The Rainbow Murders: The Serial Killer Theory

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On September 10th, 1984, West Virginia state trooper Debbie DeFalco sat hunched over a hand-drawn map.

It was a mess of intersecting roads and childish handwriting, but a few words stood out to her.

Interstate, gas station, and most importantly, rainbow meeting.

The map belonged to an inmate at a federal prison in Illinois.

a white supremacist serial killer named Joseph Paul Franklin.

He said that he'd murdered the so-called rainbow girls Nancy Santamero and Vicki Durian during his multi-year crime spree, and he'd sketched the map as proof.

There were markings to show where Franklin picked up the two hitchhikers, the roads he took up into the mountains, and the spot where he allegedly left their bodies on June 25th, 1980.

After briefly looking at the map on her own, DeFalco showed it to another state trooper who'd been at the scene the day of the murders.

He said that it looked accurate.

Some of the specifics were wrong, but the route to the murder scene and the positions of the bodies seemed to be correct.

As DeFalco drove back to the state police headquarters, she continued to puzzle over the map.

It could be a false confession, but if so, it was hard to believe that Franklin just happened to get so many of the details

right.

I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

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In today's episode, we're taking a look at the Rainbow Murders.

In 1980, a joyous adventure between two friends turned to tragedy and sparked a years-long hunt for the killer or killers.

Were Nancy Santamero and Vicki Durian killed by West Virginian locals, as law enforcement believed?

Or were they victims of serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, who made multiple confessions?

Stay with us.

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On the evening of June 25th, 1980, a college student carefully drove through the winding, forested roads in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

He lived in a lean-to cabin on the face of Briary Knob, one of the dozens of small mountains in the area.

As the sun began to set and his truck bumped along the muddy road, he saw a sudden flash of color.

Two people were lying to the left of the road.

The young man instinctively averted his eyes.

It looked like they might have been sharing an intimate moment and he didn't want to intrude.

But as his truck trundled by, the bodies didn't seem to move at all.

The young man parked his truck in front of the cabin a few yards away from the pair.

The people still weren't moving.

The daylight was fading fast, so he hiked over to get a closer look.

Two women lay next to each other on their backs, their feet facing the dirt path.

One had a red University of Iowa sweatshirt on, the other a blouse with embroidered blue flowers.

And they'd both been shot multiple times.

Panicked, he called the authorities.

A sheriff's deputy arrived first, then a state trooper.

A pair of volunteer EMTs slowly made their way up the mountain in one of the county's three ambulances.

One of the EMTs examined the bodies.

They were still warm.

Rigor mortis hadn't set in at all, meaning that the girls had died in the last few hours.

and their eyes were wide open.

The EMTs loaded the bodies onto Gurneys and carefully drove back to the morgue at a nearby hospital.

Robert Alkyre, another trooper from the West Virginia State Police, met them there.

Alkyre stepped into the cold room.

One woman had two gunshot wounds to the chest.

The other had three around her upper torso.

He would later learn that they were both young, one in her late teens and the other in her mid-20s.

And there was no evidence of sexual assault.

It looked like they'd been shot with large caliber bullets at incredibly close range.

All of the bullets entered at about a 45-degree downward angle.

This either meant that the shooter was elevated above them or that they were sitting or kneeling when the bullets hit.

None of this pointed to a clear scenario, and Alkyre remained baffled.

So far, nobody knew the identities of the victims, but their belongings gave investigators a a clue.

A folded-up flyer for the rainbow gathering had been found in their pockets.

The annual event had been held since 1972.

Rainbow gatherings were all about coming together as a community to celebrate peace and freedom, and folks from all over were invited.

In its early years, the event occurred along the West Coast, but that year, 1980, the Rainbow family planned to congregate in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia.

Local politicians were outraged.

West Virginia's Secretary of State said that the Rainbow family wasn't allowed in the area because they didn't align with West Virginia values.

He referred to the group as derelict misfits.

As many as 6,000 visitors arrived and pitched their tents in the National Forest.

