A Review of Kristine Ervin’s Rabbit Heart 

I entered West Chester University’s historic library in Pennsylvania, a room packed with over 100 guests, standing room only. Former and current students, friends from as far away as Greece, and probably other strangers like me stood along the intricate wood paneled walls in anticipation of hearing Dr. Kristine Ervin read an excerpt from her debut memoir, Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story. The book is a heart-wrenching search for identity which also documents her mother’s abduction from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and subsequent murder, and the decades long cold case that followed.

Weeks earlier, I found Rabbit Heart on an online used bookstore listed, “Only 1 left” and paid nearly full price for what I’d soon learn was an advanced readers copy, which, understanding the ethical flaws in my hastened purchase, would hinder me from asking her to sign it, but didn’t stop me from devouring the book. 

I lost my own mother to murder when I was five and have been probing for answers and my own identity outside of those events for over 35 years. I never expected to find myself so specifically represented in memoir. As a reader, I’m always looking for memoirs with families like mine, narrated by a woman who casts a glimmer of hope even amidst her own ruin, to see how she strings words together to accurately express this type of desperation and longing for answers. I had never met Kristine but knew I wanted to support her and this memoir in any way that I could.

While reading Rabbit Heart in my neighborhood restaurant, a red-haired waitress gave me a funny look as she set a nearby table, circling back to get a closer look at the rabbit’s face on the cover. 

“Where did you get that? It’s not out yet,” she asked. I assumed from the book that the author still lived in Oklahoma, but the waitress relayed that not only was Kristine teaching at West Chester University, but she was Kristine’s mentee. Since West Chester is a little over an hour from my home in York, Pennsylvania, I couldn’t miss the book release party on March 26th, 2024. 

After the book event, Kristine and I emailed back and forth a discussion of her book, and how we as daughters write about our mothers, their murders, and our own lives. 

The first thing I wanted to ask Kristine about was her overall environment in Oklahoma City, and more detail about the community she grew up in. Like Kristine, my family also remained in the same town after my mother’s murder. We lived in Dundalk, a suburb in Baltimore County, Maryland, where it seemed like people stopped and stared when my family entered a room. My father was always a prime suspect, so I wasn’t entirely dismayed by the community’s reaction but I’ve long wondered about the implications of that decision: raising children where the trauma doesn’t have a chance to age, or breaking a child’s familiarity and routine to start fresh. I wanted to know more about what Kristine’s experience was of staying in the same town, the same house. Did the community give her family space? Were they supportive?

Kristine: Not long after my mother’s death, my father consulted with a psychologist who told him that for adults, change is the best response to trauma – change houses, change jobs, change where you live – but for children, stability is best.So my father made the decision to stay, and I am grateful to him for it. 

I grew up feeling held and supported by our house and the objects within it: my mother’s needlepoints, my mother’s piano, the stairs I would sit on while talking on the phone or later while contemplating how to tell my father that I needed to go to the store for tampons. And the community was supportive rather than invasive. Women neighbors, friends of my mom’s, continued to welcome me into their homes, offering me gumballs before school, giving me old dresses to play dress-up in. Teachers and staff at my elementary school were incredible, holding meetings at the end of each spring to determine which teacher would be best for me in the fall, and taking me to their homes after school to do arts and crafts (my mother loved arts and crafts). I would not have felt this love and support, had we moved away from our home.

Though I wouldn’t register it until I was older, the broader community of Oklahoma City, not just our small suburb, also supported us, by donating to the reward fund, by remembering my mother’s story, by keeping their distance. While the media was present in the immediate days and weeks after my mother’s abduction, we didn’t experience an invasion of privacy for long. I imagine the experience would be quite different now, with social media and the 24-hour national news cycle. I’m so glad I didn’t experience this trauma with the technology we have available today.

I also would like to note that the support from the community and from law enforcement was – and is – connected to our positionality, that we received the attention and broader community support because we were a white, middle-class family and my mother was stopping by a shopping mall after work to exchange a birthday gift. This created the narrative that my mother was “a truly innocent victim” (how a detective described her), and I very much doubt we would have received the support had my mother been a woman of color or had the mall not been in a middle-class neighborhood. 

