Is “Where the Crawdads Sing” Based on a True Story? The Answer’s Complicated
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Spoilers for Where the Crawdads Sing follow.
Penned by Delia Owens and published in 2018, Where the Crawdads Sing is now a movie starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, and Harris Dickinson. Produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company, the film hits theaters on July 13 and tells the story of Kya (Edgar-Jones), a woman who lives in the North Carolina marshland and raises herself from a young age. Although she’s ostracized by the nearby town, Kya eventually grabs the attention of two different men, Tate (Smith) and Chase (Dickinson), and unwittingly creates a love triangle. When Chase is discovered dead in the marsh, Kya becomes the primary suspect.
Toward the end of the book, Kya is on trial for the murder. She is not convicted, only for the reader to find out, in the last few pages, that she did in fact kill her one-time romantic interest. The complicated nature of how Kya gets away with murder, as well as the way she’s able to create lemonade from the lemon that is her life (read: she’s abandoned by her family but manages to become a well-respected author), has readers and viewers wondering whether the story might be rooted in a little bit of truth. Turns out, the answer is a lot messier than you’d expect.
Is Where the Crawdads Sing Based on a True Story?
Put simply, Where the Crawdads Sing is not based on a true story. As far as public knowledge goes, there was never a woman who lived in a marsh and got away with killing a man who was after her. However, some of the events eerily resemble author Delia Owens’s own past.
Decades before becoming an author, Owens, along with her then-husband, Mark Owens, worked as conservationists in Africa. Together, the two primarily worked in Zambia to save elephants from poachers. They were the subject of ABC’s 1996 special Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story, which follows the couple’s tensions with the local poachers. In the episode, Mark is shown instructing scouts (a.k.a. wildlife protectors employed by the Zambian government) to shoot at poachers who enter the national park with firearms.
That might have raised only minor alarm if the episode hadn’t later shown a much more terrifying scene: an alleged poacher being shot after entering a campsite. Little is left to the imagination, barring the identities of those involved (including the suspected poacher’s). It is clear by the shooter’s uniform, however, that they are a scout.
Shortly after the episode aired, the Zambian government opened a homicide investigation, which remains open to this day.
Much of this complicated story came to light in a 2010 New Yorker article. Journalist and editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg spent months investigating the Owenses’ involvement in the shooting and uncovered that Christopher Owens, Mark’s son and Delia’s stepson, had allegedly fired two of three shots at the so-called poacher.
However, the Owenses and their supporters have denied involvement in the shooting from the very beginning, just after the ABC special aired. Years later, Goldberg interviewed Delia briefly, and she denied that Christopher was even on site when the poacher was killed. Furthermore, she claimed that the speculation that Christopher was involved only came because the cameraman for the ABC special was also named Chris, and confusion between the two names made people believe Christopher had been present.
That cameraman, Chris Everson, became a key witness in Goldberg’s reporting. Everson claimed that Mark had flown three people to the site of the shooting: Chris Everson, Christopher Owens, and a scout. Mark dropped them at the site and then left the scene. When the poacher arrived, Everson told Goldberg, Christopher fired one shot at him. Everson then began filming, capturing the scout firing the second shot and Christopher firing a third from offscreen.
But there’s another spooky element to the case: the alleged poacher’s identity has never been revealed—and the body was never recovered.
When Goldberg asked Everson how their group was transported away from the site of the killing, Everson wouldn’t answer. But Goldberg learned that Zambian police working on the case believe that Mark came back to the scene after the killing, put the poacher’s body in the cargo net of his helicopter, and then dropped it into a lagoon.
Mark denies this, of course, and the assertion that the body could have been eaten by wildlife also exists. When Goldberg interviewed Delia, she said that the reason the government thought Mark had flown the poacher’s body in the cargo net is because he actually took Christopher for a ride in it—to get a better view of the land below.
And yet, Goldberg discovered a fairly damning letter supposedly written by Mark in which he says, “Two poachers have been killed and one wounded that I know of thus far, and we are just getting warmed up.” There’s also the fact that some of the episode’s film mysteriously disappeared from the producer’s tent one day, only to reappear in the tent later.
After the killing, Christopher disappeared, too. Everson told Goldberg that he never saw Christopher again, and, according to another ABC team member who was on site, “he was gone.”
Mark and Delia eventually left Africa–they claimed that the poaching culture pushed them out. But Goldberg tells it differently: He found that the U.S. embassy instructed them to leave Zambia and stay away until the case is solved. While no formal charges have been filed against the Owenses—and Delia herself is not a suspect—they are still wanted for questioning by the government.
After they left Africa, Mark and Delia moved to a remote area of northern Idaho called Boundary County. They have continued to deny their involvement in the murder. However, Goldberg discovered that Christopher also returned to the U.S., where has since been arrested and charged with several crimes, including assault and cruelty to animals.
Are There Similarities Between This True Story and Where the Crawdads Sing?
Those who have read Where the Crawdads Sing may have picked up on some similarities already. The comparison was chronicled in a 2019 Slate piece by writer Laura Miller. There are inconsequential comparisons, like a cat in the book being named Sunday Justice—the name of an African man whom the Owenses once employed as a cook.
Then there’s the frightening: a “righteous” murder where the killer walks free because the murder was justified. As readers, we are meant to side with Kya because Chase attempted to raped her, and is therefore the villain, and also because of Kya’s status as an outsider. “Although Kya is in fact guilty, the book frames her trial as unfair, the targeting of a mistreated outsider by a community incapable of justice,” Miller writes.
As Miller explains, there are situational comparisons between the two murders, but she also draws symbolic comparisons. “After all, isn’t Chase, like that nameless poacher, a bad man, who got his just deserts even if his killing technically violates the law of the land?”
Authors, of course, are free to use their personal experiences in their writing. It’s entirely possible that Delia Owens (knowingly or not) used the mysterious circumstances of the poacher’s death as a jumping-off point for her story—regardless of whether her then-husband and stepson were involved. Whatever the case, it has made Where the Crawdads Sing a creepily compelling story, both on and off the page.
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