Town note
In the late 1800s coal mining and transportation became a big industry in southern West Virginia, with railroads built to move the coal.
about 0:05:24The story
They began an affair. A couple of years later she married David Cloud, known as D.B., born 1926, a wealthy businessman who was vice president and general manager of Carter Machinery Company, based in Salem with offices in West Virginia and a headquarters in Roanoke. She owned a beauty parlour, ran a cosmetics franchise and was treated as local royalty in Princeton.
He said he told her to forget it. A week or ten days later, at a motel in Rich Creek, Virginia, she asked for his help and he said he would ask around. They agreed a price of $2,500 with a $500 bonus.
On January 26, 1980, the Clouds went to a dinner party at the Sahara Club in Bluefield, about twelve miles from home. They drove around the neighbourhood for half an hour, waiting to see whether anyone called the police, then returned.
Just before midnight the Clouds came home. D.B. was holding a glass and his key at the back door when a masked man with a 12-gauge shotgun demanded money and shot him in the face at point-blank range. Naomi, beside him, was covered in blood and brain matter but unhurt. The gunman ran off without taking the $150 in Cloud's pocket. She called 911. Several neighbours told police they had seen two men cruising the streets in the same car earlier that night.
Over a nine-month investigation police learned of the affair. She received between $90,000 and $100,000 in insurance money as well as property.
Naomi had moved to Huntington, West Virginia, sold cars at a Chevrolet dealership and moved in with Bernie D. Stanley. On July 18, 1981, she sold the bail apartment building to her brother E. Howard Hill and his wife Betty, and sold her cosmetics business to her sister Sylvia. The judge forfeited the $50,000 bond and issued a bench warrant. She and Stanley had gone. Posters offered $5,000, and newspapers called her 'the fugitive temptress'.
In 1985 Cloud's children offered a $20,000 reward.
Naomi and Stanley moved into a house in Kennewick, Washington, in July 1987. In one identity she sold water softeners and ranked third in the country. Twenty to thirty people saw her off at the airport with signs saying 'We believe in you' and 'We love you, Donna'. Back in West Virginia bail was set at $100,000. In 1989 the state was still trying to trace the insurance money, with a $50,000 judgment against her.
The second case came from Mingo County in 1956. On October 19, between 4 and 4.30 in the afternoon, Clyde Fields and nineteen-year-old Luther Daniels arrived at Don's Place, a beer tavern on West Virginia Route 49 at Delorm. Fields was forty to forty-five, about five feet ten and 155 pounds, and limped because he had an artificial leg. Daniels argued with a customer named Artemis Mounts, and Fields offered to fight anyone in the bar. Both were told to leave. Fields went outside. Daniels was pushed out of the door, fell into Fields and both went down. He got up and walked away, heard a shot and turned to see Fields put a hand to his stomach and fall.
The bullet passed through Fields's chest, severed a main artery and killed him quickly. Fields had not joined the fight, made no threats and had left when told. The defence said he had a knife and was coming back at the door. Only he and his father saw the knife.
On February 8, 1957, Julius Estep of Virginia and Condy Stanley of Mohawk, West Virginia, swore affidavits that they had seen Fields with a knife and that Estep picked it up after the shooting and put it in a jar on top of his refrigerator.