Most of the residents in the area seemed indifferent toward the Rainbows.

Others, not so much.

Before the event was officially underway, members of the Rainbows reported that gunshots were fired toward their camp.

One woman attending the gathering was Kathy Santamero.

She'd planned to meet up with her sister, Nancy.

When the 19-year-old didn't show, Kathy didn't think much of it.

But then she saw an image that gave her pause.

A sketch had been circulating in the Rainbow Gathering's daily newsletter.

It depicted the two dead women found on the mountain.

State trooper Robert Alkyre had supplied them, hoping somebody would come forward to help ID the victims.

Kathy noticed that one of the women bore a slight resemblance to her sister, but initially she thought the whole thing was too unlikely.

She figured Nancy had probably just gotten wrapped up in another adventure and bailed on the Rainbow Gathering altogether.

That's why she didn't show.

But when Kathy returned home and still hadn't heard from Nancy, she had a terrible feeling.

Shortly afterward, she identified one of the so-called rainbow girls for law enforcement.

It was Nancy Santamero.

Kathy also knew that Nancy was traveling with her friend, Vicki Durian.

Investigators confirmed Vicki was the other victim discovered on Droop Mountain.

Identifying Nancy and Vicki may have felt like a triumph for Alkyre, the state trooper, but many of his most basic questions about the case remained unanswered.

For one, he still had no idea why the women were killed.

In his mind, there were three possibilities.

Vicki and Nancy could have been victims of a robbery gone wrong.

Two, the motive could have been sexual.

Or three, they could have been murdered because they symbolized the Rainbow family, a group that hadn't exactly been welcomed into town.

At first, the sexual angle seemed like the most likely.

The young hitchhikers could have gotten into a car with someone who intended to take advantage of them.

But the medical examiner had found no signs of assault on the women, so that motive was moved to the bottom of the list.

Robbery was also eliminated as the most likely motive when, months later, a group of deer hunters found Vicki and Nancy's backpacks deep in the woods.

They'd been hidden under a bush about 60 miles away from where their bodies were found.

Nothing was stolen from the bags.

To investigators, the most likely motive seemed to be hatred of the Rainbow family.

Alkyre threw himself into this one, trying to track down anyone who had expressed strong negative feelings toward the gathering.

Meanwhile, his office was swamped with tips after the Rainbow Girls' names were released.

Dozens of people claimed that they'd seen the girls at some some point before they died.

Al Kyr was sure that most of these stories were bogus, but he was intrigued by a possible sighting at a general store.

The cashier told police that Nancy and Vicki stopped in around 5.30 or 6 p.m.

They mentioned they were coming from Arizona, where Nancy and Vicki had met.

The cashier then saw the women leave and get into a black Chevy Nova with a man.

Al Kyr learned that the man driving the Chevy was lanky, clean-shaven, and blonde.

He purchased gas, then turned right on State Route 219 toward the rainbow gathering.

The state troopers started scouring the county for Chevy Novas and any suspicious characters who fit this description.

But by the end of July 1980, the suspect list had been winnowed down to zero.

There was another interesting turn in the case early on.

When Nancy's sister provided identifications, she told them something else.

Nancy had been traveling in a trio, and if only two bodies were found, that meant one of the girls had to be missing or in serious danger.

Authorities all over the country were told to be on the lookout for the so-called third rainbow girl.

Officers scoured the woods where Nancy and Vicki were found, but there weren't any other bodies.

After a week of frantic searching, state trooper Alkyre's phone rang.

It was a woman named Liz Jondreau, the third rainbow girl herself.

Luckily, she was very much alive, but she couldn't offer any information to help the case.

She had been hitchhiking with Nancy and Vicki, but when they got to a rest stop in North Carolina, Liz told them she wouldn't be able to join the last leg of the trip.

Her father was getting remarried in Vermont, and she wanted to be there for him.

Later, Liz told author Emma Copley Eisenberg that this was, in fact, a lie.

Liz didn't want to go to her father's wedding, but she'd had a premonition the night before, a bone-deep feeling of dread.

