[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  Romantic love was something he would like in his life eventually, he said, but he was not in any rush. Jordan was still somewhat guarded when it came to his body and being trans in Greenbrier County, but he found he felt comfortable wearing fewer layers of clothing than he thought he would—“just a T-shirt is fine, no need for the seven sweatshirts. I’m not hiding here nearly as much as I thought I would be,” he told me. In a fact that shocks many of my friends when I tell them, West Virginia has the most transgender teenagers per capita of any American state.

  “I have found a lot of acceptance,” Jordan said. “I’ve been able to share my story and be out there in the community here in ways I didn’t expect.…Greenbrier County has opened up a lot. It’s a mix between the old life and the new—it has that farm life still, and agriculture, and familial culture. But we are also seeing this surge of cultural diversity. We have a Jamaican restaurant now, and a fry bread restaurant is coming in. Our access to technology is changing. The high school gives their students netbooks and laptops now.”

  But, he acknowledges, the price of living at home is sometimes high.

  “The bad side of coming back is that you’re consistently fighting those Appalachian values of closed-mindedness, man and woman, God is the word.…No matter how much women work, they’re still expected to come home and take care of the kids. Men do the physical labor, and that’s considered enough.”

  It was Jordan who, super in love with his high school girlfriend at the time, changed Greenbrier East High School’s policy on queer couples attending prom together. He considers himself a natural-born fighter with a knack for standing out but understands that not everyone wants to live like that. The questions Appalachian young people must ask themselves, he said, are these: “Are you willing to put your heart and your soul into changing a place that you love? Are you strong enough to withstand the barricades that you will come up against?”

  6

  AT SOME POINT IN THE process of writing this book, I became concerned that I was going to die. I became concerned that I was going to die because I was thinking, more and more often, about killing myself. These are two separate states, are they not—the faraway fear and the longing, so nearby.

  The image that rose and would not leave me during this period was of my chest as a puzzle missing a central piece that was shaped like a gun. After my meeting with Debbie DiFalco, I’d driven west on I-66, then south on Route 29, and pulled off the road at a collection of red buildings with a sign that advertised “GUNS ALL KINDS & SHOOTING RANGE.” On top of the roof of the largest red building was a plastic statue of a brown bear, its mouth open in anger.

  I pulled in ostensibly for research, to learn about how Franklin’s gun, a .44 Magnum, would have felt in the hand. The gun felt much lighter than I had expected, and once pressed up against the right temple, the trigger much easier to pull.

  I say Franklin because I believed then, as I do now, that though we’ll never know for sure, the evidence supports the conclusion that Franklin killed Vicki and Nancy better than it supports the conclusion that Beard did. I say Franklin additionally because the violence and death this book cares about is also that which began before Vicki and Nancy were killed and which was visited upon so many others after they died: Walt Weiford, Bobby Lee Morrison, Gerald Brown, Arnold Cutlip, Pee Wee Walton, Johnnie Washington Lewis. David Martin and Ted Fields in Utah, Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown in Cincinnati, and all of Franklin’s other victims and their families. Lori Franklin and Terry Mitchell, and so many more whose names I will likely never know.

  At the darkest point in this process, I felt that if I could go back to the gun store where they had let me hold that .44 Magnum in my hand, I would get the relief I needed. The puzzle piece would fall into place, aglow, and the cracks would heal. I was dreaming often of death, though like Pee Wee, death was appearing so often in my waking life that I was not always sure if I had written it or dreamed it. I could understand how the distinction could be confusing, as I could understand everyone in this story, how one might lose whole nights to alcohol, waking in the weak light of the morning to the sight of your car in the field but having no memory of how your car might have gotten to the field, meaning you drove it from the restaurant in Hillsboro to the party at the Homeplace at Mill Point and then back again, some thirty minutes of driving executed in the apparent absence of my mind. In the presence of such actions and feelings, I could understand how one might begin to pray, not just for a gun, but for a pile of white pills in a repurposed bottle, the entrance to a building marked “EMERGENCY,” which you can drive your brother to but cannot, yourself, enter.

  It turns out that disappearing yourself does not allow you to shed your privilege off like a skin, nor does it create any meaningful crack in this already broken system. It means only the final and irreversible death of your body.

  In the white schoolhouse on the top of Droop Mountain, I had a small office with not just a phone but also a desk where I wrote my first real words. I wrote them because I felt safe there and I had time. Something about Pocahontas County opened up a space in me for unknowing, for that thing some call magic, some mysticism, some God—that which cannot be held in the mind but only be felt elsewhere and which not only allows contradiction but demands it. I wrote them because I was confused, baffled, bonkers, and I wanted to know why. Something had begun; it was my life.

  I wrote to Trey not long after I realized I was writing this book, to ask about including him in it. “I think that sharing truth is important, and everything is relevant,” he wrote back. “I hope you will understand that with me it is often my consideration that is most offensive.” I don’t know what that means. I think we believed in each other. I know we did.

  Telling a story is often about obligation and sympathy, identification and empathy. With whom is your lot cast? To whom are you bound?

