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IN THE FALL OF 1978, thirty-four state police cadets graduated from the West Virginia State Police academy. Their class was called “the Pioneers,” for it contained, for the first time, five black cadets and three women, including Deborah DiFalco. She had grown up in Maryland but crossed over into Mountaineer territory for college in Wheeling, where she studied political science and made it into the school’s basketball hall of fame. She just liked the idea of being a police officer; she thought it would be exciting. She took the police academy exam while she was still a college student and began training just days after graduation. The six months at the police academy were like boot camp. Military style. You would be in formation; you would be in PT; back in formation, you would march into meals. Classes all day. She loved it.
DiFalco started out as a field trooper in uniform, stationed in Charles Town, in the Mountain State’s eastern panhandle, famous for its horse racing. She wasn’t the first woman to be a state trooper in West Virginia, but she was the second. The first, a woman named Sharen Deitz, would later successfully sue the West Virginia State Police for gender-based discrimination; a trainer in the police academy called Deitz “it,” she alleged, because she was butch, and the promotion she applied for was given to a much less qualified man.
Perhaps because DiFalco was femme and pretty, or perhaps for other reasons, this wasn’t her experience. “I was confident,” she says. “I was kind of oblivious to being a woman. I worked with a really great group of guys. They never made me feel like I couldn’t do something—quite the opposite. Love the people of West Virginia. You couldn’t be offended. They defended me. I was small. I was lucky.”
DiFalco became the first woman to do undercover police work in West Virginia. Drugs, gambling, a lot of narcotics. A lot of work in Martinsburg, Charles Town’s big-city neighbor, where she was assigned to a task force to work an open-air drug market. It was thrilling and scary. She was often alone out there.
She went into plainclothes, then into investigations as a detective, and was stationed in Randolph County, just up from Pocahontas. Each day DiFalco left the house that she shared with her husband in Buckhannon and drove the half hour to the state police headquarters in Elkins, a three-story building with a cafeteria and barracks upstairs, where officers fresh out of the academy could live for a while until they got on their feet. Detectives might catch an hour nap or so if they were working through the night.
The office in Elkins was full of jokes. You had to know how to have fun; otherwise you’d die of a heart attack or boredom. Alkire liked to have fun, and that’s what he was doing in March of 1984—after Morrison had confessed, then recanted. The Rainbow Murders case was quiet.
The phone rang. It was Ernest Smith, special agent of criminal investigation for the state of Wisconsin. We’ve got someone here, he said to Alkire, by the name of Joseph Paul Franklin, and he says he did the murders where you are.
Franklin’s flesh was peppered with tattoos, but it was the one of the Grim Reaper on his right forearm, done in delicate line work, that got him caught. In October 1980, a Florida blood bank employee recognized it as he waited, sleeves rolled up, to sell his blood at a plasma center. It was Utah that tried him first, for murdering the two young black joggers in Salt Lake City. Franklin was given two life sentences and transferred to a federal penitentiary in Illinois, where he became the recipient of visits from law enforcement agents from multiple states. He spoke to most of them and confessed to his crimes on his terms and on his timeline, except Missouri, which had the death penalty—at that time, he did not want to die. He would spend the next thirty-three years in prison, awaiting trial, being tried for crimes he’d committed in five states, and then awaiting death. He was convicted of eight murders in the courts, though if you include crimes to which he confessed but for which he was not prosecuted—why spend the resources on a man already on death row—you’ll arrive at a count of at least twenty deaths.
Every state with an unsolved murder of a black man or a white woman had come calling on Franklin at the federal penitentiary in Illinois. Special agents from Wisconsin arranged to visit Franklin to ask about the young white woman who was killed in a Wisconsin state park while hitchhiking home from college. Franklin quickly confessed to that killing, then turned the subject to other crimes. Also, he said, he had killed two women hitchhikers in West Virginia, in “Beckley County.”
