[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  “I can see them right now,” Alkire said then, “just as good as I could when I went in there. The thing that got me the most was both of them had their eyes open. No matter where I walked around the table, it looked like they were looking at me. Never had that feeling before.”

  I asked him about the Franklin theory of the crime and why he didn’t believe it. He said that he didn’t get “tunnel vision,” as Beard and others have accused him of having; he was open to the possibility that Franklin did it. He listened to DiFalco read from the report of her investigation, and he listened to the tape she had made in the Illinois prison.

  “I could hear DiFalco say on the tape, ‘What we want to talk to you about is the death of two girls in Pocahontas County.’ Then there was a silence. And then Franklin said, ‘I don’t know nothing about that.’”

  Alkire did his own investigation and was willing to have his mind changed. “I still hadn’t gotten Franklin out of my mind. I wasn’t going to be satisfied until I talked to him myself.” He drove to Chattanooga, where Franklin had been transferred to stand trial for slaughtering the black man and white woman outside the Pizza Hut. “If you can’t prove that somebody did something, then you can back up and prove that he didn’t do it.”

  But Franklin wouldn’t see Alkire. He tried to call Franklin, but Franklin wouldn’t take his calls. He listened to tapes of interviews other law enforcement agencies had made of Franklin. “He would just ramble,” Alkire told me, “like I am doing now.”

  Alkire asked me if I minded if he chewed a little tobacco, that he knew it was gross but that it was his only vice, and when I told him I didn’t, he loosened the pouch, pinched a tuft, and inserted it into his cheek with a finger.

  “I got the right guy,” Alkire said, after a while, of Beard. “I presented all the facts that I had. I presented them to the grand jury. They indicted him. They found him guilty. To me, I did my job.”

  Alkire was still calling Beard “Jake,” I noticed; there was still that chain that connected them. It’s important that I understood who Jake Beard was, Alkire said, many times. How involved, how changeable, how mean, how strange. If Jake hadn’t been that way, if he hadn’t been who he was, Alkire said. But there was no end to that sentence, and Alkire would refuse to talk to me anymore after this interview.

  “I guess there’s still some people around here who don’t think Jake did it. But I want to tell them about how he was. That third-girl thing.” Alkire stopped, chewed, smiled. “It was 2 o’clock in the morning, and the phone rang,” he remembered, though the official report has Beard calling the Marlinton office rather than his home directly. “And it was Jake Beard. He said, ‘Bob, I got some information for you.’ He said, ‘I know what happened to that third girl.’ I said, ‘Jake, there is no third girl.’”

  Bobby Morrison’s ex-wife was on house arrest but serving her community-service hours that night at the Pocahontas County Animal Shelter office. She’d dealt weed and later heroin, she told the Pocahontas Times, as a way to support her children as a single parent because she did not qualify for government vouchers at the time. She started using opiates after her doctors prescribed them for a spinal injury she suffered in childbirth that dislocated several of her vertebrae. “I don’t blame any of the doctors for me being an addict by no means,” she said, “but it certainly didn’t help.”

  The shelter was in a corner of a Marlinton warehouse the size of a cruise ship that held secondhand furniture and antiques. I could hear the river running just on the other side of the parking lot. There were two boys skateboarding in the rain near the door and I walked around to the back corner, where I could see cages of animals. They barked and jumped in the air all at once, a forest of dog sounds. The door opened, and a man’s head stuck out. “Get in here!” he called. “I heard you coming.”

  Inside, the walls were also concrete, and the only light was coming from a rectangular fluorescent panel. Most of the cages inside were empty. In a small clearing in the center of the room was a foldable table with two chairs, one of which the man took again. In the other was a tall woman with dry, tan skin. Powerful shoulders, indigo denim, and white sneakers. Hair worn up in a ponytail with short bangs. She raised her hand when I said her name—Teresa—then said we could talk in the back.

