The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  LESLIE STANGA and her husband met with Eugene Simmons, who had collected Roberts’s belongings. He gave them the keys to her Prius, the five suicide notes discovered in her car, and the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver found by her side. The Stangas asked Simmons to throw away the gun. Roberts had purchased it just a week before her death from an outdoors supply shop in Virginia. Her family and friends believed she’d never shot a gun before.

  “The very idea of Marianne buying a gun and shooting herself—if I was told to name ten things in the world that would never happen, that would be one of them,” Charlee Pawlina told me.

  When making such predictions, Pawlina spoke with confidence. She was a professional psychic and member of the Minnesota Society for Parapsychological Research who worked under the name Lee Channing with an “energy interpretation” business called Spirits Evolving. She normally charged around two dollars a minute for consultations.

  “I’ve done some famous people,” said Pawlina, who was in her seventies. “But I am not going to invade Tom Cruise’s privacy!”

  She said she could tap into people’s energies to read their future and had worked with law enforcement to solve murders. In one case, Pawlina divined the initials of the killer. A year later, according to Pawlina, a man with the same initials pleaded guilty. She also worked with dying animals and ailing people to help bring them peace and resolution. And she spoke to dead people. After learning of Roberts’s death, in fact, Pawlina had “tuned in to” Roberts’s last moments alive.

  “She was calm and clear the moment she pulled the trigger,” Pawlina said. “I did not feel any fear. I felt resolution in her mind.”

  Roberts had become religious in her final years, hanging a crucifix above her bed and praying over the phone with her friend Donna Middleton. Together they’d read The Purpose Driven Life, a Christian self-help book. To Middleton, it was no coincidence that Roberts killed herself near a church. “Her whole focus was she’s going to meet Jesus,” Middleton said. “For Marianne to take a gun and shoot herself, it just had to be her ticket home.”

  In Middleton’s use of the word “home” was a notion of Roberts going back to a familiar, welcoming place where she felt comfortable—a place that existed before WiFi and smartphones, perhaps. It seemed like Green Bank was initially going to be that home, until Roberts concluded that she didn’t feel at peace in the Quiet Zone, either.

  “I have realized that the only way out is to leave my physical body and return to the spirit world,” Roberts wrote in a suicide note addressed “to anyone who will listen,” which her sister shared with me.

  I know this decision will be difficult for people to comprehend, but it feels right to me, and I am not afraid. I am hoping that my death and this letter prompt discussions among elected officials, legislators, policy makers, parents, schools, and the general public about the dangers of wireless frequencies and that these discussions lead to laws that protect people from RFs [radio frequencies]. RFs affect everyone, not just those individuals who can feel them.

  Many factors play into suicide. Several of the electrosensitives in Green Bank told me they’d had suicidal thoughts in their darker moments, though they were always pulled back by family or friends. One had even made an emergency call to a friend on a cellphone, with the device of her torment saving her in that moment of despair. Roberts almost seemed a victim of how isolated she’d become, of how quiet she’d made her life.

  Stanga visited the forested spot where her sister’s body was found. She tied two branches into a cross and propped it upright, the final marker for someone who had considered herself a kind of martyr to quiet. When I visited the area months later, nothing remained—though I did spot a rough-hewn wooden cross hanging from a garage several hundred feet away through the woods. I couldn’t help but wonder if a neighbor had taken Roberts’s cross for decoration.

  I went and knocked on the home’s door. A short woman answered. She said the cross on her garage was made by a nephew “when he was just a little fella.” I asked if she was aware of the recent suicide nearby. She nodded. She believed she’d heard the shot but had simply thought it was someone “out sighting a gun.” She’d discovered otherwise at church. “It happened right here in my own yard and I didn’t even know it,” she said. “It wasn’t in the Pocahontas Times.”

  “Why do you think she killed herself here, of all places?” I asked.

  “That’s what my question is, Why? It’s like that lady from Florida that came up with that dead child. Why?”

