Stillman

Filipinos launder soldiers’ uniforms, Kenyans truck frozen steaks and inflatable tents, Bosnians repair electrical grids, and Indians provide iced mocha lattes. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops filled with carved camels and Taliban chess sets, beauty salons where soldiers can receive massages and pedicures, and fast-food courts featuring Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and Cinnabon. (AAFES’s motto: “We go where you go.”)

The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

The wars’ foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as “third-country nationals,” or T.C.N.s. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers.

Stillman’s piece won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Public Interest and the Sidney Hillman Foundation prize, for excellence in reporting for the public good. (And her recent story “The Throwaways,” about young informants being used to a deadly degree in the nation’s criminal justice system, is up, tonight, for a National Magazine Award. Our Annotation Tuesday! series will carry a line by line on the piece soon, so check back for that.)

When accepting the Hillman prize, Stillman recounted how she found the “invisible army.” Her acceptance speech comes in at the three-minute mark, but here’s the first of it:

“It began when I was at an Indian restaurant in Oxford, England, a few years ago, oddly enough, and I had a waiter—a young man, Tony, came up to me. He was giving me dinner and he heard my American accent and he said, ‘Oh, you’re an American! I used to work on a U.S. military base, feeding soldiers.’ And he whipped out his cellphone and started showing me these pictures of Jessica Simpson on her U.S.O. tour, like in a tank top. He had these funny, interesting stories but then he began to tell me about some of his friends, also from Goa, India, who had been promised great jobs in Dubai and Jordan and instead were taken to a war zone, to a U.S. military base. Other workers had been hit by rockets and lost eyes or limbs and had been sent home to their countries with no insurance. So this was on my radar when I first went to to Iraq in 2008. I thought I was going to have to work hard to dig up these stories and just find these people. And I arrived on the base and lo and behold one of the first things I saw was a Burger King staffed by Indian workers. One of the second things I saw was a Pizza Hut staffed by Bangladeshis, and a Cinnabon. And then a beauty salon where you could actually get $7 manicures and pedicures from a group of Fiji women who ultimately became the subjects of my story. … I learned that they had been promised lavish jobs and a nice hotel in Dubai, and instead were taken to Iraq. I got to know them over a period of years and was there on the day that one was sexually assaulted by her supervisor. When I called the emergency sexual assault hotline on her behalf I found only a phone that rang and rang, and no answer.”

You can find Stillman’s full talk here:

And for more installments of “How’d you find that story?” go here.

“The Innocent Man,” Part 2
By Pamela Colloff
Texas Monthly 
December 2012

I.

Colloff

“Even though I asked to be transferred here for the master’s program, coming here was a shock,” Michael Morton wrote on January 22, 2002, from his cell in the Ramsey I prison unit, south of Houston. He was replying<Did Garcia provide you the letter? How did you get access?/pw Yes, Mario gave me a stack of letters. I was so thrilled when I sat down and read them./pc to a letter he had recently received from Mario Garcia, a former co-worker at the Safeway in Austin where he had worked before being sent to prison fifteen years earlier. Besides his parents and his younger sister—who made the five-hundred-mile round-trip from East Texas to visit when they could—Garcia was the only person from Michael’s previous life who had stayed in contact with him. Virtually everyone else believed that he was guilty. Throughout the fall and winter of 1986, his case had been splashed across the front pages of Central Texas newspapers, earning him a grisly notoriety. “Victim’s Husband Held in Murder Investigation,” the Hill Country News announced in the fall of 1986. “Killing Linked to Sexual Rage,” trumpeted an Austin American-Statesman headline just before he was sentenced to life in prison, in February 1987. The Williamson County Sun announced, “He’s Guilty.” Michael had become a pariah—a “murderous pervert,” as he would ironically refer to himself.

“When I got here, they used to put all new arrivals in the field force,” Michael<One thing I meant to ask in Part 1: How did you decide to refer to him as “Michael” and not Morton?/pw Excellent question. I always wrestle with whether or not to refer to a protagonist by his/her first or last name. In this case, there were practical reasons to go with his first name. Christine had the same last name, so it ended up being an easy decision. (Calling him “Morton” and her “Christine” seemed awfully weird.) But generally speaking I like the immediacy of using someone’s first name, when it’s appropriate./pc wrote, referring to inmates who were assigned to work on the prison farm. That had been three years earlier. Now 47, he was too old to be doing hard physical labor all day long, he told Garcia. His face had settled into the softer contours of middle age, and his sandy blond hair was going gray. “Try to imagine twenty to forty men,” he continued, “shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, swinging their [hoes] in unison and chopping weeds that are, I swear to God, six to ten feet high. Or, on the bad days, working in a huge irrigation ditch, skinning the banks down to bare earth<Hey, not bad, the writing./pw I know! I get a lot of letters from prison, and I can assure you that none of them sound like this./pc and then dragging the chopped-up vegetation back up the banks. It’s long, hard, backbreaking work. Sometimes guys pass out and have to be carried to the hospital. (Fakers are found out by being dragged onto a fire ant mound. Either way, the consequences suck.) During all this, armed, hard-ass guards are riding around on horseback, shouting Christian-hearted encouragement. Added to the natural camaraderie and high spirits of working outdoors are more snakes, rats, poison ivy, and biting, stinging, and pinching insects than I like to remember. The first few weeks damn near killed me.”

During his fifteen years in prison,<Structurally you’ve zoomed us forward in time. Why was it important to pick up Part 2 here?/pw I telescoped down the information about his time in prison because there was still so much more information left to convey. I wanted to keep the story moving. Had Michael gone into as much detail in our interviews as he did in these letters, that would have been a much more difficult decision. But his time in prison was not something he liked to dwell on. So much had happened during those 25 years—he lived in three different prisons, had dozens of different cell mates, and so on—so it seemed easier to compress the information I did have. As I mentioned previously, I have second-guessed that decision. Michael is writing a book and my hope is that he will tell us more about what those years were like./pc Michael had already survived sweltering summers with no air-conditioning, when temperatures inside the old red-brick penitentiary reached into the triple digits for weeks on end. He had fought off the unwanted attention of a hulking inmate, an enforcer for a prison gang who later died of AIDS, by inviting him into his cell and slamming a makeshift tabletop against his throat. He had been kept awake by inmates who cried at night and by his own longing for his son, Eric, and his wife, Christine, whose absences he felt only more acutely as the years wore on. But in his letters to Garcia, Michael tried to strike an upbeat note. “I have fallen in with a tolerable collection of half-witted misfits,” he wrote in one letter. “Despite it all, I am okay,” he assured Garcia in another. “Honest.”

When he did allude to the indignities of his daily life, he added a heavy dose of gallows humor, as when he dubbed a stomach flu that swept through the prison population one winter “the Brown Storm.” (“I live on a dorm with 56 guys and four toilets,” he wrote. “Do the math. It wasn’t pretty.”) He proudly described working toward his master’s degree in literature—he had already earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology during the early years of his incarceration—and he expressed how much he enjoyed reading Homer and Dante. He casually mentioned that he was at work on a novel. <Has anything come of this? Did he let you read it?/pw I did not read it. I was asking him for so much other material—letters, journal entries, access to people, etc.—that I tried not to make requests that weren’t absolutely essential. I was always scared that he was going to be overwhelmed by my requests, which were often overwhelming! I knew that the novel was entirely a work of fiction and did not pertain to his case or prison or anything I was writing about./pc

Eric was a recurrent subject in his letters to Garcia. The boy was being raised by Christine’s sister, Marylee, who, along with the rest of her family, had come to believe he was guilty. “It seems hard to believe, but he’s eighteen years old,” Michael wrote that January. “This spring, he’ll graduate from a private Catholic high school in Houston. The Jesuits are supposed to be good at cramming info into the heads of teenagers, so I hope he’s ready for college. I say ‘I hope he’s ready’ because I don’t know. We’ve drifted apart. A few years ago, he reached the age where coming to visit his old man wasn’t at the top of his to-do list.” In fact, Eric—when he was fifteen—had cut off all contact with his father.

Michael never failed to express his gratitude to Garcia for taking the time to correspond with him. “No matter how my train wreck of a life ends up, I will always think of you as one of the best,” Michael signed off one letter. “Adiós for now, my friend.”<I love that you used the Garcia correspondence as the hook for this section, rather than simply summarizing his prison time to date. We get to hear his voice, and we understand that everyone else has abandoned him. How did you decide to do it this way?/pw I really felt that this was the best way to telescope down all of this information. Because this material is presented in his voice—to a friend on the outside—readers know that they are only getting a truncated and selective version of reality./pc

Amid the jumble of holiday mail that arrived at Bill Allison’s house every December, there was always one envelope that stood out, distinguished by the return address from prison and Michael’s familiar handwriting. The Christmas card inside—in which Michael thanked Allison for defending him so forcefully during his trial—left him flooded with emotion. He had always felt certain that Michael was innocent, and he was filled with regret that he had not been able to convince the jury of this. “I’ve practiced law for forty-one years,” he told me. “In terms of the psychological toll that cases have taken on me, Michael’s was the worst.” In the aftermath of the guilty verdict, he said, “I couldn’t get over it. I went into a three-year tailspin.”

In Allison’s opinion, something had gone very wrong during the six-day trial at the Williamson County courthouse in Georgetown. On the afternoon that Michael was convicted, Allison and one of the prosecutors in the case, Mike Davis, had lingered after the trial to talk with jurors. As they discussed the case, Allison overheard what he believed to be a shocking admission. According to Allison, Davis told several jurors that if Michael’s attorneys had been able to obtain the reports of the case’s lead investigator, Sergeant Don Wood, they could have raised more doubt than they did. (Davis has said under oath that he has no recollection of making such a statement.)

Allison had immediately hurried back to his office in Austin to write down Davis’s comments. While he puzzled over what the prosecutor might have meant, he thought back to an argument he’d had with Davis’s boss, Williamson County district attorney Ken Anderson, who had led the prosecution’s effort. During two pretrial hearings, the lawyers had clashed over what evidence the state should, or should not, have to turn over. As Allison remembered it, state district judge William Lott had ordered Anderson to provide him with all of Wood’s reports and notes before the trial so he could determine whether they contained any “Brady material.” (The term refers to the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland, which holds that prosecutors are required to turn over any evidence that is favorable to the accused. Failure to do so is considered to be a “Brady violation,” or a breach of a defendant’s constitutional right to due process.)

Judge Lott had examined everything Anderson had given him and ruled that no Brady material was present. Afterward, as is the protocol in such a situation, the judge had placed the papers in a sealed file that could be opened only by the appellate courts to review at a later date. Thinking back on that series of events, Allison had a terrible thought: What if Anderson had not, in fact, given Lott all of Wood’s reports and notes?

It was this idea that prompted Allison’s motion for new trial, which was denied, and his first appeal, which he filed in 1988, one year after Michael was found guilty. That December, the Third Court of Appeals upheld Michael’s conviction and denied Allison’s claim that Brady material had been withheld from the defense. The language of the decision also made it clear that the court believed that Lott’s sealed file—which its justices had taken the time to open and examine themselves—contained the entirety of Wood’s notes.<Could Wood not be compelled to answer questions about what was or wasn’t in the file? Where was he during all of this, and where is he now?/pw I think all the judges involved in this case felt sure that they had the entirety of the file, since that is reflected in their rulings. Arguably Judge Lott should have held a hearing about this and put Wood on the stand, but judges rarely want to start monkeying around with cases of theirs that have already been adjudicated. Wood was still working for the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department at that time, and he has since retired./pc Still, Allison remained convinced that something was amiss. He appealed the ruling to the Court of Criminal Appeals, but the following year, its justices declined to reconsider the lower court’s decision. This was a major blow to Allison’s efforts. “I can’t say that I ever completely gave up,” Allison told me, “but I was pretty close.” Despairing, he called an old friend, noted criminal defense attorney Barry Scheck. “Bill told me that he was haunted by this case,” Scheck recalled. “He felt that Michael was innocent and that Anderson was hiding something. He smelled a rat from the very, very beginning.”

Scheck was an early proponent of DNA testing, a new forensic technology that was just emerging in the late eighties. Though the science was first used to match perpetrators to their crimes, Scheck and his law partner, Peter Neufeld, had become convinced that DNA testing could be used for another purpose: to exonerate the falsely accused. In 1992 the two attorneys founded a nonprofit legal organization in New York called the Innocence Project and began to take on cases in which biological material from the crime scenes could still be tested. In time this practice would transform the landscape for the wrongfully convicted, but litigating these cases was difficult at first. The technology was still in its infancy and required large quantities of DNA material, which were often unavailable. Despite these hurdles, Scheck and Neufeld managed to win numerous exonerations, and as news of their success spread, they were inundated with requests for help from across the country. “I badgered Barry and the people who worked for him for years to take on Michael’s case, but they were swamped,” Allison told me. “Barry would say, ‘We’ll get to it,’ but it took a long time.”

