THERE WAS ONLY ONE MOTEL in Lewisburg—the Brier Inn—and everyone ended up there. Nancy’s mother, Jeanne, and her sister Kathy, coming from Long Island, took a room, as did Vicki’s sister Mary and her cousin DeAnn. Nancy’s father, though traveling separately, got a room there too.
Defense attorneys Allen and Farmer also took rooms at the inn, and Allen’s room ended up being next door to Mary and DeAnn’s. Allowed to go free on bond during the trial, Beard stayed there, too, in his own room. He and Linda had separated in December 1992 after his arrest in Florida. “Mr. Beard reports that they were having problems for ‘a couple of years,’ and then charges pertaining to the current matter were filed,” reads a court form. “That ended it.”
Allen told Beard it was important to look rested, but Beard had trouble sleeping. No family or children or friends came to support him, though from time to time there would be someone in the courtroom he knew. After the proceedings each day, he’d go out to eat alone at one of Lewisburg’s restaurants and then meet with Allen and Farmer in Allen’s room to go over the next day’s testimony. At night and through the wall, Vicki’s sister and cousin could almost hear Beard and his attorneys’ voices asking questions, cracking sodas, cracking jokes.
The State of West Virginia v. Jacob Wilson Beard lasted twelve days, during which time reporters and camera people from news outlets both West Virginian and national sat in the press benches and bumped into each other on the stairwell landing on the way to the courtroom. Strong soaked up as much advice as she could from the other reporters. She took a liking to the seasoned vet representing the Roanoke Times; anytime he took a break for a cigarette or a cup of coffee, Strong asked him the questions for which she hadn’t been able to get answers. What’s it like to get hate mail? How do you get an interview with someone who won’t return your calls?
Walt Weiford, commuting from his home an hour away, sat alone at the desk reserved for the prosecution, though Robert Alkire and Sheriff Jerry Dale, also making the long daily drive, were never far away. Nancy and Vicki’s female relatives sat together in the first row, four across. Twenty-five citizens of Pocahontas County were called as witnesses, and over the course of the twelve days, they, too, were there.
May 19, 1993, was a Wednesday. Bill Clinton had been president for five months. The most listened-to song on the radio was Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes.” Judge Lobban smiled for the camera, then told special prosecuting attorney Walt Weiford to proceed. The back of Weiford’s head was the only part of his body that was visible to a courtroom observer when he rose from his wooden chair and stood, angling his body toward the jury. He spoke slowly and without great passion.
“Yesterday, several times we had the opportunity for some levity and a laugh or two,” he said. “We were able to break the ice and sort of get familiar with each other. But today I am sure you understand by looking—with the looks on your face, we are about serious business.”
Weiford then addressed what he felt had been two widespread misconceptions: first, Vicki and Nancy were not interchangeable members of an ideological group, but rather individuals—real women with real families and friends. Second, the Rainbow people were much less strange and organized than they had been made to seem. “It’s not a sect. It’s not a cult. It’s a group of people with a common view of life that get together, spend time with each other.”
Weiford tugged on his tie, then on each of the cuffs of his starched white shirt in a series of movements he repeated as he spoke—tie, cuff, cuff; tie, cuff, cuff; a gesture of nerves perhaps, or only a way to mark his internal rhythm.
“There was some partying going on there. The testimony will even suggest that there were efforts to engage the girls in sexual activity. An eyewitness will even say that there was some struggle. Some man-handling of the girls. That they began to be concerned again about their circumstances, and even suggested if they weren’t allowed to leave or weren’t taken somewhere, they were going to go to the law.
“Now, the testimony will tend to show that shortly after these comments were made by these young women, and really for reasons that may never be clear, absolutely clear to anybody, perhaps out of anger, perhaps out of ridicule, frustration, for whatever purpose—and it would have been a senseless purpose—this defendant, Jake Beard”—a long pause here, a turning toward Jacob Beard and an arm gesturing at him with fingers splayed—“obtained a gun and shot both girls dead.”
Weiford explained to the jury that there would be little in the way of physical evidence. No murder weapon was ever found. There would be no fingerprints and no DNA evidence, which was not widely used in the United States until the mid-1990s. Instead the prosecution’s case would be made by two witnesses, Pee Wee Walton and Johnnie Washington Lewis. Their testimony would not be spotless, Weiford conceded—Lewis was “not [a] very sophisticated” person, and Walton had been highly intoxicated—but they were determined to tell the truth as best they knew it.
Weiford spoke a long time before he realized he’d gone on too long, then rushed to wrap up. He asked the jury to keep their minds open and their eyes “on the ball.”
“Now, if you will do that, and if you will do what I am asking you right now, then the defendant will receive a fair trial. And that’s what he asks for, and that’s what he has a right to.…And if you will do those things, the verdict that you reach will be a correct one, according to the law and the evidence and the instructions of the court, and justice will be done.”
Stephen Farmer rose and buttoned his suit jacket. His head stood significantly higher than Weiford’s had, a great tuft of dark bushy hair, the top of which bobbled slightly as he spoke. He stood at a small music stand the Court TV man had procured as a podium, and the camera caught him in exact side profile. His air was more urbane than Weiford’s but less polished.
“Bob Allen over here, and I, are proud to stand before you on behalf of Jacob Beard, a fellow who grew up over in Pocahontas County, and who is charged with killing these two girls,” Farmer said, at a louder volume than Weiford had been using. “Mr. Beard is a man who is not guilty. And it is my job to give you the facts and to show you that he is not guilty.”
Farmer reminded the jury that it is not the defense’s job to prove Beard innocent but rather to prove that the state had not succeeded in making its case beyond a reasonable doubt. With that, he turned to poking holes in the state’s version of events. But where Weiford’s statement flowed and centered around a single theory and theme, Farmer’s jumped from idea to idea in a seemingly arbitrary manner.
He framed his case as a reaction to that of Weiford, saying that the state’s problem was not what they would say, but what they would leave out. “The state did not tell you that their witness, for instance, Winters Walton…witnessed two girls being shot to their death at point-blank, and forgot it for thirteen years. Not that he didn’t tell anybody. Not that he was trying to hide anything. Just that he didn’t remember it.”
