Woman In the Woods

Words by Holly Haworth | Photos by Rinne Allen

The week police found her dead in the woods, the woods were coming alive. It was late February, that tender time when the canopy has yet to leaf but ephemeral flowers speckle the forest floor. Under the trees, soft light pouring in: rue-anemone, round-lobed hepatica, trillium, bloodroot. And a woman’s body, dead of blunt-force trauma.

Twenty-two-year-old Laken Riley was murdered in Athens, Georgia, where I live. Her death sparked a national conversation — not about the ongoing horror of gendered violence, but about the suspect’s immigration status. 

A naturalist and forager, I look for patterns. To me, the woods are an intricate tapestry in which I always try to see the bigger picture. The bloodroot that pushed through the soil and unfurled in bright, blooming patches the week of Riley’s murder grows on slopes above creeks, in rich, well-draining soil, where it’s cool at night and slower to warm in the morning. What keeps me walking in the woods is seeing how one thing is connected to another, which is also the work of being a writer. Most women who are murdered are not murdered in the woods, but after Riley was found on a trail in the woods that I often walk alone as a woman, it’s the pattern I saw as I trod through a terrible thicket of stories. 

A month before Laken Riley was killed, an unidentified woman in her 40s or 50s was found dead in the woods in nearby Atlanta with “signs of assault” on her body. In North Carolina four months earlier, 40-year-old Crystal Michelle Loughran was found in a clearing in the woods, shot to death. Within the seven months before Loughran’s death, 29-year-old Lauren Heike was found dead off a Phoenix hiking trail, stabbed 15 times, and 58-year-old Leticia Martinez was found in the woods in Renton, Washington, strangled to death. 

Between February and May of last year, six women, all under 40, were found murdered in the vicinity of Portland, Oregon, “most in wooded or secluded rural areas,” the news reported. The year before, 19-year-old Sarai Llanos Gomez was found stabbed to death in the woods in Flowery Branch, Georgia, an hour from where I live. A couple of months later, the body of 59-year-old Debbie Collier, who lived here in Athens, was found in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest just a little ways north. She was naked and burned, grasping a tree at the bottom of an embankment. 

In 2021, 22-year-old Gabby Petito was found in Teton National Forest in Wyoming, dead from blunt-force trauma and strangulation, and 24-year-old Kylen Schulte and 38-year-old Crystal Turner were found shot to death in the La Sal Mountains in Utah, where they had been camping. Two months after those three killings, 48-year-old Paula Marie Kindley was found in the woods in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, dead of blunt-force trauma, and 30-year-old Miranda Springs was found murdered in the woods a little farther east, in Charlotte. Two months later, 30-year-old Jamesha Trammell was found shot to death in the woods in an Atlanta park. And just four days before Laken Riley was killed this year, the body of 26-year-old Leah Chaparro was found in the woods in Redding, Connecticut. 

These are only some of the stories; and the stories of Black and Indigenous women found dead in the woods often don’t receive any media attention at all, although they are killed at much higher rates than white women. Investigative police bureaus rarely give the same time and resources to finding the killers of women of color. But in nearly all of these publicized murders, a male suspect was arrested, a bureau congratulated itself, and a police chief assured the public that there was no remaining danger, failing to point out a clearly visible pattern, unmistakable to anyone who’s paying attention — as walking in the woods teaches us to do. 

While bloodroot can be found in ample shade under tall, mature trees, I began to see that a woman’s dead body might be found anywhere at all in the woods. As I foraged murders like a terrible, bitter fruit that is always in season, and collected them onto the page, it was clear that women found dead in the woods are all part of an ecology of gendered violence. Notice the markings of male rage on these bodies, the signs of sexual brutality, the fetish for a woman not alive in the woods but dead on the ground. Who will be the next woman killed, I wondered, her body found blooming with decay on the forest floor? I wondered as I walked the woods alone: Who will be the next woman stalked and hunted as prey — raped, assaulted, attacked, stripped naked, bludgeoned, stabbed, strangled, or shot? 

I walked many hours that week of Riley’s murder so that I could see the trillium, the hepatica, the anemone and bloodroot blooming. I love them all, but I focused my gaze especially on bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, because it’s the most ephemeral, opening for such a short time before its petals shatter away and disappear. I needed its brief balm, brief, surprising beauty. 