  We settled into the back room, which was a bathroom with two stalls. “Oh Beard did it,” Teresa said, “there’s no doubt in my mind.” I leaned against a scrub sink; she stood next to a metal shelf of towels and detergents. She lit a cigarette and ashed it into a red plastic cup that sat on the shelf for this purpose.

  She said that Beard would come to the house where she was living with Bobby after he separated from his child’s mother just to scare them. “That guy Franklin, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s never been here. It sounds convincing to you when you read about him, but I know. We lived through it.”

  I’d already called all Morrison’s numbers and written letters to no answer. I gave Teresa the newest letter I’d written and asked her to give it to him. She said she would try to get Morrison to talk to me, but she didn’t know. He was in his early fifties; they’d been divorced for years but were still good friends. “For a long time he wouldn’t talk to anyone. So mad, so mad, so mad,” she said. “I think, also, ashamed.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s what I asked him.”

  In the cage room, the phone rang. The voice of the man who let me in the door, then his footsteps. He appeared and handed the cordless to Teresa.

  “I’ll be there, sweetie,” she said into it, “anything you need. Just as soon as I’m off work. But what did they say about the follow-up? Which medications? Shit.”

  Past the Little General store and straight through the intersection is the building supply store where Jesse and Pee Wee Walton worked. The building supply store was low and wide but too small for the vast acre of wet gray pavement on which it sat. Mine was the only car in the parking lot; Jesse’s wagon was probably parked behind or somewhere special. The automatic doors slid apart, and the entryway to the store was wide and decked with straw tiki torches. I wandered down the center aisle, then turned left at the paint and paintbrushes, and followed the aisle all the way to the wall. A few aisles down, there he was, filling a shelf on the end of the aisle with rolls of duct tape.

  Whoa hey, Jesse said. He wore his navy West Virginia Mountaineers hat as usual. He had filled out a little, and looked more solid somehow. I knew about his recent wedding, had heard that his wife was a cool outspoken woman his family loved.

  I asked him about music night, if it was still that night, Tuesdays. No, he said. They had to move it because the mandolin player was racing cars again.

  Oh yeah?

  Yeah, he said. You should come by.

  I will, I said.

  Cool, he said.

  It was very quiet in the store—no music.

  Well, he said. I’ve got to go check something outside, but you can come if you want.

  Jesse got to work in his sweatshirt, moving boxes around underneath the cover of a small outbuilding, but the rain was coming in sideways. He never did own a rain jacket. Or rain boots. Always only those gray sneakers.

  I was afraid, I noticed. But of what? Of myself and my own desire to know. And yet something pushed me forward—a smell, or a Spidey sense perhaps, that what there was to know would hurt but in a way that was necessary.

  I’m writing about the Rainbow Murders, I said to Jesse then. I think I need to talk to Pee Wee Walton.

  He’s not here today, Jesse said. It’s his day off.

  Another time, then, I said. Will you help me?

  Jesse looked straight ahead at the corrugated tin walls of the store. For once he kept his head still, no bobbing. I wanted to reach through everything that had happened—my sudden departure, the Chef’s death, the boisterous DMHB’s death, every mile and every minute—and say something that wasn’t an apology and wasn’
t an accusation, something that was just true. But my language was language, and his was living. I saw that he had survived, not just growing up in a place where the roads and the trees and the weather can become weapons, but also growing up in a place where his form of masculinity was often reviled, and that his survival, though complicated, was no small feat.

  Hmm, I don’t think so, Jesse said, rain dripping down the brim of his hat and onto the ground. He doesn’t want to talk about all that mess.

  Jesse had never refused me anything before—not a drink, not a ride, not anything. I was, almost, proud.

  Pee Wee Walton’s mother had answered the last few times I’d called, but this time it was Pee Wee himself. I told him who I was, and we spoke for a few minutes about the weather and the roads I’d lived on when I lived in the county.