Her gut was telling her she shouldn't keep traveling with Vicki and Nancy.

Summer turned to fall.

Tips and leads slowed to a trickle.

Vicki and Nancy had both been buried in their hometowns, and Liz Jondreaux wanted nothing to do with the the investigation.

Alkyre continued to work the case, but other investigations started to take up his time.

In her book, Eisenberg described one of Alkyer's theories about the murder.

He often told other officers and deputies that he believed the culprit was a local because the girls had been killed in an extremely remote area.

He'd made this connection in the first few days of the investigation, and he hadn't wavered.

But in March 1984, he received a phone call that called that theory into question because a serial killer had just confessed to the murders of Nancy Santamero and Vicki Durian.

Joseph Paul Franklin had been extremely active during the summer of 1980, and according to authorities in North Carolina, he'd been spotted at that time driving a Chevy Nova.

It's pretty likely that Robert Alkyre, an investigator in the Rainbow Murders case, had heard of Joseph Paul Franklin.

Franklin was a white supremacist serial killer who'd committed dozens of hate crimes up and down the East Coast in the late 1970s.

When he was finally arrested in October 1980, the story made national headlines.

We have covered him on serial killers before, but his crimes and alleged murders are so numerous, we didn't even get to his confession in the Rainbow Murders case.

Joseph Paul Franklin was born under a different name, James Clayton Vaughan, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama.

His father deserted the family when he was eight, and his mother beat him and his siblings almost every day.

By the time he reached high school, the boy had multiple skull fractures and was blind in one eye.

Vaughn's cognitive impairment made school difficult, and according to a 2011 biography, he skipped class constantly.

The author, Mel Aiton, described him escaping into fantasy stories and said that fairy tales and westerns were his favorite.

In high school, he became obsessed with religion and compulsively read the Bible and other spiritual texts.

Around the same time in the mid-1960s, Alabama became a battleground for the national civil rights movement.

When his high school was desegregated in 1965, 15-year-old Vaughan was angered by the sight of black teenagers sitting next to him in class.

He delved deeper into the writings of white supremacist Christian sects, and when he was 17, he stole a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf from the Mobile Public Library.

Soon after that, he dropped out of high school and joined the American Nazi Party Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

He became convinced that Jewish people were conspiring with black Americans to take over the country, and he believed he needed to take matters into his own hands.

In 1973, James Clayton Vaughan changed his name.

He started calling himself Joseph Paul after Nazi propagandist Paul Joseph Goebbels and Franklin after Benjamin Franklin.

He'd fantasized about murdering black and Jewish people for years.

Now, with this new identity, he seemed ready to bring those bloody thoughts to fruition.

He committed his first known murders in August 1977 when he shot an interracial couple in Madison, Wisconsin.

Franklin then criss-crossed the United States, targeting people who were black, Jewish, or who appeared to be in an interracial relationship.

He continued to roam the country like this for over three years, living off of bank robberies and blood plasma donations.

Franklin attacked at least two more interracial couples and allegedly attempted to assassinate Vernon Jordan, a prominent civil rights activist.

He also reportedly ambushed Larry Flint, the publisher of Hustler magazine, because one edition depicted interracial sex.

In 1980, the year Nancy and Vicki were murdered, Franklin's crimes reached a fever pitch.

Within two months, he shot two black children in Cincinnati, murdered an interracial couple in Pennsylvania, and killed two black joggers in Salt Lake City.

By this point, law enforcement departments across the country had connected the attacks.

They knew that the killer visited blood banks frequently and had a prominent tattoo of the Grim Reaper on his right arm, so they issued a nationwide alert.

In October 1980, an employee at a Florida blood bank quietly recognized the menacing tattoo as Franklin rolled up his sleeve.

The FBI was called and Franklin was arrested soon after.

He would ultimately be convicted of eight murders, although he's believed to have killed as many as 20 people.

Franklin was imprisoned at a federal facility in Illinois.

Even though he'd confessed to a few crimes, no one knew exactly how many murders he'd actually committed in those three years.

