[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  “Everybody got along,” Jordan said. “The wives got along well; the men got along well. It was kind of like a little clique. The ladies would cook; the men would play cards, smoke cigars, do what guys do.”

  Jordan described Alkire as a mellow, even-tempered officer and boss who didn’t micromanage and always signed off on Jordan’s investigation reports and receipts with a joke or two. Jordan’s then-wife was close with Elaine Alkire, and Jordan watched Alkire be a caring and present father to his two sons. “That’s what also made this very hard,” Jordan said.

  Sometimes when there was a significant crime, such as a murder that wouldn’t solve, detectives from their twelve-county area could request major crimes officers to come in and assist. “That’s how I got involved in the Jake Beard aspect of the Rainbow case,” said Jordan. In the hallways and over the coffeepot, officers told each other that Alkire was holding steadfastly to the idea that local people had killed Vicki and Nancy.

  Alkire got a promotion in the late 1980s to sergeant and then first sergeant and took a transfer back to Pocahontas County. One day in the early ’90s, after they had already arrested the “relevant necessary people,” Jordan said, “Bob came to me and said he wanted me to help him put this case together.”

  “When we sat down initially, the Franklin issue came up, and I said, ‘What are you going to do about this?…It’s discoverable, I mean, you know it’s gonna come up.’ And he said, ‘We’re going to investigate this case to the fullest, and if Franklin did it, then Franklin did it.…If you want to look at the Franklin aspect of that, that’s fine.’ And he gave me full leeway to do that. And I did.”

  Jordan retreaded much of DiFalco’s investigative territory from the early 1980s, and was involved in many of the actions in 1992—taking statements from the witnesses who still lived on Droop Mountain as well as interrogating Pee Wee Walton and Johnny Washington Lewis.

  He reported on his work daily to Alkire. “To me, the further the case went, the more the Jake Beard aspect of the case fell apart, and the further the case went, the stronger to me it looked like Joseph Paul Franklin had committed the crime,” Jordan said. He was persuaded by the sum of the facts in support of Franklin’s guilt. Plus, simply, that Franklin was an established killer with a modus operandi and Beard was not.

  “I think Jake is a detective wannabe. I think he wanted to be the hero of the case and crack the case—he has an ego thing going. I think he wanted to be some sort of little local hero.”

  In contrast, Jordan said, “[Franklin] is a psychopath. I get that part. Not everything that comes out of his mouth is truthful. But when you look at Jake Beard, you take a man that has no real criminal history…to brutally murder two girls in cold blood and not just kill them, but shoot them to pieces for apparently nothing. Then you have Franklin, who has all kinds of issues and upwards of thirty confirmed kills [this number is in dispute], and I mean just that within itself.…I believe [Alkire] is sincere in his belief [in the Beard theory]. But I personally don’t see it, and didn’t at the time, and made that known.”

  Jordan cited one incident in particular that precipitated his split with Alkire—the interview of Johnnie Lewis on June 12, 1992. Lewis had just been brought in to sign an agreement that offered him immunity in exchange for his testimony against Beard, and there was, Jordan said, a plan to interview Lewis the following day to hear whatever information he could offer now that he was legally protected. Jordan was supposed to be part of the interrogation team. He was still living in Elkins at that time and commuting the nearly two hours back and forth to Pocahontas County every day and was in his car heading to the Buckeye West Virginia State Police office when a radio operator contacted him and told him there was no need to come to Pocahontas County that day—the meeting with Lewis had been cancelled.

  “I find out that that was the day that they did interview Lewis, and I personally believe they intentionally did not want me there,” said Jordan.

