In 2009, Kissinger and fellow Journal Sentinel reporter Susanne Rust were Pulitzer finalists for investigative reporting with their stories on the failures of the federal government to regulate household chemicals. Their work won the Polk Award, the Oakes Award and two National Journalism Awards.

Kissinger talked with us by phone last week about reporting on highly contested issues, getting readers to care, and the haunting events that became a key part of her story. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

You address the sweep of involuntary treatment or commitment for the mentally ill across more than 40 years. And then there’s the rest of the project: graphics, other print pieces, video. What was the paper hoping to do with this project?

It was biting off quite a lot. The assignment came from the managing editor, George Stanley. It was right after the shooting in Tucson, when Gabby Giffords and the others were shot.

Just to backtrack a bit, I’ve written about mental health issues for the paper for a long time. This has been something that we have heard repeatedly: “Why aren’t we better able to predict who is in trouble, who is dangerous to himself or to others, identify them and get them into help before tragedy ensues?”

The night that President Obama gave his compelling speech in Tucson, I got an email from George Stanley saying, “Let’s take a look at this.” I already knew that the Alberta Lessard decision was the benchmark, that it was the pivotal court case that led to sweeping reform in commitment laws all over the country. So that’s how it got started.

One of our editors noted how vital it was for your story that you found Lessard. How did you locate her? Had you already been in touch with her?

I had, so that was the easy part. Again, because I’ve written about mental health issues for so many years, I was familiar with her. She is going strong at 91, and is a fascinating person. I’m in her debt for her being so generous with her time. And believe me, we spent many, many hours talking about all kinds of things. That was, I think, critical. But in terms of putting together the story, this was not so much a focus on the Alberta Lessard case. It was a happy coincidence that it was the 40-year anniversary, but that was not the incentive for doing the story.

We spent many hours at her house, the video/photo guy, Gary Porter, and me. She makes for compelling footage, as well as being a human quote machine. What a treat in every way, especially journalistically, to be able to have access to this historical figure. I kind of likened her, in my mind, to the Rosa Parks of the mental health system.

But it’s complicated. You’re trying to address the issue of protecting patients’ rights and also the challenge of protecting society from the violently mentally ill. How did you approach balancing the very graphic nature of the murders that make these headlines and this other fact, which you carefully note, that only a tiny percentage of mentally ill people ever commit this kind of violence?

It was the most challenging assignment that I’ve had in my 31 years as a reporter. You probably hear that from everyone you talk to! (Laughs.) It was daunting. I was very, very concerned that we not overstate anything, both with the regard to the issue of dangerousness and mental illness and the Lessard decision legacy. I had in my mind every day that we had to give this the exact right emphasis – I was very aware of the sensitivities around this issue. I worked on this thing for many months and was really careful.

Did you have any rules for yourself, ways of checking yourself?

The short answer to that is yes, because I had background enough to know about the different poles or camps, the ideological ground that people come from. It’s a lot like the abortion issue, or even the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There are very passionate opinions on what is the best way to care for people with mental illness.

There were a number of challenges: not playing into stereotypes, not sensationalizing something or overstating it. Also in terms of telling a story, not devolving into a he-said-she-said kind of thing. I didn’t want it to be a quote-’em-up about what’s the best way to identify somebody with mental illness. I wanted to go beyond that.

We started by going right to the people on the polar ends of this argument. I began with the Bazelon Law Center in Washington, D.C., and the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia, because those two organizations represent really opposite thinking in many ways on the question of commitment.

What about somebody asked to tackle this kind of story without your experience? This story has to balance a lot of ambiguity. Can you offer any strategies for how to approach the Middle East, Northern Ireland and mental health issues?

In some ways, that’s almost an advantage. I felt that I had those people in my head the whole time. It was a good thing, but it also slowed me down a lot. I was nervous – not that I wanted to please them, that was not the purpose of the story – but I’m acutely aware of the sensitivities.

The advice to people 5 or 10 years in … Just assume that people don’t have a big background. You can see pretty quickly where people fall. And so I kind of had a twin narrative in this story that I tried to maintain: Alberta Lessard and the Richard Wilson case. And it’s really interesting about how that came to pass.

In Richard’s case, the current case, (there’s) a young man, obviously dangerous, and the mother – both parents really – grasping for any help they could get. In Alberta’s case, she’s literally 91 years old, not a harm to anybody, and she keeps getting arrested and thrown into mental health complex. How ironic and what different circumstances. I thought that it made for a very interesting contrast. Younger reporters or reporters with less experience, I think they could still tease that out, that there are very different points of view that represent the tension in the overall argument.

I guess this is kind of hokey, but I always think, “What would you be talking about over the fence?” That’s the cliché in reporting, of course. If you were talking over the fence to a neighbor, how would you frame it?

So how did the Wilson case come to you?

It’s one of those things that happen every once in a while that give you chills. I know Martha Wilson, the mother in this really sad story. She, among other things, taught my kids. She’s a schoolteacher, and she grew up next door to my cousin. She was not a friend, but an acquaintance, somebody I would know to say hello to on the street.

So there I was one morning, two or three months after getting this assignment. I had told my cousin that I was working on this, traveling around the country to talk about this really tough issue. I’m out walking my beagle one morning, and there’s Martha out walking her dog, and she came up to me and said, “Meg, I understand you’re working on this story. You know, we’re having a really hard time with our son Richard. We can’t get him to take his medication. What are you finding out in your reporting?” I said, “Oh, it’s just a mess. It’s really a challenge. I’m so sorry you’re going through this.” She said, “I’m going to call you sometime, and maybe we can talk about this some more.” Two weeks later, her son kills her father with an ax.

It was just haunting. There wasn’t a day after that that I didn’t see Martha Wilson’s face when I sat down to write this story or to report it. That was so chilling to me, and it kind of put the story in my lap. That was a good thing and a bad thing. It made it even more challenging, but it also made it more searing.

When it came to putting the stories together, some of our editors liked the braided narrative that moved in and out of the different stories, and some wanted it more pared down. Was that a discussion that took place at the Journal Sentinel, too?

We didn’t really debate it, but we talked about it. You know, the challenge of it, of course, is that you don’t want to confuse the reader. You also don’t want to make it too tidy, or to be hokey or forced. But it did provide the continuum. You could see the vast difference, the conditions Alberta faced in 1971 that led to her challenge of these laws, and then fast forward to 2011 and the practical implications.

But then again, I was quite concerned about not wanting to oversimplify that so as to say that the Lessard decision was responsible for the Richard Wilson murder – that would really be a stretch. But certainly the Lessard decision informed or provided the atmosphere or the legal environment for how he was ultimately treated. He had pulled a knife on his mom and dad, and they had called the police, and the police took him out to the mental health complex. It was these doctors, using that litmus test that was established in the Lessard case, who concluded that he was not an imminent danger. And so they didn’t commit him. And months later, this happened. It just makes you wonder, what would have happened if the laws were different?

What did you see as the main storytelling challenges when you were writing the piece?

I always approach stories about mental health stuff with the concern that readers identify with the people in the story as people. I know how marginalized people with mental illness are in our society. You’ve got to get them to care, No. 1, and that’s a huge challenge. And then the next challenge is to keep them invested in the story. And this is a really long story, and as you noted, really complicated. And so the next challenge was to keep them engaged and make sure that all points of view were represented as best as you can – and then to answer the question: “Why aren’t we doing a better job?”

I don’t know that we answered that, but I think that we gave readers a lot to think about. I learned a lot in doing this, and I think readers got a historical sense of events.

What has reaction been to the piece?

