[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  “If a person remembers that a trip on a ski lift badly scared him, he may choose to go cross-country skiing rather than downhill skiing next time,” writes Loftus. “If a child remembers that she got horribly sick after eating chili last summer, she may find chili inedible in the future. However, do false memories have these same sorts of consequences for people’s lives?” The answer is yes.

  Studies further showed that social or interpersonal factors can have profound results on the production of false memories, like an interviewer with “high status” and a participant with “low status,” or an extroverted interviewer and an introverted participant. Individual factors also matter. One study found that more aggressive people were more likely to form false memories for having perpetrated acts of violence or aggression.

  In a 2013 study, Loftus and her team had college students undergo routine medical checkups performed by research assistants whose practices were videotaped and found to be free of any impropriety. The students were then called up and told that several other students had accused the research assistant (RA) who had examined them of inappropriate behavior, and then (1) asked about their experiences with the RA and (2) asked to sign a formal complaint against the RA; the interviewer, participants were told, “just needed a few more students to sign on” so they could fire her.

  The study found that 17 percent were suggestible and suggestible participants were more likely to make a false accusation, but an additional 27 percent of participants agreed to sign the complaint even “after repeatedly denying that the accused research assistant had behaved inappropriately during their own encounter.” Like a Venn diagram, then, two groups emerge with an overlapping portion in the middle: those who are genuinely “suggestible” and believe the false information to be true, and those who don’t but are willing to tell a false story anyway because of social pressure. The result, of course, is the same.

  Beard’s defense team sent Loftus copies of Lewis and Walton’s testimony, which she read and annotated.

  “In the testimony of both of these persons, they claim to have lost and then subsequently recovered memories of the events of June 25, 1980, involving the death of the victims in this case,” she writes. “The claims of both Mr. Walton and Mr. Lewis with regard to their lost and recovered memories are contradicted by generally accepted scientific studies regarding the working of memory. Consequently, the validity of their memories is highly questionable.”

  As citizens of Pocahontas County who had read numerous newspaper accounts of the crimes, including from the Bobby Morrison and Gerald Brown era, Walton and Lewis were steeped in case details and speculation. There was also Walton’s dream and the hypnosis treatment he had been subjected to.

  “Numerous scientific studies of memory demonstrate that such suggestive techniques can create the illusion of memory—that even the act of imagining an event can create a ‘memory’ of an event that never occurred.”

  Yet at the first trial, both Walton and Lewis seemed very sure that what they remembered was fact. “Did these events that you’ve told the grand jury, did they happen, Pee Wee?” Weiford had asked in 1992. “Yes,” Walton responded. “Are you sure?” “Yes.”

  Yet, Loftus says, the degree to which a witness is convinced of the truth of their memories is not always an accurate predictor of their actual basis in fact.

  “I have little doubt that Eileen Franklin believes with every cell of her being that her father murdered [her friend],” Loftus writes. “But I believe there is a very real possibility that the whole concoction was spun not from solid facts but from the vaporous breezes of wishes, dreams, fears, desires. Eileen’s mind, operating independently of reality, went about its business of collecting ambiguities and inconsistencies and wrapping them up into a sensible package, revealing to her in one blinding moment of insight a coherent picture of the past that was nevertheless completely and utterly false. Eileen’s story is her truth, but I believe it is a truth that never happened.”

  Loftus’s flight from California to West Virginia for Beard’s retrial got delayed by a bad storm, and she had to be driven through the night in a taxi from Washington, DC, to Braxton County—a change of venue motion was also granted for the retrial—to make it in time to testify. Franklin’s deposition was read into evidence.

  On the stand, Weiford prompted Bill McCoy through his movements on June 25, 1980. McCoy finally gave Weiford the statement the prosecution had long been seeking—that he was there in the blue van when he, Fowler, and Walton had picked up Vicki and Nancy and driven them to the mountain, and that he’d seen Fowler cleaning out the inside of the van later that night and noted bullet holes in its side.

