Life writes the best stories – it is not without reason that successful writers are often people whose biographies themselves sound like an exciting script. So it’s hardly surprising that the American Delia Owens, 73, who landed an international bestseller in 2018 with her novel “The Song of the Crayfish” and is now back in the limelight with the cinema adaptation, has a colorful past. Like her protagonist, Catherine “Kya” Danielle Clark, Owens explored the North Carolina countryside from an early age. The detailed descriptions of life in the wild that characterize the book are more likely to come from her later life as a zoologist and activist in Africa. Owens lived and researched there with her husband, the biologist Mark Owens, and his son from his first marriage, Christopher Owens.
“There’s a lot of symbolism in this book,” Owens said three years ago in an interview: “You don’t have to understand it. You can just read it as a story.” But it is precisely this symbolism that could be the author’s undoing. Because her novel is about a murder. And there is a suspicion that here, too, the boundaries between fiction and reality, between what really happens and what is only made up, are fluid. Like her leading lady, Kya, Owen’s name is now linked to a murder. Was she a witness? Or at least an accomplice?
The Owens spent almost 20 years of their lives in North Luangawa National Park in Zambia. Their goal: to protect elephants from poachers. If necessary by force, like a Research of the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg for the magazine TheAtlantic disclosed. give a hint Recordings of the broadcaster ABC News, who accompanied the couple for the 1996 documentary Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story – and kept the camera on as a man was shot dead for no apparent reason. It is not clear who pulled the trigger, and the identity of the person killed remains unclear. The cameraman later stated that Christopher Owens fired the shot.
“The bush is the perfect place to commit murder. The animals eat the evidence.”
According to research by journalist Goldberg, Delia and Mark Owens, self-proclaimed animal rights activists, also tied to stakes and beat people they considered a threat to wildlife. Several people were killed in their anti-poaching operations. The Owens’ lawyers deny this. According to media reports, however, the couple has been wanted by the authorities in Zambia for some time. The two now live in the USA, in Idaho.
Former Zambian police commissioner Graphael Musamba explains that the murder was never investigated on camera in conversation with the Atlantic with the missing basis for investigations: “The bush is the perfect place to commit a murder. The animals eat the evidence.” However, the local police department has now told the magazine that it is suspected that Mark Owens disposed of the body in his helicopter in a nearby lagoon.
In Delia Owen’s bestseller, which is due to be released in German cinemas in August, a murder committed out of a sense of justice was covered up by the influences of nature. The protagonist Kya, who recently – Spoiler alert! – turns out to be a murderess, was never prosecuted for her crime. In the novel, the court decides to acquit for lack of evidence.
Demands are now being raised again in Zambia that the author and activist Delia Owens should finally testify in court. It remains to be seen whether there will also be a happy ending for them in this case.