[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  Gerald Brown still lived in Pocahontas County in a trailer on top of Droop Mountain and still worked as a logging contractor. When he was arrested and then charged with the murders in 1983, he had refused to answer any of Alkire’s questions or give any formal statement. There were those statements about the times Brown told others that he was a killer and the statement from his girlfriend about the necklace he had given her, but they were all hearsay and could not be corroborated. Brown’s attitude was the same in 1991: he never offered an official alibi and summarily refused to discuss the matter. A man who worked for himself when he worked and did all his business in cash, he was not inclined to trust any system of power, law enforcement included, who had already incarcerated him for seven months.

  Arnold Cutlip agreed to answer additional questions in the winter of 1992 but gave the same story he had been giving all along: he and his friend Johnnie Lewis had spent the day cutting locust posts on his property on Briery Knob, then driven their haul to a farm near Marlinton to sell them, and then gone back to Hillsboro to hang out at the beer joint for the afternoon. Later he and Lewis followed Adkison, in his girlfriend Christine Cook’s car, to the mouth of Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, where they hung out for a while, and then went home. He never saw any Rainbow girls.

  If one of the “relevant necessary people” was going to open up further to Alkire then, it was going to have to be Johnnie Washington Lewis, Jacob Beard, or Winters Walton. At age fifty-nine, Lewis was the oldest, and he was also the only one with no permanent address. He bounced around between the homes of friends and relatives; Cutlip’s couch was just one in a long string of generosities. Lewis had dropped out of school in the third grade and had a reputation around town for being “simple.”

  “Mr. Lewis is—I don’t know that ‘shy’ covers it,” state police detective Michael Jordan later added. “Mr. Lewis is—and not being derogatory towards him…a recluse.” When interviewed, Lewis confirmed Cutlip’s story—they had been together all day cutting posts and then drinking beer and had not seen any Rainbow girls.

  Alkire and Weiford say that Beard was not an active suspect between 1985 and 1991, though they had not forgotten that he had made those calls to Vicki’s father, nor that he had given that statement about the corn chopper and the “third Rainbow girl.”

  In those years, Beard had taken a job with a farming contractor that put him on the road planting corn in North Carolina and all up the East Coast. He and Linda had moved to neighboring Greenbrier County for the better schools and proximity to Interstate 64. He says he didn’t have time to even think about the Rainbow Murders and never went back to Pocahontas County—there was no one there he cared about or who cared for him. On a trip back down to Florida in 1991, when Beard was just “rambling around” on a short solo trip to see friends in Daytona Beach, he visited his old Chevrolet dealership in Crescent City. His old boss had just fired his service manager the day before and asked Beard if he would come back. Beard jumped at the idea and convinced Linda and his daughters, now seventeen and nine, to move once again to Florida. Within weeks, they had sold their house in West Virginia and were gone.

  6

  THE NAME ON HIS BIRTH certificate is Winters Walton, but everyone called him Pee Wee. He was solid and thick-limbed with light brown hair and pale skin that, when he became embarrassed or scared or shamed, flushed a deep red that started in his forehead and spread. He liked to work and be among friends and ride his motorcycle across the flat, wide scenic highway in the sun.

  When Morrison and Brown were in jail on Morrison’s incriminating statement from 1983, Pee Wee Walton was hanging out at Denmar State Hospital in the hamlet of Denmar near Hillsboro one day when he heard some people talking—rumors of a girl who had seen the two Rainbow women get into a blue van. That hit something in his brain, which hit something else. Had he been there? He felt that he had, he would later tell investigators. But at first he told no one.

  Pee Wee Walton and Alkire spoke for the first time in 1991 at Walton’s house in Hillsboro, where he lived with his mother—they took care of each other. Alkire parked his car in Walton’s yard, and Walton came out into the chilly September sun. Alkire wanted to know if Walton knew Fowler, and if Fowler had indeed owned a blue van in the summer of 1980. “Yes I do, yes he did,” said Walton. “And where were you on June 25, 1980?” Walton said that as best he could remember, he and Ritchie Fowler and Bill McCoy had been riding around that day, shooting groundhogs and drinking beer in Fowler’s blue van. For a while they had sat on top of Droop Mountain in the parking lot of a store called CJ’s. But they hadn’t seen any Rainbow girls and certainly hadn’t killed any.

