Beyond Reason: The True Story of a Shocking Double Murder, a Brilliant and Beautiful Virginia Socialite, and a Deadly Psychotic Obsession - Softcover

SWEAT ROLLED DOWN DEREK HAYSOM’S FACE. IT streamed down his forehead, collected in his eyebrows, and dripped from the end of his nose. Every few minutes he stopped digging and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. It did not do much good. Seconds later, the perspiration was flowing as freely as before.

A few miles away, in Lynchburg, the weather bureau’s protected thermometer was pushing eighty-four. But it was hotter than that in the shadeless garden where Derek and his wife, Nancy, had been working since early that morning. It was much too hot, Derek thought, for March 30. Without turning his head, he asked his wife, “How are you holding up?”

“As far as I’m concerned, we can call it a day,” Nancy replied wearily.

“That’s a good idea,” Derek agreed, slowly straightening his stiffening back. “I think it’s sundowner time.”

Normally, it does not get particularly warm in the Blue Ridge Mountain country of central Virginia until much later in the year. But 1985 was an exception; the sun had been beating down relentlessly all week. It was particularly hard on Derek, who was accustomed to cooler climes.

“It’s going to be just as miserable tomorrow as it was today,” he grumbled as he gathered his tools and began stacking them at the side of the house. Sometimes he was as fussy as an old maid, which is about what one might expect from a man whose favorite hobby, after gardening and card games, was designing circuit boards for ham radios. “But that doesn’t matter,” he panted. “Palm Sunday or no, we’re going to have to be out early again.”

Nancy nodded silently in agreement, too exhausted to reply. Turning toward the house, she listlessly peeled off her thick cotton gloves and threw them on the ground.

As he gathered the equipment, Derek tried to make light of his fatigue, joking about his “seventy-two-year-old bones” and how it was getting harder to bounce back than it used to be. Advancing age was not something he accepted readily. To help postpone it, he kept in shape with tennis and sporadic jogs along Holcomb Rock Road, the narrow, twisting thoroughfare that ran in front of their house. But a long day of hard labor in a hot sun was enough to drain even the barrel-chested Derek.

The Haysoms had moved to Boonsboro three years before, in 1982, after Derek retired as director of a venture capital organization in Nova Scotia. An engineer by education and training, Derek had shifted into management at midcareer and worked in executive jobs on three continents. Boonsboro beckoned because it was a suburb of Lynchburg, where Nancy had grown up. They lived in relative tranquility in a modest two-story house that Nancy had named Loose Chippings, after a dwelling in an obscure British novel. In the novel, the house was called that because it served as a sort of way station for eccentrics. Nancy found that particularly applicable to their situation.

Naming houses was one of Nancy’s little quirks. Another was collecting small boulders, which she used for building walls around the gardens they always planted whenever they moved to a new residence. Over the twenty-five years she and Derek had been married, wherever they lived, Nancy always built rock walls around their gardens. Now that she was into middle age, the children nagged her about it. Wrestling with outsized rocks, they argued, was not a hobby particularly conducive to her continued good health. To appease them, she promised that the wall at Loose Chippings would be her last.

“I’m for a shower,” she said, running her hand through a mop of auburn hair that was just beginning to show streaks of gray.

“You go ahead,” Derek muttered. “I’ll finish up here and then I’ll be right behind you.”

 

“GOD, IT WAS BEASTLY OUT TODAY,” NANCY SAID, LOOKING cool and comfortable in a royal blue dashiki she had chosen for a quiet evening at home. Her speech was clipped and sprinkled with Briticisms, which was not surprising considering she had spent the last thirty-six years, since she was seventeen, living among British expatriates in southern Africa and Canada. Despite her Virginia roots, there was hardly a hint of a southern drawl.

“Summer will be here before we know it,” agreed Derek. “At times like this I wish we were back in Nova Scotia.”

While Nancy’s accent was affected, Derek’s was legitimate. Most Americans hearing him talk, in fact, thought he was British. In reality, he was a South African of British descent, a native of Natal Province on the East Coast. During the years he worked and studied in the United Kingdom before returning to southern Africa after World War II, he polished his speech to the point where no one but an Englishman would notice his colonial roots.

Nancy sighed. Finishing her drink, she extended her empty glass. “Would you, please?” she asked Derek.

Derek took it and strode to the liquor cabinet. “The same?” he asked, already pouring a large shot of gin over the melting cubes.

She did not answer. Given a choice, Nancy almost always drank gin: Boodles when it was available, Gordon’s when it was not. It was a sign of his exhaustion that Derek did not offer his usual lecture on the evils of her beverage of choice. Almost invariably he chided her about her love for gin. “The juniper extract used to flavor it is a perfect poison,” he would say. “It produces the same feelings of aggression as amphetamines.” Tonight he said nothing. Silently, he added a splash of soda and a slice of lemon to her glass and put it to the side while he refilled his own. Derek’s preference was scotch, which he consumed in the British fashion: straight up—no ice, no water, no soda.

Scooping up the two glasses, he recrossed the room, handing the gin to Nancy and taking a seat across from her. As much out of habit as because of the heat, Derek had closed all the curtains so that they were sitting in the glow of a single lamp. The weak light threw Derek’s craggy face into strong shadow, accentuating his nose and jutting chin, making him look positively fierce. The same light made Nancy appear soft and cuddly. At fifty-three she was still a good-looking woman, perky rather than pretty, petite with attractive, even features, a charming upturned nose, flashing brown eyes, and a fine, full figure. Plump some might say. But whenever she and Derek attended social functions, and that was often, Nancy never failed to draw stares from the men in the group. This raised conflicting emotions in Derek —pride mixed with jealousy—and usually sent him off on a tirade about how she undoubtedly would remarry quickly once he was out of the way. She laughed off those exhibitions, but as a woman with an almost insatiable need for attention and affection, she was secretly pleased with her lingering voluptuousness. Tonight, she had not bothered with makeup after her shower, and the lamplight made her appear unnaturally pale. Around her neck was a doublestranded gold choker, her only concession to formality for the evening. It glowed in the darkness.

“One more, please, dear,” she said. “A little something while I’m fixing dinner.”

While Derek mixed her another drink, Nancy put a pot of rice on to boil and attacked a mound of ground beef, shaping the meat into thick patties, which she slid into the oven.

 

NANCY RINSED THE PLATES AND STACKED THEM IN THE dishwasher, carefully culling the...