  That night Alkire and Jordan spoke on the phone, and Alkire delivered this news. Jordan said he understood but asked if Alkire would mind if he interviewed Lewis himself, in the presence of Lewis’s attorney. Alkire agreed, and Jordan did so. “I started asking [Lewis] some very direct questions. In his original statement [to Estep and Alkire], there were things that I thought were very strange. He described the girls as ‘the tall one’ and ‘the short one’ and if you look at it I think there was a one-inch difference, a very small amount of difference in [Vicki and Nancy’s] heights. And when I started asking [Lewis] some very direct questions, and which one was which? And which one had on this clothing? And which had on that clothing? This guy maybe had a first-grade education. I mean, he was very, very not smart. Very. I don’t know if you would consider him—whatever. So when I’m asking him these questions, he eventually just kind of gave it up and said, ‘I didn’t see any girls,’ he began to say, ‘I didn’t see any girls. I was threatened; I was throttled; I was assaulted.’”

  At that point, Jordan alerted his boss, who alerted others higher up in the state police. Then Walton told his attorney he’d been assaulted too.

  A great deal happened very quickly after that. Weiford was forced to dismiss the charges against all of the arrested men that summer, and the state police brass called a meeting to discuss the whole mess of a situation at the state police headquarters in Charleston with all the involved players—Alkire, Weiford, Estep, and Jordan. The superintendent himself presided over the meeting.

  “And that was the last contact I had on the Rainbow case,” Jordan said.

  “So did they say to you, ‘Thank you very much, you’re no longer assigned to this case’?”

  “They didn’t say, ‘Thank you very much,’ no.” Jordan laughed. “They said that they were going to continue to investigate the case against Jacob Beard but that I was not going to be involved in it.”

  “Did you feel that you were a whistle-blower and they were mad at you for having spoken up?”

  “Very much so,” he said.

  I told Jordan I couldn’t believe that any person, and definitely not Alkire, who made that wooden bench I loved sitting on and was a friend and card player to Jordan, meant to put an innocent man in prison for six years. Jordan didn’t either.

  “I don’t think [Alkire] was that type of a person [to get violent]. I don’t think he was that type of person in this case.…He’s a good person. To me, good people make mistakes. I do it every day. I am a good person, but I make mistakes. I think with this case…it got personal. Everybody wants to protect their beliefs and their interests. I believe that Bob will go to his grave believing that he had the right person.”

  I wondered aloud what made Alkire so convinced of Beard’s guilt. Did he give Jordan any sense of that, or any sense of why he truly couldn’t believe in Franklin’s guilt?

  Jordan went silent on the phone for the first time. “No,” he said after a time. “He felt like they still had a provable case, like they had the right people. Sometimes police are just like anybody else: they get blinders on. They get tunnel vision. I’m not accusing him of that; I’m just saying that sometimes—I probably did it at some point with Franklin. My belief was that he committed the crime, and maybe I began not to be able to see the Beard theory any longer. I don’t have any evidence of [Franklin’s guilt]. I don’t think there’ll ever be any evidence of that.”

  Jordan continued, “I’m not saying he’s a perfect witness; I’m just saying compared to the Jacob Beard aspect, I thought there was a lot less holes in the Franklin stuff than there was with the Jacob Beard stuff.”

  “We want the story to be perfect,” I noted, “and the minute it’s not perfect, we’re like, it’s a lie!”

  “Right.”

  3

  THE STATE OF MISSOURI SOUGHT the death penalty against Franklin for the murder of the Jewish man outside the St. Louis synagogue, but first it would have to prove that he was sane enough to stand trial.

  Malcolm Gladwell’s 19
97 New Yorker article “Damaged” depicts the 1994 hearing to determine this very issue. In Gladwell’s words, the object of the hearing was whether Joseph Paul Franklin “embarking on a campaign to rid America of Jews and blacks was an act of evil or an act of illness.”

  No one disputed that Franklin had suffered astounding physical abuse at the hands of his mother, and many signs pointed to mental illness, but his crimes were so many and his hatred so extreme. To gain insight, the defense brought in Dorothy Lewis, psychiatrist to the criminal stars, who had consulted on the trial of Ted Bundy among others, and her colleague, the neurologist Jonathan Pincus.

