Nov. 23--HENRICO, Va. -- The beating death of a homeless man whose body was discovered last week near a Henrico County railyard ended his companion's dreams of a happy life together.

Robert Edwards Dyck, 37, and Lucille Obarzanek, a 28-year-old University of Vermont graduate, were hopping freight trains south from Pennsylvania to New Orleans when Dyck turned up missing and then dead, the victim of blunt-force injuries to his head and chest.

"We were going to try to make a go of it. To get to Louisiana and find work and raise a family," Obarzanek said yesterday.

"But everyone around me is dying," she added, weeping inside the Henrico jail and laying out a story of deceased parents, an empty home in Vermont and an attraction to a homeless man that turned into a love affair. Her father, a native of Poland who sang opera there, died in June; her mother died several years ago.

Dyck and Obarzanek had been in the Richmond area for about three weeks, she said, living in a shantytown near the Acca Yard that the train-jumpers call Valhalla.

But sharing a tarp roof, a fire pit, and a pine-tree-studded junkyard of garbage and empty beer and wine bottles, Obarzanek said, were two men who carried ominous nicknames, "Satan" and "Roofless." Dyck was known as "Yard Sale."

The two men -- Samuel E. Gase, 32, aka Satan, and Brandon Thomas Geissler, 21, aka Roofless -- appeared in Henrico General District Court yesterday and are being held without bond. Both are charged with voluntary manslaughter in Dyck's death.

"They told me they beat up Yard Sale and ran him off," Obarzanek said. "I couldn't find him, and someone told me that he had seen him walk by last week. So I hoped he was OK."

Dyck's death is the second of a homeless person since 2006 in the same immediate area. The badly decomposed body of Robert Allen Chassereau, 46, was found in June of that year; the case was investigated as a homicide, but no arrest has been made.

Obarzanek is facing a charge of simple trespassing but can't make bail, she said. The former Vermont resident whose parents ran a bed-and-breakfast in Stowe, Vt., called Ten Acres Lodge fears she may have been the unwitting reason Dyck died.

"He would get drunk, and he could be pretty violent," Obarzanek said. Dyck got the "Yard Sale" nickname because he would leave his belongings scattered around his sleeping area when he drank. "It looked like a yard sale," Obarzanek said.

As cold nights set in last week, Obarzanek said, she drank too much hard liquor and passed out, only to have Dyck strike her. She remembers nothing of the attack but said Gase and Geissler told her they had jumped Dyck because of what he had done to her.

"They said they didn't like the way he treated me," she said.

Now, as the holidays approach, Obarzanek has never been more alone.

"I really have no family except an aunt in Queens. I was living there when my father died in June," she said. Dyck was so obsessed with Obarzanek that he camped out in front of the aunt's house, she said.

"I would take him food and money."

Several weeks ago, he persuaded her to ride the rails with him, and they headed to Philadelphia to hop a freight train south.

"There are times [riding boxcars] is invigorating and sort of exciting seeing new places, but you get very tired and I miss being able to stay clean and take a shower," Obarzanek said.

University of Vermont records confirm that she graduated from the school in 2007 with a major in psychology.

Prospects are that she will spend Thanksgiving in the Henrico jail, where it is warm, there is food, and she can stay clean. The panhandling for cash, Yard Sale's constant pleas for money to buy alcohol and a weak grasp of a foggy future for a while are in abeyance.

"I sort of feel like I am losing touch with myself," she said. "It is getting harder to think about who I am. Sometimes I just want to die."

On the floor of the lean-to where Satan and his pit bull lived with Roofless, Yard Sale and Lucy, a hand-printed sign they used to beg for money was turned facedown in the dirt yesterday.

It shows a train track and a distant setting sun and reads: "Passin Thru. Hungry & Broke."

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or [email protected].