With Riley’s killing on my mind, though, I also couldn’t help but notice the blood in the plant’s name. The solace the woods gave me also brought grief and fear. I thought of the ephemerality of too many women’s lives, the perennial danger of being a woman. While I can find bloodroot in flower for mere days in early spring, I might find a woman’s dead body at any time of year, seeping blood like the red sap that bloodroot leaks when it is uprooted. My eyes scanned for bloodroot blooming in the leaf litter, thinking of all the searches for missing women that end in the woods (and most stories did not describe the particular habitat beyond “the woods” or “a wooded area”). While I might find bloodroot along a creek, in the shade, for just a few days in spring, I might find a woman’s body anywhere, any time, any season. Or — as every woman who walks often in the woods alone must inevitably imagine — someone might find my own.

For naturalist Holly Haworth, an early-spring murder brought bluntly into focus how sylvan surroundings are too often the scene of gendered violence.

What does it mean to be a woman in the woods? I started to wonder after Laken Riley’s murder. If we walk through the forest of language to dig for the roots of “woods,” we find that “wooded” was wald, related to wild, which is connected to will. To be in the woods is to be wild is to be self-willed. In Old English, the word for woods, wudu, was sometimes used to mean wild, as in wudufogol, “wild bird,” or wudurose, “wild rose.” The uncaged bird, the untamed rose, self-willed.

As for “woman,” we find that the word was a compound of wife and man, literally wife-man. And so we can see that in some of our oldest conceptions, a woman exists only insofar as she is chained to a man, her self-will already bound as soon as she is called a woman. And forests, the woods, have long been feminized in the rhetoric of taming the wilderness, fetishized as “virgin” before being cut to the ground. 

Murder is the most extreme form of revoking a person’s freedom to be self-willed, the most extreme form of caging the wild bird, taming the wild rose. An estimated 89,000 women and girls in the world were murdered in 2022, most of which were gender-motivated, according to a United Nations report. That’s to say that while men kill other men for all sorts of reasons, men kill women because they are women. (A UN report also found that globally, 98 percent of murderers are men.) 

An estimated 24.7 million acres of wild woods are razed and cut down every year while we are perpetually fighting, too, for the self-will of women. In the gruesome ecology of gender violence, one in five women in this country will report being raped in their lifetime; a rape is reported every 3.9 minutes of every day and night. But most experts believe nearly 80 percent of rapes and sexual assaults aren’t reported. Male lawmakers across the country are pushing anti-abortion bills that require victims of rape who are impregnated to carry and birth their babies, and in 31 states those rapists have parental rights. Meanwhile, the leading cause of death for pregnant women is their male partners. Then there is domestic abuse, which is practically impossible to quantify, but we do know that the primary cause of injury to women ages 15 to 44 in the United States is being beaten by their male partner. 

The men and boys in the home I grew up in sought to revoke my self-will at every turn by exerting verbal, psychological, sexual, and physical violence. I went to the patch of woods behind our house to get away, to be alone, to pretend the world was different. And there, it was different: none of the creatures around me showed the least bit of interest in taking my will away. No one told me what to do, or how to be. With the wood thrush and the otter, the salamander and fox, the hickory and oak, moss and fern, greenbriar and bellflower, I belonged. If even for the briefest of moments, I felt my imagination unfurl like a flower, felt myself grow taller like the trees. And then, I heard my own voice. 

This is, I think, what it means to be a woman in the woods. To be a wild bird, to be a wild rose. Uncaged, untamed. Singing, reaching for the light. To have a will. To have a voice like every other living thing.

To be a dead woman in the woods means the opposite of all that. And to be a woman in the woods is also to know it could go that way for you, too. Because the woods are wild — because they are often beyond surveillance and control — they are good places for a man to kill a woman or dispose of her body. Women often go missing for months and sometimes years before they are found in the woods, while the man who killed them gets away and lives free. (This is especially true in the case of missing Indigenous women, for whom searches aren’t conducted with the same rigor, if at all.) And so we must seriously ask why being self-willed and wild for so many men — not all of them — means to be free to take the will of others away, particularly to treat a woman’s body as violently as he wishes, and even to kill her. 

A woman found dead in the woods comes up so often in news stories that it begins to read like a literary trope. In our stories, then, a woman in the woods is usually not a woman alive. I Google “woman in the woods” and get a book of that title, the description of which begins this way: “In the Maine woods, rain exposes the body of a woman buried in a shallow grave.” Or, if she is alive, she is sexualized and hunted. In the image results for the same search, I see loads of stock images of women, most taken from behind, with titles like “backside view of blonde woman walking through the woods,” “a beautiful young woman walks alone in the dark woods.” And then, not far down, “woman running in fear in woods,” “scared girl running through forest.” And then a woman’s lifeless body draped over a fallen tree, “muerte, mujer.” Dead, woman.

