Unfortunately this wasn't a good fit for me. I don't love when authors insert themselves & their story inside of a complete unrelated story & that is what was happening here. I think if she wanted to do that-- she could have written more generally about the disappearance of young women in this time period & untangling the domestic violence & sexual education & (lack there of). This also really felt like it was trying to get at answering the question of What Happened to Paula but no one really knows and that was just deeply unsatisfying to me.

I'm surprised I'm not seeing this book more places. Lovers of true crime are going to find a lot to love here. A feminist look at crime that I couldn't look away from.

One picks up What Happened to Paula? On the Death of an American Girl, expecting a true crime murder mystery. On the surface, it checks all the boxes. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling leaves her home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the middle of the night and never returns. When last seen, she was barefoot and wearing a dress so flimsy it was referred to as a nightgown by the police.

Paula’s body is found four months later in a culvert with her wrists and ankles bound. No one was ever arrested and her death, in July 1970, remains an unsolved cold case 50 years later.

Author Katherine Dykstra married into this case. Her mother in law Susan, who grew up in Cedar Rapids, is the instigator, having started a documentary film project that never quite gets off the ground. Although Dykstra is initially repelled by the brutality of Paula’s case, she eventually signs on to help her mother in law with research and, before long, she finds herself going down the rabbit hole of “what ifs.” Coming out the other side, Dykstra has produced an extraordinary book that is nothing like your typical true crime saga.

Using Paula’s death as a jumping off point, Dykstra has written a sociological study of how society mistreats women and how many of us—even mothers—teach girls and young women to turn the other cheek and be quiet when faced with perverts, creeps, and killers. That acquiescence and learned experience allows violent men to turn females into throwaway toys, not occasionally but often.

This book is a damning examination of how vulnerable women are in our society, and it’s a topic that is hiding in plain sight. “In 2017 alone, 3,222 women were murdered in the United States. Here is one giant gaping wound that, never triaged, is festering just beneath the surface of American society.

“There is rarely physical equality between men and women,” Dykstra writes. “In this way a woman would nearly always be at a disadvantage.”

It’s jarring to hear a feminist writer admit in print that women are the weaker sex physically but just as jarring are the statistics Dykstra quotes. She notes how often all of us read about dead and missing women, but rarely does anyone stop to connect the dots: “In recent memory I can recall the stories of women whose bodies had been tossed into fields, into bodies of water, buried under leaves in the forest, run over by cars, chopped up, put in trash cans, stuffed into suitcases and left at the side of the road.”

Dykstra begins her journey in a very different place. Naively perhaps, she expects to unearth enough evidence to avenge Paula’s death by finding her killer. She does what any true crime reporter would do: retracing Paula’s steps on the fateful night when she leaves her house in a flimsy dress never to appear again.

Dykstra pores over police reports and attempts to talk to relatives who refuse to talk to her. Dykstra gets almost nowhere with her first-person reporting, but what saves her are the earlier interviews done by her mother-in-law.

Dykstra’s journey into Paula’s last days seems to shift when she learns the young woman may have bled to death—her body dumped—after getting a botched abortion.

As she writes: “It dawned on me that what I wanted to say about her death was less true crime and more sociological study. Meaning, though a girl had been killed, and though the details of her disappearance and death are important . . . this is not a book about a murderer.

“It’s about the legacy and the things that are handed down between women over generations. It’s about the women in Paula’s family and the women in my own. It’s about women who lived in Cedar Rapids in the 1960s and women who also lost mothers, sisters, daughters to violence.”

As the details of Paula’s case pile up, Dykstra realizes to her horror that, despite Paula’s horrible end, society might not see her as a sympathetic enough victim. Even Dykstra’s own husband is not so sure he “likes” Paula because, in the days before her death, she was playing one boyfriend off against another. When Paula rushed out of her home that night, she alternately was dating an African American and a local blue-collar boy. It seems likely the African American boy was the father, a societal taboo at the time.

Among other things, Paula’s story puts the spotlight on how much has changed in society since 1970. When the police tell Paula’s mother they’ve reached a dead end, she tries to enlist the local media, but a man who later became the newspaper’s publisher tells her, “There’s no interest.” Compare that to today’s wall-to-wall media coverage whenever a blonde and beautiful Caucasian girl goes missing. Chances are, the name Paula Oberbroeckling, as hard as it might be to pronounce, today would be on everyone’s lips.