  I nodded, though I had no idea what she was talking about. I later learned that, a year earlier, a few miles outside of Green Bank, someone was spotted dragging a corpse into the woods. Police detained the woman and discovered she’d been trying to dispose of her eleven-year-old daughter’s body, which had injuries to the head and torso as well as signs of strangulation or suffocation. The woman had driven all the way from Florida after searching on her smartphone for “alligator ponds,” “people killed on Virginia cliffs,” and “Virginia highways that has huge cliffs.” That apparently led her to the Quiet Zone.

  THE SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS, I scooted into a pew at Boyer Hill Mennonite Church, where Roberts had last parked. Maybe there had been something special about this church, and I hoped I might find some sense of closure or resolution by attending a service.

  I sat next to a bearded man in a white dress shirt and American flag suspenders, among a dozen men on the right side of the sanctuary. A dozen women sat on the left, all wearing white bonnets and dark-colored dresses. The service started with a pimply teenager blowing into a pitch pipe to set the key. Then the entire congregation launched, a cappella, into harmony. It was beautiful. Their voices vibrated to the ceiling. The suspenders-wearing man sang in a voice so deep that our pew quaked.

  It was the final Sunday of the year, and the pastor preached about crossing into a new year that held “12 new months, 52 new weeks, 365 new days, 8,760 new hours, 525,000 brand-new minutes, 31,536,000 new seconds.” “Behold, I make all things new,” he said, paraphrasing Revelation 21:5. The new year was a chance to start over, he said, a new start. I thought of Roberts, looking for a new life in Green Bank and beyond.

  Roberts’s final note made clear that she hoped her death would raise awareness about the dangers of technology. But she was not the redeeming figure she hoped to be. Each of her family members and friends spoke to me with a smartphone pressed to their ear. They still charged their devices by their bedsides. Nobody had changed their habits, despite Roberts’s pleas. And if her own friends and family would not change, what hope could there be for the rest of us to reconsider our tech addictions? If death itself could not spur people to rethink the need for constant connectivity, what chance did the Green Bank Observatory have for getting the community’s cooperation in preserving the Quiet Zone?

  “We’re so entrenched in technology,” said Kohler, the coworker. “To turn back the clock is almost impossible.”

  FOR THE ELECTROSENSITIVES, the suicide was a warning: people flocking to Pocahontas County were discovering that the quietest place in America wasn’t so quiet. They considered this a matter of life and death, and they wanted to bring attention to the issue.

  But despite calls to the Pocahontas Times, Roberts’s death never appeared in the county’s sole newspaper. Historically, the media has not reported on suicides because of social stigmas and fear of inspiring copycats, though a growing consensus has emerged that, in certain cases, suicides can and should be covered in a nonsensationalistic, informative way that sheds light, sympathy, and understanding on mental health issues.

  To editor in chief Jaynell Graham, however, this was nothing more than the case of a confused woman committing a senseless act of violence on herself. Not a story. “Anybody who kills herself because they can’t find someplace they’re supposed to be has a lot more going on than some kind of electromagnetic sensitivity,” she told me.

  Graham regularly got calls from sensitives around the
country asking for information about Pocahontas, and she wasn’t hesitant to tell them to stay where they were. A woman from Pittsburgh had recently called to subscribe to the Times because she planned to move to Pocahontas. “I told her it was the ‘fallacy of elsewhere,’” Graham said. The grass is always greener on the other side, especially when the other side is called Green Bank.

  Only once had the Times ever reported on the sensitives, with a 2009 profile of Schou. Since then, despite a steady stream of national and international media filing through Green Bank to report on the sensitive community, Graham avoided their story. “I think the problem in today’s society is that we take abnormal behavior and try to make it normal,” she told me.

  When I met up with Graham over the winter holiday, I told her that I’d continued to look into the suicide case since she first told me about it at Thanksgiving. I’d learned that many people in the Green Bank area had heard about the death, yet nobody really knew what had happened, fueling rumors that her newspaper might have been able to correct. Graham sighed loudly, raised her eyebrows, and gave me an exasperated look. She said I was being “nosy.”