In prison, Michael had become well versed in the science of DNA analysis from the many magazine articles he had read on the subject. While he waited for Scheck to get to his case, he secured a court order, with the help of Allison and another lawyer, to permit DNA testing of a semen stain found on the sheet of the bed where Christine had been murdered. Michael still knew next to nothing about what had happened to his wife. He had returned home from work on the day she was killed to find their house overrun with law enforcement. The walls and ceiling of their bedroom were spattered with blood. Because she had been in bed at the time of the killing, in her nightgown, with the blinds closed, Michael believed that she had been attacked shortly after he left for work early that morning. But who had broken into his house and savagely beaten her was still a mystery, one he was determined to solve. <Deft summary of the crime./pw Thank you. I think Jake wrote that last sentence./pc

The technology proved to be too primitive to yield a result on such a small sample, however, and two rounds of testing—first in 1991 and then in 1994—were inconclusive. Over the next few years, the process grew more sophisticated as it became possible to “amplify” DNA, or duplicate even minute amounts of genetic material so there would be a large enough sample to analyze. Michael obtained another court order to have the sheet retested. The results, which he received in 2000, did not identify Christine’s killer, but they did directly contradict a sinister theory of the prosecution’s—that, after murdering Christine, Michael had masturbated over her dead body. It was a sadistic image that district attorney Anderson had repeatedly asserted during the trial, and it had helped turn jurors’ opinions against Michael. But the stain, it turned out, was not composed of semen alone; it was a combination of Michael’s semen and Christine’s vaginal fluid, indicating that something much more mundane had taken place: in the days or weeks leading up to the murder, the Mortons had had sex. <I’m trying to ask fewer questions in Part 2 because I fear we overloaded you in Part 1, but is there anything you’d like to say at this point about challenges particular to the second half of the story?/pw You’re not overloading me; I’m hugely flattered that anyone cares enough to read my writing this carefully. I think my big concern, when writing this part of the story, was that I not bog readers down in so much information that they would get lost. There was a lot of very dense legal material that I had to telescope down and make easily digestible. This part of the story, more than any other, was the place where I was worried about losing readers./pc

In 2002 the Innocence Project was ready to take on Michael’s case. Staff attorney Nina Morrison—who, to date, has secured no fewer than twenty DNA exonerations—headed up the effort in New York; she tapped a Houston attorney named John Raley to serve pro bono as her co-counsel. At first glance, Raley was an unusual choice: he was a civil attorney—his specialty had long been medical malpractice defense—and he had never practiced criminal law before. But he came highly recommended by a former colleague at Fulbright & Jaworski, in part for his facility with scientific testimony. He and Morrison would push for DNA testing on a wide range of evidence that had been gathered during the investigation: fingernail clippings; vaginal, anal, and oral swabs taken at Christine’s autopsy; her nightgown; stray hairs found on her hand; and a bloody bandana that had been discovered approximately one hundred yards behind the Morton home.<The case seems so jaundiced at this point I’m surprised the physical evidence didn’t go missing. Were you able to review any of this evidence? How important is it to you as a reporter/writer to see every available piece of the story?/pw There was a wonderful story that I did not feel I had the room for about how Michael’s lawyers ensured that the evidence did not go missing. In a nutshell, when the Innocence Project took on the case, they sent a young law student to Georgetown and she made sure to dress casually in jeans. She arrived unannounced at the courthouse and somehow talked her way into the evidence room. She didn’t identify herself as being with the Innocence Project; I think she just said that she was a law student. She then wrote an affidavit about everything she had seen in the evidence room and then—and only then—did the Innocence Project notify Williamson County that they knew what evidence was there. To really tell the story properly and set the scene would have taken a few paragraphs and the story was a dead-end because the bandana was not stored at the courthouse but in the sheriff’s department … and oh, I could go on and on. But there were so many interesting stories like that which I simply could not include because they would slow the story down or take readers a little off track. As for seeing the evidence myself, that was never a possibility. By the time I started reporting, Mark Alan Norwood had been indicted for Christine’s murder, so the evidence was in the possession of the Texas Attorney General’s office, because it was going to be used at trial, and it not available to the media./pc Raley, a six-foot-three former University of Oklahoma offensive guard, had an optimistic, almost wide-eyed view of how Williamson County would respond to the request for DNA testing. “Had the murder happened in the present day, there’s no doubt that law enforcement would have tested the evidence to try and find Christine’s killer, so initially I didn’t think they would oppose us,” Raley told me.

By then Anderson had left the district attorney’s office—in 2001 Governor Rick Perry named him district judge—but he kept in close communication with his successor, district attorney John Bradley. For eleven years, Bradley had been Anderson’s loyal first assistant, and when Anderson was appointed to the bench, Bradley became his replacement. The Houston native was well suited to carry on Anderson’s tough-on-crime legacy. A brash and sometimes polarizing figure who had cut his teeth as a young prosecutor in the Harris County DA’s office, Bradley had honed his hard-boiled approach under the legendary Johnny Holmes, who had won more death sentences than any district attorney in Texas history. After becoming Williamson County DA, Bradley issued press releases he drafted himself that publicized the numerous convictions and often draconian sentences that his prosecutors won. He was notorious for bullying defense attorneys into taking pre-indictment plea bargains for their clients, which often required people who had been accused of crimes to enter guilty pleas before knowing how strong or weak the state’s evidence was against them. His unusually combative stance toward defendants was an easy fit in an office molded by Anderson. “John was Ken’s protégé,” Allison told me. “Every policy, every strategy, got handed down from Ken to John. The only difference between them is that John’s louder. He likes to be onstage more. That was never really Ken’s forte.”

While Raley hoped for cooperation, Morrison cautioned that they would probably meet resistance on their motion for DNA testing. Lawyers from outside Williamson County had never been made to feel particularly welcome in Georgetown, and a request for DNA testing—which by its very nature implied that Bradley’s mentor may have made a grievous error in prosecuting Michael—was certain to get a chilly reception. Though Anderson was no longer DA, his presence in the courthouse was still keenly felt. The motion would have to be filed with the original trial court where Michael had been sentenced, just down the hall from the courtroom where Anderson, now a judge, presided.

Before filing the motion, Raley called the DA to introduce himself. He let Bradley know that he came from a law enforcement family—his father, John Wesley Raley Jr., served as U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Oklahoma under two presidents, and his brother, Robert, is a federal prosecutor in Tulsa. “I said that I hoped he would agree to the motion or, at a minimum, not oppose it,” Raley told me, explaining that his overtures were rebuffed. “He was polite at first, but after we filed the motion, he made it clear that he would fight us. I couldn’t understand why he was opposing testing that we were paying for, that would cost the county nothing, especially if he was so certain that Michael was guilty.”

In fact, Bradley was generally skeptical of post-conviction testing, in part because it could undermine the finality of the legal process. One telling indication of his view on the matter came years later, in 2007, in a now-redacted thread on an online forum for prosecutors that was discovered by Scott Henson, of the criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast.<Wow. How did this come to your attention and how did you get access to the redacted material?/pw I can’t take any credit for this; Scott Henson took screen shots of the thread before it was redacted and reproduced them on his blog./pc Posting on the forum, Bradley had advocated a troubling strategy: that when obtaining guilty pleas, prosecutors should also secure agreements that would ensure that all physical evidence could be subsequently destroyed, so as to preclude the possibility of endless appeals. “Then there is nothing to test or retest,” Bradley wrote. (Bradley declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Unsurprisingly, when Morrison and Raley filed their motion in 2005, Bradley opposed it. As the DA stonewalled, Raley’s conversations with him became increasingly antagonistic. “At one point I asked him, ‘Why won’t you just agree to this? What harm can it cause?’ ” Raley said. “And he told me, ‘It would muddy the waters.’ ” (This phrase had previously been used in a 2002 Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that denied DNA testing to a death row inmate, holding that such testing could not definitively prove the defendant’s innocence and would “merely muddy the waters.”) Bradley’s response left Raley stupefied. “I said, ‘Mr. Bradley, truth clarifies,’ ” Raley recalled.<Best line of the whole piece./pw

Yet despite Bradley’s resistance, a decision handed down by district court judge Billy Ray Stubblefield in 2006 gave Morrison and Raley a partial victory. The judge agreed to allow DNA testing to go forward on the evidence collected from the Morton home, but he denied the request to test the bandana. Bradley had made the case that the bandana’s connection to the murder could not be proved because it had been found too far from the crime scene. “They fought us the hardest on the bandana,” Raley told me, adding that Bradley had been willing to have only the hair sample that was found on Christine’s hand tested and nothing else. “We argued that the fingerprints on the sliding-glass door and the footprint in the backyard established that the bandana had dropped along the killer’s escape route. I could picture it—him wiping the blood from his hands and face on the bandana, sticking it in his back pocket, and running.” But Stubblefield did not see it the same way.<A procedural question that relates to organization: Do you work from timelines? Also, how much of the case was already laid out in court documents and other source materials, and how much did you have to go beyond what was already known, to fill in blanks? Did you do any investigating of your own?/pw Piecing together what had happened in this case after the trial was a nightmare. There were so many hearings and motions and letters back and forth between the lawyers, and all the lawyers involved remembered the sequence of events differently, and they described everything to me in very complex legal jargon. I basically pieced together a timeline after months of reporting and then tried to whittle that timeline down to include only the most important things that happened. I tried to understand them as best I could—I don’t have a law degree—and then I tried to write this in the clearest language possible. And then it went through fact-checking./pc

When DNA testing on the fingernail clippings, swabs, nightgown, and hair was completed, the results were discouraging. Only Christine’s DNA was detected, and Michael could not be excluded as the donor of one of the hairs.

Bradley would later scoff to reporters that Michael and his attorneys were “grasping at straws” in their search for a “mystery killer.” He used a similarly contemptuous tone when Michael came up for parole in 2007, having served the first third of his sixty-year sentence. “I am writing to protest parole and request that you put off reconsideration of parole for as long as the law permits,” Bradley wrote to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. “Michael Morton has never accepted responsibility for murdering his wife.” (In an aside Bradley added, “His nickname for Christine was ‘Bitch.’ ”) The district attorney was correct that Michael appeared to be unrepentant; Michael had been told by other inmates that he would be eligible for early release only if he showed remorse for his crime, but he emphatically refused to do so. He would not lie to get out, he told his parents. His innocence, he said, was all he had.

When the DA’s office received notice that Michael had been denied parole, someone—it’s unclear who—scrawled a note on the letter from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In small, blocky letters, it read, “Victory.”

Six years earlier, Michael had hit rock bottom. In 2001 a letter had arrived for him at the Ramsey I Unit informing him that his son had decided to change his name. Eric was eighteen at the time. He had recently been adopted by his aunt, Marylee, and her husband, whom she married when Eric was twelve. That the boy had rejected his own name was too much for Michael to bear. Before Eric was born, Christine had wanted to name him Michael Morton Jr., but Michael had balked, telling her that he would rather their son have his own distinct identity. And so they had compromised on Eric Michael Morton. Now Eric Michael Morton no longer existed.

“That’s when I finally broke,” Michael told me. “Nothing before then did it—not Chris’s murder, not my arrest, not my trial, not my conviction. Not getting a life sentence. Not the failed appeals, not the lab results that led nowhere. Eric was what I had been holding on to. He was the reason I was trying to prove my innocence. Once I found out that he had changed his name, I knew that reconciliation was not a possibility anymore. We weren’t going to be able to put this back together. That was a hollow, empty feeling, because getting out had never been the goal. It was getting out so that I could tell Eric, ‘Look, see? I didn’t do this.’

“I can’t remember if it was Marylee or Eric who wrote to tell me, but I remember being nearly catatonic for at least a week. It was like the bottom fell out. This wasn’t just another difficult thing to overcome, this was the end. This was a death. I literally cried out to God, ‘Are you there? Show me something. Give me a sign.’ I had nothing. I was spent, I was bankrupt. It was the most sincere plea I have ever made in my life. And I got nothing. A couple weeks went by and . . . nothing. No response.<We’re entering a long-running quoted passage from Morton, the first passage of its kind in the piece. Can you talk a bit about how you decided to use this material in this way?/pw Yes, I did this once before in a story I wrote about lottery winners. Instead of describing the excitement of winning the lottery myself, I had one of the lottery winners describe the day he won his millions, and it worked much better. I used this long-running quote here to the same effect. I could try all day long to write, in my own words, about how Michael felt that he was in the presence of God … but it wouldn’t work as well as Michael’s own words. I also felt that this was the right place and time in the story to introduce Michael’s present-day voice—not his voice in letters or testimony, but the words he spoke directly to me. I knew that I would need him to be able to comment, in his voice, on the events that took place in the last quarter of the story./pc

“I was lying in my bunk one night listening to the radio on my headphones, and I ran across a classical station. I heard something you rarely ever hear: a harp. There was no slow buildup, no preamble to what happened next. I was just engulfed in this very warm, very comforting blinding light. I don’t know what to call it—an ecstatic experience? a revelation?—because it was indescribable. Any words I use to explain it will fall short. I had this incredible feeling of joy. There was an overwhelming sense of this unlimited compassion aimed right at me. Then I heard my alarm go off and it was over, and I sat up in bed. Outwardly, everything was still the same. But I knew that I had been in the presence of God.