Farmer recapped Beard’s phone call to the Durians and Morrison’s confession against Gerald Brown and argued that from 1983 forward, Alkire and Weiford were focused on Beard as a suspect to such a degree that they consciously disregarded evidence of other theories.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” Farmer concluded. “I concur with the one thing the prosecutor said, that this is a very serious situation. Mr. Beard wants you to pay attention to this case. Wants you to listen to the evidence. Wants you to determine whether or not he is guilty or not guilty. Ladies and gentlemen, from the evidence in this case, we believe that you will have only one conclusion, and that is that Mr. Beard is not guilty. Thank you.”
By the second day, the trial was drawing forty spectators. Barry Adams, a Rainbow member who had attended the 1980 Gathering and helped Alkire pass the photos of the dead bodies around the camp, sat in the last row with a small group of other Rainbows. “We’re here to see what kind of a show trial this is,” he told the Charleston Gazette. Adams tended to believe that Vicki and Nancy were murdered as an attack on the Rainbow people and their way of life; he was suspicious of those in power in Pocahontas County and of law enforcement. “Police, government folks, they tend to be on our case. They tend to think we’re outlaws. And in reality, we’re pretty strong about the principles of the Constitution.”
Barbara Thymius, a retired nurse and volunteer with a Greenbrier County organization that offered services to abused women, came every day of the trial and watched the proceedings from the second row, sitting just behind Nancy’s mother. She was propelled by a desire to witness and to keep watch, she said, as women often did not get a fair shake at trial, whether as victim or defendant.
“I think it’s a liars’ contest if you want to know the truth,” Thymius said.
Tim, who had found Vicki and Nancy’s bodies late that summer night thirteen years earlier, took the stand for the prosecution as the very first witness after opening statements. He wasn’t a young man anymore, but an accomplished local doctor who had built a life for himself and his family in these mountains. He laid out all the back roads in tenths of a mile and yards and all the possible ways the clearing could be accessed from each direction. He described to the court how the bodies looked—rumpled, as if they’d fallen or been moved. He told the courtroom how isolated and little-traveled Briery Knob was. He lived still, he told the jury, only a few minutes’ drive from that spot.
Dr. Irvin Sopher, sporting a head of gray hair more robust than would be expected of a man in his sixties and a face so pink it looked slapped, testified next. Now the chief medical examiner for the state of West Virginia, Sopher had once participated in the exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald. Sopher spoke in elegant jargon like the television doctor Quincy. He cocked his hands into guns and leaned far back in the witness chair. To better gesture at enlarged line drawings of two human bodies punctured by bullets, he wanted to use an easel.
“If that would be helpful, you may do that,” Judge Lobban told him. “If there is room to set it up there. Maybe it will lean.”
The two bullets that killed Vicki, Sopher testified, were discharged from a distance of about a foot, entered through the top of her left breast, punctured her heart and lungs, and exited her back near her right kidney. The shot paths were roughly parallel to each other, Sopher explained, indicating that they had been fired in quick succession.
“This is a markedly downward path,” Sopher emphasized, about a forty-five-degree angle, which would be very unusual if the person was shot while standing upright. He suggested that Vicki must have been seated or bent over. “Unless someone were standing on a ladder or a chair, but that doesn’t make much sense, you see.”
Nancy was also shot at a close range of about a foot, once in the head at an angle more or less parallel to the ground and twice at a downward angle—one shot entered her chest near her collarbone and exited through her back near her right lung. The other had “a very peculiar angle,” Sopher testified, entering and exiting her right breast from top to bottom, suggesting she may have been bent forward at the time of impact. Unlike the other two, either one of which would have been enough to kill, this shot would not have been fatal and the lack of hemorrhage suggests it might have been fired after Nancy’s heart stopped beating.
Cross-examining Sopher, Allen then asked, “Are any of those wounds consistent with anybody running away and running up a hill?”
“If they were flexed at the waist. But they would have to be running toward the weapon.”
The time of death, essential in establishing the prosecution’s theory of the crime, was hotly disputed. Sopher had originally said that the women most likely died around 7 pm, which would make it hard for Beard to have been the killer, since he was at the school board meeting in Marlinton, about forty minutes away, by 7:30 pm. On the stand, Sopher now said that he could not be certain. He was not Quincy after all. By his best estimate, the murders probably occurred between 6 and 9 pm but could have happened as early as 2 pm.
Christine Cook took the stand next. Pee Wee Walton had said in police statements that he saw Cook on Droop Mountain that day talking to the Rainbow girls, so she was an important element of propping up one of the main eyewitnesses to the crime. By now she lived in Morgantown, working as a unit clerk for the army and even had a new name, having separated from Paulmer Adkison. She now said that she “could not swear to it,” but she thought that Johnnie Lewis was there, riding with Arnold Cutlip. Later, she said, a “bunch of people” ended up on Droop Mountain. “I think Bill McCoy was there. And Richie [misspelling in transcript] Fowler. I think Gerald Brown may have stopped by.” Cook said that everybody was talking about the Rainbow family and wondering why they had come to Pocahontas County. Some of the men had been out to the Rainbow camp to check out the scene. When asked if she knew Beard or had ever met him before, she said she didn’t think so and didn’t think he had been there that day on Droop.
Cook was equally vague on the sequence of events. She said she thought the latest she was on Droop was 5 pm, but again she was not certain.
“Did you see any girls there that day there at the park?” asked Walt Weiford.
A: I don’t believe so. Again, I couldn’t swear to it, because it’s a long time ago. And I don’t believe there was any girls in the van…
Q: Was there drinking going on there at the park?
A: Yes, there was.
Q: A great deal?
A: Yes. They always drank a great deal.
Q: What was being consumed?
A: Seven and seven—and I forgot what all they drank. A lot of liquor and a lot of beer.
Q: Do you recall advising Sergeant Alkire that this was a time of your life that you wanted to forget?
A: Yes, because it’s a lot of bad memories. I am sure people like to put their pasts behind them.
On the morning of the third day, locals William Scott, Sis Hively, and Steven Goode testified to seeing Beard racing his truck up the road at the entrance to Droop Mountain State Park, Beard’s intoxication at the school board meeting, and his presence at Gerald Brown’s trailer that night on Droop Mountain, respectively. Pamela Wilson, narrow, with power bangs, read into evidence her 1992 statement that she’d seen two “hippie-type girls” get into a blue van driven by Richard Fowler.
