He set to work walking the scene and marking its essential features. He walked farther down Tim’s dirt lane with a high-powered flashlight and found that it ended in deep ruts and was closed off by a log placed across it. On a rock lining one of the ruts, Hott discovered some metal flakes and a scrape of orange paint, as well as a set of tire tracks. The right front tire of the car looked to be a summer tire, while the left rear tire mark looked to be made by a winter tire.
It was Hott who took the eight photographs of the bodies that night that would be the only record of how they were found, but to take some of them, Hott decided it was necessary to roll one of the bodies onto her back.
Judy Cutlip wasn’t especially surprised when her kitchen phone rang and it was the fire station saying she was needed right away. It was her night on call. She worked in the business office in the hospital, so being a volunteer EMT allowed her a more physical kind of work, plus she liked helping people if she could. It hadn’t been a walk-on situation, though; she’d gone through a rigorous eight-week training process in everything from first aid to dodging bullets. So far she’d mostly been called to respond to car accidents and elderly people who’d slipped and fallen.
Pocahontas County had only been offering ambulance service to the citizens in the southern parts of the county like Hillsboro and Droop Mountain for three years. In the 1950s, hospital workers rode to emergency calls throughout the county in a hearse, and if the hearse could not make it up a particularly rough or snowy road, the family would be obliged to carry the injured or sick person the rest of the way. In the 1960s, the Marlinton Fire Department had a single ambulance to service the whole county, but if two calls happened to come in on the same night, the hearse method might still be employed. This was no way to live, people had been telling the county commission for years, but Pocahontas County officials pled funding shortages. Then in the late seventies, the state subsidized the purchase of two ambulances, and good ones too—four-wheel drive and equipped with a winch and cave rescue equipment, which would come in handy for foolhardy cave enthusiasts—and the commission jumped on it. The Hillsboro Volunteer Fire Department got one of these ambulances, and that was the one Judy Cutlip rode to Briery Knob.
On a clear night and moving at average speed, it might take a pickup truck twenty or twenty-five minutes to cover the eleven country miles between the Hillsboro Fire Department and the clearing on Briery Knob Road, but it took the ambulance forty-five minutes at least to navigate the steeply sloping and switchbacked curves, four-wheel drive or no. One of Cutlip’s neighbors did the driving, a great guy who could load and unload a human being, though he wasn’t an EMT. Cutlip and another man were the trained personnel responsible for whatever might happen when they got there. They exchanged few words if any the whole trip, except near the end, when the driver called out to hold on and the ambulance bounced from asphalt onto potholed dirt.
Flashlights shone this way and that in the dark. One of the law’s cars had its flashing lights on but without the sound. There was some maneuvering of the ambulance to be done in order to park it as close as possible without disturbing the scene. Tim was concerned the ambulance would obscure the tire tracks Hott had found—plaster casts hadn’t been taken yet. The ambulance driver assured him that he would not drive over them. It was dark, Judy Cutlip remembers, and surprisingly quiet, no bustle, just the voices of four men talking together and the tick-tick of the ambulance engine cooling.
She was the one who leaned over to feel the carotid arteries of the two women and say that they were dead. They were still warm, very warm—rigor mortis had not set in at all—and she remembers thinking that they must have been killed very recently. Their eyes were open, and Cutlip looked in them. She had picked up corpses before and touched them, but this was the first time she had ever touched a body that had not died on its own terms.
Cutlip, the other EMT, and the ambulance driver loaded the corpses onto two gurneys. As the driver backed up the vehicle, Hott looked on and helped with directions. The ambulance proceeded back down the dirt road toward the hospital in Marlinton, but it bounced and jiggled more loudly now with the added weight of its cargo.
Trooper Robert Alkire of the West Virginia State Police was halfway asleep in his home two hours north when the phone clanged and the voice on the Pocahontas County end of the line told him that two women had been shot on Droop Mountain and that he should get in his car and drive.