“My life didn’t change right away. Everything didn’t instantly fall into place. I was in prison for another decade, so it wasn’t like God knocked open the doors for me. Becoming a believer was a slow, organic process that I had to grow into. But I was different after that. You can’t buy inner peace, but I had it.”

II.

During the five years that Michael and his attorneys sought to have the bandana tested and Bradley tried mightily to resist their efforts, the bandana itself sat within the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office. It didn’t look like anything extraordinary. The deep-blue Western-themed handkerchief was bordered by a white lariat pattern that repeatedly spelled, in loopy script, the word “Wrangler.” Scattered across the fabric, which was deeply creased, were a number of small brown bloodstains.

Whose blood was it? On January 8, 2010, the Third Court of Appeals reversed Stubblefield’s decision and allowed testing on the bandana to go forward. Justice G. Alan Waldrop noted in his decision that the unidentified fingerprints on the sliding-glass door of the Morton home and the footprint in the backyard did, in fact, suggest that there was a trail of evidence connecting the bandana to the crime scene. Further, he suggested that DNA testing could definitively determine whether or not there was a link. “If the bandana contains Christine’s blood, it is sufficient by itself to establish a trail.”

Still, the bandana was seen as a long shot. “I did not have high hopes,” Morrison told me.<When speaking to each of the key legal players in the case, did you ask them targeted questions or have them recount his/her experience/perspective and then get more specific with the questions?/pw I did multiple, lengthy interviews with Raley and Morrison, then returned with a zillion follow-up questions in the months that followed. What you see in the story are the most important moments and quotes, which I have cherry-picked from a very long and complex legal battle./pc She and Raley had requested that the bandana be shipped from Williamson County to a private lab in Dallas that could amplify small amounts of DNA using the most cutting-edge technology available. But Bradley insisted that the bandana instead be submitted to the Department of Public Safety crime lab for analysis, even though the lab was not equipped to amplify DNA. In a letter to Stubblefield, Raley, who had grown increasingly impatient, wondered if Bradley’s insistence on using the DPS crime lab stemmed from “a desire to cause additional delays, or to minimize the odds that interpretable DNA results will be obtained.” Finally, after five months, Stubblefield ruled that the bandana, as well as a single strand of hair that was found on it, be shipped to the lab that the Innocence Project had initially requested. By then the dried blood on the bandana was nearly 24 years old.

Testing small quantities of degraded evidence takes time, and private firms that specialize in the process are in high demand. For a full year, the blue bandana sat in the lab in Dallas. It was stored carefully, folded into a neat square, its secrets held within. In May 2011, it was submitted for testing, which was completed the following month. The results, which Morrison was informed of by a phone call from the lab, were breathtaking. Both the blood and the strand of hair matched Christine’s DNA profile. The DNA profile of an unknown man was also recovered, intermingled with Christine’s blood and hair. Michael’s DNA was absent.

Morrison, who already had plans to be in Dallas that week to work on another wrongful conviction case, met Raley at DFW Airport so they could tell Michael the news together. The mood in Morrison’s rental car that morning was “euphoric,” Raley told me. “I don’t think the wheels ever actually touched the ground.” It was the first time during the eight years they had worked together that Raley had seen Morrison allow herself to be confident about their chances of getting Michael out. The dauntless Yale graduate had always met Raley’s enthusiasm with the cautious pragmatism she had developed after years of dealing with lost evidence, recalcitrant prosecutors, and a slow-moving justice system. That morning, she beamed as they headed east into the Piney Woods, toward Palestine, where Michael had been transferred to another prison—the Michael Unit—after earning his master’s degree.

Michael suspected that the news was good when he learned that Morrison was coming. Although he had spoken on the phone with her for years, he had never actually met her in person before. “I knew this wasn’t just a grip and grin,” Michael told me. When Morrison and Raley were escorted into the cramped visitation booth where he sat waiting for them, he could see that they were elated. He pressed his hand against the glass that separated them in greeting<Great detail – source? Did you ask certain questions to get this kind of acute detail?/pw I know that’s usually how an inmate greets the person on the other side of the glass because I have been a visitor to prison many times before, so I specifically asked each of the attorneys about this./pc and picked up the phone on his side of the partition. His attorneys talked animatedly, passing the phone receiver back and forth between them. “I don’t remember the exact words they said, but we were all bouncing off the walls,” he told me. “After a while Nina said, ‘Okay, sit down and take a deep breath. They’ve fought us all this way, and they’re going to keep fighting. This isn’t over.’ ”

Proving a DNA-based innocence claim requires showing that a jury would not have found the defendant guilty had the DNA results been known at the time of trial. Doing so, however, can take years. Michael’s lawyers understood that Bradley would almost certainly oppose any innocence claim and that years of appeals could follow. Even if Michael’s conviction were eventually overturned by a higher court, the DA’s office could still choose to retry him. The quickest way to clear his name would be to learn if the unknown man’s DNA profile matched any one of the millions of individuals with prior convictions that are stored in the FBI’s national DNA database, CODIS.

“Then there would be no question of Michael’s innocence,” Morrison told me. “When you have a name and a face to put to the DNA, it usually removes any possible hypotheses about contamination or tampering or accomplices.” Initially, though, it was unknown whether the DNA profile, which had been extracted from bloodstains that were old and fragile, was detailed enough to be compared with those in CODIS. “Among the many miracles in this case is that had the DNA profile on the bandana been missing just one more marker it would not have been eligible for a national search,” 
Morrison said.

The DNA profile was entered into CODIS, and on August 9 Morrison was informed that there had been a match. His name was Mark Alan Norwood, a drifter with a long criminal record, including arrests in Texas, California, and Tennessee for aggravated assault with intent to kill, arson, breaking and entering residences, drug possession, and resisting arrest. Old mug shots<Terrific – part of the case file or sourced elsewhere?/pw This was probably the easiest thing to find in the whole case. Once Norwood was arrested, his old mug shots ran in the Austin American-Statesman and on the local news here quite regularly./pc revealed a man with a large, drooping mustache, his chin tilted upward, looking down at the camera with a cold-eyed stare.

Almost 25 years to the day after Christine was murdered, Morrison and Raley called Michael to tell him that the man whose DNA was found on the bandana had been identified. “I remember Michael was quiet for a while after we told him,” Raley said. “There was just silence on the other end of the line. And I said, ‘Michael, are you there?’ I thought he might have fainted or something. And he said, ‘Yes, I’m here. I’m just letting this all wash over me.’ ”

As dramatic as the DNA results were, the Williamson County district attorney’s office was not ready to admit that Michael had been wrongly convicted. No sooner did the news break that another man’s DNA had been identified than Bradley began to discount the significance of the bandana, pointing out that it had been found roughly one hundred yards from the crime scene, not in the Morton home. “I don’t think, on its face, that a DNA result [on] . . . a piece of evidence away from the crime scene immediately proves innocence,” he told the Austin American-Statesman. “It does raise some good issues that are worthy of investigation, and we will do that.” As Morrison had predicted, Michael was in for a fight.

By then, he was accustomed to the stubbornness of the system that had put him away, and he knew better than to expect it to yield. He understood that the district attorney’s office was deeply invested in maintaining that he was guilty. Yet he did not fully fathom how singularly obsessed Williamson County had been in its pursuit of him until he was able to see portions of Sergeant Wood’s reports and notes. This material, which the Innocence Project had, after years of litigation with the DA’s office, acquired through a public records request, was nothing short of astounding.

The stack of old documents contained critical clues that might have helped identify Christine’s killer had they ever been followed up on. Michael learned from a 1986 sheriff’s deputy’s report that several of his neighbors had seen a green van parked by the vacant, wooded lot behind his home around the time of the murder and had observed its driver walking into the overgrown area that extended up to his privacy fence. He read an internal memo to Wood about a call received from one of Christine’s relatives in Phoenix who reported that a check his father-in-law had made out to her had been cashed after her death with what appeared to be a forged signature. (On later inspection, Michael would realize the signature was actually his own.) The internal memo, which was unsigned, included a telling note to Wood: “They seem to think that Chris’ purse was stolen, course, we know better than that.” Though Christine’s purse was missing from the crime scene, Anderson had brushed aside this detail by telling the jury that Michael had staged a burglary to deflect attention away from himself.

It was this sense of certainty that appeared to have blinded investigators to what was surely the most incredible missed clue in the entire case: a handwritten phone message for Wood reporting that Christine’s credit card had apparently been used at a store in San Antonio two days after her murder. “Larry Miller can ID the woman,” stated the message, which included a number to call. Wood did not appear to have ever investigated the lead.

As he sifted through the papers, Michael felt “no anger, just bewilderment,” he told me. “By that time, I had been pummeled with so much, for so long, that I recall just staring at the pages, stunned.” For the first time in almost 25 years, he began to have a sense of clarity about what had happened. Michael carefully turned the pages and came across an eight-page transcript of a phone call that had taken place between Wood and Michael’s mother-in-law, Rita Kirkpatrick, less than two weeks after Christine’s murder. As he studied each typewritten word, Michael could feel his throat tightening.

“Eric and I were alone at my house . . . , which was the first time he and I had been alone since his mother’s death,” Rita told Wood. “I was putting on makeup in the bathroom. Eric layed [sic] his blanket on the floor of my bedroom. He said, ‘Mommie is sleeping in the flowers.’ His dad had told him that last week at the cemetery. Then he kicked the blanket and said, ‘Mommie, get up.’ ”Rita explained to Wood that at Marylee’s suggestion she had written down everything her grandson had then said. She read her exchange with the boy back to the investigator:

Eric: Mommie’s crying. She’s—stop it. Go away.

Grandmother: Why is she crying?

Eric: ’Cause, the monster’s there.

Grandmother: What’s he doing?

Eric: He hit Mommie. He broke the bed.

Grandmother: Is Mommie still crying?

Eric: No, Mommie stopped.

[Grandmother:] Then what happened? . . .

Eric: The monster throw a blue suitcase on the bed. He’s mad . . .

Was he big?

Yeah.

Did he have on gloves?

Yeah, red.

What did he carry in his red gloves?

Basket.

What was in the basket?

Wood.

The boy’s account perfectly matched the crime scene. Christine had been bludgeoned in her bed. Wood chips had been found in her hair, suggesting that she had been beaten with a log or a piece of lumber. A blue suitcase and a wicker basket had been stacked on top of her body. But it was the last part of Rita’s conversation with Eric that Michael found the most astonishing:

Where was Daddy, Eric? . . . Was Daddy there?

No. Mommie and Eric was there.<Just, wow./pw Right? I mean, there it is. There’s the whole case in a nutshell. Was Daddy there? “No.” I really wrestled with when to introduce this information. Chronologically, it should have come in Part 1. This was known to investigators within 10 days of Christine’s death, all the way back in 1986. There were other, earlier places in the story where I could have revealed this information, as when his attorneys discover the transcript. But I wanted the reader to discover the transcript along with Michael so that it would have the full emotional impact./pc

Rita had then added, “So, Sgt. Wood, I’d get off the . . . domestic thing now and look for the monster and I have no more suspicions in my mind that Mike did it.”

Just as Allison had suspected more than two decades earlier, there had been critical evidence in Wood’s reports—evidence that would have changed the outcome of Michael’s trial had the jury ever learned of it. But the transcript did not end there. Michael read along with disbelief as, over the course of the next six pages, Wood failed to ask a single pertinent question or inquire about a time when he could question Eric. Wood sought instead to convince Rita of a bizarre theory that the “big monster with the big mustache,” as she referred to the killer—a reference, presumably, to a description that Eric had given her—had actually been Michael wearing his scuba-diving gear.