Bobby Lee Morrison was thirty by now, work-strong and handsome in a flannel shirt, with a thick mustache and hair that hung down past his collar. When the Court TV footage aired, the anchor asked the guest commentator if Morrison was dressed appropriately for court. She would have thought not, the anchor said, “but hey, you’re in West Virginia.”
Weiford needed Morrison to testify that Jacob Beard had bullied and threatened him into making false statements; Farmer wanted to offer Morrison as a possible alternative suspect—after all, he had once given a detailed murder confession that lined up with some of the facts.
During cross-examination after the lunch break, Farmer took Morrison through every element of his later recanted 1983 confession against Gerald Brown, demanding to know where Morrison “got” various details—how much each of the women had to drink, the mud puddle he had described, the brush under which their backpacks were found. Morrison again claimed that Beard had told him key pieces of evidence about the events so that his statement incriminating Brown would be more believable. But Morrison gave conflicting information about the source of his facts—he had told the grand jury that the police gave him the information that one of the women had drunk more alcohol than the other, but at trial, he said that Beard had told him that. As Farmer cross-examined him, Morrison’s jaw, set in anger, clicked back and forth. His knee, where his baseball cap rested, jiggled up and down.
Q: You also told them that you just made that information up out of the whole cloth, didn’t you?
A: I don’t think so.
Q: “Answer: I was—that was made up.” “Question: Who made it up? Answer: I did.” Nobody told you that information, did they?
A: Mr. Beard told me that one of them was supposed to have drunk and the other one wasn’t supposed to have drunk.
Q: Then why did you tell the grand jury in 1983 that you just made it up?
A: I think that was recanted wasn’t it?
Q: That’s what you’re saying here.…That’s what you said isn’t it?
A: I don’t remember…
Q: If Sergeant Alkire and Trooper Lanham would say that you were threatened in jail by Gerald Brown to change your story would that be a lie?
A: I don’t think so, because I don’t think I was threatened in jail by Gerald Brown.
Q: Did you tell these law enforcement people that the reason you were changing your story to implicate Jake Beard after being in jail with Gerald Brown…was because Gerald Brown had threatened you, would that be a lie?
A: I don’t know, cause I don’t think I was ever threatened in jail by Gerald Brown.
Q: Did you tell these gentleman, these law enforcement people, that you were threatened by Gerald Brown to change your story to implicate Mr. Beard?
A: I don’t think so.
Q: You don’t remember?
A: No, I don’t.
Q: How many murders have you witnessed?
A: I have never witnessed any murders.
Q: How many murders have you given statements on and confessed to?
A: None, that I know of.
Q: This is the only one?
A: Yes.
Q: And you don’t remember?
A: No I don’t.
To observers, including the Court TV commentators, it was hard not to wonder about the truthfulness of Morrison’s testimony. After a commercial break, the anchor turned to her commentator. “Let me ask you, Matthew, about what we just saw with the cross-examination of this witness who at one point snapped at the defense attorney there.”
“Well, I’m upset, and let me tell you why,” responded her guest. “[Morrison] remembers something from thirteen years ago, doesn’t remember something from yesterday. He says he’s been threatened by Mr. Beard.…What’s he holding back?”
In his closing argument, Farmer, too, would harp on Morrison’s hostility and strange demeanor.
“How many times did [Bobby Morrison] say ‘I don’t know’ to a difficult question? Did you notice that the entire time he was in the courtroom he did not look at you, he did not look at me, and most of all he never once laid eyes on Jake Beard? The entire time he testified he looked directly at that back wall and thought to himself, when is this hell gonna be over?”
Alkire’s testimony and cross-examination, with the aid of a big black binder of his notes, took up the better part of the trial’s second week, interspersed with other witnesses for scheduling reasons. Though only in his early forties, the hair on both sides of Alkire’s head was a distinctly lighter shade of gray than the top and front, which flopped, Bieber style, onto his forehead. His green, short-sleeved West Virginia State Police uniform was adorned with black and gold patches on both shoulders and the metal badges that marked him as a first sergeant. He looked attentive, eager, and exhausted—the dark areas underneath his small eyes were the size of quarters. He answered many of Weiford’s questions with a quick, courteous “yes, sir” or “no, sir.”
Alkire testified that Beard fell under suspicion because of the telephone calls he placed to the Durian house in 1982, but after that, Beard was an informant of sorts, providing investigators with ideas, none of which led to any evidence in the case.
“Local people did the killing,” Alkire quoted Beard as saying.
Stephen Farmer conducted a long cross-examination that pushed hard on Alkire. Farmer stood on Alkire’s left and very close, such that Alkire was obliged to turn his head to look at Farmer and answer his questions, and the cameras took Alkire mostly in right profile. Farmer was combative, aggressive even, while Alkire seemed calm, folksy, wrongly attacked. Farmer read Bobby Morrison’s confession back to Alkire.
Q: Did you provide him with that information or did he provide it to you?
A: He provided it to me.
Q: You did not lead him or provide him with any of that information?
A: No sir.
Q: To the extent that he says that you provided him with any information, is he not telling the truth?
A: That I provided him with this information? I did not provide him with this information.
Q: Were you careful not to ask him questions in a manner that would give him the answer?
A: Well, absolutely, yes sir.
Q: So if he says that you intentionally or inadvertently asked him questions in a manner which would clue him into the answer, would that be a lie?
A: It would be an accident on my part, if I did. I can’t say that I don’t make mistakes. I could have asked a leading question, but I try to stay away from that, yes sir.
Farmer continued reading Bobby Lee Morrison’s statement and underscored that in 1983, Alkire had felt that Morrison had so much information about the case—including information not released to the public—that he had to have been there. Alkire agreed that he had felt that way in 1983 and had testified as such to a grand jury, but had since changed his mind and lost confidence in Morrison’s statement. Over and over, Farmer tried to show that Morrison’s story was specific and accurate, while Alkire tried to politely push back, asserting that it was more or less in line with the facts, if a little vague.
