[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl
Page 9
For days after Nancy’s sister identified the bodies, sheriff’s deputies in West Virginia and Iowa searched for the elusive “Liz.” Authorities in every American state were sent her description. “It seems now that a third girl may be involved,” reported McNeel. “She is believed to be a tall, slender, blond named Elizabeth.” The area around Briery Knob was checked and rechecked for this “third Rainbow girl.”
A week later, Alkire’s phone rang at the state police headquarters.
My name is Elizabeth Johndrow, the voice said. And I’m alive.
Liz met Vicki Durian at the co-op grocery store in Tucson, just as Nancy had. Liz was hanging outside the store with her backpack when Vicki tore off a hunk of the crusty bread she’d bought and handed it to her. Liz had hopped out of a van headed west earlier that day and didn’t know anyone in town; Vicki had put down some roots and had a mentor’s warm energy. They walked the three blocks to Vicki’s apartment, which she shared with two other women. She’d been in Tucson about six months and worked as a nurse in the homes of elderly people in the area to pay the bills. There were already a few people camping in tents in her backyard, and another couple living out of a truck that was parked in the front. All Vicki had left for Liz was a closet. Would that work? It was a big closet.
When Vicki wasn’t working, she and Liz walked all over Tucson. Vicki knew the restaurants, supermarkets, bakeries, and produce suppliers that threw away perfectly good food, so they dumpster-dived and prepared what they found in big dinners for whoever happened to be staying at Vicki’s that night. They sat on the steps of Vicki’s house with the other travelers and talked. Someone knew beadwork, and from then on that’s what they did with their hands. Vicki took Liz to parties at the sprawling communal house where Nancy had stayed, but Liz and Nancy didn’t meet each other. The house was a real hippie household; they juiced everything in sight, drank wheatgrass, and kept a kombucha mother in the fridge, which did not surprise Liz.
Almost nothing surprised Liz then. She was eighteen, but she felt much older, felt that she had seen it all, done it all, drugged it all. So when, a few months after arriving in Tucson, Liz heard about a hippie outlaw commune in the desert, she figured it was as good a time as any to head there. Its residents were several families from Arkansas who had been caught growing pot by the kilo and others who were hiding out from the law. Some of them had been to last year’s Rainbow Gathering. Go, they told Liz. She had saved some money, but it was stolen at the commune. She went.
Liz was in a school bus on her way to Washington State—another adventure—but then Mount St. Helens erupted, covering the entire Pacific Northwest from Idaho to Alberta in ash. She caught a ride out of Portland, and arrived in Iowa a few days after Vicki and Nancy.
Liz could calculate the miles they needed to cover and about how long it should take them to get there, but it was Vicki who would lean over and make people stop, and Vicki who would talk to them about who they were and where they were headed, while Nancy hung back on the road’s shoulder. There was the woman who drove past them because she was too scared to pick up three hitchhikers and then turned around and came back because they were women and she felt she should. They got a ride in an RV from another woman who told them, Send me a postcard when you get where you’re going. A truck driver let them off at a truck stop in Illinois and told them about a baseball field nearby where they could get a safe night’s sleep. There was a Christian guy who took them home to his family for dinner. They had a gun pulled on them. The guy told them he just wanted them to know he had it. Then he put the gun away and drove on. In Louisville, they were riding in a semi truck with a bench seat, and the driver started grabbing at Vicki, who was sitting next to him. When they stopped at a traffic light, Vicki grabbed his deodorant can and sprayed him in the face with it, and the trio hopped out and ran. Vicki taught Liz how to juggle. They had a tent but never used it; that’s how clear the sky was. Vicki had brought a small drum in a velvet case, and she played it if she couldn’t sleep.