  Farmer rose to cross-examine McCoy.

  “Did you see Jacob Beard?” Farmer asked, of the day in question.

  “Don’t know. Don’t think so,” McCoy said.

  “Did you see these girls?”

  “Definitely not.”

  McCoy had gotten addicted to heroin in prison and was hallucinating and vomiting from the withdrawal when Alkire contacted him again, McCoy told the court. He agreed to testify when Weiford offered to get him into a methadone program, and he took the information in his testimony from information Weiford and Alkire told him.

  “I was just wanting to get out to get what I needed,” he admitted.

  Alkire took the stand for the prosecution, once again carrying his large black binder.

  Weiford asked Alkire a few preliminary questions, establishing the early years of the investigation, and then turned the witness over to Farmer. Weiford thought he would have the opportunity to ask Alkire many more rebuttal questions once Farmer was finished, as had been the case at the first trial. But Farmer did not even rise. “I have no questions for this witness,” Farmer said. Both Weiford and Alkire were stunned. The judge had to repeat that Alkire was excused several times before he stood to leave the stand.

  The morning of closing arguments, May 30, 2000, Weiford was getting ready in his hotel room with his wife when he collapsed. He was rushed to Charleston Area Medical Center with one of the worst cases of walking pneumonia physicians there had ever seen; he also suffered from severe dehydration and kidney problems. The jury was sent home for the day while a solution was found. Weiford’s young assistant Steve Dolly agreed that if given the afternoon and all night, he could be prepared to act in Weiford’s stead. He and Stephen Farmer delivered closing arguments the following day.

  In under three hours’ worth of deliberations, the jury of nine men and three women found Jacob Beard not guilty. Again, Beard sat stock-still when the verdict was read, but this time his eyes did wet with tears afterward, and he turned to look at his wife, Linda, who winked at him.

  Interviewed by Susan Strong, one juror said that the prosecution’s case lacked sufficient evidence—“We looked at all the points of contention. We went on the basis of the evidence. We felt the defense was correct and certain things were not convincing enough from the prosecution to merit a guilty verdict.”

  “Truth wins in the end,” Beard told Strong. “I don’t know that this will prove it to everyone, people who know me know I didn’t do this. My conscience is clear.”

  “The system we have is the best system in the world,” Alkire said. “You’ve got to accept what the jury says. There’s still one more judge Mr. Beard has to go through.” But Alkire was also relieved, he told reporters. The case was finally over.

  “Over for Beard,” wrote Strong, “but not for two families still grieving after 20 years and still looking for answers about the brutal murders of their daughters and sisters.” Nancy’s mom and sister Kathy had come again, but only for the first week of this trial; Vicki’s sister Mary and cousin had declined to return.

  And perhaps it was not over for Walton or Lewis, whose memories had been the subject of much testimony. “Some things you just don’t forget,” Steve Dolly told the Charleston Gazette. “Some things live on in our minds long after the event has passed.”

&n
bsp; Strong called her boss, the aging McNeel, at the office of the Pocahontas Times and reported the verdict. It was Wednesday, too late to get the story into the paper—it would have to wait. The Gazette would scoop them—their own hometown saga.

  But the following week, people in every part of Pocahontas County read Strong’s news: “The 20-year-old Rainbow Murders are once again officially unsolved.”

  PART VI:

  JESSE IN THE QUIET ZONE

  I believe that the normal human heart is born good. That is, it’s born sensitive and feeling, eager to be approved and to approve, hungry for simple happiness and the chance to live. It neither wishes to be killed, nor to kill. If through circumstances, it is overcome by evil, it never becomes entirely evil. There remain in it elements of good, however recessive, which continue to hold the possibility of restoration.

  —Pearl S. Buck

  Beard, West Virginia, 2016

  1

  THAT WINTER OF 2009, IT snowed more than any year on record, and the Director sometimes called to tell me her dreams. She dreamed of making Mountain Views a boarding school so girls could opt out of the public school system if they wished and roll into classes at the Mountain Views office in smiley-faced pajamas, even in snow.

