[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  I asked her why she hitchhiked, if it was pure economics or something else. As the writer Vanessa Veselka points out, we tend to condemn women who travel alone much more harshly than we do men, allowing them only the slimmest of acceptable stories.

  “You can go on a quest to save your father, dress like a man and get discovered upon injury, get martyred and raped,” Veselka writes, “but God forbid you go out the door just to see what’s out there.”

  Liz thought for a moment, then answered.

  “Well, there was adventure to it too. There was something back then: hitchhiking was like falling forward into the universe that you wanted, in a way. It was very much putting yourself in the hands of others and going where you serendipitously landed. It was a little bit like sloppy Buddhism. We were putting our faith in humanity. For me, there’s something important in that. I still do it. I know where my car keys are because they’re always in the ignition.” She did note, however, that she now has a car from this century and does sometimes take her keys out and lock it.

  I told her I knew what she meant—I made choices when I was in West Virginia that came from that place, and I make them sometimes still. There’s a beauty in living that way, I told Liz, and you can also get hurt that way.

  After Vicki and Nancy were killed, she promised her mother that she would never hitchhike again. But she did, and in February 1981, she was attacked while hitchhiking.

  “Yeah. It was a pretty typical fucked-up scene where, like, it’s February in Vermont, and in the deposition they are grilling me like, what was I wearing? And I was like, ‘Umm, you know, Sorels and a parka? Many layers.’”

  Liz got pregnant in the spring of 1984, when she was twenty-three. After having a short relationship with a man in Vermont, she took off for Glacier National Park in Montana, where she had gotten a job doing river rafting and trail maintenance. “About eight weeks into it I was like, ‘This elevation is not working out for me at all,’ and then I figured out I was pregnant. So I was definitely like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’”

  “Did it ever occur to you to have an abortion?”

  “I think if things had been different. I think I was meant to have him because I was living in Glacier, where I couldn’t figure out what was going on, like I literally thought I had altitude sickness for weeks and weeks and weeks. And it’s really common to not get your period at high elevations. So by then I was so bonded with the spirit in me. I was kind of far along at that point too.” She went back to Vermont and got an apartment; a few friends who were working nearby as apple pickers would sometimes party and then come back to her apartment wanting to crash there. Liz gave birth to her son at home, but there were complications. She began hemorrhaging badly and had to be rushed to the hospital and given three blood transfusions.

  “It was a pretty intense start as a parent. Pretty heavy-duty. And then he met his dad when he was three. So it was just like everything else went out the window except, like, protecting him and being the best mom I could. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s not all about me anymore.’”

  Liz was eighteen when Vicki and Nancy died and thirty-one when she was called to testify at Beard’s trial in 1993. “Their families got pretty messed up,” Liz said. The intervening years had been terrible for all the parents; the Durians had divorced since their daughter’s death.

  “Vicki’s mom was like, ‘I’ve forgiven—whoever, in the eyes of Jesus.…’ She was done. Nancy’s dad, he was just pretty torn up still.”

  Over the years, to take care of her son and for her own fulfillment, Liz became a massage therapist, worked at a bookstore, trained to be a midwife and an herbalist, worked at a wilderness school, did landscaping, and cooked at a natural foods restaurant. She also went to the Rainbow Gathering eight times after she skipped the one where Vicki and Nancy died.

  I would not have predicted this and told Liz so. She said the fact that it was a Rainbow Gathering that Vicki and Nancy were headed to when they died didn’t matter that much to her. She brought her son to several Gatherings as well, and some of her best friends’ children were conceived at Rainbow Gatherings over the years.

  Today, though she is the director of a nonprofit, she still doesn’t make much money. When back in Vermont, she fund-raises for her organization, and lives out of her van or house-sits for friends. “I have a big skill base,” she said, “but I always kind of steered away from conventional pathways.”

  “How do you cope with all that uncertainty?” I asked.

  “Being this age and letting things be this uncertain, it’s been a huge practice—it’s like surfing or something. Like, ‘That wave knocked me over.’ It’s like, ‘Wow, that wave was fun.’ You know, ‘What was I doing to make that wave work?’ It is a little bit about timing; it is a little bit about being a little older.”

  “That really works?”

  “I don’t know—my friend says it’s some hard wiring in me. I find I get a little depressed when I’m not honoring that part of myself. But maybe that’s also why I haven’t been in a relationship in, like, six years. I don’t really have a lot of intimate relationships.”

  Liz told me that she allows herself to say yes to opportunities that present themselves and participate in conversations in vulnerable ways. “I mean, what do I got to lose?…It might sting a little or something, but I’m not gonna die.”