People have become more familiar with the term Missing White Woman Syndrome: the disproportionate media and community attention given to what society deems to be attractive, young, upper-middle class, white women. 

I’ve personally struggled with this concept and found myself coming back to it a few times in Rabbit Heart, looking for answers through the comparison of my own childhood surroundings to Kristine’s. My mother was young and white, but her murder did not receive national attention immediately after or in the years since. The past 35 years have been an uphill battle for me to pressure the media to cover the story or to get evidence tested by the police. I wondered if there was something about the location–we were in Baltimore, Kristine was in Oklahoma City. Or something about my mother? 

Did she not have enough education? Not pretty enough? Not innocent enough? Not financially stable enough? 

Media can hurt active cases, but the benefit of the coverage applying pressure on the community and investigators to provide answers prevails. I was curious if Kristine’s research and writing had revealed an equitable way to apply media coverage or if that was even achievable. 

I met a poet in graduate school at NYU who had worked for an Oklahoma news channel at the time of my mother’s death, and I asked him why my mother’s story had traction back then, at least at the state level. He answered that it was because it was a “sexy crime,” one that didn’t happen often, especially in Oklahoma and especially against a white woman. 

For the public and for women specifically, there was something unsettling about my mother’s abduction, how it proved the narrative that it’s unsafe to be alone, to stop by a mall at dusk. I think you’re right that our cities play a factor in the coverage (I can tell you, for example, that an Oklahoman will stereotype Baltimore as being full of crime, simply because it’s an east coast city), but I also think the type of crime makes a difference too, unfortunately. 

Is equality achievable? I don’t think so. Because media coverage is tied to systems of oppression, to the bodies that are valued and the bodies that are not. I think there can be movement (I’m not entirely cynical), and I think stories like yours, voices like yours, can help move us in a more equitable direction, but a full dismantling seems impossible to me. 

Then, Kristine tells me, “If there is anything I can do to help you apply pressure – perhaps we hold an event in Baltimore and talk openly about these questions and issues and harms? – please let me know. Your mother’s life should be valued.” Even though Kristine is busy teaching and talking about her book, nearly every time I’ve reached out to her, she asks me what she can do for me. This not only feels true of her character, but of a writer who knows what I am experiencing and working on. 

Memorists struggle with where a story ends, since our lives will keep going. My family is closer than ever to answers but I wonder if a fulfilling memoir is achievable if my mother’s murderer is never found. Where is the end of my story without that? In an interview for Hippocampus, Kristine mentioned how the arrest and trial of her mother’s murderers shaped the ending of her book and created a better narrative arc. I wanted to know how she previously planned to end it without the case closure. Can an unsolved murder memoir still successfully stand on its own without that justice? Does a memoir need a satisfying ending, tied with a bow?  

Rabbit Heart was originally a collection of essays centered on grief and on the body, meditating on the differences between the sudden and brutal death of my mother and the slow deterioration of my father’s body through aging, on the violence I experienced to my own body and on how my body held on to that violence. In that version, the collection ended with a chapter about writing and storytelling, about how writing can be cathartic but also how it can harm others. I didn’t want, have never wanted, a tidy ending and a narrative arc because my experience with grief, especially when connected to violence, is that there is no closure, and an ending with a bow suggests as such. 

But then we received the DNA match and the resolution to the case (quite unusual for a cold case of 23 years), and suddenly I had an arc in my own experience that I needed to represent authentically in the memoir — it is true that I experienced an unrelenting form of grief for 25 years and that the case was solved and that I received a sliver of peace through that resolution, knowing that other women would be saved. 

It is also true that I don’t have closure. I hope that Rabbit Heart shows that even with a resolution to the case, trauma and grief will still live in the body and will continue its presence in different ways. I worry that this message will be lost, because of the arc I created and how as readers and consumers of narratives, we tie that bow off, even when a text is asking us not to.

I think it’s deeply problematic that so many narratives, including those in memoir, offer tidy resolutions and don’t ask readers to reckon with inconsolability, with questions that are never answered. I want more memoirs that ask us to stay in a place of confusion or turmoil or unknowing, so as not to create the impression that the only way to define success (personal, commercial, professional, etc.) is through a satisfying ending that shows healing, that there are ways to exist, painfully, beautifully, in the midst of irresolution. Can an unsolved murder memoir be successful? I hope so. We need those stories to have a fuller understanding of human experiences and to allow other victims to feel seen and understood.

