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Authors: Ken Englade

BOOK: Beyond Reason
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There was no question he had died brutally. Someone with a large, very sharp knife had slashed and stabbed Derek Haysom unmercifully. There were two large, roughly parallel horizontal gashes on the left side of Derek’s face. One began near his cheekbone below the corner of his eye and angled upward and across, cutting through his ear. The other ran from the corner of his prominent chin straight across to the back of his neck. There was another slash on his right cheek that began on his chin and went upward to just below the ear. Brown figured these cuts were made by the killer in efforts to slice Derek’s throat. Obviously they were preliminary attempts because the killer soon found his mark. A huge, gaping wound ran right around Derek’s neck.
A glance at Derek’s hands demonstrated how desperately he had fought for his life, actually grabbing the blade in attempts to wrest the knife away from the assailant. He had six cuts on his hands, including the one that traversed his entire left palm. One of his knuckles was abraded, Brown noticed, indicating that Derek may have slugged the killer at least once.
An autopsy report would later confirm that the killer’s slash had severed every major blood-carrying organ in Derek’s neck. If he were alive when the wound was administered, he would have bled to death in a matter of seconds. Whether he was indeed alive at that time no one knew, because that was not the only potentially fatal injury inflicted upon the retired executive. He also was stabbed through the heart.
Besides the cuts on his cheeks, jaw, and hands, there were eleven slash wounds on Derek’s chest and fourteen on his back. All told, Derek was cut, sliced, or stabbed some three dozen times.
Nancy was not sliced as terribly as her husband, but there was no question that the attacker meant to kill her. In addition
to the grotesque slash across her throat, there were two stab wounds to her torso which could have killed her, one to her heart and one to her side, which penetrated the peritoneal cavity. She would not have died as quickly from those wounds as she would from the slit throat, which virtually guaranteed that she had dropped where she was cut. Besides those wounds, Nancy had a cut on her jaw, a superficial wound on her left breast, and an incised wound on her left elbow, apparently inflicted when she raised her arm to try to ward off a knife thrust.
By the time Brown had finished his cursory examinations, the first wave of what soon seemed like an army of police had begun to arrive. A deputy was posted at the door to keep out everyone who did not absolutely need to be inside until the lab technicians had a chance to collect their evidence.
Since the murder occurred in Bedford County, Sheriff C. H. Wells would be the man responsible for the investigation. Standing in the blood-soaked dining room he quickly surveyed the scene. Three chairs were pushed back from the table, which still held a dirty plate, a bowl, a wine glass, and a neatly folded paper napkin soaked in blood. On one end of the table was a stack of books, as though someone had been using it as a desk. On the tasteful gray upholstery covering the seat of one of the chairs was a large bloody palm print looking for all the world like the cover illustration on a recent mystery novel entitled
Thinner
.
Almost immediately, Wells came to two conclusions. The first was that three people had been seated at the table. Since two of them were dead, that meant that either the third party, the guest, probably was the killer or there was another body somewhere that had not been found. His second conclusion was that the attack took place in the dining room. Nancy apparently was gravely injured early on and staggered into the kitchen to die. But the killer and Derek fought around the dining room and living room until Derek was overcome by his injuries. Both. bodies apparently were left where they fell.
When no third body was found, Wells’ first observation was substantiated: Nancy and Derek knew their killer at least well enough to invite him into the house and serve him a meal. From the first, Wells was thinking “him.” A “her,” he reasoned, would not be strong enough to fight with
Derek as viciously as the killer had done, and a “her” was not as likely to slice up the bodies as badly as they had been. Nor would a “her” be likely to perform what looked to be a grisly
coup de grâce.
The chances were good that the Haysoms’ throats were slit either after they were dead or when they were very close to dying. It would take an unusual woman to be able to do that.
 
THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS toiled at the crime scene. While Brown and other technicians worked on the bodies, Wells’ investigators spread out in the neighborhood to try to find some clue that might lead them to the killer or killers. Who had been friendly with the Haysoms? Who had seen them and when? Had anyone seen a stranger or strangers lurking around the neighborhood? There were hundreds of questions and very few answers. But there was one thing no one connected with the investination ever forgot: the viciousness of the crimes. Whoever murdered Derek and Nancy Haysom must have deeply hatred them.
