The Third Rainbow Girl Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  Cover design by Amanda Kain

  Cover photograph by Jani Riekkinen / EyeEm / Getty Images

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  First Edition: January 2020

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  Lines from “Darkness Poem” by Irene McKinney used with permission.

  Lines from “At 24” by Irene McKinney used with permission.

  Lines from Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles by Chad Berry used with permission.

  Maps of West Virginia and Pocahontas County by Liz Pavlovic.

  Photo credits: Page 7, photo of Nancy Santomero: courtesy of Jeanne Hackett. Page 7, photo of Vicki Durian: courtesy of John Durian. Page 47: courtesy of the author. Page 79: courtesy of Jacob Beard. Page 127: courtesy of Jerry Kauffman. Page 177: courtesy of Jerry Kauffman. Page 217: courtesy of the author. Page 253: courtesy of Liz Johndrow. Page 312: courtesy of Jerry Kauffman.

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  Print book interior design by Abby Reilly.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-44923-6 (hardcover), 978-0-316-44920-5 (ebook)

  E3-20191119-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Maps

  TRUE THINGS

  PART I: WELCOME HOME 1

  2

  3

  4

  PART II: A DIVIDED HEART 1

  2

  3

  PART III: THE RELEVANT NECESSARY PEOPLE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART IV: A PERFECT STORY 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART V: THE COGS DON’T MEET 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART VI: JESSE IN THE QUIET ZONE 1

  2

  3

  PART VII: THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Discover More

  Advance praise for The Third Rainbow Girl

  FURTHER READING

  For my parents

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  If I am missing in any sense, it is a missingness I created for myself in order to be free.

  —Dawn Lundy Martin

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  What follows is the result of five years of reporting and research I conducted in seven states. To understand and conjure the historical sections, I drew on police records, court documents, newspaper reports, scholarly articles, social media posts, and the personal archives of those involved.

  The voices of the living are here, with the exceptions of Bobby Lee Morrison, Winters Walton, Robert Allen, and Steve Hunter, who declined my requests for interviews. I included their point of view where it is available by other means, but no doubt this book would have profited from their insights. If interviewees’ contemporary memories differed from their earlier statements in the public record, I have noted the discrepancy.

  The sections chronicling my own time in Pocahontas County were aided by journals, letters, photographs, and emails. Quotation marks indicate verbatim speech, while passages without quotation marks convey speech reconstructed to the best of my abilities. I have changed some names and identifying details to protect individuals’ privacy. For certain names and nicknames, where official documents and court records used different spellings, I chose the most commonly accepted spelling.

  In one instance, where the privacy of minors was involved, I chose to make “the red-headed girl” a composite of several real people.

  The perspective offered here is mine alone. I don’t claim to speak for the people of Pocahontas County, though I hope that this book speaks to them as well as other audiences. I have tried to see the telling of truth in this book like the drawing of an asymptote, a line that continually reaches for the heart of the matter, even as it does not—cannot—meet it.

  TRUE THINGS

  HERE ARE SOME TRUE THINGS:

  1. In the afternoon or early evening of June 25, 1980, Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were killed in an isolated clearing in southeastern West Virginia. They were twenty-six and nineteen, hitchhiking to an outdoor peace festival known as the Rainbow Gathering, but as the result of two and three close-range gunshot wounds respectively, they never arrived. Vicki was from Iowa but was working as a home health aide in Arizona. Nancy had dropped out of college in New York and was working at a Tucson thrift store. They had not had sex on the day they died, nor were they raped. Their killings have been called the Rainbow Murders.

  2. They died in Pocahontas County, a sparsely populated area that consists largely of protected national forest and sits along West Virginia’s eastern border with Virginia. At the time of their murders, thousands of travelers from all over the country had come to this area to attend the Rainbow Gathering. Local reaction to the festival, organized by outsiders, varied widely. One faction of Pocahontas Countians was upset at the disruption of their lives and, assisted by prominent state politicians, filed an unsuccessful injunction to stop the event. Some speculated a causal link between the festival and the deaths. Because of this, as well as the remoteness of the clearing where the two women were found, citizens and law enforcement mostly believed that the killer was local.

  3. The murders were a trauma experienced on a community scale. Wherever they went to eat or relax or pray, residents discussed these crimes and the fact that the killer was likely still living among them. Two young women had come to their home place for a peaceful celebration and instead ended up dead. Hillsboro, the closest town, held less than three hundred residents. Neighbor accused neighbor.