The three friends reached Charleston, West Virginia, ahead of schedule. Vicki wanted to go to the beach, said they had time, and Liz and Nancy agreed. A guy picked them up and drove them to a big old mansion on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. He had home brew, he made his own furniture, and the women talked with him awhile, swam with him off the coast, and spent the night in his rambling home. They’d intended to spend another night camping on the beach, but it rained. They left the next day, catching a ride in an empty Trailways bus up into North Carolina, and planned to make it to the Gathering the following day.
That night, Liz had a feeling she should call home and acted on it. Her father was getting remarried in Vermont that week, she learned, so she decided to part ways with Vicki and Nancy. At a truck stop in Richmond, Virginia, the three women said their good-byes; Liz stood on a road headed north; Vicki and Nancy stood across from her so they could catch a ride west toward the Gathering. A truck stopped and picked her up, Liz told Alkire, and she didn’t know what happened to her friends after that.
Most every business owner along all the routes Vicki and Nancy might have taken from Richmond to Droop Mountain had something to tell Alkire. A woman in a county to the east swore she had seen Vicki and Nancy sitting in her diner. Another woman in Hillsboro was equally sure they had walked by her house and shown her a Swiss army knife. Feeling swamped, Alkire took the ones he could, then gave a stack of tips to other officers, both state police and Pocahontas County Sheriff’s Department.
Feeling was not Alkire’s first language. His father was military and moved the family to Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Alabama, Germany, then back to West Virginia to Buckhannon, a small city that contained a rigorous liberal arts college and that looked more like Pittsburgh than like Pocahontas County. The family stayed in town just long enough for Alkire to finish high school, and then they were gone again. But so was Alkire—without them. His great-uncle had been a state police officer, and Alkire wanted to be too, but the timing was wrong. Nine days after graduation, he signed up for the navy. At seventeen, he stood on the deck of the USS Quillback headed for Spain. Later Guantanamo Bay and Key West. It would be years before Alkire would see the United States again, or anyone he had known.
The Quillback crew was close. “Truly one of the great experiences of my life,” writes one of Alkire’s contemporaries on a website that promises reunion with old navy buddies. Another writes, “Looking for shipmate Hinkley, first name not known. [While] on board Quillback, had operation on lower jaw?” But Alkire didn’t haul or scrub like the rest; he collected information, he watched and recorded, and shaped it all into plans and coordinates. “Best boat I was ever on,” writes a third. “Was on 5 boats all out of Key West, FL. Anyone remember me?”
No one remembers Alkire. He kept quiet, did his work, and came back to West Virginia. In rapid succession throughout the 1970s, as if checking off boxes on a to-do list, he got his degree from West Virginia University, got married, had his first son, entered the state police academy, had a second son, and graduated. He had a thick head of brown feathered hair and had developed a low, loping gait. He didn’t want to write tickets; he wanted to solve murders and, once given the opportunity, set himself fully to the task. The state police divided West Virginia into four quadrants, and Alkire had C company—some six thousand square miles, including Pocahontas and nearby Greenbrier counties, as well as more populous counties to the north and west. Throughout the late 1970s, he solved a lot of murders, and rose from trooper to trooper first-class and then eventually to corporal. Whenever a case needed help or a fresh look, they’d call Alkire, and he’d go.
The Rainbow Gathering map Vicki had been carrying suggested that travelers exit Interstate 64 in Virginia just east of Pocahontas County and then use a two-lane road to cross into West Virginia, eventually ending up in Marlinton. But based on the fact that Vicki and Nancy’s bodies had been discovered on the southern side of Pocahontas County, off Route 219, Alkire began to work wi
th the theory that they might have overshot their target and taken the interstate farther than recommended, getting off at the exit for Lewisburg.
In our time, Interstate 64 runs a comfortable 189 miles, crossing the state of West Virginia horizontally, but in 1980 its line was fresh and broken—a few sections west of Pocahontas County remained yet unfinished. If a traveler wished to continue past that point, she’d reach Beckley and then have to exit and take a steep two-lane road into Charleston. This state of affairs remained unchanged until 1987, when the gap was finally closed, making it one of the last and, because of its steep grade, most expensive stretches of interstate to be constructed in the United States.