“If you’re going to vent your anger at a witness and you’re gonna try to prove that some sort of conspiracy had taken place, pick on Bobby Lee,” the Court TV commentator said later. “The jury would much prefer that than picking on nice old Officer Alkire.”
He also criticized Farmer’s overall strategy: “Why not start right out and say, ‘There are other people who had motives; there are statements that were made.…’ This is thirteen years later. They can’t go after the dead man [Gerald Brown], so why not go after Mr. Beard? Nobody likes him anyway!” He felt Farmer was not presenting a strong story, wholly separate from the story Weiford was telling, to the jury.
Liz Johndrow, now thirty-one and living in Vermont, traveled with her boyfriend for the trial. Walking through the hallway, she came face-to-face with Nancy’s dad. He took Liz in his arms. A lot of weeping.
Liz was sorry, she told Nancy’s dad, but she couldn’t give him what he was looking for.
Liz’s hair was cut short and held back by a thick black headband. She wore a beige suit jacket that was too big for her, even with its prominent shoulder pads. Her face and lips were pale too; the only color on her person came from her nose, which was red, and her eyebrows, which were dark and thin and perfectly horizontal. On the witness stand, she looked focused yet far away, determined to remember the truth, but with little access to it. She took long pauses after each question and a few times counted things out on her fingers.
After she had been sworn in, Weiford asked Liz where she lived now, and she answered him—but very quietly.
“If you would speak up so that everyone can hear you. You say you live in Brattleboro, Vermont?”
Weiford continued to struggle to hear Liz. Later in the testimony, Stephen Farmer also interrupted Liz, saying he could not hear her.
Judge Lobban turned to Liz then. “Miss Johndrow, I think the jury is straining also to have to hear you.…Your testimony is going for naught.”
Weiford led Liz through each step in her journey with Vicki and Nancy. After leaving the beach in South Carolina, the trio boarded an empty Trailways bus that took them to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Liz called home and decided not to go to the Gathering. After informing Vicki and Nancy of her change of heart, Liz testified, “they would head to the Gathering, and I would head to Vermont.” Liz looked down at the courtroom floor a long time as she said the word “Vermont” and did not lift her eyes even when Weiford started his next question.
The next morning, Liz testified, they got a ride north on I-95 with a commuter headed into work who dropped them at a truck stop outside Richmond, Virginia. There was a diner there, and the women went in, even though they had no money—loose change, maybe.
“It was like morning,” Liz testified. “People were in there having breakfast. This person bought us coffee. And we were just kind of saying our good-byes and making plans for Vicki and Nancy to come up to Vermont after the Gathering.”
As she spoke, Liz put a question mark at the end of each of her sentences. “And then we walked out to the road, and I don’t remember exactly what road? And I just remember, I—when we parted, I was on one side, they were on the other? We were headed”—Liz held her hands out wide to her sides then brought them together—“in different directions?”
“Still hitchhiking?”
“Yeah, and they waited until I got a ride because they were concerned. You know, about me taking off by myself.”
“So they were still there when you got a ride?”
“They were still there.”
In some newspaper articles from 1980, Liz is quoted as saying that she left Vicki and Nancy around noon or one o’clock on June 25, the day they died, and in others the same time on June 24; Alkire’s notes from that time indicate that she told police June 25. In court, however, Liz testified that she left them on June 24. The date matters—it would help prove or disprove the prosecution’s theory that Vicki and Nancy had been killed in the afternoon of June 25 in time for Jacob Beard to make it to the school board meeting at 7 o’clock that night. Richmond sits about 235 miles from where Vicki and Nancy were found, a drive of about six hours at 1980 speed limits, so if Liz parted from the women at noon at the earliest on June 25, the state’s timeline of the women getting killed in the afternoon would not work.
As Stephen Farmer cross-examined Liz, pointing out the different date she had given in 1980, she listened to his questions but again stared at that spot on the courtroom floor, not meeting his eyes. She scrunched her eyebrows and moved her lips while Farmer spoke, repeating the names of the places he mentioned. She touched her fingers to her eyes and leaned back heavily in the wooden chair.
“Is Charleston, South Carolina, near Sullivan’s Island?” she asked Farmer at one point instead of answering his question. “I don’t even know where Charleston, South Carolina, is.”
Farmer reminded Liz that when she first spoke with him in preparation for this trial, she was still convinced that she left Vicki and Nancy on Wednesday, June 25, not least because she remembered she arrived home in Vermont later that day and her mother and brother were out at their Al-Anon meeting, a thing they usually did on Wednesday nights. Liz made the switch to Tuesday, June 24, she testified, after talking with Alkire and other members of the state police, who helped her to count the days the trio were on the road and map their route. “It kept coming out to being the 24th,” she testified.
“Both attorneys on Beard’s defense team reacted visibly,” Strong reported, when Liz said this.
Criminal trials are long, tedious affairs, more paperwork and logistics than dramatic utterances, and by the time Pee Wee Walton took the stand, it was the trial’s seventh day, Thursday, May 27, 1993. When Walton was sworn in that morning, his face was already red, and his eyes, behind clear aviator-style glasses, looked wet. His hair was parted to the side, and he wore a brown blazer over a navy blue, vertically striped, button-up shirt; the top button was undone, so his white undershirt was exposed. He interlaced his hands in front of him.
“Do you have a clear recollection of the events of that day?” Weiford asked, consulting his notes, which were handwritten on a yellow legal pad and sat on the music stand he was using as a lectern.
“Yes, I do,” Walton said in a jaunty, eager voice that was a bit at odds with the somberness of the occasion.
The beginning of Walton’s testimony was unchanged from the story he’d first told Alkire on his lawn, but the ending was different. Yes, he and Ritchie Fowler and Bill McCoy had been sitting at the top of Droop Mountain off Route 219 at CJ’s store on June 25, 1980. Yes, they had spent the morning going to town for liquor and beer, then driving around shooting groundhogs and drinking. Yes, they had a .22 caliber pistol they had been using on the groundhogs. But then, Walton’s story now continued, someone drove by and told him and the other men that there were two girls hitchhiking down on the Renick Flats. Walton didn’t want to go and asked Fowler and McCoy to take him home if they were going to pick up the women. But Fowler, who was driving, lobbied for it and said they could just go and look at the girls—they didn’t have to pick them up.
