The day heated up, and Beard’s air conditioner blasted. I could ask a single short question, and Beard would talk for many minutes uninterrupted.
“I don’t think Gerald Brown did it,” Beard said. “And there’s two reasons to this. Where the darn backpacks were found. Gerald Brown would have never driven all the way over there. If he’d have driven on Briery Knob with them, he’d have thrown them over the hill and thrown their backpacks over the hill and nobody would have probably ever found them.”
I reminded him that Brown would go around saying, “I’m a hippie killer,” and that he took his girlfriend up on Briery Knob and cried, even gave her a necklace that he claimed “belonged to one of his Rainbow friends.”
“[Brown] was just like that,” Beard said. “When he was sober and hadn’t had a drink all day, he was just fun-loving and hardworking, hard at work at his logging business. When he and Drema lived there on the mountain, he got to drinking real bad and started losing his equipment. And she left him. It was bad. But other than that, he was just a happy-go-lucky somebody who would show up at dinnertime, eat supper, and then go on to somebody’s house to party.”
I told Beard that I found a lot of the ways the nine men talked about women in their statements very ugly. “Brown, Walton, McCoy, Morrison. It seems like they didn’t like women very much.”
“No,” Beard said. “I don’t think they did.”
I asked him about the comment he made to Newsday in 1992 that most shaped my impression of him. When confronted with pictures of Vicki and Nancy as they would have been before they died, he had looked at the pictures, and, as a way of denying that he had been the one to kill them, he said, “They were definitely not the type of women I’d want to have sex with. They weren’t the slimmest, trimmest little things.”
What did he mean by that? “Well, if you said I said it, I said it,” he said, and left it at that.
Beard, too, thought the perpetrator was most likely Franklin. “There’s two or three things that Franklin said that are absolutely true, as far back [as when he first confessed in 1984]. I-64 wasn’t finished [west of Pocahontas County]; you’d get back on Route 60. When he describes it in one of his interviews, he said, ‘I was on the interstate, and I found myself on a two-lane road going through town,’ and he got worried about having [the women’s belongings] in his car.”
He told me that he also saw on Facebook that I was friends with Susan Strong, former editor of the Pocahontas Times.
Beard thought Strong’s articles, which made a stronger case for his guilt than his innocence, were a part of why everyone believed he was guilty over the years and why some believe it still. “She was biased before the trial ever began,” he said. “All through the first trial, she tried to get ahold of me in the evenings for comment, but I always told her no.”
I asked Beard about his life now, his life in Florida, and what it was like to live in America within the law after, for six years, being unfairly punished by it. “I am more skeptical when I see police,” he said, and extra careful driving. “It’s a shame that there’s a few people like Alkire out there. And I know there are.”
Beard, too, is bound to Alkire, forever probably, in his anger and his contempt. In Beard’s opinion, Alkire is fundamentally evil and made unethical choices in order to implicate Beard to the exclusion of other suspects. “He had this cocky little smile that he would give you,” Beard said. “It just irritated the hell out of me. It made me feel like, ‘I’m your best friend; you can tell me the truth.’ You told him the truth, but if it didn’t line up with what he thought was the truth, he’d disbelieve it.”
Steve Farmer, too, said that he believed Alkire was “a deeply dishonest person” who was motivated by a profound desire to matter, to be at the center of things. “He wanted to be part of the story,” Farmer told me of Alkire’s insistence that the killer was local. “That let him be a starring character instead of a bystander.”
Farmer says he didn’t continue to represent Beard over the years because he felt he had to, but rather because he felt Beard was innocent of the murder charges, and Farmer was young and had the space in his life to listen to his convictions. He felt that Beard was a vulnerable target because he was a figure about whom people had strong opinions, even if those opinions often didn’t agree. Some knew him as a heavy drinker and partyer; some knew him as an exceptionally skilled mechanic who had fixed a piece of their equipment. “There were two stories about Jake,” Farmer said, “and the story you got depended on who you asked.”
