In The Spotlight…

Dianne Wickersham

Dianne Wickersham

Forrest “Lucky” Halterman
Charged With Murder

Forrest “Lucky” Halterman
Charged With Murder

•

•

•

•

The year was 1965 and it was a totally different time in America, especially in small-town, heart of the Bible Belt America.

Change was in the air around the country, but some resisted and held on to their belief systems with everything they had.

The nation was only two years removed from the 1963 March on Washington and the assassination of Presi-dent John Kennedy, I wouldn’t be born for another decade (just thought I’d throw that in there), opponents of the Vietnam War were burning draft cards, Sandy Koufax was striking out batters left and right in the baseball world and there was a gigantic social ideology that if it wasn’t white-on-white and male-on-female it had no place whatsoever amongst civilized folks.

Those assumptions, and all of the negative connotations that go along with them, are what Dianne Wickersham faced in the time before her disappearance in September 1965.

I mean, let’s face it — we’re talking about Covington, Va., not San Francisco or New York City.

There’s never been a shortage of old-fashioned opinions, then and now, about things like sexual orientation.

To be honest, I couldn’t give two flips about what side of the plate someone swings from (if, by chance, you were wondering), but even in 2015, there’s still a huge social stigma associated with anyone who “comes out of the closet.”

Imagine how hard it would have been for Dianne to have lived in a place that would have been as judgmental toward her as this area would have been; and it didn’t help any that she wasn’t a Covington native.

If the rumors about her sexuality are true, that is.

Yeah, you read it right — her sexuality.

It’s been rumored — and rumored only — for 50 years that Dianne was a lesbian, had diddled with the wrong person’s daughter and had, I guess you could say, been dealt with accordingly.

That “accordingly,” as it so happened, included being dumped over a cliff and shot in the head.

I want to state unequivocally right here that there is no concrete evidence to prove that anyone other than one person killed Dianne Wickersham.

That’s not to say someone didn’t help cover it up.

But I’ll get to that later.

Lesbianism and closets aside, it took two years, but, in October 1967 a Covington auto mechanic, Forrest “Lucky” Hal-terman (he got really lucky in the end), was indicted for murder by a Bath County grand jury.

His 1968 trial could easily be called Bath County’s “Trial of the Century,” complete with a semi-media circus, lookie-loos and rubber-neckers and a Bath County church group selling snacks and drinks during the trial proceedings in the courthouse lobby.

Now, “In the Spotlight,” we take a look at the arrest and trial of “Lucky” Halterman, Dianne Wickersham’s accused murderer, and who may or may not be buried in her grave.

—
First, let’s review what we’ve learned so far.

In Part 1, we talked about Dianne’s roommate, Jeanna Arnold, whose statement to the police was, well, let’s just say, a little confusing to say the least.

Arnold told police she last saw Dianne at 10 p.m. on Sunday, September 5th, as she was leaving the Collins Hotel.

No one missed Dianne  (that’s truly sad) until she didn’t show up that following Tuesday for her music class at Rivermont Elementary School.

The day before her disappearance is reported, two Carloover residents see a “strange reflection” on the side of the mountain near Ingalls Field.

They report the sighting to the Bath County Sheriff’s Office after Dianne’s disappearance is announced, but that report is never followed up on.

Then I told you about, in Part 2, that on September 19th, after continuing to see the reflection, Arthur Peery explored the area and discovered Dianne’s body.

Three days after Dianne’s body was discovered, two Valley High School students, looking for the hubcaps from Dianne’s Corvair, found a gun just a few feet from where Bath County Sheriff Leo Lockridge was standing on the day Dianne’s body was found.

Although there was considerable rust in the barrel of the gun, due to it being left in the elements for two weeks, the FBI’s test of the gun showed that the striations closely matched the bullet retrieved from Dianne’s body and a box of bullets found in her lap.

—
That’s where we left off last time.

We begin today’s episode by looking at Jeanna Arnold’s testimony to police on the day Dianne disappeared.

The “official” timeline that police and investigators have used since 1965 was set by Arnold when she was interviewed by police.

She said she saw Dianne leave the Collins Hotel on Sunday night, September 5th.

To that, I call Shenanigans, because she was either lying or had her days mixed up.

