I started staying in my car a long time after returning from getting groceries or seeing a friend. I looked through the windshield out at my dark Virginia street and left the engine running so I could listen to bluegrass. Before I’d left Pocahontas County, Jesse had made me three CDs: the Foggy Mountain Boys, the Stanley Brothers, and his own pick, Jimmy Martin. There they sat in their neatly layered CD case, labeled in Jesse’s black Sharpie hand.
I knew I’d have to turn the car off and go back to my apartment and my life eventually, but there was nothing in me that was ready to do it. The car was an in-between space, a temporary container, and I could put my most curious and strange feelings into it. I did my best thinking and messaging and Googling there.
I read the 1992 and 1993 coverage of the arrests of the seven men and about the first trial of Jacob Beard in the Pocahontas Times and elsewhere. I read the words “culture clash” and “they weren’t the slimmest, trimmest little things” and “hicks versus hippies” and “he goes to parties with axes and chainsaws” and “culture of silence,” and I smelled something off, something wrong. Something false had hardened into a story, I suspected, that people both from the county and not had heard over and over and then began to tell. I wanted to know how and why.
Jesse’s parents, I learned from messages I was exchanging with people in Pocahontas County, had been friends with Ritchie Fowler, the alleged driver of the blue van, and had believed strongly in his innocence. The redheaded girl was a relative of Fowler’s too, and Bobby Morrison was tied to a Mountain Views employee by marriage and friendship. Jesse had recently taken a job at the hardware store in Marlinton, a job that allowed him steady hours, a good paycheck, and colleagues he liked—including Pee Wee Walton.
If I had been harmed by Jesse or some other invisible force in Pocahontas County, and if I had harmed him or Mountain Views in turn, what did I want now? I wanted justice. And what was that? Didn’t know.
“A crime creates a debt; the criminal becomes a debtor, the victim his creditor,” writes Lacy M. Johnson. “One primary meaning of the word redemption was the sense that one could buy that debt back—every injury has some equivalent of pain or sacrifice.”
The idea that I might buy back my debt to Pocahontas County and to myself by writing about the deaths of Vicki and Nancy on Briery Knob did not come all at once. It came on hot afternoons when I fell off my bike and my knees ground against loose asphalt. It came at night when the light through the bars on my window fell in stripes across the face of some kind sleeping woman or man. It came in the morning when I woke looking at how those iron bars stood between me and the hostas I had just planted in my backyard, and it stayed with me, even after I had finished graduate school to become a writer and moved back to Philadelphia. Why did it make sense to put the story of Vicki and Nancy and the nine local men who had been implicated in this crime over the years up against the story of me and Jesse and the Mountain Views girls and the DMHB? Didn’t know. But it made sense.
The idea to write about both the Rainbow Murders and my own time in Pocahontas County, together, came most perhaps when I found out about Liz—a woman who was both a part of this story and not a part of it. I cared about the women who died, I knew, and I cared about the men who suffered because two women happened to die where they lived, in a place America prefers to forget exists. Writing this story became real to me when I realized a story could—must—encompass both.
PART VII:
THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL
Have you had enough darkness yet?
No, I haven’t had enough darkness.
Have you had enough fire?
Maybe…
Enough water? No, not nearly enough.
Enough dirt to walk on?
No. Never, never.
—Irene McKinney
Liz Johndrow, 2017
1
I DIDN’T KNOW WALT WEIFORD when I lived in Pocahontas County, but I knew his daughter. She was married to a man Jesse had grown up with, and sometimes she and her husband would come to Tuesday music night. She played the bass—acoustic for when she was playing bluegrass, electric for when she wasn’t. Jesse showed me videos of her from high school—head banging, hair swinging, T-shirt riding up, her face—rocking out. Girl can play, he said.
