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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 by vast slopes of oak trees.
The women made their way to a campground, enjoying the silence and isolation as they set up their tent and laid out their belongings. But Rebecca was startled when she popped to the site’s outhouse by the sudden appearance of a man who asked her for a cigarette.
Unnerved, she made her excuses to leave and hurried back to Claudia to tell her what had happened, insisting that they should move camp to find somewhere more private. The couple hastily redressed in their hiking gear and hit the trail again, leaving the stranger behind.
“See you later,” he called as they disappeared out of sight.
“I never expected to see him again,” Claudia told the Roanoke Times in a 1997 interview. “I know now that he must have known it was a loop trail and just waited for us.”
