BRIDGTON, Maine — Crystal Perry was murdered in her Bridgton home nearly 30 years ago, riveting Maine as the case took over a decade to solve. Perry's daughter, Sarah, was just 12 years old when her mother was killed.
Sarah Perry's award-winning memoir chronicling her mother's murder will be the focus of an upcoming discussion for the Finding Our Voices book club for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Sarah remembers waking up to her mother's screams, fighting for her life in the kitchen—just down the hall from her closed-door bedroom.
"Surviving that night was a trauma for me to disconnect a timeline, who I was before and after," Sarah explained.
It was May 11, 1994, and Sarah was only 12.
She later found her mother, Crystal Perry, on the kitchen floor. Blood was everywhere. She had been stabbed dozens of times. The youngster fled the small ranch home barefoot, finally finding help at a restaurant nearly a mile away.
Published six years ago to critical acclaim, Perry's book "After the Eclipse" chronicles Sarah's life before and after that horrific night and the 12-year investigation it took to find her mother's killer. DNA evidence finally led to charges against Michael Hutchinson, who lived about a mile from the single mother's home, but the two did not know each other. Sarah testified about the loss of her mother at Hutchinson's trial in 2007.
"My kids will never get to know their grandmother," Sarah told the court.
Hutchinson, who maintains his innocence, is serving a life sentence.
"Grief continues forever. So, I don't know if that made that better, and the book was not easy to write either; I had to go back into a lot of old territory and revisit," Sarah said.
Sarah, now an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas, spent more than six years pouring over police and autopsy reports, piecing together the complicated life of her mother, who was impacted by multi-generational substance use and domestic violence. A story that is helping break the shame and silence of countless survivors.
"Women have been coming up to me in readings—saying the violence in this story reflects my own experience and allowed me to think through what I have experienced," Sarah explained.
Sarah will discuss her book during an online Finding Our Voices book club event on Monday at 6 p.m. as part of Domestic Abuse Awareness Month. Patrisha McLean is a survivor and the founder of the nonprofit. Click here to sign up for the online discussion with Sarah Perry.
"It opens the eyes of people who don't identify as survivors in the discussion," McLean added.
The event is part of the nonprofit's library fall tour focused on the impact of domestic abuse on children, featuring survivor-led discussions and short films to public libraries from Millinocket to York.