Unrelenting is a great word to describe that grief. I deeply felt this sentiment in Rabbit Heart, that answers were found, but it doesn’t mean all is well, which reinforced my trust in Kristine as the narrator. Towards the end, I found myself nodding and nodding and nodding and stopping on her line: “…how naïve we were then, believing in resolutions.”  She hints that the grief and the trauma do not end with the conviction, or even the sentencing. I’m nowhere near a conviction in my own story, but I already know in my bones it won’t be the magic bullet that rights all the wrongs. 

I saw it again in the scene with Kristine’s husband Jerry, playfully placing the kitchen knife on her arm. Kristine has to excuse herself to the bathroom where she subsequently breaks down “There are just too many knives around us,” she writes. 

Her sensitivity is palpably obvious to the reader, but I also know first-hand how the everyday world lacks that degree of context that Kristine and I share, daughters who have lost mothers to that magnitude of violence. I’m thrown sideways if I enter someone’s kitchen and find a knife block on the counter. I become obsessed with warning them of the danger, convincing them to hide them away in a drawer, not making them so accessible. Because in my reality, it is possible for someone to break into your home and use your own kitchen knives against you. I’ve learned to reign it in a bit, remembering that my experiences are not widely universal. 

And yet, even though Jerry doesn’t understand fully, I love the balance that he lends the story. He isn’t Kristine’s savior, but he shows that while men can violate women in the vilest ways imaginable, there are also kind men. Kristine’s ability to trust him shows a lot of growth on her part. In memoir, we are writing from our own experience, but many of us think we shouldn’t discount our family’s feelings on how they are portrayed. What has Jerry’s reaction been to his portrayal in Rabbit Heart?

Those of us who have experienced trauma have the objects and the gestures and the language that still reverberate within us, often in painful, brutal, and sometimes terrifying ways.

Jerry struggled with the scene you mentioned, where he taps the chef’s knife against my arm, because he never knew, until reading Rabbit Heart, that I reacted the way I did, that I went to the bathroom and cried. I never told him how it affected me because I knew the action was innocent and playful. To learn, through a person’s writing, that you’ve unintentionally hurt them is difficult, even destabilizing, and it’s one of the reasons why memoir carries risks that other genres do not or do to a lesser degree. 

It was also hard for Jerry to read because it’s one of the few moments where he is represented as not being attuned to my experience and my pain, when he, as a deeply empathetic and deeply good person, so often is. It’s a necessary moment in the memoir though, because it not only shows the reverberations of violence but also that he isn’t a perfect character, a perfect husband. 

After reading the scene, he kept saying that he should have known better, that he couldn’t believe he would tap my arm with a knife, after the trial, and I explained that the compression in the memoir, all the moments I had to exclude to achieve the shape of the story, makes it seem like he tapped my arm not long after we learned the cause of death when in reality it was years later, in a moment when we were having fun in the kitchen and removed from experience of the trial, a moment neither of us knew would hold a painful connection to the trauma. For years, I’ve taught classes on the ethics and complications of writing memoir, but Jerry’s reaction, pained and valid, was the first time I’ve encountered the real and thorny effects in a personal way. 

I’m always interested in hearing memoirists chronicle the research they did for the book, especially in regards to court cases and genealogy. I know from my own research that we face hurdles, dead ends, and sometimes, rabbit holes. After my mother’s murder, my father told me and my sisters we were part of the dead parent club. He’d said when he was three, he lost his own father to an adverse reaction to a vaccination. My father was never one to tell the truth about any family story, so when I began investigating my mother’s case, I needed to corroborate everything he’d told me with autopsies and death certificates. I learned his father died in his early twenties from complications of alcoholism, a plague that has haunted nearly every corner of my family tree. It gave me a different perspective on why my father had quit drinking shortly after my mother’s murder, which I had initially understood to be a token of severe regret or remorse for actions he may have done while under the influence.  What were the hurdles Kristine faced? What was the most surprising thing she learned? 