  4. No one was prosecuted for Vicki and Nancy’s murders for thirteen years. Eventually, nine local people were arrested and charged with crimes connected to the killings. Three more were named as suspects by law enforcement. Two confessed. Four accused another in sworn statements or testimony. All this and more was reported, in great detail, by the local paper, the Pocahontas Times, each Thursday morning. The accused were all men who made their living by working the land—farming, hauling timber, cutting locust posts, or baling hay.

  5. In 1993, the state of West Virginia c
hose to pursue a trial against one man only, a local farmer named Jacob Beard, whom it deemed the “trigger man.” Beard was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The state’s case rested on the word of two of the nine men, both offered immunity in exchange for their testimony. Three men, prosecution witnesses testified, had picked up Vicki and Nancy hitchhiking and then driven them to the woods, where the other men joined the party. The men drank and smoked weed, the prosecution’s theory continued, and then they tried to rape Vicki and Nancy. When the women struggled too much and threatened to go to the police, Beard was said to have shot them. One of the witnesses had less than a third-grade education, and the other said he had repressed his memories of the murders for many years but later recovered them. Both witnesses were physically assaulted by West Virginia State Police officers.

  6. In 1984, a man named Joseph Paul Franklin, already incarcerated in a federal prison in Illinois for a series of murders he had committed throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, told an investigator that he shot and killed two women in the woods of West Virginia. Franklin had a tendency to make claims that he would later disavow, and he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Law enforcement deemed his confession less than platinum, and the judge in Beard’s case agreed. But in 1996, after learning that Beard was doing what Franklin felt to be his time, Franklin grew more insistent in claiming responsibility for Vicki and Nancy’s deaths. With Franklin’s cooperation, Beard was granted a new trial in 1999 and found not guilty in 2000.

  7. I lived in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, from May 2009 to November 2010 and have spent approximately two hundred additional nights here, mostly in summer. I came as a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA), a corps of domestic service volunteers created in 1965 to “alleviate poverty” in America’s most distressed regions that sits under the broader program AmeriCorps. It was my job to empower the teenage girls of southeastern West Virginia by fostering their academic excellence, their knowledge of the ecology and history of their home state, and their healthy emotional development. I eventually moved away from Pocahontas County but have since been back many times as a friend and worker and later as a reporter—that troubled and troubling term—because once I heard the story of Vicki and Nancy and the nine men, it would not leave me.

  8. Though it was my job to work with the girls of Pocahontas County, most of the people I was closest to here were men. They worked construction jobs to make the money they needed and shared with me their music and their land. I existed in a relationship with them essentially as a friend and neighbor and fellow researcher looking into the word “alive.”

  9. The idea of Appalachia is well understood; the real place, less so. It is a borderland, not truly of the South or the North, and West Virginia is the only state entirely within its bounds. Because of its enormous natural resources and their subsequent extraction, which has largely profited corporations based elsewhere, the relationship between the people of West Virginia and the broader United States of America is often compared to that between a colonized people and their colonizers. The programs of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty that funneled national dollars and aid workers to central Appalachia, though founded on humanitarian ideas, also furthered this troubled interdependency.

  10. Pocahontas County life demanded that women and girls be powerful in ways that the more urban places I’ve lived have not, or have even categorically denied. The masculinity I saw in Pocahontas County also encouraged emotional and physical closeness between men in ways I have rarely seen elsewhere.

  11. If every woman is a nonconsensual researcher looking into the word “misogyny,” then my most painful and powerful work was done in Pocahontas County. It could have been done in any other place, because misogyny is in the groundwater of every American city and every American town, but for me, it was done here. Looking into the Rainbow Murders became part of this work.

  12. According to the most recent FBI data, 74 percent of women who are murdered are murdered by men. In 84 percent of cases, the act of murder was not related to the commission of any other felony such as rape or robbery.

  13. In America, protecting or avenging white women from a violation of their safety or sexual autonomy has been used time and time again to justify the unlawful incarceration of men—particularly poor men and men of color. To be conceptualized or to conceptualize oneself as a victim, as my friend the writer Sarah Marshall often reminds me, is the thing more than any other that inhibits personal and moral growth.