It’s been really mixed. Some in the mental health community were upset, especially at the layout, the fact that we would feature Jared Loughner’s face and (Seung-Hui) Cho’s face in there, that we were highlighting the issue of dangerousness. That’s a really sensitive topic in the mental health community. They’ve fought against the stereotype of the crazed lunatic. They were upset that there was that emphasis given to the front page and a big chunk of the newspaper that day to that issue. That’s one camp.

But families of people who have been in this situation were very grateful, I would say, and I think in a way relieved that what they go through all the time was validated in a newspaper article. And then others found it an interesting part of history that they didn’t know about.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

On stories that teach and reach:

A cornerstone of effective narrative is to invite empathy through the capture of universal emotion and authentic drama. Meg Kissinger does that here, and with one of the toughest of subjects. Mental illness isn’t something that is easy to relate to for those who don’t suffer from it or aren’t intimately connected to it.

But the real genius of Kissinger’s piece lies in how she uses the narrative not just to evoke emotion, but to teach. Her deep reporting and deft weave of story and context takes readers through an important tour of the history, law, politics, policy and economics of society’s attempts to deal with the mentally ill. It’s a classic example of “teachable moment” journalism – Kissinger uses a compelling storyline to crack open understanding of shared systems. She lays out that aspect of her package with the simplicity that only comes from bulletproof reporting.

I was lured into Kissinger’s piece with the heartbreaking introduction to the Wilson family and the quick reminders of the horrors that played out at Virginia Tech and a Tucson shopping center. Spare use of the right numbers highlighted the enormity of this issue. Then the grabber – a tight but sophisticated “nut” section where Kissinger lays out the contrast between our reactions to physical and mental illness, and delivers a quick litany of “whys” – sets up that perfect hook:

The answer begins 40 years ago on the second-story window sill of Alberta Lessard’s West Allis apartment.

From there I am not just being taken into the tragic story of one family, I’m on a quest – almost an archeological dig through courtrooms and records and memories. Kissinger doesn’t leave us with the frustration of where we are, but helps us understand how we got here. Along the way, she reveals how the best of social intentions that drove the civil liberties movements of the 1960s and ’70s set the table for unintended consequences today. This is the stuff of elite, book-length journalism. Bless her heart, Kissinger gives it to us in the daily fishwrap.

That approach reminded me of two other remarkable works that used intimate stories to teach bigger social truths:

• In “And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic,” published in 1987, Randy Shilts went on a hunt for “Patient Zero.” He reported around the world to try to track down the origin of HIV’s sudden spread. (Shilts died of HIV/AIDS in 1994. His book is a movie of the same name.) Alberta Lessard is the “patient zero” in Kissinger’s story, and helps us track the origins of decisions that determine how we deal with the mentally ill.

• In 1996, The Oregonian’s Tom Hallman Jr. wrote “Children of a Lesser Hope,” a groundbreaking piece on children being raised by developmentally disabled parents. Hallman found a small program for normal-intelligence children who, often by the age of 5, had surpassed their parents’ ability to read, make change and navigate society. This was a subset of children born after society banned the forced sterilization of those deemed incompetent, including those long called mentally retarded. As with Kissinger’s piece, it was a glimpse at the unforeseen consequences of a good social intention.

I could cite other examples. For my lights, this is the best use of narrative journalism. It doesn’t just engage – it educates and enlightens. In terms of service and relevance, it runs parallel to the best of investigative journalism. No matter the story, certain elements are always present:

• Deep, layered reporting. The sourcing box to Kissinger’s story shows how far she went to get it right.
• A clear, tight focus. Kissinger doesn’t try to tell it all. Instead, she layers information in support of a primary question.
• A view of history. Kissinger doesn’t just look at the moment in front of her, but wonders what led up to that moment, and where it might go next.
• The right, relatable characters. The reader has to feel some genuine connection to the people who shine light on the bigger issue. Kissinger found that in the Wilson family.
• A disciplined story structure and writing. Kissinger didn’t rely on tricks and flourishes; her elegance is in her simplicity. Not easy to do, but so easy to read.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

I’m a big admirer of Meg Kissinger’s story on mental illness and the law. It’s a complex and controversial topic, one that can provoke a highly charged debate, especially in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech and Tucson, Ariz., shootings.

Meg tackles the subject with authority, sensitivity and balance. She is an ambitious storyteller, using what I call a “braiding” technique – weaving several storylines together, shifting time frames and moving from one perspective to another.

In my view, this braided approach is not entirely successful, so let me dive into the issues of structure and sequence a bit more.

In “Sequencing: Text as Line,” an essay in “Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide,” Tom French urges writers to report and write along a clear, simple line.

“The act of narrative writing is arranging the elements of each sentence, each paragraph, each section, along a line,” French writes. “The skillful writer arranges a line that the reader can follow easily.”

French is not arguing that writers should restrict themselves only to chronological storytelling. But he says that every time a writer diverges from the simple line, there’s the potential for confusing the reader – a new character is introduced, the scene and time frame are different. French asks the writer to think hard before he or she chooses to break the narrative line.

There are often good reasons to break that line, especially in explanatory stories like Meg’s. In “Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies For Every Writer,” Roy Peter Clark explains: “The writer tells us a story, then stops the story to tell us about the story, but then returns to the story… Wonderful insights and explanations are hung like pearls on a strong narrative string.”

I don’t think that Meg could have told her story in one simple line. But I do think the story could have been even more powerful by weaving together only the strongest narrative threads. The other material – the other perspectives and anecdotes – could make strong secondary stories or sidebars.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will outline the sequence of Meg’s story here:

• Introducing Martha Wilson (April 2011)
• Passage providing context to violence and mental illness, plus details on Virginia Tech and Tucson shootings (April 2007, June 2010)
• Psychiatrist Jon Lehrmann speaks about tendency for public to look the other way when confronted with mental illness
• Framing question: Why can’t the public and families do more to make sure the mentally ill get the care that they need and help them and others stay safe?
• Introducing Alberta Lessard (October 1971)
• Martha Wilson looks for help for her son Richard (April 2011)
• Sam Hengel’s story – boy who held teacher and students hostage (November 2010)
• Alberta Lessard’s court case (Fall 1971)
• Lessard’s lawyers’ legal strategy and U.S. Supreme Court ruling (1971-1972)
• Background on anosognosia
• Aftermath of the Lessard ruling, including Milwaukee County Court Commissioner Rosemary Thornton’s experience
• The pace of public mental hospitals emptying out accelerates after the Lessard ruling
• Alberta Lessard’s experience after the court ruling
• How mental health care is different today, including debate over court-ordered outpatient treatment
• The experience of several people who survived the Virginia Tech and Tucson shootings, or whose loved ones were killed in the shootings (2011)
• Pat Spoerl’s story – she has struggled for 35 years to keep her son safe (2011)
• E. Fuller Torrey’s registry of violent crimes committed against and by people with mental illness
• Richard Wilson’s violent act (May 2011)
• Alberta Lessard reacts (May 2011)
• Lessard’s continuing problems and arrests (Sept. 2011)
• Martha and Jeff Wilson attend Richard’s court hearing (June 2011)

The strongest narrative threads are the stories of the Wilson family and of Alberta Lessard. (I include Lessard’s court case and the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling as part of Lessard’s narrative thread.)

Each would be a powerful story in its own right. But the two stories also play well off each other – they show how complicated and painful the issues are. And they get to the heart of the central question: Why can’t the public and families do more to make sure the mentally ill get the care that they need and help them and others stay safe?

I would have advocated braiding these two narrative threads together, and interrupting the story, as sparingly as possible, whenever greater context and explanation is necessary.

While there’s value in the passages on Sam Hengel, Pat Spoerl and Rosemary Thornton, I probably would have moved them into sidebars. This would allow the reader to focus on the Wilson and Lessard stories, and move with more velocity toward Richard Wilson’s violent act.

