[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  Morrison was picked up at Beard’s shop on April 6, driven to a West Virginia State Police interrogation room and questioned for approximately six hours. He signed a rights waiver in high school perfect cursive and then a statement saying that he had been riding in Gerald Brown’s pickup truck when they picked up two women walking just outside Hillsboro. The women said they were “with the Rainbows,” so he and Brown drove them into Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park—a shortcut to the Gathering—where they stopped to drink a little moonshine, then drove up to Briery Knob road. There, Morrison alleged, they stopped again, drank some more moonshine, and talked “about partying and how much we used to drink.” Brown then propositioned the women for sex, but they refused.

  They said no they were sorry but they weren’t going to do it.

  Gerald took off then and started driving towards Briery Knob again. I went to sleep. I heard something and when I woke up I heard a gun shot and saw a flash. Then I heard another gunshot and saw another flash. The gun shots were three or four seconds apart.…I asked him why he did it. He said he wanted to get some pussy off of them and they wouldn’t give it to him and it made him mad.

  According to Morrison, Brown shot the women as they stood along the passenger side of the pickup. Asked how many times, Morrison said, “I only heard two shots; there might have been more than that.” He and Brown dumped their bodies in the clearing where they had been found. Later, Brown chucked the women’s backpacks under some brush along a two-lane county road heading west toward Beckley.

  Morrison was held in the county jail, and Alkire set about getting a warrant for Brown. When picked up, Brown said he didn’t know anything about what happened to the Rainbow girls and that on that day in June he had gone to a beer joint in Hillsboro and drank six beers. He said he did not remember whom he talked to or who was in the beer joint with him, but he certainly had not seen Morrison at all that day, though he did remember seeing an ambulance go through Hillsboro headed north on 219 around nine or ten o’clock at night. The investigator’s report goes on to state, “[Brown] did remember that he did tell someone that he had killed the Rainbow girls but he didn’t remember who he told it to.”

  Brown was quickly arraigned, and bail was set at $100,000; off he, too, went to the county jail. As for motive, his 1983 investigation report reads “anger due to being refused sexual gratification.” While in the back of a police car en route to the magistrate’s office for arraignment, Brown told the trooper driving that it didn’t matter what happened to him and that if he was brought to trial for the Rainbow Murders, he would plead insanity. “‘It’s possible I was there with Bobby and the girls,’” the trooper’s notes reflect, “‘and it’s possible I did do it, but if I did, I was drunk and I don’t remember doing it.’”

  In the weeks that followed, Alkire and his troopers looked for evidence that further incriminated Brown. He had apparently been confessing to murder all over the place. “I am a hippie killer,” he told the owner of a nearby inn.

  Like Beard, Brown also had a wife and a girlfriend. Brown’s girlfriend lived in Maryland but had started coming down to Pocahontas County in the late 1970s to visit her mother. “On different occasions we would go to the Droop Mountain Park and he would drive over the mountain on a steep road,” notes the statement she gave on April 12, 1983, days after Brown was arrested.

  Sometimes he would stop at a wide place and he would be really upset, he would be crying. Then he would tell me that he had done some awful things.…One day he and I were riding around together and I made the comment that one of these days I was going to kill my husband. Me and my husband were separated and weren’t getting along. Gerald said, “No, you wouldn’t want to kill anyone, believe me, I know how it feels.”

  One day, the girlfriend also found a small turquoise cross necklace in Brown’s truck. He gave it to her, saying that it had belonged to one of his “Rainbow friends” but that they wouldn’t be back for it.

  Later that spring, Morrison recanted his accusations against Brown and his statement in its entirety. He said that in fact he and Brown had nothing to do with the murders, that he had made the whole statement up because his boss, Jacob Beard, had told him to do so and threatened to hurt his girlfriend and child if he refused. Beard had given Morrison a few details, Morrison claimed—the location of the bodies and how they had lain, that one girl had drunk a little and the other a lot—but he knew nothing else. All charges against Morrison were dropped, and he was released from the county jail in early May 1983.

