The Quiet Zone Read online

  Police found bloodstains on a pair of Hauer’s clothes in the house. A caver found .25 cartridge shell casings underneath his porch; Hauer was known to have purchased a .25-caliber pistol after the attacks on his animals, according to Professor Rauch, whose research informed much of what I knew about the case. Years later, children would discover Hauer’s pistol under a rock in a nearby stream. Law enforcement concluded Hauer raped and killed Smith.

  But where was Hauer? Cavers scoured the area. The FBI issued a fugitive from justice warrant and conducted a national search. Authorities also sniffed around the farm of Boyd Thompson, who’d been known to have an open dislike of Hauer because he was an “arrogant” outsider who outspokenly opposed hunting and other aspects of local culture, according to De Thompson. (Boyd Thompson died in 2015.) Law enforcement even dredged the Thompsons’ pond to look for evidence—namely, Smith’s missing bicycle. They found nothing. County prosecutor Eugene Simmons invited spiritual mediums to aid the hunt. Two psychics performed a séance and pointed on a map to where Hauer’s body would be found. As Simmons told me, “They came pretty close.”

  Nearly six months later, on Thanksgiving Day 1975, a boy named Larkin Dean was hunting with his father when he came across a pair of boots on the ground. He looked up: high in a tree was the head and upper torso of a body hanging from a noose. The corpse had been dangling for so long that it had decomposed and split in half, with everything from the waist down falling to the ground.

  The state medical examiner identified it as Hauer’s body. Simmons concluded that Smith and Hauer had gotten into a fight over a woman, that Hauer had shot Smith, and that Hauer then hanged himself out of guilt. He speculated drugs were also involved. But this didn’t explain why Smith was sodomized. As for the cruelty directed toward Hauer’s animals, Simmons said that was just because Hauer was an outsider. “They’ve got a little animosity in rural areas against outsiders,” Simmons told me.

  De Thompson had another version of the story: it was no murder-suicide. Hauer had been framed for Smith’s killing and then hanged, he said. “Maybe Peter Hauer pissed off the wrong motherfucker and the other people just happened to be in the way, if I was going to take a stab in the dark.”

  “But why would Hauer leave a suicide note saying he’d killed Smith?” I asked.

  “I’d say Peter Hauer would have probably confessed to fucking Sister Mary or Mother Teresa by the time whoever was talking to him got done. He pissed off the wrong person.”

  Over the years, a rumor had emerged that Smith’s missing bike was hidden inside the chimney foundation of the Thompsons’ old home, but De said that was a rumor he’d started himself on the school bus.

  “My dad’s lots of things, but stupid ain’t fucking one of them,” he said. “Keeping a piece of evidence would not have ever happened.”

  His phrasing pricked my ears: he wasn’t denying that his father was involved, only that his father wouldn’t have kept any evidence. So, Boyd was involved?

  Thompson laughed. He said he and his family had been out of state when Smith and Hauer disappeared. “All I can tell you is we went to Florida,” he said.

  I was incredulous. A random ginseng hunter in the Appalachian woods held the secrets to at least four of the county’s mysterious murders?

  “I got a pretty good idea, let’s just put it that way,” Thompson said. Then he shrugged, because people went missing all the time in those days. “This is karst country,” he added, referring to the region’s topography of caves and sinkholes. “People disappear.” There were more unsolved killings than anybody knew about, he alleged, but they weren’t investigated because “you’ve got to have some good family and somebody to push for you or they don’t give a fuck.”

  I didn’t know if I should doubt Thompson because he was a drug-dealing ex-convict, or if his shady history made his testimony all the more believable. Sensing that I wanted to hear more, Thompson offered to take me into the cave where the young man’s defiled body was discovered in 1975. Hess quickly said he wanted to join. With more than two thousand feet of passageways, the cave would take several hours to navigate through, Thompson warned. He’d been inside before and the interior chambers were “sort of squirrelly.”

  He told me to return the next day in proper caving attire: work pants, a helmet, and two flashlights. “Because you don’t ever go in a cave,” he said, “with only one fucking flashlight.”