There’s a strong argument for including the voices of the Virginia Tech and Tucson shooting survivors and families of the victims in the main story. Here’s another approach, though: Write a story based on their experience, and then run it prominently alongside the main story.

Some general takeaways for narrative writers, then (in addition to all the things Kissinger pulls off here): Use clean, simple lines whenever possible. Braid fewer narrative threads, not more. Introduce fewer characters and voices, not more. And stop to provide context and explanation, but only when necessary.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

This story could have been written as a straight chronology, beginning in the past, with a woman who thought Richard Nixon was out to get her.

It could have then moved to the present with the story of two mass murderers and why a young man named Richard Wilson didn’t get the help he needed before he turned into a killer.

But the story was infinitely more effective because Meg Kissinger started in the present, bounced back in time, then toggled back and forth.

Normally, I’m hesitant to jump around that much. As Tom points out, readers can get lost, and the writer can, too. He’s right, also, that the story could have been more tightly focused around the two strongest narratives.

But what I most liked here was that story within the story. It actually kept you focused and eager to read on.

Why didn’t people around Cho or Loughner do more to make sure these obviously ill men got care and that others around them were safe? Why couldn’t Martha and Jeff Wilson force their troubled son to take the medicine that might make him well?

The answer begins 40 years ago on the second-story window sill of Alberta Lessard’s West Allis apartment.

Who could stop there?

Kissinger did several things effectively to weave Lessard’s tale into the larger story.

First, she recognized that Lessard’s case was not only pivotal, but inherently compelling and ironic. Readers would want to follow it through. It was the perfect way to illustrate how difficult it is for even the well-meaning to address the issue of mental illness. Lessard is crazy, sure, and also – at times – perfectly rational.

She took her time. This is a difficult subject, for society to address and a reporter to tackle within the constraints of a newspaper article, even a long piece like this one. So Kissinger told a little at a time, giving you the opportunity to get to know Lessard and become invested in her circumstances.

She made Lessard familiar. So often, particularly with the coverage of mass murders, the deranged killers are little understood. This woman didn’t pick up a gun or a knife, but it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that her paranoia could have fueled something deadly.

She didn’t wait to point out why the old story is so relevant today. Notice that Kissinger doesn’t expect you to read to the end to understand the ramifications of Lessard’s battle. She stops to make sure you take in just how important this case was.

For instance:

Her persistence would change mental health care across America.

And then later:

The standard of imminent danger set by Lessard’s case would prove to be a tragically inaccurate measure for who was mentally ill and in need of being kept safe. … In time, even Lessard would be denied protection she desperately sought. By correcting one outrage, her case had created others.

Again, who could stop there?

————

For more on this story, check back tomorrow for our Q-and-A with Meg Kissinger. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? Send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

The story, which ran in the January 16 issue of Sports Illustrated, breaks down the legend of Herring eliminating Jordan from the team during his sophomore year. It turns out that events may not have unfolded in quite the way that Jordan came to recount them in the decades that followed.

The most surprising thing about Lake’s narrative is not that Jordan has misremembered or exploited a minor high school trauma, but what has happened in his life – and Herring’s life – since. Lake uses counterpoint beautifully, and the degree of Herring’s suffering and decline seems to parallel the degree to which Jordan’s star rises.

As he is inaugurated into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Jordan surrounds himself with coaching legends, friends and associates, whom Lake contrasts with the homeless derelicts who make up Herring’s social set these days.

We pull up at the ramshackle house and step into a blinding afternoon, 97º, vibrating with the song of cicadas. Pop carries the pizza box in one hand and the bag of King Cobra and cigarettes in the other. We walk toward the picnic table under the spreading oak, where several ragged men cool their heels in the fine gray sand. Collectively they are known as the Oak Tree Boys. They are here morning and night. Some are homeless. One has a wild shock of white hair and another is missing his middle lower teeth, so he seems to have fangs. They have nowhere else to go. Pop lets them stay here. He still gives what he can.

Pop opens the pizza box. The fanged man takes two pieces. The third goes to the wild-haired man, who gobbles most of it and flings the crust in the street. Two seagulls swoop in and finish it off. Pop opens the King Cobra and takes a long pull. He hands the sweating bottle to his adopted brother and roommate, Bob Wells, who takes his own gulp.

We get Pop Herring as a schizophrenic post-millennial Jesus, still out there feeding the multitude, even if it’s just with leftover pizza and malt liquor from a shared bottle. Lake’s layered scenes are full of moments like these that make the piece sing.

But why, in the end, does his story matter? Is he just calling out Michael Jordan for ingratitude? I don’t think that’s all there is to it, but, boy, does the story do that. Is it to show how far a man can fall, despite all the good he does in the world? Maybe. But it seems to me that in telling this story, Lake is going for something bigger, reminding us of the negligence that accounts for too much of human traffic. It’s never said explicitly on the page, but all the same, I get the feeling that Lake is wondering what we’ve done lately for our own Pop Herrings.

For more about this story, read Brandon Sneed’s interview with Thomas Lake.

How did you first hear about Mike Sword’s death?

It was in our newspaper, and it was reported widely. Even when stories came out that proved that the police had acted appropriately – there were even follow-up stories where they won awards for valor – you never got a sense of what really happened with him. People just assumed it was PTSD, but it was never brought up.

Then I did a story about a woman soldier who had been a prison guard at Abu Ghraib right after the big ruckus there. And she had PTSD. She was one of the first to come back and really get involved with the VA community, so writing about her was a great way of writing about the VA. She was buddies with all these old vets from World War II, a guy from D-day. But she had a lot of problems, and one of the things that she and the vets focused on was Sword’s story. You could tell it was really powerful in the vet community. “What happened with him?” “I’m sure it was PTSD.” And they would tell their own stories about hearing a lawn mower and ducking behind the bushes.

I mentioned Mike Sword’s death in writing about Debbie (Camicia), and his sister contacted me. She was trying to come to grips with what had happened and wanted to know if Debbie would speak with her. I followed up with her to see if she would be willing to tell her story, and she said no.

Fast forward a few years to last year: We wanted to do a story on PTSD. The guy I was initially following was a National Guardsman from an hour away. He was really suffering. He was on full disability, with back issues and PTSD. I spent a lot of time with him, and he eventually decided it was too painful to discuss. His wife said, “After you leave, he’s a mess.” Of course that makes you feel horrible.

So my story backed out, and a couple other reporters were working on other stories. And in the meantime, Mr. Sword’s father contacted our top editor. He wanted an anniversary of 9/11 piece honoring all the fallen heroes, including his son, who he thought was a fallen hero because of his PTSD. Finally, we got our chance to tell the story.

You were trying to get different sides of Sword’s character from family members who are estranged from each other. Have you ever had to deal with that before?

I don’t think so. It was to the point that one family member would tell me not to talk to another one because they had already asked, and that person didn’t want to talk to me. But I would call to confirm it, because I needed to hear it from them, and they would say, “No, I want to talk to you.”

The deeper I dug, the sadder it got. Then you think, “Is it worth it as a story?” You want to inform the public, but are you stirring up too much pain?

The story has a classic narrative structure: You start in the present to let people know there was a shootout, then you cycle back through Sword’s life, bit by bit to the tragedy and then the present again. Was that the structure you always had for the piece?

I knew the whole thing was building up to the really intense shooting scene. So much of my reporting had to focus on that. A lot of those details hadn’t been reported before, because the police were really shut down about what they’d give out.

The first thing I did was to file an FOI request. I asked for everything and got an official form letter back, citing this clause saying, “We’re not going to give you anything, because it’s ‘still under investigation’ ” – even though it wasn’t. It was just this clause they were using. I checked with FOI officials statewide, and they really can say that – even though the subject is dead, even though it’s clearly not under investigation. It’s a loophole.