In 1980, the Lewisburg I-64 exit sign advertised access to Route 219, which may have been why Vicki and Nancy took it—219 was marked on their hand-drawn map as an alternate, though not recommended, route. If a traveler were to pull off I-64 and head north toward Pocahontas County, the first place to get gas was the Little General store.
A woman who worked as a cashier at the store gave a statement saying that on June 25 between 5:30 and 6 o’clock in the evening, two women came in and bought something, though the woman could not remember what, and paid for it with some coins from a green velvet change purse. They told her they were from Arizona, which she remembered because it was so odd—the desert. Then they left and got into a black Chevy Nova driven by a young man who had purchased six dollars’ worth of gas. He was “tall and thin, wasn’t a hippie, blond hair. No glasses, no beard, or mustache.” The Nova turned right, the woman said, continuing north on 219 toward the Rainbow Gathering.
Alkire began looking for dark Chevy Novas, starting with several in the county that met the store owner’s description. Alkire also looked for people with a history of run-ins with the law; there was a local “flasher” with a history of nonconsensually masturbating in front of women, who didn’t have a firm alibi. Just two houses were within earshot of the spot where Vicki and Nancy died: one belonged to a deaf octogenarian, and the other to a man named Arnold Cutlip and his partner, Virginia Schoolcraft, who said that she had heard several gunshots on June 25 between 4:00 and 4:15 pm. When Alkire asked around about Cutlip, he was told that Cutlip was a heavy drinker who sometimes abused Virginia.
Alkire and his associate, a Sergeant FW Dickinson, clacked out a list of three possible suspects: (1) The flasher, (2) Arnold Cutlip, who “was in the area at the time of murders and is capable of drinking or committing acts of murder.…Appears to know more than he is telling,” and (3) Paulmer Adkison, a local young man who had been spotted in the area around Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park on the day of the murders and was already being investigated for another local death—a murder for hire.
In a pleasing parallel, the neat report also offered three possible motives: (1) “For sexual satisfaction, as one of the suspects has a known history of being a ‘flasher,’ and after exposing himself may have become hostile and upset if he was laughed at or ignored.” (2) Robbery, since Vicki and Nancy were known to have backpacks and a tent when they parted ways with Liz, but those had never been found. (3) “That of personal satisfaction in the killing of two individuals connected to the Rainbow family.”
But two of these three suspects had alibis—Arnold Cutlip had a friend, a man named Johnnie Washington Lewis, who, to the great chagrin of Cutlip’s partner, Virginia, essentially lived on Cutlip’s couch. Cutlip and Lewis were inseparable, everyone said; wherever Cutlip went, so went Lewis. Lewis said that he and Cutlip had been together all day, cutting downed locust trunks into posts to sell, then drinking at a beer joint in Hillsboro.
The summer of 1980 ended. At the end of deer season, hunters found Vicki and Nancy’s backpacks under a laurel bush near Hico, West Virginia, about sixty miles west of Briery Knob. All their belongings were there—their sleeping bags, their tent, even the small velvet case that had held Vicki’s travel-sized drum. So much for the robbery motive. Alkire was left with Rainbow hate. He and his fellow investigators crisscrossed the county from Snowshoe ski resort all the way to Interstate 64 again, following stories of “hippie killers” and dark Chevy Novas. Nothing held.
For two months, Alkire drove the sixty-five miles of switchbacking 219 between the West Virginia State Police office in Marlinton and his home in Elkins before he finally admitted the commute was untenable. The Motor Inn in Marlinton let him rent a room by the week and take his meals there, too, and he worked out of the trunk of his car, storing a growing trove of case notes.
