A stunningly written investigation of the murder of two young women–showing what sort of violent crime casts a shadow over a whole community.

In the first evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered within an isolated clearing. These were hitchhiking to a event referred to as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years, nobody was prosecuted for the ‘Rainbow Murders,’ though deep about THE 3RD Rainbow Female: The EXTENDED LIFE of a Increase Murder in Appalachia suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, harmful, 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. Using the duration 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 did to this region for centuries. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years surviving in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal functions. Using days gone by and today’s, she shows how this incomprehensible act of violence has loomed over all those affected for years, shaping their anxieties, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this criminal offense through the complicated background of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America-its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence.