[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  There may be no stronger bond than the one between two people who fundamentally do not agree about what happened in their story. Who was wrong and who was right, who was evil and who was innocent, who did what to whom and what it all meant. Alkire and Beard are bound to each other in this way.

  After Alkire interviewed Beard about his calls to the Durian family and then learned about the animal cruelty charges against him, Alkire kept close tabs on Beard. He summoned Beard for an interview three more times in January and February 1983, though Beard said each time that he knew nothing more about the Rainbow Murders and that he was sorry he had ever made those calls. Alkire asked Beard if he knew Arnold Cutlip, suspect number two from Sergeant Dickinson’s first report who lived in the house closest to the clearing where Vicki and Nancy had been found. Beard said he knew Cutlip by face and to say hello because he had hired Cutlip a few times to cut some timber on the Beard farm, but that was all. Alkire showed Beard pictures of Vicki and Nancy’s dead faces, taken when they were found on Briery Knob and asked Beard to show the pictures around the county to see if they triggered any recognition. Alkire still thought Beard knew something more. He might make a suitable ambassador or informant of sorts, rattle the people truly involved out into the open.

  Beard began to look more and more disheveled each time he came in to meet with Alkire—burst blood vessels in his cheeks, heavy circles under his eyes. When Alkire asked why, Beard said his father had just died and that money was tight on the farm, so he had taken a second job as an overnight security guard at a dam more than an hour away. Alkire asked around and found that Beard had become friendly with another Pocahontas County man who worked at this same dam and that they would sometimes carpool to their shifts together. The new friend also had a teenage girl staying with his family, and the rumor going around was that Beard was sleeping with her.

  Alkire called the prosecutor’s office. As usual, Weiford answered. The two men discussed applying this rumor as pressure to see if Beard might finally give up whatever information he knew. Plus there was still the animal cruelty charge to resolve.

  On a Thursday in early February 1983, Alkire called Beard to arrange a meeting. Just a few more questions, he said. But this time, Alkire asked Beard to come to the courthouse in Marlinton, to Prosecutor Hunter’s office.

  Beard looked even worse than the last time Alkire had seen him, and he reeked of alcohol. Alkire dropped the rumors of an affair between Beard and his friend’s teenage houseguest and watched Beard for how it landed. Beard got agitated and denied it. Weiford reminded Beard of the cat murder charge. Finally, Prosecutor Hunter spoke very slowly: Is there anything you may have forgotten to tell us about the Rainbow Murders? Beard’s lawyer told him that the state would grant him immunity for whatever he might say.

  Yes, Beard said. On his way home from his service call on June 25, 1980, around 5:30 pm, he drove by the entrance to Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park and saw several cars parked at the mouth of the entrance road, known locally as “Lovers’ Lane.” He recognized one of them as belonging to a female friend of his from high school and another was a little red Buick that belonged to a woman named Christine Cook. Beard saw Cook sitting inside the car. He also saw two men standing on either side—Paulmer Adkison, Cook’s boyfriend, who had been suspect number three on Alkire’s original list, and a friend of Adkison’s named Bill McCoy. There were also two people inside Cook’s car, he said, and they might have been women—they seemed to have long hair—though Beard couldn’t say for sure. He hadn’t told this to Alkire before, he said, because he hadn’t seen the high school friend herself and came to believe her car was only there because it had happened to run out of gas nearby and he didn’t want to get her in trouble.

  Beard then asked if he could have his $1,100 back for “the cat thing.” Prosecutor Steve Hunter said he could, and that in exchange for Beard’s continued cooperation he would make sure that a continuance was granted for the animal cruelty charge—vague wording that Alkire and Weiford interpreted to mean the charges would go away (Beard was never tried or convicted of animal cruelty, and his criminal record does not reflect this charge at all). Beard was then presented with an immunity agreement that protected him from prosecution as an accessory to murder before the fact but provided no immunity if it turned out Beard had been the one to shoot the Rainbow girls. Beard’s lawyer motioned for him to sign it, and Beard did.