Here’s how I know: After Part 1 ran back in February, I confirmed through several sources that Dianne was last seen two days earlier, on Friday, September 3rd.

Wanna know how I came up with that one?

Do you remember from Part 1 where I told you that Dianne was an expert horsewoman and how she was planning on bringing a horse she had recently bought up to Covington?

A longtime friend of mine, who’s now in his 60s, told me after Part 1 was released that he was supposed to travel to Georgia with his father on Saturday, September 4th to pick up Dianne’s horse and bring it up to their farm in Alleghany County.

To maintain his anonymity, I’ll call him “Jim.”

His story is one that I’d never heard before.

This is what Jim told me: “Dianne had asked me and Dad if we would take her to Georgia to pick up her horse she had just bought and if we would house and keep her horse on our farm. Dad thought a lot of Dianne and she was going to pay me to feed it each day. Dad came home and asked me if I would like to go and, as a small child, about the age of 12, I was tickled to be able to go.

“On Friday, Dad said we needed to go to bed early, because we were leaving early the next morning to go to Georgia. We got up early Saturday morning, around 5 a.m., ate breakfast and waited on Dianne to show up so we could leave.
Dad tried several times to call her, but was never able to get in touch with her.”

Jim told me that his Dad was told by someone at the Collins Hotel that Dianne had not been seen there since Friday night.

As much as she loved that horse, there’s no way she would have missed out on an opportunity to go and pick it up.

I’ve talked with others who confirm Jim’s story.

People who lived in the area where she parked her car have said that, after that Friday, her car never came back to the garage again.

So, why did Arnold tell the police she left Sunday night instead of Friday night?

I’d love to ask her that, but that’s a question for the ages, for if you recall, Arnold left Covington two months after Dianne’s murder to supposedly return to school at the University of Georgia.

She was never heard from again and was never called as a witness in the trial that came along in 1968.
—
After Dianne’s body was found, it was first taken to McLaughlin Funeral Home and then transported to Richmond for the autopsy.

Assistant State Medical Examiner Dr. George Abbott reported that Dianne was partially dressed; there was a shoe on the left foot only and she was not wearing any stockings, and that she had tears near one armpit of her blouse and on the right side near the back of the armpit.

Her skirt appeared as if it had been rolled up.

Damage to her body included bruising of the skin on her legs; there was a large amount of blood in the chest cavity; she had a tear in her diaphragm (which is the muscle under the lungs which controls breathing), and the root of her aorta (the main blood vessel in the body) was partially “torn from the supporting structures.”

Strangely, though, she had no bone breaks of any kind, outside of the gunshot wound to her right temple that penetrated her skull.

Dr. Abbott said could not tell if Dianne was shot before or after she was dumped over the cliff.

Now, I was never the brightest firefighter or EMT that has ever come through the Covington Fire Department and Covington Rescue Squad, but I’ve been on enough trauma calls during my 13 years of service as a firefighter to know that anyone who falls or, in this case, goes over a cliff in a vehicle, while conscious, is going to have some kind of bone break, if only from the reflexive move of throwing his or her arms up to protect the face.

Abbott’s report stated that Dianne could have lived for several hours after the trauma was inflicted on her body, which I believe was inflicted during a very violent assault she took at the hands of her assailant prior to her being pushed over the cliff.

As Abbott was doing his autopsy, local investigators were combing over Dianne’s Corvair and found that one of the battery cables had been removed and a set of jumper cables were found in the trunk.

One report I read stated that Dianne was not known to have owned a set of jumper cables.
—
So, just who was her assailant?

Was it the grocery store owner, the car dealer or dealers or the tow truck driver that, for past 50 years, everyone has said had their hands in conspiring to commit this crime?

That’s highly doubtful.

Based on the evidence that came out during his 1968 trial and information I’ve learned over the course of my investigation, Dianne’s killer was likely Forrest Halterman.

Forrest Halterman (aka. Lucky) was born in the Burnside area of Bath County on January 9, 1924.

Lucky was but a youngster when his family moved to Covington, in a house across from McAllister Memorial Presbyterian Church on Alleghany Avenue.

From what I could find, he had a relatively boring childhood, having some minor scrapes with the police, but nothing that would  have put him on law enforcement’s radar.

He served a little over two years in the military during World War II and returned to Covington after his discharge in December 1945.