Wisconsin Special Agent Smith said that wasn’t enough; they would need more details. Franklin said he had just come from robbing a bank in North Carolina a day or two earlier and was traveling on an interstate highway in West Virginia en route to Lexington, Kentucky, in the late morning or early afternoon of June 25, 1980, when he picked up two female hitchhikers whom he described as of average build, one with medium brown hair and one with light brown hair, “looking kind of sleazy, hippie type, kind of scruffy looking.”
He picked the women up, he said, and then took “a road that went off to the side past a gas station,” where he stopped for gas while the women were with him. It took “a couple hours’” driving time from there to the place where he murdered them. He believed the women were into communism and had been friends with, or possibly dated, black men in the past, so he simply decided to “waste both of them.” He said he got the two women out of his car and that neither screamed. He shot the first girl in the chest from the front and the other once “in the face or the head.” Special Agent Smith then asked Franklin to draw a simple map of the area where he supposedly picked these women up, which Franklin did.
Agent Smith was troubled enough by this confession to call law enforcement in West Virginia straightaway. Alkire thanked Smith and put the phone down, but his mood was not elation. Though charges had formally been dropped against Gerald Brown two months after young Bobby Morrison recanted his confession, Alkire felt that it was likely Morrison had just lost his nerve. All of Alkire’s waking hours were still being channeled toward investigating Brown and Morrison. But Agent Smith would not quit; he faxed a follow-up letter to Alkire four days later, which included the map Franklin had drawn.
Alkire called Weiford. They turned the map this way and that but still could not make it match the topography they knew so well. Both men felt that Franklin’s map was inaccurate on the whole, putting the gas station where he allegedly stopped on the wrong side of the road, as well as the “winding dirt road.” The Xs Franklin had drawn to indicate Vicki and Nancy’s bodies were only a short distance from 219, when in reality they were a solid fifteen or twenty minutes’ driving time at a minimum. Alkire thought maybe Franklin had read about the case in a crime magazine or watched it on a crime show. Weiford agreed.
When agents from Tennessee visited Franklin a month later about the bombing in Chattanooga, Franklin again told them he’d killed two women in West Virginia. The Tennessee officer was taken aback. “Have you given that to anyone else?”
“Yeah, yeah, I told that already to Madison,” responded Franklin.
“Has Pocahontas County, West Virginia, been in touch with you about it?”
“No.”
Hand-drawn map by Joseph Paul Franklin, 1984
Courtesy of Deborah DiFalco
In August 1984, DiFalco had just made trooper first-class for working some drug cases and a few murders in the eastern part of the state when her captain called her into his office. There was a case down in Pocahontas County, he said, a couple of girl hitchhikers that won’t solve. Yeah, she said, I’ve heard of it. Well, the captain said, something’s come up. We got a call. Alkire is under water. Can you help him out?
DiFalco was pleased—it meant something that they would give this to her; it meant they trusted her. Alkire called her on her desk phone. Listen, he said, this guy Franklin has been confessing to every crime this way and that, crimes all over the nation. It’s probably nothing when it comes to him and West Virginia. But go check it out.
On Monday, September 10, 1984, DiFalco drove the ninety minutes south
along winding 219 to Marlinton. Aside from skiing at Snowshoe, DiFalco had never been in Pocahontas County before. She observed that the land was much steeper here than where she lived and that everyone seemed to know each other. Walt Weiford was waiting for her when she arrived at the state police office: an eager man with a round face who had a tendency to follow her around and rock back and forth on his feet from heel to toe.
Weiford gave her Franklin’s map. On the map, DiFalco saw, Franklin had marked the West Virginia state line, the interstate he had been traveling, the exit road he had taken, the gas station, the winding dirt road he said he had turned down, and the “small dirt road” where he had supposedly left the bodies. Franklin had also written “Rainbow Meeting” along one of the roads, which according to what he had told Agent Smith, “the girls talked about either having just participated in or were hitchhiking to.” Franklin had also told Smith that he used a .44-caliber revolver for the crimes and had drawn a picture of the 240-grain bullet he said he used.
