The Rainbow Murders (Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero)

Case background and investigation

In mid-June 1980, Vicki Durian, 26, of Iowa, and Nancy Santomero, 19, of New York, set out hitchhiking toward the annual Rainbow Gathering, a counterculture peace festival being held that year in the Monongahela National Forest of Pocahontas County, West Virginia. The two women, traveling together as part of the loose community that followed the gatherings, never reached the event.

On June 25, 1980, their bodies were discovered in a remote clearing on Briery Knob, near Droop Mountain in southern Pocahontas County. Both women had been shot at close range. According to the coroner's findings, neither had been sexually assaulted. With few witnesses in the sparsely populated Appalachian county, the killings quickly went cold and became known locally as the 'Rainbow Murders.'

The case reopened dramatically in the early 1990s. In 1992 and 1993, murder charges were brought against several local men. Prosecutors ultimately focused on Jacob Beard, a Pocahontas County farmer, who was convicted of the murders in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison, largely on the strength of statements from other locals. Almost immediately the case drew scrutiny over the conduct of the investigation and the reliability of that testimony.

While Beard's appeal proceeded, attention turned to Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist serial killer already imprisoned for a cross-country shooting spree that targeted Black people, Jews, and interracial couples. Franklin had claimed as early as the 1980s that he killed the two hitchhikers in West Virginia with a .44 caliber pistol. A judge granted Beard a new trial in 1999, and on May 31, 2000, a Braxton County jury acquitted him. Beard later won a wrongful-conviction lawsuit that settled for roughly $2 million in 2003.

Franklin was never tried for the Durian and Santomero killings. He was executed by the state of Missouri on November 20, 2013, for an unrelated 1977 synagogue-area sniper murder, and his shifting statements about the West Virginia case were never tested in court. Because Beard was acquitted and Franklin was never prosecuted for these specific deaths, the Rainbow Murders remain without a standing conviction. The case was the subject of Emma Copley Eisenberg's 2020 book 'The Third Rainbow Girl.'