“When I picked it up and turned it over, I seen Bobby Lee Morrison—whatever the guy’s name is—up at the top. I just—I just turned it over and brought it in here to Mr. Miller. I didn’t even look at it,” the juror in question told Judge Lobban.
Each juror then had to be individually questioned to see if they had read it and if their ability to be impartial had been tainted in any way. “We’re sorry to bother you,” Judge Lobban told each member as he spoke with them. “Unfortunately, it’s a commentary about the trial and the witnesses and the parties and our system of justice in West Virginia.”
“Now,” Lobban asked one juror, “if the…document is critical of our trial and our witnesses, our lawyers, our system, our state, does that cause you any problem continuing to be a member of this jury panel?”
“As much as I have criticized all those things myself,” responded the juror, who then quickly added, “No.”
Later that morning, Gerald Brown’s ex-wife, Drema, was finally permitted to take the stand. She testified that she had been home the whole day on June 25, 1980, except for an hour in the early afternoon, because she was waiting for her mother and sister to arrive from Ohio. She claimed that no men in a blue van had come to their trailer that night, contradicting Pee Wee Walton’s testimony.
Beard’s wife’s brother, Larry Dean, testified next. Pee Wee Walton had claimed that Dean had also been in the woods the night the Rainbow girls had been killed—he had come in his jeep to “party.” Dean said that he had not been on Briery Knob that night at all and that he rarely if ever drove the jeep Walton had referenced. On cross-examination, however, Dean admitted that when he had first been questioned by police, he said that he believed Beard might have committed the murders.
Roger Pritt also offered testimony rebutting that of his cousin’s husband’s brother’s wife, Sis Hively. He claimed that Beard had not been drunk or aggressive at the school board meeting but had seemed his normal self and that they left together.
“It’s up to you; it’s your life,” Robert Allen told Beard when they’d discussed if Beard would testify on his own behalf. On the one hand, an appealing defendant who can offer a coherent story of their whereabouts elsewhere on the day of a crime or a humanizing insight into how their character would not allow for such acts can be a lifesaver. On the other, a defendant who seems nervous, hostile, distant, or otherwise unappealing can make a jury convict faster than any damning evidence.
In a bright white polo shirt, dark suit jacket, and gold watch, Beard settled himself into the witness stand on the morning of the tenth day of the trial, a Wednesday. Except for an occasional shake of his head, he didn’t move his body at all as he spoke. Once, during his long testimony, he adjusted his glasses, also aviator-style, to sit more solidly below his large, shiny forehead. He didn’t smile or cry. Instead, he frowned and looked straight ahead, answering Allen’s questions with a “yes, sir” or “no, sir.”
As Allen led Beard through his movements on the day of the murders, Allen drew an elaborate and confusing diagram on the green chalkboard.
“And where is the valley in relation to this intersection?” Allen asked.
“About where you have them squiggles,” Beard said, trying to be helpful.
Beard reiterated his alibi—that he had been at work at Greenbrier Tractor Sales in Lewisburg, then out on a service call in the afternoon, after which he got some groceries, went home, and ate a sandwich with his wife. They arrived together at the school board meeting by 7:30 pm.
Beard told the jury how defending himself in this case had tanked his health. Allen and his firm now held a second mortgage on Beard’s house, and he had been on a leave of absence from work since February 1993.
“My nerves got pretty bad,” Beard said, without emotion. “I suffered a couple blackouts. My daughter found me on the floor one Sunday morning, and I was taken to the hospital. They determined that I had had a small stroke.”
He again said he didn’t know any of the “relevant necessary people” more than to stop and chat with, and some not even that much; he had never even seen Pee Wee Walton until the preliminary motion hearings in mid-April. The only interaction he’d had with Rainbow people, he said, was in late 1980, when he met two of them who needed help hauling a burned van. They told him that “the Rainbows as a whole felt that local people had done [the killings].”
“Did you kill these girls?” asked Allen.
“No, sir. Absolutely not,” replied Beard.
