For nearly three decades, Kristine S. Ervin lived an inconceivable horror story – hoping and praying that the two monsters who kidnapped, brutally raped and murdered her mother in April 1986 would be stopped. She wanted justice – and also revenge – to finally be served.
Eight years old when 41-year-old Kathy Sue Engle’s life was violently snuffed out, Ervin fearlessly memorialized her mother, the murderers and the true crime that had long shaken her world in her devastating new memoir, “Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder. , A girl’s story. (Counterpoint)
Engle’s revenge surfaces violently — and, rightly so — in one of the many stark scenes she details. “Learning the extent of her pain, her rape and her fear, I wanted to hurt you even more. I wanted to make you bleed,” she wrote of her mother’s killers.
Twenty-eight hours after Engle was kidnapped outside an Oklahoma City mall, his car was found 390 miles away in New Mexico, with his bloody and torn clothes inside as well as male DNA.
And seven days later, Engle’s naked, bound and badly decomposed body was found in an oil field on Oklahoma’s western border. Face down, his hands tied, his throat had been slit from behind and his features had practically disappeared from those of wild animals.
Long a frustratingly cold case, the killers — Steven A. Boerner, 33, and Kyle Richard Eckardt, 44 — were finally identified in 2008. Boerner was then a long-dead former Michigan inmate, and Eckardt was already in prison for an unrelated matter. crime.
Boerner was linked to the crime through an old fingerprint found on the steering wheel of Ervin’s mother’s abandoned car; DNA evidence was used to track down Eckardt, the rapist, who is currently serving a life sentence for murder.
It took Ervin a virtual lifetime to put his intense feelings into memory form. And you can almost feel the pain and fear coming over her.
As she strangely writes: “I have my mother’s features… her long face, her slim figure. I grew up wondering if men would recognize me, if they would look for the girl who looked like the woman they killed. -Caroline Howe
New York Post
