Resolved

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 28/10/11

The Internet is amazing. All I had to go on was my friend’s name; just her first name. I remembered it after forty-eight years. I vaguely remembered what happened to her, but after that, not much else. Some months ago — why I don’t know, maybe it was guilt, or the flicker of a soul, or the settling of mental sediment with age — I began wondering about the outcome, about justice. I decided to try a “Google” search.

“Linda, murder, Charleston, West Virginia, 1963,” I typed and hit enter.

I found little that was useful, at first. Some genealogy sites, obituaries and death-certificates that couldn’t be viewed by anyone except “members” who paid a fee. I tried typing in a birth-date — I presumed Linda had been born the same year as I, in 1952, since we had been in fourth, fifth, and the first part of sixth grades together. I generated a list of possibilities, based on my guess at her given name, and at the top of the queue was this: “Linda Alice Thornburg.” I didn’t recall “Thornburg” at all, but I typed the full name in the Google window, along with the words “killed” and “November, 1963.”

And there she was, her face staring back at me from a fuzzy and crooked scan of an old newspaper clipping. I recognized her short, curly hair, large eyes, the sweet and innocent expression. In the picture I kept, she was in her Girl Scout uniform, a green cap nestled on her head, her badges displayed draped across her chest. In the faded image peering out at me from my monitor, Linda had the exact same face, but wore a simple dress and was positioned in a different pose; it looked like a school picture taken when we both attended Scott Teays Elementary in Scott Depot, West Virginia.

I suppose I should have visited a library in hopes of finding boxes of the Charleston Gazette or Daily Mail saved on microfilm roles secured by rubber-bands. But with my high-speed Internet service and a powerful computer, I found just about everything I needed online. It took hours, days, weeks to gather the bits of information and put together all of the facts available. At times my search-terms seemed wild and counter-intuitive. I used Google-Earth and photos and maps, I used government agency records. But every bit of information added to the whole.

Linda left school on the afternoon of Thursday, November 21, 1963. She started to walk along Scott Lane. My mother picked me up that day. The last time I saw Linda was when we drove by her in our truck, and I asked my mother to stop and give my friend a lift, but my mother said “No.” I only shrugged, and didn’t argue. I’ve never felt much emotion, and even then, usually took a path of least resistance. I yelled out the window as we passed her, “Hi!” but she didn’t look up. She probably didn’t hear me. We came to Teays Valley Road, and turned left, heading home.

What I think happened next, according to my research is that instead of likewise turning left at Teays Valley Road– which is also called Scary Road, for God’s sake — and continuing towards her own street, Linda decided to turn right, and advanced along the highway for a short distance. I think she wanted to stop at the local Dairy Queen for ice cream. This is what we sometimes did together. Linda and I were complimentary. We were both uncool. We bonded because we were both loners with active imaginations. She was the outgoing, sensitive, empathetic one, I wasn’t any of those things. It was about a mile from the school to her house, two blocks less than that to mine, and I would be lost in thought daydreaming while she sang, joked, danced the entire way. I can picture Linda that afternoon, lost in her own world, completely oblivious to reality. I would have been with her, if my mother hadn’t given me a ride. Linda would have been with me, if my mother had taken a minute to stop and give her a lift.

As it was, I arrived home safe and sound, and Linda … she disappeared. Some boys from out sixth-grade class said they saw a car, a station-wagon, slow down beside her, but they weren’t sure. By dinnertime Linda’s mother became frantic. She called us first, asking if we’d seen her daughter. By nightfall, Linda’s father was in a state of panic. Both parents notified the county sheriff, and the school, and their church. Impromptu search parties were organized — about a dozen people initially — and we fanned out through the neighborhood, checking houses, knocking on doors.

I had to go back to school, but the others continued their efforts the next day. The teachers at Scott Teays were in the process of addressing the situation in each classroom, trying to elicit information and at the same time, keep the kids calm. But in the middle of this, at a little past 1:00 PM, the principal interrupted from speaker-boxes positioned above blackboards, and asked us to stand at attention. We were told that the President of the United States was dead, that he’d been shot in Dallas,Texas. I felt blank as sad music began to play.

Linda’s disappearance was overshadowed by the national tragedy, but her mother and father, and other parents in her neighborhood, pressured the sheriff, who called in deputies and volunteer fire fighters from around Putnam and Kanawha Counties. About fifty men in all. They concentrated their efforts, and worked with stern expressions and sealed lips. They knew what the public didn’t, that another girl from the same area had gone missing during August, and her partially decomposed remains had been discovered in the vicinity, in October, her clothing half gone, her skull bashed in.

