The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  Felton believed he’d photographed the face of Jesus in the clouds. Was it all that much different from another person believing he or she was sensitive to WiFi?

  Felton had also asked the attorney Robert Martin to look into the clouds. “I thought he was going to lose his shit when I said, ‘Sam, I see a Jack Russell terrier,’” Martin told me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Mountain Justice”

  THE TRAIL FORKED, both directions disappearing into densely thicketed, untrodden woods. Jenna and I had already forded three swiftly moving rivers, each swollen from an overnight downpour that left the ground muddy and our clothes soaked from brushing against waterlogged branches. We were eight miles into the Cranberry Wilderness, the U.S. Forest Service’s largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi, and our only means of navigation was a paper map, soggy and disintegrating. Our legs were lacerated and covered in itchy rashes from stinging nettles. Which way would get us out? This was not what Jenna had in mind for her birthday.

  We were lost, again, in Pocahontas County, consumed by that feeling of being untethered from society and without connectivity. All around us, a never-ending forest muffled sounds and erased footprints. The area felt simultaneously beautiful and foreboding, welcoming and hostile—a rugged, rolling terrain of secrets. After fifteen miles, Jenna and I finally emerged from the forest, which was perhaps better than others could say.

  “There’s people who went missing in Cranberry Wilderness that we’ve never found to this day,” Michael O’Brien, the county’s emergency services director, told me. He mentioned how a Cessna 414 crashed in the 47,815-acre wilderness in November 1995, going missing for six years. The body of the pilot—who was flying solo—was never found. That potential to disappear had attracted people to Pocahontas over the decades. “You wouldn’t believe the number of people who come here to end their lives,” O’Brien said. “It’s secluded. It’s wild. It’s beautiful. You can come here and say, ‘Nobody’s going to find me for a long time, if ever.’”

  The quiet of Pocahontas had initially sounded so idyllic. Then I started hearing about this darker side, finding myself engrossed with the stories and drawn to several mysterious, unsolved killings. Pocahontas was an area of extremes, and I felt sucked toward its poles. I hadn’t come to the Quiet Zone to investigate decades-old murders, and Jenna reminded me that such was far from my original premise of looking for a place outside the bounds of modern connectivity. But maybe it was all connected, so to speak. With solitude came isolation. With disconnection came the inability to call for help. Perhaps the unsolved killings were a symptom of how justice played out in an ultraquiet place.

  TINY HEMPCRETE FIBERS filled my nose, lining my nostrils and clogging my sinuses. All afternoon I’d been climbing up and down a ladder while shoving mushy handfuls of hempcrete—an insulating material made of cannabis fibers—into the walls of Bob Must’s new home in Lobelia. He and his wife, Ginger, were moving a mile away to “civilization,” a property with grid electricity where they wouldn’t have to snowshoe up a half-mile-long driveway every winter.

  I’d volunteered to help work on the house. The construction manager was a young man named Clay Condon, whom I’d first met up the road at Yew Mountain Center. The son of a back-to-the-land couple, Condon was starting a hemp farm in Hillsboro, which had some humor to it. The hippies were now openly growing what they were always suspected of smoking. (When the hemp farm was featured on the front page of the Pocahontas Times, one reader threatened to cancel his subscription, telling editor Jaynell Graham that he wasn’t paying to see “dope on the front page.” After Graham explained the benefits of CBD oil, the man kept his subscription.)

  As we stuffed handfuls of hempcrete into the walls of the house, Must told me how June 25, 1980, had almost passed by like any other day. He’d been running errands in Lewisburg, arriving home after dark. Parking his car at a turnout a half mile below his cabin, he spotted two people lying in the brush. He approached and saw the bodies were deadly still. Then he noticed the bullet wounds.

  Since Must didn’t have a landline to call the police, he drove to a friend’s house to use the phone. But that friend wasn’t home, so he drove to another friend’s house to make the call. Police questioned Must at the sheriff’s station in Marlinton, and he became the first suspect in the killing of nineteen-year-old Nancy Santomero of New York and twenty-six-year-old Vicki Durian of Iowa, who had been thumbing their way to a hippie festival called the Rainbow Gathering in the Cranberry Wilderness, on the border of Pocahontas and Webster Counties.

