WHY IS THE ATLANTIC TRYING TO DEMONIZE THE 72-YEAR-OLD AUTHOR OF WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING ON THE EVE OF THE FILM VERSION’S RELEASE?
NOTE: This is an extended version of an essay that was published in Quillette back in 2022 at the time of the release of the movie Where The Crawdads Sing. I haven’t updated it — merely reinserted a lot of material that Quillette edited out — so subsequent news events — such as the release of Brittney Griner from a Russian prison — go unmentioned in it.
Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens’s 2018 novel, is, along with books such as The Da Vinci Code and Gone Girl, one of the most successful American pop fictions of the twenty-first century. According to Wikipedia, it is “one of the bestselling books of all time,” having sold roughly as many copies as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (which has been in print for 83 years), Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place (66 years), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (61 years), William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (51 years), and Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (43 years). Owens’s novel has been on the New York Times Fiction Bestsellers list for 167 weeks and is currently in first place on that list. It has sold roughly twelve million copies to date, but could well double that number before it finally drops off the bestseller list, which would put it somewhere in the vicinity of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone With the Wind, and of Daphne du Maurier’s 1939 novel Rebecca, two of the most storied titles in all of English-language popular fiction.
A film version of Where the Crawdads Sing was released on July 13, 2022, one of the few Hollywood blockbusters in history to be brought to the screen almost exclusively by women. It was produced by Reese Witherspoon (an early endorser of the novel) and her business partner Lauren Neustadter. It was directed by Olivia Newman, who has helmed only one previous feature film, the low-budget 2018 indie called First Match, which was released directly to Netflix after a single film festival appearance. Where the Crawdads Sing stars English actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, who has been hovering on the edge of breakout stardom for two years now, ever since her memorable turn as Marianne Sheridan in the 2020 TV mini-series Normal People (based on a Sally Rooney novel).
Alas, there is one discordant note among all these singing crawdads. Delia Owens, who lived in Africa for many years with her ex-husband Mark Owens and his son Christopher, is wanted for questioning by police in Zambia who are investigating their involvement in the murder of an alleged elephant poacher there in the mid 1990s. The murder took place in North Luangwa National Park, where the Owenses established an elephant-conservation operation back in 1986. This operation, known as the North Luangwa Conservation Project, was financed by a nonprofit organization created by Mark and Delia called the Owens Foundation. The murder was captured on camera by an ABC News team who were filming a profile of Mark and Delia Owens for a TV show called Turning Point. The profile, titled Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story, was broadcast in the U.S. on March 30, 1996. The segment included footage of a Zambian game scout shooting and killing a man he claimed was an elephant poacher. The broadcast was well received by American TV critics, but Zambian authorities were less pleased with it. Donors to the Owens Foundation were also unhappy with what they had seen. Mark and Delia Owens sent out a letter to concerned donors explaining that, “The ‘shoot to kill policy’ is only used by Zambian government Game Scouts in self defense. It is NOT a policy of our project…We were not involved in the incident, or in any other incident of this nature.” Another letter from the Foundation asserted that, “ABC was looking for sensationalism. They insisted on going on patrol with the game scouts alone over and over but never said what they had encountered. We were just shocked…From what we have been able to find out about the incident, the scouts felt so protective of the unarmed camera and sound people that they killed the poacher – who was, indeed, heavily armed and, according to Zambian law, subject to ‘shoot to kill.’” Despite these assertions, Zambian law-enforcement authorities suspected that the Owenses might have been involved in the killing. Mark and Delia both left the country in September of 1996. They claimed to be taking a brief vacation from Zambia, but they have never returned. In their absence the American Embassy in Lusaka argued not only that the Owenses were innocent of any crime, but that Zambian officials had seized hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Foundation equipment, essentially ending a decade’s worth of elephant conservation activities by the organization and leaving dozens of local employees jobless. Also defending the Owenses against accusations of wrongdoing was ABC News. Janice Tomlin, the Turning Point producer who first suggested filming a segment on Mark and Delia, wrote to the American Embassy in Zambia: “I have learned that the footage that was broadcast on our program of a poacher being killed has created a problem for the North Luangwa Conservation Project. I can assure you in the strongest way possible that neither Mark nor Delia Owens nor any other North Luangwa Conservation Project staff were even in the area at the time of this shooting.”