What Happened to Paula? is a powerful book and a touching one. Dykstra learns she is pregnant with a daughter in the middle of her research and finds herself wondering what the future will hold for her baby girl. She writes: “Figuring how to move forward with the knowledge that we send our daughters into a world tilted against them, reconciling our own roles in making this so, and keeping our eyes open to the dangers that lurk as well as to the many wonders and opportunities—these would be my challenges now.”

Katherine Dykstra’s mother-in-law roped her into the story of Paula Oberbroeckling, an 18-year-old from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who disappeared one summer night in 1970. Her remains were found a few months later but a cause of death was never determined.

Instead, the lack of answers and decades of speciation around what happened to her gave rise to a number of narratives and theories, the most prevalent of which was that she’d died during an illegal abortion gone wrong. She’d also been dating a Black classmate, which had led to such friction with her mother that she’d recently moved out of her family home.

Dykstra’s mother-in-law had collected a wealth of information and files but had hit a wall in her attempt to make a documentary, and so Dykstra, a writer and teacher, took a fresh look instead.

She tells the story by retracing what’s known of Paula’s life and her last night, and juxtaposing it with a sociological study of what the framework of life in America was at the time for young women of her age and background. It was a dangerous one even for women with plenty of privilege, as Paula had, thanks to the attitudes towards women’s rights and safety that led women to be incredibly vulnerable.

The investigation into a local doctor who’d allegedly given illegal abortions with some dangerous outcomes was fascinating, as was Dykstra’s parsing of how Paula fit into the social structures allowed to women in the 1960s.

Unfortunately, this is also part memoir, and it falls into the easy trap of making things about the author that shouldn’t be. I’m not sure where this insistence on showing why a story matters to you came from or why it’s become such a mega-popular genre. I suppose because when when memoir is woven into a crime story and works, it does so brilliantly — We Keep the Dead Close, The Red Parts, and The Fact of a Body are excellent examples. But when it doesn’t work, it’s irritating and distracting.

Dykstra does great work in showing how Paula was both hemmed in by the standards of her time but also a self-assured, forward-thinking rebel, anti-racist and unwilling to accept her circumstances because it’s what was expected of women. In showing things about her story that are universal; namely, the danger of limited options for women’s reproductive choices as well as the danger of assault and sexual violence, she weaves in her own experiences and some from her mother-in-law. To some extent, this works because it does underscore that universality, horrifying as it is, and creates so much empathy for Paula and her peers in a time when they were denied the dignity of a safe, legal medical abortion, among other things.

But elsewhere, the links feel tenuous. Dykstra tells a melodramatic-feeling story about taking the morning-after pill after a broken condom incident, I think it was,. I was rolling my eyes at how minor the episode came across although it was built up as an event of great significance on par with others here which are truly disturbing, such as her mother-in-law’s assault by an abortion doctor. The drama of a Plan B pill was not a story that belonged here, at least not in the level of detail it received. I skimmed some memoir sections because the interest just wasn’t there, although Dykstra is a compelling writer. It all feels like filler to both Paula’s story and to the greater social issues.

Otherwise, it’s pretty compelling, Paula’s life and memory are handled sensitively, and although it does feel ultimately unsatisfying (as much work and research as the two women have put into this, Paula’s case remains unsolved), that’s not the author’s fault. It’s a testament rather to how important she made Paula’s story feel as a sociological episode, regardless of what led to her death, and how much she brought of this woman, only a teenager when she died, to life.

Paula had danger lurking around every corner. Because of the era and because of her familial situation, there was no one to advise Paula on how to respond to domestic peril, nor did she likely have the voice or the vocabulary with which to combat it herself. Place this climate of normalized violence adjacent the movement toward sexual liberation and you have a dangerous dichotomy. On one hand, violence was implicit and accepted; on the other hand, the push toward sexual freedom necessitated trusting the opposite sex. These forces were in direct opposition. Women are encouraged to embrace the very people who could hurt them without repercussion.

