Killed For Being Gay: The Murder of Rebecca Wight
What should have been a romantic camping trip turned into a desperate fight for survival for two young women.
It was May 1988, and 31-year-old Claudia Brenner was heading into the Michaux State Forest in Pennsylvania for a weekend of camping along the Appalachian Trail with Rebecca Wight, 28.
Rebecca was of Iranian-Puerto Rican heritage and busy working on a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, while Manhattan-born Claudia was a student of architecture. They had met two years earlier over breakfast at Virginia Tech and had been a couple ever since.
The trip should have been a chance to enjoy some romantic downtime amid the busy routine of studying, as well as to appreciate the beautiful wilderness of the forest.
However, neither of them knew that it would turn into their worst nightmare — or that only one of them would come out of it alive.
A chance meeting at camp
Claudia and Rebecca parked their car at the eerily prophetically-named Dead Woman Hollow before hiking into the Michaux State Forest. Encompassing more than 85,000 acres in the South Mountain region, the area is known as being Pennsylvania’s ‘cradle of forestry’ and is dominated…