The defense spent the afternoon session calling an expert they’d commissioned to do computer graphics of the bullet paths through Vicki and Nancy’s bodies based on the findings of Dr. Sopher, but it was so convoluted that even Farmer and Allen seemed to have trouble following the expert’s train of thought and its implications, if any, on Beard’s guilt or innocence.
Closing arguments took place on Thursday, June 3, the eleventh day of the trial. The gallery was clear of most spectators by then—they’d run out of sick days, or money, or interest. Kathy Santomero and her mother had returned home to Long Island; Kathy was getting married the following week and had errands to run.
“The style of Special Prosecutor Walt Weiford, whose relaxed matter-of-fact statements were delivered in increasingly hushed tones, was compared to defense attorney Stephen Farmer, who delivered his arguments in seeming frustration and increasing fervor,” reported Strong.
In his closing, Weiford said that the witnesses he presented were imperfect, which made them in fact more credible. “Johnnie Lewis was in a place he didn’t want to be,” Weiford told the court. “He saw things he wishes he hadn’t seen. Now if the state wanted to invent a witness for you, the state might have invented somebody that might have had an easier time testifying than Johnnie Lewis had.”
He also emphasized the sheer number of Pocahontas County citizens who participated in the prosecution to testify against Jacob Beard. “You will believe Mr. Beard and his relatives,” Weiford told the jury, or believe innocent citizens with no reason to lie. The other theories of the crime—Bobby Lee Morrison, Brown, and the inmate in Illinois were “hardly even worth mentioning.”
Farmer’s closing was indeed feverish, and frustrated. He delivered it from his music stand, looking at the jury. On Court TV, his face was again caught in profile.
“Pee Wee lives in Hillsboro with his mother. Sometimes he is employed; sometimes he is not. In Hillsboro, the law is the law. He told the law that he didn’t know what happened. He told the law that…what he was telling them could be a dream. What did the law do? The law made him captive. The people that were supposed to help him and the people who were supposed to be in search of the truth took him captive.
“They may not be able to do that to me. And they may not be able to do that to you all. But you saw Pee Wee. It’s real. And Pee Wee knows, when this is over, you all get to go home. I get to go home. Everybody in this court room gets to go home. Pee Wee goes back to Hillsboro. And it’s him and the law…”
“Johnnie Lewis may be the most tragic aspect of this case short of the tragic deaths of these girls.” Lewis, Farmer continued, was “an unfortunate man.…Knowing his capabilities, and the fact that he is not as fortunate as most of us, knowing that he lives out in the woods with a caretaker, is unable to care for himself.…The law…came to see him again. Now, if Sergeant Alkire was in search of the truth…why did he go get Estep to come and see Johnnie?…So they ditched the lawyer, and in October, they bring Estep back in, and it had the desired effect.
“You see because Johnnie Lewis has to go home too. Johnnie Lewis has to go home where the power is vested in the very people that he told the truth to, and look what they did to him. Johnnie Lewis knows what he has to do to survive. Pee Wee Walton knows, within both of their lives, what they must do to survive. And that was to come here and tell what the state wanted to hear.”
Farmer ended by appealing to the West Virginia jury’s understanding of how essential it can be for ordinary citi
zens to resist those with power. “The people that formed this county and this country came here in large part because the country that they were leaving permitted the government to randomly walk on people the way Mr. Beard has been walked upon in this case,” Farmer said. “This country is founded on the premise that it’s people like you that can look at the government and say, ‘No, it won’t happen. It won’t happen.’ Mr. Beard is not guilty. Send Mr. Beard home to try to put his life back together.”
After just over three hours of deliberation, the jury reentered the courtroom. Judge Lobban had them line up at the front of the gallery facing the judge’s bench so that Beard, Farmer, and Allen as well as Weiford were looking directly at the jury’s backs and butts. Judge Lobban read the verdict: Beard was guilty of the murder in the first degree of Vicki Durian and guilty of the murder in the first degree of Nancy Santomero. Beard did not move his head or his eyes or his face while these sentences were read aloud.