When I asked Michael to describe what he had felt after reading the transcript, he bowed his head and searched for the right words for a long time. “The magnitude of the tragedy felt more profound,” he said finally. “I had no idea that Eric had seen anything as catastrophic as his mother’s murder.” After reading the transcript, he told me, “I was doubled over.” He was incredulous that his wife’s family had known that Eric had said that a stranger killed Christine. “The betrayal by my in-laws became magnified,” he said. Why did he think the Kirkpatricks never told him of Eric’s account? “The police said I did it, so I did it,” Michael told me. <It does seem incredibly odd that they wouldn’t have pushed for some clarity about Eric’s account. What do you make of it, and what do they say about that?/pw The Kirkpatricks have still not spoken publicly about this case, so I can’t answer that. But as Eric explains later in the piece, his family came to believe that he was simply repeating things he had overheard family members saying./pc

Soon after the results of the DNA testing became front-page news, Michael received a letter from Margaret Permenter, a friend of Christine’s. Permenter apologized for having believed the worst about him and asked for his forgiveness. (Her mistaken assumption that Michael was guilty, she told me, was based on a single conversation she’d had with a woman at the Williamson County courthouse in 1987. “I called the court to order a transcript, because I hadn’t been able to attend the trial,” she told me. “The woman I spoke with told me that the medical examiner testified that Chrissy had died at a time when she could only have been with Mike. And that was enough for me.”) Michael sent a gracious letter back, absolving her of blame. He reserved his anger for the Williamson County authorities who he believed were responsible for his wrongful conviction. “To this day, I wrestle with what might have been—and what continues to be—their motivations,” Michael wrote. “I still wonder, why? Careerism? Peer pressure? Hubris? Misplaced duty? A warped longing to ‘get’ the bad guys? I don’t know. I only know what they did.”<Great details/insights; how’d you get the letter exchange? /pw When I interviewed Margaret, she told me that Michael had sent her a letter and asked if I wanted to see it. She sent it to me and I was so happy when I read it, because Michael sums up everything so nicely here./pc

III. 

At first the whereabouts of Mark Alan Norwood—the convicted felon whose DNA had been detected on the bandana—were unknown. To prevent his name from being publicized, he was referred to only as John Doe in court documents. “We were very concerned about what he might do if he saw his name in print, because we felt he was a flight risk,” Raley told me. Locating him was of paramount importance to Michael’s attorneys, but they did not believe that the district attorney’s office felt the same sense of urgency. Even after Williamson County opened an investigation on Norwood in August 2011, Bradley and his staff continued to question the importance of the DNA results, casting doubt on the bandana’s “chain of evidence.” (Strict protocols now dictate how law enforcement collects and transports evidence; in Michael’s case, the bandana had been recovered not by a police officer but by Christine’s brother, John Kirkpatrick, who had picked it up, placed it in a plastic bag, and driven it to the sheriff’s office.) “There could be many innocent explanations for why DNA is on that bandana,” assistant DA Kristen Jernigan asserted during a hearing late last summer.

To debunk that hypothesis, Morrison launched her own parallel investigation. The first step would be determining whether Norwood could have committed the murder; if he had been living out of state at the time or if he had been in jail on an unrelated charge, then Morrison would have to pursue other possibilities. (“Sometimes a CODIS hit leads you right to the killer,” she told me. “And sometimes it leads you there indirectly, by identifying someone who is closely connected to the killer, like a crime partner or a roommate.”) Though she lacked the resources law enforcement has to conduct a nationwide search, she was able to draw on a network of volunteers who had worked with the Innocence Project on other wrongful conviction cases. “We don’t have much money, but we do have a lot of people who want to help us for free, so we had private investigators and lawyers across the country—everywhere that Norwood had a criminal record—volunteering to go to the nearest courthouse and pull his files for us,” she said. Based on information culled from these sources, she was able to assemble a detailed time line that plotted out where Norwood had previously resided. “We figured out pretty quickly that he had been living in the Austin area at the time of the murder, and that he was out of custody”—not behind bars—“on the day that Christine was killed,” she said.

It was while looking over this time line that Raley’s longtime paralegal, Kay Kanaby, made a revelatory discovery. Like everyone who worked at Raley’s close-knit, six-attorney law firm, Raley & Bowick, Kanaby had become preoccupied with Michael’s case. A former oncology nurse who had spent the early part of her career caring for leukemia patients at M.D. Anderson, Kanaby had seen her share of tragedy, but she was particularly struck by the injustice of Michael’s odyssey through the criminal justice system. As she studied the time line and Norwood’s lengthy rap sheet, she noticed that the serial criminal had never been charged with murder—a curious omission, she thought, if he actually was the man who had killed Christine. “I didn’t think someone would commit a crime like that once,” she told me. She searched the Internet for any mention of unsolved murders in the places where Norwood had passed through—Davidson County, Tennessee; Broward County, Florida; Riverside County, California—but little information was available online. She was relieved when she found that the Austin Police Department maintained a web page devoted to cold cases. As she scrolled through photographs of the victims in those cases, one photo, of a woman named Debra Baker, gave her pause. “She looked like Christine Morton—dark hair, early thirties, attractive,” Kanaby said. “The resemblance was striking.”

Kanaby read the case summary beside the photo. It stated, “Debra Baker was last seen the night of January 12, 1988. She failed to report for work at Elliot Systems on January 13. She was found deceased in bed by a family member who went to the residence to check on her. She had been beaten multiple times with a blunt object and there was evidence of possible forced entry into the residence.”

Kanaby was floored. Whoever had murdered Baker had used the same M.O.—bludgeoning her in her bed—as Christine’s killer, just seventeen months after Christine’s death.

Kanaby saw that the address of Baker’s home was listed, and she plugged it into GoogleMaps. As the satellite image of the North Austin neighborhood materialized before her on her computer screen, she noticed that the street where Baker had lived, Dwyce Drive, ran parallel to Justin Lane, where Norwood had lived at the time. “I got chills,” Kanaby said. “I didn’t have his exact address yet, but I could see that Justin Lane and Dwyce Drive were about two hundred feet apart. The homes on Justin Lane backed up to the homes on Dwyce. Their proximity seemed like more than just a coincidence.”

She hastily wrote an email to Morrison asking if her investigators could pinpoint Norwood’s old residence on Justin Lane. As she waited for a reply, she continued looking online for information about Baker. She soon stumbled across a criminal justice blog on which Baker’s daughter, Caitlin, had written several long posts. “There were pleas from her from 2005 begging for any information that anyone might have about who had killed her mother,” Kanaby said. “She had clearly done this out of desperation. She said that the police had not adequately investigated the murder and that detectives had told the family they were working on it, but she didn’t believe they were.” Kanaby read on as Caitlin explained that she had barely known her mother because the murder had happened when she was three. “It was heart-wrenching,” Kanaby said. So too was the realization that Caitlin and Eric had been the same age when they lost their mothers.<Reading this passage about Kanaby, I’m all the more grateful for publications that allow for – encourage, even – the detailed unfolding of a story. Nothing is wasted in this piece – everything matters. /pw Thank you so much. I really, really wanted to tell this part of the story in the detail it deserved. It made me so happy that we were able to tell the story of the incredible contribution that a paralegal made to this case. So often it’s only the lead attorneys who get the attention./pc

Were the Morton and Baker cases linked? she wondered. As she studied the map, she had the “steadily escalating sense,” she told me, that they were. “I couldn’t stop thinking that if Norwood had been arrested and convicted of Christine’s murder, Debra might still be here, and Caitlin’s story, like Eric’s, would have been so different,” she said.

Morrison was not able to obtain the information until five days later. On August 23 she emailed Kanaby, telling her that investigators had verified which house Norwood had lived in on Justin Lane. Kanaby typed his address, and then Baker’s, into GoogleMaps and looked at the image that appeared on her screen. “He basically lived around the corner from her,” she told me. “I kept staring at the blue line that traced the path from his house to hers.”

Morrison was already in Texas when she learned of Kanaby’s findings, having flown in from New York to attend a hearing in Georgetown that afternoon. The hearing would take up a request made by the defense that was almost certainly doomed: that Judge Stubblefield recuse Bradley from the case and appoint a special prosecutor to review the evidence with fresh eyes. Stubblefield—who had consistently sided with the state since the battle over DNA testing had begun—was not swayed. “It would be truly an extraordinary act for this court to disqualify or recuse Mr. Bradley,” he observed, expressing his confidence that the two prosecutors who were present—Jernigan and first assistant DA Lindsey Roberts—would handle the case in an unbiased manner.

Stubblefield then turned his attention to another request from the defense. Citing the materials uncovered by the Innocence Project’s public records request, Raley had made a strenuous case for Judge Lott’s sealed file to be unsealed. He argued that the transcript of Wood’s phone conversation with Rita Kirkpatrick was so plainly favorable to Michael—it conveyed an eyewitness account of the murder in which an unknown intruder, not Michael, was identified as the killer—that Lott would have undoubtedly disclosed it to the defense had he known of its existence. That he hadn’t, Raley insisted, proved that Anderson had never produced the transcript to the judge. “The way to find that out is to unseal the file,” Raley argued. Confident that everything had been above board, Jernigan did not object. “There’s nothing to suggest that this transcript wasn’t in that Court of Appeals’ file,” she said.

Stubblefield ordered that the file be retrieved from the appellate court in Austin—a process that would take a few days—so he could open it and review it with attorneys from both sides. “I personally am curious and would like to see it,” the judge added. He paused for a moment before concluding the hearing, which was taking place just down the hall from Anderson’s courtroom. “We must all have the courage to learn the facts and to let them lead us where they may, regardless where that might be,” he said. <How did you reconstruct this court scene? Transcripts?/pw Yes, I was lucky enough to have a transcript of this, as well as Raley and Morrison’s memories./pc

The following morning, as the heat wave that gripped Texas broke all records, marking the seventieth consecutive day when the temperature soared over 100 degrees,<Love this heat-wave detail for its subtle metaphorical power. How did that bit of dovetailing come to you? /pw Thank you! I was hugely pregnant that summer so it was easy for me to remember just how hot it was. Raley had mentioned to me that he and Morrison had arrived at the police department drenched in sweat because they had had to park several blocks away. When I was writing, I looked back at news reports to figure out exactly how hot it had been on that day and realized that it was that day, in particular, when all the records were broken. I was so happy to have stumbled across that fact./pc Morrison and Raley made their way to the Austin Police Department for a meeting they had requested with its cold-case unit. The two lawyers were met by detectives and a prosecutor from the Travis County DA’s office, who listened intently as Morrison and Raley laid out the pieces of their case, from Norwood’s DNA on the bandana to Kanaby’s findings. The warm reception stood in contrast to the way they had been greeted over the years in Georgetown. “Everyone was very interested in what we had to say,” Raley recalled. “They told us they would look into the possibility of comparing the DNA from the Baker crime scene to the recent Norwood evidence.” As Morrison and Raley left the police department that morning, they were buoyed by the hope, however remote, that a link might be found between the two cases—a link that would erase any doubts about Michael’s innocence. Raley’s excitement was tempered by his frustration. “We were having to conduct our own investigation,” he said. “We were doing the work of law enforcement. I kept thinking, ‘Why isn’t anyone in Georgetown trying to figure this out?’ ”

Two days later, on August 26, Jeffrey Kyle—the clerk for the Third Court of Appeals—drove from Austin to Georgetown to hand-deliver Lott’s sealed file to Stubblefield. By then Morrison and Raley had returned home, and so Patricia Cummings, a local criminal defense attorney who had become a member of Michael’s legal team, served as a witness to the unsealing. As she and the two prosecutors, Jernigan and Roberts, waited for the judge, Kyle stood with them, holding the small brown envelope that contained Lott’s file.

“I think the expectation, at least from the DA’s office, was that there was going to be a lot of material in there,” Cummings told me. “But we could all see that the envelope was very thin.” Stubblefield finally summoned them into the foyer of his chambers, where they remained standing while he opened the envelope. He pulled out six pages. All that was inside the file was a report of Wood’s, written on the day that Christine was killed, and a one-page form that Michael had signed, allowing deputies to search his pickup. “No one said much afterward, but it was very, very awkward,” Cummings said. After Stubblefield had copies of the file’s contents made for everyone, Cummings excused herself, then raced to her car and pulled out her cellphone to call Morrison. “There’s nothing there,” she said.

Stubblefield recused himself from the case the following week when Morrison and Raley stated in court filings that the absence of Wood’s reports and notes from Lott’s file raised the “specter of official misconduct.” (Stubblefield did not provide a reason for exiting the case, but he would have likely faced criticism had he not, given that Anderson was a fellow judge and longtime colleague.) In his absence, the Texas Supreme Court named a neutral party from outside Williamson County, state district judge Sid Harle, of San Antonio, to preside over the case.

Soon after, Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg contacted Harle to request an appointment. The judge—who was in the midst of a capital murder trial in his home district—elected to speak to her by phone instead, but he had a court reporter transcribe the exchange, which took place on September 16. During a hearing in Georgetown ten days later, he provided a sealed transcript of the conversation to Morrison, Raley, Jernigan, and Roberts and called a recess during which the attorneys could read it. The transcript contained an earth-shattering bit of information: a pubic hair that had been recovered from Debra Baker’s bed in 1988 did, in fact, match Norwood’s DNA profile.