  Beard says he never threatened Bobby Morrison into making a statement against Brown and can’t understand why he would say that. Beard has a different theory for the chain of events with Morrison and Brown based on rumors he’s heard: Morrison had a family member who was in some trouble with the law, and his family was putting pressure on Morrison to try to exchange information in the Rainbow case—which everyone in the county knew law enforcement desperately wanted—for his family member’s freedom.

  Walt Weiford, for his part, was not surprised by Morrison’s recantation—law enforcement themselves had come to doubt what Morrison had said. After offering his confession, Morrison consented to do a ride-along to the scene of the crime. Weiford and Alkire sat in the back, a sheriff’s deputy drove, and Morrison sat in the passenger seat, his head leaning out into the open air. Alkire asked Morrison to retrace the path he said he and Brown had taken that day. Without hesitation, Morrison led them to the wide spot on Briery Knob where Vicki and Nancy had been found, showed how the bodies had lain perpendicular to the road, and said that their clothing had been disheveled—all true facts. He said that he and Brown continued straight after dumping the bodies but had to turn around shortly afterward because the road dead-ended, also consistent with the tire tracks and paint scrape found at the scene.

  But then Alkire asked Morrison to take them to the site where he and Gerald dumped the women’s backpacks. Morrison said he didn’t remember. He had the trooper turn down the nearest paved road and fifteen minutes later halfway gestured at a spot off to the right. There, he said, without conviction.

  “He wasn’t within fifty miles of the place,” Weiford says. “It wasn’t like he was even close.”

  Meanwhile, even after Morrison was released, Brown remained in jail, unable to pay his bail. He was a “pauper”—so read the affidavit he had to submit to prove he was too broke to hire a lawyer—so the court appointed him two for free. He listed his income per month as zero dollars, likewise his cash savings and assets; he was unemployed and was receiving twenty-five dollars a month in food stamps. After Brown was kept in jail over a month, his lawyer filed a motion to reduce his bail, arguing that Brown was a native and lifelong resident of Pocahontas and Greenbrier Counties with no felony record and that $50,000 per count of murder was “excessive in relation to his financial ability.” The motion was refused.

  The wheels of bureaucracy turn so slowly. In late October, the case having unraveled, the prosecutor’s office requested that the indictment be dropped against Brown, but Brown’s case was not officially dismissed by a judge until the middle of January 1984. By the time the jail doors slid open for him, Brown had been in prison seven months.

  5

  PERHAPS IF THE PICTURES OF Vicki and Nancy with their eyes open and the smell of their blood on the grass of Briery Knob had not worked their way down into Walt Weiford’s sternum and sat there like a stone, the investigation into the Rainbow Murders might have ended in 1984—with two stories he couldn’t do much with: the evidence against Bobby Lee Morrison and Gerald Brown was circumstantial at best, and Jacob Beard seemed to be either deeply confused or a teller of monumental lies.

  Weiford was still volunteering his time as the assistant to the county prosecutor—taking care of traffic stops and drug charges and juveniles who went AWOL. When Hunter’s term was up in 1984, he gave Weiford his blessing. Weiford ran for county prosecutor that year but lost by twenty votes. Deflated, Weiford continued
building his private practice, but he kept calling the new prosecutor and asking questions—What about Vicki and Nancy? His victor was no friend of Weiford’s former boss and did not share Weiford’s devotion to the Rainbow killings.

  It’s cold, he told Weiford. Leave it alone.

  Alkire was no more encouraging—he was being transferred to Parkersburg, nearly Ohio, to work on a different murder case. Keep in touch, he told Weiford before leaving, and the two men promised they would.

  Weiford’s daughter grew up, tumbling over logs and swimming in the Greenbrier River. He taught her how to play music, what notes were, what a scale was, to strum a guitar but pick a banjo.

  Soon it was 1988; Vicki and Nancy had been dead eight years. That fall, Weiford ran for prosecutor again at the age of thirty-six, and this time he won. In an act of God or complete coincidence, Alkire had been promoted to the rank of sergeant and then first sergeant in the West Virginia State Police just a few months before and reassigned to Pocahontas County.

  In January 1989, just days after he took office, Weiford called a meeting between Alkire’s West Virginia State Police officers and the Pocahontas County Sheriff’s Department headed by Sheriff Jerry Dale to discuss the status of the Rainbow Murders investigation. Alkire had at times, he was the first to admit, pushed aside the help of Dale’s deputies, and they in turn had at times resented this and been hesitant to turn over information to Alkire.

