[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  Yet even in the midst of this legal cloud, the men, released on bail, went about living their lives. Brown went out drinking with McCoy’s brother one night in the winter of 1993, then went back to the McCoy house afterward. Brown was in the kitchen by himself a long time, so McCoy’s mother went to check on him and found him sitting in a chair, silently choking on a bite of the ham sandwich he’d made. She called for help, but no one came.

  “It’s called a café coronary,” the medical examiner in Charleston said when they got his body. “People trying to eat, get choked on something, have a heart attack, and die. Happens all the time.”

  4

  SUSAN STRONG ALWAYS WANTED TO be Lois Lane. A junior high teacher told her she could write, and after reading about how Woodward and Bernstein uncovered Watergate, reporting was all she wanted to do.

  As Vicki and Nancy’s lives as adult women were ending, Strong’s was just beginning. She was two years out of high school and had been working all through the month of June 1980 fixing up the house that she and her fiancé, a man she had known since she was a freshman and he a senior, would move into. She would be leaving her parents’ farm and moving up onto Droop Mountain, where she knew no one except her husband’s cousins, Gerald and Drema Brown. When the Rainbow people started coming, she was excited; she went down to Marlinton to watch them arrive and wave. Then the bodies of two girls from somewhere else turned up on Briery Knob. Three weeks later, she and her husband were married.

  Like most others in the county, Strong kept up with the Rainbow Murders in the paper and heard talk of the case when she went out to eat or shop for groceries or pump gas. For a time, she didn’t believe the killer could be local. She preferred not to put stock in rumors. But over time, she began to believe.

  By the time Strong turned thirty-three, she had two daughters and had gone back to school to get her bachelor’s degree in English. She and her husband volunteered at their Lutheran church and for the Democratic Party and the Family Refuge Center. She had interned at the Pocahontas Times under the elderly Bill McNeel, learned fast, and gotten hired afterward.

  The defense’s motion for a change of venue was granted in the spring of 1993, after Beard was rearrested, and McNeel’s health was failing. The trial was expected to last three weeks. Would Strong be up for making the long drive and covering it freelance? She would.

  Beard’s trial was assigned to Judge Charles Lobban, a balding man in his sixties with a patrician diction and a military record. His courtroom was in Lewisburg, county seat of neighboring Greenbrier County, where Beard had lived and worked for many years—not quite the distance Beard’s lawyers had hoped for.

  The Greenbrier County Courthouse room was neither grand nor shabby, but simply utilitarian: cream-white walls, linoleum floor tiles, windows with slatted blinds. The only things that distinguished the room from a modest Presbyterian church were the dark wood judge’s podium, which matched the wood tone of the spectator benches.

  Each day, Strong left her home on Droop Mountain and drove the forty minutes to the courthouse in Lewisburg. She wasn’t alone, as media went; the same television firm that had covered the first Rodney King and Jeffrey Dahmer trials wanted to film the Rainbow Murder trial and air the footage on Court TV.

  The defense team objected—the Lewisburg courtroom was not well-suited to being televised. There were no podiums for the lawyers upon which microphones could rest. Wires would have to be run up and behind the bench, which didn’t thrill the honorable Judge Lobban, who was a few years out from retirement and prone to tripping. “Don’t you want to be on national television?” the representative from Court TV asked Beard’s attorney, Robert Allen. “No,” responded Allen, “I would rather be on the farm.”

  But Court TV prevailed. The accommodations were made, and people around the United States could now watch a West Virginia murder trial on their television for the first time. “As you leave the courtroom you might smile,” the affable Judge Lobban would later tell a group of children visiting the proceedings for a school trip. “You may find you’re on camera.”

  The potential jurors were exceedingly polite to Beard’s lawyers and to Weiford during jury selection. Though they had large farms to run, gardens to weed, children to watch, and sick parents to care for, they were not eager to evade jury service—No, it’s fine; my farm is rented. It’s no problem; I’ll get a babysitter.

  Two male potential jurors had mothers who were retired correctional officers at the women’s prison in Alderson, twenty miles away, where Martha Stewart would one day do her time. One juror had a father who had been murdered. One potential juror had himself been a correctional officer.

  “Do you think that that has had any impact or influence on your thinking as to people that have been accused of a crime?” asked Mr. Allen.

  “No,” the juror responded. “If anything, in my opinion, it would probably be for me more reassuring that I did have an open mind, from seeing, you know, both sides of the tracks. I deal with the facts. I mean, if I don’t see it, it didn’t happen.”

  Lobban addressed the potential jurors. How many of the jurors had already read something about the case? All but three jurors responded that they had. Read something about it in the last two or three days? Nine hands. Talked to someone about it? Ten.

  Mr. Farmer then asked a question. “Have any of you ever been involved in a situation where you felt that something happened in a certain way, and therefore tried to reconcile or conform facts to support that view of what happened?”

  Judge Lobban interrupted: “That’s probably human. Everybody does that some.”

  5

  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.