Today, Explained - It ain’t over 'til the crawdads sing

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Delia Owens’s runaway bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing tells the story of a killing in North Carolina’s marshland. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg explains Owens is wanted for questioning in Zambia regarding a real-life killing that bears striking similarities to the novel. This episode was produced by Victoria Dominguez, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. There's a story that has preoccupied Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, for more than 10 years. In 1995, in Zambia, in Africa, a man was shot and killed. We don't know for sure who shot him. This man was alleged to be an animal poacher, but no one ever proved that he was. An ABC News crew in Zambia was doing a story about a pair of American conservationists and filmed the killing. And afterward, someone disposed of this man's body in a lagoon. No one was ever charged with the killing. What bothers me is the idea that somebody was murdered in a remote part of Zambia, a remote part of Africa, and no one cares.

It doesn't seem right, is my point. It just doesn't seem right that this happened. And also, Jeff thinks he knows who did it. Coming up. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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And all of this is interesting to Jeffrey Goldberg because the author of that book is Delia Owens, one half of the conservationist duo that ABC News was profiling during the 1995 killing. Jeff, your reporting found that Delia's husband, Mark, and his son, Chris, were present the night of the killing. Tell me about how this American couple ended up in Zambia. They had, early in life,

decided that they were going to go save the animals in Africa. They were naturalists. They moved first to Botswana. It was very young conservationists. And they wrote a book out of their experience there, Cry of the Kalahari, which became quite popular. They ran into trouble with the Botswanan government. They were protesting the fencing of various planes that were stopping animal migrations

and had alienated the government there. I have no way of judging whether they were right or wrong. Chances are they were partially right, maybe partially wrong. I don't know. But they were kicked out of Botswana. And then they looked for another country to go to, to continue their work. They really did feel, and you get this in their writing, that they were on a mission to save the animals, which is a very great mission. They went to Zambia. They found this park, North Luangwa, very remote. Zambia, first of all, is not on the main track of, you know, eastern and southern Africa.

It's sort of a tertiary country in terms of safaris and all the rest. But it has great wildlife and these very, very remote parks. And in this particular park, North Oahu, there was a poaching problem, huge problem for elephants and rhino also. And they set themselves up there. And eventually, over time, Mark Owens in particular kind of became the ruler of this vast swath of Zambia. I mean, this park is about 2,400 square miles, and the outskirts of it are also, you know, wilderness. So it's quite remote, and Mark Owens and Delia became kind of the king and queen of this region. Over time, Mark got more and more militant in his efforts to fight poaching

and would fly nighttime missions. He kept talking about Vietnam. He had never served in Vietnam, but he kept in books and other talks talking about it as if it were Vietnam. They were throwing cherry bombs and other things out of planes at night, burning the tents of poaching groups.

And as things got darker and darker, they started claiming to other people in the region that they were killing poachers, that the scouts under Mark Owens' command were killing poachers. Delia refers to this in a couple of their books, and she expresses ambivalence about it, but she was part of this operation. She co-ran this operation with Mark Owens. And eventually, I think what happened, to put it bluntly,

is they became so enamored of it that they thought, you know what, we need a lot of publicity for this. So that's when they invite ABC News in, and that is the beginning of the end of their operation there because what they didn't realize, I guess you can sort of get, I mean, this happens often, I guess, in life. You become convinced of your own rightness, your own righteousness even their bidding, operating without any oversight and going further and further in. And the story, when I first heard about it, it almost instantly struck me as a kind of heart of darkness story. Where was their money coming from? Well, they had support from the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which is a very good organization.

And still today, actually, is the NGO that helps the Zambian government run the park and keep it safe. They had a very big fundraising operation in America. They're very, very good at publicity. They're very, very good at romanticizing their work. I mean, the work of someone who works in conservation and anti-poaching is actually quite boring in some ways. There's a lot of science, there's a lot of environmental studies, there's a lot of community activism, community building. Mark and Delia leaned heavily when they were raising funds and doing publicity into the kind of more, let's say, Rambo-ish aspects of this. Flying night patrols, inserting game scouts into the bush, battling machine gun-carrying poaching gangs.