Delicate and all-but-momentary, bloodroot blooms in just-awakening woods. Too many women’s lives are likewise too fleeting.

It’s not that there are no natural dangers in the woods. In the warmer months in the Georgia Piedmont, I keep my eyes peeled for copperheads that might be slithering, camouflaged, in the leaf litter. In East Tennessee, where I grew up and where I became a certified naturalist, I watch for the lumbering dark shapes of black bears. In a high desert pine forest in New Mexico, I hiked nervously in the rain, following fresh mountain lion prints on the wet trail. Still, I know that the chances of being bitten by a snake or attacked by a bear or mountain lion are extremely low, while I have felt seriously in danger more times than I care to count by men who encroached on my space in a threatening way when I hiked or camped alone. 

When I worked on a reintroduction program for Mexican gray wolves in Gila National Forest in New Mexico, I walked for miles in wolf territory, their howls surrounding me at night where I camped under the pine trees. But I knew that according to statistics there was almost no chance at all of being attacked by a wolf. When I came across a man in the backcountry with a rifle strapped to his back, I knew that I faced a real statistical danger. Eighty percent of women experience harassment or assault by a man. Yet the wolf, an ecologically important top predator, has been demonized and eradicated from most of its natural ecosystems while we have failed to address the harms of that other top predator.

We all know the story of a young woman who goes walking to her grandmother’s house in the woods. As soon as she enters the woods, she meets a wolf. The wolf thought to himself, what a tender young creature, what a nice plump mouthful. The young woman’s cloak is red, some scholars argue, for the menstrual blood that begins at puberty, a symbolic marker of her womanhood, and the wolf is not a wolf but a man. We are told that this story serves as a warning. It is the tale of what it means to be a woman in the woods.

To begin to rewrite this story, we have to use our voices as women to speak to our reality. Since Laken Riley’s murder, some politicians — like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Representative from Riley’s home state and a supporter of former President Donald Trump, whom a jury in a civil case found to be a rapist and who was recorded on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women — have been trying to lead us astray, to veer us off this clearly marked trail we should be following. They hope we cannot see the forest for the trees. They hope we are not good ecologists and cannot see how things are connected. Many campaigns have begun to keep track, though, including the Killed Women Count, Counting Dead Women, the Femicide Census, and Killed Women. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous woman to hold the position, announced a new unit in the Bureau of Indian Affairs to address the issue of missing and murdered Native women and girls. 

In our unfortunate fairy tale of a woman in the woods, Little Red Riding Hood thought to herself, as long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path to run into the wood. But this cannot be our reality, cannot be the moral we are left with when the next woman is found. Throughout ancient history, the survival of our species has hinged on women’s knowledge of forests, on their skills with foraging plants for food and medicine, their orienteering and navigating abilities. A woman in the woods is one who knows where a spring bubbles forth, where the cress grows. 

But this knowledge extends into the metaphorical woods we are always finding our way through. We collect information, make connections, listen for the stories that are true, the tales that will move our species forward, seeing clearly. It is a way of honoring and protecting life itself. The woods are our birthright, a place where we remember. Every patch of forest we can protect, no matter how small, is a place where we can witness and learn from the wild. It was the female scientist Suzanne Simard who brought forth the story about how individual trees support one another, how they send nutrients underground through the mycelial network, using interlacing fungal threads to nourish and protect each other, to send messages of care. Men need to remember what the wild teaches, too. They need the woods to help them see ways of being self-willed that do not involve taking away the will of other living beings. Ways of being self-willed that nourish and support women and the whole living world. 

My imagination flowers, and I grow taller, like the trees. I will use my voice to share what the woods teach me. 

And so I kept walking my usual paths through the beeches, hickories, oaks, and pines as early spring gave way to warmer days. Within a week or two after Riley’s killing, the bloodroot went to seed, and the crowns of the tulip poplars burst into green. Bees hummed at violets. Moths fluttered clumsy, delicate wings through the breeze in the awakening understory. The woods were coming alive again. For Laken Riley and all the thousands of other women whose lives were too ephemeral, may the woods come alive again.  ◊

Holly Haworth is an award-winning author whose work has been included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and listed as notable in The Best American Travel Writing. She is a recipient of the Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her first nonfiction book, This Resounding World: A Field Guide to Listening, has received the Robert B. Silvers Foundation Grant for Works-in-Progress.

Rinne Allen is a photographer living in Athens, Georgia, who documents process as a way to visually demonstrate the effort that goes into creating things. Rinne spends most of her days collaborating with chefs, farmers, artisans, designers, and researchers to document their work and the process that goes into making it, with the hope that those who view her pictures will learn something from them.