And that seemed to be that. But fourteen years later, in March of 2010, the New Yorker ran an 18,000-word story on Mark and Delia Owens and the North Luangwa Conservation Project. This piece was written by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and published under the title The Hunted. This was an in-depth expose that portrayed the Owenses in a harshly negative light. Goldberg’s piece acknowledged that elephant poaching was a huge problem in Zambia. He writes: “In 1960, the park held about seventy thousand elephants; by the nineteen-eighties, the population had been hunted almost to elimination. The Owenses estimated that by the time they arrived, in 1986, there were only five thousand elephants in the park.” He quotes Alexandra Fuller, author of the acclaimed memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and a friend of the Owenses, who told him that, by the nineteen-seventies and –eighties, “There were lorries coming out of the park with hundreds of tusks. All sorts of people were funding their wars using the ivory out of the park.” Goldberg credits the Owenses with helping to restore the elephant population of North Luangwa National Park. Goldberg also acknowledges that Zambia is rife with government corruption at both the local and national level. But he also presents a wealth of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Mark Owens, who had no actual police powers, was not averse to capturing poachers, torturing them, and even murdering them in order to save his beloved elephant population. He describes Owens training and leading a paramilitary organization comprised of “scouts” who would seek out poachers for capture, torture, and murder. The most productive scouts were rewarded with guns, knives, and other prizes.
Early on in his African sojourn, Mark Owens learned how to fly both a helicopter and a small airplane in order to scare off poachers from the air. Mark claimed that neither he nor anyone working for him ever fired an actual bullet from either a helicopter or an airplane. They scared away poachers by shooting firecrackers at them, Mark said, which the poachers mistook for gunfire. By all accounts Mark became obsessed with defeating poachers, so much so that he put his marriage in jeopardy. Goldberg several times mentions that Delia opposed Mark’s more extreme anti-poaching efforts and he notes that at one point she even separated from him because she no longer wanted to be married to a man who was so willing to risk his own life in order to combat poaching.
Mark may be the primary villain of the piece, but his son Christopher also comes in for a great deal of criticism. In fact, Goldberg writes that it may well have been Christopher who murdered the poacher on camera:
“There were three sets of gunshots in the killing shown in ‘Deadly Game.’ The first shot, the one that knocked the alleged poacher down, was fired before the camera began rolling, according to [ABC newswoman] Meredith Vieira’s narration. The second shot—the first to be heard in the video—came from a thin black man in a green uniform. The third came from offscreen, fired by an unidentified shooter. On my visits to the North Luangwa region, I had asked about the scout in the video, a man I eventually learned was named London Kawele, but I was told that he had been transferred to another part of Zambia, or that he was dead. The ABC documentary doesn’t indicate who fired the first and last sets of shots. In the absence of a witness’s testimony, there has been a persistent controversy about what actually happened on the video—who the other shooter was and, in some quarters, whether a killing happened at all.
“[Mark] Owens gives his interpretation of the shooting in his letter to the Zambian attorney general: ‘I have no direct evidence of what I am about to suggest, however, based on what I have been told by others, I believe that the following may describe what actually happened: I believe that one or more game scouts, excited by being filmed for international television, shot a poacher in front of the camera.’
“In the intervening years, supporters of the Owenses have put forth various other explanations. Mary Dykes told me that the scene might have been filmed in Zimbabwe; she also suggested that ABC News could have staged the shooting with actors. Gordon Streeb, the former U.S. Ambassador to Zambia, also said that this was possible. ‘My judgment is that they more likely staged something that was fake for visual effect, and no one was killed,’ Streeb said, adding that ABC ‘could have been in Zimbabwe.’ Streeb said he found the film suspicious because ‘when you hear the gunshot go off, the body twitches, but you don’t see blood spattering. Beyond that gunshot, there’s no evidence.’”
But, wrote Goldberg, Chris Everson, the ABC cameraman who shot the footage, had a different explanation of the killing:
“According to Chris Everson, though, the documentary did not present the whole truth. I reached him early this year at the winery he owns with his wife in the Cape Province of South Africa. (Everson still works as a cameraman, mainly for ‘60 Minutes.’) For the first time, he spoke of what he saw. It was not the Zambian scout, he told me, who fired the first shot or the last shots: it was Christopher Owens, Mark Owens’s son.
“‘It’s a very complicated story, it was a very emotional thing, it was a very bad thing,’ Everson said. ‘It’s something that never should have happened.’ Christopher Owens, who was twenty-five years old at the time of the incident, was spending the summer with his father and stepmother at Marula-Puku. On the day of the shooting, Everson said, Mark Owens flew him, along with Christopher and the scout, London Kawele, to a remote location within the park. It was an unusual group; scouts rarely went on patrol without at least three other scouts.
