That’s how it works, during these sad searches.
You put one foot in front of the other, in gridded-out moves, like a game of chess.
Clear one quadrant, one thicket, and move on to the other.
Outwardly, you might appear calm – stoic, even – but inside, you’re churning.
Conflicted emotions?
You’d better believe it, buddy.
That’s because while you’re half-hoping you’ll be the guy who finds something – you’re also praying you won’t be the guy who finds something.
By all accounts, Albert “Rod” Everly was a capable soldier in his National Guard unit in Morgantown.
So capable, in fact, that the sergeant was tapped as a squad leader for this most important search, on this particular expanse of land near Goshen Road, just outside Morgantown.
When it happened, it was purely by chance, which is also how these things work.
One of the guys in the unit had plopped down for a break when he saw it.
A leg, poking out of the brush.
“Over here! Hey! Help! It’s them!”
Everly double-timed the 30 yards to the source of the yelling.
It was around 10 a.m., April 16, 1970. Karen Ferrell and Mared Malarik had just been found.
And the real search was just beginning.
‘Hey, thanks, man’
Karen and Mared, WVU freshmen who became fast friends at orientation, were last seen alive in downtown Morgantown 53 years ago, this past Wednesday.
Friends spied them getting into a white sedan with a white license plate.
They had just taken in a movie, and rather than make a long walk to their dorm on a cold January night, the pair decided to hitch a ride.
No buses ran in the evening and cabs were non-existent. The PRT was still five years away in the future.
It was all part of the hang-loose, bellbottom vibe of a funky, scruffy college town coming out of its Aquarian days and into a new decade.
You’d jut out your thumb and say, “Hey, thanks, man,” when the ride rolled up.
If your radio could pull in the FM stations out of Pittsburgh, or, if you were the type who bought albums over 45s, you could hear Simon and Garfunkel singing about it: “It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw … I’ve gone to look for America.”
Karen and Mared were just looking for a ride to Sunnyside.
Nobody thought anything about it.
Not until they missed curfew at Westchester Hall that night and their classes the next day.
Not until their decomposed, decapitated bodies were lifted from a wooded grave made, perhaps, to look like an altar – and happened upon by a Guardsman who just needed to get off his feet for a few seconds.
Page-turning time machine
The case was marked by hours and hours of police work, a dubious confession (and conviction) and the sad fact, he said, that the heads of the murdered coeds have yet to be found after more than a half-century.
Everly, now 78, went on to make a successful career as a contractor in the Morgantown area and as a teacher at the Monongalia County Technical Education Center, where his drafting students regularly earned national accolades in competitions for their work.
The case, and plight, of Karen and Mared faded over the years for him until Geoffrey Fuller, a former newspaper reporter, teamed up with podcast producer S. James McLaughlin to write a well-received book in 2021 revisiting the time and circumstances of it all.
“The WVU Coed Murders: Who Killed Mared and Karen?” was a true page-turner for Everly.
“It took me right back there,” he said.
He could again hear the yelling of the Guardsman who unwittingly sat down next to the makeshift grave of the victims.
Something else came back, too: that tingly, slightly uneasy sensation at the crime scene.
“We got the feeling we were being watched,” he said. “By the killer, or killers.”
And there were the letters.
Especially the letters.
Numbing numbers
There were four anonymous letters in all, penned from across the mountains, as evidence in Morgantown was being discovered by degrees during those April days before the bodies were found.
Taken as a whole, Everly said, the missives amount to what he calls “the overlooked confession” in the case.
That’s even as the letters were gnawingly concise, and maddingly vague at the same time.
“The author was trying to play a game with police,” Everly said.
Go 25 miles from the “most southern border of Morgantown” to “1 mile in the forest,” and you’ll locate the bodies, the first letter detailed.
Police ended up in downtown Grafton, in neighboring Taylor County, trying to follow that letter, well, to the letter.
There were other brow-furrowers: “striking 10 degrees southwest” and “approximately 10 degrees southeast,” read another set of directions.
Everly started playing with the numbers last fall – and got the West Virginia State Police interested, in the process.
Barking up the right tree?
It helped that he knew, 50 years later, the exact location where the bodies were found.
He juggled the “25+1” direction as three separate digits, in every possible configuration.
The 5-2-1 arrangement – 5 miles from the southern line of Morgantown, 2 miles to a forested area and 1 mile to the coeds’ remains – seems to have worked, as it took Everly right to where the bodies were found in 1970.
If it was a stretch, Everly said, it was a noisy one.
May 5 of last year told it – this time in the form of cadaver dogs yelping at the locations of where the missing heads were said to be buried, through other directions mapped out in the letters.
Five highly trained dogs, each running a circuit separately, all caught scents at the two locations said to contain the skulls.
The letters recounted the missing heads buried in shallow depressions around a foot deep.
Forensic investigators from the State Police Crime Lab in Charleston spent hours last May painstakingly digging at the site. Compounding the work was the fact that the site was heavily renovated years ago, with metric tons of earth added to the mix.
A ground-penetrating radar unit was purchased by the lab over the summer, but it hasn’t made it up to Morgantown yet.
The technology uses radio waves to detect anomalies in soil and strata, such as depressed, sunken-in areas where bodies – or body parts – could be buried.
“It’s basically an X-Ray machine,” said Michael Kief, a retired State Police lieutenant who now does forensic work with the agency and led the site work here last spring.
For Everly, it could also mean deliverance of a true verdict of guilty – even if it would be from beyond the grave.
A call-out for information
Fifty-three years is a long time, Everly allowed.
People get old and die. Memories go first.
Everly contends the author of the letters was also the killer of the coeds.
Each letter carried a Cumberland, Md., postmark, which State Police traced to Richard Warren Hoover, whose handwriting matched up, also.
Hoover, who died two years ago, was the spiritual leader of the “Psychic Science Church,” a hippie assemblage in the mountain town boasting around 30 members and the ability – Hoover said – to solve crimes with the help of seances.
Those letters were written in Hoover’s hand, but he said they were dictated by a spirit entity from the 17th century.
Police discounted Hoover and the church on the basis of the above mysticism.
Hoover, they contended, was simply trying to cash in on the $3,500 in reward money offered during the investigation, and didn’t know one whit of detail about the case.
The man following the letters – disagrees.
“If he was gonna send letters and he didn’t know where the bodies were, he would have done that two months earlier,” Everly told The Dominion Post previously.
‘They had to sit through all that’
A fourth letter, which Everly didn’t know about until he read Fuller and McLaughlin’s book, was one he found decidedly cruel.
It was addressed personally to Mared’s parents in New Jersey.
In it, the author chided local authorities and said the missing heads were used “for other purposes,” which may have implied a ritual of some sort, Everly said.
Find the skulls, he said, or bone fragments, at least, and you might also find the murderer’s DNA – this being 50 years in the future.
There could be a bullet hole.
Everly would like anyone with any additional information on the Maryland spiritual leader to contact him by email. His address is: rodeverly@yahoo.com.
He thinks about lurid testimony lifted from detective magazines and mainly of the wrenching suddenness of two young women on the cusp of their futures, being taken away – just like that.
He thinks about grief in the days immediately after.
Mared’s father was a respected dentist in suburban New Jersey. His patients loved him, and he loved his family.
Karen’s father came home from World War II to his native Greenbrier County. He was a combat medic who narrowly escaped death in the Battle of the Bulge. Her mother was a Rosie the Riveter during the war at an airplane plant in Baltimore. Karen was their only child – and she was adopted.
“With everything that went on with that trial, they had to sit through that. It was like their daughters were murdered a second time.”
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