But the nice thing was that the police said, “We don’t want to be jerks about this. We’ll meet with you.” I met with them four times. Each time, the main policeman would have his laptop there, with all the information on it. He would stop and consult with the PR person and say, “Can I tell her this?” They gave me a few details that weren’t released at the time.

Then through reporting, I would go back in and say, “Well, I learned this.” And they would say, “We forgot to tell you that.” Once I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this?” and the police officer said, “Well, you didn’t ask.” So I told him that story about Edna Buchanan, and I said, “I don’t know exactly what I want to know. But I want details that will allow me to build a really rich narrative.”

They kept talking about “the loud music, the loud music.” I said, “What kind of music? Was it heavy metal?” This guy says, “I don’t know. It was just really loud and horrible music, but they left it on for a long time because it was crime scene.” I said, “But what was it?” One of the policemen said, “No, it wasn’t heavy metal, it was hard rock.” When I finally got the cop who fired the fatal shot, he said, “I’ll never forget that song. It was Buckcherry’s ‘Crazy Bitch.’ ”

That policeman was another person – almost nobody wanted to talk to me for this story, which makes you feel bad. But this policeman had initially agreed to “work with me.” I said, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “I’ll talk to you, but I don’t know if I want you to use everything. I’ll work with you.” The idea was that I would go over with him what I was going to use ahead of time, but we didn’t get into specifics about on the record/off the record on the phone, because I was going to do that when we met.

And then he kept cancelling. And then we were Facebook friends, and he would contact me that way. Then he unfriended me and cut off all connection. And then as I was getting ready to polish up the draft, I just wrote to him on Facebook, I sent him a message, which you can still do if you’re not friends.

I said, “Per our initial agreement that I would work with you, I’d like to talk to you about what I’m going to use from you for our first couple of phone conversations.” I kind of acted like I had forgotten that he had unfriended me, but that got his attention. Once he called me and we started talking, he was just full of questions about what this guy was like. Then he spelled out everything the other police wouldn’t tell me: just exactly how it went, exactly where the cars were located. He was very open, as if he had really needed to talk about it.

In the end, he thanked me and said it had really helped him process what was going on with him, but he said, “All my friends told me not to talk with you.”

Since this was part of a larger multimedia project that the paper did, how much background about PTSD did you feel you needed to include? How did you think about it?

Well, I knew Sarah (Bruyn Jones) was writing about the science of PTSD, and I knew she was also looking at specific changes at the Salem VA. I talked to the people at the VA several times. They’re not very media friendly. I have an old friend who’s the director of mental health there, and he wants to help, but he’s like, “We’re just not allowed to talk to you unless a PR person is here with us. We can’t send a vet to you, even if they want to talk.”

It’s really hard to get in there. So I did a lot of hanging out at the VA. There’s a plant nursery there, where the veterans, as part of their therapy, work on growing plants, and they sell them. And I’m a huge gardener. So a lot of times, when I’m looking for a story or I need to write something about the vets, I just go hang out at the nursery, and I meet people. And one thing will lead to another. And I actually ended up contributing some of the reporting to her story based on conversations I had with vets I met at the nursery. It’s a huge complex – just giant.

One time some guy was supposed to meet me, and I got out there to find a note posted on a picnic shelter, just a piece of white paper with handwriting, “Dear lady at The Roanoke Times. I’m sorry I can’t meet you today.” I didn’t have his phone number, but he was in treatment there, and he said, “Call me back at this number at such and such a time.” He didn’t have my number either.

That informed my work with my story, but I was also helping her out a little bit too. I was casting my net wide, especially at the beginning. I did a lot of interviews in February, when I thought I was writing about the other vet.

I don’t know that very much of what I learned (about PTSD) is actually in this story. Knowing that she was writing the bulk of what was going on with the science and at the VA allowed me to concentrate on the narrative instead.

You raise some questions early on that in the end can’t be resolved, because Mike Sword is dead. Can you talk about how you decided to navigate that in terms of your storytelling?

It was disappointing that I couldn’t know, but I think I was also pretty careful not to act like I was going to answer the questions at the end. There’s nothing more frustrating than that – you’re sort of robbing the reader. The question to me is, what should we have done differently? That to me was something the family of a veteran would take away from it. I had to deal with the facts I had. It’s still really, really sad.

It’s not like you’re promising something that isn’t delivered. It’s like you’re leaving it for the rest of us to determine if we need to be doing more. Is there something that could have stopped this?

I got to watch the father come to that realization. At the end, he said, “We should have been circling the wagons.” I had been hanging out with him off and on for a couple months by the time he came to that realization. He lives in Virginia Beach, so I didn’t actually hang out with him, but we would meet every couple of weeks to go over what I had learned.

He had the motivation that he wanted a reporter to do this big investigation and find out that the police improperly shot his son. When I finally was able to see the video of what happened, it was not a good video, because it was from the car farthest away.

The police finally let me see it the fourth time I asked, and only because through reporting, I learned that what they had told me in my initial meeting with them didn’t jibe with what family lawyers told me. The policeman, trying to be helpful, said, “When you watch the video, you can see Mike getting out of the truck and shooting at the officers.” He was really specific about that. I recorded all the interviews, because I knew it could all be contentious. So I knew he had said that.

But everybody else specifically remembered that you couldn’t see that. I said, “Chuck, you’ve got to let me watch that video. I don’t want this to be some kind of problem in the story: ‘So and so says this’ and ‘so and so says that,’ but I can’t see the video, so there’s just one big other mystery that I can’t answer.” He said, “Okay,” and he went down and watched it in the basement archives.

He came back and said, “I am so sorry. They are right. I was wrong. I was misremembering.” It had been a couple years. And he said, “We’re going to let you watch it.” Once I saw it – and they let me watch it as many times as I wanted – you don’t actually see Mike, because it’s dark and he’s too far away. But what you do see is the police officers walking. They’ve got their hands on their guns, they don’t have their guns drawn yet. And all of the sudden sparks are flying. You know they’re being shot at before they even had their weapons drawn.

To me that kind of answered the major question, because once you open fire like that, they have to shoot you. So I called Mr. Sword’s dad and said, “I know this isn’t what you want to hear. But I saw the video, and to me it’s really clear.”

What I think the story suffers from the most is that it doesn’t feel very intimate. To me, it doesn’t sound like me, the way I write. There’s too much attribution in it. I got one conversation with the wife, who spent more time with him than anyone. Of course I never got to talk to him. I talked to as many people as I could who would talk to me about him. I’m not sure you have a huge sense of who he is. Some of this stuff about their relationship – I had some stuff on the record, a lot of stuff off the record, but some stuff I had was just too painful to put it in. The last conversation they had, I chose not to put it in. I just thought it was too painful. The reader didn’t need to read it, and the widow didn’t need to read it.

Do you have any advice for anyone else trying to tackle a story like this?

I don’t want to do another story like this for the rest of my career. It’s an honest and true story. It’s not a complete story, because of not being able to talk to some people. I think the complete story would probably be even harder to tell.

Talking to that policeman, I could tell the first time I talked to him that he really wanted to talk … but that was months of trying to coax him and being pushier than I’m normally comfortable being. Still, I think it added a lot to the story to have his point of view.

Every detail just makes it a little bit richer. It was copyedited a lot with the idea that “this is a controversial thing” and “you’ve got to say where you got all your information.” I wanted to make sure I wasn’t relying on just one family member. Because of the dispute about the police, I had to say exactly where I got my information, which I felt made it more awkward and less conversational. When I read it again the other day, it didn’t sound like the way I normally write. So it leaves me a little cold, but I guess the whole thing leaves me cold because every little piece of it was emotionally draining to do.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know?