  Alkire was sweating as he watched Beard sign the document; he didn’t like the idea of anyone getting immunity until he could clearly grasp the whole case in his hands. But Beard had given information where there was none, so Alkire ran with Beard’s facts, setting off straightaway to interview Christine Cook. Since Paulmer Adkison had always been on Alkire’s list, and Cook was his girlfriend and the mother of his child, Alkire had already talked to her several times over the years; Adkison had been arrested for that unrelated crime shortly after the Rainbow Murders. Around the county, Cook was known as a nice, polite girl; no one including Alkire could figure out why the two kept gravitating back together. When Alkire had interviewed her in July 1980, she had said that yes, she had been in Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park with Adkison earlier in the day to sell a truck to Arnold Cutlip, but they had left the park in the early afternoon. She had not been in the park in the evening, and she had certainly not seen any Rainbow girls or hosted them in her car.

  Interviewed again, she told Alkire that she might have been on Droop Mountain that evening after all, with Adkison and his friend Bill McCoy, just as Beard had said. Also, two more of her boyfriend’s friends had been there—Richard Fowler and Gerald Brown. But there had been no women besides her there, she said, she was sure of it. And she had not seen Jacob Beard at all that day.

  When Alkire checked, he found that Richard Fowler was indeed a friend of Bill McCoy’s, that they were often a duo, local guys in their late twenties who worked as day laborers in a slow 1980s West Virginia economy when they could get the work. Gerald Brown was older and better off, a logging contractor with a wife and a trailer on Droop Mountain. He sometimes hired McCoy and Fowler to cut posts when he had the work to give them.

  Then, three days after Beard signed the immunity agreement, Alkire’s office phone rang. It was a Sunday, early, and Alkire wasn’t in.

  “It’s pretty important,” Beard allegedly said to the trooper who answered. “I want to tell [Alkire] about the third Rainbow girl.”

  To hear Beard tell it, that winter after the phone call to the Durians, Alkire would not leave him alone. It was constant. Alkire kept calling him, wanting him to come down to the station to talk about the Rainbow Murders, and Beard kept going in. He had been raised to believe in the law, he says, and felt that if an officer of the law needed help, you helped.

  Beard says that he was the one who ended the affair with Patricia, and that he ended it long before Christmas Eve because he decided he loved his wife and wanted to stay with her. On Christmas Eve, he and Linda had been invited to a friend’s house to play cards, but Linda didn’t go, instead staying at home with their daughter. Beard went for a couple hours, he says; he loves dogs and would not hurt one.

  Beard’s father died in January 1983, and after that, Beard says, he began to lose it with grief. Despite getting into the car and driving straight to Florida at his mother’s call, his father had still died before Beard could say good-bye in person.

  “And for a month or six weeks, the only time in my life I ever drank much was then, when I lost my dad because I loved him and I think about him every day yet,” says Beard.

  Before, Beard says, he only drank on weekends, but now he was drinking every day. Also, he had indeed made a friend at his new job, and they’d carpool to the dam, which was more than forty miles away in Virginia. His friend was no help on the drinking front, even encouraged it. Beard got into the habit of going over to his friend’s place early, and they would play a couple of rounds of cards and drink together before they had to leave for their sh
ift, which started at five in the evening and meant Beard didn’t get home till nearly 4 o’clock in the morning. Then he’d get up in the late morning and put up hay.

  When Alkire called Beard in February 1983 and asked if they could meet, Beard says he was exhausted, strung out, bone tired of Alkire and his harassing calls. But still feeling obligated to the law, he went. They met in Steve Hunter’s office, with Hunter and Weiford, as well as Beard’s lawyer, though Beard can’t remember asking him to be there.

  The prosecutors had drawn up an immunity agreement for him, Beard says, though he couldn’t understand what he might need immunity for. But his lawyer seemed unconcerned—tell them something, anything, sign it and you can go home—all this will be over. Beard really wanted to go home, he says. So when Hunter asked if there was anything he had forgotten to say, Beard told them something he knew wasn’t related to the Rainbow Murders—the tip about the cars on Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park.