“According to Everson, Mark Owens left the three men in the park and returned to his headquarters. They quickly came across an abandoned camp and waited in ambush. When a suspected poacher entered the camp, Christopher Owens opened fire. ‘I don’t know what was going on in Chris’s mind,’ Everson said. ‘He had a rush of blood to the head. I don’t know why he shot him in the first place. I don’t.’
“Everson began filming after Christopher fired the first shot, the one that felled the man Meredith Vieira described as a ‘trespasser.’ Then the scout fired at the man, who was now on the ground; this is the first shot heard in ‘Deadly Game.’ Everson said he continued filming as Christopher, who was standing off camera, fired the three final shots at the man’s body. ‘I should never have allowed it to happen,’ Everson said.
“I asked if he had considered alerting the police in Lusaka that he had witnessed a killing by an American visitor to Zambia. He said, ‘That was way above my pay scale. I was working for ABC. It wasn’t my business to do that.’ Everson would not say how he got back to camp after the shooting, but he said that he did not see Christopher Owens again.”
One theory put forward by people who have studied the crime holds that Christopher Owens committed the murder and then, later that evening, Mark took the body up in his helicopter and then dropped it into a lagoon, where it would have quickly been consumed by crocodiles and other animals. This theory seems plausible because, after returning to the United States and his home state of Maine, Christopher’s behavior became frequently violent. Goldberg writes:
“Christopher Owens has led a tumultuous life since he left Zambia. He has been arrested numerous times, and in 2001 he was convicted for misdemeanor assault after attacking a man in a Portland bar. He has since pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of assault and terrorizing…In December, 2003, Christopher was living in the town of Palmyra. According to a neighbor, Christopher Silva, Owens was hunting in the woods near his home when he shot and killed one of Silva’s dogs and injured another. ‘One of the dogs came out of the woods with one of his legs missing, and so I ran out and looked for the other one,’ Silva told me. ‘I found the body hidden under some leaves.' The police searched Owens’s house soon after, and found a rifle with a scope attached. In a statement for the police, Owens wrote that he believed the dogs were actually coyotes.’”
Christopher Owens is a martial artist and several of the game scouts who worked for the Owenses have said that he beat them at times while acting as their overseer. But, as Goldberg notes, some of these accusations have since been retracted.
At any rate, it must be said that, in his New Yorker piece, Goldberg made a pretty damning case against both Mark and Christopher Owens. What he didn’t do, however, is implicate Delia in any wrongdoing. He seems to think that, if Mark and Christopher were involved in the killing of elephant poachers, Delia must have known about it, which, in the U.S. at least, would make her an accessory of sorts. But if Delia, who by Goldberg’s own account was far away when the poacher was killed, is an accessory, then surely Christopher Everson must be even more of an accessory. He witnessed the murder, captured it on film, and then never reported it to the authorities.
In Goldberg’s New Yorker piece, the name Mark is mentioned 138 times (Mark Owens is occasionally referred to only as “Owens,” but because three people in the story share that last name, Goldberg made an effort to use first names). The name Delia is mentioned 55 times. And Christopher is mentioned 42 times. One reason Delia is mentioned so much is that Goldberg actually ambushed her at the couple’s ranch home in Idaho one snowy winter day in 2010. He writes:
“One day this winter, I made a visit to their ranch. The Owenses had long declined to speak with me. It was snowing when I arrived, and the clouds had settled on the slopes of the mountains behind their log cabin. As I pulled up their drive, I saw Delia Owens emerging from a barn on the property. She was feeding hay to a herd of deer that had gathered near their cabin.
“Delia became agitated when I introduced myself. ‘I’m going to have a stroke right now. I’m going to have a heart attack,’ she said. ‘How in the hell did you find us?’ She composed herself, and asked me what I wanted to know, and I told her I hoped to talk about the ABC video. ‘By the time they came, the poaching was over,’ she said. ‘They were waiting for some action. We told them poaching was over. They just wanted something sensational.’