To Beard, I wondered aloud about the years he spent in prison at Moundsville and then Mount Olive. I asked how he coped with the feelings of anger and despair, if he ever thought about killing himself.
“A few times in the beginning there, yeah. I would call [his lawyer, Robert Allen], and he just said, ‘You can’t call in here every day like this!’ I had no idea what the appeal process was and how long it was going to take. I thought, You do an appeal, and you’ll be out in two months. No. I was angry, and I was hurt that the justice system could do that to me. But I always believed in the justice system, or I’d have slit my throat when I was sentenced.”
Reconciling with Linda helped. Mount Olive was only an hour away from Beard’s old house in Greenbrier County, and Linda decided to move back there and take an apartment to be closer to her family and to Beard, but their daughters—one grown, one almost grown—made their own choices; one moved with Linda, and the other stayed in Florida.
Beard teared up when he described the second trial and the moment he knew he was free.
“Judge Lobban did this little speech after the jury gave their verdict,” Beard said. “He said, ‘And you may go forth hence!’ I went over to him, and he turned around in his chair, and he shook my hand. He was smiling ear to ear. And I said, ‘Can I go back into your office and call my daughters?’ We were both crying now. And he said, ‘You go back and call whoever you want.’”
He flew back to Florida, tried to find work on the land, and moved into a two-bedroom apartment that belonged to his older daughter, Teresa, where his younger daughter, Tammy, was also staying.
In newspaper articles covering Beard’s successful wrongful prosecution suit, Beard was quoted as saying that there was no amount of money that could make up for what had happened to him and that he planned to live out the rest of his life far away from Pocahontas County. But he didn’t. After he was liberated, Linda remained in West Virginia. She was close to retirement at her nursing job and didn’t want to leave it until she reaped the benefits. Before long, Beard moved back there to join her.
Beard had little to say about his drinking, calling the period after his father’s death in 1983 “the only time I ever drank much.” Beard was arrested outside Lewisburg in the fall of 2006 for yet another DUI, just blocks away from the courthouse where he had been convicted of murder. The sheriff’s deputy “observed the defendant cross the center line several times and observed the defendant run at least five vehicles off the roadway and drive 15 mph to 30 mph in a 55 mph zone.” Beard blew a .204, almost three times the legal limit. When he was asked to get out of his car, he could not stand and had to be assisted in walking the line by a state police officer.
Why did he keep coming back? Why did he continue to live in a place that had so wronged him? He was silent a long time.
“It’s the place,” he said. “The land. I can’t explain it.”
The worst part of Pocahontas County is “what happened to me,” he said, “the way people who know each other so well and don’t have nothing else to do make up stories. The worst part is people that don’t want to work that get tied up into the situation of being on welfare, drink their welfare money up or whatever they do, they just hang around. You’ll see them on the streets. You see them up on the sidewalk in Marlinton one day, and you go back a day or two later, and they’re still there. I think the area is so depressed on the one hand, for a certain segment of people.”
“Why
is it so depressed?”
“Well, right now the lack of work. If you give those people a job to go to, a lot of them would go. For young people, there’s nothing for them to do. In the summer you can get out there and swim in the creeks. You can hunt and fish, but those things are limited, time-wise. Kids now, they get out of school or quit high school as soon as they turn sixteen. There’s the feeling that ‘I gotta get out of here; there’s nothing for me to do; Mom and Dad are stuck here.’ Unless they can make a living doing what they love, they don’t stay.”
And the best part?
“The mountains, and the change of seasons, and the good, hardworking people that I knew and still care for up there.”
I drove around a long time after I left Beard, through one development and into the next, which all had the same beige construction and identical storefronts selling smoothies and pancakes. I didn’t know how to hold him or his story. I couldn’t seem to fit him into the box marked “martyr” in my mind; I neither admired nor pitied him. He was only who he was—an old man with a heart condition developed and exacerbated during six years of incarceration for a crime he probably did not commit.