  I had moved again and was living in a historic one-room schoolhouse that sat right off 219 on the crest of Droop Mountain. The schoolhouse had belonged to a long line of VISTAs before me, most of them women, most of them also placed with Mountain Views. It had beige carpeting and faux wood-paneled walls and furniture that previous girls had plucked, plopped, and left. One such item was the phone. It was pale and square with a ringer so powerful it vibrated the plastic shell and shocked me awake. There was no cell reception here, so to talk to the Mountain Views girls or anyone else, I sat in the small office and held the phone’s spiral cord.

  My landlords were an elderly couple who treated me more like a guest to take care of than like a tenant with whom to transact business. They lived a little ways down 219 in a neat ranch house and were retired, though they still worked every day tending their chickens and sheep. They stopped in to check on me, invited me over for Sunday dinner, and showed me how to cook ramps, that flavorful cousin to the onion that grows only in patches of shade in the Appalachian mountains. After a particularly big snow, the husband got his John Deere out of the shed and moved a white mountain from in front of my house so I could see the road and feel a part of the world again. The orange cat, whom I’d brought with me from the farmhouse, tread and retread the windowsill when I kept him inside, and courted death by writhing around in the middle of 219 when I didn’t.

  Peter and Dan, a DMHB recently back from living abroad, hitchhiked occasionally, just from Droop to Lewisburg if they were short on cash, and my house was a good place to park and catch a ride or to leave a truck in favor of a carpool. They knocked sometimes on my storm door to ask permission or tell me of their plans, to ask for a glass of water or see what I was baking. Trey was rarely with them; he and I had split, and several months passed without me seeing him.

  Then one night, he and I both ended up in a ten-person crew of DMHBs and friends who were squatting in an abandoned house after a night of drinking in the Lewisburg bars. Everyone seemed to be pairing off, but I found a quiet upstairs room and went to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor.

  I woke to a heavy weight bearing down on my chest. It was Trey. My sleeping bag was down around my waist and he was lying on top of me, kissing my mouth. I can’t be certain what I said; the word or words, if I said any, are gone now, but I feel sure I made some sound, something low and wincing.

  What? Trey said, pulling his face back from mine.

  I looked at his face in the light streaming in through the window, and I saw that he knew what, and his face changed from looking outward to looking inward, reflecting a kind of fear—fear of himself I think, and of what he had been doing. He rolled himself off of me.

  It wasn’t a huge boundary crossing—for that, I suppose, I should count myself among the lucky—but it felt like a crossing nonetheless and the first one, and something in me was never quite the same again. There was the person of before this night and there was the person I became after it.

  When I woke in the morning, I saw that the hardwood floor we had slept on was covered in black ash. It was in my sleeping bag, my hair, my eyes. Trey was curled up against a wall in the fetal position. I left him there.

  Deeper into winter, I was supposed to meet Ruth, a VISTA worker from Kentucky and the best friend I had then, at the restaurant in Hillsboro for a special Valentine’s Day dinner and movie event, but she didn’t show. I looked at the walls, which Ruth and Trey and Peter and I had painted in exchange for pizza and beer, until the lights in the restaurant began to flicker, and the waitress who’d given me extra mashed potatoes on the house came over to say they were closing early. When she and I stepped outside, I could hardly see the café’s wooden steps before me—the wind was blowing the snow sideways. I was stalling in the parking lot with the heat on, hoping the storm would let up a little, when I heard a honk. I rolled down my window. It was the waitress.

  Where do you live? she called.

  Top of Droop, I said.

  Follow me, she said. You can follow my lights.

  I was thankful for her then and even more so as we wound our way up the mountain going five, maybe eight miles an hour. It was a total whiteout, impossible to tell which lane I was in or if I was even on the road at all. When we finally passed the sign for Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, she honked again, accelerated into the snow, and was gone.