“Okay. What did you all do?” Weiford asked Walton. Walton responded:
A: We drove down there in Renicks Valley, and where the girls was at. We slowed down a little bit. And drove by.…We seen two girls standing along the road.…They was standing there just with their knapsacks on the side of the road, waiting for a ride, I think. We drove on down to the next road that turned—secondary road, right below there, and turned. We sat there awhile.…Rich and Bill was discussing picking them up. I thought they was just going to go on by and not pick them up.
But they did turn back and pick the women up, according to Walton. It was McCoy who got out, talked with Vicki and Nancy, and helped them get their belongings inside. Fowler’s van was a ’70s captain’s style with big seats and a plush bed in the back. According to Walton, Fowler told Vicki and Nancy he was headed the way they were going but first needed to stop at his boss’s—Gerald Brown’s—trailer on Droop Mountain to pick up a paycheck. They went there and stayed about an hour. Walton claimed that when they got to Brown’s trailer, McCoy called around to more friends, “Let’s have a party. We picked up a couple of girl hitchhikers.” They then drove on to the entrance of Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, where they drank more and met up with Arnold Cutlip, Johnnie Lewis, Gerald Brown, Paulmer Adkison, Christine Cook, another man named Larry Dean, and Jacob Beard.
A: I heard something, said that they was wondering where they could take them to.
Q:…What do you mean?
A: They was wanting to take them somewhere, to get them off the road by theirself or something.
According to Walton, Cutlip then came over to the van to look at the women, then returned to where his vehicle was parked to discuss potential secluded spots where they could take the women. After that, he said, Cook left with Adkison.
Q: What’s the next thing you can remember?
A:…Rich and Bill had—said something about they was going to see if the girls would put out for them or something. And they got in the van with them.
Q: When you say “put out,” Pee Wee, what do you mean?
A: Have sex with them.
This many men meant several vehicles, and the caravan then proceeded deeper into the state park and then through the park to a popular party spot. Two of the men then assaulted Vicki and Nancy, Walton claimed, pulling their hands behind their backs and feeling them up. McCoy asked Walton for his pistol so he could threaten the women into having sex. When asked what Vicki and Nancy were doing at this point, Walton described “the shorter one”—Nancy—as not putting up much of a struggle.
“The other one”—Vicki with “the teeth that stuck out”—“was fighting with Bill quite a bit.…She was hollering that she was gonna go to the law.”
“Then,” Walton paused, stumbled on his words, reddened, and touched his mustache with the index finger of his left hand.
A: I believe, Bill said something like, uh, “we kill people, we’ll kill y’all,” or something.…The girl that had the teeth that stuck out, she come over, got away from Bill some. Bill was with Ritchie towards the other girl. She came to me and she asked me. I was on the [van] bed at that time sitting back in the corner. And she asked me why was we doing this to them. And I told her, I ain’t doing nothing to you. And Bill came back over and got her.
The women continued to refuse sex, according to Walton, and the men eventually gave up on the idea of raping them, which they seemed to regard as no great failure, according to Walton. “Rich said they ain’t gonna put out for us…just party.”
Soon more men showed up, apparently just cruising around the woods, or perhaps called to the party, and the tension was diffused. According to Walton, Vicki and Nancy were then left unattended while the men talked, drank, and went to check out guns, a homebrew operation, and a camper. Fowler had brought the weed and rolled a joint, which everybody smoked; some people, including Walton, were also drinking liquor and beer. Vicki and Nancy were now standing outside the van.
Sitting among the other journalists in the Greenbrier courtroom, Susan Strong watched Walton lose his composure as he spoke of what happened next. Walton stayed in the van while Fowler got out of it.
“What’s the next thing you can remember?” Weiford asked, with great gentleness.
A: Everybody jumping up there in the van, I guess when the first shot was fired.
Q: Did you hear a shot?
A: At this time, I can’t, I can’t say if I did or not.
Q: Do you remember people jumping in the van?
A: Yes. Everybody stood up and was standing around…
Q: What’s the next thing you can remember, Pee Wee?
A: The girl running up into the doorway and backing out.
Q: What doorway?
A: The sliding door on the side.
Q: Can you remember which girl that was?
A: I think it was the one with the buck teeth.
Q: Do you remember it clearly or could you be mistaken?
A: No it seemed pretty clear.
Q: OK. What do you remember next?
A: A person coming up into the doorway with a rifle. Like this.
Q: Do you remember who that was?
A: I’m not really sure. It had to have been Jacob since he’s the only one who had the rifle.
Q: You said it would have to have been Jacob?
A: Well I guess it couldn’t have to have been, I’m not for sure if there was anyone behind the van or not.
Q: Did you ever see anybody else holding the gun?
A: Just Arnie, they was up in front of the van.
Q: Was it Arnie with the gun?
A: No.
Q: Was it Gerald?
A: No.
Q: Was it Bill?
A: I don’t know.
Q: Was it Rich?
A: He was in the van.
Q: Was it Jacob?
A: All I can remember is just seeing the person right there with the rifle in his hand.
Q: What kind of condition were you in at this point?
A: Pretty well just about ready to black out I think.
Q: Because of what?
A: The whole mixture of things I guess. Drinking and smoking that pot and beer and whiskey.
Q: Were you afraid?
A: Um, I think it was a little too much drinking to even be afraid. It I guess scared me, had to.
Q: Do you remember what you did?
A: Just sat there, I think.
Q: You remember what you were looking at, what you were seeing?
A: Just the girl and the guy and the gun.
During Walton’s cross-examination, which would take the rest of the morning until lunch and then the rest of the afternoon after it, Stephen Farmer paced between his notes on the music stand and the dark wooden chair that served as the witness stand. Farmer pressed hard, asking when Walton first asserted that he remembered being there when the Rainbow girls were killed, and digging deeply into Walton’s mental state.
Q: And you were convinced that over the years on occasion you had dreamed it?
A: I thought I did, yeah.
Q: And during those years you drank daily, did you not?
A: No not daily.
Q: Regularly.
A: Pretty often yeah.
Q: And when you drank you didn’t drink socially did you?
A: No.
Q: You drank to get drunk. Correct?
