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The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (editie 2020)

door Emma Copley Eisenberg (Auteur)

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"In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman however, who lived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. With the passage of time, as the truth seemed to slip away, the investigation itself caused its own traumas--turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming a fear of the violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal acts. Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America--its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence."--Jacket flap.… (meer)

▾Boekgegevens

Lid:	sharonstern
Titel:	The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia
Auteurs:	Emma Copley Eisenberg (Auteur)
Info:	Hachette Books (2020), 336 pages
Verzamelingen:	Fiction and lit, Books I've read, Aan het lezen, Gelezen, maar niet in bezit
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Trefwoorden:	Geen

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The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia door Emma Copley Eisenberg

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1-5 van 13 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)

I got slightly caught up in the details of the court case in this book, but otherwise very much enjoyed it and found it very relatable. It reminded me a bit of THE FACT OF A BODY, which is my favourite true crime book. (

)

emmy_of_spines | Sep 8, 2022 |

This was a tough book to rate. To me, the memoir/true crime/history of Appalachia/psychology themes of the book were a bit too much and made the book disjointed. I liked the author's writing and think she has real talent, but the flow was off to me. I was listening to it so that may be part of the issue as I do better with print books (author has a nice reading voice too). I enjoyed the history and social critique of WVA because that is where my dad grew up and I found it enlightening.
I would like to read more of this author. (

)

carolfoisset | Jan 10, 2022 |

surprisingly, the least interesting parts in this book were actually about the killings this book is supposed to be about. the information about west virginia and its changing politics was the most interesting, and i appreciated her personal introspection even as it was at most peripherally related to the main story. i found myself much less interested in the story she was ostensibly writing about, and i don't know if that was her writing or the fact that it's not a solved crime (there are theories, though), or my inconsistent attention as i was listening.

it was kind of shocking to me to learn that west virginia split from virginia in part to join the union and fight the confederacy (although it was more a two thirds majority, not super overwhelming, but still), that they were against slavery and wanted to fight it. that they voted democratic consistently (like in all but 3 elections) until basically 2000. i thought the deep red had been entrenched for many years. like many people, i guess i have some misconceptions about west virginia.

she's a good writer, and makes some interesting points and connections, but i didn't find that i was very engaged with the book. overall this was just ok for me, but i'd read her again.

"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."

"You start to think maybe you can abdicate your privilege like a crown, if only you try hard enough, and that maybe that will settle the score. I felt broken and running from the system in my mind, in which the only choices were to dominate or be dominated, stay completely still or get annihilated by my feelings and the terror of history. It was a system of impossible twos and endless double-binds, and I was afraid to move within it, or choose anything. I felt that no one I knew had a clue about America, it's true texture and shape and flavor and that the ways I had been taught to live in it were no longer working." (

)

overlycriticalelisa | Jul 11, 2021 |

(24) I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, a well-written true crime exploration of the killings of two young women who were hitchhiking to a hippie festival in rural West Virginia in 1980. Their bodies were dumped in an out of the way clearing that seemed accessible or knowable only by locals. Was this a culture clash - the rural Appalachian 'Deliverance' sort of male enraged at counter-culture and women who dare be independent? Unfortunately, the case is never definitely solved and the author's exploration seems to not add that much. So in order to make it worthy of a book there is some well-written West Virginia sociological history (best part of the book) and a deeply personal narration about the author's young adulthood in which she lived some in Pocahontas County where the murders took place as part of AmeriCorps (worst part of the book.)

The writing was uneven. At times, when the author was writing about her own existential angst it was unfocused and pretentious. All the earmarks of the new millennium liberal arts education with terms like cultural relativism, historical trauma, toxic masculinity, and this notion of being aware of your own privilege. It truly came off as that horrible but apt term - 'virtue-signaling.'

I think this author has potential and the negative here is a common forgivable rookie mistake - she tried to do too much in one book. I think she should have stuck to the story of the Rainbow murders and how it may reflect a deeper truth (or not) about West Virginia. I think her own personal knowledge of the area could have informed that and added to the book as opposed to the memoir aspect which detracted. My critique sounds too harsh for my actual star rating of this book as is often the case when one has mixed feelings. Give it a try if you like a more literary look at the true crime genre. (

)

jhowell | May 11, 2021 |

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in the Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg January 21, 2020

I received a digital ARC copy of this book from NetGalley and Hachette Books in exchange for an unbiased review.