Strong did not linger at the courthouse. “The thirteen-year-old mystery,” she typed, “of who killed ‘The Rainbow Girls’ has now been solved.”
PART V:
THE COGS DON’T MEET
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.
—Niels Bohr
Robert Alkire, 1993
1
ONCE UPON A TIME IN 1950s Mobile, Alabama, there lived a boy named James Clayton Vaughn. His father left when he was eight, but he had a mother and two sisters and a brother and a house near a woods of loblolly pine.
Vaughn lived in the Birdville neighborhood, close to the air force base and the water of Mobile Bay and a stone’s throw from the new interstate they were building through town. Most of the homes in Birdville had gone up fast during the Second World War to give temporary shelter to military personnel, and when the officers and their families left, you could rent them for cheap. Later they would become a public housing complex, which still stands today.
Nearly half of Mobile was black then, but only 275 black residents were registered to vote out of a total of 19,000 voters. Alabama had passed onerous provisions in 1901 requiring voters to own property, be able to read and write an article of the US Constitution, have been employed for at least one year, and have not been convicted of any crime, including vagrancy and public intoxication. This eliminated nearly all black residents of Mobile and many whites too, including Vaughn’s family.
Because poor communities have their own kind of logic outside middle-class rules, Vaughn’s Birdville was more or less integrated; poor black and poor white kids tossed balls back and forth and hit each other with friendly sticks. Yet if Vaughn left his neighborhood even for a moment, the reality of white supremacy and black dispossession was everywhere. It was in the whites-only restaurants and stores and schools of course, but it was also in the crosses that burned on Highway 90 and 42 and 45 and 43—the only roads into or out of Mobile. A Klansman ran for city commission in 1957 on the slogan “the Negro will be kept in his place” and promoted his candidacy with buttons depicting two black men hanging from a tree.
Vaughn’s father was mostly gone. His mother starved and beat him and sent him to sleep under the loblolly pines. For reasons that were never clear, Vaughn took the brunt of his mother’s rage. By his teenage years, he was blind in his right eye, and his skull was cracked many times over.
When he was seventeen, Vaughn stole a copy of Mein Kampf from the Mobile public library and took to carrying it around his house and to the loblolly pines when he was forced to go there. Now instead of waiting for the sky to turn light, he had something to read. He read of Hitler’s poverty and hunger and gobbled the words into his mind. “Our own painful struggle for existence,” Hitler wrote, “destroys our feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind.” To be a poor white boy with the same amount of power as a poor black boy—none—it seemed, was to have the lowest kind of human life.
Vaughn started looking at Birdville with new eyes. He stopped playing with his black friends. One of his neighbors, a black woman, had always been kind to him, sometimes giving him food while he sat under the loblolly pine; now he pretended he didn’t know her. Vaughn kept reading Hitler and joined the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
As soon as he was old enough to drive, Vaughn dropped out of high school and took off for points north and east, where, under various fake names, he worked in construction, at a real estate firm, and in a shoe store. At twenty years old, he started hurling insults at interracial couples on the street, then at interracial couples idling in cars. He became transfixed by the philosophy Charles Manson called “helter skelter”—a vague collection of ideas involving anger at being rejected by the world of the rich and powerful, as well as promoting violence designed to create an apocalyptic war between blacks and whites that would end the world as we know it.
When he visited his sister in Mobile in 1973, he could not stop shaking and yelling when he saw that she had a black woman working in her house as a maid. “He got so upset that it was almost necessary for her to call the police in order to get him to leave,” his FBI case notes read. In Maryland, he worked as a maintenance man at a building complex. It seemed as if he had calmed down emotionally during this time, his other sister told the FBI. But she was wrong. That year, in Atlanta, Vaughn followed a black man with a white woman date, then sprayed them with mace. Then he changed his name, reinventing himself forever. The name he took was Joseph Paul Franklin—Joseph for Goebbels’s efficiency; Franklin for Ben’s ingenuity.