“I asked Delia about the accusations that her stepson had shot the man in North Luangwa. ‘Chris wasn’t there,’ she said. ‘We don’t even know where that event took place. It was horrible, a person being shot like that. We think people say Chris did this because they got confused, because the cameraman was named Chris, too,’ she said. ‘We don’t know anything about that trip.’ (Donald Zachary later wrote to me that Christopher Owens denied being involved in the shooting.) I told her that I had heard frequently in the valley that Mark carried poachers in the cargo net underneath his helicopter. She laughed and said that the people around the park were confused because Mark once gave Christopher a ride in the cargo net. ‘I know how the rumors about dropping poachers in the river got started. Mark put Chris in a harness under the helicopter and gave him a tour of the valley. Imagine that view! I was going to do it, but I got too scared. So people saw Chris in the harness and they assumed it was a poacher.’
“I asked Delia if her husband was available to speak to me. She waved to the mountains behind us and said, “He’s up there.’ She added, ‘He’s going to be very angry you’re trespassing.’ She said that she and her husband would not allow me to talk to Chris Owens, who now lives in Maine. ‘He might say something that you could misinterpret,’ she said. ‘He’s trying to get his life together. Just leave him alone. You have something to ask him, ask us.’ She told me, ‘Chris came in the summers to help out. He was involved with the scouts. He was involved in their training in various aspects.’ She would not elaborate further.
“As we talked, Delia again grew upset, and she walked off toward the deer, who were feeding a few yards away. She pointed out a doe to me. ‘This one is named High Cheeks,’ she said. The snow was coming down harder, and she looked back at the mountains. She told me Mark would be back soon. ‘He’s going to be upset that you came onto the property.’
“She said that she and Mark had no knowledge of poachers being killed. ‘We don’t know anything about it,’ she said. ‘The only thing Mark ever did was throw firecrackers out of his plane, but just to scare poachers, not to hurt anyone.’”
Goldberg didn’t hang around long enough to talk to Mark. But his New Yorker piece makes it clear that he thinks Mark, and probably Christopher, were involved in the killing of the poacher on ABC News. Delia, who wasn’t the author of a bestselling novel at the time, is never directly implicated in the murder.
On July 11, 2022, a few days before the film version of Crawdads was released, Goldberg, now the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, wrote another article about the Owenses. This one ran in the Atlantic and was titled “Where the Crawdads Sing Author Wanted for Questioning in Murder.” A less ambitious piece than the one he wrote twelve years ago, this one ran to only about 2,500 words and seemed intended only to try to diminish enthusiasm for the film. Goldberg’s Atlantic piece rehashes the highlights of his New Yorker piece. But this time around the name Mark appears 24 times, while the name Delia appears 21 times. Goldberg seems to have decided that the couple now deserve equal billing for the murder of the alleged poacher (whose body has never been found and whose identity remains unknown). What changed in the past twelve years? Well, Delia Owens wrote one of the bestselling novels of all time. She is currently enjoying a success that few American authors have ever known. Might this rankle Mr. Goldberg? Possibly. Back in 2019, during a question-and-answer session about contemporary journalism and why all the good long-form magazine articles seem to get assigned only to white males, Goldberg responded, “It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males.” Of course he was quickly lambasted for this and soon began backtracking, claiming that he misspoke, but it sure seems as if Goldberg doesn’t hold female (or nonwhite) writers in the same high esteem as white males. In his recent Atlantic article, he writes:
“Zambian authorities today remain interested in bringing charges for the 1995 televised killing. On a visit last month to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, I spoke with several officials who expressed both displeasure and wry amusement about Delia Owens’s recent publishing and cinematic success. The country’s director of public prosecutions, Lillian Shawa-Siyuni, confirmed what officials at the Criminal Investigation Department of the Zambian national police told me: Mark, Delia, and Christopher Owens are still wanted for questioning related to the killing of the alleged poacher, as well as other possible criminal activities in North Luangwa. ‘There is no statute of limitations on murder in Zambia,’ Siyuni said. ‘They are all wanted for questioning in this case, including Delia Owens.’”
Goldberg makes it sound as if the Owenses are hiding from the law. But, in America, at least, no one is required to talk to the police. All citizens have a constitutional right to remain silent. If Zambian law also doesn’t force anyone to speak to the police, then the Owenses are perfectly within their rights to refuse to do so. And if Zambian law requires cooperation with the police, then it is understandable why the Owenses might not want to return to the country. How exactly do the Zambian police plan to elicit answers from the Owenses? Will they be tortured or jailed until they sign a confession? Goldberg also doesn’t mention that Delia has commented several times on the accusations, and she has denied that any of the Owenses were involved in the killing. In fact, she made these denials to Goldberg himself. What’s more, in his 2010 essay for the New Yorker, Goldberg noted that Mark Owens sent a letter to the Zambian attorney general explaining how he thought the murder might have gone down. But in his recent article he makes no mention of that, leaving the impression that the Owenses have completely stonewalled the Zambian authorities.