I guess just the thing about going back to people. When I first talked to the sister, she wasn’t interested. She said the whole family wasn’t interested. It came like a gift when the dad got in touch. By then the sister was willing to talk. And the soldier who canceled on me – by the time the series ran six months later, he was willing to talk to us again. He’s included in a couple of the other installments.

People change their minds, and it’s worth going back to them gently, respectfully, saying, “How are you doing? Would you be willing to talk to me?” It’s not a comfortable thing, but what you’re doing you hope is for the greater good.

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

One of the great challenges of narrative journalism is veracity. As you set the scene and build your character, you must remain absolutely faithful to the facts. What do you do if there are things you don’t know? (There will always be things you don’t know.) What do you do if the main character won’t talk to you – or can’t talk to you?

In Beth Macy’s story, Mike Sword couldn’t talk to her because Mike Sword was dead. And how he died, and why, are the crux of her powerful piece – even though the “why” is never entirely answered.

Macy’s piece is admirable for many reasons. It’s seamlessly written, it’s rich in telling and heartbreaking detail, and it’s well-reported. Most important, she tells only what she knows. The question that drives the piece is stated clearly in the second paragraph:

How did it come to pass that the 24-year-old, an expert marksman and former military cop, opened fire on police from Roanoke and Franklin counties in the ­early-morning hours of Feb. 29, 2008, provoking a shootout that ended his life?

It is a question that is never entirely answered, and yet the piece remains satisfying because Macy makes the wise decision to turn unanswered questions into a recurring theme. She poses questions, and she lets us know that the answers are a mystery.

What did Mike think about the roadside bombing that killed his friend? Nobody knows. He never talked about it.

Was he suffering from PTSD? Some think he was; others say he seemed fine.

The summer before his death, was he withdrawn and silent because, as one co-worker thought, he wanted to die? Or was he that way simply because that was his naturally quiet personality?

The night he died, did Mike panic when he saw the cops chasing him? Or was this what he had hoped for? Why was his truck loaded with guns and ammo? What was he doing at the strip club? Was he suffering from a flashback? Or was he suicidal?

Macy writes exactly as much as she knows, and no more:

Grainy video from the only dashboard camera working that night — shot from the cruiser farthest from Mike — offers no clues to his mindset, just the flinching of officers scrambling to duck for cover as Mike, a onetime turret gunner, fires on them.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Beth Macy’s story on the death of Mike Sword is a great example of using multiple sources (people and records) to write about a person who is no longer around to tell his story. By my count, Macy got at least 14 people to go on the record, including Sword’s father and several relatives, Sword’s Air Force colleagues and Roanoke-area law enforcement officials.

She got these sources to open up – enough to allow her to write a profile full of anecdotes and character details. Her reporting also made it possible for her to include a riveting description of Sword’s last moments.

Here’s what I think Macy got from each group of sources:

Sword’s father, Graham, and other relatives help readers see what Sword was like as a child – adventure-loving, comfortable with camping and hiking in the woods, driven to play war games and paintball. His family also gives us glimpses of Sword later in life – particularly his struggles with Crohn’s disease. And we learn about his lighter side – his love of “Napoleon Dynamite,” Johnny Cash lyrics and prank calls.

Sword’s emails, instant messages and photos help readers get inside Sword’s head and see some of what he experienced in Iraq. As a good narrative reporter, Macy knew that interviewing Graham Sword wouldn’t be enough. She needed to read Mike’s emails and see his photos. Because of that, we get some powerful details, including the image of the aftermath of a roadside bomb that killed one of his fellow airmen. We also learn about how Sword witnessed a young girl getting run over by a military vehicle.

One key family source, Larry Blankenship, a Vietnam veteran, helps us understand that while his nephew didn’t show any trademark signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, he had learned how to hide it. Through Blankenship, we learn that Sword sought counseling at the local Veterans Affairs Medical Center and that he filed a PTSD disability claim.

Sword’s Air Force colleagues portray him as stoic and focused, serious and ambitious. We learn that he was reliable and worked hard, and that he had high ethical standards, once turning in a military contractor who pumped Air Force gas into his personal car. Through his colleagues and relatives, we get a sense that Sword must have felt crushed when the Air Force handed him a medical discharge, in part because of his Crohn’s disease.

Law enforcement officials – including Lt. Chuck Mason, Officer Shaun Chuyka and Deputy Brian Garland – give Macy enough details from their recollections that she deconstructs most of what happened during the high-speed chase and 40-second shootout. She presents what she has found with such fairness and balance that we see the tragedy of Sword’s death from the perspective of both family members and police.

Police reports, court records and police video provide supporting evidence of what happened to Sword. Again, Macy is thinking about how she can document her story beyond interviewing human sources.

One challenge that Macy faced was that Sword’s widow, Kristi, did not give VA counselors permission to talk to the reporter. I presume that Macy was not able to get his medical records, either. She is upfront about this in her storytelling, and while it would have been nice to have that material, I don’t think its absence weakens the story.

To prepare these comments, I compiled a list of Beth’s on-the-record sources and include it here:

• Graham Sword (father)
• Court records (describing Sword’s parents’ divorce)
• Windsor Nevitt (sister)
• Quentin Floyd (shift supervisor at Andrews AFB)
• Sandra Mihovich (Air Force colleague)
• Mike’s email and instant messages (providing details of his tours in Iraq)
• Mike’s photos from Iraq
• Carleena Blankenship (aunt)
• Larry Blankenship (uncle)
• Kristi Sword (Sword’s widow, interviewed by phone)
• VA counselors were not allowed to talk
• Shawn Godfrey (Salem postal supervisor)
• Lt. Chuck Mason (Roanoke County police)
• Officer Shaun Chuyka (Roanoke County police)
• Deputy Brian Garland (Franklin County officer who shot Mike)
• Dashboard camera video
• Police reports
• Tyler Putnam (hospital surgeon)
• Chris Wilson (fellow airman)
• Bill Cleaveland (family attorney)

I’d recommend Beth’s story as a case study for any journalism instructor teaching a class on sourcing.

For more on this story, read our Q-and-A with Beth Macy. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? Send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

How did you find the story of Hannah and Andrew?

This has never happened to me before, but a reporter with the San Antonio Express-News called me out of the blue one day and told me about Hannah’s case. I’ll back up for a second to say that I wrote an article in 2010 about a former death row inmate named Anthony Graves, and that story was partly credited with helping eventually win his freedom, with the help of his attorneys and a special prosecutor.

Because of that, after that story came out — and this continues to this day — I get letters and calls literally on a daily basis, usually from inmates but sometimes from attorneys. This is the first time it came from another reporter. People will come to me and say, “There’s this innocence case, and I really wish that you would look into it.” It has gotten somewhat overwhelming, with letters piling up.

But in this case, this reporter from the San Antonio Express-News, John MacCormack, who is one of the best newspaper reporters in Texas, called me. John and I didn’t know each other, but I’ve been following his work for a long time. He said, “I’ve been writing about this case out of Corpus Christi, and I’ve done as much as I can do with it on a newspaper level. It’s a really important case, and I wish you would look into it.”

John ended up driving to Austin and giving me notes and documents. Again, I’ve never had anything like this happen before. And four days after John called me, a TV cameraman I was talking to for other reasons said, “There’s this case in Corpus you should look into. It’s the case of Hannah Overton.” To have two different media people tell me this was an important case, obviously, I was going to look into it.

About these calls and letters you get: Do you weigh stories now in a different way than you did before the Graves story?