“I remember screaming a lot as we read that transcript,” Morrison told me. “I said to John, ‘The case is over! We are done! This is it!’ ” Why, I asked her, was she so certain? “There was no argument that could be made with a straight face that it was a coincidence that Norwood’s DNA was found at the scene of both crimes,” she said.<Can you briefly walk us through how you concretely started this project – what was your first act and who was your first phone call? Where did you go from there?/pw I began with John Raley, because he was the gatekeeper to Michael. But Michael had signed an exclusivity agreement with 60 Minutes, so for months, I had no access to him, only the promise that we would get to talk when he could talk to me. During that time, I read the trial transcript, case file, old newspaper clippings from the ’80s, Ken Anderson’s book, and any other documents I could find. I interviewed as many ancillary people as I could. When I finally got access to Michael, I was well-prepared./pc

The Williamson County DA’s office did not see things the same way. When attorneys from both sides of the case reconvened in the courtroom as reporters looked on, Raley—still shaking his head in amazement—stated what by then seemed obvious. “I would imagine that in light of this new information, the state should be prepared to agree to relief for Michael Morton immediately,” he said firmly. “Right now.” But when Harle moved the hearing into chambers so they could speak freely about Norwood, whose name was still being withheld from the public, the two prosecutors dug in their heels. <Can you say how you got the details of the conversations that happened in chambers? /pw Luckily, that was transcribed and by the time I came along, it was public record./pc

Roberts told the judge that the bandana should undergo further DNA testing, and Jernigan brought up a report from the files of the late Williamson County sheriff Jim Boutwell, who had overseen the investigation into Christine’s murder, that seemed to cast doubt on the importance of the bandana. The report had been written by a sheriff’s deputy the day after John Kirkpatrick had turned the bandana over to investigators. In the report, the deputy stated that he too had seen the bandana while earlier canvassing the area, but he justified not gathering it as evidence by explaining that he had not noticed any blood on it. (The stains were small and easy to overlook.) Based on that report, the DA’s office put forth a far-fetched theory: that Christine’s blood had gotten onto the bandana after John picked it up, when he returned to the Morton home. (How, exactly, John had managed to get whatever dried blood remained at the house onto the bandana was not explained—nor was it explained how a hair of Christine’s had come to be found on the bandana.) In other words, even if Norwood had dropped the bandana, that did not make him Christine’s killer.

But the position that the DA’s office had taken was untenable. By then both Morrison’s investigators and Williamson County sheriff’s deputies had managed to locate Norwood—he was found living with his mother thirty miles east of Austin in the town of Bastrop—lending the reinvestigation of the case a new urgency. With local media reporting that evidence in the Morton killing had been linked to an unnamed suspect in a Travis County murder, Bradley folded. Four days after the hearing, he called Barry Scheck.

This was a remarkable turn of events; just two years earlier, Bradley and Scheck had famously clashed over the state’s reinvestigation of the troubled case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the deaths of his three daughters in an East Texas house fire. (Bradley, who was appointed by Governor Perry to head the Texas Forensic Science Commission, had openly disparaged Scheck’s efforts to examine whether Willingham had been wrongly convicted using flawed forensic science.) But during an intense weekend of phone calls back and forth, Bradley finally relented to Scheck’s terms. Bradley agreed not only to release Michael on bond while the Court of Criminal Appeals considered his claim of actual innocence but also to allow Michael’s attorneys, during that time, to conduct a court-supervised investigation into possible misconduct in the case. The unusual arrangement would allow them to question Anderson, Wood, and others under oath.

“I didn’t just want to get out,” Michael told me. “I wanted to know exactly how this had happened to me.”

Monday, October 3, 2011, was Michael’s 8,995th day in prison. It would be his last. He spent the morning giving away the few items he had that had made life more tolerable—a radio, an oscillating fan, a pair of sneakers—and took his final walk around the yard. That afternoon he was led from his dorm to a holding cell where he would spend the night before being transported back to Georgetown for his release. As a guard walked him through the dorm, he heard the rumble of applause. Over the years, Michael had earned the respect of his fellow inmates. He was known as a generous person who, along with two other prisoners with whom he attended Bible study, had routinely performed small acts of kindness for those who were the worst off—the men who never received any visitors or money in the mail with which to buy creature comforts. During the dog days of summer, Michael had used the commissary money his parents sent him to buy ice cream for some of them, earning himself the nickname the Ice Cream Man. Now, as he walked down the concrete hallway for the last time, he looked up and saw scores of inmates standing on the second tier, clapping and whistling and cheering for him.

Michael carried a Bible that his sister had given him, a few photos, and a toothbrush. Filled with the anticipation of what was to come the next day, he managed to sleep for just a few hours. Early in the morning, two Williamson County sheriff’s deputies arrived to bring him back to Georgetown. The protocol for transporting an inmate—even a man who was about to be freed on grounds of actual innocence—required that he be handcuffed and put in leg irons, but one of the deputies hesitated before reaching for his cuffs. “Now, Mr. Morton,” he said, “if you start having bad thoughts, I want you to remember that when all of this happened to you, I was only twelve years old.” Michael smiled and assured the deputy that he had nothing to worry about. He held his wrists out to be shackled, eager to get on the road.

The drive took three hours. Staring out the window of the squad car, Michael studied the brown, desiccated landscape that stretched westward from the Piney Woods. Leaning forward, he asked the deputies if there had been a fire in the rolling farmland and was told that the devastation was a result of the state’s historic drought. He had read about the drought, but he had not yet seen the toll it had taken and was amazed by the sight of the parched and brittle fields. There were other details that startled him too, like the peculiar metal spires he saw in the distance every now and then, which he soon understood were cellphone towers. When one of the deputies pulled over at a gas station, he studied the self-service pump with its digital display and credit card reader. The last time he had seen the outside world was seven years earlier, when he had been transferred to the Michael Unit. He had not driven a car since midway through Ronald Reagan’s second term. <This, to me, is just the right kind and amount of detail to convey how much the world had changed while Morton was incarcerated—it hews to the tight narrative of his experience. We don’t need to know what else had happened in the world, only what he can see of it. Did you feel compelled to reveal more or did this focused POV always seem right to you?/pw It always seemed right to me. I think if you provide the reader with a few details like this, they can be more evocative—sometimes—than a few paragraphs. I wanted the simple, awful fact of that statement to really strike the reader: He hadn’t driven a car since midway through Reagan’s second term./pc

When they arrived in Georgetown late on the morning of October 4, Michael could see that it too had undergone a transformation. Though still a small town, it thrummed with traffic that poured off the interstate, and the subdivisions that ringed it seemed to stretch on forever. No longer a sleepy, rural area, it had been overtaken by the northernmost edge of greater Austin. The century-old Greek Revival courthouse at the center of town where he had been convicted was shuttered. Michael was taken to the new jail, next to the Williamson County Justice Center—the spacious, modern courthouse where his bond hearing was to be held. In his cell, he found a tidy pile of clothes that his mother had hurriedly bought for him the previous day. Having worn only loose-fitting prison whites for as long as he could remember, he stared at them as he was unshackled: a white button-down shirt, khakis, boxers, and a pair of socks. Unaccustomed to buttons, he fumbled them as he dressed himself. As he slid on the khakis, which felt impossibly soft,<Such a lovely detail. How’d you get?/pw He talked in a number of interviews with reporters about how wonderful it had been to put on real clothes again, so I pressed him on this. What was it about wearing regular clothes that was so different than prison whites—was it the fit? That he looked more like a “normal” person in them? He told me, “They were so soft,” and he rubbed his fingers together like he still couldn’t believe it./pc he began to cry.

A sea of faces greeted him in the courtroom: Morrison, Raley, and Scheck were there, as was Bill Allison, who embraced him.<*sniffle*/pw His mother, Patricia, and his father, Billy—who had asked the members of their church to pray for their son’s release for nearly 25 years<Another beautiful detail; source?/pw I interviewed Michael’s mother for two hours and then never used any of the interview in my story, which I felt terrible about. This is one of the few vestiges of that interview. Again, there were so many paths to go down with this story, and the way in which his family had suffered during his incarceration was a story unto itself./pc —sat behind him with his younger sister, Patti, beaming. Reporters crammed into the courtroom, craning for a better view. As Michael scanned the room, he saw a young woman who he would later learn was Caitlin Baker, Debra Baker’s daughter. She sat quietly by herself, observing the proceedings.<*sniffle*/pw He spotted Mario Garcia at the back of the courtroom and motioned to his friend to step forward, enveloping him in a long, silent bear hug.<*SNIFFLE*/pw  These sniffles are making me so happy. I’m so glad that the story is resonating—that was my hope./pc

The hearing lasted just a few minutes, during which Harle apologized to Michael from the bench. “We do not have a perfect system of justice, but we have the best system of justice in the world,” the judge observed before agreeing to the terms of his release. For several minutes, everyone stood and applauded as Michael smiled broadly, his face electrified by the joy of the moment. “I thank God this wasn’t a capital case,” he told the crowd of reporters and TV cameramen. They trailed after him as he took his first steps out of the courthouse, his face upturned toward the sun.

Michael was already in his parents’ SUV, beginning to pull away, when Raley motioned for them to stop. A dark-haired woman in her sixties stood next to him, looking distraught. Raley explained that she was Lou Bryan, one of the jurors from the 1987 trial. She had learned only that morning, when she picked up the newspaper, that DNA tests had proved Michael to be innocent. “I’m—I’m so sorry,” she managed to say as she stared at Michael in disbelief.

He reached out to squeeze her hand. “I understand,” he said.

IV. 

By the time Michael walked out of prison a free man, Ken Anderson<This may be inappropriate but I’m silently calling this section HAMMER TIME./pw Thank you for making me laugh out loud. This case is so sad that you have to find ways to laugh or else it’s just too dark and depressing./pc had long been a respected member of his community. He was a Sunday school teacher and Boy Scout volunteer who cast himself, in his rulings, as a champion of both crime victims and children. A father of two, the 59-year-old jurist held a regular mock trial for fifth graders that he called “The Great Stolen Peanut Butter and Jelly Caper,” and he frequently made appearances at local schools to talk about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. He was a prolific writer, and of the eight books he had written, his most impressive work was a biography of Dan Moody, a Williamson County DA from the twenties whose prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan helped win him statewide acclaim and put him in the Governor’s Mansion. Like Moody’s, Anderson’s ambition reached beyond Williamson County. At the courthouse, rumor held that he had his sights set on obtaining an appointment to the Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases.

So it was a sudden reversal of fortune for Anderson when, eight days after Michael’s release, the CCA overturned Michael’s conviction on grounds of actual innocence. The ruling meant that Anderson had secured a guilty verdict against an indisputably innocent man. Yet whether he, or anyone else involved in the case, would ever be held accountable for the wrongful conviction remained an open question.

Immediately after his release, Michael’s legal team began digging for answers. Thanks to Scheck’s negotiations with Bradley, the lawyers—who now numbered six, including Morrison, Raley, and Scheck—were able to depose Anderson, Mike Davis (the former assistant DA who helped prosecute the case), and Wood and take affidavits from many others. The testimony was revealing. During his deposition, Anderson said that he had likely informed Allison and his co-counsel, Bill White, of the transcript in which Rita Kirkpatrick told Wood what Eric had seen but admitted that he had no recollection of what he had actually done.

“There’s no way on God’s green earth, if that was in my file, I wouldn’t have told them that Eric said that the monster killed his mother,” Anderson testified. Allison and White are both emphatic that he never did so. “If we had known what Eric told his grandmother, we would have fought hard to have the jury hear that evidence,” Allison told me. “Eric’s account would have been critical, because it supported the theory we presented at trial that an unknown intruder killed Christine.”

Shortly after the investigation concluded in November, Anderson made what still remains his only public statement about the case. Standing outside the old courthouse on the town square in Georgetown, the white-haired judge looked down at his prepared remarks as he told reporters that he had behaved ethically—“In my heart, I know there was no misconduct whatsoever”—and that he had no plans to step down from the bench. Caitlin Baker, who stood in attendance, was unimpressed, telling reporters afterward that Anderson should resign. She held Anderson partially responsible for her mother’s murder, she said, because his single-minded pursuit of Michael had allowed the real killer to go unpunished. “She could be alive right now,” she said. Her outrage was fueled by what was widely seen as Anderson’s failure to take any personal responsibility for his role in a conviction that he had long trumpeted as one of the pinnacles of his prosecutorial career. “As district attorney at the time, and as woefully inadequate as I realize it is, I want to formally apologize for the system’s failure to Mr. Morton and every other person who was affected by the verdict,” he had said before fielding a few questions and walking away.