  Can’t you just try to work together, please? Weiford pleaded with those gathered that day, and both Alkire and Dale agreed they would try. Just go through everything again, Weiford said. Share all your information, go over every note again, every interview—together. See if one of you has something that the other doesn’t know about. Maybe something will turn up.

  Nothing did. Two more years passed. Then one day in the winter of 1991, a sheriff’s deputy found a small handwritten note made in 1986 on a scrap of loose-leaf paper. “Alice Roberts seen Ricky Fowler pick the girls up at Renick Valley,” the note read, referencing a spot in the unincorporated hamlet of Renick, just south of Droop Mountain. The note further added, “Jake Beard—blue car.”

  Had anyone, either sheriff’s deputy or state police detective, ever followed up with this Alice Roberts? Nobody had. When found, Mrs. Roberts said, Oh yes, I think so. But if you really want to know the story, you should go talk to my daughter, Pamela. She was living in another county by then, but Alkire found her and drove the miles. And she said, Oh yeah. I saw the whole thing.

  Pamela Wilson was a bored teenage girl on June 25, 1980, with nothing to do but stare out the window of her house, which sat along a rare straight stretch of Route 219 known locally as the Renick Flats. It was afternoon, she said, somewhere between 2 and 6 o’clock. “I saw two hippie-type girls standing at the road,” Wilson told Alkire in a sworn statement. “The girls were not obese, but they were bigger and heavier than average. Ritchie Fowler pulled up in his van. He was there about a minute and the girls got in the van and drove it off towards Droop Mountain.” Fowler was a familiar name to Alkire by then, since he was one of the friends of Christine Cook’s boyfriend whom Cook had alleged was hanging out in Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park that day.

  That wasn’t all. Wilson told Alkire that she thought she also saw two more men in the van, Bill McCoy—the same man Beard supposedly saw outside a car with two women in it at Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park on the evening of the murders—and Winters Walton, a friend of McCoy’s. But, she cautioned, she wasn’t sure.

  “I told my mother at the time that those girls shouldn’t have got in with them,” she continued. She said that she knew Fowler from growing up around the county and felt that he was a drinker with “a bad reputation.” She knew his van, which she described as being light blue, either a Ford or a Chevrolet with “a bubble window” on the back. Wilson further said that a week or two after she’d seen the two women getting into the blue van, Bill McCoy had threatened her in the supermarket, cautioning her not to tell anyone what she’d seen.

  Alkire thanked Wilson and drove home to Pocahontas County. “Things just started happening then,” he says.

  Throughout the winter of 1991 and into 1992, Alkire and the sheriff’s deputies interviewed and reinterviewed dozens of Pocahontas County residents who lived on Droop Mountain or nearby. By that winter Alkire and Weiford had a story: three men—Fowler, McCoy, and Walton—had picked up Vicki and Nancy on the Renick Flats. They then assembled a bigger group of men to party at the mouth of Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park. Then one of the men—they were not yet clear on which one—shot Vicki and Nancy.

  At trial, Weiford would refer to this group of men as the “relevant necessary people.” Alkire, too, used this term. “It seemed like no matter who we talked to,” Alkire says, “it kept coming back to those guys and the blue van.”

  Five of the men had already fallen under suspicion—Jacob Beard, now forty-six; Gerald Brown, fifty; Arnold Cutlip, fifty-four; Bill McCoy and Ritchie Fowler, thirty-six and forty respectively. By 1992, Bill McCoy was locked up for a DUI in Nevada, and Fowler too had left the state, having moved his family to Virginia. Some were new—Johnnie Lewis, fifty-nine, the man Cutlip let sleep on his couch, and Winters Walton, forty-two, a gentle man who’d taken a job at a lumberyard. They had all grown up in southern Pocahontas County, and in 1980 if not in 1992, most of them still lived there.

  The relationships between these men were diffuse and various; by 1992 they were not a group anymore and perhaps had not truly been one even in 1980. Some of the men were certainly friends—Fowler and McCoy, McCoy and Walton, Cutlip and Lewis. McCoy, Fowler, Cutlip, and Lewis had been day laborers for hire in 1980, and all had worked for either Brown or Beard. Brown and Beard knew each other to say hello, as business owners and competitors. Brown drank and hung out with these men when he hired them; Beard says he did not.