  THOMPSON AND HESS were standing outside when I pulled up in the morning. Five hundred miles away, Jenna was less than thrilled about my caving plans. “I’m a little nervous for you,” she’d emailed. I was a little nervous, too. Thompson’s criminal record included arrests for grand larceny, dealing drugs, and illegal possession of a Walther P22 semiautomatic pistol that he’d pointed at his wife. Was he up to something with me?

  Thompson hopped in the passenger seat of my car; Hess sat in back and leaned forward excitedly. Linda followed behind in her Subaru with their two Rottweilers. As we rumbled down Boyd Thompson Road, I said I’d just come from the high school, where I’d told a class that I was going caving in Lobelia. The students had sounded scared for me. “People die down there!” one girl had said. Thompson laughed. In telling the story, I was trying to hint that people knew where I was and that they’d be looking for me if I went missing.

  As we drove through Hillsboro, Thompson asked to stop at McCoy’s Market. He went inside while I waited in the car with Hess. I slouched down, tucking my head in like a turtle, anxious that somebody might see me driving around with a neo-Nazi and a guy who (by his own count) had been arrested seventy-five times, as well as shot twice. Thompson got back in the car with a bag of fig bars and water bottles—sustenance for our expedition.

  We turned right onto Lobelia Road. Houses gave way to fields with Texas longhorn cattle. Pasture turned to forest as the road steepened and wound around Caesar Mountain, passing by the house of Larkin Dean, who had stumbled upon Hauer’s body in 1975. (It so happened that Dean’s brother-in-law was Jacob Beard, the man initially convicted of the Rainbow murders.)

  De Thompson told me to park by a bridge. We were at the site of Peter Hauer’s old farmhouse, which had years earlier burned down. We strapped on headlamps. Hess held a flashlight. Thompson also wore his bowie knife and carried a backpack with the water and fig bars. He led us across the road, past the foundation of Hauer’s old house, over a small brook, and up a hillside to an opening in the ground about the size of a basement bulkhead. It was known formally as Lobelia Saltpeter Cave. A weathered sign warned that the cave was “Closed to All Access.” Thompson squinted at the words and laughed about how signs didn’t tell him what to do. He entered first. I followed. Hess went last. The darkness swallowed us.

  I WOULD LATER circle back on my own to Larkin Dean’s house, finding him smoking a cigarette outside. I wanted to hear what he remembered of finding Hauer’s body, and whether he thought Hauer hanged himself.

  “Why would Peter Hauer string himself up here when he lived over there?” Dean replied in a tone that made me feel like a moron for even raising the question. Calling it a suicide was a convenient way for authorities to write it off, he said.

  Many local people saw evidence that Hauer was framed. In Hauer’s farmhouse, police had found the suicide letter beside a bag of groceries, which seemed like an odd purchase for someone planning to die. And why would Hauer hide Smith’s body if he was going to confess to the murder anyway? Why would Hauer say his own body would be found in a cave, only to hang himself in the woods? Professor Rauch noted that Hauer’s autopsy determined his right leg was broken, and while it was unclear if it had been broken before or after the hanging, it would have been impossible for him to climb a tree and hang himself with a broken leg.

  Theories swirled. Hauer’s story became somewhat legendary in caving circles, earning the lead-off spot in a book called True Tales of Terror in the Caves of the World, which suggested that Hauer and Smith had been involved in a Wiccan cult in Lobelia
and their deaths were connected to witchcraft or satanism. Another theory was that McNeill had gotten out of prison and exacted his revenge. Underscoring how strongly the caving community believed in Hauer’s innocence, the National Speleological Society in 1979 established the Peter M. Hauer Spelean History Award, which is still given every year. Awards typically aren’t given in memory of murderers.

  Standing outside Dean’s house, three dogs sniffed at my feet. He warned me not to pet the small one with the crazy eye. Dean recommended that I talk to a neighbor, Bill Wimer, who lived farther up Caesar Mountain, second trailer on the right. Wimer owned the property where Hauer’s body had been found.