Many observers in Williamson County wondered if the matter would end there. Rarely have Texas prosecutors had to answer tough questions about their conduct, even in the wake of wrongful convictions. But in February, Judge Harle ruled that the investigation conducted by Michael’s lawyers suggested that there was probable cause to believe Anderson had broken the law in failing to turn over evidence that was “highly favorable” to the defense. Harle recommended that the Texas Supreme Court launch a court of inquiry to look into the matter. A week later, the Supreme Court concurred with Harle’s findings and ruled that an inquiry should proceed. Anderson would have to answer for his alleged misconduct.

There was no precedent for this decision. A court of inquiry is an arcane and extremely rare legal procedure, unique to Texas,<Texas is so notorious for its criminal justice problems and procedures but the court of inquiry provision seems like a good idea. But is it? Why does Texas have it and why don’t other states?/pw I honestly don’t know why Texas has this and other states don’t, but I will say that I’m not sure I think it’s a good idea. I think it can be very easily misused. That said, I covered the court of inquiry in this case for our web site and it was fascinating./pc that can be used to investigate wrongdoing, most often on the part of state officials. But as far as anyone can remember, it has never before been used to probe allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, much less when the subject of the investigation was a sitting district judge. Nevertheless, the decision was well received. “The pursuit of justice shouldn’t end with an innocent person’s release from prison,” the Austin American-Statesman concluded in an editorial extolling Harle’s recommendation.

By then the tide of public opinion had turned against Anderson and Bradley. As the face of the Williamson County DA’s office, Bradley—who had devoted untold time and taxpayer money to opposing Michael’s requests for DNA testing—was excoriated in the local press. “Adjust the facts as needed, feign respectability, stick to the talking points, and, above all else, protect your friends and associates,” wrote local legal blogger Lou Ann Anderson, suggesting that Williamson County was less tough on crime than “light on justice.” Though Bradley had long been considered bulletproof politically in Williamson County, he soon found himself in a hard-fought race against a primary challenger. Despite support from Governor Perry, who sent letters to the county’s registered Republicans exhorting them to vote for Bradley, the DA was defeated by a stunning ten-point margin. The race had become a referendum on his handling of the Morton case; in the months leading up to primary day, his critics had tied bandanas to his political signs.<Wow. Were they blue?/pw Funny you should ask. The bandanas I saw were all red. No one knew what the bandana in the Morton case looked like./pc

This fall, attention turned back to Anderson. On October 4, the one-year anniversary of Michael’s release, the state bar issued a withering report on Anderson’s conduct. Sixteen years earlier, the agency had named him “Prosecutor of the Year”; now it filed disciplinary charges against the judge. After a ten-month investigation, it had concluded that Anderson had deliberately withheld evidence. A judge appointed by the Texas Supreme Court will hear evidence at an upcoming disciplinary hearing, which has not yet been scheduled. If the judge determines that Anderson withheld evidence, he could be reprimanded, have his law license suspended, or be disbarred. <How did you and the magazine decide to run this story prior to the proceedings against Anderson? /pw I didn’t want to hold the story any longer. I knew the court of inquiry would take on a life of its own, and in fact, I think I wrote 5,000 words or so on it just during the week that it took place./pc

As devastating as these penalties would be to a sitting judge, Anderson is no doubt far more concerned about the possible outcome of the court of inquiry, which is slated to begin on December 10. Fort Worth district judge Louis Sturns will preside over the inquiry, with legendary Houston criminal defense attorney Rusty Hardin—once a top prosecutor in the Harris County DA’s office—serving as special prosecutor. The unusual legal proceeding will be held in Georgetown, at the Williamson County Justice Center, just down the hall from Anderson’s courtroom. The irony of the situation will not be lost on anyone; the former DA—who subjected Michael to a ruthless cross-examination in 1987—could himself be called to testify while Michael looks on. If Sturns finds that Anderson violated the law, he could refer the case to the Texas attorney general’s office, even though Anderson’s attorneys have argued that the statute of limitations has long since expired on any offenses that he might be charged with. Michael’s lawyers, however, argue that the four-year window during which a prosecutor can be charged for violations such as suppression of evidence has not yet closed because Anderson committed an ongoing act of “fraudulent concealment” that did not end until August 2011, when Judge Lott’s file was unsealed.

Anderson is also expected to put on a vigorous defense that will draw on a narrow reading of what his legal obligations were to turn over evidence. He did not provide Wood’s reports and notes to Lott, explained Anderson’s attorney, Eric Nichols, “because it should be abundantly clear to any objective reader of the record that what the state agreed to produce was only a report from the day on which Christine Morton’s body was found.” The strategy of Anderson’s legal team will presumably involve trying to shift blame onto the late Sheriff Boutwell, whose mishandling of the investigation into Christine’s murder cast a long shadow on the case. They have pointed to the fact that several pieces of evidence, such as the phone message about Christine’s credit card, were found only in the sheriff’s office’s files, not the former prosecutor’s. Regardless, Allison told me he believed it was implausible that Anderson had not seen all the documents in the case, irrespective of where they were stored. “As the DA, Ken would have had complete access to the sheriff’s office’s records,” he said. “Quite frankly, I can’t imagine him stepping anywhere near the courtroom before going through every piece of paper first. He’s very meticulous.” No one knows exactly how long the court of inquiry will last; it could well be concluded before Christmas.

The denouement of the Morton case will come in January when Mark Alan Norwood, who was arrested last fall in Bastrop, will stand trial for Christine’s murder. Given Williamson County’s obvious conflict of interest—its own prosecutors, while fighting Michael’s efforts to prove his innocence, discounted the very same DNA evidence that implicated Norwood—the case will be tried by special prosecutor Lisa Tanner of the attorney general’s office. Because there is a gag order in the case,<When did the gag order come into play and how did it affect your reporting?/pw The gag order came down very early in my reporting. Luckily it did not preclude me from talking to Michael, thank goodness, so it really did not have a big impact. Usually I will put a story on hold when I hear that a gag order has been put in place, but there was surprisingly little overlap between what I was writing and what was happening in the Norwood case./pc it is unknown if state investigators have been able to connect Norwood back to the green van, the contents of Christine’s purse, or Michael’s .45 automatic, which was also stolen from the Morton home. It also remains to be seen whether the DNA hit in the Baker case will be admissible.

For Michael, the experience will be surreal. He will essentially be watching his original trial replayed, featuring evidence that his jury never heard, with another man sitting behind the defense table. In recent court appearances, Norwood has appeared unkempt, his dark, greasy hair pulled back into a ponytail, his expression blasé as he surveys the bank of TV cameras in the courtroom. (Because of publicity surrounding the case, the trial has been moved to San Angelo on a change of venue.) “I won’t do anything to jeopardize the trial, of course,” Michael told me, “but I’ve wondered if I will be able to control myself when I see him face-to-face.” Yet Michael has already shown Norwood mercy. At his request, as well as that of the entire Kirkpatrick family, Tanner will not seek a death sentence.<Can you update us on the cases against both Anderson and Norwood?/pw A weeklong court of inquiry was held in early February, which I chronicled for our web site. The judge who presided over the inquiry will likely issue a decision this spring about whether Anderson should face criminal charges. Norwood went to trial on March 18. (The dates of both the court of inquiry and the murder trial were delayed after my story went to press.)/pc [Ed. note: Norwood was found guilty.]

Eric’s memories of childhood begin with playing T-ball in the suburbs of Houston.<Here we come back full circle, to the opening of Part 1, featuring Eric. Can you tell us a little about the decision making behind this structural move? Also, you answer a question that’s been hanging indelibly over this whole story—what does he remember? /pw Setting aside this case for a second, I’ve always thought how strange it is that parents and kids remember the first five years of life so completely differently. The parents remember every last detail while the kid remembers …  absolutely nothing! That’s a weird situation to begin with. Then you add a crime into the mix, and it gets a lot stranger. I was so blown away with the fact that Eric remembered nothing, and I wanted that fact to really have an impact on readers. At this point in the narrative, you know what Michael remembers of him and how fiercely he loved Eric. So to learn that Eric remembers nothing is both heartening (he doesn’t remember seeing his mother killed) and deeply tragic, because he and Michael are coming at this from such completely different perspectives./pc He is five years old, a cheerful kid with blond hair and a wide, unclouded smile. Try as he might, he is incapable of drawing any earlier images to the surface; everything that took place before he was five is a blank. A photograph he has seen of himself with his mother, which was taken shortly after he underwent open-heart surgery when he was three, has evoked only a few unsatisfying details; he can recall the Hot Wheels set that he is playing with in the picture, but he has never been able to summon up an actual memory of the smiling woman with dark hair who is looking at him adoringly. His mother is lost to him.

The few recollections he has of his father start after Michael was already incarcerated. He can remember the lemon drops that Michael used to give him during their twice-a-year court-mandated visits at the Wynne Unit, in Huntsville. And he can remember the hand-drawn mazes that would arrive in the mail every so often, which his dad had carefully penciled onto graph paper before finishing in ink, each one more intricate than the last.

Those innocent details were overwhelmed, as Eric grew older, by the anguish of understanding why his father was in prison. That his father had been convicted of murdering his mother was a closely held family secret. Marylee had warned him not to tell his friends at school for fear that the stigma would rub off on him. “She and my grandmother wanted to protect me,” Eric told me.<Was he reluctant to speak with you? Was he forthcoming? How much time did you spend with him and in what circumstances?/pw It took a long time to get this interview; it was the last one I did before I started writing. But once we sat down together, he was pretty candid. We did one sit-down interview in his house and we corresponded a little bit by email afterward. I was so nervous during the interview because it was a really important interview and we had limited time, and I was afraid that he was going to cut the interview off at any second. So I think I raced through my questions. But he really was very open with me./pc “Everything they did was to shield me from what had happened. Obviously I was told my dad had been found guilty, but it wasn’t something we talked about.” When they did have to confront the past by making the two-hour drive to see Michael, Marylee attempted to make each visit as positive an experience as possible; the day would begin with a stop at McDonald’s and a coloring book for Eric to fill in on the way to the prison. “I’m sure those visits were torture for her,” he told me, “but she always put on a good face for me.” Marylee was intent on moving forward, past the tragedy that had engulfed them, and Eric helped her, in his own way, by revising the family history. When friends asked about his mother, he said that she had died of cancer or that she had been killed in a car accident. He told people that his father had taken off not long after he was born and now lived in California.

And so for Eric, life moved on. He had a doting aunt and grandmother, a top education at a private Catholic school, friends from the many sports teams he played on, and a beloved mixed-breed collie named Shelby. “Everything was picture-perfect,” he told me. “It was Leave It to Beaver, only with a single mom.” When he was twelve, Marylee married a friend of hers from junior high school, and her new husband would play a large and positive role in Eric’s life; Eric would later take his name—Olson<Nice; here it is./pw —when he was preparing to apply to college. His decision had less to do with cutting ties to Michael, he explained, than with wanting to become part of the Olson family, which by then included not only Marylee and her husband but the son they’d had three years earlier, whom Eric thought of as his little brother.

Eric went on to attend Texas State University, where he became the president of a small Catholic fraternity. When he returned home to Houston, he went to work in the campus ministry at his old high school. He met his future wife, Maggie, while volunteering at a local church. A year before they married, he told her on a drive through the Hill Country, as he stared straight ahead at the two-lane highway, that his father had killed his mother. He asked her not to tell anyone. “It wasn’t something that ate away at me or that I really dwelled on,” Eric told me. “I put it out of my mind so I didn’t have to deal with it. I just wanted to live a normal life.”

In June 2011, three months after he and Maggie married, Eric received an email from John Raley. After trying fruitlessly for weeks to track Eric down, Raley’s wife, Kelly, who is also an attorney at Raley & Bowick, had finally come across his wedding announcement on the website of a small local newspaper; using the details that were provided, she had figured out where Eric worked, and she passed along his contact information to her husband. “I have called you a couple of times recently, and I want you to know who I am and why I called,” John Raley’s email<Great; how’d you get the email?/pw I asked Raley for it and he was nice enough to give me an archived copy./pc explained. “I am part of a team of lawyers who, for many years, have been volunteering our time on behalf of your biological father.” Raley then laid out what had not yet been disclosed to the public: DNA testing had provided “powerful new evidence” of Michael’s innocence.

