CATCH THE SPARROW

A New York City public schoolteacher’s account of her quest to discover the truth behind her stepsister’s brutal murder.

Rear was 14 when her stepsister, Stephanie, vanished from her Greece, New York, apartment in 1991. At the time of Stephanie's disappearance, the author still lived with her mother and father, “who was a cruel man, abusive by any measure.” Rear’s mother married Stephanie’s widowed father seven years later; not long after that, Stephanie's remains were discovered in a shallow creek several miles outside of town. Rear unsuccessfully tried writing about her stepsister, a "beloved violin teacher," months before her stepfather died in 2009, but it would not be until 2015, six years after a Greece police chief had quietly reopened Stephanie’s case, that the author decided to investigate her death. “She’s become more than my muse now; she’s my creation. I see her now when I look in the mirror,” writes the author. The details that slowly emerged told a troubling story that began with the gentle stepfather Rear had known. Friends revealed that Jerry had been mentally and physically abusive and that Stephanie had been in therapy since childhood. Further research revealed that Stephanie, who was periodically depressed, had endured further trauma from a boyfriend who forced her to have an abortion. The gradual revelations Rear makes about her gifted stepsister’s life—along with the tense cat-and-mouse story of how two police investigators elicited a confession from the psychopathic serial rapist who killed Stephanie—make for compellingly suspenseful reading. But the book’s greatest strength by far is the way it evokes the “fragility of [human] existence” while reminding readers of the terrifying and random violence to which women continue to be subjected, both at home and in the world.

A chillingly candid memoir and work of true crime.