DiFalco began by tracking down Corporal Gary Hott, the first officer on the death scene after young Tim had found the bodies, and showing him the map that Franklin had drawn. Does it work? she asked. Hott studied the map. Pretty well, yeah, he said, if you take Franklin’s “interstate” to be I-64, the exit road he took to be Route 219 north, the “winding dirt road” to be Briery Knob Road through Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, and the “small dirt road” to be the lane where they were found. Further, the “gas station” near the interstate could be the Little General store in the hamlet of Maxwelton near Lewisburg, where the initial investigators in 1980 had turned up the cashier that put two hippie women from Arizona in her store on June 25 with a tall, slim, clean-shaven man with light hair who drove a black Nova.
“Cpl. Hott advised that he felt the map adequately depicts the route to the murder scene and the position of the bodies,” reads DiFalco’s official “Report of Criminal Investigation.”
DiFalco called the ballistics lab in South Charleston to check if Franklin’s memory matched their findings. The fragments recovered from Vicki and Nancy’s bodies were super small, they told her, but they could check the bullet jacket. They did, and indeed, the jacket appeared to belong to a 240-grain bullet, as Franklin stated. Franklin said that he had used the same gun and bullets in the Wisconsin hitchhiker murder as in the West Virginia ones, but the West Virginia fragments were too small for any conclusive comparison.
DiFalco kept calling different jurisdictions trying to check Franklin’s facts. Pennsylvania told her that they had a murder of an interracial couple ten days earlier on June 15, 1980, that they thought was Franklin’s, and according to their investigation, Franklin had short, light hair at that time and had been driving a dark metallic Nova. Florida sent her pictures of Franklin in the summer of 1980—short, sandy-blond hair, no facial hair.
North Carolina police said that there was indeed a bank robbery on June 24, 1980—North Carolina National Bank—and a little boy had seen the suspect getting into a black car. A special agent with the Chattanooga, Tennessee, office of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco said he had interviewed Franklin about the Chattanooga synagogue bombing, and, come to think of it, during that interview he had said something about West Virginia. Hold on, the agent told DiFalco. I’ll send you the transcript.
Q: “6/25/80, Pocahontas County, West Virginia, some killings there,” asked the ATF agent.
A: “Yeah, I did that,” answered Franklin.
Q: “What did they involve?”
A: “Couple of race mixers.”
Q: “Women?”
A: “Yeah.”
Q: “What happened on those?”
A: “I just blew them away with a .44 magnum, said they went out with niggers.”
DiFalco called the federal penitentiary where Franklin was being held in Marion, Illinois. She wanted to meet with Franklin herself, go over everything with him in person, and see if it added up. She wrote to the warden. She called. Finally, in early October, they called her back. Franklin had agreed to talk to her. Could she come next week?
That Monday, DiFalco and a trooper, Terry Snodgrass, set out on the nine-hour road trip in an unmarked police cruiser, sharing the driving as first signs for Huntington, then Lexington, then Louisville appeared and receded. Snodgrass was quiet, and there was little to talk about. Neither of them had interviewed a serial killer before. The last three hours beyond Louisville were dark, and they got dinner, then separate motel rooms. DiFalco read and reread her notes until she just shut the light off.
When DiFalco and Snodgrass reached the federal prison in Illinois just before ten in the morning, they were led down through one layer of the facility, then the next. “Just door after door. Seems like we just kept going down and down. Doors clanking behind us,” DiFalco says. “I still tell people about it.”
Finally they reached the very bottom of the prison and were led into a small square room. Franklin was brought in shackled. His eyes looked strange, off, possibly from the blindness in the right one. Right away he started looking at DiFalco, would only talk to DiFalco, and ignored Snodgrass altogether. Snodgrass put a tape recorder on the table. DiFalco said, Okay, tell us about the girls in West Virginia. But Franklin was “playing around,” she says. He told them that he’d never shot anyone, never killed in his life. He told them that he was being held in prison for his political beliefs and that he had lied to the agents from Wisconsin and Tennessee about having killed girls in West Virginia. Everything I have ever said before is a lie, he said. This is the truth.
