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 in 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.