This book is more of a memoir than a true crime story. On June 25, 1980, Vicki Durian (26) from Iowa, who worked as a HHA and Nancy Santomero (19) who dropped out of a NY college to work in a Tucson thrift shop, were murdered in southeastern West Virginia. They died in Pocahontas County where they hitchhiked to attend the Rainbow Gathering peace festival. It was during the author’s experience living and working for almost 1-1/2 years in Pocahontas County that she developed an interest in this cold case. Likewise, she had spent many summers there as a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) to help alleviate poverty by empowering teenage girls to pursue their education. She states that her 5 years of research spanned over 7 states. With that in mind, this is not a true crime novel in traditional sense, far from it. By the end of the book it is noted that was the author’s intention. She wanted to record her memories in West Virginia as well as the unsolved murders which occurred there. She felt deeply moved and sought to interview many of the people who lived through the terrible ordeal. There were many trials and accusations many about 7 local men who were considered disorderly drinkers. There was plenty of speculation regarding the police and politics of the handling of the situation. Honestly, I was expecting a rather traditional true crime novel given the title and felt confused and deflated at times. Although the two stories, that of the author and the cold case, are interesting it wasn’t my cup of tea. The story reads as unconventional as the author describes herself. In the end I had to wonder about the title, The Third Rainbow Girl. It is only at the end that focus is given to Elizabeth Johndrow who was considered the “third rainbow girl”. This is most likely because she survived and returned home before the group reached their destination. The author relates so well with the characters and setting that she might consider herself the third rainbow girl. Although she lived and worked in Pocahontas County many years after the crimes were committed, her experiences entwined with the history feels almost akin to her bearing witness to the events. (

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marquis784 | Mar 1, 2021 |

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1-5 van 13 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)

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Ms. Eisenberg shares deeply personal experiences of her time in Pocahontas County, exposing her vulnerabilities, her own heavy drinking, her relationships with the men there and how deeply she had come to feel about the rugged pouch of land below the Eastern Panhandle.... Besides being a compelling read, this book advances the efforts of other storytellers who have tried to cut through the devious and hurtful attitudes about Appalachia to reveal an abiding humanity in its quirky soul.

toegevoegd door Lemeritus | bewerkPittsburg Post-Gazette, Diana Nelson Jones (May 12, 2020)

The Third Rainbow Girl is as committed to history and personal exploration as it is to its respectful and detailed reporting of the murders, investigation, trials and aftermath. Its complexity and insistence that a true crime story is one that expands into further questions, and doesn’t collapse toward a resolution, will frustrate some readers. Some skimmers may exit after what they interpret as the spoilers in these opening pages – but they’ll miss an intimately lived and researched look at life in Appalachia, of life as a woman in constant, uninvited danger from men, and of the deep bonds that are possible between people and a place.... the context Eisenberg has established, and returns to after this section, is one of deep empathy and searching, from a writer who understands that the stories told about a place and its people, and the people who venture into that place, can never be quite definitive or tidy, much as readers and writers may like them to be.

toegevoegd door Lemeritus | bewerkThe Globe and Mail (Canada), Naben Ruthnum (Mar 10, 2020)

The book offers a deep-dive into rural Appalachia, a region of the United States that is little understood, and it digs into questions of how deeply misogyny and bias can run inside a community.... The Third Rainbow Girl accomplishes what any good murder mystery should. It shines a spotlight on a nexus of people and a place. Eisenberg's tendency to weave in references to writers who've preceded her in the genre — Joan Didion and Truman Capote, for example — makes the reading experience uniquely thoughtful and introspective. The insights into human nature are the real gritty, good stuff you get from reading a masterful work of journalism like this one.

toegevoegd door Lemeritus | bewerkNational Public Radio (NPR), Rachel Veroff (Jan 21, 2020)

“The Third Rainbow Girl” is an evocative and elegantly paced examination of the murders that takes a prism-like view of the crime. Everyone in the rural county contributes a piece of evidence, but none of those pieces fit together to build a truthful picture of who killed the two women. Years pass and the once notorious “rainbow murders” fall from the headlines into obscurity. But the stain of guilt on the group of men in Pocahontas County, and the deep-seated trauma inflicted by the unsolved murders on the families of the murdered women, remains.... In the end, “The Third Rainbow Girl” is not just a masterly examination of a brutal unsolved crime, which leads us through many surprising twists and turns and a final revelation about who the real killer might be. It’s also an unflinching interrogation of what it means to be female in a society marred by misogyny, where women hitchhiking alone are harshly judged, even blamed for their own murders.

toegevoegd door Lemeritus | bewerkNew York Times, Melissa Del Bosque (betaal website) (Jan 20, 2020)

The book is more than just another true crime memoir; 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.

toegevoegd door Lemeritus | bewerkBooklist, Michelle Ross (Nov 1, 2019)

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Anthony Award (Genomineerde – Critical / Biographical – 2021)

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Edgar Award (Genomineerde – Fact Crime – 2021)

Lambda Literary Award (Finalist – Bisexual Nonfiction – 2021)

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Most had not wanted to be Confederate, but saying no to a thing is not the same thing as saying yes to its opposite.