One of the things that’s hard is that part of my job is to be a storyteller. There are many innocence cases or potential innocence cases that I see which are very interesting from a legal perspective but aren’t interesting from a narrative perspective. I can’t write a story about every one of these cases, and so I have to find the ones that are compelling from both a legal standpoint and a narrative standpoint.

One thing that I’ve done in the past month is that I’m partnering, if that’s the right word, with Anthony Graves’ attorney, Nicole Cásarez, who’s an attorney and also a journalism professor at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston. All letters that I get from inmates I forward to her. And she and her students — she runs an innocence clinic — look into the ones that they feel have the most merit, or the ones they can do something with. Our hope is to look at these things together and try to pick out the ones that are the best for us to write about, for her students to investigate, and try to make more of a difference that way.

I write three to four big stories a year, and there are so many of these cases.

It’s interesting that you note the line between what’s an engaging case and one you can tell narratively.

Part of being a long-form journalist is that you are sometimes an investigative reporter, but you are also a storyteller. Is this a narrative — if you’re going to write it at 10, 12, 14,000 words — that is interesting enough to keep the reader going? That’s something I have to consider, which is sometimes hard.

I noticed that each section in “Hannah and Andrew” very clearly captures one thing. You introduce Andrew, you introduce Hannah, you bring them together, you take them apart. She’s charged with his death, she’s convicted of his death, and then family tries to cope. This is just the spine of events, of course.

I have actually never (outlined) it like that.

That’s what I wanted to know. Do you lay things out ahead of time before you write, or do you impose structure on something messier as it evolves?

I picked this up from Skip Hollandsworth, my mentor here at the magazine, who is a wonderful writer. He’s done a lot of crime stories. I have one Word document that I dump everything into — all my notes, interesting quotes, references to documents, everything. It’s a master document that I can do a word search on, and hopefully everything’s at my fingertips. As I start to input information into the document, it starts to take its own organic shape. Information is grouped together spontaneously, and at some point it starts to take a shape. Now, admittedly, that’s not always the right shape to write the story in.

But with Hannah and Andrew, I really struggled with whether to begin with him or her. And I just kept returning to that case file of his, which was really all that I had. I had a couple pictures and maybe 30 pages, most of which didn’t mean much to me. But I just kept leafing through that, trying to understand him, and I thought, “Well, readers are going to be in the same position. He’s our main character, but I’ve never met him.” And our readers will never meet him either. So how do we handle that? My idea was to put him front and center, and go from there.

As far as mapping it out that way, I actually didn’t. So it’s really interesting to hear what you just said. That helps me – I need to diagram my own stories!

The main goal I have in the thick of writing is simply – I have such a short attention span, I have two kids and almost no reading time – so I try to put myself in the reader’s shoes. I try to end each section with something that is going to keep you going, if possible.

But you don’t outline ahead of time? You just use the Skip Hollandsworth Document Evolution Method?

I would call it a loose outline. When I’m writing the beginning of the second section, I don’t yet know what the beginning of the sixth section is. But I do have a general sense of where I’m headed. I always know what my last scene is. For some reason that’s the easiest thing. I always know what my last few paragraphs are, and I’m trying to get there as efficiently as possible.

You have all this information, particularly with something that’s a legal case: the trial, the child protective services material. There’s a lot of stuff you’re not going to tell the reader. One section opens with you explaining “the most unsettling aspect” of the case against Hannah. When you write that, are you thinking of helping readers know where to focus?

That’s so funny that you focused on that. That was the section I had the most difficulty with. It was a three-week-long trial – just reading the transcripts took me so long. There was so much information, and a lot of it was extremely technical medical testimony. I struggled with how to present that to the reader. To do a blow-by-blow account with the trial with its dramatic moments wasn’t going to work in this case.

I probably spent more time on that paragraph that you just mentioned than anything else. Okay, we can’t go through every hour of the three-week-long trial, but what’s the most important thing for readers to take away from what happened at the trial? What lens should they view the trial through?

What really jumped out at me – and there were many lines from the trial I didn’t even get to use – but to say that Hannah was vilified at trial would be an understatement. It was every mother’s nightmare, I guess, to have every aspect of every decision she had made as a mother held up to scrutiny and made to look sinister. That’s what I hoped readers took away from the trial without getting too lost in the details.

I think a lot of people might think of the trial as having real potential for drama. Why not use the trial for drama and fold everything into that? Can you talk about when you would or wouldn’t do that?

This has been true with the Overton case, with the Graves case, and it’s about to be true with another piece I’m working on, in which another person was exonerated with DNA evidence. There is so much you can’t tell in a courtroom. There’s so much context you can provide in a magazine narrative, that for good reason you can’t present in a courtroom, but that still matters. Someone’s character, someone’s history over time, in this case with children, someone’s capacity for dealing with stress and difficult things, like Hannah did with Andrew – there’s so much you can present in a magazine story that you can’t at trial.

To me, when I go back now, having written the story, and read the trial transcript, it’s sort of like reading one fragment of the story. There’s so much that’s left out, there’s so much the jury doesn’t know. It would be too limiting to just tell a story through a trial. To me what’s most interesting is what gets left out of the trial.

Outside of the debates over her contact with Andrew, Hannah is so overwhelmingly a force for good in your story. Everybody who actually knew her said such positive things. Did you worry that would seem unrealistic?

What was challenging – and it’s rare that I’ve run into this to this extent – no one from the DA’s office would talk to me. No one at the police department would talk to me. So I knew heading into this story that whether I wanted it to be or not, that it ran the risk of being one-sided. I would have loved to have had quotes in there from the cop, from the prosecutor. I tried to quote them as much as I could from the record.

To me, what was so fascinating about this case was that people either viewed her as almost saintly or almost demonic. There was no gray with her. People either felt that she was the most wonderful mother ever, or that she was a child abuser and the worst of the worst, that she had murdered a child. That you could look at the same person and sometimes the same set of facts and come to two such different conclusions was so interesting to me.

One of the things I tried to do in the story was to show how all the little disparate details taken together, if you didn’t know the Overtons, looked bad: the bed sheets and the fire pit. There were a couple different things that all put together seemed very strange and seemed like this was a place where abuse could be happening. That duality, that perfect mother vs. evil mother – I’ve never really run into something like that before, and hopefully I presented each side as fully as possible.

You mentioned the people who wouldn’t talk to you, people who normally would. You had some people who backed off their involvement with the case or changed their mind about their role in it. Did this case have an unusual degree of that kind of reversal?

It was a very unusual degree of that. There were people who talked to me off the record who I obviously couldn’t quote in the story. But there were people who had been involved in this case who had made dramatic changes of opinion about this case.

You’re an investigative journalist, and you’re a storyteller. Whatever your intent, with these kind of stories, there’s almost an activist or advocacy effect that trails in their wake. How do you think about your role as a journalist in relation to activism or advocacy?

I think in both the story about Hannah and the story about Anthony Graves, the stories were better the more I pulled back. There was an early version of the Graves story that was an advocate’s draft, and it didn’t work. It was too obvious from the beginning what my thoughts about the case were. I tried, and I think I succeeded, with the Overton case to not make that mistake again, and to lay out the facts so that a reader could come to his or her own conclusion.

I think with the Overton case there are ways in which we can see that there were mistakes made. It’s clear the Overtons waited too long to take Andrew to the hospital, things along those lines. I don’t think they did so maliciously, but I thought it was important to explain to readers that his health had been deteriorating for a while before they took him to the hospital, that it was important not to smooth over the difficult facts of the case. I knew that some people would read this and think that an injustice had happened, and that other people would read this and think, “I wouldn’t have made those same decisions, and of all the cases out there, this isn’t one I’m going to feel sorry about.” So hopefully, it lays things out in a way that people can come to their own conclusions.