I didn’t do as much research as I could have against the man convicted of my mother’s murder because I needed to keep my distance from those acts of violence and from him, as much as I could anyway. I read the newspaper articles about my mother’s murder and about Terry Welch’s death, since her murder led to the DNA match in my mother’s case. I know other memoirists have done deep-dives into case materials, even when those cases involve family members and loved ones, but learning the details of my mother’s murder through newspaper articles and meetings with law enforcement was already brutal enough. I don’t think examining the photos of her body or seeing her bloody clothing that was recovered from her car or reading through the court case proceedings when her murderer was convicted of aggravated assault and battery against Terry Welch would have led to any place other than more pain. This was an understanding I arrived at only after we learned the specific cause of death, 24 years after my mother’s murder.

What was interesting and surprising to me was what I ultimately did with the court transcripts in my mother’s case. In an earlier draft of the memoir, I included a lot more courtroom testimony, especially from [one of the murderer’s] sister, who testified about her brother’s rage but also about the abuse he faced at the hands of their mother. I wanted her testimony to be in the memoir because her descriptions humanized Eckardt in a way that I could not do. I always grappled with the fact that I was representing Eckardt as a perpetrator and a monster. As a writer, I believe it’s problematic to reduce a person this way, but as a daughter of a murdered woman, I couldn’t do the research into and about her killer to learn who he was as a fuller human being. I just wasn’t willing to let myself get closer to him, after all the pain I had already experienced. And doing so would also feel like a betrayal against my mother. 

Though the testimony is a matter of public record and though it would have helped to complexify a central person to the story, I ended up deleting all the pages of her testimony, because I felt like it wasn’t my story to tell. It is hers. I remember how pained she was on the witness stand, acknowledging his anger and his actions while having empathy for the brother she loved, and I didn’t feel it was ethical for me to make use of that turmoil for the purpose of my memoir, even if it’s to present her brother in a fuller light.

I felt some level of kismet when Kristine mention turning to James Ellroy’s My Dark Places. That was the first book I read when I thought I might be able to tell my mother’s story. It was the book I read when I started learning how to put my experiences into words, when my obsession with my own mother’s murder took over my life. It’s the book I still mull over, how it made me feel less alone and alienated in my experience of being a child when my mother was murdered, and I suppose, what ultimately became an obsession with reading other books like it, including Rabbit Heart. There aren’t that many memoirs about this particular experience: what it’s like to be a child and lose your mother to violence. Kristine and I talked about how and why she shied away from calling Rabbit Heart a “True Crime Memoir,” and if her feelings have changed since the book’s publication. 

It’s interesting because you and I had different experiences with My Dark Places, though this wouldn’t be clear through the details I provide in Rabbit Heart. Perhaps if I had read Ellroy when I was younger, I might have felt more understood and seen, but when I read it during my PhD program, I felt cheated by his lack of reflection and greatly disturbed by his love of — and perpetuation of — violence against women. I think Ellroy is one reason why I haven’t engaged much in true crime narratives; another reason is that I don’t have the stomach for consuming much violence anymore, not after going through the judicial process and learning more about my mother’s death, even when a book does significant work to examine violence in our culture, like Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts or Alex Marzano-Lesnevitch’s The Fact of a Body. 

I haven’t thought of Rabbit Heart as true crime, though it does track movements in my mother’s case. I think of it as a memoir, hopefully a feminist one, about a specific type of grief — one that was unrelenting and spanned 25 years of learning horrific details — about motherlessness, about gendered violence. The details about my mother’s murder are present in service of these meanings, as opposed to the book’s focus being on the case itself. If I were to model Rabbit Heart after Ellroy, for example, I would have gone into detail about the 200+ suspects they had in the case, the interrogations and testimonies and evidence. 

I don’t want to participate in violence as entertainment, as mystery, as something that entices us, though I worry I’ve done exactly that with Rabbit Heart, despite my attempts not to. But if my book can do some work of interrogating violence and the genre of true crime from within the genre, then I’m more comfortable with its being categorized and shelved this way and will feel like I’ve accomplished something I set out to do. 

I agree that some of Ellroy’s craft choices, and the sensationalizing his mother’s murder didn’t ethically age well, and I’d venture to say as a daughter of a murdered mother, I  was probably not his intended target audience, though oddly enough, it was the first time I had felt truly seen in a memoir–that persistent despair.