  Several months later, Alkire called Walton again and asked him to come into the state police office and take a polygraph. Alkire also called the state police office in Charleston and asked them to send over someone who could administer the polygraph test; they sent a Sergeant R. D. Estep.

  Walton took the test, repeating the story he’d given to Alkire in his yard. Estep, a tall, large man, accused Walton of being deceptive. Walton denied it. Alkire stood and left Estep and Walton alone in the room together for the better part of an hour. A week later, Walton called the state police office and said he had remembered more details and wanted to talk.

  April 15, 1992—tax day. In the spring in Pocahontas County it’s cold as winter until noon, and everything is wet, and then the sun comes out and dries up the mountainside, and the roads are bathed in light. That afternoon, Estep was back in Marlinton, helping Alkire again. At Alkire’s request, Estep drove north out of Marlinton on 219 to the hamlet of Edray, where Walton worked at a lumberyard. Estep told Walton that he needed to get into the squad car and come down to the state police office again—Alkire had a few more questions for him. But the car did not turn around and take the direct route to the station. Instead, Estep directed his partner to pull the car onto a back road. Estep got out of the passenger seat and got into the back of the car with Walton.

  “And you were scared,” a defense lawyer would later ask Walton.

  A: Yes I was.

  Q: And when he got in the back seat with you, he told you, hell I’d a just beat you up, didn’t he?

  A: Yes he did.

  Q: Told you he’d just as soon throw you in a ditch and shoot you. Right?

  A: Yes he did.

  Q: He told you he could do that and get away with it, didn’t he?

  A: Yes he did.

  Then, according to Walton, “[Estep] reached around and slapped me upside of the head with his hand,” a blow that bent his glasses but did not break them.

  Back at the station in Buckeye, in the room alone with Estep, Walton says, the abuse continued.

  “He jerked me off the chair onto the floor. And then he said, ‘you lay there in the floor, don’t you get up.’ And then he stuck his foot up toward my head and was leaning back on the desk. ‘I will kick your head through the door if you don’t tell me what I want to know’ and stuff like that. He was wanting me to say who done it. I said I think maybe Jacob done it, I don’t know.”

  Then Estep opened the door and left. “Ready to talk,” he told Alkire.

  Alkire came into the room. Walton had a stunned look about him, his face was red, his clothes were disheveled, and his glasses were wonky. Walton then told Alkire that he thought he had had a dream about these women, about how he was there when they were killed. He told Alkire about the day in 1983 that he first heard the rumors about the Rainbow women getting into a blue van.

  “They said they had somebody down at Renick’s valley that seen them getting in a vehicle down there, and that kind of struck something right then,” said Walton in his testimony to the grand jury. “I said, ‘Wow, we was down there. We picked up two girls down there.’”

  But he couldn’t be sure if he’d truly been there or if he’d dreamed it.

  “I had—I thought it was a dream. I dreamed about the field and coming down off Briery Knob, and waking up i
n the dream, and it was real to me, and then back into a dream, and then waking up at home in bed.”

  “But you didn’t tell [Alkire] about this, did you?” Weiford would ask Walton.

  A: No, I didn’t.

  Q: Why not Pee Wee?

  A: One thing, I couldn’t remember it.

  Q: Okay. Are you saying that you feel you blocked it out?

  A: Yes.

  The door to the interview room kept opening and closing. Alkire and several other law enforcement officers interviewed Walton for several more hours. “And I told them I thought Jacob [Beard] might have done it, I don’t know for sure,” Walton would testify. “And they just kept up, ‘We got to know for sure,’ they said. I told them—I finally broke down and said, ‘Yeah, Jacob done it.’”