Alkire passed through Marlinton and then into the hamlet of Buckeye when headquarters radioed again, telling him to turn around and go to the Marlinton hospital instead. He walked into the small, cold morgue. One of the women had been shot twice in the chest, the other three times—in the head, neck, and chest. One wore a red University of Iowa sweatshirt and was missing one of her foam sport sandals. The other was carrying a pocket knife and a folded flyer that offered handwritten directions to the Rainbow Gathering.
Above the typed text of the flyer was a hand-drawn map of southeastern West Virginia that suggested that the best route to the Gathering was to approach from Virginia, taking newly minted Interstate 64 to Lexington, then following a quiet two-lane into Marlinton, county seat of Pocahontas, where the Rainbows would have a welcome station to help guide travelers on into the wilderness. “Dotted roads are uptight,” read the handwriting. All local roads in West Virginia were drawn dotted. Because their eyes were still open, no matter where Alkire walked around the table, it seemed as though the women were quietly watching him.
Alkire stayed with the bodies until they were airlifted to Charleston to be autopsied. Day broke. It was Thursday. Alkire followed several squad cars of Pocahontas County sheriff’s troopers down Route 219 and then onto the dirt roads to the clearing where the women had been found. Alkire noted the browning blood in the grass and the tire tracks, but little else. Back into the car caravan and on into the Monongahela National Forest to the Rainbow Gathering, which was now nearly in full swing. The officers showed around the photos Trooper Hott had taken of the women’s dead faces, but no one seemed to know them. A Rainbow leader promised to get the photos into the festival newsletter the next day.
“No belt, no brassiere or underpanties. No socks…” medical examiner Irvin Sopher in Charleston wrote Alkire. “No evidence of sperm, no evidence of sexual assault.” One of the women had a blood alcohol level of 0.01, less than a can of beer or a shot of whiskey consumed within an hour of dying, while the other’s was 0.08—about three or four drinks. They had most likely been shot within three hours of being discovered, making their time of death around six or seven in the evening. They had not been shot as they had been found but had either fallen or been moved after impact. The weapon was either a rifle or a pistol; the bullets had passed cleanly through the bodies and left only small particulate fragments. But the trajectory was very unusual—markedly downward at about a forty-five-degree angle, as if they had been kneeling, crouching, or sitting while someone had shot them from above. And the “level of destruction” was very high—the bullets were of a large caliber and been shot at such close range that the back of one woman’s right hand and the left side of the other’s face had been charred by the blasts.
The Rainbow leader was good to his word. He went to the back of his VW bus and printed and mimeographed the faces of the unidentified corpses into the daily festival newsletter with the question “Does anybody know who these women are?”
George Castelle was a lawyer who had traveled from nearby Charleston to attend the Gathering. He watched as people passed around copies of the Rainbow newsletter with the faces of two dead women on it. His friends spoke of the two “sisters” who hadn’t made it. People were afraid—is there a killer traveling around picking up Rainbows and killing them? Is this going to be a problem on the way out?
“I had hoped the Gathering would be successful and that the Rainbows would come back often,” says Castelle. “It was really demoralizing. After so many years of peaceful gatherings in Western states, they com
e to West Virginia, and people start getting slaughtered.”
No one came forward to claim the women in the photos. A week later, the Gathering ended, and the members began their steady exit out of Pocahontas County by the feet and cars and buses and mules by which they’d come, and the Forest Service came in to survey the damage, of which there was remarkably little in the end. The Rainbows had broken down their camp with shocking precision and cleanliness; no arrests or hospitalizations had occurred at all.