Investigators from all over clamored to speak with him, including special agents from Wisconsin.

They wanted to know if he'd killed a female hitchhiker whose body had been left in a state park.

And to their surprise, he admitted to it instantly.

While on the subject of hitchhikers, he then admitted to killing two women in West Virginia in the summer of 1980.

The Wisconsin agent pressed for more details.

Franklin said that he was on his way from North Carolina to Kentucky on June 25th, 1980.

He saw two white women looking for a ride on the side of the road.

They had a scruffy look to them.

They looked like hippies.

The girls climbed into Franklin's car and told them they were headed to some kind of rainbow festival.

He drove them for a few hours, only stopping once to fill up on gas.

Naturally, the three of them got to talking.

As the conversation went on, Franklin started to suspect that they were communists and that they hung around with, or maybe even dated, black men.

In his mind, this was reason enough to kill them.

Franklin claimed that he ordered the girls to get out of the car once they got to a remote area.

Then he shot them point blank and left their bodies on the side of the road.

At first, the agent was skeptical of this confession.

Franklin was already in prison for life, so it was no skin off his back to confess to a crime he didn't commit.

He could be making this up to attract attention or boost his number of alleged victims.

The agent gave Franklin a pen and paper and asked him to draw the area where he'd supposedly killed these girls.

Then he called the West Virginia authorities.

State Trooper Robert Alkyre listened to everything the Wisconsin agent had to say.

When the story was done, he gave the man a courteous thank you and ended the call.

Alkyre was sure that an outsider like Franklin couldn't have actually committed the rainbow murders.

Vicki and Nancy had been killed on the face of a remote mountain.

It was almost impossible to imagine a random drifter getting up there on his own.

But the Wisconsin officer was insistent.

He faxed the hand-drawn map to Alkyre's office a few days later.

To Alkyer, it looked nothing like Pocahontas County, and it didn't seem to match the details of the case either.

The gas station was drawn on the wrong side of the road, and Franklin made it look like Vicki and Nancy were killed close to the interstate when they were actually several miles away.

And he'd referred to the area as Beckley County, which didn't even exist.

Al Kyr put the map out of his mind.

A few months later, Franklin brought up the Rainbow Murders again, this time in an interview with authorities from Tennessee.

Even though the West Virginia state troopers remained skeptical of Franklin, they felt like they had to follow this lead, and Debbie DeFalco was assigned to the case.

DeFalco assumed that this would be yet another dead end, but the more she thought about it, the more Franklin made sense as a suspect.

In addition to the map, the inmate had drawn a picture of the bullet he supposedly used.

It was a large one, 240 grain.

DeFalco called the ballistics lab.

They confirmed that Vicki and Nancy could have been killed by a bullet that size.

And when she looked through the old case records, DeFalco was reminded that a general store cashier had allegedly seen Vicki and Nancy right before they died.

According to this woman, the girls were traveling with a tall, blonde man who drove a dark-colored Chevy Nova.

The state troopers started contacting other agencies that were investigating Franklin, trying to figure out if he matched the cashier's description.

An agent in Pennsylvania told her that as far as they knew, Franklin had short blonde hair at the time.

DeFalco was able to confirm that Franklin had robbed a bank in North Carolina the day before the Rainbow murders.

A young boy had actually seen him climb into a black car when he was fleeing the scene.

According to North Carolina authorities, it was a Nova.

By this point, DeFalco was pretty sure that Joseph Paul Franklin didn't make this story up.

But in order to really be certain, she needed to talk to Franklin.

She drove hours to the federal penitentiary and came face to face with him in a cramped, square room.

DeFalco's recollections of this meeting are described in detail in The Third Rainbow Girl.

According to her, the inmate arrived in shackles.

He wouldn't stop staring at her through his one good eye.

She sat across from him for more than an hour, asking question after question, but he flatly dismissed everything.

He even denied robbing the bank in North Carolina.

DeFalco called the guards in, and they ushered Franklin back into a cell outside of the interrogation room.

But then, as the state trooper was leaving, Franklin motioned to get her attention.

