The letters were Hannibal Lector stuff, in many ways.
Except, this wasn’t a fictional murderer, brought to life from the pages of a novel and delivered to a Hollywood sound stage for a movie.
The letters were real, and so were the victims.
The writing, though, was more mathematically complex than lurid — save for one telling detail in the last one sent.
And that alone, said the Morgantown man who got West Virginia State Police to revisit the case last spring, just might be enough to tag the letter writer as the murderer.
That’s getting ahead of the story, though. First, some history.
One-way trip
It had been three months since Karen Ferrell and Mared Malarik were spied ducking into a cream-colored sedan on a cold January night in Morgantown in 1970.
They had taken in a movie downtown and Sunnyside was a long trudge in cold temperatures for the WVU freshmen and friends.
Their dormitory, the former Westchester Hall, was located in the student neighborhood overlooking the downtown campus, and buses didn’t run in the evening hours then.
Taxis were basically nonexistent and the university’s landmark Personal Rapid Transit system had yet to be built — so no one thought anything about the idea of two young women opening the door of a stranger’s car. Everybody hitched rides back then.
Except, Karen and Mared didn’t check in at Westchester that evening.
They weren’t in their classes the next day, or any day, thereafter.
On April 8 that year, State Police received a letter with a Cumberland, Md., postmark that was punctuated with a triangle symbol at the end.
“Gentleman,” the brief missive began, “I have some information on the whereabouts of the bodies of the two missing West Virginia University coeds, Mared Malarik and Karen Ferrell …”
That letter led authorities to a wooded expanse near Goshen Road, where heartbreaking bits of evidence began showing up, in the form of eyeglasses along a lane and a weather-soaked purse in the brush.
Enter Albert “Rod” Everly, more than 50 years later.
Well, the now-retired contractor and former drafting teacher didn’t actually have to enter.
He was already there.
Getting it in writing
A book and podcast about the murders renewed his interest and involvement in the case.
It was his National Guard unit that happened upon the bodies eight days after police opened that letter with a symbol for a signature.
Everly was second on the scene at the makeshift, tomb-like grave containing the decapitated, decomposed remains of the murdered coeds.
Their bodies were stacked on top of one another, almost as an afterthought, he mused then.
And their heads weren’t anywhere near their bodies.
The author of the letters, four in all, tried to direct authorities to the missing evidence — with directions that managed to be vague, and overly exact, at the same time.
“Proceed 25 miles directly South,” further read that first correspondence.
“This will bring you to a wooded forest land. Enter into the forest exactly one mile.”
Two state troopers trying to follow those directions ended up in downtown Grafton, in neighboring Taylor County.
Five days after the bodies were found, a third letter arrived, more maddening than the first two: “The heads can be found from the position of the bodies by striking out 10 degrees S.W. for the first head, and approximately 10 degrees S.E. for the second, roughly one mile. You are already seven-tenths of that mile …”
The fourth and final letter was addressed to Malarik’s parents in New Jersey, which Everly found decidedly cruel.
And, even more chilling.
“The first and second [letters] were taken with some seriousness,” the author wrote to Mared’s mother and father, “and instituted a search which was successful in locating two bodies minus the heads which were needed for other purposes.”
Road map
Last November, Everly decided to test out the letters.
He got permission from the current owner of the property that was a crime scene more than a half-century ago. Once in the expanse, he began gridding it out, in his builder-draftsman way.
Everly was driving in an oval, because he knew exactly where the bodies were found.
Cadaver dogs were enlisted to test the math on the missing skulls.
Yelping and with their tails wagging furiously, five dogs, each running the expanse separate from one another, all caught a scent at the two locations the letter writer said the heads were buried.
Everything lined up, as the author said it would. That’s how Everly made his acquaintance with Michael Kief.
Back to the future
Kief is a retired lieutenant with the State Police who worked several cold cases in his career.
He’s now a civilian employee of the same agency, teaching forensic examination techniques to cadets at the State Police Academy in Charleston.
This past May, he led the crews that descended upon the site in Morgantown as the digging began.
The work, under a hot sun, was meticulous. Archeology, for an act of ill intent.
A 50-year mystery was peeled back, in 1-inch layers. Soil was combed and sifted. A beer tab from a now-vintage can was uncovered, along with a spent, small-caliber bullet.
But no bone fragments. No skulls.
The State Police Crime Lab purchased a ground-penetrating radar unit over the summer, and Kief said it will be tested out in the coming weeks at the site in Morgantown.
“It’s basically an X-Ray machine,” he said.
The technology uses radio waves to detect anomalies in the soil and strata, such as depressed, sunken-in areas where bodies — or body parts — could be buried, Kief said.
“We can get a 3-D picture of the area.”
The overlooked confession
Everly’s view is one that drifts in and out of focus, like the camera feature on a smartphone wobbling in an uncertain hand.
He’s reasonably certain he knows the killer: Richard Warren Hoover, who was the spiritual leader of the Psychic Science Church, in neighboring Maryland.
Cumberland. The postmark.
Hoover’s church, a “hippie” assemblage, as characterized by Everly, claimed 30 members — and the ability to solve crimes from the Great Beyond.
Two state troopers drove to Maryland to talk to Hoover, but he was discounted after he conducted a séance in the middle of the interview, they said.
Officers also said the church and its leader were simply trying to cash in on reward money Malarik’s family offered and didn’t actually know any details as to where the bodies were located — or if there were bodies to begin with.
These days, Everly isn’t so sure.
The first letter arrived eight days before the discovery of the bodies, after the search began in the Goshen Road area.
Hoover had an intellect and bent for numbers, and the coordinates in the letter meshed with the cadaver dog investigation.
“If he was gonna send letters and he didn’t know where the bodies were, he would have done that two months earlier,” Everly said.
That the missing heads were used “for other purposes,” he added, implies a ritual or ceremony of some sort.
“Maybe they ended up on an altar,” he said. “I really don’t think we’ll find anything when we go back out, because I was pretty thorough.”
Hoover, who died years ago, hid in plain sight for a lot of years, Everly contends. He even enjoyed local notoriety as a “psychic reader.”
That, while two sets of parents were caught in the amber of grief for the rest of their days.
Everly doesn’t like making psychic steps into someone else’s shoes — but in this case, he can’t help it.
“You’re hearing all that testimony and that’s your daughter,” he said.
“Hoover either did it, or he knows who did. Those letters are his overlooked confession.”
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