"A few months earlier, during August 1969, Norma had been traveling throughout the South with a carnival. Her job selling tickets to an animal sideshow was not exciting, but she loved the life. It was the people who attracted her to the carnival. These people were theater. They were even better than theater, these exotic vagabonds who got paid for roaming the country and performing their various acts and tricks for delighted audiences. Norma liked this life more than anything she had ever done. For once she did not feel like an outsider, as she so often had with her family. The carnival felt like the home she had been searching for and had never found. Unlike her parents, her co-workers simply accepted her for what she was and asked few questions. She had even made a couple of special friends, two women with whom she shared a motel room. Norma told Linda and Sarah how she was selling tickets one sultry summer night, the last night of the carnival’s gig in a small town outside Augusta, Georgia, when some minor trouble broke out. She and several of her co-workers were harassed by a group of rough-looking, tough-talking young men. Since it was the kind of disruption that often rippled through a traveling show, it was no cause for alarm. Because this was the carnival’s last night in town, the atmosphere was more festive than usual, and the women treated the men with good humor, even bantering with them a little bit. After the show closed that night, several hours’ work remained to be done, taking down the big tents and packing them away so the show could leave the next morning. As a result, Norma and her roommates decided to walk back to their motel rather than wait for their usual ride. It was during the walk back to the hotel with her friends, Norma recalled, that real trouble broke out. On the way back to her room, she told Weddington and Coffee, she was raped."