  Johnnie Lewis was also picked up on tax day 1992 and interrogated by Estep for fifteen or twenty minutes. “Ready to talk,” Estep told Alkire again, and again Alkire went in. But still Lewis backed up Cutlip’s story—the two men had been together the whole day cutting locust posts and drinking beer. There had been no Rainbow girls, and he had no information about their deaths.

  Lewis also was not spared Estep’s methods. When Estep was again alone in the room with Lewis, he told Lewis that there were many witnesses against him and that if he went to jail he would suffer and suffer. “He shook his handcuffs at me,” Lewis would testify later. “About to hit me in the face with them. I ducked back.”

  Then Walton gave his statement about his dream and everything else he had remembered and signed it. And the next day, according to Alkire, Lewis came back, put his head down on the investigation room table, and said that he’d seen Jacob Beard shoot the two girls.

  Lewis’s statement also said that he was with Gerald Brown, Arnold Cutlip, Bill McCoy, and Ritchie Fowler, but it does not say that Walton was there—nor did Walton’s statement say that Lewis was there. Could there have been other people present when the girls were killed that Lewis didn’t see? “Could have been.”

  After Lewis gave his statement, Weiford charged Walton and Lewis with two counts of first-degree murder each. Ditto Gerald Brown and Arnold Cutlip, who were promptly picked up and taken to the county jail. Warrants were prepared and sent to police in Virginia, Nevada, and Florida for the arrests of Fowler, McCoy, and Beard.

  “A renewed investigation of the case led this week to the arrest of seven men in four states,” reported the New York Times on April 19, 1992.

  “This case had not been out of anyone’s mind or thoughts in 12 years,” reads Weiford’s quote.

  A Hillsboro resident named Eugene Walker told the Charleston Daily Mail, “No one wanted to be a rat, I guess. One of them took one of those wild fits and did it just in a rage.”

  “It’s all you hear about,” Hillsboro postmaster Priscilla Sheets told the same publication. “Everyone who comes in here has got their own version of what happened.”

  Alkire, Weiford, Pocahontas County sheriff Jerry Dale, and all the officers who had helped with the renewed investigation met at the Buckeye West Virginia State Police office on the night of April 19 for a little party.

  Alkire faxed the arrest report for Jacob Beard to the chief of police in Crescent City, Florida, cautioning him that Beard was “extremely dangerous, use extreme caution,” and advising the use of a SWAT team for his capture. But Beard had young children in his home; as a compromise, the police chief called Beard’s boss at the Chevy dealership and had him call Beard late at night with a ruse—the alarm was going off over at the dealership again; could Beard drive over and check it out?

  When Beard pulled up in his pickup, he was thrown to the ground, and automatic weapons were pointed at his head. He stayed in the local Florida county jail for a week until West Virginia could send a plane down to get him. When Beard stepped onto the tarmac in West Virginia, there was Alkire.

  PART IV:

  A PERFECT STORY

  What one does not remember dictates who one loves or fails to love.…What one does not remember is the serpent in the garden of one’s dreams.

  —James Baldwin

  Jerry Dale (left) and Walt Weiford (right), 1993

  1

  WE DON’T KNOW HIM, BUT we know his story: the man who lives in the woods and goes a little bit crazy. He lives too far from the civilizing forces of law, commerce, and family, so he goes too far with his own body, his own impulses, and his own power. He lives off the land but is too close to it—he gets dirty, wet, unpredictable; he drives a monster truck, or he walks. He doesn’t trust outsiders and will do anything to them in order to maintain his freedom. He is Frankenstein and Wolf Man and Grendel and Rumpelstiltskin and the Cyclops; he is the rough honky-tonker who tries to rape Thelma in Thelma and Louise, the trucker who rapes Aileen Wuornos in Monster, the rural kids full of hatred who murdered Brandon Teena, and the rural kids full of hatred who murdered Matthew Shepard. He is the psycho killer of Deliverance, and of I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, Rest Stop, Vacancy, Wrong Turn, Eden Lake, Joy Ride, and many others. He is chaos, anarchy, and wretchedness. He must be punished or killed if we are to live any kind of life.