He was employed as an auto mechanic at a service station that was located on the corner of Monroe Avenue and Riverside Street, where State Electric is today.

I’ve been told by several sources that he also moonlighted at a local car dealership.

Despite the fact that he didn’t have any significant dealings with local law enforcement, I’ve talked to several people who said there “was something not right” about him.

I’ve also heard the description “odd duck” used several times to describe him.
Some people told me he just was downright mean.

One incident was reported to me about sexually-graphic and disturbing pictures that he had drawn on one of the chalkboards at the old Jeter School, where his mother was a custodian.

Instead of reporting the incident to school authorities, the chalkboard was cleaned off as if nothing  happened.

Were something like that to happen these days, he might have been labeled by shrinks as a sexual deviant; but those labels didn’t really exist in 1965.

It’s my theory that Halterman, having seen Dianne at the Jeter School, had developed an unhealthy (to say the least) infatuation with her and, late on Friday, September 3rd, tampered with Dianne’s car battery to keep the car from starting and waited for her to call the dealership for help.

He came in a tow truck to pick the car up and took it to an isolated location, where he attempted to make a move on her.

When she resisted, he flew into a rage and viscously assaulted her, beating her into unconsciousness.

At this point, Lucky was in a bit of a predicament, to say the least.

Whether his attack on Dianne was premeditated or happened in the heat of the moment, he had to do something to cover his tracks, so he takes the car, with her wedged in the front passenger floorboard, up to Airport Road, disconnects it from the truck and pushes it over the 110-foot cliff.

He calmly goes back to Covington, returns the tow truck to were he got it and heads home.
—
It’s fairly clear to me that Bath County prosecutor Shad Solomon had the right guy when, in October 1967, he took his case against “Lucky” Halterman to a grand jury.

Unfortunately, the case he presented in court just didn’t hold up to the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.

There were two big blows to Solomon’s case.

First was the fact that the state medical examiner never conclusively confirmed the identification of the body as that of Dianne Wickersham.  

That’s a bit of a stretch for me, as there were no other young women reported missing in Covington, Alleghany County or Bath County during that timeframe except for Dianne, the body was found in Dianne’s car and the purse found near the body had identification showing it to be hers.

One of Halterman’s attorneys, future judge Kit Carson, said in court during the May 1968 trial that the prosecution “hadn’t even proved the car in which the body was found belonged to Dianne Wickersham.”

The second knock to Solomon’s case was his star witness, Richard Ferris, who testified Lucky came to his home on Monday, September 6th, and asked Ferris to take him up to Airport Road, saying he and Dianne had been in a bad accident and the car had gone over a cliff.

Ferris testified that he took Lucky to Airport Road at about 10 that morning and Lucky recounted to him what had happened. He also said Lucky had a gun with him at the time he drove him to Bath County.

According to Ferris, Lucky told him to stay in the car and he went down over the cliff to where Dianne’s car had come to rest.

Ferris said he heard a shot and, soon thereafter, Lucky reappeared, without the gun, and told Ferris he had shot Dianne.

As they returned to town, Halterman confessed to Ferris that he had actually beaten and choked Dianne and pushed her car, with her in it, over the cliff because, as Lucky said, he “wanted to get rid of her after the way she was treating me.”

Lucky told Ferris that, when he got down to where the car was, that Dianne was still alive, “and I shot her,” he told him.

Ferris said Halterman threatened “to do the same thing to me” if he told anyone what had happened.

Under any normal circumstance, Ferris’ testimony would have meant a slam-dunk for the prosecution; but, as I’ve found in this case, nothing is usually what it appears.

You see, Ferris was questioned several times by police officers beginning in February 1966.

Had he stuck to the story he gave during Halterman’s trial, his testimony would have been gold for the prosecution.

Unfortunately for Solo-mon, Ferris gave two or three variations of what happened during the five or six times he was interviewed by police.

Solomon went ahead and used Ferris as his key witness, but it didn’t take much for Halter-man’s attorneys, which included Carson and future Virginia Supreme Court Justice Roscoe Stephenson, to blast major holes in his story.

Personally, I feel that Ferris’ account, based on the evidence, is pretty close, if not dead on (no pun intended), to what actually happened.

