Suspect Defined By What He Wasn't

Loner's Tracks Adding Little to Investigation Of Killings at Va. Resort

HOT SPRINGS, Va. -- When Beacher F. Hackney killed two co-workers in the kitchen of the Homestead two months ago, he fled the luxurious mountain resort on foot, authorities said. Then he seemed to vanish without a trace.

Now it appears Hackney had lived his life just as mysteriously, a loner who shunned family, friends and almost every tie to the world around him. Living like a hermit in the small towns of Southside Virginia, he has left little for law enforcement officials to work with as they continue to search for him.

On a busy Saturday night during the dinner hour, Hackney, 59, stalked into the kitchen and without a word, opened fire on supervisors Ronnie Stinnett, 60, and Dwight Kerr, 39, with a .380 semiautomatic handgun, law enforcement officials said. The March 21 slayings stunned people near and far who knew the world-class Homestead as a gilded playground visited by presidents, corporate executives and other VIPs, including John D. Rockefeller Sr., for more than two centuries.

Sheriff R. Larry Norfleet said this is the first homicide case in Bath County (pop. 4,635) in 29 years. But Norfleet, who has investigated such crimes as a former Virginia state trooper, said it is also the most mysterious he's ever seen, even though investigators quickly identified Hackney as the killer and filed a warrant for his arrest on capital murder charges.

In an interview earlier this month, Norfleet suggested that Hackney's world might best be defined by what is missing:

Hackney, who had done janitorial work at the Homestead since 2003, had no known friends. He was estranged from his family. He belonged to no church or other house of worship. He had no military or criminal record. He had no passport. No pets. No phone. No credit cards. No computer, and no evidence that he ever used one. He had a bank account with a tiny amount of money and paid for everything with cash or money orders.

He kept few belongings and seldom, if ever, watched television. He may have had a hunting or fishing license at one point but was not known to spend time outdoors, as many do in the Allegheny Mountain region. Hackney appears to have owned the handgun legally, although authorities are not sure where he might have obtained it. His only pastime appears to have been reading newspapers and magazines.

Soon after the shootings, police recovered two vehicles Hackney owned, including a 1982 Chevy Blazer left in an employee parking lot on the night of the killings. Except for the twisted coat hanger used as a radio antenna and some spots of rust, the Blazer was in excellent condition, its red velour seats brushed clean without a scrap of trash inside.

Norfleet said Hackney moved from Princeton, W.Va., to Virginia some years ago to work in a furniture plant in Martinsville. When the plant shut down with others in the Southside mill town, Hackney found work at the Homestead.

Hackney had been married, but his wife died awhile ago. His parents are also deceased. He is estranged from the rest of his family, which included a brother and four sisters, although from time to time he was in touch with a sister. Hackney also has a daughter who is about 30 years old and lives in the Princeton area, but she told investigators that he has not been in touch with her.

Hackney often ignored people when they spoke to him, and he opened his mouth to talk so rarely that some co-workers thought that he might be deaf and mute. At the Homestead, Hackney would often wait for an empty shuttle bus from the employee parking lot rather than board one carrying other passengers, Norfleet said.

"With him being the loner he's pretty much been his entire life, you don't have a lot of pieces to put together," Norfleet said.

Law enforcement officials, former landlords and others offer only a few glimpses of a man who preferred to be left alone. He was neat. He was punctilious about paying his rent. He routinely visited the same places to buy gas and other items, sometimes for years, without so much as exchanging a by-your-leave with clerks and proprietors. When he was renting a double-wide trailer in Hematite, Va., outside Covington, neighbors noticed that he mowed the lot so fastidiously that he seldom left a blade of grass out of place.

"He was one of the best renters I ever had," said JoAnna Cooke of Hematite. Cooke said Hackney always drove to her house on the first of the month to pay the rent in cash and then waited silently while she wrote out a receipt.

About five months ago, Hackney moved to a second-floor walk-up above a shuttered store in Covington. The yellow building sits on a dead end near the boarded-up Chesapeake & Ohio Freight House, cater-corner to Covington Wesleyan Church.

When police entered his apartment, they found few answers inside. His room was spotless. Two or three shirts hung in the closet. He had a twin bed, a vacuum cleaner, a table and a single chair. There was nothing on the walls. There was no note explaining his alleged crime or his disappearance. There was no journal, no letters. Hackney was spartan even in how he illuminated the place, using a single light bulb in each room where the ceiling fan light fixtures were designed for three.

"The people on either side of him didn't even know he was there," said his landlord, O. Vaughn Roberts. Although there was a coin-operated laundry across the street, Hackney carted his clothes once or twice a week to the laundry at Ritsch's Cleaners, a half-mile away, across from a strip mall with a Dollar General and a Goodwill Store.

"All I can say about him is we tried to speak with him like other customers -- 'How are you, sir?' and so on -- and he'd just walk away," said Harry Singh, 44, owner of a Valero gas station and convenience store near the apartment. "He would say, 'I need my receipt.' "

It all leaves Norfleet with only hunches about Hackney's motives, especially because the sheriff said there is no evidence that Hackney quarreled with the victims. The only thing that makes sense, Norfleet said, is that Hackney became angry after he was moved from a quiet 11 p.m. shift to one during the dinner hour when he had to deal with more people.

A $25,000 reward has been offered for information leading to Hackney's arrest. The U.S. Marshals Service and Virginia State Police have joined the far-ranging search that began six weeks ago in this remote area on the West Virginia border, and "America's Most Wanted" has aired a brief item about the case. But despite an initial search with helicopters, ATVs and dogs trained to follow people or find corpses, Hackney is still missing.

"If you were to go back in time, he would have been a good mountain man," Norfleet said. "He just wanted to be left alone."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.