DiFalco and Snodgrass talked to Franklin for more than an hour, but there was no change. Finally, DiFalco showed Franklin pictures of himself in a wig and sideburns as he was robbing the North Carolina bank. He claimed he’d never robbed any bank but seemed interested in the pictures, even fond of them, and rubbed them with his fingers. Then DiFalco pulled out pictures of Vicki and Nancy after they’d been shot. Franklin would not look at them. No, no, don’t show me that, Franklin said, turning away in his chair.
Finally, DiFalco called for the guard. This was a waste of time; they might as well put Franklin back in his cell, she said. But just after they had left the room and were outside in the corridor looking at Franklin behind bars again, Franklin motioned DiFalco over. He pressed his face through the bars and then lifted his mouth to her ear.
Let me put your mind at ease, DiFalco says Franklin said. I did it.
That’s not enough, DiFalco says she told him. They needed details. She asked him what he did with the women’s belongings. Franklin told her that he had hidden them in the woods far away from the murder scene on his way back toward Interstate 64. He told her that one of the backpacks was green. (Both Vicki and Nancy’s sleeping bags were dark blue; Vicki had a bongo drum in a green case.) Franklin said he did not want to see anyone else go to prison for what he had done.
Back home in West Virginia, DiFalco found Nancy’s missing sandal. It had been in the evidence locker of the Marlinton State Police all that time; she sent it to the South Charleston lab to be checked for prints, but there were none. She combed the original reports of investigation from 1980 and found a composite sketch of the driver of the black Nova given by the convenience store cashier who said she had seen the two women from Arizona get into his car. It looked a lot like the photographs that Florida had sent of Franklin.
She reinterviewed the cashier, who again said that she had seen women matching Vicki and Nancy’s descriptions getting into a black or dark green Chevy Nova on June 25, 1980, with a tall, clean-cut man who didn’t look to be from around there, adding that she remembered one of the girls made a purchase and paid for it with coins from a green change purse. She bought something from an aisle of the store that held snacks and cans of beans. This was consistent with the fact that a tan, pasty bean fluid was found in Vicki’s stomach after her death, DiFalco noted. But the cashier couldn’t identify Franklin’s photo from a photo lineup. She was an elderly woman, and it
had been years.
On a March day in 1985, DiFalco rose extra early. Her captain at the West Virginia State Police wanted her to present her report on Franklin to him, Alkire, Weiford, and Weiford’s boss, and she wanted to be able to be comfortable enough with the material that she could look them in the eyes as she spoke.
Before this group, DiFalco presented the results of her labor. “I feel that Mr. Franklin had the motive, opportunity and capability to be the perpetrator of the crimes against the victims, Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian,” her report concluded.
The men in the room shifted in their chairs. Then Alkire spoke. He was not convinced, he told the room. He felt the facts of Franklin’s confession were wrong—particularly the errors Franklin made when describing the road where he picked the girls up, the topography of the area, and the distances between where he picked the girls up, the road where he turned off, and the spot where he eventually killed them. Plus he had placed them in “Beckley County,” which did not exist. He still suspected Franklin had heard about the case secondhand. Weiford agreed with him, suggesting that Franklin was talked to by so many investigators from so many different states, who was to say they hadn’t perhaps filled in some of the details?
“Alkire felt that nothing was right about what Franklin said,” DiFalco says. “He kept saying, ‘It doesn’t fit with what we know to be true.’ He kept saying, ‘The killer has to be local.’”
Why? DiFalco doesn’t know, and it puzzles, especially considering that many citizens of Pocahontas County didn’t believe Franklin’s confession either, once they heard about it in the Pocahontas Times.
[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl Page 19