Eric did not respond for seven weeks. He was 28 years old and had lived almost his entire life believing that his father had killed his mother. The email rattled him so much that two days went by before he even mentioned it to his wife. “I wasn’t sure if it was real at first,” Eric told me. “There had never been any question that he did it, so this came totally out of the blue.” When Eric failed to answer, the Raleys enlisted their pastor<Wow./pw I love this part of the story. Again, there was a long, fascinating story here about the pastor and the priest … but I was not writing a book./pc to help, asking him to contact the priest who oversees the private school where Eric works. Only after he received a visit from the priest did Eric answer Raley’s email, sending a curt note acknowledging that he had received it. By then the hit to Norwood had been made, and Raley replied with a more detailed accounting of the facts surrounding the case. “The most important thing I can tell you,” he wrote in conclusion, “is that your father loves you.”

The following day, Eric wrote back: “My family does not have any desire to reenter this discussion or to relive what happened 25 years ago. Please do not contact my place of work or my family again.”

Eric’s first instinct, he told me, was not to shut his father out but to protect the woman who had raised him and prevent her from ever having to dredge up her grief over her sister’s murder. He did not tell Marylee about his exchange with Raley until weeks later. When he did, he found that she remained extremely skeptical that Michael could be innocent, even though she had, by then, read media coverage of recent developments in the case. Based on her communications with the Williamson County DA’s office, which was still trying to discount the relevance of the bandana, she continued to trust that Michael was guilty. Still, Eric kept educating himself about his father’s case, of which he knew little. He had never even been aware of Michael’s long fight to have the bandana tested. Encouraged by Maggie, Eric began to form a different view of his father.

Marylee, however, did not do the same. As she had always done, she accepted the DA’s office’s view of the case—that the DNA results did not exonerate Michael. No one at the DA’s office informed her of the deal that Bradley had brokered with Scheck, so she was blindsided when she learned of Michael’s impending release. She found out when Austin American-Statesman reporter Chuck Lindell emailed her to ask for comment on the afternoon before Michael walked free.

Eric had, by then, come to accept that his father was likely innocent, but he felt fiercely protective of Marylee, who was struggling to understand how everything she had been told was rapidly unraveling. And so, on October 4, the day of Michael’s release, Eric kept his distance. He was not present at the courthouse to hear Judge Harle’s apology or the crowd’s applause. When classes let out that afternoon, Eric closed the door to his office and sat down in front of his computer. On the website of an Austin TV news station, he was able to find a live-streaming video of the press conference that was being held nearly two hundred miles away in Georgetown. He leaned in closer, looking on in wonder as his father—older and grayer, wearing an exuberant grin—spoke to reporters. Eric did not have the urge to be there with him, but neither did he have the impulse to turn away.

Two days later, he wrote to Raley. “I want to begin by sharing my appreciation for your hard work,” he typed. “I hope that you continue the work you have done by pursuing the true murderer.” His family, he went on, was having “difficulty processing this new information.” He described the preceding weeks as “a bit uncomfortable.” Despite that tension, he wrote, “I feel the need to begin to reconcile the situation. I cannot imagine the pain everyone has felt, and I know that I was blessed with a childhood in which I was sheltered from most of that suffering. However, I would like to slowly establish contact again with my father.”

Immediately after his release, Michael returned to East Texas with his parents and settled into their spare bedroom. In time he would assume a high profile—speaking at universities about the lack of oversight for prosecutors, meeting with lawmakers to discuss legislative reforms—but in those early days, he was intensely private. He was unaccustomed to the everyday things he had once taken for granted: using metal silverware, or carrying a wallet, or being able to push open a door. The tactile experience of being touched by another human being was foreign to him, and he was taken aback whenever his mother or his sister threw their arms around him. Though the Innocence Project made sure that a social worker who had previously worked with exonerees was present on the day he was freed and available to help him in the months that followed, he did not seek out her counsel. “It was a blessed, easy transition,” he told me. “I had my family to help me and a roof over my head. Honestly, my return to the free world was not overwhelming compared to everything I’d been through up until then.” He delighted in mundane indulgences like taking off his shoes and walking barefoot across the carpet. Even doing the laundry, he told me, was its own pleasure. “Sorting socks and folding underwear may be work for some folks,” he said, “but you approach it from a radically different perspective if you haven’t been able to wear your own clothes for twenty-five years.”

The process of reconnecting with Eric was less straightforward. Michael tried to be patient as days and then weeks went by with no further word from him. It would take until shortly before Thanksgiving for Eric to agree to meet, and he did so without telling Marylee, who was still coming to grips with the revelations of the previous few months. John and Kelly Raley had offered their home in West Houston as a neutral location for the meeting. So one Saturday afternoon in November 2011, Eric and Michael set out to meet again. <What strikes me above all with this piece is its straightforwardness. You don’t resort to cheap or heavy-handed emotional tricks; therefore, it’s more powerful. Do you have a strategy for calibrating the delivery?/pw That’s the nicest thing you could say to me. A journalism professor recently told me, in a complimentary way, that he thought my story was “underwritten,” and I was thrilled. When I first started writing, I was really enamored with Tom Wolfe’s baroque style and I wrote my undergraduate thesis about him. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really come to appreciate more plain, stripped-down writing. When you’re working with material this good, your job is just to get out of the way—tell the story and don’t do anything too fancy./pc

Michael paced the floor as he waited for Eric, who was running late. After a while, Kelly began to worry that Eric might not come after all, and so she was relieved when she finally saw a car pull up outside. Eric and Maggie got out and approached the house, where Michael waited in the foyer with Raley. “This grown man was standing there,” Michael told me of his surprise when Eric appeared at the door. “That was him, that was my little boy. I would have walked right past him if I had seen him on the street.”

They shook hands. Then Michael reached out for Eric, and they embraced for a long time. “He was emotional, more than I was,” Eric remembered. “I didn’t know how to react, because I didn’t know him. I kept thinking, ‘Should I be crying? What should I be feeling?’ I was just kind of stunned.”

Eric was quiet for most of the evening as he took everything in. But his father, who had yearned in the solitude of his cell for this moment, could not hide his eagerness for them to be close again. “Michael was so excited that he was almost manic,” Raley told me. “It was the fastest I’d ever seen him talk. I think he wanted to cram everything they had missed into that first hour together. Eric was respectful and courteous, but he did not engage.” Raley and his wife watched with growing concern through dinner as Eric said little, and when the conversation stalled, Kelly talked to Maggie about the baby that she and Eric were expecting.<Lovely, subtle way of handling this bit of exposition. /pw Thank you! I wish I could figure out how to introduce more information in this indirect sort of way./pc Finally, Raley steered Michael and Eric outside to the back patio with mugs of coffee, where they could talk by themselves. It was the first time they had been alone together in 25 years.

They sat in the darkness, in a white garden swing that overlooked the yard, and it was only then that Eric opened up. “I told him that I was extremely freaked out,” Eric recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not mad. I don’t hate you. I just feel weird, and I don’t know how to act around you. Part of me feels like I’m betraying the Kirkpatricks right now. I know you’re excited to be out, but this is hard.’ ” Michael relaxed and listened as his son explained his mixed emotions. Slowly, the conversation eased into subjects that Eric had always wondered about: his mother, whose adult life he knew little about, and the three years they had all spent together as a family. “There was an organic, natural cadence we fell into,” Michael told me. “It just started going so well. We were alone, and it was good.”

Michael would see his son twice more that winter. In January he visited Houston shortly after the birth of Eric and Maggie’s daughter, and in February Eric came to East Texas to visit the extended Morton family. By then Eric had told Marylee about meeting his father, and he had been both surprised and relieved to discover that she was supportive of his desire to reconnect with Michael. But the Kirkpatricks themselves—having been conditioned for more than two decades to trust the sadistic portrayal presented of Michael at his trial—were more hesitant. (The conversation between three-year-old Eric and his grandmother, in which he described the murderer as a “monster,” had ultimately not persuaded the Kirkpatricks that Michael was above suspicion; encouraged by the sheriff’s office, they had always believed that Eric had simply made up the story after overhearing family members discussing details of the case.) When the entire family convened in April for the christening of Eric and Maggie’s baby girl, Michael received what he felt was a lukewarm reception—first at a dinner with Marylee and in particular at the baptism itself. “We greeted each other, but there were few words spoken,” Michael said. Even John Kirkpatrick, who was responsible for finding the bloody bandana that helped to free Michael, was cordial but distant. “I sensed that none of them had accepted or internalized my innocence,” Michael told me. “But I also know that they were lied to, manipulated, and kept in the dark about the most important aspects of the investigation, so in the end, I have to forgive them.”<How has your story affected the relationship between Michael and these family members?/pw Things are still strained. I’ll leave it at that for now./pc

By then Michael had received compensation for the time he served; in accordance with state law, which requires that exonerees be paid $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, he received just short of $2 million. He contributed some of the funds to a prison ministry that had buoyed him during his time behind bars and bought a piece of lakefront property, where he plans to build a house. He will remain close enough to his elderly parents that he can help them, having already shepherded them through several health crises since his release; not long after he returned home, his father had a stroke and his mother broke her arm. “I feel like I got home right in time,” he told me.

He has toyed with the idea of moving out West someday, but too many ties bind him to East Texas. One is his relationship with a divorcée and mother of three grown children who attends the same church as Michael’s parents. “We’re like an old married couple because we’re in our fifties,” Michael said. “We have our reading night, when we lie around her living room and read our respective books. Another night is movie night, and we’ll watch something I missed while I was away.” Christine will never be far from his mind, he added. “I think of her, but she is not the overriding influence she used to be,” he said. “It’s a bittersweet thing to realize that. But maybe, in the end, healthy.”

Michael tries not to overwhelm Eric by going to Houston too often, though he told me there were few things that made him happier than seeing his son holding his granddaughter. When he does visit, he usually stays with the Raleys and stops by Eric and Maggie’s home to say hello. On a recent visit, he and Eric went to an Astros game. It was the first time they had ever gone to a ball game together. “We haven’t had much one-on-one time, so I figured the game was the easiest way to do that,” Eric told me. “It was nice. Of course, it was weird too.”<Did you feel compelled as a reporter to be present on a day that Michael and Eric hung out together? /pw Stupidly, no. That is a great idea. I should have gone to the ballgame with them./pc Nah, was just curious./pw

It was on the heels of this visit, the night after the ball game, that I met Eric and Maggie for the first time. As we talked in the living room of their small, ranch-style house on the western edge of Houston, Maggie explained that Eric had become much more receptive to welcoming Michael back into his life since the birth of their daughter. She looked at her husband. “When you were turned off to the whole thing and you didn’t want to meet Mike, I just said, ‘You’re going to understand his feelings as soon as this little girl’s born,’ ” she reminded him. “I knew you were going to understand what a father’s love was and that it doesn’t just go away.”

Eric nodded. “That little girl has been my saving grace,” he told me. “The whole family has come a long way this year, and I think she’s helped with that.” I asked him about Marylee and how she was coping with the situation. He thought for a moment. “I think it’s difficult for her to share how much confusion she’s felt in the process of forgiving my father,” he said. “She’s come a long way from where she was when she seemed so resistant and angry. Now her anger and frustration is focused on the system and on Ken Anderson. She doesn’t believe my father is to blame anymore.” He was hopeful, he said, that there would be greater reconciliation when they all attended the Norwood trial together. Eric told me that he had less interest in the outcome of the court of inquiry than in seeing justice served in the Norwood case. “If he’s convicted, then life can go on with my father and the Kirkpatricks and we can be normal,” he said.

We heard the baby cry in the next room, and Maggie went to get her. A few minutes later she returned, holding the seven-month-old. The baby was tiny and alert, her expression placid as she stared at us. Her blue eyes were as bright as her late grandmother’s, who would be 57 were she still alive. We all stared back at the baby as she studied us, watchful and serene, unaware of all the pain and suffering that had come before her. Her name, of course, is Christine.<Lovely. Life goes on. Generations unfold. It’s all connected, etc. When did you know that this would be your kicker?/pw I always know how I’m going to end a story when I sit down to write. The end is pretty intuitive for me. Figuring out the beginning is hell. The last interview I did before I started writing was with Eric, and as soon as this moment happened, I knew this was the way to end the piece. Nearly all of the story is about Michael, but I didn’t want to lose sight of Christine. I wanted to bring it back to her. She never got to be a grandmother, she never got to see her son grow up, and I wanted to remind readers of that. But I also wanted to end this dark, depressing story on a somewhat hopeful note, and ending with the next generation allowed that./pc

Pamela Colloff has been writing for Texas Monthly since 1997 and is an executive editor at the magazine. She has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, and her stories have been anthologized in three editions of The Best American Crime Reporting. Her two-part series about the wrongful conviction of death row inmate Anthony Graves has been credited with helping win Graves’ release after 18 years in prison. A New York native, she lives in Austin with her husband and their two children.

To read other installments of Annotation Tuesday!, go here.