That persistent despair, that persistent longing – you and I and Ellroy, and I suspect a great many others, have this in common, and Ellroy’s book, at the time I first read it, made me understand that the likelihood that we’d receive a resolution in the case was extremely low. That an overwhelming number of murders will never be solved.

From reading Kristine’s book, I would have never known there were 200+ suspects in her mother’s case– a number that sounds frighteningly tedious. Having done research on cold cases, this is actually the reality though: so many suspects and without any real evidence on the suspects. 

I didn’t learn about the number of suspects until we were in meetings with the detectives and attorneys when charges were going to be filed against Eckardt. Up until that point, I thought there had been only two suspects. I’m certain that if I asked to see the case files I would be astounded by the magnitude of the case, by all the information and misinformation, by all the work that detectives and forensic specialists put in, over the years. 

In the memoir, Kristine also explores the tangle of emotional knots that is Lee, an older neighbor who took advantage of her innocence, her predicament, her. So many women know a Lee. I love that Kristine wrote that thread with layers and conflicting attributes that allows such easy relatability. Again, memoir is faced with other people in the story. Had his family or friends reached out after the book’s publication?  

No one who was close to Lee has reached out, and so far, I am grateful for this. Over the years, I quarantined my life in Oklahoma, to the extent that I could. I had limited contact with people from my youth, likely as a way to protect myself from engaging, and being further harmed by, the experiences of my past. When Lee’s sister said to me, years after my relationship with him, “We teased Lee about robbing the cradle” or his mother said, “Lee always loved you,” it unsettled me because they don’t seem to be aware of how deeply problematic and abusive that relationship was. Responses like these carry the risk of making me doubt my own experience and what my body knows, and after claiming my experience, I want to stay here, in this place of knowing and trusting.

I had an extremely difficult time reading the violence against Kristine’s body. I had to read tiny snippets at a time, put the book down, and focus on something else. Kristine took care in writing and reporting on what happened to her mother’s body, and made it clear she did not want to glorify violence on women. Yet in some ways, I felt she had abandoned her own. She claimed an accountability for the violations made against her body that felt honest and genuine but not her own cross to bear. This made it even more difficult to read, even though the overall pacing, first-person narrative, and layering of her mother’s murder made it incredibly powerful. Kristine told me that when she was trying to find a publisher, some editors had difficulty with some of the scenes. Did she feel pressure to change or omit portions to make it more palatable to them or did she stand firm in what she wrote? 

In an early draft of the most difficult section to write and to get right, I had the scene broken up into very small vignettes that ran through the entire chapter. I wanted to give the reader a needed breath but more importantly, I also wanted to show how I returned again and again to that experience, how trauma resurfaces, how it lingers. When I revised the draft and brought the vignettes back together for a full scene, it was all action and no reflection. I included the reflection in other vignettes, separating the two to show the path and trajectory we often take: we experience violence and then we process it later. 

But early readers–either in my PhD workshops or later with agents and potential publishers–were deeply uncomfortable sitting in a scene of sexual abuse without having the reflection to distance themselves from it. I found it interesting and confusing and problematic – I still do – that readers seemed to be comfortable with graphic details about the violence, imagined or real, that men enacted on my mother’s body but that they would not accept graphic details about the violence I experienced. I don’t know that I will ever fully understand this difference – if it’s because the I is speaking, if it’s because I survived, if there was something different in the writing itself that I could not see because I was so close to the material. So I kept adding more reflection to the scene, breaking up the action, creating more distance, and even then, some editors worried it was “salacious,” a word used by one editor. 

My editor at Counterpoint Harry Kirchner is a wonderfully empathetic, thoughtful, respectful reader and guide. He suggested I cut some of the details in that scene, especially around the objects used against my body. He said, for example, that I could trust the reader more, that all the reader needed was a line about how the men were curious to see how far up the long neck of a beer bottle could go. But ultimately I was unwilling to cut all the details of the experience with the bottle, how it felt inside my body, because it was such a horrific moment and I felt it was important to name it, not to rest on the reader’s imagination. I remembered Elissa Washuta’s description of a penis as a “serrated knife” inside her vagina – graphic, yes, but also necessary for me, as the reader, to sit with, to understand the corporeal and emotional experience of her assault. And Harry didn’t argue against it, once I made it clear I wouldn’t cut as much writing as he suggested.