On Saturday morning, as most of the world was glued to live coverage of Lee Harvey Oswald’s transfer from the Dallas jail, and we became witnesses to his shooting by Jack Ruby, the dragnet of men enlisted by the sheriff found Linda. She had been left in some scarlet-leaved brambles and brush under late-autumn trees just off a gated, winding, gravel country drive that branched of Hickory Road. Her thin, fragile body was naked from the waist down, and her head was smashed by some heavy object

I didn’t have much of a reaction to the news that Linda had been found dead. I don’t think I understood what any of it meant at the time. I hardly thought of her after a while, and not at all for a number of years.

When I first discovered the old news stories about them finding her, I felt sort of detached; like, it wasn’t a surprise, I knew what to expect. But then I started to feel restless, agitated when I realized no one was charged in Linda’s murder. Dozens of men were interviewed — as two-paragraph articles described — the usual suspects; former mental patients, vagrants, men of color who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Linda’s mother apparently called for the neighborhoods around the school to be cleaned up, and the brush cleared out. She fought for local, then national attention for her daughter’s case. She contacted a famous forensic psychiatrist from Florida, a Dr. Gorman. This was a Page-5 headline in the Charleston Gazette just after Christmas 1963, “Psychiatrist Knows What Killer Looks Like.”

“This is a man who has killed many times,” Gorman said. “He blends in. He is probably married with a wife and children of his own. He is most likely not a vagrant, or a former mental patient, or a minority. He is possibly a pillar of his church and community. But he is a child-molester and a psychopath, and psychopaths can seem charming, non-threatening, functional to all who observe them.” This was almost half a century ago, before the world knew of Ted Bundy, or fictional characters Hannibal Lecter and Dexter. “Psychopaths aren’t all killers,” the doctor continued, “but none of them can sympathize or empathize with the pain of others. They are narcissistic in the extreme, and care only that their own needs are met.” They’re called anti-social today; anti-social personality disorder. And they come in different shades or gradations of insane. Like passive-aggressive, fearless and cruel while they wait in their webs for the fly to enter.

In late March of 1964 the sheriff’s department got a tip. A Charleston woman came to them — a woman who has since disappeared, or rather, I can’t find any trace of her. She came to them with a story. It was reported in one paragraph in the Daily Mail: “A deputy states she claimed to have seen a girl tied up in their basement, and when she confronted her husband about this, he threatened to kill them both….” Was the kidnapped girl another of the missing, a teenager whose body has never been found? In April of 1964, the FBI joined local law enforcement and questioned the lady’s husband. He was indeed, a deacon in his church, a hard-working executive for a coal company, a well-dressed and charming guy. He was cleared of any wrong-doing. He divorced his wife, who fled the state. Reporter Dana Kelly was able to connect the dots in June of 1964, and wrote another piece in the Charleston Gazette about how Dr. Gorman’s predictions matched up point for point with pillar-of-the-community’s profile. Dana Kelly was fired from her job a short time later. She too left the state.

The general public still thinks Linda’s murder was never solved. I believe her murderer was never charged. There wasn’t even a grand jury. More girls disappeared. Three more we know about, between 1965 and 1969. All were from low-income and troubled backgrounds, and were declared “runaways” by Putnam and Kanawha County law enforcement and by representatives of the DHHR. Mr. Pillar-of-the-Community moved to South Carolinain 1972. And yeah, there hasn’t been a single murder in this region since he left.

I tracked his life, and the rumors of his pedophilia, the reports of missing children wherever he stayed, from his high-school days, to his time at boot camp in Texas, through college at WVU. I paid for the memberships, the software, the information gathering services. It appears he hasn’t molested little girls or killed anyone in two decades; well, that’s wonderful. A recovering sex-killer. He is now retired from his energy company, living in luxury in Arizona. He is a very respected and important person.

Mr. Thornburg, Linda’s father, died of grief in 1968. Her mother passed away not long ago, aged eighty-five. Her brother lives in Virginia, and doesn’t want to be bothered — I know, I tried to call him and his wife, and talk to him. He has grandchildren, he said.

The killer thinks he’s gotten away with it, because no one cares any more. But I care, as much as I can care about anything. Linda was my best friend.

It’s all planned now. This place is rigged up with more security than the Pentagon. I left a phone message. I called from a land-line. I told him who I am, and where I live. I called him in Tucsan and let him know, that I know what he is, I know what he did to Linda. I know about the truck tire tracks that were found, so long ago. I know he used a large metal tool of some kind to hit his victims on the head. I told him about the teenager he strangled while he was in the army. About the five year old found tortured and killed a couple of miles from his estate, when he lived in Palm Beach.

I had to do something. Forgetting about Linda, burying her in my mind, did nothing to solve the problem.

Now I have to keep awake and alert, because I’m expecting a visitor.