He beckoned her to come closer, then whispered in her ear.

That's when he told her he did it.

He added that he dumped Nancy and Vicki's backpacks in the forest.

He remembered that one of them was green, which made it easy to hide in the foliage.

Vicki Durian had been carrying a green bag.

DeFalco told the author that she sped home to West Virginia and dug even deeper into the case.

She talked to more law enforcement agencies and compiled the evidence against Franklin in a comprehensive report.

She presented everything to Robert Alkyre and the other higher-ups.

Her Her report concluded with a clear statement.

Joseph Paul Franklin had the motive, means, and opportunity to commit the rainbow murders.

It was entirely possible that he was the killer they'd been looking for.

But despite all the evidence DeFalco presented, Alkyre and his colleagues didn't buy it.

They hardly even entertained it.

This may have been because Alkyre still thought the killer had to be local.

Even though DeFalco presented plenty of reasons to suspect Franklin, the serial killer was an outsider.

In fact, Alkyre and other investigators had been pursuing a few men from in and around Pocahontas County.

In particular, he'd set his sights on a man named Jacob Beard.

Back in July 1982, two years after the murders, Vicki Durian's father, Howard, got a phone call at home.

The man on the line said he was calling from Pocahontas County.

It was really awful what happened to Howard's daughter, and he wanted to say sorry.

The caller went on to say that he'd gone to high school with some of the investigators.

They were small-town cops, not the sharpest.

Howard should probably contact the FBI if he actually wanted to know who killed Vicki.

Howard was terrified.

After a few moments of silence, he asked what the man's name was.

The caller refused to answer.

All he said was that he wasn't the murderer.

Then he hung up.

Howard contacted Alkyre, who put a trace on the Durian's phone line.

When the man called again, the police were able to identify him immediately.

It was Jacob Beard.

Beard had lived in Pocahontas County, West Virginia for almost all of his life, so of course he'd heard of the rainbow murders.

One night as Beard thumbed through the newspaper, he saw an article commemorating the crime.

He said he felt awful that this had happened in his hometown and wanted to call the families of the victims and say sorry.

He didn't know how to pronounce Santamero, so he opted for the Durians.

Beard later claimed that he was tipsy, but not drunk when he did this, though he did have a reputation for drinking heavily.

He didn't think much of the call with Howard Durian, and within a few weeks, it had completely slipped from his memory.

When a sheriff's deputy showed up at his work and took him in for questioning, Beard was confused.

He didn't know what he'd done wrong.

And he didn't know he would spend the next 18 years trying to explain why he'd called Vicki's family.

After state trooper Al Kyr identified Jacob Beard, he pressed the local man on his whereabouts on June 25th, 1980, the day of the murders.

Beard had a surprisingly clear memory of that day, even though more than two years had passed.

He said he was working at the tractor sales company until the late afternoon when he left to visit a customer.

He finished the house call around 5:15, then drove home, ate a quick dinner, and headed back into town for a school board meeting.

He said he arrived at the meeting around 7 or 7.30.

He didn't see any rainbow gathering participants that day.

Beard didn't say anything incriminating, so Alkyre had no choice but to let him go.

Then, Alkir got to work trying to verify his story.

First, he checked if others saw Beard at that school board meeting.

Several people did, so it seemed like he was telling the truth from 7.30 onward.

Alkyre tried to verify the house call he made by checking the company time cards.

The card did note that he finished the job at 5.15 p.m., but it didn't include the name of the customer he claimed he visited.

Also, the time was written in pencil, which Alkyre found strange.

But without anything else to connect Beard to the crime, the trooper was stuck.

The following year, in 1983, the investigation into Beard began to pick up speed.

But to say things got complicated is a bit of an understatement, so bear with me for a moment.

First, Beard suddenly recalled something new about the day of the murder.

He said he was driving home from the house call around 5.30 p.m.

when he saw a few locals hanging out in their cars near the entrance to Droop Mountain State Park.

This was very close to Briary Knob, where Vicki and Nancy's bodies were found.