Sometimes I think I edited out too much for the sake of the reader’s comfort; other times, I feel like Harry and I found a good balance between the imagery and the exposition. And I know that even with the edits, some readers won’t accompany me on this journey, that the violence, even with the added reflection, is too great, which I do understand and respect.

As writers, we’re told to imagine our reader, our audience, and yet, as Kristine said, we also have to write for ourselves and be true to ourselves. Kristine said this book began exploring “how writing can be cathartic but also how it can harm others.” Everyone enmeshed in my mother’s case is still alive, and I’ve learned that despite how delicate I am with my words, there’s always someone that doesn’t like the nuance,  a pseudonym, or fractionally disagrees with a minor detail. It’s caused me to become an even slower writer, reticent to share until publication. What I’ve learned is that some family will never like my work, mostly because of the topic. They don’t want our tragedy and decisions made thereafter under the microscope. They don’t want our family grief mass consumed. I’ve questioned my own need to write, repeatedly. And yet, I’ve come to my deepest understanding of the complicated nature of my family, and partially my own identity outside of my mother’s murder, through my writing. I wondered if sharing Rabbit Heart had helped Kristine heal from her trauma. 

The shaping of experience, controlling the story through the language, the sentences, the form, the moments I choose to include and exclude, has always been cathartic, though the process is also painful, particularly when it comes to composing the initial drafts, when I’m returning to memories that are difficult. Through the writing, I’m also able to discover meanings, to arrive at a place of understanding or empathy, including for the self, to get outside of my own experiences and see connections to a broader history and community. 

Sharing Rabbit Heart, putting it out into the world, so far has been a remarkably wonderful and healing experience, even with the vulnerability I experience. And I didn’t expect to feel this way. I’ve worked on the story for so long, feeling like I would always be writing it, this big story of my life, but now that the book is out, I feel like I can let it go, like I don’t have to keep returning to the horrific details of her death, writing and revising, writing and revising. I’m certain the loss of my mother will inform or make its way into future writing of mine, new grief calling back old grief, but this story — with all its different versions of her murder and with my mother as I knew her — is preserved now and relinquishable.

I’m thrilled to hear that the success of Rabbit Heart and all the years and pieces of herself that Kristine poured into the story have been worth it. It’s been such an important book to me in many ways, and I suspect many other readers with similar childhoods. Rabbit Heart validates some of my own childhood trauma responses; the longing for stand-in mother figures, misplaced and often inappropriate male attention and promiscuity, while simultaneously relaying the message that yes, these awful things have happened, and there is and has been and always will be an overwhelming suffering and ache that will take your breath away and from time to time, and yet. And yet.

When I initially asked Kristine for this interview, I was overflowing with questions, but quickly became hyper aware that these questions are rooted in raw trauma. It goes beyond interviewing an author about stylistic choices and story development. I wasn’t sure how the publicity of publication may have impacted Kristine or aggravated old wounds, but I was awed by her candidness and insight.

I’d like to thank you for this opportunity to connect over our similar experiences. So often I have felt alone, and your own candidness makes me feel it less so.

—

Kristine Ervin grew up in a small suburb of Oklahoma City and is now an associate professor at West Chester University, outside Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature, with a focus in nonfiction, from the University of Houston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Crimereads, Crab Orchard Review, Brevity, Passages North, and Silk Road. Her essay “Cleaving To,” was named a notable essay in the Best American Essays 2013. Ervin’s debut memoir Rabbit Heart is currently available from Counterpoint Press.

Shannon Tsonis earned a B.S. in Electronic Media & Film from Towson University, an M.B.A with a specialization in Marketing from the University of Baltimore, and an MFA in Nonfiction from Goucher College. She’s published essays in Little Patuxent Review, Lunch Ticket, Memoir Magazine, Booth, and other literary magazines about the effects of unsolved crimes, mental health, and domestic violence. Shannon is currently finishing her first full-length memoir about her mother’s unsolved murder.