[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  She began to look back at Franklin’s crime and the ways her life had been shaped by it. Newspaper articles after the events had printed her home address, accused her of setting her friends up to die, and questioned why she had lived when they had not. Inspired by a class assignment that asked her to create a mask about the parts of herself that people don’t normally see, Mitchell put on her own art exhibit in June 2013 and decided to create a piece that would have a component in which she drove to the mountains outside Salt Lake City and recited words forgiving Franklin. “I did this meditation, and I just said, ‘May his suffering be eased,’ because I understood that in his childhood there was nothing else that he could be but what he was. Nobody showed him kindness. Nobody tried to help this child,” she said. “Because this whole village saw his suffering. They didn’t help him, so he took vengeance on the village in his own way. And I got it. There was nobody who could get it that deep like I got it.”

  When Mitchell left the mountains that day, she said, she felt completely at ease. Then the next week, she saw an article on Facebook chronicling how Franklin had denounced racism and was asking for his victims’ forgiveness.

  “Seeing that was so shocking.…I just couldn’t stop crying; I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t believe that he was finally going to be released from his suffering. And maybe I would be too.”

  At Franklin’s request, one of his lawyers contacted Mitchell. “Everybody’s saying, ‘He wants to talk to you.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t want to talk to him; I forgave him; let’s just leave it at that and be done.’” But Franklin was insistent—he wanted to be forgiven before he died, and he wanted to be forgiven by Mitchell. Eventually, she agreed to speak to him by phone.

  When we talked, we had two conversations, that one and one the day before his execution. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life because I never expected to deeply forgive him. He wanted me to fight for him not to be executed, and I told him, ‘No, I think you should be executed. You’ve been a prisoner from womb to tomb, let it be done.’ He was trying to avoid accountability in the first conversation, like, ‘Oh sorry about what happened with your friends and all,’ so I knew he wasn’t sorry.…To this day I feel strongly about this, that when he dies his energy goes somewhere. And I did not want it to bind with more dark energy; I wanted it to bind with light.

  I talked to him again, and it was very different. He was a very different person at that point. The day before the execution, they put him right next to the room where they were going to kill him. And he goes, ‘So what are you doing?’ And I go, ‘Nothing, what are you doing?’ And he goes, ‘I’m watching TV.…I turned the TV on and the very first thing I see is the KKK rally. With these two blond girls holding this banner.’…and I go, ‘What do you think of that?,’ and he goes, ‘Those poor girls don’t know how they’re ruining their lives. I wish I would have known how much I would ruin my life.’…He told me the only people that ever were good to him were black people, and I’m like, ‘I don’t understand why you hated them so much,’ and he was like, ‘Terry, I was really messed up.’ He described when he was accepted into the KKK, and he said there were a thousand hoods. I could smell the smoke. I could see the fire, the way he was describing it to me.

  Mitchell told Franklin to stop. She could not bear to hear any more.

  I brought up the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, where I had lived during graduate school, and the ways racist hate seemed to be ever-growing lately. “Yes,” Mitchell said. “Everything [Franklin] once wanted to come true is coming true now.”

  I asked Mitchell what it was like to speak to someone she knew was about to die and if she felt called to offer him anything.

  “I said, ‘When you die, choose light, and then come to me, and let me know you chose light.’ And he did. I swear to God, it was incredible.”

  The day Franklin was executed, Mitchell said, she woke early to go to class and was protected all day from reporters by her fellow students. “And then I came home that night after class, and I told my husband, ‘It’s so weird—I feel like this weight has been lifted off my chest; I can breathe a full breath.’”

  Later, Mitchell was in bed, and her husband was in the living room, but she says she felt a presence in the doorway. “You’re looking at your child sleeping like, ‘Oh my God, she’s so beautiful—I can’t believe that’s my child,’ and you just can’t not look at them. You just stare at them and lose time? It felt like somebody was doing that with me.” In that moment, she felt a burst of energy, more full of gratitude and joy than any other feeling she’d had in her life. “I know it was [Franklin] choosing light. There’s no doubt in my mind.…And I slept for the first time in months all the way through the night.”