  First held in Colorado in 1972, the Rainbow Gathering was a monthlong camping event with nudists, hippies, environmentalists, peace activists, and other counterculture groups, all loosely organized by the Rainbow Family of Living Light. West Virginia was the first state east of the Mississippi River to host the event, and for many reasons the locale made perfect sense: the area was remote and sparsely populated, surrounded by state and national forest. On the other hand, the community was insular, conservative, and wary of outsiders, especially hippies who were anti-war, anti-marriage, anti-religion, and pro sex and drugs.

  To try to prevent the gathering from happening, a group of Marlinton residents—led by a young, buttoned-up lawyer named Robert Martin who would later become county attorney—filed a motion in federal court to stop the government from issuing a camping permit in the Monongahela National Forest. The judge denied the petition. But Martin believed he won the argument, in the end.

  “This is the Bible Belt, for God’s sakes,” Martin told me, nearly four decades after the fact. “I said, ‘Judge, you cannot allow this to happen in Pocahontas County, that’s a clash of societies, that’s a clash between classes of people that are so different that something bad is going to happen.’ And something bad did happen.”

  BOB MUST WAS well covered in alibis, but authorities still believed the killer was local, given how gunshots had been fired in the direction of the Rainbow Gathering’s camp. It was also hard to imagine an outsider wandering down a series of narrow, winding, disorienting backroads to Briery Knob, where Must found the bodies. No highways pass through Pocahontas. Getting there invariably required going over a mountain pass. If you were in Pocahontas, you wanted to be there, you had to be there, or you were born there.

  During a police investigation that stretched more than a decade, multiple witnesses implicated a local farmer named Jacob Beard, who had been in his early thirties at the time of the killings. In the years that followed, he had been charged with animal cruelty for stabbing his mistress’s dog and slicing open her cat—among many macabre subplots that included stories of a third woman having been run through a corn chopper. At a 1993 jury trial, two local men testified to having seen Beard shoot the women. Additional eyewitnesses put Beard in the area on the afternoon of the murders. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

  But there was a twist: another man had already confessed to the killings. While in jail in 1984, nine years before Beard’s conviction, the racist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin told a Wisconsin Department of Justice officer that he’d killed two hitchhikers in West Virginia because the women said they engaged in interracial relationships. His confession was barred from the 1993 trial, however, because he had subsequently denied responsibility and then refused to talk further.

  In a chilling coincidence, Franklin was connected to the neo-Nazis in Pocahontas, though the murders happened several years before William Pierce purchased his mountain compound. As a teenager, Franklin had once carpooled to a white supremacist gathering with David Duke and Don Black, who would become leaders in the movement and friends with Pierce. Pierce would dedicate his book Hunter to Franklin and laud the serial killer for doing “his duty as a white man.” In turn, Franklin admired Pierce and listened to his white power radio broadcasts.

  A 60 Minutes investigation into the case helped spur a retrial, this time with Franklin’s confession admitted as evidence. Of the two eye
witnesses in the first trial, one now said he’d been coerced by police into making a statement against Beard. After less than three hours of jury deliberation, Beard was acquitted. He received a $2 million settlement from Pocahontas County for wrongful conviction. Franklin was executed by lethal injection in Missouri in 2013 for other crimes, having never faced a judge or jury on the question of whether he killed the Rainbow women, which only deepened the suspicion in Pocahontas that Beard may have gotten off the hook.

  Eugene Simmons, the longtime county prosecutor, was one of many people directly involved in the investigation who still suspected Beard was guilty. He personally knew Beard, having once hired him to work on his farm. “He was a good guy until he started drinking,” Simmons told me. Former sheriff Jerry Dale, who investigated the case and interviewed Franklin, believed Franklin falsely confessed to increase his rank among hate groups, boost his standing among inmates, and potentially get transferred to a lower-security penitentiary in West Virginia, which had fewer Blacks in its prisons as well as no death penalty. “Trust me, I know who killed those girls, based on the evidence,” Dale told me, describing Beard as a Jekyll and Hyde character. “There’s no doubt in my mind.” The attorney Robert Martin was familiar with the men allegedly involved in the Rainbow murders, having served as defense counsel to a Green Bank woman who hired two of them to knock off her husband—they cut off the husband’s head. “They were immoral criminal types who didn’t give a shit about nothing,” Martin told me. That case was not to be confused with the Green Bank man who decapitated his wife, buried her head in the backyard, and tossed the rest of her body down his well.

