WITH THE ARRESTS OF SEVEN local men in the spring of 1992, the Rainbow Murders drew their first in-depth media coverage from outlets outside West Virginia. Reporters visited Pocahontas County for a week at a time, and citizens could spot their New York plates driving too slow on 219 or parked outside Dorie’s lunch counter in Marlinton, which only fueled the community buzz over the crimes. The articles wove a narrative of drunken backwoods hicks and sexy hippie women, of two profoundly separate value systems that had touched because of the Rainbow Gathering, then wished they hadn’t.
“The culture clash was thought to carry the potential for violence,” a September 1992 article in the St. Petersburg Times declared.
“The women were outsiders,” wrote a Newsday reporter in 1992, and “the suspects were locals.…A lot of people in Pocahontas County didn’t want the hippies there, and many thought the women should know better than to hitchhike unescorted.”
These outlets also told the story that Pocahontas County was home to “both rugged physical beauty and a few rugged people,” characters that were capable of “backwoods intrigue.” The place was rural, and it was scary, they made clear. “The bodies turned up near the driveway to Arnold Cutlip’s home, an address so remote the television was powered by batteries.”
Further, went the logic, the twelve-year lag between the murders and the arrests was because Pocahontas County’s central motivation was the protection of its own “clan” rather than rooting out the truth.
“Local sentiment was that hillbillies killed a pair of hippies as an expression of anger over the Rainbow Gathering.…It has been suggested by several residents that the investigation dragged because the victims were from somewhere else.”
“Weiford and the police deny that there was any xenophobia against the victims and point to their persistence in eventually bringing charges as proof of their lack of bias,” the Newsday article continued.
“Jake Beard goes to a party with axes,” a Hillsboro resident was quoted as saying. Other neighbors told stories that he had chainsawed animals, that he had waved a pistol at a man who had damaged his fence. A Pocahontas County resident who had moved to the area as part of the Back to the Land movement offered this view to the St. Petersburg Times: “Everyone knew who did those murders. I’d say a big reason nobody talked is they were all afraid of Jake Beard.”
Weiford brought charges against Beard first, since he was “the trigger man,” and the grand jury had found there was sufficient evidence to try him for two counts of first degree murder. In the state of West Virginia in 1992, premeditated intent could legally be formed in a tiny gap between the idea of killing someone and its execution—even a few minutes is sufficient.
Weiford’s term had technically run out—he had campaigned for reelection in 1992 and lost again. But he’d spent his career steeped in the Rainbow case, so his successor deferred to Weiford, allowing him to remain on the case as a “special prosecutor.”
During the winter of 1993, Pocahontas County got pounded by more than twenty inches of snow. The stream of cars that drove past Walt Weiford’s house and honked hello slowed to a glide, then a skid; soon it stopped altogether. Not even the guys who had plows strapped to the front of their trucks wanted to brave it. No school for Weiford’s daughter. Silent days, and Weiford spent them at home hunched over his desk, preparing his case against Beard.
A persuasive story in a court of law turns out to mean pretty much the same thing as it does in literature. Echoing Aristotle’s rules for compelling drama, expert trial lawyers say that a good trial story is one in which people have reasons for the way they act, accounts for all the known facts, is supported by details, makes common sense, and is organized in a logical way, so that each piece of information naturally follows the one before it based on cause and effect.
“Your case must have both a theory and a theme,” advises Steven Lubet, author of Modern Trial Advocacy: Analysis and Practice. A winning theory “has logical internal force,” and it should be simple and easy to believe. “Even ‘true’ theories may be difficult to believe because they contradict everyday experiences,” writes Lubet. “You must strive to eliminate all implausible elements from your theory.”
The theme is the emotional center of the story that ensures that your theory will stick and persuade a jury. “Just as your theory must appeal to logic, your theme must appeal to moral force.…The most compelling themes appeal to shared values, civic virtues, or common motivations.”
The hick monster story was certainly “simple” and “easy to believe” and offered more than a hint of moral force, but Weiford had his doubts about it, possibly because he himself did not believe it. “To me it wasn’t a hicks versus hippies sort of thing,” Weiford told the St. Petersburg Times. “It’s not that simple.”