And I'm not saying that those things didn't happen, but it's much more effective as a fundraising mechanism, I think, to go to American audiences on American tours and say, look, we're actually battling evil out here, and we're risking our lives. And they were always talking about how they were being threatened with kidnapping and killing and that sort of thing. It's a lot more effective than saying, actually, what we're doing is we're trying to build a beekeeping cooperative for the villages on the outskirts of the park so

that the people have gainful employment and so they don't poach. To be clear, Jeff, was poaching a real problem? Yes, there definitely was slaughter of elephants in this park and many, many, many other parks. Okay, so this was not some white savior, and we're running around and nothing's really going on. This was an absolute issue. It's white savior where the white savior was, for a while at least, helping to protect some of the elephants, some of the rhinos in this park. Don't get me wrong. There weren't

the only people doing it, by the way. There are quote-unquote white Zambians who are in that area who were doing this for many years in a much more quiet way. People who had run safari companies and made anti-poaching part of their efforts. No, no, no. The park wasn't well run. It wasn't well protected. And there was a need for this. This is not a question of whether anti-poaching is a worthwhile thing. Of course it is. It's a question of doing it without oversight and employing more and more violence in order to achieve your ostensible goals. The Zambian government was not effective in dealing with it. And at the end of the day, the Owenses walked into something that was akin to a vacuum. They took advantage of that vacuum to build their program in, let's just say, a non-democratic way.

How did the Africans that you spoke to feel about the Owenses? You know, it depends. There are Game Scouts who are very loyal to them. I spoke to some of them. There are Game Scouts who felt that, and I have testimony in the original piece about this from Game Scouts, who said that in the course of their training, quote-unquote, under the leadership of Mark Owens and his son Christopher Owens, they were beaten as a matter of course. And so they had resentments. In the villages and areas surrounding the park, the Owens's had a very negative or

developed over time a very negative reputation for brutality. One of the white Zambians who I spoke to is an enormous critic of the Owens's said in essence that their attitude was, Africa is a wonderful place. It's pity about all the people. Their mentality was that what made Africa special was the large mammals and that the people of Africa were the people in the way. Okay, Zambians have mixed feelings about the Owens, but in the United States, they are getting a lot of attention. And that's how we get to the night when someone kills an alleged poacher while an ABC News camera is running. Tell me about that night. flew an ABC cameraman, producer, and his son, Chris Owens, who was then helping him in this operation,

out to an unknown location. We don't know where it was exactly in the park, on the outskirts of the park, to what they said was an abandoned poacher camp. At a certain point in the night, an unidentified person, never learned the identity of this person, came into the camp and was shot.

Early in the morning, a scout discovers an abandoned campsite. Lying on the ground are shotgun shells. This person who is shot, we can't really tell. It's a black person, but we don't know anything about this man's identity other than that. He's allegedly a poacher coming into this camp, is on the ground, is still moving. We can visibly see that he's moving, so he's wounded. He's not dead. Then there are three more shots from off camera. Our cameras begin rolling again after a shot is fired at the returning trespasser.

The camera doesn't pivot to show us who, at least in what we saw on ABC, we don't see who is firing, but the bullets are fired into this body, this live body, on the ground, helpless person, and then the body stops moving. The person is obviously dead. The ABC narrator, Meredith Vieira, implies that the person is dead and makes a broad, sweeping statement about this. The bodies of the poachers are often left where they fall for the animals to eat. Conservation. Morality. Africa. And that's the last we see of this. My investigation 13, 14 years ago learned that the shots from off-camera were fired by Chris Owens. The person

who told me that was the ABC cameraman, Chris Everson, who's a South African cameraman, very prominent journalist. It was never reported by ABC that a white American visitor to Zambia, I mean, he was on a tourist visa, the son of Mark Owens and the stepson of Delia Owens, fired these shots. Chris Owens disappeared from the camp, witnesses told me, after that and was sent out to America. He's never been back to Zambia. But Chris Everson said that it was Chris Owens who fired the original shots and the fatal shots. And since then, the Zambian government, you know, and the Zambian government, by the way, the authorities conducted an initial investigation. They came to the same conclusion.

