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In the afternoon or early evening of June 25 1980 two young women Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were killed in an isolated clearing in rural Pocahontas County West Virginia. They were hitchhiking to an outdoor peace festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. Their killings have been called “The Rainbow Murders.”For thirteen years no one was prosecuIn the afternoon or early evening of June 25 1980 two young women Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were killed in an isolated clearing in rural Pocahontas County West Virginia. They were hitchhiking to an outdoor peace festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. Their killings have been called “The Rainbow Murders.”For thirteen years no one was prosecuted though suspicion was cast on a succession of local men. In 1993 the state of West Virginia convicted a local farmer named Jacob Beard and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Later it emerged that a convicted serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin had also confessed. With the passage of time as the truth behind the Rainbow killings seemed to slip away its toll on this Appalachian community became more concrete—the unsolved murders were a trauma experienced on a community scale.Emma Copley Eisenberg spent five years re-investigating these brutal acts which once captured the national medias imagination only to fall into obscurity. A one-time New Yorker who came to live in Pocahontas Country Eisenberg shows how that crime a mysterious act of violence against a pair of middle-class outsiders came to loom over several generations of struggling Appalachians many of themlaborers who earned a living farming hauling timber cutting locust posts or baling hay—and the investigators and lawyers for whom the case became a white whale.Part “Serial”-like investigation part Joan Didion-like meditation the book follows the threads of this crime through the history of West Virginia the Back-to-the-Land movement and the complex reality contemporary Appalachia forming a searing portrait of America and its divisions of gender and class and its violence.(less)