  Can I go now? Beard says he remembers asking. He signed and left.

  That Sunday, he had started drinking early. He was still distraught about his father’s death just a month before, after all. Alkire called yet again, and left a message, Beard says. Again Alkire asked if Beard could come down to the station for a chat. Beard was dreading returning the call. He wanted to tell Alkire he was finished with all that. But, he says, he called Alkire back and, after a few minutes on the phone, gave in yet again.

  The trooper who answered the phone at the West Virginia State Police office when Beard called hung up and then picked the phone back up again to call Alkire at home. Alkire returned Beard’s call, then called the trooper back at the office. “Called this officer and advised that Mr. Beard had told him that Arnie Cutlip and Paulmer Adkison had run a girl through a corn chopper at his farm back in September 1980,” read the trooper’s notes from that day.

  Alkire had arranged to meet Beard at the state police office in Marlinton that evening. They met. Beard spoke in more detail. Alkire typed up his words in a written statement, which Beard then read and signed:

  It was in the first part of September, 1980. I was at my shop in Beard, WVa. I was working on my chopper, that is what is used to chop up silage. Arnie Cutlip and Palmer Adkison drove up in Arnie’s green Chevrolet pickup truck. Arnie was driving. They got out of the truck. Arnie had been drinking. I couldn’t smell anything on Palmer. I had oiled the chopper and it was sitting there idling. Arnie was looking for Gerald Brown. I told him Gerald was not here. Palmer started to walk around the wagon and tripped over the tongue. When he got up he looked into the chopper that was running. He said, “Arnie, I think there is the answer to our problem.”

  According to this statement, Paulmer Adkison then went to the back of Cutlip’s truck and took out the pale undernourished body of a young woman wrapped in a dark gray smock. The two men put her through Beard’s corn chopper, directed Beard not to tell anyone they had done so, got back into Cutlip’s truck, and drove away.

  No, Beard says, that’s not how it happened at all.

  At the station, Beard was buzzed, fatigued, overcome with grief, he says, vulnerable and weak. His resolve to resist Alkire had left him. Alkire again accused him of having a sexual relationship with his work friend’s young female houseguest. According to Beard, Alkire then said that he would see to it that Beard went to jail for statutory rape if he didn’t make a statement incriminating Adkison and Cutlip for the Rainbow Murders. That’s when Beard began to feel truly afraid. Could Alkire really do that? And if he could, what else might he be capable of?

  Beard refused to make the statement. Alkire persisted. After several hours, Beard says, Alkire then said, Come on. If you were going to get rid of a body on your farm, how would you do it? And Beard allegedly responded, Through my corn chopper.

  He claims those words—“the third Rainbow girl”—weren’t his and never were. He says that Alkire wrote up the statement himself, that Alkire would suggest a few lines, then Beard would throw out some ideas, and they made it up together as they went along. Beard says he only signed it.

  Alkire had become obsessed with the idea of Beard’s guilt, Beard alleges, for what reason he can’t say. In his phone calls to Vicki’s dad, Beard had stated that police investigators were not doing their jobs; maybe Alkire had taken it personally. Or perhaps because of the animal cruelty charge, Alkire had gotten it in his mind that Beard was violent and cruel to women.

  Whatever the truth, the statement was written. It was signed and presented to a magistrate. Arnold Cutlip sputtered a denial and called Beard a liar, but Cutlip was arrested anyway. Paulmer Adkison remained incarcerated for another crime. It is unclear who investigators thought this allegedly murdered woman was, for Alkire had already spoken to Liz Johndrow at length.

  Alkire sent officers to interview Cutlip’s partner, Virginia Schoolcraft, again. “When [Cutlip] gets drunk he slaps her around a lot,” read the WVSP trooper’s notes from the interview, “and the next day after he sobers up he doesn’t remember anything that happened when he was drunk.” A magistrate declared there was probable cause to hold Cutlip for murder and set a high bail, forcing him to remain in the Pocahontas County jail.

