RABBIT HEART: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Story, by Kristine S. Ervin
One week after the arrest of Bryan Kohberger — currently awaiting trial for the brutal 2022 slayings of four college students in Moscow, Idaho — law enforcement officials were seen removing bedroom furniture from the victims’ home. The media covered this development with the same ardor it had displayed since the crime first entered the news cycle, and photo documentation quickly made its way to a detail-starved public.
In the days that followed, internet sleuths and news outlets began presenting digitally enhanced versions of the images, speculating that the dark shadows that appeared to bloom beneath the mattresses’ protective covers were pools of blood, that an innocuous-looking drip sliding down the leg of a desk was evidence of carnage. If the house had already become the grim metonymy of the young people who’d died inside it, the removal of its contents functioned as a kind of autopsy, a methodical post-mortem conducted in front of an audience invested in the lurid details of strangers’ deaths.
Studies indicate that the primary consumers of true crime-related media are women, and I’ve thought a lot about why that is. The most straightforward explanation I can suggest is that it’s a forum where we can passively engage in violence while simultaneously managing our fears of victimization. But if the genre dramatizes the differences between “safe” and “endangered,” it also has the effect of reducing victims to pure abstraction. In her new book, “Rabbit Heart,” the poet and essayist Kristine S. Ervin offers a devastating account from the other side of murder, outlining in stark detail the trauma we fail to recognize when we consume tragedy as entertainment.
Ervin was 8 years old in 1986 when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from a mall parking lot in Oklahoma City. It would be several days before Engle’s partially decomposed body was discovered in a nearby oil field, and more than 20 years before a suspect was identified and convicted of the murder.
Melding true crime with memoir, Ervin reminds us of what happens when we conflate people with the transgressions committed against them — the collateral damage we inflict when we turn human beings into moral allegory. She asks, too, what it means to live in a world where even death does not spare women’s bodies from the indignity of surveillance.
Ervin writes with painful clarity about the instability of a childhood defined by public tragedy. The unanswered questions surrounding her mother’s death meant that even the most familiar of places became potential crime scenes, familiar objects indexes of loss.
Much of the book grapples with Ervin’s need to separate her mother’s identity from the brutality of her death. Part stranger and part cautionary tale, Kathy Sue is the absent epicenter of her daughter’s adolescence.
And running parallel is the author’s reckoning with how her own vulnerability was exploited. Recounting a series of psychologically and physically injurious encounters with adult men during her teenage years, Ervin untangles how her understanding of sexual agency unfolded in tandem with her growing knowledge of the crime.
She is particularly skillful at examining the conflict inherent in commodifying female sexuality — while simultaneously punishing women for being looked at. Though she had long heard innuendos that tacitly held Kathy Sue accountable for the violence committed against her, it was not until Ervin was a freshman in college that she learned the language — “dragged,” “bound,” “raped” — that had been used to describe the murder, and felt a horrifying shock of recognition. Measuring her own experiences of abuse against the facts of the case, Ervin exposes a culture that shames victims while demanding access to their trauma.
Throughout, her mother remains elusive. At one point, Ervin describes encountering the piece of clothing she most identified with Kathy Sue: a brown leather blazer that once smelled of Charlie perfume and menthol cigarettes. Slipping it on one afternoon, the author is surprised that the garment does not accommodate her at all; she has tried on her mother’s body and it does not fit.
“Rabbit Heart” is a powerful treatise on love and loss, on mothers and daughters, but it is also a warning to all of us who consume true crime. Reading about the afternoon Ervin ran across an image of Kathy Sue posted to a website called “Victims, Young, Beautiful — Murdered,” I found myself considering my own relationship to catastrophe-gazing. Looking at violence does not protect us from it, and our passivity does not prevent it from happening again.
RABBIT HEART: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Story | By Kristine S. Ervin | Counterpoint | 294 pp. | $27