Neither was he an innocent exactly. He had probably done “the cat thing,” though we’ll never know for sure. He had created stories that harmed people—“the corn chopper man” and “the third Rainbow girl.” He was a misogynist and kind of a jerk, it seemed to me. But that is not the same thing as being a murderer, however much they may sometimes feel like the same thing.
5
MEIGHAN HACKETT, THE DAUGHTER OF Nancy Santomero’s sister Jeanne, was born eleven months after her aunt’s death to a family reeling from loss. As she grew up in Long Island, everyone saw Nancy in her—in the hippie outfits she wore, the way she braided her hair, her hunger to walk and sleep outside, and the way she was always moving and looking around. She was camping in upstate New York, or she was taking TGV trains through Italy, or she was moving to San Francisco and driving into the mountains on the weekends. Her aunt Patricia worried about her—they could never have watched their own kids take such adventures. In addition to Patricia losing Nancy, Patricia’s husband, Paul, had lost his brother in a car accident. “I think we held onto our kids a little too tight,” Patricia said. “We made them afraid. They got it from both sides.” One time Jeanne came to pick Patricia’s kids up in a little Honda. “You can have a nice ride by yourself,” Paul told her, “but you’re not taking our kids in that.” The following year, he bought Jeanne a Chevy Suburban.
For her college admissions essay, Hackett wrote about her aunt who had been murdered. She said that she experienced Nancy as a spectral presence in her life, one not of grief but of unconditional love, similar to how some people describe God. There was a wild weeping willow tree in Caumsett State Park on Long Island that everyone called Nancy’s tree because she had gone there often when in junior high and high school. Later, Hackett went there too.
Hackett had grown up in a family shaped by women—her mother and two aunts, as well as her grandmother—and the family shared openly with each other everything they knew about Nancy’s death, but the Durian family was different. Brittney Durian, who is studying social work at the University of Iowa, said that she and her cousin Victoria Lynn Durian grew up knowing that their aunt had been murdered but little else. No one in their family would talk about it. To obtain admission to the social work major, Brittney, too, wrote an essay about her aunt Vicki’s murder and the ripples it began across her life and the others in her generation. “I would love for you to read it,” she wrote to me, “so maybe then you can understand why it is so important to me and my siblings/cousins that we know the truth about what happened.”
“Instead of coping with grief, my family failed to acknowledge the pain,” her essay continues. “They believed that if you ignore it, the pain will disappear. Consequently, my father’s side of the family never received the full closure they deserved. They were never able to properly heal, or open up to each other. After I took ‘Death and Dying: Issues Across the Lifespan,’ I learned about the concerns of death, dying, and the grieving process. I realized my family struggled with accepting death. Additionally, I discovered more about myself by witnessing my family’s unhealthy way of coping. I aspire to help others recognize that death is ‘okay.’”
The Mountain Views student with the scar is a trans man named Jordan. He, too, left southern West Virginia for college but stayed in the state, finding a school he liked in the eastern panhandle near Washington, DC. There, despite the college ignoring the fact that he had checked the box marked “transgender” on his housing placement form and a six-foot penis spewing sperm that was graffitied on his dorm room door, he thrived, finding queer friends and mentors, majoring in psychology and minoring in Appalachian studies and catalyzing the implementation of a policy to better serve transgender students as well as the founding of the institution’s first LGBTQ center.
Upon graduation, Jordan had several job offers in the Maryland area and had gotten accepted to a five-year doctorate program in DC. But his mother, back home in southern West Virginia, had recently been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, and his stepfather had little to offer in terms of her care. Plus, “a lot of my heart and soul is here,” he said. “There is something in me that needs to be here, in the mountains, in a place that is familiar. It was hard, hard to explain what it felt like to be away from home. Just existing in a world that I didn’t recognize felt very hard.”
