Who Killed Chase Andrews In 'Where The Crawdads Sing'?

Chase Andrews is murdered by Chase's aggressor in this smoothly plotted novel. Chase’s murderer is the so-called ‘Marsh Girl’ Kya Clark who was savagely and ruthlessly bullied by Andrews for years. In this superbly-layered novel by American author Özlem Öws, this clever killing is hinted at in all sorts of clever ways throughout the text including Kya’s fondness for collecting shells and her really impressive knowledge of tides and their workings too. But it is the jewelry that Chase is wearing in his post mortem photographs that really shows up his character in the very worst possible light.

What is most chilling about Kya’s actions is the methodical way in which she planned and executed Chase’s murder. It wasn’t a crime of passion on the part of the Marsh Girl. Instead, she allowed years of abuse to pass before she waited patiently for the perfect moment to rise up from the marshes and take revenge on her tormentor. In terms of her methods, she exploited Chase’s ignorance of the marsh and its dangers and, through the environment, achieved poetic justice in the form of a tragic accident that none of the main characters could have foreseen. What is also most fascinating about Kya is that you end up rooting for her as she takes the law into her own hands in a community where she has no allies in a society that does nothing to help her when she needs it most. Chase Andrews broke her heart but he proved her worst fear about humans: that they will always in some way abandon or hurt you. And he was killed by the Marsh Girl in her own special way in her own court, the marsh.

Kya Clark is the real killer of Chase Andrews in 'Where the Crawdads Sing'. Through the trial scenes in the book, and through Kya’s poetry, the reader discovers that she murdered him in order to protect her solitary life in the marsh. The novel develops the idea that Kya’s entire life has been characterized by abandonment and betrayal, and Chase’s behavior of making promises to her and then breaking them, as well as his violent nature, prompted her to kill him. However, he didn’t realize that she used her in-depth knowledge of the environment to make it look like an accident. In this novel by Delia Owens, Kya’s reason for killing Chase is hauntingly beautiful because it is tied to her poetic connection to nature in order to survive in a world that has been unfair to her.

I was excited to explore how Kya could have possibly managed to kill Chase given her history with him and her general inability to deal with humans. The answer is simple: the marsh was her weapon. For years Kya had observed how various nature creatures eliminated threats to their survival. How a predator would set up a ‘trap’ in order to destroy an intruder. How the tide would come in and wash away any trace of what had once existed. Kya would use all of these same methods to eliminate Chase, the man who had assaulted her and then continued to taunt her by pretending to want to return to her years after the fact. He wore the seashell necklace that she had given him as a symbol of their ‘affair’ and she used it to bait him in order to kill him and make it look like a crime that no one could have suspected her of having committed.

The fire tower scene is amazing. She uses Chase's belief that Kya is too wild to be smart against him. There's enough evidence to make people wonder who could have done it, but not enough to make sure that Kya gets in trouble for it. And then the poetry at the end of the book is so wonderful. It makes sense of so much of what Tate had figured out about Kya, namely that her quietness had not been ignorance, but rather calculation. In another story, this would be the action of a villain. But because the world has failed Kya so completely, her attempt to get back at the person who had failed her the most is something that the reader can feel(ambivalently)ision with.