Guernica Magazine

What Happened to Paula: “She was different from them. And that’s why I loved her.”

Author Katherine Dykstra and the project’s originator, Susan Taylor Chehak, talk about complicated collaboration, resurrecting a cold case, and creating a narrative when there is no closure.

Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses writers’ digital artifacts to understand their practice. Conceived by Mary Wang, each interview provides an intimate look into the artistic process.

Paula Oberbroeckling was eighteen years old when she went missing in her hometown of Cedars Rapids, Iowa. The year was 1970, and the police were dismissive: Girls are impulsive, they told Paula’s mother. They run away. Four months later, Paula’s body was found beside a culvert, wrists and ankles bound. After that, there were more excuses. She was dressed provocatively. She was involved with more than one guy. She thought she was pregnant, and didn’t want to be. The case was never solved.

When Paula died, Katherine Dykstra, author of What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl, had yet to be born. But the woman who would become Dykstra’s mother-in-law, the fiction writer Susan Taylor Chehak, was around the same age as Paula; she also grew up in Cedar Rapids and the two attended the same high school. Chehak was obsessed with the lack of answers surrounding Paula’s disappearance and death, and spent years investigating the cold case: poring over old documents, interviewing Paula’s family members, and struggling to find a shape for the story. Eventually she asked her daughter-in-law, a nonfiction writer who had recently given birth to her first child, to take on the case. Dykstra had brushed off her earlier attempts at persuasion, but, stirred by new motherhood, she found herself transfixed. It wasn’t only that she wanted to understand who this beautiful, tragic stranger had been and why her life had been cut short. She felt, somehow, like she owed it to Paula to find out.

And so the story of what happened to Paula became, in part, one of inheritance. It’s a story Chehak passed on to Dykstra, but also one that women have been telling each other in broad strokes for generations. It’s a story about the choices women make and those that are beyond our control; about mothers and daughters, pleasure and danger, sex and race and responsibility and risk. Even as she dug deeper into the case and discovered new leads and angles, Dykstra recognized that

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Guernica Magazine

Guernica Magazine1 min read
A Spoonful
of sugar helps the Metformin go down. Mine are syrupy sentences, sweetheart. I save them for perverted spelling bees. Then I slip the leftovers, as epistles, into pill bottles. I send them to patients. Dear fellow asthmatic-dramatic-diabetic- 60px;em
Guernica Magazine10 min read
Black Wing Dragging Across the Sand
The next to be born was quite small, about the size of a sweet potato. The midwife said nothing to the mother at first but, upon leaving the room, warned her that the girl might not survive. No one seemed particularly concerned; after all, if she liv
Guernica Magazine1 min read
Once Upon a Time
Once Upon a Time . . . (10/20/1916–10/22/1916) Once upon a time, there was a lord who lit Fire to his castle, so as to be free to wander the great roads of the world. He ventured everywhere, stopping only when his means were spent. And here I sit, tr

Related Books & Audiobooks