They did not talk to Chris Everson, but they talked to other game scouts who said that, yes, indeed, it was Chris Owens who fired the fatal shots. And they have been ever since then seeking to interview not only Chris Owens, but Mark Owens and Delia Owens. Delia Owens was back in the camp at the time. One more Baroque but relevant point about all of this is that afterward, in the cleanup and cover-up of this killing, Mark Owens flew his helicopter back to the site where he had dropped his crew off. And according to witnesses, put the body of this alleged poacher and again of course we don't know that this person was a poacher or not we have no proof we have no sense of his identity put the body in a cargo net attached it to the helicopter flew away and dropped the body off in a lagoon just dropped it into the water and it no body has ever been found. Nobody knows where this happened. I can't stress enough how remote these locations are,

how far away from cities or towns or even law enforcement. So a lot of this happened in circumstances that make it very easy to both kill someone and then cover up the killing, and then make the body disappear. Coming up, the body disappears, and so does Delia Owens. How she got from the Zambian wilderness into Reese Witherspoon's book club. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family.

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Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today Explained, we're back with Jeff Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. Jeff, how did you find out about this very complicated story in the first place?

Somebody I know who is involved in the universe of African conservation mentioned to me, you know, a couple of years after this was actually aired on ABC nationally, said, have you ever seen the Turning Point documentary on Mark and Delia Owens? And I said, no. And I got a hold of it. This is in the videocassette era. This is before the internet.

And I watched the videocassette and I couldn't believe it. I mean, the person who informed me about it gave me the right moral framing for it. So I was primed to understand this as a morally dubious exercise as opposed to, oh, look, the cameraman got a great shot of a guy getting killed. So I watched it and I just started going down the road in traditional reporting methodology of trying to find people who knew things. After a certain point, you run out of people to talk to in the United States or a couple of professional hunters I talked to who shared with me some information. There were ex-US officials who had some information, people in the State Department, but general information, nothing confidential. And then eventually you just realize you have to go to Zambia. So I probably

made my first trip there 15 years ago. The good thing about getting to Zambia was that the Owens were well-known and quite controversial. So even though they're not charged, the Owens all leave the African continent. Tell me what happens. Who helps and how do they get out and where do they go? You know, what happens is the Turning Point documentary is broadcast. Somebody, the State Department, someone, is alert or alive to the fact that this is controversial. And that, again, by the way, if this was the age of Twitter, they probably would have been arrested the next day. You think so, huh? I do. I do, because the Zambian authorities would have found out right away about the broadcast, but they did not find out about it right away.

The U.S. embassy, I believe, helped encourage them to leave and say, you know what, guys, this is going to get hot and that, you know, he feared that Mark Owens was going to get arrested and thrown into Zambian jail and then raped and be given AIDS. So it was his responsibility as an American official to get the guy out of Zambia. So the whole system there was geared to believing that the Owenses were righteous victims of some kind of either media malfeasance or Zambian corrupt government malfeasance. And so they got out, they left all their equipment there and the Frankfurt Zoological Society took possession of it and I think uses some of it to this day to good ends, from what I can tell. But the Owenses' got out, went to Idaho, and were leading a fairly quiet life up in Idaho when I finally got up there, I don't know, 13 years ago. They wouldn't talk to me,

but I finally had to drive up there and try to look for them. And I did find Delia Owens, and we did have a brief interview conversation. By the way, I should say it wasn't completely benign and quiet situation for them in Idaho. They came into Idaho in sort of the same way that they came into Zambia, which is to say they immediately positioned themselves as experts in bear conservation and started making demands of the community. And there's a quote in the stories. One of the neighbors who said that Mark Owens came in here thinking that it was Africa. And he could just tell us what to do. But this isn't Africa.