  The morning of the execution, Mitchell had received two emails confirming that Franklin had been executed. The emails were signed “from the Honorable R. Roberts,” a name that Mitchell recognized but could not immediately place. “And I’m like, who is that? I swear I know that name. And then I remembered.”

  Utah had come early in the list of states that wanted to prosecute Franklin, and he was scheduled to stand trial for the murder of Martin and Fields in the winter of 1981. Utah’s attorney general decided to prosecute Franklin for the additional crime of “depriving Martin and Fields of their civil rights”—a charge that reflected Franklin’s motive to murder them specifically because they were black. But Utah local law enforcement was inexperienced in prosecuting a federal civil rights hate crime case. To help, they asked the US Department of Justice to send in a seasoned attorney who could take over the civil rights trial against Franklin, due to begin in February 1981. Twenty-seven-year-old Richard Roberts, a young black attorney and rising star in the department’s Washington, DC, office, soon landed in Salt Lake City.

  It was Roberts’s job to prepare Mitchell to testify that she had been with Martin and Fields and seen them get gunned down by Franklin. She testified. Franklin was convicted and given multiple life sentences. This seemed like justice, and the families of Martin and Fields gave statements to the press saying they were satisfied with the outcome.

  In 2014, Terry Mitchell reported allegations of criminal misconduct about Richard Roberts, by then the chief US district judge for DC appointed by President Bill Clinton, to the Utah attorney general’s office, alleging that Roberts sexually abused her many times while he was prepping her as a witness for Franklin’s trial.

  “I did whatever he said because he told me Franklin would be let out on a mistrial and he would be free to kill again and it would be my fault,” Mitchell said.

  Roberts admitted he had a sexual relationship with Mitchell in 1981—his sixteen-year-old witness—but called it “a consensual affair, a bad lapse in judgment.”

  After Mitchell received Roberts’s email about Franklin’s death, she started having nightmares. “And I’m thinking to myself, I’m going crazy. Right? This can’t be real; this didn’t happen; that was my fault.” A few weeks later, Mitchell formed a plan to kill herself with the gun her husband kept in his bedside drawer. “I was going to go drive up to the mountains and just be done because I couldn’t take the pain anymore and I didn’t want to be a burden to my family.…I’m gonna add this too and tell everybody? And who’s gonna believe me?”

  Mitchell found some solace in her community, and her will to be alive returned. But the investigator for the Utah attorney general recommended that their office not take any steps toward a criminal prosecution. Sixteen was the age of consent in Utah in 1981, and so much time had passed.

  “In some theoretical sense, [Mitchell’s] description of the events…could arguably fit the elements of the crime of rape,” reads their report, “but in terms of a real world criminal prosecution, the case would be impossible to prosecute.”

  Roberts has never been arrested or charged for any crime in relation to Mitchell. She decided to file a civil complaint against Roberts, the outcome of which is, at the time of this writing,
still pending. Roberts announced his retirement because of an undisclosed illness on the same day Mitchell’s civil complaint was filed, and he will receive a generous pension from the US government until he dies.

  Trauma is cumulative, argues Lovie Jackson Foster, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “You don’t get through one trauma and then it dissipates. They just keep building on top of each other.”

  Foster specifically studies the effects of American slavery and racism on mental health in the black community and is part of a broader conversation about the idea of “historical trauma,” a kind of extension of the familial intergenerational trauma logic.

  “Historical trauma is related to a genocide of a people, where some major event is aimed at a particular group because of their status as an oppressed group,” says Mary Ann Jacobs, chair of American Indian studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. “It could be a war; it could be cultural, such as when a people’s language is banned and they are not allowed to speak or print it. It could be the desecration of monuments, such as graveyards and other sacred sites. Any of those events that have to do with ignoring the humanity of a group and having that part of social policy, be it formal or informal.” When a traumatic event is inflicted on a community or social group, the descendants of that group will always carry its effects.

  In the middle of Liberty Park in 1980 was a long wide street, and in the middle of the street all the teenagers would park their cars and play their music, and everybody would dance or roller skate. But after Franklin murdered Martin and Fields, the city closed that street and filled it in.

  4

  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 m
alicious 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.”