I saw Walt Weiford’s back before I saw the rest of him. It was August 2013, and he was waiting for me at Marlinton’s gourmet coffee shop that doubled as a bike shop in a Shaker-style wooden chair; his back a beige square, his hands clasped on the café table in front of him. He was bald-headed and khaki-panted.
“There was a time probably not terribly long ago that I would’ve said, ‘No, that’s in the past for me,’” he said, smoothing his hands over a knot in the table’s wood. His dress shirt looked like his face—pale peach, soft, and a little shiny. “At some point I let the Rainbow case go. I was retired for Christ’s sake, and the case was done. But then, I don’t know how, but recently it all came back. I started wondering about it again. And then you called.”
An oval of men on their third refill were klatsching in the cushioned seating area near the front window and spilling out the door into the sunny afternoon. It was the tourists who mostly took advantage of the bike-shop part of this business, renting cruisers or mountain bikes to take down the gravel rails-to-trails route or up into the Monongahela National Forest. The food was wheat wraps and health cookies but also pizza and milkshakes, a solid compromise. It was the only place to get a latte in forty miles, but you could still pay for the self-serve house blend in quarters if you wanted.
“It was a lot like putting a jigsaw puzzle together,” Weiford said as we ate our Reubens and potato chips from yellow plastic netted baskets. His eyes were small and quick; he smiled with his mouth closed. “You couldn’t put it down.”
I agreed, and said that I felt that already. I’d been staying up most nights reading all the case documents available online or making arrangements to get the ones that weren’t. I said that I thought part of the case’s puzzle quality came from how many stories have been told about what happened to Vicki and Nancy that night—all the statements that contradict each other, all the confessions that contradict each other, all the testimony. “None of the facts seem to be facts,” I said. There was hardly anything that everyone agreed on.
“That’s true,” Weiford said. “There were so many people there. And of course everybody is drinking, and all that. You can’t fit what Franklin says around the facts that we know. But the same is true with our theory. All the cogs don’t meet exactly, in places. That’s why we build courthouses.”
I envied his certainty in Beard’s guilt. I asked him to convince me. Weiford took another bite of his sandwich, then rubbed his hands together to wipe off any traces of Thousand Island dressing, and when he did so, I saw the drive for this case in his face, the energy that had propelled him through the twelve-day murder trial in 1993 and then the eleven-day retrial in 2000. For him, he said, Beard’s guilt came down to that phone call.
“If [Beard’s] intentions had been sincere,” Weiford said, “why didn’t he say, ‘Mr. Durian, this is Jake Beard, and I’m really sorry about what happened to your daughter, and in my opinion they’re not working on it, and I wish there was something I could do to help you’? But why do that anonymously and then follow it up with another call? It was almost like Jake was taunting [Mr. Durian], and the police.”
“And why would he do it if he were guilty?”
“I think there was a part of him that kind of wanted the notoriety, wanted to be caught. You know you read about that all the time and see it on TV—same kind of thing. Though I can’t say I’m completely comfortable in saying that’s why he did it.”
And what of Bobby Morrison and Gerald Brown?
“I think Gerald Brown may have been there,” Weiford said. Morrison still lived in Pocahontas County, Weiford said, though he and his ex-wife had run into some legal trouble, he for drinking and driving, she for selling drugs. “[
Morrison] was very young then, just kind of an itinerant farm worker, that would go from one farm to another putting up hay and things like that. The older Bobby got, the more courage he had.…He got a little more gumption, eventually accusing Jake Beard right to his face.”
Morrison’s statement incriminating Brown was so detailed, I remembered, full of precise details that set the scene and were immaterial to a criminal statement—“we talked about partying and how much we used to drink.” Why, then, all those details?
“He wanted you to believe him?” I asked Weiford.
“Yes,” Weiford said.
“But he confessed!” I want to say. My attachment to the idea of confession may be a function of the word—religious, flavored with morality; the stakes of talking about murder seem so high that my first thought is that everything people say in relation to it must be factually correct. “False confession” feels like a contradiction in terms, a paradox that undermines the whole idea that what people say can be believed.