  “People have talked about their neighbors and gossiped forever,” she said. “If I had to put one thing in the Pocahontas Times, I’d say, ‘Don’t believe a damn thing you hear and only half of what you see.’”

  “But that’s the whole point of having a newspaper,” I said, frustrated by her approach to covering the news. My first job in journalism had been for a newspaper that was, like the Pocahontas Times, among the country’s dwindling number of independently owned press outlets. I had met Jenna through the newspaper, where she worked as a reporter and editor. I thought it obvious that a robust press was vital to democracy, and that people should know the good and the bad happening in a community.

  “What is it you think I should have put in the paper?” Graham asked.

  Aside from Roberts’s suicide, I said, there had been a recent, tragic death of a former member of the high school’s championship forestry team. The twenty-two-year-old had been visiting her parents’ home in Durbin when an out-of-control logging truck barreled down the road and fatally struck her in her own driveway. She’d gotten married only a month earlier. In memory of her, the high school’s forestry club had added angel decals to its traveling van, then gone on to win the national championship.

  “I got a call asking why it wasn’t in the paper,” Graham said of the death. “I said the police and insurance company are the only ones who need to know.”

  “What about holding the driver accountable?” I asked.

  “Why would we pile on when he’s going to have to live with this? Is it your business? Are you going to counsel him and help him through this? You want to throw the book at this guy? That’s sensationalism . . . The difference between the Pocahontas Times and the Charleston Gazette is they don’t know the people they’re dealing with. Everybody knows most everybody here.”

  Seeking further to keep the peace, Graham had opted to not report that a former Marlinton councilman running for mayor had recently attacked someone at the local Family Dollar with a golf club. Graham said the former councilman hadn’t formally launched his mayoral campaign, so he wasn’t yet a public figure. But didn’t assault in a public place automatically make someone a public figure?

  The thing was, I’d heard about the golf club attack from Graham herself, just as I’d first learned about Roberts’s suicide from her. News in Pocahontas quietly spread through chatter, not print.

  Who was I to tell Graham what to cover? But the criticism was also coming from the community, with one person calling her paper “nothing more than a promotional tract.”

  “You know what?” Graham said to me. “We are a promotional tract. From an economic standpoint, we are a dying county, so you’ve got to support everything.”

  She had a point. Amid massive layoffs across the news industry, Pocahontas was lucky to have a newspaper at all. I didn’t face the economic reality of figuring out how to keep the newspaper running.

  In the vein of controlling the narrative, Graham focused on positive news. Suicide didn’t fit into that picture. Nor did neo-Nazis, for that matter. She didn’t consider her newspaper to be a watchdog. She once told me the Southern Poverty Law Center was “a bigger terrorist organization” than the National Alliance, apparently because of the nonprofit’s dogged monitoring of hate groups. She later said she’d been joking. She thought the SPLC could be “overzealous,” while the National Alliance, in her judgment, was never a threat to the community. It seemed to sum up her approach to the news. Live and let live. Stop being nosy. It walked a dangerously fine line between respecting people’s privacy and being permissive of a hate group.

  “It’s hard to get news about Pocahontas County because it’s not in the newspaper,” I once told Graham.

  “Everybody here knows what the hell’s going on,” she said. “You don’t. But you don’t live here.”

  “My impression is that a lot of people in Pocahontas wished they had a better sense of the news,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “tell them to start a fucking newspaper.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Shutter the Place and Move On”

  DOWN THE HILL FROM the National Alliance, a path of plywood planks and flattened cardboard led across a muddy yard to De Thompson’s RV. I knocked. Thompson swung open the door with a big, toothless smile. He said he’d just been thinking about me—a scary notion. He welcomed me inside. It was late afternoon, a couple of days into 2019.