  Beard helped Alkire disassemble his corn chopper so that it could be shipped to the West Virginia state crime lab to be tested for human remains. At Cutlip’s preliminary hearing, Beard repeated the corn chopper story under oath, and it made the papers. By spring’s end, every citizen of Pocahontas County knew what the words “the third Rainbow girl” meant.

  A few months later, the results of the tests performed on the corn chopper came back negative for any blood or tissue. After being incarcerated for more than 180 days, Cutlip was released. For years afterward, whenever Cutlip showed his face at a town festival or a family reunion, people tilted their heads toward their companions and whispered, “There goes the corn chopper man.”

  4

  IN 1912, AN OREGON SUPREME Court judge presiding over an arson case wrote, “It is not an easy task to unring a bell, nor to remove from the mind an impression once firmly imprinted there.” In so writing, he coined the legal phrase “You can’t unring the bell.” A ruling in 1962 from the Fifth Circuit Court of appeals offered similar sentiments: “After the thrust of the saber it is difficult to forget the wound”; and, memorably, “If you throw a skunk into the jury box, you can’t instruct the jury not to smell it.” A story, even one debunked as false, lingers.

  This is also the truth undergirding our defamation and libel laws; as a society we have decided that false stories are so permanently damaging as to constitute a crime. Defamation suits require the plaintiff to show that their life—or that more amorphous idea, their reputation—has been injured by the false story beyond repair. There goes the corn chopper man.

  Yet it may not be as easy as we might think to distinguish telling a true story from telling a false one. Lies and fictions do not come from nowhere; they come from our experiences, the newspaper obituaries column, and perhaps our deepest wishes, curiosities, and instinctual drives. Psychoanalysis would label these “phantasies,” the ph connoting that they reside in a mental reality rather than an objective reality. Freud believed that phantasies were primarily about bodies—the desires to possess one’s own body or that of another and to destroy it.

  He also believed that criminals were not those who lacked a moral conscience but rather people with overactive consciences. “Paradoxical as it may sound,” he wrote, “I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely—the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt.” Once the crime was committed, Freud posited, the phantasy was relieved. At least now they knew why.

  The mind then, has its own facts, connected to objective facts, but not always in agreement with them. Before a story can be told to someone else, we must first tell it to our self.

  That image of a young pale girl in a loose smock and of a man looking into the maw of a corn chopper and
deciding it would be a good place to “solve the problem” of a dead woman’s body—where had that come from? Alkire says Beard. Beard says Alkire. Someone had told himself that one before.

  Bobby Lee Morrison may have been the last person in all of Pocahontas County to learn about the Rainbow Murders. He was seventeen in 1980 and had just dropped out of Pocahontas County High School to support his girlfriend and their infant daughter by cutting locust posts. He showed up even in bad weather. He cut down trees, then cut them into six-foot segments with a chainsaw, then used a splitter until the pieces were thin enough to sell to farmers. Gerald Brown paid the best, so Bobby mostly worked for him.

  According to his girlfriend, Bobby Lee Morrison was on a fishing trip with two other men on June 25, 1980. When his girlfriend came to pick him up the next day, she told the men about the murders. “Well,” Morrison said, “I am glad I know where I was.”

  Years passed, and Morrison began working for Jacob Beard by a kind of accident. “[Beard] had some two calves or something that went wild,” Morrison would testify in court. “They had been chasing them. Couldn’t get them. They needed more help. I think [my friend] told [Beard] I would probably help him if he would come and get me.”

  Morrison started doing odd jobs for Beard. Many boys had already lost their licenses to DUIs by the time they were seventeen, but not Morrison. When Beard opened a small auto body shop on his land, he hired Morrison as a mechanic, and there Morrison worked every day without event for about a year, until the night of April 3, 1983, when a local man walked into the Greenbrier County Jail and said that he had heard secondhand that Bobby Lee Morrison, now twenty years old, had watched Gerald Brown kill the Rainbow girls.