  Then I told him that I knew the truth was more complicated than what had been reported and that I suspected he had been caught in the middle of two versions of events, neither of which were exactly true. I told him that so much time had passed and no one could be prosecuted anymore, and was there anything he could tell me, anything he wanted to say?

  Pee Wee Walton was silent on the Hillsboro end of the line, but he was there, breathing.

  Then he said one word—“No”—and the line went dead.

  I returned to Pocahontas County many more times after that and asked many more questions. But before I drove away that time, I went down to the low-water bridge to see how it was faring after the 2016 flood. During the flood, it had been under feet of water—mud marks on the concrete and the grass showed how many. But the small beach of pebbles was beginning to show again, and there was a black pickup parked there and a few young people having a small party. One of them was the redheaded girl.

  She was just as thin as she had always been, but now she was taller and more elastic, as if her whole body had been stretched. She wore a black string bikini top and a jean skirt and had her hair in a low ponytail. I slowed and watched her open the door to the pickup, pull out a hoodie, and put it on. Our eyes met, and I waved and tried to decide whether to slow enough to speak and if so what to say, when she turned and picked her way over the rocks to the water. I watched her drink from a can of beer, and I watched her get picked up and tossed over the shoulder of a tall tan man who wore nothing but shorts and a West Virginia Mountaineers baseball cap.

  I drove away, through the state park and past Jesse’s grandma’s house to the place where the road comes to a T with 219. There was a time when seeing her that way would have made me think that she had disappeared, was disappearing from women and from herself, heading for things that would bring her mostly pain. Also, there was a time when I would have told myself no—think nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

  But this time I thought: both things were possible and were likely happening at the same time. I had made a mistake thinking I knew what it looked like for myself to disappear or what it looked like when someone else did, and I had made a mistake thinking that hiding my truths from other people could keep me from doing harm.

  This woman—she wasn’t a girl anymore, I saw—may have just been a person who was loving the taste of a beer and the feel of her own body with many twisty years left to make the important mistakes and stay alive.

  2

  DEBORAH DIFALCO—DEBBIE, AS SHE signed her emails to me—was waiting for me outside a Starbucks at the end of a brightly lit shopping plaza in a suburb of Washington, DC. Her Frappuccino was half empty before her on the slatted iron table, and she was older than I expected her to be, softer and more blurred, in a blue rain jacket and jeans. I understood her neck and her shoulders before I understood her face—dark eyes, dark eyebrows, dark thick hair past her shirt collar that looked as if it had been straightened, today or recently, and then frizzed. It was going to storm. I’d promised not to make her late for her daughter’s basketball game, where she was the coach.

  DiFalco had left the state police and began working for US Customs doing special investigations. “If anything other than people was crossing the border, it was ours.” Drug smuggling, weapons, fraud, cargo ships. “Eventually we got into investigating child pornography, or cybersmuggling,” which is what brought her to northern Virginia and this Starbucks landscape. She worked on drug cases and spent three months in Bulgaria enforcing sanctions against Serbia Montenegro; she became the deputy director of her task force and the director of the cybersmuggling investigation. She was retired from law enforcement, now, though she still did investigative work.

  “There is no doubt in my mind that Franklin did it,” DiFalco told me bluntly.

  I’d like to have what she has—no doubt. I told her about my sense of being caught between two stories, each with their believers. I asked her how she could be so sure.

  “Emma,” she said, “there was no evidence that ever pointed to Jake Beard. That’s the bottom line.” Whereas when it came to Franklin, “the evidence matched.”

  She rejected the idea that Franklin might have read about the case in newspapers or a true crime magazine, as Alkire and Weiford have alleged over the years. I had spent hours myself on this line of thinking, even engaging the services of a professional archival researcher and research librarian to try to find a detailed article on the Rainbow Murders published before Franklin first confessed in 1984, but to no result.