The crime was the worst anyone could remember in normally sleepy central Virginia. One LPD officer, a veteran of twenty-five years on the force, was so disturbed by the ferocity of the crime that he did something he had never done before. As soon as he got off duty he went home and put a pistol under his pillow. It stayed there for many months.
SHERIFF WELLS WAS NO NEOPHYTE. HALF HARD-NOSED country cop and half accomplished politician—a delicate, sometimes volatile mix required to be a successful rural sheriff—Wells knew a problem when he saw one. He had no sooner screeched to a halt in front of the Haysoms’ door and dashed inside the house than he knew he had trouble. It was bad enough that two apparently well-to-do members of the community had been attacked in their home and sliced almost beyond recognition. Even worse, though, was the immediate knowledge that the crimes were not going to be easily solved. As he poked gently around here and there, careful not to touch anything the lab technicians had not already examined, Wells grew increasingly dispirited about the prospect of a quick resolution. The killer—Wells had seen nothing to change his opinion that the murders were committed by one person—had covered his tracks well, leaving little if anything behind to put police on his trail. Evidence would have to be developed the hard way: by talking to people in ever widening circles until sooner or later investigators got enough clues to put together a concept of why and how the crime occurred and, most importantly, who might have done it. But that took manpower, and manpower was the rarest of commodities in the Bedford County sheriff’s department, an agency that was geared more to the mundane details of rural law enforcement than to spectacular murders.
Although Bedford County, like every other county in the United States, has its share of killings, these usually involve no great mystery. A husband kills his wife because he thinks she is playing around. A wife gets tired of her husband beating her up and puts a bullet in his head. Two drunks get in a
fight and try to carve each other up. In most cases the Bedford sheriff’s office has the murderer in jail in remarkably quick time. But the Haysom case was different. While suspects may be predictable in more run-of-the-mill homicides, investigators in this case had not the slightest clue about who the murderer was or why the Haysoms were killed.
There was another issue to consider as well: public opinion. Wells’s political antennae vibrated like a tuning fork when he thought of the effect the murders were going to have on the residents of Bedford and Campbell counties. The Lynchburg policeman who rushed home to put a pistol under his pillow was not the only one feeling jittery. The fact that the arrest of a suspect or suspects did not appear imminent, not to mention that no one was even sure about motive, caused considerable unease in Lynchburg and Bedford. Within hours of news reports about the discovery of the bodies, rumors began building that the killings were the work of an East Coast Manson, that the Haysoms perhaps had been only the first victims of a roving band of mad thrill-seekers who could strike again at any time. Almost immediately, gun and ammunition sales skyrocketed. Strangers were examined with blatant suspicion.
Sheriff Wells had anticipated this. Moments after he arrived at the Haysom residence, he decided to activate the Regional Homicide Squad.
Several years previously, law enforcement officials from six central Virginia jurisdictions, including Bedford and Campbell counties, had agreed to form a special team that could be activated in those rare instances when the investigatory job was too big for any one of the departments to handle on its own. The Haysoms had been killed in Bedford County, but that was not to say that another murder was not already being committed somewhere else in the region. By immediately summoning the team into action, Wells was not only hoping to increase the chances for a quick arrest, but covering political bases with his constituents as well. Central Virginians would sleep better if they thought a small army of investigators was combing the countryside.
Actually, early on the public believed that the investigation was being performed more efficiently than it really was. Although cops had gone banging on doors virtually as soon as the bodies were discovered, the immediate results were depressing: Nancy and Derek were not high-profile people in the neighborhood. Derek had a reputation along Holcomb Rock Road as a gruff, sometimes tactless man who was unnecessarily abrupt much of the time. Nancy was regarded by her neighbors as snooty and pretentious and a tad quirky. But neither of them was well known along Holcomb Rock Road; most of their friends lived in Lynchburg, a twenty-minute drive away.
As the investigation broadened, police learned that among those who knew the Haysoms few of them, with the exception of Annie Massie and her husband, knew them well. Much of the investigators’ early information about Derek and Nancy came from Annie Massie. But once Nancy’s and Derek’s offspring began arriving, profiles of the victims began to be fleshed out.
