The opening chapters of Emma Copley Eisenberg’s first book of nonfiction, The Third Rainbow Girl, lay out a series of “true things.” The reader learns where Pocahontas County, WV is located on a map if you “take your right hand, and give the world the middle finger.” That all of Pocahontas County is inside a National Radio Quiet Zone established by the Federal government, encompassing 13,000 square miles along the Virginia-West Virginia border, where cell signals and wifi are “severely restricted.” That “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 the groundwater of every American city and every American town, but for me, it was done here.”
On June 25, 1980, 26-year-old Vicki Durian and 19-year-old Nancy Santomero were murdered in an isolated clearing inside this quiet zone in Pocahontas County. They were outsiders, hitchhikers who were on their way to a hippie-type festival called the Rainbow Gathering, taking place not far from where they were killed. The investigation, trials, media blitz, and collective trauma that snaked through Pocahontas County following the discovery of their bodies, a tangled web of stories, make up only part of The Third Rainbow Girl. The third girl that the title refers to, Elizabeth Johndrow, had been traveling with Vicki and Nancy before deciding — based on an almost supernatural internal pull — to skip the gathering.
The details of the case itself are convoluted at best, though they are expertly presented. They center on a group of seven local men with reputations for rowdy drinking; but then, what group of people anywhere in America, maybe especially men and maybe especially in a rural area, doesn’t have such a reputation? Many police and investigators are involved, and coercion plays a big role in some of the testimony. It’s not until 1993, 13 years after the crime, that Jacob Beard — a chief suspect with all the markers of suspicious behavior (including specifically around these murders) — is convicted. But he is released when a serial killer named Joseph Paul Franklin, in prison for other murders, confessed to those of Durian and Santomero.
But the left ventricle of the story is Eisenberg herself. She is the real third rainbow girl. Arriving in Pocahontas County as an Americorps VISTA volunteer to teach writing at Mountain Views, a camp for teenage girls meant to empower them through education, Eisenberg was already jaded and disillusioned. She had just graduated from a liberal arts college where “I destroyed every God — religion, literature, politics, feminism, art — with my self-important words, dismissing each as problematic and essentially worthless. I dismantled every system to make a new world, but then I had to live in it.” In her teaching notes from that time, she writes, Does the story have more than one point/idea/theme? Could it be read in more than one way? Does the character have flaws and contradictions? Are all the words carefully chosen? Is every word necessary? Is it physical? This kind of meta-layering permeates Third Rainbow Girl, creating a reading experience that is both electric and cerebral, acute and obtuse.
The entwined threads of silence, storytelling, and truth — and the messy concept of justice — are far more critical to this narrative than the crime itself. The crime is a microcosm that generates a messy jumble of questions leading to bigger questions. Justice is a thing that exists within cultural norms. And those norms are often very toxic.
The book brings in archetypes of storytelling, like the Jekyll and Hyde split-logic narrative, the “monster hick” story, and Beauty and The Beast. Joseph Paul Franklin, for example, would only confess his crimes to beautiful women — like Melissa Powers, a model-turned-lawyer in a separate Franklin murder case. In reference to an MSNBC documentary about Franklin, Eisenberg writes, “The media comparison of Powers and Franklin to [Beauty and the Beast] tells us something in the language of story truth: people don’t kill other people for no clear reason, we say; only animals do. Fathers rack up the balance. Daughters pay it.” This is one of the most striking and disturbing moments in the book, a potent manifestation of one of the main narrative arcs: storytelling as a basic impulse that can be empowering in some cases and utterly horrifying in others. Both have profound consequences.
“Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that in all desire to know, there is a drop of cruelty,” Eisenberg writes in the opening chapter — titled, necessarily and impossibly, True Things. “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.”
Silence is as essential to storytelling as it is to misogyny and toxic masculinity. Eisenberg writes about the ways in which the men she befriended in Pocahontas County tried to connect, the ways in which intimacy expressed itself, moments that often involved alcohol. The same is true of the seven men at the center of the murder case. “There were moments where people were trying to break silences, where men were trying to connect with other men and talk about stuff that was really hard. But it’s also a difficult thing that that could sometimes happen only in the middle of the night, or in moments of urgency,” Eisenberg told me over the phone. The groundwater, and all that.
The reliance on alcohol, on moments of urgency, on the middle of the night as excuses to break silence is not inherent to Appalachia, though it is a story often told about rural men. It is, however, inherent to a patriarchal society.
“When I talk to people about this part of West Virginia, and about the Quiet Zone, a lot of people tend to think that it’s a chosen silence. It’s this idea that this community is being closed-minded or ‘backwards’ in some way, or resistant to technology or to change or to progress,” Eisenberg said as we spoke. “And I think it’s really important to remember that in the case of the Quiet Zone, it’s actually federally mandated — an imposed silence from outside.”
Even in the exploration of masculinity, a larger question emerges: what is a story, and what does it have to do with truth?
“Something I really struggled with was [the question of] where and how does the idea of solving the murder … dovetail with these questions about narrative and story and truth? For example … Pee Wee Walton, who testified that Jacob Beard had done the crime, [also] couldn’t really be sure if he had dreamed this image of Jacob Beard shooting these women or if he’d actually seen it,” Eisenberg said. “That question between dreaming and seeing was something that bounced around in my head for a while. I do believe there are truths that matter that aren’t necessarily truths that happened. [I feel] like our justice system only allows for fact-based truth, but I think our brains and hearts and understanding of what happens in a crime should expand to include some other kinds of truths as well. But I don’t know exactly how you accomplish that.”
The nature of truth is one of the things The Third Rainbow Girl deeply questions. In a 50-year-old murder case that has so many tributaries and side roads; is so ingrained into, and yet so elusive for, the community in which the murders took place; and whose chapters unfold like a disquieting map of the unmappable, what can be considered true? And what kind of truth are we talking about?
Nietzsche isn’t the only “relevant necessary person” — a concept that occurs repeatedly — that Eisenberg cites when exploring the nature of storytelling and truth. She writes about Freud and his idea of “phantasies,” cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus’ takedown of the pop science theory of “repressed memory,” Chad Berry’s concept of the “divided heart.” All aid the reader in accepting the same messy conclusion as the author: “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 felt elsewhere and which not only allows contradiction but demands it.”
Even the “true crime” genre relies on an acceptance of truth, an agreed-upon notion of justice. The Third Rainbow Girl, then, is not so much a true crime story as it is a philosophical meditation. Eisenberg doesn’t just report on the details of the case — and there are many, many details here, skillfully reported. She reckons with her own position as an outsider working in Appalachia, a place that in many ways becomes her adopted home. The relentless questioning that marked the case of this double murder also marks Eisenberg’s own life in this place where it happened. Rainbows are rare — their appearance relies on just the right angle of light. Most of the time, the rain just falls, and becomes groundwater. The Third Rainbow Girl aims a beam at a vast constellation of droplets, and draws color.
[Published by Hachette Books on January 21, 2020, 336 pages, $27.00 hardcover]