  Though it was twelve years later, a handful of Pocahontas County residents, on being reinterviewed claimed to remember relevant facts from June 25, 1980—facts that either were new or had never made it into the investigative record. They said the day and the days after were etched into their memories, like the day Kennedy was shot.

  A resident of Droop named Steven Goode told Alkire that he had seen Ritchie Fowler’s blue van at Gerald Brown’s trailer on Droop Mountain at around 6 o’clock on the evening of the murders. The van had been “backed in” toward Brown’s trailer, and he had seen Ritchie Fowler, Bill McCoy, and Jacob Beard there. His first thought, Mr. Goode reported, was that they had “gotten an illegal deer.”

  Another Droop resident, Mike Hively, who is in fact Gerald Brown’s half brother, also swore that he saw Fowler’s van at Gerald Brown’s trailer that night. His wife, Sis, Gerald Brown’s sister-in-law, claimed that she saw Jacob Beard’s red truck at the entrance to Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park between 5:30 and 6:00 pm on the day of the murders and reiterated that she felt Beard was aggressive at the school board meeting that night and seemed drunk.

  Yet another, William Scott, said that he saw Jacob Beard driving out of Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park at around 3:30 or 3:45 on the day of the murders. And Virginia Schoolcraft, Arnold Cutlip’s partner, repeated what she had said in 1980—that she heard two rapidly fired gunshots on June 25, 1980, between 4:00 and 4:15 in the afternoon. An older woman named Betty Bennett, who had been Ritchie Fowler’s “friend” in the early 1980s, now swore that Fowler had confessed to her that he had been there when the Rainbow girls were killed. She was also a friend of Bobby Morrison’s mother and said that she had witnessed Jacob Beard threatening Morrison’s family.

  Why have you waited so long to tell us this information? Alkire and the sheriff’s deputies inquired. Most of these witnesses had by then been interviewed several times—in 1980 and perhaps again in 1985 or 1986. They cited fear, specifically of Jacob Beard.

  The tangible material needed to prove this story—the blue van for example—proved elusive. In central Virginia,
where Fowler now lived with his wife and son managing a recreational horse farm, Fowler had heard that his name was often in law enforcement’s mouths. He called Alkire up and demanded to know what in the actual fuck this was all about. Alkire told him. Fowler said that he didn’t know anything about the Rainbow Murders and that he had wrecked his blue van on a tree in 1986 and then had it crushed for scrap. But it didn’t matter anyway, Fowler said, because he had already been living in Virginia by June 1980 and only came home on the weekends, so he couldn’t have killed any Rainbow girls on a Wednesday.

  Nevertheless, Alkire said, could Fowler come back to town to answer some questions? Fine, Fowler said, agreeing to travel to the Pocahontas West Virginia State Police office, now located in the hamlet of Buckeye just south of the county seat. The station was moved after the flood of 1985, which devastated Marlinton, washing houses and bridges down the river.

  Fowler had picked up some Rainbow hitchhikers once, he recalled to Alkire, but there were six or seven of them, and they had a dog. In the end, Fowler said that he might have been on Droop Mountain on June 25, as it was possible that he had taken the day off, and it was also possible that someone had borrowed his blue van without his permission—he had been a heavy drinker at that time.

  Did he have any proof of that? Alkire asked. Fowler then cut the interview short and stormed out. Later, he agreed to take a polygraph exam near where he lived in Virginia, but after that he got a lawyer and never answered any more questions.

  Alkire collected guns from all the relevant necessary people he could and had them tested against the bullet fragments pulled from Vicki and Nancy, but nothing matched. The medical examiner had also managed to extract a few paint chip fragments and some automobile glass from Vicki and Nancy’s skin and clothes, but with Fowler’s blue van destroyed, there was nothing to compare them to. Alkire called and wrote letters to Bill McCoy in Nevada, but no reply came. Without any evidence of McCoy’s involvement beyond Pam Wilson’s statement, Alkire could not force him to answer questions or bring him home to West Virginia.