It's Idaho. Right. You know, the long and short of it is that they have this fairly quiet life up in Idaho. They know they can't return to Zambia because, as I've shown, the Zambian authorities would very much like to interview them, interrogate them based on the videotape, the ABC videotape, so they're not going back. And then Delia, over time, develops this, there's always second chances in American life, right? And so she starts as a novelist in her 60s and writes this book, Where the Crawdads

Sing, that interestingly, amazingly, however you want to describe it, becomes the biggest novel of 2018, 2019. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. It has sold 1.8 million copies and is currently number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Reese Witherspoon buys it. I'm so excited to announce the September book club pick, which I just love this book. It is called Where the Crawdads Sing. It becomes this big movie. Sometimes I feel so invisible. I wonder if I'm here at all.

And so she has her new career. All the numbers, all the weeks on the bestseller list. It is exciting. But the most important part is to write a story that means something. Can I ask you about the moment you, I don't know if it was a two and two equals four moment, but the moment you realized this woman on whose trail you've been for many years has written a book that is in Reese Witherspoon's book club. What the hell was that like? It started with one or two emails from people who remember my New Yorker piece from 2010 who said, hey, I don't know if you know this, but Delia Owens is on the New York Times bestseller list. And so, you know, piqued my curiosity. I went out and got the book.

And this is the strange part is the book is kind of Edgar Allen Poe-ish in a certain way. There are all these like hints and allusions to earlier dark events in Zambia. I mean, spoiler alert to the extent that there's anybody in America who doesn't know what this book is about. But the book is about a strange awkward loner naturalist southern girl who commits a righteous described as righteous murder in what would in in the african context is known as the bush and what in the american context would be known as the wilderness or the swamps or whatever. And I'm reading it and I'm going, oh my goodness. And by the way, makes references to people that they knew in Zambia. I mean, the name of the jailhouse cat is Sunday Justice, which is the name of their cook and aid in their camp in North Luangwa, the guy I met. And I come across that and I'm like, oh my goodness.

Like, I almost felt like at that point she was, I almost, not to make this self-referential, but I thought she was trolling me from a distance in a kind of way. It was like, why are you planting all these clues? Why are you doing this? Maybe some of it happened at the level of the unconscious. I don't know.

But the story has very many echoes of their experience in Zambia. But when I was in Zambia last month, two months ago, I guess, you know, I spoke to various law enforcement officials there, and they consider her a material witness. And, you know, they want to understand whether she's an accessory after the fact, what her role was in the camp, what her role, if anything, was involved in helping Mark allegedly cover up the crime. Delia and obviously Mark have shown no interest whatsoever in helping the Zambian authorities,

and the Zambian authorities have a hard time getting to them. I mean, I've met some very, very creative, ambitious detectives associated with this case in Zambia, but they were incredibly frustrated because they can't do the investigation the way they want to do the investigation. At the end of the day, Jeff, what would you like to happen here?

What do you think justice would look like? Is justice what you want? Or do you just want to keep chasing the Owenses around the world? No, I don't. I don't. And by the way, I mean, I had done my thing 12 years ago, wrote my piece, put it out in the world. Thank you very much. On to the next thing.

You know, I'll tell you what bothers me. What bothers me is the idea that somebody was murdered in a remote part of Zambia, a remote part of Africa, and no one cares. I would like to know who the person was. It was a male, a grown male, probably had a family, disappeared into the bush. If the body was dumped in a lagoon, it means it was eaten by crocodiles.

It doesn't seem right, is my point. It just doesn't seem right that this happened. And I include ABC News in the category of people who have done wrong things here because they were just out looking for some violence, right? And they know what happened. And Chris Everson, the ABC News cameraman, his conscience obviously was bothering him. When I called him in South Africa, he told me what happened. He didn't say no comment. He didn't say, I have no idea what you're talking about. He didn't lie. He told me the truth. He said, this is a terrible thing that happened. And I saw it. Almost like he was waiting for years for somebody to call him. Just think it's wrong. And I know that some combination of Mark, Chris, and Delia Owens

know exactly what happened to this person. And they know where the body was taken. And that just doesn't seem right. Today's episode was produced by Tori Dominguez. It was edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. I'm Noelle King.

It's Today Explained. Thank you.