  The light was on at my house—odd. When I opened my front door, Ruth leapt into my arms in her snow pants, and we hugged each other and danced, rejoicing in the other’s safety. Thus set up with bowls of Corn Chex and something stupid on TV, we killed that blizzard and several more. Ruth was living in a house at the end of a two-mile road on land that its owners had turned into a Christmas tree farm, but when it snowed, it was a half-hour walk to her front door. She lived with me for most of that winter. She was still dating Peter, who lived with his parents, so soon Peter was there most nights too. My house was so close to the road that there were only two places to park, so Peter usually parked his truck across the road by the mailboxes, annoying the mailwoman and leading to some speculation about what the doctor’s son was doing with two VISTA girls every night up on Droop Mountain.

  I gave Ruth and Peter the small back bedroom that had a door you could close. My own bed was separated from the yellow kitchen by a curtain only, and the cat, still a kitten really, had a habit of waking me once an hour with his nose and claws. When pushing him off the bed gently with my hands failed and doing the same with my feet only turned the volume up on his madness, I grew frustrated and then enraged. One night, I threw him across the room so hard and fast that when he scrambled to his feet on the carpet, he spent several minutes looking at me and cocking his head from side to side, stunned. On more than one occasion, I locked him in the cold laundry room away from his food for hours, prompting whimpers of betrayal or hunger or both.

  Sometimes, particularly when Ruth and Peter were out, a feeling came. It wasn’t a new feeling, but I was surprised at its return, so soon, here in this new landscape. In college, I’d be getting dressed in some kind of shirt contraption that tied behind my neck, and I’d feel fear and energy surge up like two dolphins rising in sync and know that a tide of alcohol was coming and that I’d lose the night tomorrow.

  I tried to put this feeling into shoveling snow. It snowed continuously, so I had ample opportunity. I dug my car out in the morning before work, and again in the afternoon to drive to a meeting, and sometimes again after the meeting, or again in the evening to make the drive home. I had been catching rides to Mountain Views with a coworker who had a four-wheel drive, but even still we were obliged to park at the foot of the steep driveway and hike the rest of the way up on foot. Somewhere around the twenty-second school day missed, the
Director called and told me not to come to work until spring.

  I had already read all the books I had and watched every even slightly gay television show available on the internet. Some evenings I stood at the living room window with the cat and counted the number of individual revolutions made by the tires of cars driving carefully over the fresh powder. They honked sometimes if they knew me, just to say hello. Sometimes I talked to people from my old life on the beige phone—my college roommate, my mom—but the once-cute question “Where are you again?” became aggravating and then intolerable. I let that phone ring and ring.

  One white Friday afternoon, when winter’s volume had gone down, I was just finishing up digging out my car when a squat black Honda hatchback I had often seen at pool night slowed on 219, then stopped near where I was sweating. I knew the driver; we’d chatted and laughed together. He was the one who’d worn shorts with wool socks even into late October. He rolled down the passenger-side window.

  Need help?

  Actually, I just finished, I said. Perfect timing.

  The driver laughed. He said his name, then my name, then thumbed toward his passenger.

  This is Jesse, he said, and Jesse bobbed his head in acknowledgment. His shape was familiar. I knew he too had been there some Friday nights, but I couldn’t place him in the center of any particular scene, couldn’t call up any joke he’d made or song he’d played.

  Six hours later, I was back at my house, only this time it was dark, and I was looking at it from the other side of the road as I passed, seated inside a white sedan with dark tinted windows driven by a man who played the mandolin. There was bluegrass music every Friday night at the restaurant in Hillsboro, and while there I’d run into the driver of the black hatchback again and this mandolin player. We stood around together, having a few beers, and they asked me if I’d like to come to Lewisburg with them to keep the music and the fun going. My old landlord and coworker Sam’s stepfather, Don, was playing a show there.