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Francis Wheatley's avatar

To get to Roanoke from Lynchburg you need to be on 460. That's an easy ten miles from Boonsboro. If you came into Lynchburg on Rt. 29, say from Charlottesville, some miles to the north of 460, you would find yourself at the gorge above the James River at Madison Heights with the old city high up on the southwestern side. It is a steep city. Going down and crossing the bridge you would climb up to Rivermont Avenue, and if you were going to Boonsboro you would take a right and follow Rivermont Ave, past the Massie's (as I shall always note) near the hospital, through the suburban area to the point where it becomes Boonsboro Road, otherwise known as 501. That has to be some nine miles and though you don't see it, you are running along the river, though that river run deep somewhere a few miles to the east beyond nice neighborhoods, such as Peakland Place, where there are beautiful, champion dogwoods now growing at intervals along the old trolley line. The three Benedict kids must have taken that trolley to school sometimes. Their team was known as the Hilltoppers, which gives you an idea about Lynchburg. They were there with their mother during the war. Their father, a geologist, was an important figure in a federal agency that controlled certain vital war mineral resources and was stationed I forget where. I don't recall there being much at Boonsboro. There was a store called Mitchell's there, and to get to the Haysom's on Holcomb Rock Rd. you would turn right and go at least a mile and one half. Something like that. From the Haysom's the road drops down an incredibly long, steep slope through forests to the river. Off on the right going down there is a spring said to have the best water in the region. There is a blue-collar settlement at Holcomb Rock called Perch, with thirty chained snarling dogs, and a dam. There is another dam further up the river towards a place called Big Island. From 501 you can get up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, a lonely drive for me where I suddenly found myself keeping an eye on my system lights. Indeed, at Bedford, going down from the Parkway, like you were coming in for a landing, I actually smelled my brakes. The houses along the road to the Haysom's had land around them, there were some estates, and the whole area gives an impression to me of being on an escarpment --a long forested ridge that falls away to the north across fields and down to the river hidden behind woods. High up on the other side somewhere in the forest is a place called the Eagle's Eyrie, a Baptist conference center. It was believed by some that a giant black man who was a hermit lived down there, and maybe he did. From down in front of the Haysom's the river bends east maybe less than a mile or so to the dam at Perch and Holcomb Rock. There is a little beach down there which is a sex spot for the young. The James River here is surprising to someone from Tidewater. It is in a gorge, there are cliffs all along the eastern Amherst County side, and I would think that the bateau in the Eighteenth Century taking hogsheads of tobacco down to Richmond would have had to be careful navigating. During Hurricane Camille the river rose seventy or eighty feet at Holcomb Rock and would have been terrifying all the way down to the city and beyond. It is a pleasant enough county gentry neighborhood by day but I know that Nancy Haysom didn't like being alone there at night. They had spot- lights on every corner of that house that could be turned on with a switch over the Shaker bed. To me, strangely, they had no weapons. Not that in this instance, one would have helped.

There is no way that two random hitch-hikers could have found this place.

And both of these young men wore state brogans in large sizes, one, I recall, being twelve, and another, possibly size fifteen.

I can see them now staring in horror at the three LR's. "Hey, who's that!? There's somebody else here!"

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Arctic Warrior's avatar

Also: Why and how would the “deadly drifters” have locked the front door when leaving after the murders?

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