When you start to veer into advocacy, you can do your subject a disservice. If you show the warts, if you show the problems, I think that makes the strengths of the story better anyway. The reader knows, hopefully, that you’re being candid and telling them all the facts that you know.

One more thing – with the Graves story and the Overton story, with both of those stories, I had extensive letters, interviews, many, many hours from Anthony’s perspective in the Graves story and from Hannah’s perspective in the Overton story. In both those stories I waited until the last section for the reader to hear from them, and that was very intentional. The reason for that is, of course, if you go through those cases, they see themselves as innocent, and they narrate as such: “I had no idea why the police were there.” That’s not the way to take the reader through the case. You have to present things in a more clinical way before getting to what the subject of the story thinks.

You’re sort of resisting the scenic narrative, the most intimate version, which would have been through their eyes.

Which I could have done in both stories, which I could have done in great detail, but which I resisted because I thought that would be too much and that doesn’t give the reader all the information.

I suspect that a lot of editors giving general advice would say to find the most intimate perch you can, because that’s where you’ll have the most power.

The other things I’ve been spending a lot of time on the last couple of years have been oral histories of important moments in Texas history, like the Whitman shootings in 1966. I did an oral history from the perspective of the victims and people who were on campus that day. That is the exact opposite of what you and I are talking about; it’s nothing but what someone saw from their perspective, and the emotion of that moment, and that’s very gripping, too.

I’ve never really thought this out before, but in a story where someone’s guilt or innocence is in the balance, to me if you told the story from the perspective of the defendant the whole way through, it would be as misleading as telling it from the perspective of the prosecutor the whole way through. You have to somehow have a perfect medium, if you can, though I doubt you can. You have to present things to the reader almost as if they are the jurors, in a sense, but with more information, often, than the jurors received in the actual case.

At more than 12,000 words, Colloff’s narrative – which ran in the January issue of Texas Monthly – unfolds largely as straight chronology. It reads cleanly, with each section focused on a single piece of the story. But the reader can feel thousands of pages of documents lurking in the background, leaving a psychic trail on the page even as Colloff compresses events for readers.

We find out that the boy, Andrew, would have had to eat 23 teaspoons of Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning or 6 teaspoons of table salt to hit the lethal level. We learn about the amount of water in his stomach, which has implications for what happened in the hours before he received medical attention.

But along with information that seems to exonerate Hannah, Colloff also delivers the specifics of her delay in getting Andrew to an emergency clinic. Describing the trial, she writes that “just as the prosecution could not show exactly how Hannah had forced Andrew to ingest a lethal dose of salt, neither could the defense give precise details for how the four-year-old had come to have so much sodium in his body.”

This journalistic restraint matters. Colloff shows that it is possible to create tremendous emotional engagement while giving readers enough information to interpret events for themselves.

She doesn’t seem interested in presenting a story of angels or demons, but writes on a plane where humans, often with unknowable motives, act. How do we evaluate those actions with imperfect information? Colloff suggests that the way we answer that question makes a difference. On the heels of a 2010 story that helped secure a man’s release from prison, she presents another problematic conviction, asking whether justice has really been served.

For more on this story, read our Q&A with Pamela Colloff.

Grann hosted a talk with a collection of investigative types – not investigative journalists but people whose careers require them to delve into other peoples’ business. (You can see a free preview of part of the session here). The panel included

• Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer-winning biographer of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Véra Nabokov and Cleopatra;
• Robert Baer, a two-decade veteran of the CIA, author of “Sleeping with the Devil” and “See No Evil”;
• William Oldham, a former police detective in Washington, D.C., and New York City, co-author of “The Brotherhoods”; and
• Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of Oxford and author of “Leonardo.”

Grann noted that he had assembled an unconventional combination of participants but swore some patterns would emerge. And sure enough, a lot of the things that were said about how to approach sleuthing in different fields are relevant to storytellers, even if those of us who aren’t calling out French SWAT teams to make high-security arrests or chasing down murderous mafiosi.

Schiff, when asked what drew her to the art of detection, quoted the adage that “all biography is high-class gossip.” She talked about sneaking from her desk at a publishing house to the New York Public Library on her lunch hour to look at material on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a project she orginally thought she would find someone else to write for the company. She had heard that one of the biographies, perhaps the best one, had been written by his mistress but published under a male pseudonym. Hoping to identify the mistress, she sat at a table with the various accounts piled around her. Eventually it dawned on her that the mystery biographer was the one who had avoided any discussion of his marriage. A lot of biography, concluded Schiff, “is reading the silences.”

Former detective Oldham addressed assessing information in a way that will surely seem familiar to many narrative journalists:

No matter what you’re presented with, half of it is unlikely to be germane to what you’re looking at or what you’re looking for. So you learn to dismiss what seem like perfectly good clues and concentrate on the clues that actually have some meaning.

Furthering the idea was art historian Kemp, who suggested that it’s easy to see what you want to see.

The key thing to me is not to believe your first idea too strongly. Always look for the thing which will erode it. Even if 10 things are good about it, at the 11th thing, you have to say, “If this doesn’t fit, then start again.”

…

That’s essential, just hard looking, just serious hard looking. That’s a very difficult thing. I was trained as a biologist. Once we were dissecting an animal, and the biology master said, “Let’s look for the gall bladder.” And he said, “How many people have found the gall bladder?” All the arms go up. “Funny thing: This animal doesn’t have one.” Looking is important.

Panelists mentioned peoples’ willingness to lie when questioned, but more than one member pointed out how sources typically viewed as more reliable have their own problems. Grann quoted Schiff as explaining how “documents can be as deceptive as people.” Former CIA agent Baer said that even using what seemed like crystal-clear phone intercepts had backfired, explaining how he once heard a target call for a delivery, giving his hotel room number and verifying that he would be there for a set period of time. After mobilizing the French police to do a midday hotel raid to capture the suspect, the agents crashed through the windows of the room number he had given, only to startle an innocent Spanish family eating lunch.

Kemp addressed sourcing by talking about the process for evaluating a work of art and its provenance:

The job I do is rather simple. We say, What is the source? What is the quality of the source? Is it trustworthy? … You cut back to the most reliable possible sources you can find. And then you assume that the most likely explanation is true. (If) that one breaks down, you go on to the next most likely one.

On whether misinformation is a more serious matter today, digital sources took some heat and then Schiff stepped up to defend the Internet, tracing the role of disinformation going back to Benjamin Franklin and the Revolutionary era (another subject she has treated).

Even with an established set of facts, Schiff noted, it’s not as if the truth comes with a bow. Another biographer had access to the very same material she did – personal letters – and drew very different conclusions from them. “I do believe that every biographer is like a child who impudently connects the dots a little bit differently,” she said, “and that your own personality will somewhat come into play.”

Even though journalists are rarely cast in the role of experts and are more likely to investigate CIA activities than to participate in them, there’s more than one profession from which we can cadge techniques, turning relentless sleuthing into great stories.

There was a line in your piece that made me think you had been working on it since 2009, when you were in Marianna doing “For Their Own Good.” Is that true?

It is. I was spending a lot of time in Jackson County then. You talk to enough people, and pretty soon that story surfaces.

So you don’t remember where you first heard about it?

It may have been as simple as the Marianna, Fla., Wikipedia page. I can’t really recall. I do remember originally thinking it was potentially a story when I was in a hotel room in Jackson County on a “For Their Own Good” reporting trip, and I was just doing some research online. There’s a branch of CNN’s website called “iReport,” or something like that – it allows some kind of citizen interactivity. It was a solitary, random post from Orlando Williams saying, “We need a reporter to take a look to try to figure out who is responsible for the 1934 lynching of my uncle Claude Neal.”

