Captain Blackburn admitted that he had questioned the circumstances from the beginning. “I bet if we ever find him, he won’t have drowned in the lake,” he told fellow rescuers. “He could have been killed somewhere else and dropped here. Just like that boat. Looked like a setup to me. I went over there that first day. Something wasn’t right. The broken motor, those spilled pills. I noticed on that prescription that the pills were over two years old. And that business about the motor was just plain peculiar. Jimmy Don could make a motor out of a pile of scrap metal. A missing rotor blade wouldn’t give him a heart attack.”
As the official search wound down, Captain Blackburn wrote his report from the thorough records he had kept. Two hundred boats had been involved, two helicopters, four airplanes, and hundreds of volunteers. In all, he computed there had been 3,020 man hours logged into looking for Jimmy Don’s body.
After thirteen days, the official search ended, but unofficially people continued searching. They couldn’t get Beets off their minds. His friends still visited his favorite fishing spots, just in case. Whenever people were out on the lake they couldn’t help talking about him or looking for him—just in case.
Closure for Betty Beets came a little quicker. Two days after she reported her husband missing, she waltzed into a funeral home in Segoville, Texas, chose a white casket lined with blue satin, and picked out a cemetery plot. The next week, she asked that a memorial service be held for her late husband. His family dismissed the idea because they were still looking for his body.
In desperation, people turned to whatever means they could to find Captain Beets. One source was psychics. They more or less appeared, with no one taking credit for calling them. Although the sheriff’s office was blamed for hiring at least one, they firmly denied that they had.
One psychic, a four-hundred-pound woman in her sixties, began orchestrating her magic near the site where Jimmy Don’s boat had been found. She stood at the water’s edge with her eyes closed, inhaling the lake air. Then she asked to be driven to Glen Oaks, where Beets still owned a pretty, frame house painted robin’s egg blue. The pleasant three-bedroom, two-bath home had a “great room,” which consisted of a combined den, living room, and dining room, all braided together to form a large room where Jimmy Don had loved to entertain.
The home nestled under soaring oaks across the street from the lake, so after visiting the house, the psychic strolled over to neighbors fronting the lake. On the neighbor’s dock, she squeezed her massive frame into a chair near a spreading magnolia tree, and tried to sense Beets’s presence. After much deliberation, she declared that he was in the water with brown moss on his face. A current siege of Hydrilla, a greenish-brown, moss-type plant held areas of the lake hostage, and the newspapers ran continuous stories about the problem. Any psychic worth her salt could have learned that from the local press.
A Dallas newspaper reported on another psychic, a short, matronly woman from Georgia who had coal-black hair. To see visions, she also closed her eyes and then gently rocked back and forth as she concentrated. After that, she returned to the lakeside search headquarters and stroked a photograph of Captain Beets. She saw him buried somewhere near a castle, adding that he had sand on his face.
The Coast Guard, eager to try anything to find Beets, slowly cruised the shoreline with her on board looking for a castle. They discovered one house on the lake built of stone with turrets at each end of the roof in castle fashion. The eager men docked their boat and went ashore to investigate the structure and its grounds. The puzzled owner let them examine her yard, but they found no freshly turned earth or any indication of a grave. With their attention directed on dwellings at the water’s edge, the Coast Guard overlooked Betty Beets’s wishing well that may have symbolized a castle.
Beets’s two nieces, Jackie Collins and Diane Hodges, piled into their car and drove to Arlington, Texas, just west of Dallas. They had heard about a psychic there, and found her in a small eerie house that smelled of incense. Her head was wrapped in a silk scarf, turban style.
Without their mentioning their uncle, the psychic said, “I see that you have a relative you’re worried about. It’s someone who’s lost that you’re trying to find.”
When they heard her accurate description, they immediately hauled the woman back to the lake. There she asked questions and walked through Beets’s home in Glen Oaks. She fingered his clothes and touched his comb and sunglasses. Then she walked to the water and for a long time stood staring at the lake.
Finally she revealed, “He’s not in the water.”
Diane and Jackie, thinking that meant their uncle was still alive, grinned enthusiastically, but their enthusiasm faded as the psychic continued.
“I see a young man in a white shirt. He’s in a struggle with a woman.” The psychic frowned and placed her fingers to her temple. “He’s near the water, but I’m afraid he’s in a grave.”
Diane and Jackie glanced at each other through tear-fogged eyes. After a few moments of digesting the psychic’s words, they swamped her with a stream of questions, but she could give them nothing specific about their uncle’s whereabouts. However, she did tell them something that later would send chills through their young bodies: “Mr. Beets will be found on July 8, 1985.” She had the day and year right, and only missed the month by one.
FOUR
Roxboro, a village nestled on the green plains of North Carolina, lies in the heart of the tobacco-growing territory. Betty Lou, born there on March 12, 1937, came into the world at a time when the town of 5,000 was trying to pull itself up from the Great Depression. Almost everyone knew poverty, including her young parents, who struggled to make a living as sharecroppers on a tobacco farm. It was a meager beginning for someone who would later be known as Betty Dunevant Branson Lane Threlkeld Barker Beets.
Betty, the second child of James and Louise Dunevant, began life in a small pine cabin that had no electricity, no running water, and no glass in the windows. Rarely did the family have milk or fresh vegetables. They survived on salt pork, flour, and meal—a diet barely capable of nourishing Betty and her older brother, Dewey. Their only source of heat, a black coal stove, could have heated the small home, except that heat escaped through the broken windows, leaving colds and influenza as Betty’s constant companions.
When winter came and the tobacco crop had been harvested, Mrs. Dunevant had time to take on another job as a domestic, the occupation she listed on Betty’s birth certificate. She cleaned the homes of wealthy people, who had beautiful furnishings, heavily fringed drapes, and thick carpets. She’d return to her little house and describe the mansions to Betty, giving her daughter every glittering detail.
“Life’s gonna get better,” Betty’s mother promised her five-year-old daughter one day. With eager anticipation, Mrs. Dunevant and her husband packed the family’s meager belongings and moved twenty miles north to the more-industrial Danville, Virginia, sitting on the border between Virginia and North Carolina. There Betty’s parents found work in the cotton mills and placed the children in a communal day-care center. The young couple now happily provided more of life’s necessities for their children. They rented a snug little house that stayed warm in the winter, and the general health of the family improved thanks to plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables, and red meat.
However, in that same year, Betty came down with measles. She suffered prolonged sore throats, hacking coughs, and a fever that sometimes reached 105 degrees and lasted for days. Her mother took off from work to care for her, and for hours sat in Betty’s small bedroom and sponged her thin body with cold water and placed ice-filled compresses on her forehead. Betty’s flaxen hair stuck to her moist scalp and her blue eyes looked dull and lifeless.
With many sleepless nights, and Betty’s high fever, her parents’ frustration mounted. “You should feel her skin,” her mother said to her husband one