When the full ballistics report came back from the Charleston lab, Alkire took it into his motel room and spread the pages out over the thin bedspread. Next to the official case number, the firearms examiner had written “Rainbow Family Murders”—the title, later shortened to “Rainbow Murders,” that would become the case’s moniker. In some official documents, Vicki and Nancy are simply called “Rainbows,” marked forever by a group they never joined, a destination they never reached.
The bullet fragments lodged in Vicki and Nancy’s bodies were, taken as a group, too small to yield any useful leads, the report concluded. But one revealed that the bullets used in their killings were a Sierra brand, .41-.44 caliber—thick ammunition, big in diameter, and very powerful. The examiner could still not be sure whether the gun that had fired them was a revolver or the short rifle known as a carbine. Nine types of revolvers could have fired the bullet as well as two carbines, including the .44 Magnum made popular by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry.
Alkire paged forward and back through this report and also reviewed the full autopsies of “Red Sweat Shirt” and “Blue Sweat Shirt” as the medical examiner had called them before their identities were known. It was Nancy who wore the red University of Iowa sweatshirt, though it was Vicki who came from that state—Nancy must have borrowed it. Every part of Nancy’s body was examined, and while the coroner noted that she was “slightly obese” and had dirty feet and fingernails that were “crudely manicured,” he found her corpse otherwise “without note.” Vicki had two rings on her little and ring fingers, white metal rings with a turquoise heart and star, but her body was no more revealing. It was Nancy who had the higher blood alcohol content—.08, the current legal limit to drive—while Vicki had had maybe one drink.
“There has been no new development in the murder case concerning the two girls but the investigation is continuing,” McNeel had reported on July 31, 1980. “Every bit of information or evidence is being checked carefully.”
Vicki and Nancy’s case, it seemed, would not solve. The scene had yielded little, ditto the lab results. Everyone in the county with any relevance had been examined or eliminated. Yet the clearing was just too remote for a stranger to find, Alkire felt. Over and over again, in briefing meetings with other state police officials and sheriff’s deputies, Alkire told the room that whoever had killed the women had to be local.
Alkire’s sons were eight and two by then, and it might be a month before he got home to them. Enough, his wife, Elaine, eventually declared after two years. Land was cheaper in Pocahontas anyway, she pointed out, so why didn’t they just buy a lot there and build their own place? Alkire was promoted to corporal and officially transferred to Pocahontas County full-time in November 1982. Elaine Alkire enrolled their two sons in Marlinton Middle School. They were Pocahontas Countians now.
The funeral service for Vicki Durian took place on July 15, 1980, at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, the same place where her sister Mary’s wedding had taken place. She was buried in the cemetery where she and her brothers used to hang out and drink and watch the weather roll in. Newspaper reporters from as far away as Cedar Rapids kept showing up at the farmhouse, knocking on the front door, and lifting the shades. Neighbors and family members kept showing up too, leaving casseroles and condolences. Clarabelle took to her bed. It was winter before the doorbell and phone stopped ringing incessantly. But by 1982, two years had passed, and even Alkire had ceased calling. Now they were wishing for its ring again.
Howard said nothing until the caller was finished and then asked the man’s name. The caller wouldn’t give it. I am not the murderer, he said. Then he hung up.
Howard put the phone’s receiver down, then immediately picked it up again and called Alkire. A tap was placed on the Durian line, in case the guy was dumb enough to call back. He was.
“That,” says Alkire, “is the first I ever heard of Jacob Beard.”
2
JACOB WILSON BEARD LIKED THE idea of having the power to join one piece of metal to another and make someone forget that they had ever been separate. His dad had been raised in Pocahontas County, in a big white house where one county road met another, and Beard was raised there too. It still stands today, on a road named after the Beards, in a hamlet called Beard. During Beard’s childhood, the family ran a prosperous cattle farm that grew corn and hay and had the new-looking pickup trucks to show for it. For extra money, Beard’s father had also worked as a State Farm insurance salesman. Before she married, his mother had taught school; afterward, she worked occasionally as a substitute teacher and then “finally” became a housewife.