But Weiford made his living inside this paradox. “It’s not uncommon,” Weiford said, unfazed, and he was right. It turns out that false confessions are not uncommon at all, especially among people under eighteen; Morrison was seventeen at the time. Children, or adults with the mental capacity of children, are at the highest risk for professing responsibility for crimes they did not commit. Police misconduct, wishing to please authority, or the misguided belief that going home in the short term is better than sticking with the truth and waiting in jail in the long term are all factors. In 2013, 38 percent of exonerations for crimes allegedly committed by people under eighteen in the last quarter century involved false confessions.
Richard Fowler is dead today, but he was still alive when I met with Weiford. I’d called Fowler from my house in Virginia, but his wife had answered. I told her who I was and my aim.
“We’re never talking about that again,” she said, growing heated when a few moments before she’d been bright. “Never, never. Not him, not me. That Rainbow thing. It ruined our lives.”
Pee Wee Walton was still alive, living in Pocahontas County, too. I had begun to develop a feeling about him, a feeling that he was the key to understanding this whole case, and said so to Weiford at our lunch.
Weiford allowed that Walton could have been wrong about certain things in his testimony.
“I think Pee Wee tried really hard to remember this event,” Weiford said. “And of course one of the problems I later had to deal with was that he was abused by Sergeant Estep, the police officer who interviewed him. And of course Pee Wee’s take on that was what I told you was true. It wasn’t voluntary, but it was the truth.”
Weiford claimed that he wasn’t at the state police barracks until after Walton’s interview had concluded.
“I can remember Alkire telling me something about it—Estep was getting it out of Pee Wee now. Finally getting it out of him.”
I nodded. “I suppose I can guess what you think about the Joseph Paul Franklin theory,” I said.
“Well, you know, anytime somebody says, ‘I done it,’ you got to pay attention to that,” Weiford said, leaning back in his chair. He told me about DiFalco’s trip to Marion, Illinois, in 1984 and how Franklin denied any knowledge of the murders at first. “DiFalco was a really pretty girl. She was a,…she looked kind of like, well, kind of like you. Olive skin, dark hair, dark eyes, very shapely. But she was hard as nails too; she could kick the ass of any guy,” Weiford continued. “Franklin sort of took a liking to her, and Franklin liked attention—a lot. I’ve talked to Franklin myself a couple of times. He called me collect and just wanted to talk.”
“From death row, you can just make a phone call?”
“Yep. But I think I pissed him off the last time he called me. Maybe the last several times he called me. I haven’t heard from him in a while. I thought about getting in touch with him again and just saying, look, whenever they give you the shot, I’d like to be there just to see if you change your mind. Of course, now it’s not that important to me.”
Why, I pressed Weiford, could he not believe in Franklin’s guilt? What was it about Franklin’s story that felt fundamentally not believable?
Weiford told me that he thought Franklin was “an attention seeker” and that the holes in his initial story were too hard to overlook. “Nothing was right about it. It just didn’t conform with what we knew had to be true.” Weiford felt Franklin’s statement became more believable as time passed because of all the investigators from different states who interviewed him over the years.
Our conversation drifted back to 1980 and the Gathering itself. He told me how the arrival of the Rainbow people, the run-ins between local people and Rainbow people, and the county making national news, set a somber mood.
I asked him what the source of the feeling toward the Rainbow people was. Just a knee-jerk human reaction to difference?
“I think initially it was just suspicion—these folks are so different; we don’t know them from a load of coal.” For the most part, the people who came were peaceful and law-abiding. “But there were also some who were traveling so light they had no money and nothing to eat. They stole. They were right here at the Greenbrier River, yet made no attempt to clean themselves. They were pretty unappealing to a lot of folks. It seemed like some of them would take some pleasure in the shock value associated with them, nudity and things like that. People just didn’t get that, couldn’t understand it.”