  I found a tall pile of corn husks in Wimer’s yard. I knocked on the trailer door, and a voice yelled for me to come in. Opening the door, I was hit with a wet blast of aromatic steam. A woman poked her head around the corner. “Well, come in!” she said as if she knew me. Her name was Debbie Wimer. Her father, Bill Wimer, was hunched over a chopping board at the kitchen table, cutting the kernels off what seemed like hundreds of ears of corn. He wore a hat that read “It’s Hard to Be Humble when You’re from West Virginia.” Debbie was boiling jars at the stove in preparation for canning corn.

  I said I’d been told they might help me better understand the strange case of Peter Hauer. Debbie’s jaw dropped. She said she’d just been thinking about Hauer. Days earlier, she had been foraging for ginseng when, out of the blue, the song “Dang Me” got into her head. She’d started humming:

  Dang me, dang me

  They oughta take a rope and hang me

  High from the highest tree

  “I started singing it out loud and then I got to thinking, ‘Why is that song coming in my head?’” She later realized she’d been standing near where Hauer’s body had been found. “It still creeps me out,” she said. She pointed to her bare arm. “I got chill bumps!”

  There was a paranormal undertone to Debbie’s story, a note of mysticism that highlighted how people here lived alongside the spirits of the dead. She had been seven years old when Hauer disappeared. Her father knew more about the investigation. He spoke in mumbles, so Debbie acted as his translator, and there was a lot of back-and-forth over which side of Bruffey Creek Hauer’s body had been found.

  “I know who’ll know about this,” Debbie said. “Aunt Betty!” She dialed her aunt in North Carolina and thrust the phone to my ear.

  As I stood in the Wimers’ trailer amid the thick steam of boiled corn, Aunt Betty told me that, based on what she knew from when she lived in Pocahontas, Boyd Thompson had likely killed Smith and then framed Hauer. Boyd Thompson, of course, was the father of my cave guide.

  THE TEMPERATURE FELL 20 degrees as the cave opened to a space about fifty feet wide and twenty feet high. Chunks of ice were frozen on the ground, even though it was 60 degrees outside. We could see only as far as our headlamp beams.

  “This is so cool!” Hess said, his voice echoing. “A wild cave! My first one!”

  “There’s a hell of a breeze blowing through here,” Thompson said.

  “Tells you there’s an opening somewhere,” I said.

  We marveled at a rainbow-colored stalactite forming on the smooth ceiling. The ground was covered in cobblestone-size rocks amid ten-foot-deep crevices. I scanned for signs of where Walter Smith’s body might have been uncovered in 1975.

  “I keep thinking I’m going to find a bone or something,” I said.

  “Anything’s possible,” Thompson cracked.

  We walked farther, one hundred feet, two hundred feet, three hundred feet . . . My mind was left to re-create the four-decades-old police search for Smith’s body. My headlamp shone onto a dirt patch, which I imagined as the place where police might have first uncovered the feet, then the legs, then the naked body of Smith.

  “Why would anyone bury a body back here?” I asked.

  “You mean, why even bother if there’s a note?” Thompson said. “Turns you 180 degrees, don’t it?”

  The cave narrowed. The floor and ceiling sloped toward each other. Thompson began crawling. I followed on my hands and knees, grunting as I slid forward, stopping at a sudden drop-off. My headlight shone straight down twenty feet.

  “There’s a set of steps over here,” Thompson called out. His light cast on a stone stairway leading down the subterranean cliff.

  “I don’t know if I feel like going much further,” Hess called to us. I looked back and saw him wedged in a tight section. “I think I’ve gone as far as I want to go.” His light faded. He was gone.

  Thompson and I were alone. I now understood why he’d recommended bringing an extra flashlight, and I wished that I’d taken his advice. If my headlamp died, I’d quickly be disoriented and unable to feel my way out of the cave. We weren’t sure if we should go left or right at the bottom of the cliff—both ways were simply blackness.

  “Hey, turn your light off for a minute,” Thompson said.

  He switched his headlamp off with a click. I reluctantly did the same. Click. The absence of light was almost breathtaking.

  “This is the true epitome of darkness,” Thompson said.

  In nearly a decade of living without a cellphone, in my years of visiting the Quiet Zone, I had never experienced such a void of sound, light, and life. I’d finally found absolute quiet. And it was terrifying. Here’s where De kills me, I thought.

