Excerpt from the Daily Press (The Roanoke Times), 28 March 1997: Wight and Brenner met at Virginia Tech in 1985. Both served on a committee to plan Women's Week, an annual seven days of women's events in the spring. Wight had come to Blacksburg as an undergrad at Tech and was back pursuing a master's degree in business management. Brenner was beginning graduate studies in architecture.
In May 1988, the two decided to meet halfway at a state park near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
On the first morning, they woke to find a man in the Appalachian Trail shelter they were camped near. He asked Wight for cigarettes. They left him there, hoping to find a more secluded place on a four-mile loop off the trail but they saw him again, this time with a .22 caliber rifle slung over his shoulder and asking, "You lost already?"
They said no, and then "he went south and we went on the side trail and I never expected to see him again," she said. "I know now that he must have known it was a loop trail and just waited for us."
The women found a campsite a few miles later, dropped their backpacks and stretched out on a tarp by a stream. They were making love when the first shot rang out.
The first five hit Brenner, the next two hit Wight and an eighth missed. Wight was too weak to move, so Brenner wrapped her in a blue sleeping bag and left her by a tree. Doctors told Brenner later that because she was shot in the liver, Wight would have died even if it had happened on the operating table.
Police later found twenty-five rounds of unused ammunition, a hat and other items left within sight of where the two women were lying.
Two weeks later, Carr was arrested by police in a Mennonite community where he had been living under an alias. He was a fugitive from the law who lived in the mountains of Michaux State Forest in Pennsylvania. He was later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole, a result Brenner said she felt good about.
The case brought national attention to anti-gay violence. "People need to consider where to draw the line," she said. "Anything other than completely eliminating intolerance is totally unacceptable."
About the authors: Claudia Brenner is an architect who lives with her young child and lesbian family in upstate New York. She is an active speaker against anti-gay violence and wrote about her ordeal in her one and only book, Eight Bullets (1995).
Hannah Ashley lives, writes and teaches at two women's educational projects in Philadelphia.
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