Katherine Dykstra’s What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl (Norton 2021) is a thoroughly researched and deeply personal account of a woman’s investigation into the death of a midwestern American teenager. It also discusses the through lines that Paula’s victimization has with women’s lives across time, including the author’s own.

Late one night in July 1970, Paula Oberbroeckling borrowed her roommate’s car in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She was barefoot, wearing a summer dress, and planned to be back in time for her roommate to leave for work in the morning. Although the car was later found abandoned on the side of the road, Paula was not found with it. Indeed, her body was not discovered for months. Eventually she was found bound and dumped at the edge of a culvert. The case quickly went cold and sat unsolved and uninvestigated for fifty years before Katherine Dykstra began looking into the case, following in the footsteps of her mother-in-law, who also took an interest in the case. What Happened to Paula follows Dykstra’s investigative efforts and her discovery of deep, systemic injustices that allowed Paula, and so many other girls like her, to fall through the cracks.

The text is a “quintessential Midwestern gothic, the flat landscape and pristine surfaces masking dark underbellies, the veneer of calm and tidy, beauty and success, rolling golf courses with clear edges over a labyrinth of complex emotion, cops who didn’t do their jobs, corrupt officials, a beautiful young woman with a complicated story.” What Happened to Paula innovatively undercuts some of the major tenants of the true crime genre. Although it is ostensibly based on a true crime, the text takes that crime as its starting point and moves in several different directions. As Dykstra says in the opening of her narrative: finding out what happened to Paula is not as simple as catching and confirming her killer. Rather, what happened to Paula was a series of injustices that began long before she left, barefoot, on that July night, and continued long after. Indeed, Dykstra takes up Paula’s story as the untold story of many women in Paula’s position in the twentieth century.

“…over the course of the years I spent researching and writing Paula’s story, it dawned on me that what I wanted to say about her death was less true crime and more sociological study. Meaning, though a girl had been killed, and though the details of her disappearance and death are important and will be included in the pages of this book, this is not about a murderer. … The onus of her death extends well beyond whoever dumped her body down that hill.”

Indeed, beyond Paula, “there are a lot of dead girls in this story.” Dykstra’s narrative examines the laws and social regulations that kept women and other marginalised people as second-class citizens whose bodies were not entirely their own throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. Dykstra’s research includes issues around abortion, race relations, gender stereotypes, financial and occupational exclusion, and, of course, violence against women. The text is extremely well-researched, and Dykstra attempts to provide a full and complete picture of what life as a woman with Paula’s set of circumstances might have been like for Paula, and the choices she might have felt driven to make.

This “was the story of a small city and small-city police, of disappointment and squandered potential, of race and class and sex. A story that became more complex the deeper one dug. A story all the more compelling for the fact that it had been mostly forgotten even though the case still yawned wide open.”

Additionally, although Dykstra is also a journalist, the text has the personal and emotional detail of memoir. Weaving her story and the stories of her mother and grandmother throughout the narrative of Paula’s family tree, the text collapses multiple timelines and histories to speak more widely about women’s subordinate social position and the circumstances that lead to disadvantage, dependence, and danger for women like Paula.

Certainly, if you are a reader who is looking for a more ‘classic’ true crime story, this may not be the book for you. Its engagement with the tenants of women’s writing and memoir are compelling, but they often move away from and beyond strictly investigative journalism. As a true crime reader who is interested in the confluence between memoir and true crime, I found this interesting and compelling, but it was also jarring before I learned how to read and understand this complex text. With What Happened to Paula, it is important to be prepared for a confluence of genres and angles that don’t always stay directly connected to the case. Because Dykstra’s involvement in this investigation is so personal, and because a wide variety of historical research is used to supply evidence and relevant points, the text veers away from the case at hand and what we might expect from a true crime narrative. Dkystra is correct when she writes that this book is more of a sociological study than a true crime text, but her writing poses an interesting intervention in the genre, and asks: is there such thing as closure when “once wounded, we [are] always wounded”?

A story about a fascinating a little-known case, What Happened to Paula is an interesting intervention in the true crime genre, with a socially conscious and relevant narrative viewpoint. I highly recommend this book to anyone focused on women’s histories and interventions in the way we tell true crime stories.

