SUSAN STRONG ALWAYS WANTED TO be Lois Lane. A junior high teacher told her she could write, and after reading about how Woodward and Bernstein uncovered Watergate, reporting was all she wanted to do.
As Vicki and Nancy’s lives as adult women were ending, Strong’s was just beginning. She was two years out of high school and had been working all through the month of June 1980 fixing up the house that she and her fiancé, a man she had known since she was a freshman and he a senior, would move into. She would be leaving her parents’ farm and moving up onto Droop Mountain, where she knew no one except her husband’s cousins, Gerald and Drema Brown. When the Rainbow people started coming, she was excited; she went down to Marlinton to watch them arrive and wave. Then the bodies of two girls from somewhere else turned up on Briery Knob. Three weeks later, she and her husband were married.
Like most others in the county, Strong kept up with the Rainbow Murders in the paper and heard talk of the case when she went out to eat or shop for groceries or pump gas. For a time, she didn’t believe the killer could be local. She preferred not to put stock in rumors. But over time, she began to believe.
By the time Strong turned thirty-three, she had two daughters and had gone back to school to get her bachelor’s degree in English. She and her husband volunteered at their Lutheran church and for the Democratic Party and the Family Refuge Center. She had interned at the Pocahontas Times under the elderly Bill McNeel, learned fast, and gotten hired afterward.
The defense’s motion for a change of venue was granted in the spring of 1993, after Beard was rearrested, and McNeel’s health was failing. The trial was expected to last three weeks. Would Strong be up for making the long drive and covering it freelance? She would.
Beard’s trial was assigned to Judge Charles Lobban, a balding man in his sixties with a patrician diction and a military record. His courtroom was in Lewisburg, county seat of neighboring Greenbrier County, where Beard had lived and worked for many years—not quite the distance Beard’s lawyers had hoped for.
The Greenbrier County Courthouse room was neither grand nor shabby, but simply utilitarian: cream-white walls, linoleum floor tiles, windows with slatted blinds. The only things that distinguished the room from a modest Presbyterian church were the dark wood judge’s podium, which matched the wood tone of the spectator benches.
Each day, Strong left her home on Droop Mountain and drove the forty minutes to the courthouse in Lewisburg. She wasn’t alone, as media went; the same television firm that had covered the first Rodney King and Jeffrey Dahmer trials wanted to film the Rainbow Murder trial and air the footage on Court TV.
The defense team objected—the Lewisburg courtroom was not well-suited to being televised. There were no podiums for the lawyers upon which microphones could rest. Wires would have to be run up and behind the bench, which didn’t thrill the honorable Judge Lobban, who was a few years out from retirement and prone to tripping. “Don’t you want to be on national television?” the representative from Court TV asked Beard’s attorney, Robert Allen. “No,” responded Allen, “I would rather be on the farm.”
But Court TV prevailed. The accommodations were made, and people around the United States could now watch a West Virginia murder trial on their television for the first time. “As you leave the courtroom you might smile,” the affable Judge Lobban would later tell a group of children visiting the proceedings for a school trip. “You may find you’re on camera.”
The potential jurors were exceedingly polite to Beard’s lawyers and to Weiford during jury selection. Though they had large farms to run, gardens to weed, children to watch, and sick parents to care for, they were not eager to evade jury service—No, it’s fine; my farm is rented. It’s no problem; I’ll get a babysitter.
Two male potential jurors had mothers who were retired correctional officers at the women’s prison in Alderson, twenty miles away, where Martha Stewart would one day do her time. One juror had a father who had been murdered. One potential juror had himself been a correctional officer.
“Do you think that that has had any impact or influence on your thinking as to people that have been accused of a crime?” asked Mr. Allen.
“No,” the juror responded. “If anything, in my opinion, it would probably be for me more reassuring that I did have an open mind, from seeing, you know, both sides of the tracks. I deal with the facts. I mean, if I don’t see it, it didn’t happen.”
Lobban addressed the potential jurors. How many of the jurors had already read something about the case? All but three jurors responded that they had. Read something about it in the last two or three days? Nine hands. Talked to someone about it? Ten.
Mr. Farmer then asked a question. “Have any of you ever been involved in a situation where you felt that something happened in a certain way, and therefore tried to reconcile or conform facts to support that view of what happened?”
Judge Lobban interrupted: “That’s probably human. Everybody does that some.”