Of the Santomero children, Kathy Santomero was the most like Nancy; the two shared a love of organic foods and travel and, unlike their other sisters on Long Island, never wore much makeup or polish on their nails. Kathy, too, had heard about the Rainbow Gathering, and several of her and Nancy’s friends from home were also going. Kathy and Nancy made a plan to meet at the Gathering at a white van belonging to friends and then travel together back to New York. When Kathy arrived, she found the white van and Nancy’s friends, then waited for Nancy herself. As the days passed, she didn’t worry, she says; she just assumed Nancy had found something better to do. Kathy ate brown rice and watched the sun rise and fall and the rain roll in and swam in the rivers, and then someone passed her friend the small Rainbow newsletter with the black-and-white photos of the dead women, and the friend passed it to Kathy. One of the women was wearing her hair in braids.
“I was like, ‘I wonder if that’s my sister,’” Kathy says. “But when I said that to my friend, he said, ‘They’re Indian girls. It’s not your sister.’ So I dismissed it.”
Kathy returned to New York, but days after she got back to her university in Geneseo, Nancy had still not called. A friend of Kathy’s who had gone with her to the Gathering did instead. He kept looking at the two small pictures of the dead women in the Pocahontas Times he’d grabbed in town on the way out, he told Kathy. “I think one of them is Nancy.”
“He was awesome,” Kathy says. “He said, ‘Kathy, whatever you want to do, if you want to be by yourself, if you want to go get drunk, there’s no rule book.’” Still unsure if the dead woman was really Nancy, Kathy wanted to handle it herself, and without telling her parents. She and a friend got into a borrowed car and drove to Charleston, where the newspaper reported the bodies were being kept pending identification. The whole drive there, all five hundred miles past Buffalo and Cleveland and Parkersburg, West Virginia, Kathy was able to stay positive. It wasn’t going to be her. There was no need to worry, no need to fear. Once in Charleston, they drove around and around looking for the morgue, and Kathy grew frustrated, then incensed.
When they finally found the right place and the right room and the right official and were shown the two women’s bodies, Kathy looked at them and still didn’t think either of them was Nancy. But one of the bodies was wearing a woven bracelet just like one Kathy had made for her.
“She had my bracelet on,” Kathy says, “and then I knew.” The morgue staff were brusque and insensitive to Kathy and her friend as they stood in the viewing room. “I was fighting mad as we left. I was probably venting on them. What do you call that? Misplaced, displaced anger.” Kathy called her mother in Long Island and told her she was coming home, and nothing else—she wanted to tell her mother in person—and then the friend drove her there.
Nancy’s sister Patricia, who everyone thought was Nancy’s twin, was twenty at the time, working as a fitness instructor in Huntington and living at home with their mother. On the night of the murders, June 25, 1980, she says, she had been teaching an exercise class when she began to feel a terrible pain in her chest and head. She came home from work and went straight to the bathroom without eating dinner. She ran the water, then got into the tub.
“I had the strange sensation, a very strong knowledge that I was going to die,” Patricia says. “I lay there in bed, and I wrote out my will. I wrote out what everyone would get and how I wanted to be buried. My head was hammering—I felt awful. I was able to get out of the bath, and I got into bed, and I said, ‘Okay, if this is what is happening, I accept it.’ I was ready to die. And then I woke up the next morning, and I had not died. And then I wondered where Nancy was.”
It was a week later, a morning in early July, when Patricia heard Kathy pull into the driveway. She figured Nancy was in the car too, that the two of them had come home from West Virginia together. Nancy had a habit of greeting Patricia by jumping on her and tackling her in bed. Patricia waited five minutes, ten, then twenty minutes for Nancy to come busting into her bedroom. She heard Kathy talking to her mother in the next room and then the sound of their mother crying. Patricia got up from bed, opened the door, and stood in the jamb between the two rooms. Kathy was holding her mother’s hand, and her mother was still crying.
“And I said, ‘Where is Nancy? What is wrong with her? Did she do something wrong? Is she in jail?’ And they told me she was dead.”
Kathy Santomero was able to tell the West Virginia State Police Vicki’s full name, and word was sent to the police in Wellman, Iowa, who told the Durians. Kathy knew that Nancy and Vicki had not been traveling as a duo, but rather as a trio, but she only knew the third woman’s first name—Liz.