  “It seeps inside of you,” I said.

  “You can almost feel it,” he said.

  It was dark as death, silent as eternity, as if I’d fallen into a sensory deprivation tank. Time slowed in the absence of basic perceptions. In those endless seconds, I imagined Thompson unsheathing his knife, winding back his arm, and preparing to murder me as Hauer and Smith had been murdered four decades earlier. Trapped in my mind, cut off from my senses, I was overwhelmed by irrational fear. I crouched to my knees, thinking this might help me avoid Thompson’s first swing.

  Click. His headlamp shined into the abyss.

  “I just wanted you to see what dark was,” Thompson said, and he stepped farther into the cave.

  WE CAME TO a fifteen-foot-deep crevasse, scurrying down and climbing up the other side on an old wooden ladder that was missing some of its rungs. This led to a circular room with a pile of charred wood that had been hauled inside the cave, presumably to keep somebody warm. Water dripped from the ceiling. The tunnel rose steeply to a muddy area of dirt and weeds. We’d reached a dead end. Thompson seemed lost. It’d been at least thirty years since he was last in the cave.

  “I’d like to make it through this son of a bitch,” he said, lighting a cigarette. He opened his backpack to pull out two water bottles, passing me one. “We’re going to have to try another hole.”

  We circled back to the stone stairway. Beyond it, the tunnel narrowed, then opened into a squarish room the size of an office cubicle. Carvings on the wall had dates going back to the 1930s. Thompson spotted a garbage-chute-size opening in the back. He got on his belly and began slithering through it headfirst. “You son of a bitch,” he grunted. I pushed his boot to help him forward. His bowie knife got snagged, and he had to tuck it close to his body to squeeze through. His boots disappeared.

  “Watch your fucking head!” he called back to me.

  I followed, wedging myself into the five-foot-long tunnel, which seemed barely large enough to roll a watermelon through. The glorified worm hole opened up to a crawl space with a long row of stalagmites that looked like dinosaur teeth. I couldn’t see Thompson anywhere.

  “Are you sure this goes somewhere?” I called out.

  “No,” his voice echoed back from another opening.

  I inchwormed across the dirt, squeezed through another crevice, and emerged into a tubular room filled with stalactites and stalagmites, some as long as three feet. The weird features looked like arms, reaching out to grab us. Thompson was slouched with his back against the wall. My jacket and pants were caked in dirt and mud.

  “This one stalactite loo
ks like a dick, man!” Thompson said, pointing. “A dick with genital warts!”

  There was a pile of nuts on the ground, perhaps from a spelunking squirrel. We agreed that Hess wouldn’t have fit through the last two tunnels. Thompson lit another cigarette and crawled to the back of the cavity, where the ground rose steeply to another small opening. Soon all I could see were the muddy soles of his boots, the rest of his body having disappeared into another part of the cave system. He came back down. He was still smoking his cigarette.

  “I think there’s a hole on the backside of this, but it’s a lot of belly crawling,” he said. His head scraped against the ceiling and a piece of rock crumbled down. Our situation felt precarious, as if our movement through these long undisturbed tunnels could cause the rocks to shift just enough to trap or pin us.

  “One time I helped pull a spelunker out of a cave,” Thompson said. “He went in six-foot-fucking-four but he was close to eight-foot-tall after a rock slid up against him.”

  “He died?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Thompson looked apprehensively at the next hole we’d have to squeeze through.

  “Air’s getting harder to breathe back in here,” he said.

  WE RETRACED OUR WAY back to the cave entrance. The light outside appeared ethereal. The forest felt humid and dank, full of life and color. We’d been gone two hours. It felt longer.

  Hess and Linda stood by the cars. “If there was an opportunity for De to kill me, it was back in the cave,” I said to them, joking about how unnerving it was when Hess disappeared and then Thompson told me to turn off my light to “experience” darkness. Linda laughed; she’d been so creeped out by the cave that she’d refused to even step inside. While we were gone, she’d foraged a bag of ramps and other roots. Thompson grabbed one of the plants and held it to my nose. “Sarsaparilla,” he said, and dropped it in my hands.