Throughout the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, many Americans felt dispossessed by where the country was heading and how it was heading there—the Vietnam War principally, but also the way the government had responded to the uprisings motivated by racial injustice in Los Angeles and Detroit. Fleeing cities, they went to “the land.” Between seven hundred fifty thousand and a million Back to the Landers, as they were dubbed, lived in communes by the mid-seventies, and an additional million were homesteading, either as singles or as couples in some of the most rural parts of the United States.

...imposed on Appalachia by outsiders and spun into a story that had been used for harm. As Helen Lewis writes, the region’s history “demonstrates the concerted efforts of the exploiters to label their work ‘progress’ and to blame any of the obvious problems it causes on the ignorance or deficiencies of the Appalachian people.”

Trying to help was an inherently privileged and colonialist position, and besides, it only made whatever it was that was wrong worse.

I knew the very position of dissenting and dismay was a privileged one and that my rejection of these choices made, to rational people and people with less class and race privilege, very little sense. Yet there is a particular cognitive dissonance that sets in when you have many of the advantages this life can bestow but have seen, up close and in slow motion, what they mean for those to whom they are denied. You start to think maybe you can abdicate your privilege like a crown, if only you try hard enough, and that maybe that will settle the score.

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I lived now in a real place that existed, but I struggled to express to them where that was. The words “West Virginia,” it seemed, were insufficient to convey a satisfactory reality.

In some official documents, Vicki and Nancy are simply called “Rainbows,” marked forever by a group they never joined, a destination they never reached.

Before a story can be told to someone else, we must first tell it to our self. That image of a young pale girl in a loose smock and of a man looking into the maw of a corn chopper and deciding it would be a good place to “solve the problem” of a dead woman’s body—where had that come from? Alkire says Beard. Beard says Alkire. Someone had told himself that one before.

The hick monster story has deep roots in the history of West Virginia and is wound around the story of American industrialization and capitalism. Before you can dispossess a people from their own land, you must first make them not people.

This period gave us two portrayals of Appalachia and two alone, Williams writes: “the Appalachian mountaineer, noble and stalwart, rugged and independent, master or mistress of the highlands environment; and the profligate hillbilly, amusing but often also threatening, defined by deviance and aberration.”

Why do we care if a murdered or missing woman is pretty? I don’t know, but we care. In 2004, Gwen Ifill of PBS coined the term “missing white woman syndrome” to describe what happens when, as a nation, we become obsessed with following the case of a missing or murdered white girl.

Vicki and Nancy were not ideal damsels then—a narrative problem, likely why the story of their deaths never became a consuming national media sensation.

We tend to treat believability as if it were synonymous with truthfulness or akin to solving a mathematical equation, but the relationship between what is believable and what is true and, further, what makes a story believable to one listener but not to another turn out to be some of the murkiest parts of human cognition.

For centuries we believed that humans are generally rational beings, applying rational thought and usually achieving sound judgment, except under circumstances where our feelings get in the way.

According to the Story Model, two characteristics determine how “believable” an average person will find a particular story: coverage, or the extent to which the story accounts for evidence presented at trial, and coherence, or the story’s wholeness, lack of contradictions, and “plausibility”—“the extent to which the story is consistent with knowledge of real or imagined events in the real world.” The more familiar the story is, then, the easier the narrative connection forged between teller and listener. At its most basic, many experts say, our brains work by slotting our experiences into molds of classic stories. Each time we hear a new story, we figure out what it means by trying to match it to one of our stored narratives.

We are evolutionarily programmed to make links between our perceptions and their most likely meanings. “Coherence means that you’re going to adopt one interpretation in general. Ambiguity tends to be suppressed. Other things that don’t fit fall by the wayside, Kahneman instructs: “We see a world that is vastly more coherent than the world actually is.”

Loftus coined the phrase “the imagination inflation effect” to explain the phenomenon of why people claim to have seen actual footage of highly traumatic public events that were never captured on film—the death of Princess Diana in 1997, for example.

My attachment to the idea of confession may be a function of the word—religious, flavored with morality; the stakes of talking about murder seem so high that my first thought is that everything people say in relation to it must be factually correct. “False confession” feels like a contradiction in terms, a paradox that undermines the whole idea that what people say can be believed.

In 2013, 38 percent of exonerations for crimes allegedly committed by people under eighteen in the last quarter century involved false confessions.

Her messages were short and staccato, the result of a liberal relationship with the return key.

“Surviving,” writes social worker and researcher Sue Coyle, “does not mean coming away unscathed.”

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"In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman however, who lived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. With the passage of time, as the truth seemed to slip away, the investigation itself caused its own traumas--turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming a fear of the violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal acts. Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America--its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence."--Jacket flap.

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