  Near the end of our time together, Liz asked me only one question about Vicki and Nancy—what I had found out about Franklin. I told her I had found out a whole lot, that it had changed my mind, and that I now believed more likely than not that it was Franklin who killed her friends, not Jacob Beard. She sat for a while and rocked back on the rockers of her chair. “Wow,” she said after a while. “That’s a mind-fuck. It’s such an elaborate thing for them to have constructed with all those guys and all that, if none of that actually happened.”

  I agreed that it was.

  “Wow,” she said again. “But I don’t have any attitude of like…I can’t believe you’re bringing this up again,” Liz said. “I’m definitely not one of those people who’s like, ‘Well, you’re invading my comfort zone.’ I’m like, ‘Well, what’s out here outside the comfort zone?’ That’s pretty much where I live. And like you were saying, a lot of amazing things happen there.”

  “You didn’t close in after all that happened to you,” I said. “That is hard. That is the tendency. When there’s a lot of grief. You didn’t do that.”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “I try to breathe. In and out.”

  Liz filled her lungs and then emptied them, and I did the same.

  “Where are your friends?” Liz asked me then, and I told her they had walked down the road a ways to check out a Mexican restaurant with a sign advertising “BEST SANGRIA.”

  “Yum,” she said. “It’s a beautiful night.”

  “It is,” I said, because it was.

  Vicki Durian, 1978

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To write a book that is the story of events that are painful to so many at the same time that it is the story of my becoming was at times a strange and terrible undertaking. I’m grateful to everyone who was able to hold both things in the mind at once and celebrate its making with me, even as it is also not a celebration.

  Thank you to my agent, Jin Auh, for your steady support, your patience with me over the twisty years, and for the brilliant feedback that helped me see the core enterprise of this book more clearly. Thank you to Alexandra Christie of the Wylie Agency for being my advocate and steward, and for always treating my work like a precious thing you can’t wait for the world to see.

  To the team at Hachette—my editor Paul Whitlatch, as well as Mollie Weisenfeld, Joanna Pinsker, and Lauren Hummel—my deepest gratitude. Paul, thank you for believing in the importance of this story and in my abilities to execute its telling even when my own belief faltered or my resolve left me. Your sharp eye, for narrative structure and the rhythm of a sentence both, shaped this book in ways I continue to ap
preciate.

  Thank you, Maia Hibbett, the smartest, most detail-oriented, and fastest fact-checker in the world.

  Jerry Dale, Steve Farmer, George Castelle, Jaynell Graham, Pam Pritt, Jillian Lacasse, Blair Campbell, Judy Cutlip, Gerry Morrison, Landon Sheetz, Jerry Kauffman, DeAnn Bowersox, Twyla Donathan, Melissa Bennett, JoAnn Orelli, Catherine Shea, Tim Sheerin, and Ralph Echols provided essential information, assistance, documents, and media. Naomi and Harvey Cohen gave me a place to stay while reporting the Greenbrier County sections.

  This book benefited from the generous support of the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Carey Institute for the Global Good, the Turkey Land Cove Foundation, and the Literary Reportage program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. A million hearts and flowers to Barbara Moriarty at the University of Virginia MFA program. To the program: though our relationship was not easy, you gave me my first big gifts of time and confidence, for which I will always be grateful.

  Theresa Tensuan, Dan Torday, and Kim Benston of Haverford/Bryn Mawr, Alden Smith of the Mountain School, and Karen Luten of Dalton: you were my most important teachers of writing and ideas, and you are all over these pages. Likewise, Elizabeth Richards, Susan Buksbaum, and Susan Avino, who are missed. Thank you, Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Justin Torres for your friendship and for helping to get me here.

  To those who believed in this material in its earliest forms, read early drafts, or offered invaluable insights—Chris Tilghman, Robert Boynton, Stephanie Reents, Sara Tandy, Alyssa Songsiridej, Sam Allingham, Matt Jakubowski, Ben Goldstein, Amanda Korman, Andrew Martin, and Alison Penning—I’m very grateful. Thank you to the best book bridesmaids—Elizabeth Catte, Sarah Marshall, and Jacqui Shine—for the time you spent developing, encouraging, and interrogating this manuscript. An especially glittery thank-you to Sarah, my partner in doing this strange work, who answered my calls and texts with joyful and hard truths each and every time. I can’t wait to do the same for you as you write your books.

  To my chosen family—Chelsea Alsofrom, Megan Goestch, Lindsay Mollineaux, Jules and Elissa Martel, Shira Cohen, Emma Bergman, Fay Strongin, Cara Tratner, Sarah Peterson, Jeff Frankl, Sonia Williams, Anna Krieger, Joshua Demaree, Julie Lipson, Alisha Berry, Emily Newton, Kim Rolla, Corey Chao, Julia Greenberg, Anastasia Aguiar—you made it possible to venture into the unknown and return to love. Dana Murphy, Annie Liontas, Sara Sligar, and Hilary Leichter—your support in the final hours made all the difference.