  “He could not have read about it,” DiFalco said. “Everyone always says, ‘Oh he read that,’ but where, I would like to know? He was locked up right after the murders.” She also disputed the notion that the police made details of the crimes available to the public and that his story changed over time. Every agency that interviewed him—the Wisconsin State Police, the Illinois State Police, the FBI—believed him, she reminded me, except the West Virginia State Police.

  I didn’t know Alkire, I said, but I knew Weiford a little, and I believed he was a good person. If Weiford was good, how did he go so wrong?

  “You can’t put blinders on,” DiFalco said. “You can’t believe one thing absolutely.”

  The wind picked up, and the umbrella in the middle of our metal table threatened to take off.

  “Emma,” she said, “show me some evidence against Jake Beard.”

  “Well,” I offered, “there are the eyewitnesses—Walton, Lewis, and also all the citizens who gave testimony about that day. Why would they lie?”

  “They were talked to so many times,” she said. “When you’re talked to so many times, you develop a story; you develop a story with the police who talk to you.”

  “Beard simply made a mistake, albeit a big mistake,” she said, in calling Vicki’s father.

  “Beard made a lot of mistakes,” I said, reminding her of the false statement he had given to police implicating Arnold Cutlip for killing the “third Rainbow girl.”

  DiFalco dipped her head, agreeing. “I’m not sure anyone will ever truly know what happened with that.” She was quiet another moment. “In a community like that, you have to understand. We would get calls all the time. On a rainy day, we would get calls. ‘Trooper, the TV man says it may rain, but I trust you more than I trust him. Should I take an umbrella?’”

  “Wow,” I said. I had been thinking of Pocahontas County in 1980 as a community that did not trust the police much, but this may not have been so.

  After Beard’s conviction, DiFalco said, she was trying to help the Beard family. She says that Beard seemed like a normal guy with a family; he didn’t creep her out.

  “I was a police officer. I took that serious. An innocent man was sitting in jail.”

  After his conviction was overturned, she went out for coffee with him. “I said to him, ‘Nothing can happen now, you can’t be retried, so did you kill those girls?’ And he said to me, he said, ‘Debbie, I absolutely did not.’”

  So she did doubt, I think. To ask is to doubt.

  “And you believed him?”

  “It is one of the things I have prized in myself over the years,” DiFalco said. �
��I have developed a way of knowing people, of judging their character. And what’s the motive? If it were Beard, what would be the motive?”

  No motive, I conceded. I asked if she had other cases before where there was no motive.

  “Never,” she said. “There was always a motive. Franklin had the motive; he had the means, and he had the opportunity.”

  DiFalco said that Alkire had insisted over and over that it had to be somebody local, that people just don’t come through Pocahontas County. “Well, they do.”

  Further, the case had divided the state police, officer against officer, she told me.

  “People were on one side of it, the Beard side, or they were on the other side of it.”

  If I really wanted to know about how much the state police was split, DiFalco said, I should talk to Michael Jordan, who served with her. Then she rose and wished me luck. She looked toward her silver Toyota minivan, an older model but well kept. “The traffic here,” she said. “I never wanted to end up in a place like this.”

  I looked back at the index of witnesses for Beard’s trial and found him, as Weiford noted, testifying for the defense: Corporal Michael Jordan—his real name. I called him.

  He spoke well of Alkire, which surprised me, called him Bob, and seemed to feel the loss of their friendship acutely. “I have had no contact with Bob whatsoever since the early ’90s,” Jordan said into his landline phone and then his cell phone on his way to work security with the college near his home in Elkins. “When this case kind of blew up, I went my way, and he went his.”

  In the mid-1980s, Jordan worked in the plainclothes division of the West Virginia State Police out of Elkins. His boss was Alkire. This was during the time when Alkire had been assigned away from the Rainbow Murders in order to pursue other cases but had, according to Jordan, never truly stepped away. Jordan, alongside DiFalco, worked under Alkire in the major crimes division, and their load was mostly drug cases. They were discouraged from socializing with the officers in uniform, so they often hung out with each other. Dinners and picnics and the Fourth of July.