  When I first began looking into the Rainbow Murders, I thought the relevant necessary people of Pocahontas County were guilty of the murders and the general crime of misogyny and that, by proxy, so were Jesse and Trey and Peter and many others. I thought that it was to Vicki and Nancy to whom I was bound and by proxy to their daughters and the girls of Mountain Views. Then, as I investigated more deeply and saw the state’s theory about Jacob Beard and the relevant necessary people begin to unravel, I thought the opposite—that Joseph Paul Franklin was guilty and the relevant necessary people were innocent, and that I was actually bound to them and by proxy to my friends, their sons and godsons and coworkers, that it was these voices I was really supposed to hear.

  I thought that there was only ever a thing and its opposite, and nothing in between. In writing this book I have come to believe in this far less than I did when I started. Unraveling and unlearning this split logic is crucial to justice, I think, and it is crucial to love—loving a person, community, or most of all perhaps, a place, which may turn out to be the same thing. It is possible to be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. Most of us are. We are more than the worst story that has ever been told about us. But if we refuse to listen to it, that story can become a prophecy.

  7

  IT WAS TWILIGHT IN AUGUST 2016 when I pulled up to the Putney General Store in Putney, Vermont, a solid red building with a slatted porch lined with hanging plants, with two of my best friends in tow. After a few minutes, a white Toyota Previa van with one bike attached to the back of it drove into the small front parking lot, shrieking as if its timing belts were about to go. The driver’s-side door opened, and Elizabeth Johndrow got out.

  She took her driving glasses off and put them in the pocket of her shorts, which seemed to be made for hiking—they looked soft and moisture-wicking. Her hair was long and gray and down. She wore a blue V-neck shirt, which looked extra blue against her tan skin, and open-toed hiking sandals with many straps. She hugged me and then gave me a tour of the store’s offerings, saying, “What do you want to eat? Here are some sandwiches—they are labeled, but sometimes they’r
e wrong. You never know what you’re gonna get!”

  Liz was fifty-five. She and I sat down in wood-cane rocking chairs on the porch of a square white building across from the general store and next to a steepled church. It was all very Vermont and very pretty. As we sat, from about 7 to 9:15 in the evening, the sun set, the street got dark, the moon rose, and the clouds cleared, exposing the moon. The cicadas were loud that night, and the cars too, which went by every so often, going fast down the street, and then turning onto Route 5.

  In one photograph of Liz from 1968 I’d found, she and her brothers stand in hazy sand at Indian Lake, New York. Her brothers wear matching red-and-white-striped T-shirts and look straight at the camera, but Liz is staring off intensely at something low to the ground. She wears a blue top that looks like a sports bra and drawstring shorts, the closest a little girl in the late sixties could get to gender-neutral swimwear.

  In another, she and her older brother stand in a sprawling yard in front of a gray shingle house with a great brick chimney. She is seven, dressed in a high-necked flower-print dress and matching headband, and her brother stands next to her in a clip-on tie, but there’s so much space between them you could drive an eighteen-wheeler through it. Her pale freckled face is screwed up in an expression that is more than squinting, that is maybe rage—as if the camera clicked just as her mouth was opening to scream.

  She and I had been talking on the phone and Skyping while she was in Nicaragua, then while she was biking in Colorado. She answered all of my questions without ever avoiding or moving away from them, even when they were painful.

  The daughter of a schoolteacher and a factory foreman, Liz grew up to be an honors student, but at night and on the weekends she and a friend got the hell out of suburban Connecticut. They hitchhiked. They hitchhiked to Vermont and to music festivals all along the East Coast. She didn’t like where she lived; her home life was really not good. Hitchhiking was free magic. You got in a car and got out somewhere better.

  Liz turned seventeen in 1979. A semester shy of graduating high school, she dropped out and took off west. Her plan was California, too. The second ride she caught in Vermont was a van going west and all the way—the guy said he was traveling cross-country for work. But then he started getting weird, looking at Liz too long—she could sense he would expect sex at some point. Liz was tall, wore a baseball cap over her rectangular sheet of blond hair, and carried nothing but a backpack. When the guy stopped the car near the Food Conspiracy co-op in Tucson, she grabbed her pack, opened the door, and strode off into the heat.

  When I sat with her in Vermont, Liz was living mostly in Nicaragua, where she had started an organization teaching and working with women to exchange knowledge of natural building techniques. But Vermont was where she had made her life for a long time and where she had raised her son, so she returned often to visit and work.

  She’d already told me the truth about the moment that she changed her mind about going to the Gathering in West Virginia. It wasn’t because of her father’s wedding; her father drank a lot, and their relationship was difficult. When it started raining, she and Vicki and Nancy left the South Carolina beach. Back on the mainland, an empty Trailways bus pulled over on the road’s shoulder. Vicki talked to the guy as he drove them up into North Carolina. Nancy dozed. But Liz couldn’t. She was watching the rain run down the windows in diagonals and the wet trees flick by when something began to gnaw, something began to bother.

  “I had a very strong feeling then,” Liz had said. “It seemed to be, like, some dread and uncertainty.” Premonition? Gut feeling? “I don’t think I know the difference, even though maybe I should. I just had a very strong feeling that led me away from continuing traveling with them.”