My experience as a person from somewhere else coming into Pocahontas County was so different, I said. I felt deeply taken in.
But it was a different time then, more than thirty years ago, he reminded me. “And the fact that the Rainbow people were here, and that they’ve been here three or four times since the murders actually,” Weiford said, “and the murders themselves may have opened some doors for folks. And you may have gotten some benefit from that.”
I let that sink into the air a moment.
“There’s a lot of things about this case that I would like to know that I don’t know,” he went on. “There’s a lot of suspicions that I have that I’m not really happy to have.”
The impartiality of Judge Charles Lobban, who presided over both trials, for one thing, Weiford said. Before the first trial, Weiford felt that Lobban wasn’t convinced by the state’s theory and was not pleased to be presiding over such a high-profile case. “When the jury came back [and delivered the guilty verdict] and before I left the courtroom, he called me up to the bench and said, ‘Walt, you made a believer out of me.’”
Yet Lobban granted the motion for a new trial, a thing that Weiford had never understood. He felt it had something to do with politics, optics, and all the publicity surrounding the case in the years 1998–1999, particularly the 60 Minutes II special. “There were CBS cameras right up in his face when he made the ruling. I always thought CBS had something to do with getting Jake Beard a new bite at the apple.”
He paused then, rubbed his hands again, then put them back on the table. I asked him what was on his mind. If I had known then that he would die of a sudden heart attack at age sixty-one just months after this meeting, I would have asked him much more.
Weiford stumbled over the starts of a few different sentences, paused, then spoke again. The friction around the Gathering and then ultimately the murders and the immediate suspicion that the killer had been local, he said, the whole sequence of events that began before the Gathering and lasted more than twenty years cast a shadow on the county that was larger than the facts of the case—it was emotional in a way he couldn’t quite name.
“It all created a sense of foreboding and just—something wasn’t quite right,” Weiford said. He needed to set it right. That’s what his prosecution had intended to resolve.
“I was a big hero at one time,” Weiford said. “But I gave it away.”
When West Virginia police sergeant Robert Alkire retired from investigating crimes and being the sheriff of Pocahontas County, he turned
to making art. He built chairs with dark square legs, benches with curlicue-shaped holes, dressers with star designs ripped into the grain. His glassed-in showroom sat just off Route 219, surrounded on two sides by a defunct motel and on the third by a field that in the summer became sprawling seating for a DIY drive-in movie theater. His hours were few and changeable; he traveled often with his wife to see his grandchildren. I had been calling his unlisted number and shoving letters under the showroom door for a year. But after Weiford and I finished our lunch and stepped out into the street, he told me to try Alkire one last time, and I did, and—whammo—there he was. His Ford truck was parked in the gravel by the door of his showroom, and the lights were on.
Alkire didn’t get up when I came in, but he called to me from a corner, where the wall was wood paneling and the light was dim. He sat in a straight-backed chair next to a stone fireplace—cool, empty, and swept out. His hair had turned pigeon white but was still thick and swooped. On his desk sat a clamshell phone, a large calculator, and his hands—fingernails very clean, knuckles smooth. He wore a snap-up shirt like a cowboy.
“Oh well,” he said, when I told him why I was there. He took his hands from the desk and put them on the knees of his dark jeans. Outside on Route 219, a car with a loud muffler passed, clanking.
“They’ll sue you, and I’m too old to be sued again,” he said. “I feel I gave that case what I had to give it. Thirteen years. That’s a long time.”
Alkire still had all his notes in two binders and a book in which he kept a clipping of every newspaper article ever written about the killings. He had the Court TV tapes. But when I asked to see them, he was vague, noncommittal. He preferred to tell me about how long it takes him to make a table—six months because he’s slow.
He pulled over a small bench with a rhododendron—West Virginia’s state flower—carved into its face. The price tag read $250. “You can sit there,” he said, “if you like.”
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