Please follow Katherine Dykstra on Twitter and add What Happened to Paula to your Goodreads shelf.

Don’t forget to follow True Crime Index on Twitter and please visit our Goodreads for updates on what we’re reading! You can find Rachel on her personal @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

About the Writer:

Rachel M. Friars (she/her) is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She holds a BA and an MA in English Literature with a focus on neo-Victorianism and adaptations of Jane Eyre. Her current work centers on neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century lesbian literature and history, with secondary research interests in life writing, historical fiction, true crime, popular culture, and the Gothic. Her academic writing has been published with Palgrave Macmillan and in The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. She is a reviewer for The Lesbrary, the co-creator of True Crime Index, and an Associate Editor and Social Media Coordinator for PopMeC Research Collective. Rachel is co-editor-in-chief of the international literary journal, The Lamp, and regularly publishes her own short fiction and poetry. Find her on Twitter and Goodreads.

A copy of this book was graciously provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl.

First of all, who was Paula? Paula Oberboeckling was a white,18 year old girl, living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. On July 1st, 1970, Paula went missing. When her mother reported her missing to the Cedar Rapids Police Deptartment, they brushed her case off, insisting that she “probably” ran away. The police were called again by Paula’s mom, Carol, when the car 🚗 she borrowed from a friend was found abandoned on the side of the road, with the back passenger window “rolled” down. Still, the CRPD brushed the case off. It was only 4 months later, when Paula’s body was found in a #culvert, that police 👮‍♀️ began investigating … sadly, this was 4 months too late.

In her true crime novel, journalist Katherine Dykstra, together with her mother in law Susan, re-examine Paula’s 50 year old cold case. But without (even) DNA 🧬, and with so many involved in the case already dead, @ktdsees turns the book into a part personal memoir and part query into misogyny and violence against women. Did the CRPD brush off Paula’s case? Dykstra delves deep into the history of the women in her own family, and into the history of the women’s rights movement to try to UNDERSTAND #whathappenedtopaula?

I wished for this book from #netgalley, and lo and behold, I got my wish! So, I made sure to read it and I am so glad that I did! It’s a great read and it’s out today. Happy #pubday to @ktdsees for #whathappenedtopaula. Thank you 🙏🏻 #netgalley and @w.w.norton for this e-arc in return for my honest review.
#5⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

#cedarrapids #cedarrapidsiowa #iowafloods2008 #iowaflood08 #coldcase #truecrime #violenceagainstwomen #paulaoberboeckling

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions expressed herein are mine alone and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.

As a lifelong true crime reader, I'm not sure why this sudden craze in consuming true crime popped up. Some infamous fandoms tend to make me question whether or not that's a good thing. But then there are podcasts like The Fall Line and Someone Knows Something that bring to light cases that haven't made the nightly news, cases where the marginalized voices we need to hear don't get heard. This happened to the very subject of WHAT HAPPENED TO PAULA.

Katherine Dykstra hits the nail on the head when she talks about true crime being necessary in opening up wounds that haven't healed, and in bringing justice to victims and families who have been forgotten or overlooked. Sure, we get creeps like Payne Lindsey, who take all the credit for doing nothing when a case has been solved, and even go so far as to nearly get innocent people arrested based on tissue-thin accusations. But people like Billy Jensen, Michelle McNamara, Leslie Rule, and David Ridgen work with compassion and intelligence and great respect for these traumas.

Now, if I may, we can add Katherine Dykstra to that list.

We can't always wrap something up, and sometimes--to my great dismay--there's no way of knowing why or how someone really died. Paula Oberbroeckling lived in an incredibly tumultuous time that was in no way friendly toward women who had sex. (You know, as women, being people, tend to do. Go figure.) In the days before Roe v. Wade--and if you weren't a white person of means--seeking out an abortion was an horrific affair. Dykstra examines the circumstances and socioeconomic setup that may have contributed to Paula's death. The police took Paula's disappearance to be a simple case of a young girl running away, despite a pile of evidence in favor of something being terribly amiss. Unfortunately, when they found her body, four months of exposure had wiped away any clues to how she had died, and who, if anyone, had claimed her life.