  At a rest stop, Liz called her brother collect and learned that their father was getting remarried that very weekend in Vermont and that there would be a big party. Liz said she would think about it, that she’d try to make it.

  Three women in a field just below Interstate 95, near Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Cotton. Long-haul trucks on their way south and north.

  I’m not coming with you to West Virginia, Liz finally said. Vicki and Nancy were shocked—we haul all the way across the country, and a few hours away you quit?

  So Liz lied.

  “I was like, ‘Things are weird, but also my dad’s getting married, and I’m gonna go.’ [And they said] ‘Okay? Wow.’ But at the same time they were like, ‘Okay. It’s your journey. We wish you’d come, but okay.’”

  She caught a single ride almost straight through from the truck stop in Richmond all the way up I-95. “I got there that night at like 11. I remember I was out in a lawn chair, and my mom came home with her boyfriend, and they got out of the car and I was just like, ‘Hi Mom!’” She spent the night, then took off the next morning, hitchhiking to Vermont for her father’s wedding bash. The party was huge; her brothers were there; she was glad to see them. Sometime later that week, Liz decided to go back down to her mom’s for a night on a whim and was standing in her mother’s kitchen when the phone rang.

  It was a friend of Liz’s from Eugene, Oregon. Vicki and Nancy were dead, she told Liz. The friend had heard the news from a friend of Vicki’s who was living in the area. Everyone thinks you’re dead, the friend told Liz. They were looking for her body.

  Liz slumped down the kitchen cabinets to the floor. Her friend kept talking, talking of how she had recently broken up with a boyfriend and how sad it had made her. Liz just kept listening, holding the phone. She sat on the floor a long time. Eventually her mom came home from her Al-Anon meeting; Liz saw the car pull into the driveway. Soon my mom will be with me, Liz thought. But the car kept idling, and her mom kept talking to her friend and not coming inside. After a long time, Liz let the phone fall on the floor, propped herself up against a cabinet, stood, and went through the screen door. Her mom looked at her through the car’s passenger-side window, then rolled it down.

  Liz told her the news. Liz’s mom helped her use the operator to get the number for the West Virginia State Police. My name is Elizabeth Johndrow, she told Alkire when she was connected to him. And I’m alive.

  Well, Miss Johndrow, Alkire told her. I’m really glad to hear your voice. We’ve been looking for you for a while now.

  Vicki and Nancy’s families both wanted to meet with her that summer, but Liz didn’t want to. Her mom urged her to do it, saying they probably just wanted to know her and share with her and be comforted.

  “I can understand now, if my son was killed, I would want to find who was with him last. So I feel bad that I wasn’t able to do that, but I didn’t have the support. I was eighteen and nearly on my own with no money and no support and no car, and I didn’t think they would have bought me a ticket, and I just felt like, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ I just couldn’t imagine [facing them]. It sounded really scary. But if somebody had been like, if my mom had been like, ‘I’ll go with you.’ But she didn’t. I kind of feel like maybe there should have been an adult in my life who had a better understanding of the suffering that was happening all around me.…All I could imagine is that they would hate me for having survived.”

  Most of that summer after she found out Vicki and Nancy were dead, Liz sat by the creek down from where her brother and sister-in-law were living, and she drank until she did not know who or where she was. “I was eighteen, I was definitely traumatized, you know, but I wasn’t harmed. I felt like maybe I should have been. ‘Why am I alive and they’re dead?’ I had a lot of survivor’s guilt for a while.”

  She had two friends who had just come back from traveling through Mexico; they’d been gang-raped there. “We were just like, I don’t know. They didn’t want to talk about it; I didn’t want to talk about it. But if we were partying, like, down by the river, and somebody got a little drunk, truth would come out. There just wasn’t a lot of support. I remember my one friend, she didn’t want to feel anything about it at all. Yeah. And then I remember one time we were doin
g mushrooms, and a bunch more [of what happened to her] came out.” They watched the sun die behind the gray trees, threw sticks into the water, and watched them move. Six-packs, whole plastic handles of shitty vodka. Sometimes they pitched tents and just lived there by the river.

  In the fall, she and her two drinking buddies and a few other friends went to Key West. She had dropped out of high school and had no idea what she would do with her life. “My people that I respected were homesteading and growing food, and that’s like all I really knew. I had gotten all this stuff—I had a backpack full of drop spindles and wool and beads. I was just like a handcrafty person. I think I was just looking; I was searching for something that had deeper meaning. I was looking for circles, communities, a lifestyle that was me.”

  But Key West didn’t last long, and soon Liz was back in Vermont, where she would be, mostly, for the next thirty years.

  “I got really paralyzed by my feelings,” Liz said. “I wasn’t able to make good decisions about things for a long time if I started to have that feeling again. Like I had been missed, or somehow I slipped through.”

  She sewed hippie clothes and sold them to friends and at farmers’ markets and school festivals. She got involved in street theater and activism for women’s liberation, particularly a demonstration during the Gulf War called Breast Fest, for which she organized people to think about what was obscene and what was not—women’s bodies were considered obscene, but killing Iraqi children and showing their bodies on the news was not.