  Lewis, a doctor at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, is the pioneer of a theory that brain injury, when combined with psychosis and physical abuse as a child, results in a superstorm that is an almost sure predictor of becoming a repeat murderer. According to research she and Pincus conducted on scores of America’s most violent offenders, when the frontal lobe of the brain, which houses impulse control, is damaged, the consequence is that the person cannot tell the difference between an everyday mishap and a threat to life. When your car is cut off in a parking lot, for example, you might perceive it as a fatal attack requiring a defense of lethal force.

  Lewis spoke with Franklin for six and a half hours and concluded that Franklin was a paranoid schizophrenic unable to determine what was real and what was not. He had also suffered head trauma and likely traumatic brain injury as well, though Franklin refused to let Pincus examine his brain. Taken together, these truths meant that in Lewis’s opinion, Franklin was not responsible for his actions. In short, wrote Gladwell, “she didn’t feel that Franklin’s brain worked the way brains are supposed to work.”

  “I just don’t believe people are born evil,” Lewis told him. “The deed itself is bizarre, grotesque. But it’s not evil. To my mind, evil bespeaks conscious control over something. Serial murderers are not in that category. They are driven by forces beyond their control.”

  Franklin represented himself at his 1994 capital trial and lost. He then asked the judge to give him the death penalty. If the judge demurred, Franklin threatened, he would kill again inside prison.

  Franklin was put to death in Missouri in 2013, but in the intervening time he’d changed his mind and launched a series of bids for stays of execution. In the last years of his life, he liked to read the Bible, as well as the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu writings. He meditated. When he had exhausted the prison library’s supply of meditation tapes, he sent away for more. He had also profited from the effects of antipsychotic medication to treat his schizophrenia. When interviewed weeks before his death, he seemed profoundly changed from the man Melissa Powers had spoken to in 1998.

  “I was so mentally ill and crazy,” Franklin told a local Missouri reporter. “I was like a totally different person. You would think it was somebody else except for the name.”

  He said that when he read Mein Kampf, he was a child, impressionable and starving for words that would help him. “I would get a real funny feeling after reading [that book],” he said.

  At the end of the interview, the reporter asked Franklin if he thought he deserved to die for everything he’d done. Franklin thought about it a long time before he answered: “I do, yeah.”

  Franklin had one child, a daughter—a fact I did not know until she contacted me on hearing about this book. Her name is Lori, and in several online profiles she favors a quote from Jane Austen: “I was quiet, but I was not blind.”

  Franklin met Lori’s mother in 1978 in Chisholm, a community in the northern part of Montgomery, Alabama, and Lori’s mother raised her there. Lori was a year old when Franklin went to prison in the fall of 1980, but she was always in close touch with him, sending letters and pictures back and forth and talking on the phone. “He acted like my daddy,” she wrote to me in a series of emails, “always telling me things I needed to do. Stay in school. Go to the library, study, no boyfriends, learn karate, self-defense.”

  Since Lori was old enough to know she had a father, she also knew that he was a person who had killed many people, most of them black people. At school, she was scared someone would find out who her father was and what he had done, especially her black classmates. Whenever anyone asked about him, Lori would lie and say he was a businessman in Chicago.

  Her mother and maternal grandmother talked about Franklin all the time—how he had seemed like such a nice guy, how it had all come as such a surprise—and later would echo these sentiments about the other men who came into Lori’s family.

  “I had an alcoholic and physically abusive stepdad,” Lori wrote to me. Her messages were short and staccato, the result of a liberal relationship with the return key.

  When Lori was fourteen, her mother remarried, but the new choice was no better, she said. As is often the case when girl children are abused by adult men, she said she was not believed when she tried to tell her mother about the abuse, and her mother kicked her out later that year. “I was glad to go.”

  She lived with aunts and cousins until she got pregnant, and then she moved in with her boyfriend, whom she later married, and his parents. But trouble—family, legal, emotional—seemed to follow her. Lori, too, had been through the criminal justice system, for drug possession and public intoxication. At last contact, her child was not living with her.

