Q+A: Emma Copley Eisenberg, Author of “The Third Rainbow Girl”

A gripping portrait of a crime and a region, Eisenberg's book provides social commentary on class, gender, and trauma.

Interview by Andru Okun

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl is an investigation of the unsolved double murder of two hitchhikers — 19-year-old Nancy Santomero and 26-year-old Vicki Durian — in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in 1980. Eisenberg recounts the false accusations, faulty police work, and uncertainty that followed, detailing how the mysterious deaths reshaped the community. The book is also a story of rural America and of the author’s own sense of belonging. A gripping portrait of a crime and a region, her account provides social commentary on class, gender, and trauma.

In many ways, Eisenberg’s book is about memory. As she writes, “A story, even one debunked as false, lingers.” She parses how we tell and take in stories, creating our own senses of meaning informed by previous narratives. Study Hall spoke with Eisenberg on her process, the financial costs of reporting, and the complicated task of covering the story’s gray areas.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Study Hall: The Third Rainbow Girl is about an unsolved double murder, but its scope extends beyond the fixations commonly associated with the true crime genre. I’m curious to hear about your decision to take this more expansive approach.

Emma Copley Eisenberg: It was kind of a twisty path writing this book. I am a fiction writer by training; that’s my first language. But it was very clear to me that this book was not going to work as fiction because I’m not from [Appalachia] and it wasn’t my experience. My imagination wouldn’t be able to provide the details that would be required to say something new about this story.

It’s a cliché, but also true that the story teaches you what form it wants to take. I became interested in the crime because I’m so interested in the place, not the other way around. I think that’s probably part of why it felt really important to me to spend a lot of time in Pocahontas County, the state of West Virginia, and Appalachia more broadly. It felt like, if I was going to talk about this crime, I would need to talk about this community, and if I was going to talk about the community, I’d have to talk about the systemic exploitation of Appalachia. It felt really important to me to include a contemporary framing of the place, to show that this is not a story about a place that’s in the past.

SH: There is a tendency when writing about violence — especially violence done to white women — to exploit tragedy for the sake of narrative. Were there any guiding principles or hard lines you adhered to that helped you to avoid the pitfalls of writing about other peoples’ pain and trauma?

ECE: People have been asking about my book’s relationship to the term “true crime” and about conventions of the genre that I was particularly trying to avoid or play with. The biggest one is around this idea of the dead girl, usually a white woman. In some ways, I think what was so compelling about these crimes, what made them such powerful crimes in the community, was the fact that the victims were women and that they were from elsewhere.

I think one reason why this case never became JonBenét Ramsey or Hannah Graham is that these women were not a particularly good fit for the sort of narrative we need for a woman to be a perfect victim. They were interesting and lost, a little bit fat and a little bit hairy, and I am those things too, so that resonated with me. I tried to play up their humanity and their individuality and play down any narrative that’s like, “They were so promising” or “They were so attractive” and how we should be sad because of those factors. We should be sad about anyone’s life that’s been lost, regardless of those factors.

I spent a lot of time with the families of the women who were killed, learning about their personalities and what they were like, to try to understand what led them to travel and hitchhike. I also made the decision not to put them on page one with a description of their dead bodies. I think that’s what we’re used to. My editor and I thought a lot about how to begin the book and where to put their deaths. It is the inciting incident of the book, but it’s not what I wanted the attention to go to.

I put a long summary of details about their case at the very beginning to hopefully teach readers that this book is not going to climax with the disclosure of who killed these women. Their deaths are not the central question of the book; I’m more interested in the way people see violence than I am in narrativizing it myself. I tried as much as possible to use primary documents rather than my own narrative language when talking about the violence.

SH: The Rainbow Murders were something that you learned about when you lived in Pocahontas County as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer. But it doesn’t seem like the murders were something that immediately struck you; rather, you thought about them later on and your interest grew from there. What happened in the period between first becoming aware of the murders and reporting this story?

ECE: It’s often true that the big things in our lives can take time to filter down and be realized. I heard about the murder in 2009. It was during a writing group, and I heard about it in the form of a poem, not as a news story or a documentary. It seemed to me at the time that people were trying to make sense of these crimes beyond just the facts. I felt that people had feelings they had nowhere to put, and I think that poetry is a place that we go with those kinds of feelings.

I left the county in 2011, and I did go back many times, but I never lived there again. There was this period of sifting through and processing — it felt like the place had wormed its way into my heart and I felt confused about my own role. Did I serve? Did I do good? Did I do harm? Was I harmed? All those questions felt like a complicated stew, and it wasn’t really until I started writing nonfiction that I started working on this project.