  It was hard to imagine Thompson, his wife, and their two Rottweilers all crammed inside the RV. A futon faced two small metal chairs, each duct-taped with black foam for padding. Die Hard played on an old Magnavox television mounted between the front seats, where a black cat was curled in a ball. In the rear of the RV was a double bed and a tiny wash closet. In the kitchenette, family photos decorated the cupboard doors.

  I took a seat on the futon beside Thompson, who was fiddling with a carton of cigarettes. A window looked toward the valley of Little Levels, with Droop Mountain in the distance. The setting sun was turning the sky orange and yellow, layering the rolling hills with hues of shadow. It was a sublime view of the Appalachian Mountains. Sure beat my apartment view in Brooklyn.

  I told Thompson that I’d seen his name in the Pocahontas Times. He laughed. Months earlier, police had made a marijuana bust near the National Alliance property, seizing a hundred plants. Seven of the plants—the “prettiest plants in the county”—were his, Thompson admitted. During the bust, police also found an unregistered gun in Thompson’s car, which brought a charge for illegal possession of a firearm. Adding further to his troubles, he’d recently been robbed of $600 worth of pot. As if to check all the boxes for a hopeless situation, Thompson said he’d become addicted to opiates after accidentally taking speed laced with Subutex.

  “It is a horrid, wicked drug,” he said of Subutex, which is marketed for treating opioid dependence but is highly addictive itself. “I’ve come off heroin, OxyContin. No problem really. But this shit here, it’s pretty wicked.”

  Thompson’s smartphone rang. It was connected to satellite internet, rustic as the place was. Linda was calling to say she’d purchased pot from their supplier and would be home soon with their Rottweilers. “You’re probably going to get pawed with a dirty paw, because it’s muddy as fuck,” he warned. Three adults, two dogs, and a cat sounded like a crowd inside the RV, so I got up to leave for the National Alliance compound.

  “Ain’t nothing going on up there,” Thompson said. The National Alliance, he added, had recently sold off most of its land.

  BOYD THOMPSON ROAD was a soupy, sludgy, impassable mess, forcing me to park a mile downhill from the compound. As I walked on from Thompson’s RV, slipping in the mud, an ATV rumbled out of the woods. The driver waved and asked where I was going. I said to the National Alliance. He offered me a ride, which turned into a detour on his ATV trails. />
  “Want a beer?” he asked as we sped into the woods. I declined, but he still reached for a Michelob Ultra from a cooler, stuffing the can into a koozie and taking a swig. “Drive around in a car drinking beer and you get a DUI,” he said over the growling motor. “Drive around in a side-by-side back in the woods drinking a beer, they ain’t going to do nothing!”

  His name was Derrick Miller. He lived in Charleston and came to Pocahontas on weekends “to cut loose.” His father had purchased this twenty-five-acre property in the 1970s. His neighbors were never troublesome, he said, just annoying when the heavily tattooed National Alliance members rode around shirtless on four-wheelers.

  “Just because they have beliefs don’t mean I have to believe them,” Miller said. “You do your thing and I’ll do my thing. As long as we don’t cross paths and have a problem, it’s all right. But if we do cross paths . . .” He flipped open his jacket to reveal a gun holster with a .45 Colt revolver. “When you’re out riding and stuff, you have to carry a pistol. You never know what you might find.”

  Miller dropped me off near the compound’s entry gate. The sun had set, and the fast-dropping winter temperature was refreezing the mud. Ice crystals crunched under my feet.

  THIS WAS MY FIRST TIME arriving in the dark, which made the compound all the creepier. Without my car, I felt even more isolated. I didn’t know who I might find, except that it was likely to be an armed neo-Nazi. But I was due to leave Pocahontas the next day, so I didn’t have time to come back.

  The lights were off at the cottage that Hess had supposedly been turning into a “VIP headquarters.” I walked on and rounded a bend to the main building that once held the business offices. A thin man stood outside smoking a cigarette. I called out a greeting and said I was looking for Jay Hess. He let me inside.