  OF THE TWO PEOPLE who testified in court to seeing Beard kill the women, I was told that only one was still alive. I found him in the same Hillsboro house where he’d been living in 1980 at the time of the murders. Nearly four decades after the fact, however, Winters Charles “Pee Wee” Walton was even more hazy about what had happened. He recalled being in a van atop Briery Knob on a hot day. Beard and some other men were drinking whiskey or another kind of cheap liquor. He heard gunshots. He noticed bullet holes in their van afterward. As for what happened in between, “I never could get it straight,” Walton said, “because I was drinking, too.”

  During the investigation in the ’90s, Walton had been roughed up by law enforcement in an effort to jog his memory, with police punching and slapping him, placing a boot on his neck and threatening to strike his testicles. He was also taken to a hypnotist to aid his recall.

  “Did it work?” I asked Walton, as we chatted on his porch one evening. “Were you hypnotized?”

  “I don’t know if I was or not,” he said.

  “I guess that’s the nature of hypnotism,” I said. Finally, I simply asked, “Do you think Jacob Beard did it?”

  “I thought he did,” Walton said, “but I’m not really sure.”

  The only other person alive who would know what had happened was Beard himself, so I looked him up and called a couple of wrong numbers before reaching him at his house in Florida. In his seventies, Beard was surprisingly willing to talk about a case that had either ruined his life or allowed him to get away with murder, depending on whom you asked. He still kept in touch with friends from Pocahontas and subscribed to the Pocahontas Times, but he said he could never return to the county to live.

  “A lot of people up there think I’m guilty,” he said.

  “What would you say to people who think you did it?” I asked.

  “They’re going to believe what they believe. At my age, I don’t care what they say.”

  Over the phone, I ran through the evidence that I’d heard against him: that on the second anniversary of the murders, when the case was still cold, he’d called one of the slain women’s parents to offer condolences; that Walton had testified to seeing him pull the trigger; that he’d been known as a volatile and heavy drinker; that he’d been charged with mauling his girlfriend’s pets. Beard said he drank only the occasional beer (which contradicted local testimony and records of a 2006 arrest for drunken driving), that he didn’t kill his ex-girlfriend’s pets (even though the animal cruelty case was documented), and that he didn’t even know Walton (which seemed unlikely, given that everyone knew everyone in the community). The only thing he didn’t deny was that he had called one of the slain women’s parents in 1982.

  “I said I was sorry for what happened to their daughter,” Beard said. “I just was hoping to get the investigation started again. I had two daughters and I wouldn’t want to feel what those parents felt, to be called up in the middle of the night and told their daughter was murdered.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “It sounds like you believe I’m guilty,” he said.

  “I honestly don’t know what to believe,” I said. “But you can imagine where I’m coming from, having spoken to so many people in Pocahontas County and hearing everything from one side so far, and that’s why I need to speak with you, because I need to get your side.”

  “My side is I wasn’t there. I didn’t do it.”

  In recent years, two true crime books had also concluded Beard was innocent. Regardless of who did it, somebody got away with it.

  SWIRLING AROUND THE CASE was the notion of “mountain justice,” a phrase that I heard repeatedly. Bob Sheets, who had been on the second grand jury for whether to bring Beard to trial (and called it a “no-brainer” decision to send the case to court), described mountain justice as local people taking matters into their own hands, a pact of silence falling over those involved, and an acceptance that the law played out differently in Appalachia.

