JERRY DALE’S FATHER HAD JUST taken a bad fall when I reached Dale on his cell phone. As we talked, he looked for, located, and then offered his father painkillers. In addition to being Pocahontas County sheriff from 1985 to 2000, Dale has been teaching college students since 1983 at Marshall University and elsewhere. He told me he has taught many Mountain Views students over the years and has nothing but respect for that organization. It was Dale who arranged for the judge to order that the Mountain Views land be cleared so that it could become the campground.
He is years younger than Jacob Beard, and the two didn’t grow up together, but he has formed an opinion of him over the years through the interviews he conducted with people who did grow up with Beard. It was Dale—who told me he studied behavioral science along with criminal justice—who offered the comparison to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “Split personality. The psychologist in me looks at him too as someone that was born later in his parents’ life and did not have any siblings that were close to his age. He kinda ended up being almost like an only child, somewhat pampered and somewhat spoiled.” One side of Beard was kind, attentive to his family, and successful in business. The other side was, Dale said, “crazy. He abused alcohol a lot, and I don’t have to tell you how people who use alcohol to the extreme can be unpredictable and somewhat violent.”
Along with Weiford and Alkire, Dale was still sure that Beard had been the person who killed Vicki and Nancy. His confidence was mostly based on the ballistics evidence—he believes that one of the women was killed as she sat on the bumper of Ritchie Fowler’s blue van, and the other was shot as she ran along the lane that sloped sharply downward. The idea that Franklin might have shot them from above as they sat in his Chevy Nova seems preposterous to Dale—there would also be a great deal more paraffin, or gunpowder residue, if that were the case, Dale said, since a car is such a small enclosed space and they were shot at such close range with such a high-powered gun.
Dale felt that Beard was found innocent at his second trial in large part thanks to Walt Weiford falling ill. Assistant Prosecutor Stephen Dolly did his best, as Dale sees it, but he didn’t understand the case from the inside as Weiford had.
“We lived and breathed that [case] for years, and we knew more about it than anybody.…When you work a case as long as we did, there wasn’t anything that the three of us weren’t knowledgeable about.”
This knowledge could feel like too much at times, Dale said, like a pressure bearing down on his body and those of Alkire and Weiford. When Franklin confessed again and again to the crimes, it upset Dale, who felt that he knew what had happened to Vicki and Nancy, and Franklin’s version of events wasn’t it; when Beard was acquitted, the whole world seemed to believe it.
“But that’s the way it is—that’s the way our criminal justice system is,” Dale told me. They had gotten six years from Beard, and that was pretty good for a case that so many had thought was cold. “The criminal justice system is never absolutely ideal; it’s usually a compromise someplace in between.”
I asked Dale to expand on the pressure that he, Alkire, and Weiford had been under. What was the source of that pressure? Politics, as had been suggested in the media over the years?
“No,” Dale said. “It was the pressure of being a human being and knowing what was right and wrong.” Dale strongly disputes the idea that he pursued a conviction for Beard so he could get reelected or that there was any pressure in the other direction from locals telling him to stop putting so many resources toward the investigation of two “hippie girls.”
“I know this is hard to believe in this day and age with as corrupt as our politicians are, but all we wanted to do was put the person responsible for this crime behind bars,” Dale told me. “It wasn’t right what happened to these girls.”
Years after Beard’s retrial, Dale lost his youngest son, and he felt that now he truly went to the place where the Durians and Santomeros had been. “I thought I knew what it was like to deal with death, having a parent die or a cousin,” Dale said. “But you lose a child—that’s an altogether different thing.”
I put off calling Jacob Beard many times. When I finally called him in April 2015, he answered just like any other human person, but my name in his mouth, which he uttered often at the beginning of a sentence like a man trying to sell you a car, felt threatening in a way that was hard to articulate, perhaps portending something he might want in return. In those first phone calls, I still thought he might be guilty, and he sensed it, and it made him pushy—he had an evangelical drive to convince me. By the time I was arranging to meet him in person, I believed he was likely innocent, but that didn’t mean I liked him. I booked a flight to Gainesville.
I was already late, and he was frustrated with how long it took me to find his apartment complex, which looked identical to all the other apartment complexes in that vast asphalt development soaked in sun. He wore glasses, a gray T-shirt, khaki pants, and orthopedic black sneakers. His head was bald and sunspotted; his back was large as a pillow. He wrinkled his face into the light and shook my hand.
When I asked to use the bathroom, I found it was equipped for the needs of both the very old—Preparation H—and the very young—bath toys; he and Linda often watch their only granddaughter. I was surprised when he said that he and Linda had been renting this apartment for eight years. The walls were white and bare but for the most perfunctory decorations. A hard sculpture of apples decorated with red berries floated precariously on the wall above his head when he took a seat at the small round table.
I could see his den/office, where there was a computer and a shelf of plastic John Deere tractors. He used the computer to go on Facebook (he had gone through all my Facebook friends, he told me, to see which side I was on) and make what little money he needed brokering deals for farming equipment online.
“Farming is my first love,” he said, clasping one hand with the other.
He told me that shooting groundhogs, as Pee Wee Walton and Bill McCoy were doing on the day Vicki and Nancy were murdered, is in Pocahontas County not just a way to pass the day but in fact highly utilitarian. “There’s nothing I’d rather shoot than a groundhog. They root up the fields.”
Beard filed a lawsuit against the West Virginia State Police, the Pocahontas County Sheriff’s Department, as well as Alkire and Weiford specifically, alleging malicious prosecution and police misconduct, and in 2003 he was awarded nearly $2 million to be paid by the West Virginia Board of Risk—supported by the state’s taxpayers. Most lawyers take a third of this, Beard told me, but Beard and Stephen Farmer agreed that Farmer would take 50 percent, since he’d been handling Beard’s appeals pro bono for so long. After taxes, Beard ended up with $640,000, of which he used $140,000 to pay off his debts and buy a new pickup. He estimated he paid about $600,000 in total defending himself against the charges of having killed Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero; $7,000 alone went to purchasing the transcript of his own first trial. The remainder of his settlement remained in a complicated annuity, which pays him $2,174.75 a month for the rest of his life. If he died tomorrow, which was possible since he was fresh out of the hospital for a heart attack, Linda would receive his payment in his stead until the year 2023. Linda declined to participate in the interview, even calling Beard several times to see if I was still in the apartment or if it was safe for her to come home.
Beard jumped right into talking without many pleasantries or gestures of hospitality.
“They weren’t the kind of people I ran around with,” he said, of the men with whom he was arrested. “I didn’t want to be friends with them. And I didn’t have to. I’d speak to them if I saw them, but they weren’t people I’d sit down and have a drink with.” Beard attributed this to a difference between him and these men, a difference in “quality.” “You might say that there was a little bit of a socioeconomic difference.…I didn’t go around telling people that I was better than them. I just avoided them.” As for the Rainbow people and the Back to the Landers, Beard said he got along with them. “It didn’t matter to me one way or the other.”
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.