A: Sometimes, yeah.
Q: Week in and week out, from 1980 to 1992. Is it so?
A: Pretty well, yeah.
Q: You spent a significant portion of your life between 1980 and 1992 drinking whiskey. Right?
A: (Silence)
Q: Correct?
A: Pretty well, yeah.
Nearing the end of the morning session, Farmer pulled out a white piece of standard printer paper and held it in both hands with his finger tips. It was a list of names and facts that the West Virginia State Police officers had shown to Walton on April 15, 1992, Farmer said, the day Walton was interviewed and assaulted by Estep, and the day he made his statement against Beard. Walton stated that one of the officers—he believed it was Estep though he couldn’t be sure—had shown him that piece of paper, which contained the phrase “blue van,” and that it was the officers who had given Walton that detail and told him they knew he had been in a blue van that day.
Q: Now was this before Sergeant Estep beat you up or after?
A: I’m not sure.
Q: It was before you gave any statement wasn’t it?
A: Yes.
Q: And they told you that they knew you were with Ritchie Fowler. It was not you telling them you were with Ritchie Fowler, it was them telling you that you were with Ritchie Fowler, correct?
A: Yes…
Q: And they also said, Jake Beard, Buddy [Adkison], Gerald Brown, Pee Wee Walton, Arnie Cutlip and Bobby Morrison, right?
A: Yeah.
Q: Those are the names on that piece of paper that the state police showed you before they took your statement that day, isn’t it?
A: Yeah.
When Johnnie Lewis settled his beautiful body in the witness chair the following morning, the apprehension in the courtroom was palpable. Lewis was remarkably tall and thin; his cheekbones ran hard from his long, slender nose straight back to his ears, which were so distinctly separated from his jawline that he looked as if he’d lost a part of it shaving. His voice was low; he blinked often and looked down at his hands. He wore a long-sleeved, thick, brown work shirt with a buttoned pocket on each breast. He seemed unable to read or write and could barely sign his name.
Judge Lobban asked Johnnie Lewis if he understood he was under oath. Lewis responded that he did. Lobban then told him, “Mr. Arbuckle is your attorney, and he is seated at the bench and will be available if you need to make any inquiry of him during your testimony.”
Lewis acknowledged that he’d heard this, so Weiford proceeded, even more gently than he had with Walton, speaking lower and slower. He asked Lewis his name, and Lewis answered shyly.
“Johnnie, I just want you to relax,” Weiford said. “You don’t need to be nervous, okay? All of these people just want to hear the truth, okay?”
“Okay.”
Lewis was living then with another friend, helping him out on his farm. Before that, he had lived with yet another friend, three or four miles down the road from where he currently lived. When Weiford asked where Lewis had lived during the summer of 1980, he said he could not remember for sure.
Weiford led Lewis toward the moment when Vicki and Nancy were allegedly standing up against the van.
Q: OK. Now, let me ask you Johnny [misspelling in transcript], were you paying a lot of attention to what was going on?
A: Yeah. Not much. Not much attention.
Q: Did you hear anything?
A: No.
Q: What’s the next thing you saw?
A: The girls fall. The gun cracked. The girls fall.
Q: You heard a gun crack?
A: Yeah.
Q: Where did the crack of the gun seem to be coming from?
A: Jacob.
Q: From Jacob?
A: His hand raised.
Q: Now which direction was he facing?
A: He was facing, his back to me.
Q: His back was to you?
A: Yeah.
Q: Was there anybody else standing around there?
A: Bill, Ritchie.
Q: Where were the girls at?
A: At the van.
Q: How close to the van was Jacob?
A: That table there…
Q: Now, did you hear the gun crack more than one time?
A: Three. Two times actually. Two times. Three times all together. I just hear it three times, all I can remember.
Q: What happened when you heard the gun crack the first time?
A: (Silence)
Q: What did you see?
A: The girls fall. A girl fell.
Q: A girl fell? Where did she fall at?
A: Behind the van.
Q: And when the gun cracked what did you see?
A: The girl fall.
Q: OK, anything else?
A: No. The other one started to run.
Q: The other one started to run? Did you see anybody move other than the girls?
A: No.
Q: Did Ritchie move?
A: No.
Q: Did Bill move?
A: Uh uh.
Q: Did Jacob move?
A: No, he stood.
Q: What’s the next thing you saw?
A: The other girl fall.
Q: Did you hear anything?
A: Two shots.
Q: Where were the shots coming from?
A: Jacob, I reckon. As far as I can tell.
Q: How could you tell that?
A: His arm raised.
Q: And after the gun cracked again what did you see?
A: The girl fall.
Weiford paused, perhaps sensing he was reaching the end, and asked if Lewis knew Walton. “Yeah, I seen him,” Lewis responded, but when asked if he had seen Walton that day, Lewis answered clearly that no, he had not, though he admitted it was possible that Walton had been in the van and Lewis had not seen him there.
Q: Did you drink a good bit at that time Johnny [sic]?
A: Quite a bit.
Q: Do you drink now?
A: No.
Q: Why did you quit drinking?
A: Just quit.
Q: Huh?
A: Just quit.
Mr. Allen cross-examined Lewis, establishing that Lewis had talked to the state police right after the murders, on July 3, 1980, and told them that he had been with Arnold Cutlip all day cutting locust posts. The defense wanted the jury to see how long the road had been for Lewis, from July 1980 to the spring of 1992 to this moment, over a year later, and how many times he had changed his story during this period of thirteen years.
Q: If you decided to tell the truth, Johnnie, on April 15 and 16, then why after that did you start saying you weren’t there, time and time and time again?
A: I just scared—reckon.
Q: You got scared?
A: Yeah.
Q: From who?
A: I thought I was—maybe I wasn’t there or something.
Q: You thought maybe you weren’t there?
A: Yeah.
Q: There was a doubt in your mind that you weren’t there?
A: Got to thinking I was there.
Q: So sometimes you think you are there, and sometimes you think you weren’t there. Is that correct?
A: Yeah.
Q: So you really are not sure, are you?
A: Yeah, I am sure now.
Q: Now, you are sure. Okay. What’s happened between last summer when you were saying you weren’t there, and right now, to make you sure, Johnnie?
