in the testimony, Stephen Farmer also interrupted Liz, saying he could not hear her.
Judge Lobban turned to Liz then. “Miss Johndrow, I think the jury is straining also to have to hear you.…Your testimony is going for naught.”
Weiford led Liz through each step in her journey with Vicki and Nancy. After leaving the beach in South Carolina, the trio boarded an empty Trailways bus that took them to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Liz called home and decided not to go to the Gathering. After informing Vicki and Nancy of her change of heart, Liz testified, “they would head to the Gathering, and I would head to Vermont.” Liz looked down at the courtroom floor a long time as she said the word “Vermont” and did not lift her eyes even when Weiford started his next question.
The next morning, Liz testified, they got a ride north on I-95 with a commuter headed into work who dropped them at a truck stop outside Richmond, Virginia. There was a diner there, and the women went in, even though they had no money—loose change, maybe.
“It was like morning,” Liz testified. “People were in there having breakfast. This person bought us coffee. And we were just kind of saying our good-byes and making plans for Vicki and Nancy to come up to Vermont after the Gathering.”
As she spoke, Liz put a question mark at the end of each of her sentences. “And then we walked out to the road, and I don’t remember exactly what road? And I just remember, I—when we parted, I was on one side, they were on the other? We were headed”—Liz held her hands out wide to her sides then brought them together—“in different directions?”
“Still hitchhiking?”
“Yeah, and they waited until I got a ride because they were concerned. You know, about me taking off by myself.”
“So they were still there when you got a ride?”
“They were still there.”
In some newspaper articles from 1980, Liz is quoted as saying that she left Vicki and Nancy around noon or one o’clock on June 25, the day they died, and in others the same time on June 24; Alkire’s notes from that time indicate that she told police June 25. In court, however, Liz testified that she left them on June 24. The date matters—it would help prove or disprove the prosecution’s theory that Vicki and Nancy had been killed in the afternoon of June 25 in time for Jacob Beard to make it to the school board meeting at 7 o’clock that night. Richmond sits about 235 miles from where Vicki and Nancy were found, a drive of about six hours at 1980 speed limits, so if Liz parted from the women at noon at the earliest on June 25, the state’s timeline of the women getting killed in the afternoon would not work.
As Stephen Farmer cross-examined Liz, pointing out the different date she had given in 1980, she listened to his questions but again stared at that spot on the courtroom floor, not meeting his eyes. She scrunched her eyebrows and moved her lips while Farmer spoke, repeating the names of the places he mentioned. She touched her fingers to her eyes and leaned back heavily in the wooden chair.
“Is Charleston, South Carolina, near Sullivan’s Island?” she asked Farmer at one point instead of answering his question. “I don’t even know where Charleston, South Carolina, is.”
Farmer reminded Liz that when she first spoke with him in preparation for this trial, she was still convinced that she left Vicki and Nancy on Wednesday, June 25, not least because she remembered she arrived home in Vermont later that day and her mother and brother were out at their Al-Anon meeting, a thing they usually did on Wednesday nights. Liz made the switch to Tuesday, June 24, she testified, after talking with Alkire and other members of the state police, who helped her to count the days the trio were on the road and map their route. “It kept coming out to being the 24th,” she testified.
“Both attorneys on Beard’s defense team reacted visibly,” Strong reported, when Liz said this.
Criminal trials are long, tedious affairs, more paperwork and logistics than dramatic utterances, and by the time Pee Wee Walton took the stand, it was the trial’s seventh day, Thursday, May 27, 1993. When Walton was sworn in that morning, his face was already red, and his eyes, behind clear aviator-style glasses, looked wet. His hair was parted to the side, and he wore a brown blazer over a navy blue, vertically striped, button-up shirt; the top button was undone, so his white undershirt was exposed. He interlaced his hands in front of him.
“Do you have a clear recollection of the events of that day?” Weiford asked, consulting his notes, which were handwritten on a yellow legal pad and sat on the music stand he was using as a lectern.
“Yes, I do,” Walton said in a jaunty, eager voice that was a bit at odds with the somberness of the occasion.
The beginning of Walton’s testimony was unchanged from the story he’d first told Alkire on his lawn, but the ending was different. Yes, he and Ritchie Fowler and Bill McCoy had been sitting at the top of Droop Mountain off Route 219 at CJ’s
store on June 25, 1980. Yes, they had spent the morning going to town for liquor and beer, then driving around shooting groundhogs and drinking. Yes, they had a .22 caliber pistol they had been using on the groundhogs. But then, Walton’s story now continued, someone drove by and told him and the other men that there were two girls hitchhiking down on the Renick Flats. Walton didn’t want to go and asked Fowler and McCoy to take him home if they were going to pick up the women. But Fowler, who was driving, lobbied for it and said they could just go and look at the girls—they didn’t have to pick them up.
“Okay. What did you all do?” Weiford asked Walton. Walton responded:
A: We drove down there in Renicks Valley, and where the girls was at. We slowed down a little bit. And drove by.…We seen two girls standing along the road.…They was standing there just with their knapsacks on the side of the road, waiting for a ride, I think. We drove on down to the next road that turned—secondary road, right below there, and turned. We sat there awhile.…Rich and Bill was discussing picking them up. I thought they was just going to go on by and not pick them up.
But they did turn back and pick the women up, according to Walton. It was McCoy who got out, talked with Vicki and Nancy, and helped them get their belongings inside. Fowler’s van was a ’70s captain’s style with big seats and a plush bed in the back. According to Walton, Fowler told Vicki and Nancy he was headed the way they were going but first needed to stop at his boss’s—Gerald Brown’s—trailer on Droop Mountain to pick up a paycheck. They went there and stayed about an hour. Walton claimed that when they got to Brown’s trailer, McCoy called around to more friends, “Let’s have a party. We picked up a couple of girl hitchhikers.” They then drove on to the entrance of Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, where they drank more and met up with Arnold Cutlip, Johnnie Lewis, Gerald Brown, Paulmer Adkison, Christine Cook, another man named Larry Dean, and Jacob Beard.
The Third Rainbow Girl Page 16