  Thank you to my parents: for teaching me what books do, for making sacrifices in order to put me in the way of beauty, and for taking me over and over again into the Residency for Wayward Artists & Orange Cats. Forever and always, thank you to my sister and co-resident, Mollie Eisenberg. We’ve made a way together when there was no way.

  Put plainly, neither these pages nor the person who wrote them would exist without the relationships I made in Pocahontas County. To those who educated me and called me in and pushed me deeper, thank you for your labor. It was generous in ways I will keep trying to deserve.

  Kathy Meehan, Jeanne Hackett, Jeanne Santomero, Patricia Porco, Meighan Hackett, John and Robin Durian, Howard Durian, Brittney Durian, Ashley Durian, Terry Mitchell, Lori Franklin, Deborah DiFalco, Michael Jordan, Walt Weiford, and Liz Johndrow: I am more than grateful for your time and your trust. It was the honor of my life.

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  Praise for

  The Third Rainbow Girl

  “The Third Rainbow Girl is a riveting excavation of the secrets time, history, and place keep. In a long-buried crime, Emma Copley Eisenberg has unearthed a story that reveals America.”

  —Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

  “The Third Rainbow Girl succeeds on two levels: first, as a deep dive inquiry into the 1980 murders of two young women in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and the ensuing, tangled investigation, and second, as an intimate and humane portrait of a close-knit Appalachian community, the kind of place that is often reduced by outsiders to little more than a cliché of itself…A remarkable book.”

  —Richard Price, New York Times bestselling author of Lush Life

  “Emma Eisenberg has distinguished herself as a reporter of remarkable wisdom and conscience, and her powers are on full display in The Third Rainbow Girl. Eisenberg’s meticulous, compassionate reporting does not promise any of the easy answers we might expect from true crime: neither about what happened to the ‘Rainbow Girls,’ nor about poverty, injustice, and the fate of outsiders—whether hippies, hitchhikers, carpet baggers, or journalists—who give and take in this country’s poorest areas. Her insights are hard won, deep, and devastating, making this an unforgettable debut.”

  —Alice Bolin, author of Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

  “I blazed through this book, which is a true crime page-turner, a moving coming-of-age memoir, an ode to Appalachia, and a scintillating investigation into the human psyche’s astounding and sometimes chilling instinct for narrative. A beautiful debut that will stay with me for a long time, whose story mesmerizes even as it convinces you to find all mesmerizing stories suspect.”

  —Melissa Febos, Lambda Literary Award winner and author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

  “Eisenberg has crafted a beautiful and complicated ode to West Virginia. Exquisitely written, this is a powerful commentary on society’s notions of gender, violence, and rural America. Readers of literary nonfiction will devour this title in one sitting.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “The Third Rainbow Girl is a fascinating hybrid work of true crime and memoir…In following the twists and turns of the case, Eisenberg paints an affectionate portrait of Appalachia that complicates and contradicts stereotypes about the region.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “[Eisenberg] reconstructs the case with a brisk pace and a keen sensitivity…offers a nuanced portrait of a crime and its decades-long effects. A promising young author reappraises a notorious double murder-and her life.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  FURTHER READING

  Agnew, Eleanor. Back From the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back. Chicago: Dee, 2004.

  Baldwin, James. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.

  Barret, Elizabeth, director. Stranger with a Camera (film). Whitesburg, KY: Appalshop, 2000.

  Berry, Chad. Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

  Bolin, Alice. Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession. New York: William Morrow, 2018.

  Catte, Elizabeth. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Cleveland: Belt, 2018.

  Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.

  Giardina, Denise. Storming Heaven: A Novel. New York: Norton, 1987.

  Harkins, Anthony, and Meredith McCarroll, eds. Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019.

  hooks, bell. Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012.

  Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016.

  Lewis, Helen M., Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins, eds. Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium, 1978.

  Loftus, Elizabeth F. Eyewitness Testimony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

  Maren, Mesha. Sugar Run: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2018.

  McKinney, Irene. Vivid Companion: Poems. Morgantown, WV: Vandalia, 2004.

  McNeill, Louise. The Milkweed Ladies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsb
urgh Press, 1988.

  Monroe, Rachel. Savage Appetites. New York: Scribner, 2019.

  Nelson, Maggie. The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2016.

  Niman, Michael. People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

  Null, Matthew Neil. Allegheny Front: Stories. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2016.

  Sonnie, Amy, and James Tracy. Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011.

  Veselka, Vanessa. “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why It Matters.” American Reader 1, no. 4 (February–March 2013).

  Wilkerson, Jessica. To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.

  Wilkinson, Crystal. The Birds of Opulence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016.