A: Just studying over it. I know I was there.
On Friday, May 28, the eighth day of the trial, the prosecution rested its case. Farmer then rose and asked for a directed verdict of acquittal on all charges—it never happens, but you’ve got to try. But it did happen—partially. Judge Lobban dismissed the abduction-with-intent-to-defile charge, saying that no witness had placed Beard speaking to the victims or conspiring with the other defendants to “defile” Vicki and Nancy.
With one charge down, Farmer and Allen’s defense strategy was to cast doubt on the integrity of the prosecution’s whole enterprise: they argued that every step of law enforcement conduct, from investigation to evidence collection to prosecution, was tainted by impropriety and dubious conduct, and suggested other suspects with more motive and opportunity than Beard, chiefly Bobby Lee Morrison and, though dead, Gerald Brown.
The defense called Corporal Michael Jordan and Trooper First Class Dallas Wolfe with the West Virginia State Police, both officers who had come aboard the case starting in the spring of 1992 after the first round of arrests. Alkire needed help with all the interviews, particularly in taking the statements of Walton and Lewis.
Jordan told about how upset Walton had become when shown pictures of Vicki and Nancy alive, then Vicki and Nancy dead. He cried and cried. Jordan also took Walton on a drive to jog his memory. They drove along 219, south from Hillsboro, up to Droop Mountain, past the parking lot that had once been CJ’s store, and down into Renick’s Valley, where the road flattened and straightened and where Pam Wilson had allegedly seen the blue van pick up the Rainbow girls. Jordan asked Walton to point out the spot where he and the other men had picked up the two girls. There, Walton said, pointing to a spot in the road. It was Wilson’s house.
Both Jordan and Wolfe voiced concerns about the truthfulness of the testimony Walton and Lewis had given in court. Jordan testified that he felt Lewis had been intimidated by Sergeant Estep and that he doubted the theory that Lewis was present when the Rainbow girls were killed. He also testified about another possible theory of the crime: that a man locked up in a state penitentiary in Illinois named Joseph Paul Franklin had done it. Wolfe said that Lewis had “told investigators what he felt they wanted to hear.”
Marilyn Thompson, the lawyer appointed to defend Lewis in June 1992, testified next. A young lawyer, having only passed the bar in 1990, she showed an old-timer’s expertise in advocating for her client. She pointed out that on April 15, 1992, Lewis had told police that he had not seen any Rainbow girls and had played no part in the murders, but the next day under duress from Sergeant Estep, and without a lawyer, his story changed drastically. From the point at which she became his lawyer going forward, she said, Lewis denied having seen any Rainbow girls, through five additional police interviews that summer. Only in October 1992, when she was not present, did Lewis again say he had seen Vicki and Nancy get killed.
That night, Strong drove home to Droop Mountain and put her daughters, then five and nine, to bed. The weekend was Memorial Day, so Monday was a holiday, and one she usually spent with her husband’s family. They were a big clan, the Strongs, an old name in Pocahontas County and specifically on Droop Mountain, and many of their neighbors were in fact their relatives. But on this particular holiday, no one much felt like celebrating.
The trial was playing out like a mini civil war: two family members testifying for the prosecution and three, not counting Beard, testifying for the defense. Gerald Brown’s ex-wife, Drema, was also Strong’s husband’s first cousin. Drema would testify the following week in defense of Jacob Beard and by proxy her late ex-husband. Roger Pritt, another first cousin by blood to Strong’s husband, would take the stand for the defense.
Gerald Brown’s own half brother had already testified for the prosecution—saying he saw Fowler’s van at Gerald Brown’s trailer on the night of the murders, and his wife, Brown’s sister-in-law, had been the one to say that she saw Beard parked at Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park and then again at the school board meeting, where he was drunk and aggressive. Technically these prosecution witnesses were also related to Beard as well.
Strong, given the responsibility of chronicling the facts for the larger community, was stuck in the middle.
The following Tuesday, everyone reassembled in the courtroom, refreshed from their vacation or not. But they had an urgent matter to deal with: some of the Rainbow people who had been sitting in the back of the courtroom, in particular “the gentleman with the pigtails,” had written and printed up many copies of a tract called “The Haunting of Pocahontas” and, on Friday before the end of the trial proceedings, placed them downstairs in the lobby of the courtroom as well as on many of the windshields of cars parked near the courthouse—including one that belonged to a juror.
“When I picked it up and turned it over, I seen Bobby Lee Morrison—whatever the guy’s name is—up at the top. I just—I just turned it over and brought it in here to Mr. Miller. I didn’t even look at it,” the juror in question told Judge Lobban.
Each juror then had to be individually questioned to see if they had read it and if their ability to be impartial had been tainted in any way. “We’re sorry to bother you,” Judge Lobban told each member as he spoke with them. “Unfortunately, it’s a commentary about the trial and the witnesses and the parties and our system of justice in West Virginia.”
“Now,” Lobban asked one juror, “if the…document is critical of our trial and our witnesses, our lawyers, our system, our state, does that cause you any problem continuing to be a member of this jury panel?”
“As much as I have criticized all those things myself,” responded the juror, who then quickly added, “No.”
Later that morning, Gerald Brown’s ex-wife, Drema, was finally permitted to take the stand. She testified that she had been home the whole day on June 25, 1980, except for an hour in the early afternoon, because she was waiting for her mother and sister to arrive from Ohio. She claimed that no men in a blue van had come to their trailer that night, contradicting Pee Wee Walton’s testimony.
Beard’s wife’s brother, Larry Dean, testified next. Pee Wee Walton had claimed that Dean had also been in the woods the night the Rainbow girls had been killed—he had come in his jeep to “party.” Dean said that he had not been on Briery Knob that night at all and that he rarely if ever drove the jeep Walton had referenced. On cross-examination, however, Dean admitted that when he had first been questioned by police, he said that he believed Beard might have committed the murders.
Roger Pritt also offered testimony rebutting that of his cousin’s husband’s brother’s wife, Sis Hively. He claimed that Beard had not been drunk or aggressive at the school board meeting but had seemed his normal self and that they left together.
