Early news coverage characterized Stetson-Shanahan as a “tortured artist” — he was an illustrator and worked crating pieces for an art-handling company — and Bush as merely his “roommate.” In an interview with a New York Post reporter on Rikers Island two days after he killed Bush, Stetson-Shanahan said, “I’d like to be put somewhere upstate. Somewhere 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 was quick to clarify to reporters that unlike Stetson-Shanahan, Bush did not graduate. The son of New Yorker cartoonist Danny Shanahan and Janet Stetson, a Bard alumna and administrator, Stetson-Shanahan grew up in Rhinebeck, N.Y., 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 thoughtful person, with a very distinctive artistic talent.”
Essayist and novelist Sarah Gerard knew Bush — they had worked together at a bookstore in Manhattan and connected over their common hometown of St. Petersburg, Fla. “She was aloof but funny, at times brash, and sophisticated, yet rough around the edges in a way I recognized as a hallmark of Saint Pete natives,” Gerard writes. They “had only just begun to form a friendship” when Bush died. After Bush was killed, Gerard began to feel the impulse to write about her, both as an attempt to understand why Stetson-Shanahan had stabbed her and to “keep knowing her.” Carolyn had been so many things to so many people — quick-witted “Carrie” to her family and oldest friends; intuitive and studious “Carolyn” to her friends from Bard; community-minded, philosophical “Coco” to her “family” at Wendy’s Subway. Gerard writes: “I wanted to create an archive of the stories people were sharing and find more of them and gather them all into an indelible record of her 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 an incisive, deeply reported investigation into the personal and societal circumstances that led to her death.
Gerard writes that “a trial is a series of minute details held up and examined through a prism, scattering bright sober light in every direction.” She deploys a similar approach to writing about Bush and Stetson-Shanahan, each detail taking on weight through the prism of the killing. In addition to her writing, Gerard is both a collage artist and a private investigator pursuing a graduate degree in criminal justice at University of Colorado Denver, where she studies gender-based violence. Throughout the book, she weaves the linear story of Stetson-Shanahan’s bench trial, which began in November 2019, with snapshots from 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 adolescent LiveJournal blog posts. The juxtaposition recalls parataxis — the literary technique of placing seemingly unrelated images or fragments next to one another — that Bush had been thinking about before her death.
With this approach, Gerard pushes back against the typical arc of a true crime story and invites the reader to make their own meaning of Bush’s life and death alongside her. Indeed, though Gerard was friends with Bush, and though she is consciously shaping how readers encounter this story, she enters into the narrative infrequently and rarely makes explicit arguments. Instead, she presents the recollections of Bush’s loved ones largely without commentary. At times, it is difficult to keep track of these people and their connections to Bush — Gerard typically does not re-identify their relationship to her on subsequent mentions, even if 200 pages have passed since we last heard from them. (A “list of characters” that appears in the front of the book runs to six full pages and more than 125 names.) Still, the sheer volume of these remembrances underlines how much Bush meant to those who knew her, and how her many ambitions were brutally cut short.
Gerard makes her own perspective felt most in the chapters about Stetson-Shanahan’s trial and sentencing, which she attended, and in the last third of the book, when she contrasts Bush’s experience at Bard with Stetson-Shanahan’s and contextualizes the killing within the larger culture of the school. As a White woman, Bush may have been “the perfect victim,” but Gerard makes a compelling case that Stetson-Shanahan, as a White man of a certain class, was first forged in a culture that minimizes violence against women and then shielded from the consequences of his actions.
Gerard writes of two other instances 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 president of Bard since 1975, has long abdicated responsibility for the safety and well-being of his students — at least his female students. At a town hall he held at his home in the wake of a rape on campus in 2015, he was secretly recorded saying, “A girl drinking a bottle of vodka and then going to a party is as wise as me walking into a Nuremberg rally while wearing the yellow badge.” Gerard writes that he has never denied saying it. Though Bush and Stetson-Shanahan had both left Bard’s campus four years before the killing, this context does not feel gratuitous; alongside Botstein, seven other Bard administrators and professors wrote letters to the court in support of Stetson-Shanahan, routinely describing their shock that someone as gentle and peaceful as he could commit such a crime.
The judge presiding over Stetson-Shanahan’s case believed the narrative that killing Carolyn was an aberration of his character, one that occurred in the context of an “adverse psychological reaction by ingesting marijuana.” In 2020, he convicted Stetson-Shanahan of manslaughter in the second degree (the top charge he faced was murder in the second degree) and sentenced him to five to 15 years in prison. “Carrie Carolyn Coco” is a sharp reckoning with the systems that coddled Stetson-Shanahan while disregarding Bush, a young woman Gerard makes readers miss.
Kristen Martin is a cultural critic based in Philadelphia. Her debut narrative nonfiction book, “The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow,” is forthcoming from Bold Type Books.
Carrie Carolyn Coco
My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable
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