It stood to reason that if three women had traveled together and two had ended up dead, the third should be dead, too, or in mortal danger.
PART II:
A DIVIDED HEART
Dear Mr. President, I said, Dear Dean,
Dear Husband, Dear Our Father, Dear Tax Collector,
you don’t know me. I don’t know what I am,
but whatever it is, you can’t have me.
—Irene McKinney
Valley off Lobelia Road, 2009
1
THE SPRING I WAS TO graduate college, there rose up in me the desire to drop so hard out of my life that I could hear my life trying to get in touch. Call it the loss of faith that coincides with economic crisis, call it American nostalgia for the pastoral, call it what you do when you still believe that there must be someplace left to go where anything is all the way true. At my liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, 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. My friends and I burned a Christmas tree on a patch of concrete behind our cinder-block apartment complex. I’ll never forget how fast it went—whoosh, gone.
Several years earlier, word of a nonprofit organization for teenage girls in West Virginia called Mountain Views had begun to circulate among my crowd—women’s center employees, residents of the environmental and Quaker houses, players of ultimate Frisbee. I applied and, instead of returning home to New York City, spent the months after my sophomore year in Pocahontas County working as an intern for the residential camp that Mountain Views became each summer.
A dense and crackling ten weeks. I slept in a house that looked out onto a pen of horses, made copies and phone calls in a log cabin office, and did everything else in the campground—half a football field of cleared clover grass circumscribed by an oval of dirt road. On the narrow ends sat the wooden picnic shelter for meals and the shower house, built by girls past, where the water was heated by a wood fire. The fat ends were dotted with small screened-in and tin-roofed cabins, big trees for hammocks, and a campfire ring with six benches arranged in a hexagon.
Everywhere I went in that campground was the loud counsel or good-natured yelling of the Founder. The hair on the Founder’s head was brown, thick, and arranged in a pattern of crisscrossing layers so the effect was a kind of fabulous mullet. She had small round glasses and wore indigo denim jeans and button-up flannel shirts ordered from hunting and outdoor catalogs or purchased at Cabela’s. She was tall and tan, her muscles visible under her rippled sixty-something skin.
She was from California and had wanted to be a professional fiddler but found her way to being a teacher for the gifted and talented program in the West Virginia public school system i
nstead. Over the course of many years, she saw eighth-grade girls—hand-raising, answer-knowing, laughing girls—turn quiet in high school. She convinced a friend to sell her the Mountain Views land for a dollar, and a West Virginia judge arranged for a state prison crew to come and clear it.
In the summer of 1996, the Founder asked her two daughters and their friends to come and be the counselors. The first campers were girls from the local middle schools who slept in green army tents. It rained the whole two weeks, and their sleeping bags became heavy with the moisture. Many of the girls wanted to quit. The Founder gathered them together and pointed down the embankment toward the town of Hillsboro. Everyone down there thinks we’re going to come down, she told them. Do we want to prove them right, or do we want to tough it out? They stayed.
The Founder’s vision was simple: girls going into ninth grade would live together for about two weeks in the woods. No computer, no cell phones, no boys. Meals were healthy and contained foods outside a fourteen-year-old’s comfort zone. The campground was perched on a hill, and equestrian class (there was something special that happened between teenage girls and horses) was held on the plateau below; girls might climb the steep trail between them three or four times a day. Math and science classes were held daily, along with a creative arts class. Campfire every night, when the girls would read poems they’d written and sing songs—Janis Joplin, “Swingin’ on a Star,” old cowboy songs.
As the years passed and girls went through the program and wanted to come back and see each other again, a second camp session was established, and year-round programs too—academic tutoring, college advising, ACT preparation, and trips to visit college campuses. The thought was: What if there was a place you could go where no one would judge you, where you would be taken in for exactly who you are?
[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl Page 5