The thing that led me into writing nonfiction was the UVA “A Rape on Campus” article in Rolling Stone. I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia and working at UVA. The response on campus was hard to describe — it was just monumental sadness and anger. Also, two women went missing from Charlottesville that winter. One was a white girl named Hannah Graham and the other was a black trans girl named Sage Smith who’s still missing. The responses to the disappearances were extremely different, and there was also a lot of white supremacist activity at the time, several years before the rest of the world would know about it. People in Charlottesville were very much aware of the forces in the town that would become the pro-Trump online troll movement that we see today.

It was just a really shitty time, and I did not feel like I could go to my room and write fiction at that moment. I wanted to be involved in the conversation locally around things that were happening. I started doing some nonfiction writing, and that opened up my brain to thinking about writing about the murders in West Virginia in a nonfiction format, to write about them more as a reporter.

SH: It’s interesting that you went to school for fiction and then ended up writing this in-depth nonfiction book.

ECE: I do both, and my next project is fiction. But I think I had to write nonfiction to figure out my fiction again, and I think that both genres make each other stronger. I think my training as a fiction writer served me really well in this book. I thought I had to go back to school and get an MFA in nonfiction or reporting. After my fiction MFA, I applied and was accepted to NYU’s literary reportage program. After one semester, I realized it was not the right place for me and I ended up dropping out, which I think is important for Study Hall readers because I want to give people permission to drop out of journalism school. I learned a lot of the skills I needed to do this book from working at several weekly papers doing reporting and fact-checking. I don’t think we need to go to journalism school to write rigorous reporting.

SH: This book pulls from court documents, recorded testimony, archived newspaper articles, and interviews with individuals tied to or impacted by the Rainbow Murders. You wrote about your research process for The Marshall Project, describing a situation where you wanted to see a 2,400-page court transcript that would cost you $1 a page. You also spoke in a recent interview about sitting in a courthouse for two weeks, poring over transcripts and taking pictures of documents with your phone. It seems like a lot of the research you were interested in conducting was either cost-prohibitive or really labor-intensive.

ECE: It’s really important to me to be as transparent as possible about the cost of writing a book like this — like, the literal financial costs. It is cost-prohibitive for most people. I started working on this book in 2013 and I sold it in 2017. There were about four years where I was funding the research and reporting myself, and I was fairly limited. Luckily for me, I lived close enough that I could just drive to West Virginia, and I had a lot of friends in the area so I could stay with people for free. Those were the years I was going to the courthouse and photographing documents with my phone.

When I sold the book [to Hachette Books], I was able to use some of the money from my advance to do the stuff that I was not able to do before and really dig into the reporting. I wouldn’t have been able to write this same book had I not sold to a big five publisher. I also got an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, which covered a lot of costs and was really helpful. Fact-checking is also another thing I’m trying to shout out as much as possible. Fact-checking is at the author’s expense — when you sell a book, you essentially sign on the dotted line and swear that everything in the book is true, and the publisher abdicates responsibility. It was about $7,000 for the court transcript and then I paid a fact checker about $8,000 as well. It’s really expensive, and the kind of people that can write these books and the publishers that can buy them is really limited.

SH: At what point did you realize you had enough material for a book? And what were some of the doubts you had while writing it?

ECE: I was kind of in denial that I was writing a book for a while. I thought I was writing an essay, then a magazine article, then a long magazine article. About three years in, I realized I had too much for an article and enough for a book, and that’s when I started talking to my agent about it and turning it into a book proposal.

As far as doubts, there were so many. I wondered if I didn’t solve the case, people would be like, “What’s the point?” I questioned my own opinions about what happened and why, and whether other people had other opinions, and whether they would think mine were unfounded. The case itself and the amount of reporting I did yielded so many contradictions, so many things that could not all possibly be true at the same time. I wondered how I could render all this in one book, and I tried to dramatize the process of me changing my mind. I wanted to include the contradictions as much as possible in an order that would still make sense to the reader, to include as many voices as possible. It’s a crazy doubt rollercoaster — even after you sell the book, you wonder if you can really write it.

SH: What were the biggest challenges for you when writing about the hazy nature of guilt, memory, and believability?

ECE: I wasn’t sure how much to dig into psychology, sociology, or criminology. Each field offers a different way of thinking about believability and memory. I did a lot of intake, trying to understand what makes a story believable and how the ideas we bring to a story like this influence how we understand these kinds of events. There were two theories of the crime, both of them flawed. There was this really uncommon rift amongst the investigators. This book is about the gray area: what is a fact? What is a feeling? And how do I know I’m reporting accurately on this material as someone who’s not from the area? Rather than leave those questions behind the curtain, I wanted to bring them to the forefront. These questions are the meat of the book, not just tangential. I was trying to do as much as possible within the bounds of writing a book, a book that has to be read from start to finish, knowing that I’m both trying to tell a story and to deconstruct a story that is complicated and flawed.

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