Montgomery working on “Spectacle.” (Click to enlarge.)

I thought, “Well, there’s a willing descendant who could maybe help me tell the story.” So I emailed him originally, and he was completely on board. I was shocked to learn that this had such a large impact at the time. It ran on the front page of the New York Times but had been almost forgotten. Nobody had ever been brought to account for this barbaric act of terrorism. I thought maybe I can take a shot at it, all these years later.

Had the paper already committed to a story on it, or did the FBI involvement in 2011 make the difference?

No, no. We didn’t know anything about the FBI until I had already spent about – obviously I work on different things all the time – but I had invested about a year of reporting on Claude Neal before I heard anything about the FBI’s involvement.

It’s useful for people to know about the time in. It’s not like you can go down, spend a week, and come up with a story like this.

We thought it was a story from the very beginning. It randomly happened that the FBI decided, for the first time in 76 years, to open the case.

When it came to writing, did you think a lot about how to describe the place, the setting?

It’s one of the great challenges in doing historic narrative nonfiction, connecting people in 2011 to a small town in Florida in 1934. How on earth do you do that? So we started in the present, but I wanted, in that section where we kick it back to ’34, I wanted to very quickly, in almost a pretty way – it’s not necessarily poetic, but in some fluid, pretty way – to rattle off this list of items that might help people connect to that time period. … I wanted in this tangible way to immediately stick people in that time period, sort of creating a mental collage of items from that era, with prices as well, give a sampling of what it was like, of how they existed.

Do you think of a bright spine for the story, a main arc? How do you fold in the complicating elements so they become part of the story without running it off the rails?

In my mind, originally this was a story about the lasting effects of a traumatic event, and how trauma is inherited. Because the most surprising thing to me was that 76 years later, Claude Neal’s descendents – even those who never knew him and weren’t born at the time – still deal with the effects of that barbaric mob daily, in real ways. His daughter is wheelchair-bound because of the physical effects, but others still bear these incredible emotional scars.

The original arc was that even though we’ve all forgotten about Claude Neal, there’s a family that was left scattered and destroyed in many ways because of that event. They had finally found a way to reconnect, and they had finally found someone to listen to them.

Meanwhile, there’s another arc; that’s my inquisition. It’s not first person, but hopefully, readers felt the sense that I was taking them along to investigate this old unsolved crime. In a way, that’s the secondary arc in my head. And it’s unfortunately an arc that never gets resolved. If I had gotten someone on the record with the names of those six people, I think that would have become the primary arc, and there would have been a nice big bow on the end of the story, instead of this kind of open-ended finish.

Can you talk about how you approached the ending without a bow?

We had the FBI come in very late in the game and announce that they had opened the case. So in a way it was passing the baton to a government that had failed to do what was right for many, many years. It was such a hard thing to deal with, too, when I learned the FBI was investigating, back in…

I think it was May in the story.

Yes, May. Orlando immediately called me and says, “Guess who was at my house? The FBI.” And I thought, “Oh, my goodness.” I thought about doing a daily story. It was that newsworthy.

We talked about it here and decided no one would connect with that. In some ways, if we were trying to pull off a daily, it would have cheapened the full story. And so we decided to hope that no one else caught wind that the FBI was investigating. We decided to hold onto it and let the thing run in October when we had it all finished.

Did anybody else do any real coverage?

No.

What was the most challenging part of writing the story, not the reporting but the writing?

It was really challenging trying to choose a main character. In many ways, I fell in love with Allie Mae Neal. She’s maybe the sweetest woman besides my own grandmother that I’ve ever met. She’s also a person who was really has become comfortable with not knowing who is responsible for killing her father. While she deals with the incredible pain from growing up without a dad and knowing that this event set her life on its particular haunting course, she had at some point decided that she’ll never know, and that’s okay. She chose to exist in those circumstances and attempt to be as happy as possible.

So she didn’t have an intense motivation to know who killed her father. Orlando did. But Orlando is a step removed from the story, from Allie Mae. Orlando wasn’t alive when Claude Neal was killed. He inherited the trauma because his mother dealt with demons for her entire life, stemming from that incident.

His life was affected because of how she lived, and how she was haunted. He was incredibly motivated. He had a desire, while Allie Mae didn’t really. But he wasn’t quite as appealing of a character as Allie Mae. We talked for a long while about who to go with. We opened with Allie Mae, but we bring Orlando in, and he gives the family its motivation to figure out this crime.

You want a main character to have a wish, and a main character that you can sympathize with. So they kind of both served that main character purpose.

This is the part of this kind of discussion that always makes me uncomfortable: talking about people as characters. These are real folks who are dealing with some heavy shit. And I hate to refer to them as characters, but for the mechanics of storytelling, I guess that’s important.

Picking the main character was hard, but probably harder than that was dealing with this really complicated situation which I couldn’t get anybody to give me those names. How do you deal with that? It kind of cast me in the same role as – put me in a similar ethical situation as – the historian, Dale Cox.

I heard the names, six last names, in conversation, and it was off the record, and it was from someone who couldn’t confirm and wasn’t directly connected. I tried like hell to put faces to those last names, to contact family members of people who might have been there, who had the same last names as the six men whose names I heard, and I couldn’t do it. No one would go on the record with that information. And so it was a really uneasy feeling and a quandary when writing this story. In a way, the fact that the FBI had opened the case salvaged the story. Otherwise I might still be out there, trying to figure out who those six people were.

You might have been out there hunting forever.

But then we thought, “Let’s put it in the paper. And when the FBI releases its finding, we’ll come back and hopefully be able to provide people with those six names.”

And if not, the mystery continues.

Montgomery reports that Neal, a 23-year-old African-American farmhand, was arrested in 1934 on suspicion of the rape and murder of a young white woman. Hidden from white mobs for days, he was eventually taken at gunpoint from a jailer. A lynching party was set up; invitations were issued. The governor of Florida, along with millions of others, knew of the publicly announced plans to kill Neal, but no state or federal investigators intervened in Florida. What happened afterward was horrific. No one was ever arrested or prosecuted.

The narrative sticks with the third person, and the writing is subdued and steady, as if to say, It’s okay, you can keep reading. I’ll be right here with you. The story is rooted deeply in place, and Montgomery evokes the landscape and the era in one beautifully compact paragraph.

Jackson County, Florida, 1934: Drip coffee, Purity Ice Cream, turnips, chuck roast, mustard for 15 cents a quart, 26 cents for a dozen eggs. Sun-bleached overalls, Baptists, Methodists, kerosene lamps, screen doors, mosquitoes, pine trees, knee stains, brick chimneys, K & K Grocery, and cotton, 12 cents a pound. Cotton on the roadside and cotton in the ditch and cotton in forever rows stretched across fields flat as tabletops.

While the details of the story are terrible, Montgomery keeps away from thundering indictments, letting events speak for themselves. It seems entirely possible that Neal did commit the murder that sparked the mob’s fury, but the community’s response was beyond barbaric, and the story shows how the devastation inflicted on the family continues to echo down the years.

Some of the living know who was responsible for the murder of Claude Neal, but if they were to name the killers (all dead now), what kind of hatred and judgment, they ask, would be heaped on the killers’ innocent descendants? Montgomery does not even need to point out what is implicit in the tale. If Neal’s executioners remain anonymous, his family will have to continue to bear the weight of history alone.

The ending of the story is a beginning – in the last paragraphs, the FBI arrives to investigate. No doubt there will be more to report in the coming months and years, but for now, the narrative draws literal and symbolic closure from the fact that justice has stepped in to address racism and vigilante justice, even if it has come 77 years too late.

Visit the Times’ site to see Edmund Fountain’s striking video and photos for the project. And read our interview with Ben Montgomery about “Spectacle.”