  As examples of mountain justice, I heard of an old widow who shot the legs of a man spotlighting deer in her orchards, and a young woman who shot her deadbeat husband four times through the front door; neither woman was charged, because mountain justice had already been served. Sheets told me about a particularly infamous case that ended with three people dead, making the front page of the Charleston Daily Mail in 1973. A Green Bank woman was having an affair with a man who happened to have a pirate-like hook for a hand. The hooked man got into an altercation with the woman’s husband in the high school parking lot after a graduation ceremony, stabbing the husband with a knife and killing him. He was arrested but released on bond, and whispers began circulating that he had a target on his back. Weeks later, the hooked man (who was from a neighboring county) had a rendezvous in Green Bank with the woman. They were ambushed on Wesley Chapel Road and both shot dead, their bodies left in the road along with five shell casings from a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  Many locals had an idea of who killed the couple, according to Sheets, but “there was no investigation. Mountain justice.”

  Eugene Simmons was the prosecuting attorney then, and he told me there was evidence that at least three people were involved in the killings, with multiple vehicles used to block the couple’s getaway. It would have been up to him to open a criminal investigation, but he said an overnight rain had simply washed away all the evidence. “Generally speaking, everybody knew who it was, but there was no evidence,” Simmons said. “I dropped the case.” (His own legal ethics weren’t entirely unquestionable, as he’d had his law license suspended in the ’90s for fleecing clients.)

  Simmons himself had been on the receiving end of mountain justice. In 1972, he was riding a tractor through his hayfield when he heard his engine backfire. When he heard the sound again, his arm and leg started bleeding. He’d been shot. “I jumped off and started running, made it to the fence and passed out,” he recalled. “Some people drug me out and brought me to the hospital.” He’d nearly been killed by a man named Jack Biggs, who was angry that Simmons was representing Biggs’s wife in a divorce proceeding. “He shot the whole bottom of my arm off,” Simmons told me. “If he’d been a quarter of an inch higher, it would have taken the arm off and I would have probably bled to death.” Simmons hadn’t been armed then, but he said he’d kept a firearm by his side ever since.


  “WE HAD A SHIT TON of murders around here back then,” the county attorney Robert Martin was telling me. Not that Pocahontas was dangerous, he added. Crime was low. Neighbors looked out for one another. People weren’t scared to live there. Andrew Must, who grew up near where his father found the murdered Rainbow women, told me that the killings were rarely discussed—not because they were taboo, but because the incident was so unrepresentative of everyday life.

  “Do you know that right now you can walk out there in my driveway and all three of those vehicles have the keys in them?” Martin said. “Do you know we don’t lock our houses? There’s not a lock on this house that works. Do you think I worry about that? I don’t lose a goddamn minute’s sleep over it.”

  “C’mere a minute,” he said, getting up from his kitchen table. I followed him down the hallway, up the stairs, and into a spare room. He pointed to a dozen rifles leaning in the corner. None was locked up, which was Martin’s whole point. He was unconcerned. He picked out an antique rifle that had been carried by his great-grandfather into battle for the Confederacy.

  “And you’ve got a sword,” I said, noticing a steel blade among the gun barrels.

  “You ever seen Braveheart?” Martin said. “You know at the end of the movie when Brendan Gleeson throws that sword that flies through the air and sticks in the ground? That is the sword from the movie.”

  “How’d you get that?” I asked.

  “I bought it,” he said matter-of-factly. He pointed to another sword. “You ever seen The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise? See this? That’s the practice samurai that Tom Cruise used in that movie.”

  Martin had movie memorabilia signed by Robert Redford and John Travolta, walls of expensive artwork including a lithograph signed by Kurt Vonnegut, and shelves of exotic rocks on display. “That’s a dinosaur egg,” he said, picking up an ovular rock. “See this?” He pointed to another one. “It’s a dinosaur turd.” Hidden away in a chest, he also had a collection of Nazi memorabilia, including an authentic Nazi armband, a Nazi officer’s ring, and souvenirs from the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. He’d purchased it during an estate auction in Charleston. “A bunch of skinheads were after that stuff,” Martin said. “I wasn’t going to let those sons of bitches have it. I decided I’d buy it and burn it before I let those bastards have it.”