Likewise, Goldberg’s 2010 story emphasized that Biemba Musole, the lead Zambian police detective on the case, was just as eager to speak to the ABC News crew as he was to speak to the Owenses.
Musole said he wanted to travel to the United States to interview the Owenses, as well as members of the ABC crew, but that the government could not afford to pay for the trip. He remains frustrated by ABC’s decision not to report the killing. “The ABC News show is an accessory to murder, either after the fact or during the committing of this murder,” Musole said. “The cameraman and reporter are accomplices to this. The docket is still open on this case. Why won’t the cameraman come in and tell us what he saw and show us his film?”
And yet, in his more recent article, Goldberg made it sound as if it were only the Owenses that the Zambian investigators wanted to talk to.
In any case, if the Zambian authorities had enough evidence to arrest any of the Owenses they likely would have done so some time in the last twenty-six years. The U.S. and Zambia have no extradition treaty, so Zambia couldn’t compel authorities in the U.S. to hand over the Owenses for trial under any circumstances. Even so, if the Zambians thought they had enough evidence to do so, they could have tried the Owenses in absentia in an effort to embarrass the U.S. government for shielding murders. One suspects that they haven’t done so because a trial requires evidence, and it appears that hard evidence of the guilt of Mark and Christopher Owens is lacking. As for Delia, no one seems to seriously believe she was directly involved in the shooting of the alleged poacher. The only reason she gets mentioned so often is because she is now rich and famous. But she divorced Mark years before her book was published. Christopher was raised by his birth mother. Whatever his personal problems may be, it seems unfair to blame his stepmother for them. Delia is no longer related to either Mark or Christopher by blood or marriage. But journalists like Jeffrey Goldberg seem determined to drag her into the mud simply for insisting on her Constitutional right not to talk to the police. Nowadays he acts as though her refusal to return to Zambia is a sign of her guilt. But in his 2010 essay he noted that:
“The American Embassy warned the Owenses not to enter Zambia until the controversy was resolved. In a consular memorandum of December 3, 1996, an official wrote that the Owenses ‘had better have ironclad assurances that they have been exonerated and that all arrangements are in place for their uneventful return before they consider such a move.’ [U.S. Ambassador to Zambia Roland] Kuchel told me that Zambia’s justice system was thoroughly corrupt, and he feared that if Mark Owens were held in a Zambian jail, he would be raped and infected with H.I.V.” [Note that the Ambassador doesn’t even consider the possibility that Delia could be jailed.]
In the literary world of Delia Owens, the crawdads may very well sing, but in America, no one is required to sing to the police, a prosecutor, a judge, or a jury. Delia Owen has chosen to exercise her right to silence. Goldberg seems to have a problem with that. Curiously, for many years now, the ABC News journalists and cameramen and sound-equipment operators have refused to tell Zambian investigators about what they captured on film back in 1995. The face of the killer in the footage they captured was pixilated so that he couldn’t be identified. The raw, unedited footage of the killing might well answer all of the questions that the Zambian officials have about the incident. But Goldberg is much harsher in his treatment of Delia Owens than of the ABC News employees who actually witnessed the killing and covered it up. He goes so far as to suggest that Delia’s novel, in which the main character does indeed commit a murder, is some sort of stealth confession on Delia’s part. Could it be that he finds it much easier to hector a 72-year-old woman from outside the journalistic mainstream, a woman who lives in isolation in rural Idaho, rather than to put heat upon ABC News, a pillar of the elite east coast journalistic establishment and no doubt filled with people that Goldberg probably bumps into at industry bashes and awards ceremonies? Just asking.
One of the weirdest things about the Atlantic’s coverage of Delia Owens is how sharply it differs from the treatment the magazine has afforded American basketball player Brittney Griner, who has been ensnared in Russia’s corrupt penal system since February 15, when authorities at the Moscow airport discovered vape cartridges in her luggage. On March 12, the Atlantic published an article by Jemele Hill titled “Brittney Griner’s Plight Says More About America Than Russia.” Hill noted that “Griner’s plight is especially acute because she’s a Black queer woman being held by authorities in a country that is hostile toward LGBTQ people…Griner’s case has become international news, and she could be in serious trouble if the Russian government decides to use her as a geopolitical pawn.”
