Sarah Gerard’s “Carrie Carolyn Coco” is not a typical true crime story

In the initial news reports, Stetson-Shanahan was described as a “tortured artist” – he was an illustrator and worked as a packer for an art trading company – and Bush as merely his “roommate.” In an interview with the New York Post Speaking to reporters at Rikers Island two days after Bush’s assassination, Stetson-Shanahan said, “I would like to be placed somewhere upstate. Somewhere where I can draw, paint and read. That’s really all I need.” Bush and Stetson-Shanahan had both attended Bard College in the Hudson Valley, but the college quickly clarified to reporters that Bush, unlike Stetson-Shanahan, had not graduated. The son of the New Yorker Cartoonist Danny Shanahan and Janet Stetson, a Bard graduate and administrator. Stetson-Shanahan grew up in Rhinebeck, NY, just south of the college. Bard President Leon Botstein wrote two letters to the courts in support of him, calling him “a very appealing, well-mannered, well-groomed and considerate person with a very pronounced artistic talent.”

Essayist and novelist Sarah Gerard knew Bush—they had worked together in a Manhattan bookstore and were connected through their shared hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida. “She was distant but funny, sometimes sassy and sophisticated, but also rough, which I recognized as a hallmark of St. Petersburgers,” Gerard writes. When Bush died, “they had only just begun to form a friendship.” After Bush’s assassination, Gerard felt an impulse to write about her, both to understand why Stetson-Shanahan had stabbed her and to “continue to get to know her.” Carolyn had been so many things to so many people—the quick-witted “Carrie” to her family and oldest friends; intuitive and hardworking “Carolyn” to her friends from Bard; the community-minded, philosophical “Coco” to her “family” at Wendy’s Subway. Gerard writes, “I wanted to create an archive of the stories people told, and find more of them, and compile them all into an indelible record of their impact.” The result is “Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable,” a tender, multifaceted portrait of a young poet’s too-short life and a perceptive, profound examination of the personal and social circumstances that led to her death.

Gerard writes that “a trial is a series of tiny details viewed through a prism that scatters bright, sober light in all directions.” She takes a similar approach when writing about Bush and Stetson-Shanahan, with each detail gaining weight through the prism of the murder. In addition to her writing, Gerard is both a collage artist and a private investigator, pursuing a degree in criminal justice at the University of Colorado Denver, where she studies gender-based violence. Throughout the book, she weaves the linear story of the Stetson-Shanahan trial, which began in November 2019, with snapshots of Bush’s life culled from interviews with dozens of her family members and friends, Bush’s text messages and social media posts, and even her LiveJournal blog posts from her youth. The juxtaposition is reminiscent of parataxis – the literary technique of placing seemingly unrelated images or fragments next to each other – which Bush had pondered before her death.

With this approach, Gerard defies the typical plot arc of a true crime story and invites the reader to join her in creating her own interpretation of Bush’s life and death. Although Gerard was friends with Bush and consciously shapes the way readers experience this story, she rarely enters the narrative and rarely makes explicit arguments. Instead, she presents the memories of Bush’s loved ones largely without commentary. It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of these people and their connections to Bush—Gerard usually doesn’t re-identify her relationship to her in subsequent mentions, even when 200 pages have passed since we last heard from them. (A “List of Characters” that appears at the front of the book covers six full pages and more than 125 names.) Still, the sheer volume of these memories underscores how much Bush meant to those who knew her and how her many ambitions were brutally dashed.

Gerard’s own perspective is most evident in the chapters on Stetson-Shanahan’s trial and sentencing, which she attended, and in the final third of the book, when she compares Bush’s experiences at Bard with those of Stetson-Shanahan and places the murder in the context of the school’s larger culture. As a white woman, Bush may have been “the perfect victim,” but Gerard argues convincingly that as a white man of a certain class, Stetson-Shanahan was first raised in a culture that downplayed violence against women and then protected from the consequences of his actions.

Gerard writes of two other cases in which white male Bard students fatally stabbed female Bard students and pleaded insanity; both have since been released. She argues that Botstein, who has been Bard’s president since 1975, has long rejected responsibility for the safety and well-being of his students—at least his female students. At a town hall meeting he held at his home in 2015 after an on-campus rape, he was secretly recorded saying, “A girl who drinks a bottle of vodka and then goes to a party is just as smart as me wearing the yellow badge and going to a rally in Nuremberg.” Gerard writes that he never disputed that statement. Although Bush and Stetson-Shanahan had both left Bard’s campus four years before the murder, that context does not seem unfounded; In addition to Botstein, seven other Bard administrators and professors wrote letters to the court in support of Stetson-Shanahan, regularly expressing their shock that someone as gentle and peaceful as he could commit such a crime.

The judge who heard Stetson-Shanahan’s case believed the narrative that Carolyn’s murder was a character change that occurred in the context of a “negative psychological reaction caused by the ingestion of marijuana.” In 2020, he convicted Stetson-Shanahan of second-degree manslaughter (the main charge against him was second-degree murder) and sentenced him to five to 15 years in prison. “Carrie Carolyn Coco” is a sharp reckoning with the systems that coddled Stetson-Shanahan and ignored Bush, a young woman Gerard keeps from readers.

Kristen Martin is a cultural critic based in Philadelphia. Her first book of narrative nonfiction, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow, is forthcoming from Bold Type Books.

My friend, her murder and an obsession with the unthinkable