Ferris single-handedly sunk Solomon’s case when he couldn’t get his story straight early on.
—
A couple of things still puzzle me.

During the trial, as he was questioning Halterman, Solomon asked him about purchasing a gun a couple of weeks before the murder at Merchant’s Pawn Shop in Roanoke.

Halterman said he had never been there.

Solomon continued by asking him about a speeding ticket he had gotten in Roanoke in August 1965, stating Lucky had purchased the gun when he returned to Roanoke to pay his fine.

Just when you’d think Solomon would introduce evidence putting Halterman in Roanoke, using the date of the speeding ticket or the date on the receipts from where he purchased the gun or from where he paid the fine, Solomon pulls in the reigns and moves on to a different line of questioning.

I’m no Poirot, but this could have trumped Ferris’ inconsistent testimony had Solomon pursued it further.

Another thing that I wonder about is how an auto mechanic making, at the time, probably a dollar or so an hour (nothing wrong with auto mechanics, mind you) could afford two of the best criminal defense attorneys this area had to offer?

Maybe Carson and Stephenson worked pro bono; or, if Lucky had used someone’s tow truck to dispose of Dianne and her car, the owner could have secured these attorneys for him in order to get him off, get him the heck out of town and keep his mouth shut.

Before he was arrested in October 1967, Lucky had been working in the Alexandria area and living with his brother.

After the trial, he went back and lived in Alexandria the rest of his life.

A story has gone around that, soon after the murder, the tow truck got a brand new set of tires.

There’s no evidence to prove that, but it does make you wonder, doesn’t it?
—
Halterman’s fate was left in the jury members’ hands on May 23rd, 1968, when they began their deliberations.

According to Bill Lumpkin’s report of the trial, as the jury deliberated, Halterman strolled through the courtroom, smiling and glad-handing.

Three hours after being given the case – three hours, mind you – the jurors returned and told the judge they were hopelessly deadlocked.

Deadlocked after only three hours?

What’s even more amazing is that Judge Earl Abbott took the jury at its word and declared a hung jury.

Lucky got off lucky and was free to go.

The following October, Abbott returned to court, per a request from Lucky’s attorneys, and fully acquitted him of all charges, saying he didn’t feel Halterman could be convicted based on the evidence presented by the prosecution in the case.

He headed back to Alexandria, where he remained until his death on January 13, 1987.

He’s buried in Arling-ton National Cemetery.

In an epilogue to Halterman’s story, on his deathbed, someone asked him if he had anything he wanted to get off his conscience before he headed to The Great Whatever.

He said he didn’t.

Even if he had confessed (and hadn’t been heading on to the other side), thanks to Judge Abbott acquitting him in 1968, he couldn’t have been retried anyway, so why bother confessing, right?
—
Do you know what’s really sad in this case, almost as sad as Dianne’s murder itself?

For years, reports of the crime, which were published in newspapers all across Virginia and as far away as Mississippi, had her name spelled “Diane.”

It wasn’t until recently, when I found a picture of her tombstone online, that I learned the correct spelling of her name is actually “Dianne.”

Hopefully, one day, the stars, the moon and all of the planets will align just right and I’ll be able to tell the entire story (not more rumors, not more conjecture, not more speculation) and, at long last, Dianne can rest in peace and her family can have some sense of closure — if there is such a thing as closure in a case like this.

I suppose when that happens, I’ll have to follow up with a Part 4.

By the way, the body buried in Dianne’s grave was, in fact, that of Dianne Wickersham.

Even though the state medical examiner never would conclusively identify the body found on September 19th, 1965, as that of Dianne Wickersham, there’s really no doubt that’s who it was.

I have to admit, it was a hoot getting The Mother-in-Law all riled up at me when I wouldn’t tell her who was really buried in Dianne’s grave.

Don’t judge.

We all have our sinful pleasures.

—
Next time, I’ll investigate things that go bump in the night in a local school building.

Stay tuned for the next “In the Spotlight,” where we’ll look at “The Ghost of Mrs. Jeter.”

Until then…

Do you have someone you’d like for me to put “In the Spotlight?” 

If so, write me at:
David S. Crosier
The Virginian Review
P.O. Box 271
Covington, Va. 24426
Or e-mail me at:
DSCrosier@gmail.com