  “Monsters do not emerge out of a cultural void,” writes scholar Tina Marie Boyer. “They have a literary and cultural heritage.” In other words: he does not come from nowhere.

  The hick monster story has deep roots in the history of West Virginia and is wound around the story of American industrialization and capitalism. Before you can dispossess a people from their own land, you must first make them not people.

  The end of the Civil War and West Virginia on the winning side should have meant fat times aplenty, but it didn’t. West Virginia found itself in an odd in-between space: not yet quite the North and too recently untethered from the South. It was uniquely poised, and thus uniquely poised for suffering. Unlike many Northern territories, it was not fostered for growth during Reconstruction, and like many Southern territories, it was punished.

  West Virginia hadn’t been a state long enough to have its own leadership and public infrastructure, so to rebuild, it ceded control of its railroad systems to Northern companies, which would operate them as subsidiaries—forever, it would turn out. Ditto with industries that had been nascent before the war—the oil fields near Parkersburg, for example—which would eventually flourish only when a Northern firm acquired and operated them. Gone were the wealthy plantation owners in Virginia who would buy agricultural products from West Virginia and patronize its resorts and taverns. Gone were the livestock, plucked by roving Union and Confederate soldiers alike. Congress gave away free land to those who wanted to homestead west of the Mississippi, thus subsidizing the competition in the agricultural markets that had been mainstays of West Virginia’s prosperity before the war.

  But a new force did arrive in West Virginia: writers. In the 1880s and 1890s, their sharp eyes flicked over the forested landscape and created a new genre, “local color” novels that capitalized on the nostalgia and curiosity people in the South and North alike felt for fast-disappearing regional differences. Stories of “simple people” in country villages and hollers called back the free life many white people had lived in the South before the war came. Pieces in Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly sold at a healthy clip, as well as later books like John Fox Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders, marking West Virginia and other mountainous regions as the home of “backwards,” “strange,” and “childlike” people.

  “This was the period when Appalachia was discovered and named by observers for whom the differences that separated Appalachia from the rest of the nation were more compelling than the factors that united them,” writes John Alexander Williams in Appalachia: A History. This period gave us two portrayals of Appalachia and two alone, Williams writes: “the Appalachian mountaineer, noble and stalwart, rugged and independent, master or mistress of the highlands environment; and the profligate hillbilly, amusing but often also threatening, defined
by deviance and aberration.”

  Scholars, educational reformers, and lawmakers hardened the ideas espoused by these novels into the idea of Appalachia as a place with a singular and strange culture. This was not a coincidence, for it is far easier to dominate a people that many regard as “other.” These simplistic stories played a key role in allowing absentee corporations to gain control of the region’s natural resources.

  Near the end of the nineteenth century, two-thirds of West Virginia was still covered in forest, mostly ancient-growth hardwood. Soon the lumbering companies that had been in the region multiplied, establishing larger milling operations. Then came the railroads, rendering the method of floating logs down the river obsolete and allowing production to explode. Railroads needed huge amounts of cash—a commodity that was still scarce in the mountains. Enter absentee owners who lived in cities. As a girl, the poet Louise McNeill watched the trains stream over Gauley Bridge just outside Charleston. Her people toasted, she writes, “To the biggity bugs of the N&W/Who sent regrets they can’t be here.”

  Most West Virginia officials and judges welcomed these out-of-town investors and promoted the growth of industry as progress that would create jobs. They bent laws, wrote new ones, and interpreted the constitution in favor of industrialists at every turn. With this influx of capital, lumbering exploded in the 1890s. Now equipment could be transported into, and lumber out of, territory that was previously considered too remote and craggy. More track was laid down. Jobs were abundant, and people were arriving every day to fill them, including African Americans, who flocked west from Virginia in search of greater equality and better pay.