Because of the circumstances here, Dykstra can only give us more questions than answers: Was Paula really pregnant, or was it a scare? Did the normalization of domestic abuse and violence in an era where people tolerated violence against romantic partners lead to her death? Who is responsible for taking such a young life just in bloom? And what's more, are police complicit in a crime when they refuse to investigate it properly, or at all?

Paula's life ended when she was eighteen. By all standards, she was still a child. She left behind a mother and sister who feel that absence every day. Someone got away with dumping her body, whether or not they killed her. Dykstra doesn't pretend that she can solve this crime. She doesn't profess to knowing exactly what happened, and for that I commend her. She has a touch for the human element that gives these forgotten cases heart and humanizes the people involved. I genuinely hope Katherine Dykstra continues in true crime. She could be a valuable asset to the community.

I absolutely love true crime, particularly narrative true crime, but this book didn't capture my attention. The writing felt very all-over-the-place.

True crime meets intersectional feminism - but really, the two have always gone hand in hand. Katherine Dykstra @ktdsees highlights the unsolved and mostly forgotten murder of Paula Oberbroeckling, a white teen girl in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1970. Dykstra's connection to Paula's murder is Susan, her own mother-in-law (who is from Cedar Rapids and was a year behind Paula in school). Dykstra explores the mystery around Paula's murder, the incompetence of the police, the societal trends and expectations the murdered girl may have bucked. But, she makes it clear she hasn't identified a killer and, fifty years on, she likely never will. Where this book triumphs is her linking of Paula's unsolved murder to the gendered violence and misogyny perpetrated against women. She recounts the societal shifts Paula's murder occurred on the cusp of (the women's rights movement, the Roe v. Wade decision, etc.) but always through a feminist and intersectional lens. Yes, what happened to Paula was awful, but she points out Black women experience similar violence in greater numbers. Fans of traditional true crime books might be disappointed in this book, but it correctly and IMPORTANTLY highlights the importance of talking about violence against women - especially BIPOC women - and the grave injustices all women experience at the hands of the patriarchy. #WhatHappenedToPaula Rating: 😊 / really liked it
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This book is scheduled for publication on June 15, 2021. Thank you @w.w.norton for providing me this digital ARC via @NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

So, I’ve spent a moment trying to figure out how to capture this book. I read a lot of true crime books. I write about true crime a lot, and I know that writing about an unsolved case is a particularly difficult task. But “What Happened To Paula” is a difficult read because of how it’s written. It’s obvious the author is well read, and not new to writing- but honestly I don’t know if that works in her favor. It’s very wordy, and could’ve been shorter than it was. There was an entire chapter dedicated to the author writing about what it’s like to be a mother and woman in journalism- this has nothing to do with what happened to Paula. Which is why we’re all here- to find out what happened to Paula. I’m sad to say I can only give two stars here.

Rather than a straight up true crime story, the author tends to make a sociology study of the time and situation. Well researched and written, yet I had trouble staying engaged at times. After finishing, I felt foggy about the story, rather than enriched. But that could just be me, most likely. Advance electronic review copy was provided by NetGalley, author Katherine Dykstra, and the publisher.

Interesting but very slow. I had a hard time getting through this book. Thanks to publisher and NetGalley for read.

This book really disappointed me. I was so enthralled by the synopsis and completely let down by the book.

There was to much unnecessary filler and not enough about the actual case itself. I wanted an in-depth look at the story, the investigation and I was instead met with painstakingly boring filler about everything but.

I’m critical of true crime books because I expect more about the victims than the authors or other people involved and it’s rare to find that.

Ugh. Slow, slow, slow as molasses. Full of details that do not move this story forward. This is one of those quasi-mystery murder stories that is generated by the author's slight connection to the deceased. It is loaded with details that may be meaningful to her but we are here to learn the story of the main character and her associates. We want to know what happened. We want to know what law enforcement did. I personally could not wade through all the unimportant material and still keep my mind on what is supposed to be the subject

This book was sent to me free on kindle but Netgalley for review. Although the story of Paula was lengthy, it was intriguing. However, there was too much information about the author. I enjoyed the history of the time Paula was growing up...it is a sad and disheartening tale of a young woman lost in the midst of a chaotic family. Try it...the author has researched in a fantastic way.