As soon as he began reading the reports, Wells knew why his men had so much trouble filling in the background: The Haysoms’ lives had been far from conventional.
 
NANCY WAS BORN IN 1932 IN A LIZARD DUNG–SIZED SPOT on the map of Arizona called Jerome. Her father was Platt Carico Benedict, an itchy-footed geologist who was just embarking on his life’s career of following the gold trail around the world. Her mother was Nancy Langhorne Gibbes, scion of a distinguished Virginia family.
Nancy’s mother was not particularly happy to be in Jerome. For one thing, she had been reared along the verdant Blue Ridge, where her daughter would settle almost exactly a half century later. More than a couple of thousand miles separated the tree-covered Appalachians and the barren Gila Mountains, where Jerome, a rough and raw mining town, lay scratched into a rocky landscape seventy-five miles north of Phoenix. More people lived on her street in Lynchburg than in the entire community of Jerome. But
Jerome had gold, at least for a while. It also had copper, silver, lead, zinc, and gypsum, all of which were becoming more vital to a booming prewar society. It was her husband’s job to help find them.
Life in Jerome did not offer many comforts, especially not to a woman whose illustrious family tree went back five generations in Virginia. Nancy Haysom’s maternal grandmother, Hallie Hutter Gibbes, was a first cousin to Nancy Witcher Langhorne. Students of history and politics, notably the English variety, know that Nancy Langhorne gave up Danville, Virginia, for England and the bed of Waldorf Astor, great-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor. When her husband ascended to the viscountcy after his father’s death in 1919, Nancy Astor, then Lady Astor, successfully ran for his seat in the House of Commons. She was the first woman elected to such a post, which she held until she retired in 1945. During her twenty-six years in public office she became famous throughout the Empire for her intellect and her wit as well as for her efforts for women’s rights and, ironically, considering Nancy Haysom’s predilection for gin, temperance. Hallie Gibbes gave her daughter the middle name of Langhorne in honor of her cousin. It seemed natural, then, for Nancy Langhorne Gibbes Benedict to name
her
daughter after their famous relative as well. So Nancy Haysom started out in life as Nancy Astor Benedict, goddaughter and blood relative of the renowned Lady Astor.
Much to Nancy Benedict’s relief, the family stay in Jerome was relatively brief. When the minerals started to play out five years later, her gold-fevered husband followed the scent to the Yukon. Cultural and physical isolation were marginally acceptable, she reckoned, but winter-long darkness and bitter cold were not. When Platt Benedict headed off for Alaska, Nancy Benedict packed up her children and went back to Lynchburg. In addition to her daughter, who by then had been dubbed Nancita (Little Nancy in Spanish; ‘Cita for short), there were two other Benedict offspring, both boys. Risque was two years older, and there was another son two years younger, Louis. Curiously, the Benedict
marriage remained intact; it was just that Platt didn’t come home every night like most husbands and fathers.
Once back in Virginia, there was little remarkable about Nancy’s childhood except that her father was seldom home. She did what all upper-middle-class southern girls of the time did, except more so since her family tree included contemporary British royalty. She took ballet lessons from Floyd Ward. She shone at Garland-Rodes Elementary School, where she exhibited an early flair for the dramatic by winning the lead in every school play that was produced. Later, she went to E. C. Glass High School, where she played bass in the orchestra. She was also an accomplished pianist and violinist. For two years running, 1945 and 1946, she was named to the all-state orchestra.
In 1949, when she was seventeen and barely out of Glass High, her father summoned the family, saying it was time they all lived together again. She, her mother, and Louis dutifully sped off to Johannesburg where Platt was working for another mining company, still searching for gold. Her older brother, Risque, was entrenched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology so he did not make the move.
By all accounts, Nancy adapted superbly from the first. Never lacking for spunk, the five-foot-three teenager confronted an intruder in their home one night and routed him by swinging at him with a silver candlestick. A strikingly pretty young woman with flashing green eyes, high cheek bones, a graceful nose, and a warm, welcoming smile, it was natural that she attracted a crowd of suitors. It was a rare treat for the dour Afrikaners and reserved British bachelors to come across such a spirited young woman.
But she was not impervious to the charms of her exotic beaus. When she was still in her teens, she fell in love with a charming young Englishman named
Ian Hall.