“It’s up to you; it’s your life,” Robert Allen told Beard when they’d discussed if Beard would testify on his own behalf. On the one hand, an appealing defendant who can offer a coherent story of their whereabouts elsewhere on the day of a crime or a humanizing insight into how their character would not allow for such acts can be a lifesaver. On the other, a defendant who seems nervous, hostile, distant, or otherwise unappealing can make a jury convict faster than any damning evidence.
In a bright white polo shirt, dark suit jacket, and gold watch, Beard settled himself into the witness stand on the morning of the tenth day of the trial, a Wednesday. Except for an occasional shake of his head, he didn’t move his body at all as he spoke. Once, during his long testimony, he adjusted his glasses, also aviator-style, to sit more solidly below his large, shiny forehead. He didn’t smile or cry. Instead, he frowned and looked straight ahead, answering Allen’s questions with a “yes, sir” or “no, sir.”
As Allen led Beard through his movements on the day of the murders, Allen drew an elaborate and confusing diagram on the green chalkboard.
“And where is the valley in relation to this intersection?” Allen asked.
“About where you have them squiggles,” Beard said, trying to be helpful.
Beard reiterated his alibi—that he had been at work at Greenbrier Tractor Sales in Lewisburg, then out on a service call in the afternoon, after which he got some groceries, went home, and ate a sandwich with his wife. They arrived together at the school board meeting by 7:30 pm.
Beard told the jury how defending himself in this case had tanked his health. Allen and his firm now held a second mortgage on Beard’s house, and he had been on a leave of absence from work since February 1993.
“My nerves got pretty bad,” Beard said, without emotion. “I suffered a couple blackouts. My daughter found me on the floor one Sunday morning, and I was taken to the hospital. They determined that I had had a small stroke.”
He again said he didn’t know any of the “relevant necessary people” more than to stop and chat with, and some not even that much; he had never even seen Pee Wee Walton until the preliminary motion hearings in mid-April. The only interaction he’d had with Rainbow people, he said, was in late 1980, when he met two of them who needed help hauling a burned van. They told him that “the Rainbows as a whole felt that local people had done [the killings].”
“Did you kill these girls?” asked Allen.
“No, sir. Absolutely not,” replied Beard.
The defense spent the afternoon session calling an expert they’d commissioned to do computer graphics of the bullet paths through Vicki and Nancy’s bodies based on the findings of Dr. Sopher, but it was so convoluted that even Farmer and Allen seemed to have trouble following the expert’s train of thought and its implications, if any, on Beard’s guilt or innocence.
Closing arguments took place on Thursday, June 3, the eleventh day of the trial. The gallery was clear of most spectators by then—they’d run out of sick days, or money, or interest. Kathy Santomero and her mother had returned home to Long Island; Kathy was getting married the following week and had errands to run.
“The style of Special Prosecutor Walt Weiford, whose relaxed matter-of-fact statements were delivered in increasingly hushed tones, was compared to defense attorney Stephen Farmer, who delivered his arguments in seeming frustration and increasing fervor,” reported Strong.
In his closing, Weiford said that the witnesses he presented were imperfect, which made them in fact more credible. “Johnnie Lewis was in a place he didn’t want to be,” Weiford told the court. “He saw things he wishes he hadn’t seen. Now if the state wanted to invent a witness for you, the state might have invented somebody that might have had an easier time testifying than Johnnie Lewis had.”
He also emphasized the sheer number of Pocahontas County citizens who participated in the prosecution to testify against Jacob Beard. “You will believe Mr. Beard and his relatives,” Weiford told the jury, or believe innocent citizens with no reason to lie. The other theories of the crime—Bobby Lee Morrison, Brown, and the inmate in Illinois were “hardly even worth mentioning.”
Farmer’s closing was indeed feverish, and frustrated. He delivered it from his music stand, looking at the jury. On Court TV, his face was again caught in profile.
“Pee Wee lives in Hillsboro with his mother. Sometimes he is employed; sometimes he is not. In Hillsboro, the law is the law. He told the law that he didn’t know what happened. He told the law that…what he was telling them could be a dream. What did the law do? The law made him captive. The people that were supposed to help him and the people who were supposed to be in search of the truth took him captive.
“They may not be able to do that to me. And they may not be able to do that to you all. But you saw Pee Wee. It’s real. And Pee Wee knows, when this is over, you all get to go home. I get to go home. Everybody in this court room gets to go home. Pee Wee goes back to Hillsboro. And it’s him and the law…”
“Johnnie Lewis may be the most tragic aspect of this case short of the tragic deaths of these girls.” Lewis, Farmer continued, was “an unfortunate man.…Knowing his capabilities, and the fact that he is not as fortunate as most of us, knowing that he lives out in the woods with a caretaker, is unable to care for himself.…The law…came to see him again. Now, if Sergeant Alkire was in search of the truth…why did he go get Estep to come and see Johnnie?…So they ditched the lawyer, and in October, they bring Estep back in, and it had the desired effect.
“You see because Johnnie Lewis has to go home too. Johnnie Lewis has to go home where the power is vested in the very people that he told the truth to, and look what they did to him. Johnnie Lewis knows what he has to do to survive. Pee Wee Walton knows, within both of their lives, what they must do to survive. And that was to come here and tell what the state wanted to hear.”
Farmer ended by appealing to the West Virginia jury’s understanding of how essential it can be for ordinary citizens to resist those with power. “The people that formed this county and this country came here in large part because the country that they were leaving permitted the government to randomly walk on people the way Mr. Beard has been walked upon in this case,” Farmer said. “This country is founded on the premise that it’s people like you that can look at the government and say, ‘No, it won’t happen. It won’t happen.’ Mr. Beard is not guilty. Send Mr. Beard home to try to put his life back together.”
After just over three hours of deliberation, the jury reentered the courtroom. Judge Lobban had them line up at the front of the gallery facing the judge’s bench so that Beard, Farmer, and Allen as well as Weiford were looking directly at the jury’s backs and butts. Judge Lobban read the verdict: Beard was guilty of the murder in the first degree of Vicki Durian and guilty of the murder in the first degree of Nancy Santomero. Beard did not move his head or his eyes or his face while these sentences were read aloud.
Strong did not linger at the courthouse. “The thirteen-year-old mystery,” she typed, “of who killed ‘The Rainbow Girls’ has now been solved.”