Bombs came next. In July 1977, and within days of each other, Franklin used a sophisticated electrical detonator to blow a hole through the front of the home of Morris Amitay, the face of pro-Israel politics in Washington, and then pushed fifty pounds of water gel explosives and five sticks of dynamite into a crawl space in a small Orthodox synagogue in Chattanooga. The synagogue was flattened to the ground, but its Torah survived.
In the month following his bombings, Franklin got it in mind to drive to Wisconsin to kill a judge who had released two black men accused of raping a white woman. But on his way there, in a shopping mall in Madison, he was driving through a parking lot when a car driven by a black man with a white woman passenger, both twenty-three years old, backed out in front of him. Franklin honked and honked his horn until the man opened his door to see what the hell. Franklin shot the man as he approached, then pulled up alongside the car, got out, and shot the woman. He never forgot this first couple, Franklin said. The look the man got in his eyes when he knew he would die and the way the woman turned away and covered her face with her hands. He remembered the bad smell of gunpowder, too, and the way their blood had gotten on his clothes.
From 1977 to 1980, thanks to the expansion of the interstate highway system that offered travelers much greater speed and anonymity, Franklin roamed American cities large and small and murdered black men, black men and their white girlfriends or white women who might become their girlfriends, and Jews. He kept handguns around but mostly used a sniper rifle to kill, robbing banks to cover his constant need for fresh cars, guns, and bullets.
He shot and killed a Jewish worshipper exiting a temple in a suburb of St. Louis. He shot a black man and his pregnant white girlfriend as they walked down the sidewalk near their home in northeast Atlanta, killing the man and paralyzing the woman from the waist down. Outside the Georgia courtroom where Hustler publisher Larry Flynt’s famous obscenity trial took place, Franklin tried to kill Flynt because his photographs depicted interracial sex, but he failed, leaving Flynt partially paralyzed and using a wheelchair. In Chattanooga, Franklin waited in the grass outside a Pizza Hut, where a white woman who dated a black man worked, then shot them both in the parking lot. The man, a junior varsity basketball player at the University of Tennessee, was shot first, but he managed before he died to shout a warning to his girlfriend. She lived.
Franklin grew more associative. He shot and killed the manager of a Taco Bell in Doraville, Georgia, because the m
anager was black and waited on white women. He shot and killed a twenty-eight-year-old black man for no reason at all, through a plate-glass window of a restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia. He shot another interracial couple outside a grocery store in Oklahoma City, leaving the woman’s ten-year-old son alive. Franklin had sex with a fifteen-year-old white sex worker and then killed her when she said she had had sex with a black man. He killed a twenty-two-year-old black man who was standing at the counter of a fried chicken carryout restaurant in north Indianapolis in early January 1980 and a nineteen-year-old black man who was buying extermination spray at a convenience store on January 14 in the same city. He killed a white college student hitchhiking her way home from college in an isolated state park in Wisconsin who said she had, or would consider having, sex with a black man. He shot but failed to kill civil rights leader Vernon Jordan outside a Marriott Inn in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
In Cincinnati, he camped out on a railroad trestle with his sniper rifle waiting for an interracial couple to come out of a motel. When they didn’t, he got bored and shot two black children at random instead—cousins, age thirteen and fourteen, on their way to split a dollar at the candy store. They both died. In June 1980, he killed a twenty-two-year-old black man and his white girlfriend as they walked over the Washington Street Bridge in downtown Johnstown, Pennsylvania. That August, Franklin drove around Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park, a bustling public park where teenagers of all races came to roller-skate and flirt and listen to music. When he spotted two black boys, age eighteen and twenty, jogging with two white girls, both fifteen, Franklin opened fire, dropping the two boys to the pavement, where they bled to death. The two girls came away with shrapnel in their skin but alive. Then, as ever, Franklin packed up his rifle, put it back in the trunk, and drove on.
The Third Rainbow Girl Page 18