Fifty years ago, on a hot summer night in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, an 18-year-old named Paula Oberbroeckling borrowed a car that belonged to her roommate, Debbie, and promised to be back soon. Despite the frantic efforts of her family and friends, the police weren’t interested in the case: Teenage girls, they said, went missing all the time. ‘Maybe this wasn’t a mystery of one woman’s life and why one woman died, but the mystery of why women die.’Paula, of course, was dead, though her body wasn’t discovered for four months. Still, she writes, “even if we knew how Paula died, it wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem I’d been circling. All these things lay behind the perception — of the town, the police, even her own family — that an 18-year-old woman had invited her own death.

Source: New York Times May 27, 2021 13:55 UTC