  “I’m pretty much a lone wolf,” she told me. “I stay to myself most of the time. I tried hard to interact with society around me. It didn’t and usually doesn’t work out too good.…My mind stays busy. It never stops.”

  On social media, Lori was partial to posting full-screen pictures of quotes written in white script on black or pink backgrounds. Another one she liked was from the Dalai Lama: “If human society loses the value of justice, compassion, and honesty, the next generation will face greater difficulties and more suffering.”

  “I feel cursed in a lot of ways, for his sins,” Lori wrote of Franklin. She felt there were dark parts of him that were also in her. He struggled with addiction; she has struggled with addiction. Other things too, she said, but did not elaborate. I could not help but think of the story of Beauty and the Beast again and the idea of intergenerational trauma, that the wounds of the parent are transmitted to the child through the way the parent presents what the world is, what a person is, what is safe and what is dangerous. “Surviving,” writes social worker and researcher Sue Coyle, “does not mean coming away unscathed.”

  Lori never told her father about the abuse she says she suffered at the hands of the men in her mother’s life or about her own run-ins with the law because she felt it would drive him crazy. After all, he was stuck in prison for life, and there was nothing he could do about it. But Lori harbored fantasies that he would get out and return to her.

  “I’ve always loved him. I needed him out and taking care of me. I knew he would never be. I never had false hope on that. I wished. But I knew better.”

  In the northwest corner of Liberty Park in Salt Lake City, equidistant from the two stocky oak trees that face the crosswalk, there is a small brass marker engraved with the names of David Martin and Ted Fields.

  In the late 1970s, if you walked anywhere around the southeast side of Salt Lake City and heard music, it was usually coming from Liberty Park. This was the poor side of town, and the park was a favorite with teenagers, black and white. When the sun went down, they came out on foot and on bicycle and on roller skates, and they talked and skated and danced together.

  Martin, eighteen, and Fields, twenty, were friends and neighbors who decided to go out for a jog on the evening of August 20, 1978, with two girls—both fifteen—whom they knew from the park. Martin had just graduated from high school and was taking some time that summer to think about what he wanted to do next. Fields was about to begin his sophomore year at the University of Utah studying chemical engineering. His father was the pastor of the Baptist church where Martin’s family also went, a ritual that made the Martins feel closer to Mississip
pi, where they were from; they had moved to Utah when Martin was in elementary school because they feared the effects their home state’s virulent racism might have on their son’s future.

  Earlier that night the boys, both black, had played a prank on the two girls they were jogging with, both white: they jumped out from behind a bush to scare their friends, who had fallen behind. But at around 10 o’clock, when they were crossing the street to return from the park, the friends were four abreast, and all keeping the same pace. Cracks of gunfire came fast then—pop pop pop. Martin was shot first and fell into the street. Fields tried to drag Martin from the crosswalk to the safety of the park, but he was shot before he could do so. “Run,” Fields told the two girls, one of whom was Terry Mitchell. She did.

  Mitchell is not exactly white, it turns out—her mother is Mexican American—but she passed. The night her friends were killed was the first time she had ever been jogging in her life. She was not hit by Franklin’s bullets but was hospitalized for shock and wounds from shrapnel that passed through Martin’s body, and scarred her arms, legs, neck, and stomach.

  Martin and Fields were handsome young men with bright futures and churchgoing families. No one appeared to have any motive for killing them. Later that year, when Joseph Paul Franklin was arrested in Florida, he said that when Martin and Fields came around the corner with two white girls, he decided to shoot them just because they were black and white people together, moving their bodies in the same space.

  Mitchell quit school after the murders—she was getting beat up and jumped; people were writing “NIGGER LOVER” or “RACE TRAITOR” or “SPIC” on her locker. Eventually she got her GED. She worked long hours at many different jobs to provide for her mother and sisters, married, and had children. In the decade after the murders, she returned to a classroom a couple of times, but it didn’t stick until she earned her degree at forty-eight. It was that stint in college that gave her the language to talk about race and gender and trauma that she didn’t have before.