Unhappily for her, her parents disapproved of him. Indeed, they felt so strongly that when Nancy, barely twenty, told them of her plans to marry Ian at his family’s estate near Stratford-on-Avon, they vowed they would not attend. It was some consolation
to Nancy that her godmother, Lady Astor, was there.
A year after the ceremony, Nancy and Ian had a son they named Howard Henry. It was about this time, too, that Nancy began to regret that she had ignored her parents’ warnings about her husband. Soon after a second son, Richard Platt (named for her father), was born, she divorced Ian and announced her determination to rear the two boys on her own, which she did for the next half dozen years, making a handsome living by investing shrewdly in South African gold stocks. She was following her own gold trail.
Then she met Derek Haysom.
 
AT FIVE-FEET-EIGHT AND SOME ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY pounds, Derek William Reginald Haysom was not physically imposing. But he exhibited a commanding, dynamic presence that gave him an air of authority. Nancy found him handsome, too, in a rugged sort of way. He had a hooked nose, steely gray eyes, a trim waist, and a powerful upper torso, which he maintained through tennis and squash. He had about him an aura of vitality and vision that was absent in many younger men. But what really appealed to Nancy about Derek Haysom was his stability.
Derek’s grandfather, William Pearce, had been virtually penniless when he emigrated to South Africa from Britain in the nineteenth century. Saving his money, he invested in land on which he planted sugarcane. Over the years his holdings grew, and his plantation, Ilove Estates, prospered. He became very wealthy.
Derek, who was brought up in his grandfather’s house, very early showed aptitude both as a student and an athlete. In 1917, when he was only four, his parents enrolled him in a local school. His bent was science. When he finished secondary school, he attended Howard College in Durban to study mechanical engineering. After he earned his degree, he left almost immediately for England, as was customary with young South Africans of privilege. He went to work for a large firm in Manchester and attended classes in the evenings
studying electrical engineering. Soon he had earned a second degree. Before he could put his training into practice, World War II broke out, and Derek joined the British Army. His specialty was intelligence work. He was shipped off to the Middle East, where he worked with a group called the Gas Gang, which managed to take over a gasoline refinery in a major coup that deprived the Axis Powers of the refinery’s assets. At some point Derek saw combat. He came back home both with scars and medals.
When Nancy met him, she was twenty-seven and still bitter about her failed marriage to Hall. He was forty-six. Nancy’s first husband had been charming and handsome, but he had also been immature, cruel, and irresponsible. Derek, in contrast, was everything that Ian had not been: He was kind and conscientious, solid and dependable. It didn’t matter to Nancy that he was almost old enough to be her father. That merely added to his allure. After Ian, she appreciated maturity in a mate.
The details of Derek’s first marriage are a closely held family secret. All that is known to outsiders is that his first wife was a New Zealander and that she returned to her native country soon after they were divorced, leaving the children in Derek’s custody. Whether Derek was still married when he met Nancy is unclear. In any case, soon after he was divorced, he married her, and she followed him to Salisbury, Rhodesia, where he was managing a steel mill. That was 1960. At the time, they had between them five children ranging in age from six to twelve. The oldest was Veryan Neil Graham Haysom, Derek’s older son. He was an intense, solemn child, who grew up to be a lawyer. His brother, Julian Christopher Robert Haysom, who was eight, would be an engineer like his father. Derek’s daughter, Fiona Ann Valerie Haysom, was six, the same age as Nancy’s younger son, Richard. Richard became an architect and his brother, Howard, who was a year older, became a surgeon. Of the five, only Howard would come to the United States to live.
Derek and Nancy had only one child together, a girl
named Elizabeth Roxanne, who was born in 1964. A bubbly, blue-eyed, brown-haired girl, Elizabeth was a delightful child with a quiet, even disposition and a winning smile. More so than most children, Elizabeth seemed from an early age to crave affection. When she was old enough to write, she frequently penned sentimental notes to her parents and shyly slipped them under their bedroom door, reaffirming with regularity her need to be noticed. For the most part, Nancy and Derek were elated to comply. Since she was a decade younger than her half-siblings, Elizabeth was reared virtually as an only child, from the beginning receiving almost the full force of her parents’ attention.

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