On July 12, Atlantic writer David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, used his Twitter account to call attention to an article by Julia Ioffe called “The Trials of Brittney Griner,” in which Ioffe points out that, “For all its flaws…the American legal system looks like a wellspring of pure and unadulterated justice compared to its Russian counterpart.” She goes on to point out that once enmeshed in the Russian legal system, accused persons are almost never exonerated. On that same date, July 12, Frum twice linked his followers to Goldberg’s story about Delia Owens in the Atlantic. Frum wrote: “Amazing story by @JeffreyGoldberg. Would you like a side serving of murder and cover-up with your best-selling inspirational novel?”
What exactly do the Atlantic’s staff members think will happen to Delia Owens if she should return to Zambia? The American ambassador there has made it clear that her husband is likely to die in jail if he returns. Delia’s best hope, if she returns to Zambia, is to end up merely jailed, like Griner. If, by some diplomatic effort, the Biden Administration manages to bring Griner home from Russia in the next few weeks, what do you think would happen if, a year from now, the Russian prosecutors asked her to return to Moscow to answer a few more questions under oath? Do you think that Goldberg, Hill, and Frum will be arguing that she has a moral obligation to return and subject herself to an inquisition by a corrupt government? Hill points out that Griner is a “Black queer woman” in order to emphasize how vulnerable she must feel in a country that is mostly white, run by men, and where homosexuality is illegal. Of course, Griner is also a professional athlete, in amazing physical condition, and has a better chance of surviving years of imprisonment than does Delia Owens, who turns 73 this year, and has never been in the kind of physical condition a professional basketball player must maintain to remain at the top of her game. Owens would find herself, a wealthy white woman, in a poor African country where corruption is rampant. It seems unlikely she’d be allowed to walk out unscathed after answering a few questions. Would David Frum willingly travel to Afghanistan or Iraq to stand trial for his part in the Bush Administration’s wars on those countries?
Meanwhile, we have conservative outlets treating Griner in the same way that liberal ones are treating Delia Owens. The editorial page of the Washington Free Beacon recently opined:
“It's a sad story, but Griner is hardly the political prisoner that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have made her out to be. And under no circumstances should the Democratic Party's identity politics allow a black lesbian millionaire athlete who broke the law in a foreign country to receive preferential treatment—as she already is receiving—over genuinely innocent hostages long left to rot in foreign prisons. Even if one were to leave aside the fact, which we simply cannot, that Griner clamored for the removal of the national anthem from WNBA games.”
Like so many other issues these days, the plights of both Brittney Griner and Delia Owens have become a test of tribal loyalty.
Curiously, long before Goldberg got to it, the story of Delia Owens’s hurried departure from Zambia seems to have partially inspired a novel written by Dorothy Gilman, a writer best known for her series of crime novels about amateur sleuth Mrs. Polifax. Gilman’s 1999 novel, Thale’s Folly, features a character named Emily L’Hommedieu. She lives in relative isolation, part of a quartet of unrelated oddballs who dwell in a rundown country farmhouse located in rural western Massachusetts. Late in the novel we learn that Miss L’Hommedieu once served as a missionary in Northern Rhodesia, which is what Zambia was called until it gained its independence from Great Britain in 1964. One night, in 1946, a racist troublemaker from Britain, a man named Basil Hopkins French, is found murdered in the bush. Witnesses had seen him physically abusing Miss L’Hommedieu and some of the natives in her ministry on several occasions. The local authorities are eager to question Miss L’Hommedieu about the murder. But before they can get to her, she vanishes from Africa and returns to the U.S., where her exact whereabouts cannot be determined. An official police inquiry determines that, “It has proven impossible, from the material available, for any firm conclusion to be formed as to who was responsible for the murder of Basil Hopkins French…” Thus the case remains open and unsolved, but the authorities would dearly love for Miss L’Hommedieu to return to Africa and tell them what she knows of French’s murder. Miss L’Hommedieu is portrayed as a sympathetic character and the reader is left to assume that, if she was involved in French’s murder, he richly deserved to be killed. The book was published about three years after ABC News aired its story about the Owenses. It seems likely to me that Dorothy Gilman had already written a draft of Thale’s Folly before the story was broadcast. The revelations about Miss L’Hommedieu’s time in Africa don’t appear until the very end of the novel and seem sort of tacked on as an afterthought. Perhaps Gilman wasn’t entirely happy with her denouement and decided to tag on a fictional episode inspired by what she saw in the ABC News story about Mark and Delia Owens. All this, of course, is purely speculative on my part, but I can’t help believing that the true story inspired the fictional one.