Beard recognized one of the cars.

It belonged to a friend from high school named Christine.

While he claimed he didn't see Christine there, he did allegedly see her boyfriend and his close friend.

Beard remembered seeing two more figures inside one of the parked cars.

He implied that they were the Rainbow Girls.

The detective remained skeptical.

To him, it really seemed like Beard pulled all of this out of thin air.

Then there was another dubious story about a corn chopper.

According to a police report, Beard allegedly said that a third woman was killed alongside Vicki and Nancy, and he knew what happened to her.

Beard was running some crops through a corn chopper when two men arrived at the property.

One of them was Christine's boyfriend, and both of them looked frustrated.

Then, Christine's boyfriend did something truly shocking.

The report said that he opened up his companion's truck and pulled out a lifeless female body.

She was pale and thin, covered in dark gray fabric.

The two men hoisted her up and placed her body in Beard's corn chopper.

Then they flipped the machine on.

There was absolutely no evidence that this story was true, but for the sake of the investigation, Alkyer eventually sent the corn chopper to a state crime lab for forensic testing, and they found no trace of human blood or tissue.

Next, another Pocahontas County resident went to police and implicated a local businessman who'd also been mentioned in Jacob Beard's corn chopper story.

When investigators looked into the businessman, neighbors said that he referred to himself as a hippie killer at one point, and his girlfriend recalled him bursting into tears on a drive through Droop Mountain State Park, telling her that he'd done awful things.

Once the businessman was charged with the murders, though, the person who'd implicated him recanted his statement and claimed Jacob Beard had put him up to it.

Over the next several years, the investigation continued to start and stall with further accusations and wild claims, many of them confusing and convoluted.

Meanwhile, Joseph Paul Franklin continued taking credit for killing Nancy and Vicki.

An investigative reporter from Cincinnati named Deborah Dixon conducted two prison interviews with Franklin.

As he'd done with investigators in Michigan and West Virginia, Franklin confessed to Dixon that he'd been behind the Rainbow Murders.

Dixon produced a segment about his ties to the case, which aired on 60 Minutes 2.

In The Killer's Shadow by John E.

Douglas and Mark Olshaker, the authors behind the classic work Mindhunter, retired FBI agent Douglas states that he believed Franklin was, quote, good for the murders.

The victims had been found shot in the middle of nowhere, which fit Franklin's M.O.

Douglas also identifies Franklin's signature, a kind of unique calling card a serial killer may feel compelled to do.

Franklin was known to pick up female hitchhikers, and he claimed he'd killed the women because it was his assessment that they were open to interracial relationships.

In fact, Douglas consulted on the Rainbow Murders case in 1984 and handed over his work on Franklin to the police.

Likewise, Debbie DeFalco, the West Virginia state trooper who'd also been investigating Franklin, published a report on him in early 1986.

She too had come to believe that Franklin was a viable person of interest.

Yet, Franklin was never put on trial for the murders.

According to Agent Douglas, that could be because Alkyre was too focused on following his own theory that a local was involved.

But, Douglas adds, it would have been challenging for an investigator at that time to understand the full extent of Franklin's crimes, a problem he calls linkage blindness.

As the state troopers' investigation bled into the 1990s, the stories and accusations continued to fly.

Many of them revolved around Jacob Beard.

Then, in 1993, prosecutors brought murder charges against a few local men, including Jacob Beard.

That summer, Beard's trial began.

His defense attorneys wanted to present Joseph Paul Franklin's multiple confessions.

They even wanted to bring Franklin in to testify in person.

But right when the trial started, the county prosecutor filed a motion to ban any discussions of him.

The judge agreed and only allowed the defense to mention Franklin in extremely broad terms.

Beard remained mostly quiet throughout the 12-day trial.

He'd briefly testified in his own defense and repeated the same alibi he'd given in 1982, the first time he was interviewed.

The defendant ended his cross-examination with an unequivocal statement.

He absolutely did not kill those girls.

But Beard's words didn't do much to sway the jury.