  14. White men accounted for nearly 80 percent of suicide deaths in 2017, and men in West Virginia are committing suicide at a rate of almost three times the national average, according to the most recent comprehensive data by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These numbers do not take into account deaths by drug overdose, car accident, or workplace accident.

  15. Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that in all desire to know, there is a drop of cruelty. The same may be true of the impulse to turn the messy stuff of many people’s lived experience into a single story. At the same time, stories are responsible for nearly everything in this life that has made me more free. Which stories are which and to what extent this story is an example of the former idea or the latter or both is an essential question of this book.

  16. Elizabeth Johndrow hitchhiked with Vicki and Nancy across the United States. In the mythology of these events, Liz is known as “the third girl,” though she did not die. She’s not a girl anymore, but a woman with a son and a rich network of love. When I think of all this as a story, I think of her.

  PART I:

  WELCOME HOME

  To love a familiar patch of earth is to know something beyond death, “westward from death,” as my father used to speak it.

  —Louise McNeill

  Nancy Santomero, 1979 (left) and Vicki Durian, 1977 (right)

  1

  IT STARTS WITH A ROAD, a two-lane blacktop called West Virginia Route 219 that spines its way through Pocahontas County and serves, depending on the stretch, as main street and back street, freeway and byway, sidewalk and catwalk.

  It is June 25, 1980, just after the summer solstice, and a young man named Tim is driving home for the night. He had driven to Lewisburg, the big town almost an hour away, and is coming back now, with fresh laundry and groceries.

  The road is made of black tar with a healthy gravel shoulder that gives way to ditch and then forest on both sides except when it climbs up or down a mountain, which is often. On those stretches, the ditches are replaced by tight metal guardrails with reflective yellow arrows that point drivers around the hairpin turns, some nearly one hundred and eighty degrees—a true switchback. To drive this road requires skill, to know when to tap the brake and when to press the gas. Tim is new in town and still learning. It is tempting to slam on the brake every time he sees a switchback, but the better move—for safety, gas efficiency, and natural enjoyment—is to do nothing, to let the speed ride and then, halfway through the turn, give it more gas. Beyond the guardrail is a steep drop-off into a valley where happy cows huddle together under ancient trees. The stakes of driving this road are high for Tim, as the many dents and welds in the guardrails remind him.

  If a traveler were so inclined, she could drive this road in its entirety, all 524 miles of it, from Buffalo, New York, to Rich Creek, Virginia. Just south of the modern Mason-Dixon Line, this road roughly traces the original boundary between the land to the east called Virginia and the land to the west that has had so many names: West Augusta, Trans-Allegheny Virginia, Kanawha, and finally, when it declared itself a sovereign state, West Virginia.

  In the beginning, the Seneca and the Cherokee used a route that would become this road to travel the wilderness from where the St. Lawrence River flows through New York state all the way to Georgia, long before there were any white people here.

  Soon the white people came, first only to the coast at Jamestown but then crashing west across the forest floor.
To stop the flow of blood, King George III issued the Proclamation of 1763, declaring what would become this road as the dividing line between what was “rightful” English settlement and what was not. Whites were forbidden to settle west of this boundary, and any who had already crossed were commanded to return; likewise Native Americans were forbidden to go east of it. But do the white people listen? They do not listen.

  Choosing this road as the boundary wasn’t arbitrary, nor was it empathy for the rights of Native Americans, just sheer capitalist pragmatism. West of this road was wild, and not in a good way: it was steep and craggy mountainsides unsuitable for farming—“trash land.” But for those who had left England seeking opportunity in the New World—largely the poor, the criminal, and the disenfranchised—many found that such opportunities were not easily forthcoming in Virginia. A powerful class-stratification system had quickly been established, a scramble for power that left some on top but most out in the cold. Those who had come with slightly more resources and ties to the upper classes back in London rushed to expand their claims over those who had fewer. By 1770, less than 10 percent of the white colonists owned over half the land in Virginia. To everyone else, the land beyond this road, forbidden or not, looked good.

  Before long, smoke from the fires of simple timber homes marked the presence of a different kind of settler than the Virginian gentleman farmer: the intrepid woodsman squatter. To choose this place meant choosing violent struggle and disobedience, meant choosing years of raiding and being raided by the Seneca, meant choosing to sign up to fight in the American Revolution against England in such great numbers and with such enthusiasm that George Washington said of the region, “Leave me but a banner to plant upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will gather around me the men who will lift our bleeding country from the dust and set her free.”