I called the number on the Bible at seven on a Saturday evening, from a pay phone at the foot of Spruce Knob, because Lonnie had told me not to use the one at home. A tired man answered on the third ring. “Special Agent Lowell Chase,” he said. I said, “My name is Doreen Hatfield. My husband was Lonnie Hatfield. He left me a notebook.” For a long moment I could hear nothing but his breathing. Then he said, in a voice that cracked, “Mrs. Hatfield, I have been waiting four years for this telephone call. Please do not move. I am coming.”
He arrived at my kitchen table in Elkins the next morning at nine, a rumpled man in his fifties in a gray raincoat, who had driven all night from Pittsburgh. He read the notebook for forty minutes without speaking. He read it twice. Then he laid it down carefully on my gingham tablecloth and said, “Fourteen. Mrs. Hatfield, we have eleven of these on our books as missing persons. Three of them we did not know about. Your husband solved three cold cases from a stove ash pan.” His eyes were red. “He told me on the telephone, the last time, he was only a trucker. He was wrong.”
I told him about the funeral. I told him about the tall man who had stood at the back of the funeral home in July, in a black ball cap with a tiny silver bullet pinned to the brim, who had shaken my hand and said, “Lonnie was a good man. I drove with him thirty years.” I remembered the grip. I remembered how he had looked over my shoulder at the casket for a very long time. Agent Chase asked if there had been a guest book. There had. I went to the cedar chest in the bedroom and brought it out, and we turned the pages together until we found the name: Walter Jessup.
A quiet man who writes down what he sees may become the last witness for those the world has forgotten.
Walter Jessup drove a refrigerated rig out of Beckley for the same company as Lonnie, and had for thirty four years. He lived alone in a trailer at the end of a gravel road, kept a dog, and went to the Methodist church on Easter. Agent Chase spent nine days building a case around him in the quiet way of a man who has done it before. He pulled logs and tolls and truck stop video from Exit 365 to Wytheville. He interviewed the retired detective in Florida, who wept. He found a second man, Vernon Hale, Jessup partner on the road since 1988, lying in a hospice bed in Charleston.
Vernon Hale died eleven days later, but before he did, he spoke to Agent Chase for three hours with a recorder on his chest. He told him everything. The two men had begun in 1989 with a single stolen load. A boy had seen their faces, and they had panicked. After that, it had been easier. Trucks without drivers were worth a great deal. They had buried the bodies in an abandoned limestone quarry near Sandstone, West Virginia, fourteen young men in thirty four years, and Hale said that Jessup had driven past the quarry every week, and waved at the gate.
They arrested Walter Jessup at the truck stop in Beckley on a Thursday morning, in the middle of a plate of eggs, with his black ball cap on the table beside him. He looked up at six agents and four state police, and then he looked at me. I was sitting in a corner booth with Agent Chase, a cup of coffee in my hands. For a moment I thought he might break and run. Instead he took off his cap, laid it neatly on his napkin, and said quietly, “Lonnie always did notice things.” That was all. They led him out in handcuffs.
The excavation of the quarry took nineteen days. The families of the missing came by bus from Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, and Arkansas, and stood behind the yellow tape in the cold with photographs in their hands. A mother from Knoxville, eighty one years old, held a faded snapshot of a boy in a white shirt. When the first bones came up, she sank to her knees on the gravel and said, over and over, in a voice that carried across the whole quarry, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you. He is found.”
I brought the license plates down from the cabin myself, in two cardboard boxes, in the back of my station wagon. One by one, I placed them in the hands of the families. Ohio. Kentucky. Tennessee. Georgia. A father in a John Deere cap took the Arkansas plate from me and held it against his chest like a baby. Nobody said anything. There was only the wind in the quarry, and the sound of grown men crying. I handed the last one, Virginia, to the sister of a young driver named Danny Watts, who looked up at me and said, “Your husband kept him safe.”
Jessup was convicted of fourteen counts of first degree murder. The trial lasted six weeks. He received fourteen consecutive life sentences in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. At his sentencing the judge asked whether the defendant had any statement, and Walter Jessup stood and said, to the empty air, “I should have gone the other way at Exit 365.” Agent Chase, sitting beside me, wrote it on a pad. Then he turned the pad over so I would not have to read it again.
I still drive up to Spruce Knob every April and every November, the two months Lonnie always went. The cabin is a memorial now. The state put up a plaque and a little gravel lot. Inside, nailed to the back wall in a straight row, hang fourteen new wooden plaques with fourteen names and a line of verse. I light the woodstove for the first time, and I sit on the cot with the Bible on my knee, and I read the cover note from my husband one more time. “I never hurt anybody,” he wrote. And I say, to the quiet room: “No, Lonnie. You brought them home.”