Vicki and Nancy had not been raped; there was no evidence of sexual assault or that they had had sex of any kind before they died. Yet the story that gender and thus sexuality had played an essential role in their deaths—a flavor in the groundwater we assume we taste whenever a woman is killed—had already solidified. Alkire had been telling it to himself since the first day their bodies were found; his earliest hypotheses included “the flasher: for sexual satisfaction.” Bobby Morrison told it—“Gerald Brown said something about going somewhere and getting some nookie or something like that.” Gerald Brown’s arrest report told it—“anger at being denied sexual satisfaction.” Pee Wee Walton told it, too—the men wanted to get Vicki and Nancy somewhere alone “to see if [they] would put out.”
“[The men] decided they were hippies and you know they figured, ‘Hippie girls, free sex,’ so they picked them up,” a senior law enforcement official who asked not to be identified had also told Newsday. “There is no indication that these girls were interested in any kind of sexual activity, there is no indication that they were in any way ‘loose.’ Our impression is that [Vicki and Nancy] thought these were nice guys who were going to give them a ride to the Rainbow Gathering,” the source continued.
Further, a great deal was made in the 1992 media coverage of the fact that Vicki and Nancy were not especially pretty. “The girls were not obese but they were bigger and heavier than average,” Pam Wilson, the witness who said she had seen the women getting into the blue van, told police. Vicki was frequently described in the press as “bucktoothed” and Nancy as a “tomboy.”
“Her sisters were beautiful girls,” Jo-Ann Orelli, Nancy’s childhood friend says. “Not that Nancy wasn’t pretty, but she was stockier. Nancy was more regular [looking].”
Nancy’s sister Patricia protests: “She was fine looking, she didn’t look any different than us, and she certainly wouldn’t have noticed or felt jealous.” But Patricia’s husband pipes up from the background: “Out of all of you she was definitely the least attractive.”
“They were all very naturally beautiful girls,” Catherine Shea, who grew up next door to the Santomeros in Huntington, told me. “Great skin, blond hair. But they weren’t aware of it somehow. Their mother was the same way, able to look just wonderful without a lot of makeup. Nancy looked more like her dad.”
Why do we care if a murdered or missing woman is pretty? I don’t know, but we care. In 2004, Gwen Ifill of PBS coined the term “missing white woman syndrome” to describe what happens when, as a nation, we become obsessed with following the case of a missing or murdered white girl. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post instructs that to qualify for the full treatment, the missing or murdered girl must be middle-class or higher and she must be white. “The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment,” Robinson writes. “She must be attractive—also nonnegotiable.”
“It’s the meta-narrative of something seen as precious and delicate being snatched away, defiled, destroyed by evil forces that lurk in the shadows, just outside the bedroom window,” Robinson writes. “It’s innocence and optimism crushed by cruel reality. It’s a flower smashed by a rock.”
When asked by the St. Petersburg Times in 1992 if he committed the Rainbow Murders, Jacob Beard responded by looking at photos of Vicki and Nancy and then, in a move that reveals the strange yet pervasive logic that a woman’s likelihood of being raped is equal to her supposed sexual appeal, replied, “They were definitely not the type of women I’d want to have sex with. They weren’t the slimmest, trimmest little things.”
Vicki and Nancy were not ideal damsels then—a narrative problem, likely why the story of their deaths never became a consuming national media sensation. Weiford would have to find some other way to make them flowers and some other way to make their killer a rock.
“Lawyers must therefore pay careful attention to the fact finder’s frame of reference, which in turn will be determined, at least in part, by his or her education, training, background, experiences, preferences, and biases,” Lubet, the trial expert, further advises.
Weiford needed a story that would appeal specifically to a West Virginia jury—a jury that would be made up of ten West Virginia men and just two women. A bunch of guys drinking, a blue van, that straight stretch of road, went the story taking shape in Weiford’s mind. Two girls (they must be girls, not women, if they are to be innocents) murdered by a group of men (they must be men, not boys, if they are to be rocks).
The theme would be how female naïveté inevitably gets smashed by male lechery and violence, and the consequences of dangerous masculinity. But not just any masculinity—specifically, local masculinity. The killer was local. The badness had come from within, and it was still within, Weiford felt. As long as Vicki and Nancy’s case went unprosecuted, that bad feeling would remain. The most appealing story was not only about men crushing women, but it was also about the redemption of Pocahontas County maleness: convict this one bad apple, and our community can be made whole again. Convicting Jacob Beard would be a cleansing, a return to moral correctness and safety, the way of the gentleman and the family. This was the story Weiford chose.