There's a Real-Life Murder Mystery Behind a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Bestseller
Warning: Spoilers for Where the Crawdads Sing ahead.
By now you've probably heard of Delia Owens's haunting tale of love and murder, Where the Crawdads Sing. It became the bestselling hardcover title in the first half of 2019, according to Publishers Weekly, and has already sold a staggering 1.5 million copies. It's lived on The New York Times bestseller list for the past seven months and was been included in numerous must-read roundups, including Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine book club. Witherspoon has since been tapped to produce a feature film adaption.
The novel, 70-year-old Owens's first, follows protagonist Kya Clark, who navigates life alone in a shack tucked along a coastal North Carolina marsh after her family abandons her. Kya, a nature-lover who “could find her way home by the stars, knew every feather of an eagle," is accused of murdering a rich townie named Chase Andrews. The second half of the book takes readers through her twisty trial, all leading up to a shocking, cinematic conclusion: Long after Kya’s acquitted, her longtime lover discovers that she did, in fact, kill Chase all those years ago.
As Laura Miller writes in Slate, the chilling murder mystery contains "striking echoes" to Owens's own life and is, perhaps, a bildungsroman of sorts. The author and her conservationist former husband, Mark Owens, were at the center of questions about the unsolved 1995 murder of an unidentified African poacher, according to the outlet.
Though Owens has never been implicated in the murder, the incident in question was the subject of a 18,000-word investigative feature from Jeffrey Goldberg published by The New Yorker back in 2010. The Owens family reportedly moved to Zambia to study its animals and quickly became passionate about saving elephants from poachers. They were the focal point of a 1996 ABC documentary program, "Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story," which included the apparent shooting-death of a man who was possibly a big game hunter.
Laura Miller from Slate spoke with Goldberg, who said that when Crawdads came came out, "a number of people started emailing me about this book, readers who made the connection between the Delia Owens of Crawdads and the Delia Owens of the New Yorker investigation. So I got a copy of Crawdads and I have to say I found it strange and uncomfortable to be reading the story of a Southern loner, a noble naturalist, who gets away with what is described as a righteously motivated murder in the remote wild.”
According to Slate, there are similarities between protagonist Kya and author Owens herself:
Kya’s similarities to Delia Owens, who grew up in Georgia, are manifest. Both are lonely, yet prefer the company of animals to people; the Owenses’ memoirs recount one long search for life outside the human fold. “Here’s where civilization ends,” Mark once said admiringly of North Luangwa, Goldberg reports. Kya is depicted as a misunderstood victim, cast out of society by the small-minded prejudices of her neighbors. In his closing statements, her defense attorney exhorts the jury and the town itself to examine its conscience: “We labeled and rejected her because we thought she was different. But, ladies and gentlemen, did we exclude Miss Clark because she was different, or was she different because we excluded her?”
The couple reportedly left Zambia in 1996 after the American Embassy warned them not to return to the country until the controversy was resolved, according to Goldberg. In a 2019 interview with Amazon, she describes Mark as her "former" husband, although she thanks Mark in the acknowledgements of Crawdads.
It's unclear whether the case remains open. Mark's lawyer told Slate that, "there have been no further developments in the case and noted that no charges were ever filed." The outlet also notes that they denied ever having to do anything with the murder.
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