He was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Jacob Beard was sent to prison in the summer of 1993.

By 1994, his legal team had submitted his case to the Court of Appeals.

They cited multiple issues in the original trial, including the use of hypnosis on two of the witnesses and the judge's choice to ban any evidence related to Joseph Paul Franklin.

This first appeal was eventually denied, but then, in October of that year, an otherworldly presence seemed to intervene.

According to to Joseph Paul Franklin, a so-called spirit guide came to him with a message.

Even though he'd been behind bars for 14 years and would be spending his life in jail no matter what, he should confess to more of his crimes, including the ones that carried the death penalty.

While speaking to one prosecutor, Franklin repeated a lot of the details that Debbie DeFalco had uncovered in 1984.

He said he was driving a Chevy Nova and had stopped at a store on the way up the mountain.

He described the women as, quote, dirty hippie-type broads, and he said he'd killed them because they might have dated black men.

But there were some details that didn't match the facts of the case.

Most glaringly, Franklin now said that he'd shot the women inside of his car.

According to the ballistics experts who examined the bodies, this wasn't possible.

There would have been way more gunpowder residue on them if they were shot at such close range.

But whether Franklin was the actual culprit or not, his confession opened up a new angle for Jacob Beard and his defense team.

They filed a motion they hoped would get them a new trial, and it worked.

Armed with a taped deposition in which Franklin plainly stated that he committed the murders, Beard and his lawyers went back to the courtroom in May 2000.

The jury deliberated for just under three hours.

In the end, they decided that there wasn't enough evidence against Beard.

He was found not guilty.

He later won a wrongful conviction lawsuit against the county.

After 20 years, countless suspects, and one conviction, the Rainbow Murders were once again considered unsolved, and they've remained that way.

When journalist Emma Copley Eisenberg spoke with residents of Pocahontas County, many of them still believed that Jacob Beard killed the Rainbow Girls.

She also spoke to Beard himself.

He insisted that none of the local men were involved, and it was probably Joseph Paul Franklin who did it.

According to Eisenberg's book, Debbie DeFalco agrees.

Beard had made multiple mistakes, starting with the call to Vicki Durian's family in 1982.

But at the end of the day, his case had no hard evidence.

And besides, he had no real motive.

Franklin, on the other hand, did have a possible motive, a deep and twisted belief in white supremacy and a hatred of what he referred to as race mixers.

And from DeFalco's point of view, there was plenty of evidence against Franklin, from the bullet he drew on the map to the car he was driving.

Joseph Paul Franklin was executed in 2013 at age 63.

While he was never formally tried for the rainbow murders, he also never retracted his last confession.

Many sources, including a 2011 biography by Mel Aiton, state that he killed Vicki and Nancy outright.

But there are still certain details in the case against Franklin that don't add up.

Perhaps if Franklin was willing to speak with authorities earlier, some of these discrepancies would have been cleared up.

But at this point, it seems like we'll never be certain.

What we do know is this.

Whoever killed Vicki Durian and Nancy Santamero ended the lives of two bright, adventurous young women.

The two of them had come to West Virginia looking for peace, love, and a place to belong.

That makes it even more difficult to accept the way their journey ended.

Thanks for listening to Serial Killers.

We're here with a new episode every Monday.

Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast, and we'd love to hear from you.

So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

Amongst the many sources we used, we found The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg, as well as The Killer's Shadow by John Douglas and Mark Ulshaker, extremely helpful to our research.

Stay safe out there.

Serial Killers is a Spotify podcast.

This episode was written by Kylie Harrington, edited by Abigail Cannon, researched and edited by Mickey Taylor, fact-checked by Cheyenne Lopez and Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button.

Our head of programming is Julian Boirot.

Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.

I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.

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One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession.

Stories straight from the witnesses' mouths themselves.

Something very snake-like lifted its head out of the water.

Hosted by me, your guide, Derek Hayes.

Somehow I lost eight whole hours.

Listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Every week, two journalists who have reported on this stuff on the ground all over the world bring you a new story of international organized crime, past, present, and future.

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