So he came back. He found a job with a health care company that provides physical and mental health care services to the people of Pocahontas County. Every Sunday he drove more than an hour to see his mother in the house she lived in with his stepfather to refill her medications, restock her groceries, and leave cash for her to give to the woman he had hired to clean her house. Sometimes her illness meant she became nearly fully paralyzed, so Jordan began paying out of pocket for a home health aide. Then one of his male colleagues at work refused to use the same bathroom that he did, so the company gave Jordan a private bathroom, but across the building from his desk. “If he has a problem peeing in the same room as me,” Jordan told the company, “he can use that bathroom in the boonies.”
During the nine months that Jordan was unemployed, he looked diligently for another job, the kind of job that would value his education and experience and compensate him appropriately, but it simply did not exist within two hours’ driving distance. His college degree meant he was told time and time again by restaurants and gas stations that he was overqualified. Many times he wondered why he had bothered to go to college at all.
In June 2016, southern and central West Virginia were hit by a rainstorm that quickly became a catastrophic flood that killed twenty-three people; destroyed homes, schools, infrastructure, and businesses; and left five hundred thousand US citizens without power. The event barely registered in the national media, and it took bureaucratic channels nearly two years to release the funds that would drastically improve the lives of survivors and repair the damage. I was working at Mountain Views that summer and was the person on call the night the storm rolled in. The rain on the tin roof of the staff shelter made a sound so intense and continuous it felt physical, as did my anxiety over the well-being of the minors under my charge in that campground. Then there was a sound in the sky that I knew was thunder but could best be described as a gun put to my ear and then fired.
Somehow we made it through the night. In the morning we took our students down to the sturdier Mountain Views office building and built a fire. All of our roads were washed away; the area by the mailboxes and the culvert there had become a rushing river. But this was nothing, we would learn, compared to the state of affairs in the counties neighboring Pocahontas to the south and west. In Nicholas County, the county to which I had been assigned to make those calls, their middle school and high school, their Mountaineer Mart, many homes—gone. Someone in Greenbrier County posted a video to Facebook of their neighbor’s house ca
tching fire and floating down the river.
Jordan was living with a friend at the time of the 2016 flood, a young woman who had also been a Mountain Views student. They watched the water approach their house and then submerge it up to the second story. Both Jordan’s and his roommate’s cars were fully underwater.
“We thought the house was gonna go,” Jordan remembered. “The house was shifting—I could see it rocking on the foundation. So we made the decision to leave.”
They tied a rope to the back porch, then threw it to a nearby tree, and by pulling themselves on the rope were able to reach dryer ground on the high side of a nearby mountain. They had taken shovels from the house and were able to use them as walking sticks as they shimmied across the side of a rock wall. At one point, Jordan fell in the water, and his friend pulled him out. They did a first-aid assessment to make sure Jordan could go on—he had hurt his knee in the fall but was otherwise unharmed.
“How did you know to do all that?” I asked, incredulous.
“Mountain Views, man!” Jordan said, laughing. But he was serious. “If you all hadn’t thrown us out into the woods and taught us how to get back, we would have died that day, I feel sure.”
He lived now with his best friend, another trans man who had also gone to Mountain Views and his friend’s wife and four beautiful cats in a neat trailer on some land in Greenbrier County. The steps leading up to their house were lined with rocks and crystals that his roommate had found on his hikes all over southern West Virginia. Even as a Mountain Views kid, that student loved rocks—all he wanted to talk about at lunch was his rock collection and how much it would be worth someday. The two friends liked to hike together or walk the river trail and talk or go to flea markets. Jordan did eventually find another job at a company that provides services to adults with developmental disabilities in crisis, which means his days are spent talking to and touching the bodies of people experiencing some of the most difficult moments of their lives. But he was proud of the work. “I know the people. I know that this Dollar General has peanut butter and that one doesn’t like our clients. I know this place.”
[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl Page 30