First, a quick look at last year: Julia Barton started covering audio narratives for us, and we brought the New York Times’ Sean Patrick Farrell on board as our Viewfinder columnist, covering video journalism. We added a tips category to help you find craft guidance more quickly, and broadened our speaker series coverage by including the narrative nonfiction legend Buzz Bissinger and National Magazine Award winner Luke Dittrich, and Pulitzer-winning fiction writers Paul Harding and Junot Diaz, all visitors to Lippmann House, Nieman headquarters. We expanded our popular “Why’s this so good?” series by bringing in dozens of new writers, including Eli Sanders, Jennifer B. McDonald, Pam Colloff, Ann Friedman, Wesley Morris, Ben Yagoda and Peter Trachtenberg, who, along with other contributors, covered the work of everyone from Joan Didion and Nora Ephron to Dan Barry and Roy Blount Jr.

And now, some new columns and features to tell you about:

>Just One Question, by the stellar Tampa Bay Times and Grantland reporter Michael Kruse, poses a single question to a single writer, either about a specific piece of work or about reporting/writing in general, and delivers the answer. Kruse started JOQ on his personal blog and kindly agreed to let Storyboard adopt it.

>Liner Notes, by Sports on Earth writer Tommy Tomlinson, looks at the elements of narrative journalism via songs. His 2012 breakdown of “Ode to Billie Joe” was such a hit with readers, we’re developing his idea as a regular column. Narrative works best when you tune up all the senses, so get ready for a multilayered reading experience.

>Work the Problem allows writers and editors to ask top narrative journalists for help unraveling an issue. Maybe you’re grappling with a structural situation or wish you’d written better descriptions in your last piece, or maybe you take all the wrong notes, or maybe you’re wondering how to jump-start narrative culture in your newsroom – tell us your problem, we’ll try to help you solve it. Email:  contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

>Annotation Tuesday! explores one writer’s winning story line by line, with Storyboard asking the questions and the author giving precise, in-text answers. The series recently had a popular Tumblr following and now moves to Storyboard, with upcoming annotations by the science writer Mary Roach, GQ’s Amy Wallace, National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich, Esquire’s Chris Jones, and more.

>How’d you find that story? Ever wonder where writers find certain great stories? We ask, they answer, with a little something extra. The sources may surprise you.

Don’t forget to stay connected by following us on Twitter and Liking us on Facebook, and subscribing to our free newsletter. In the meantime, if you’d like to contribute to “Why’s this so good?” or to suggest a story for annotation, or to see coverage of certain narrative issues, ping us here.

Happy New Year!

Fitzgerald: How did you decide to do this story?

Corsello

The way I pick stories is very personal. I usually have a theme that I’m interested in and look sometimes for years for a vehicle to explore the anatomy of that theme. Zimbabwe, “The Other Side of Hate,” was all about forgiveness. I was looking for stories for years that would allow me to anatomize forgiveness, because I didn’t believe in it and I was looking for people who could execute it.

The Calvin story was different. My editor at the time was Andy Ward at GQ (now at Random House), who’s incredible. We talked a little bit and he said, “You know, we’re reading maybe every three weeks or something, somebody was being exonerated by DNA evidence.” They would get a lot of coverage but it was newspaper coverage that covered the facts. He said, “Wouldn’t it be a great story for you to do it inside out and convey the emotion of what the experience was? As close as you could get to being inside.”

My first step was to contact the Innocence Project. They gave me a bunch of people. Because of the nature of DNA, almost all of them were convicted of rape. That was a prolonged and sad experience. I needed to find someone who was in touch with and able to explain their interior existence. The five or six I went through prior to Calvin were so demolished as human beings that they had difficulty even telling their stories at a factual level. I think it’s much more devastating to be in prison for something that you didn’t do than something you did. There was one guy in Oklahoma I spoke to who was almost sublingual. He was mumbling over and over, ”I don’t know the reason for my existence, I don’t know.” They were almost zombie-like. It was horrible. Prison is an infantilizing place for so many reasons. You come out even less able to deal than a normal person. The prime of your working life is gone, you have no skills, usually no education and what you have had is lost.

But for a lot of these guys, coming back to the real world was exuberant. You have that feeling of surfing on a wave. I caught Calvin at that place; he was only out about a month where I first talked to him. We had one phone call and I talked to Andy and said, “This is the guy.”

How did you know it was going to work?

He was wonderfully verbal and open, as was everyone around him. And he’s a good storyteller. He was able to tell me what I needed to know to tell the story. I went to Shreveport and spent 10 days there, just sort of immersive days, talking to him and Prissy (Janet Gregory, the woman who worked to exonerate Calvin) and everyone they knew.

Did you realize he was good?

The question is, “Should I believe everything I’m beholding here?” I mean, yeah, it just became clear that he meant what he said and meant what he felt and it was his faith – not just religious but in people in general, as affirmed by people like Prissy – that made him sane and somebody who wasn’t demolished in the end by the experience (of prison).

Tracy Kidder talks about the problem of goodness, writing about someone who is better than your readers. That wasn’t an issue?

It’s the same problem you get at the poles of the human spectrum. The one thing saints and sociopaths have in common is there is no divide between their interior and exterior lives, their soul and how they behave in the world. It’s very difficult for anyone on the in-between spectrum to understand people where you can’t get purchase on the contrasts that exist between what a human keeps to him or herself and how they express themselves in the world. I guess the problem was overcome … it was all about Prissy. It was one of those great things I didn’t really understand until I got there that I had two protagonists. Calvin was one half of the story and Prissy the other. There was no story without Prissy. She’s where the action is. Calvin is stationary; he’s in a prison for two decades.

How did you write the piece?

Unlike most stories I do, I wrote this from beginning to end, not put-together puzzle pieces. I got many of thousands of words in and realized, “If I keep going like this, this is going to be a 40,000-word manuscript and it’s not going to work.” It always happens this way for me. Some people have to match emotionally the state they’re going to be writing about. I’m completely the opposite. If I get like that, I just vapor-lock and shut down. I have to brood and sleep, and that’s where stuff seeps up. I was at an impasse and just kind of woke up from an open-eyed nap and wrote as quickly as I could the keystone of the piece, the 1,200-word section that gets into the Pentecostal call-and-response rhythm where I talk about “he tells her, he tells her…”  I was able to kill four birds with one stone in that section. First of all, the sense of time passing. I was able to really construct what that relationship was, that she was able to take on for him psychologically the burden he could not bear in prison. The confessional nature of the relationship, the Tracy Kidder problem. That’s how I solved it.

The story takes place over 22 years. How do you put that into a magazine-sized piece and how long did it take you to write it?

This took nine months. Andy Ward never breathes down anyone’s neck. He’s very zen. I was impossibly behind. I had to do other things in the meantime. I was just giving him what I had as I was completing it. He was starting to get very worried that there wasn’t going to be any redemption, because it was just so dark. He had me take stuff out of the lede that was too disturbing. As someone who had daughters, he couldn’t bear it. It just keeps piling on, and then there’s Janet, and her husbands are being hit by trains and being struck by lightning, and it’s absurd. I said, “No, trust me. Redemption’ll come.”

You have a big, distinctive writing voice, but you’re not really in this piece. What did you do with your voice?

This is one of only two perfect pieces I’ve written, because I was able to keep the piece in its own narrative bubble from beginning to end. (The other is “My Body Stopped Talking to Me” and is not online, having been published in GQ in 1995.) People talk about the bird’s-eye school of journalism, more or less The New Yorker, which is professorial and cool in tone, and distant, and the object is above all to explain in the most limpid terms possible what you need to know about a given story. I’m temperamentally different than that. Empathy is the be-all, end-all of my stories, both in terms of what I pick to write about and how I write about them. I want to find very emotional stories and come as close as I can come to recreate the emotional experience for a reader, and that means you want to do it novelistically.

This story involves a brutal crime – the rape of a child; the U.S. prison system; fervent religious belief; things that might compel most writers to insert themselves into the piece at some point. How do you avoid doing so? And how do you stay so matter-of-fact about your scenes?

This is a story done all in scenes. That’s partly to create empathy, and to create authority but not do “according to three sources…” I think I spoke to about 80 people, and then you bury it (all the reporting). That’s a question I always get when I speak in front of journalism school students. They’re taught “show your work show your work show your work.” It’s all about how you create authority. And some people want the quote, want to show you all the stuff they’ve done. I’m not in the story but I’m all over the story. It’s a weird combination of arrogance and humility. The arrogance is the willingness to create authority while hiding reporting. It’s high risk. If it fails, you can look really preposterous and silly. At the same time it’s humbling because in order to create emotional empathy you have to take people on their terms and take them in their voices. So, writing about people of faith in a matter-of-fact way doesn’t mean that I do it without questioning everything everyone tells me. That’s different from taking people on their own terms and where they’re coming from.

How did you report your scenes?

There’s no secret to it. I just talk to everyone. I talked to everybody who was there and just built it off of that. It’s very affirming when you have people coming from very different perspectives but end up all agreeing on how it came down. That would of course be Debbie (Calvin’s ex-wife) and Calvin. She was just so open and honest with me. It was a real gift. As was her new husband. So it wasn’t difficult from a reporting point of view.

How important was your editor?

He was instrumental. Both in technical terms and in psychological terms. And the latter is more important. Part of it is, he’s patient and willing to let something slow cook if he has faith that it’s going to come out right. He’s the perfect super ego to my id. I tend to be all id. I need to have complete faith, I like to write exuberantly and I like to overwrite and write purple – I love overwriting. It was so liberating when I finally came to that point in my life and said “Fuck you” to all the rules that I’d ever been taught about writing in a clear, linear and deliberate way. At the same time, I do go over the line and I need someone with exquisite taste to understand what is exuberance and what is excess. (Ward) is great at that. He’s very gentle and at the same time I have complete confidence in his taste. There was a whole section that could be another piece itself. Janet is probably more responsible than any other individual in Louisiana for getting rid of the electric chair there. That got taken out of the story. That was the most painful thing at the time to lose.

That’s the danger of doing stories like this, where emotional empathy is the object. When you’re reporting and writing that, you’re in the bubble and you have no perspective. You might have vehement arguments with someone at the time and it might take three months before you realize, “Oh, he was right.”

But forget about the Pulitzers, the National Magazine Awards, the business deals, the titles. The visitors were storytellers – they knew magic. The listeners wanted the secrets, and Cristian Lupsa wanted to give them those secrets, with the conference as his medium. Lupsa, who edits the quarterly magazine Decât o Revistă, started “The Power of Storytelling” a year ago in hopes that his narrative obsession will take hold in the hearts and minds of journalists across Europe. He was kind enough to share with Storyboard this year’s absorbing, inspiring and often irreverent keynotes.

Today, read short excerpts from some of the talks. (For each speaker, you can click through to Decât o Revistă‘s compilations of full bios, quotes and story lists.) Tomorrow and next week, we’ll run full texts: Banaszynski on the future of storytelling, Harrington on keeping the “non” in “nonfiction,” Jones on why stories matter, Kine on theme and story forms, Ratliff on moving from magazine writer to digital entrepreneur, Sager on the wisdom of shutting up, Tizon on telling your own story and Walters on the beauty of ambiguous endings.

Check back tomorrow for the first of these, plus photos and audio and a special introduction by Banszynski.

Until then, some highlights:

In my mother’s obituary I wrote of the afghans, the blankets that she crocheted and knit as wedding gifts. Everybody in my family has a blanket from my mother. And a cousin of mine, who was an ordained minister, led the services at my mother’s funeral, and while she was leading the service she held the blanket that my mother had knit for her own wedding, 30 years earlier. Held it in her arms and built her service around the notion of being wrapped in the comfort of God, in the comfort of community and in the comfort of family in times of grief. All because I had mentioned in a story that my mother knit blankets for people’s weddings. I would encourage you all to think, what is the story you would tell about your mother or someone you love? And then, how do you bring that same care and the same sense of storytelling in everything you do? — Jacqui Banszynski, winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing

Truth may be many things, but it is not nothing at all. When a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, it still makes noise. This kind of real, objective truth exists—despite the philosopher’s ponderings. Words spoken were spoken whether or not we can reconstruct them correctly. Events occurred in a certain sequence whether or not we can discern it. Sisters can remember differently just how big was the old oak tree in their backyard. But there must at least have been a  tree! Otherwise, as Jonathan Yardley said, it’s fiction. — Walt Harrington, author of Intimate Journalism

I think a lot of writers have been taught by traditional journalist or journalism schools that you’ve supposed to be objective. That there’s supposed to be a distance between you and what you’re writing about, so that you cover it like you’re neutral, like you’re a star in the sky, looking down on the world. I’ve always taught that that is a really strange, crazy idea. It’s like asking someone to be a robot. — Chris Jones, Esquire

If there’s an idea I like and I don’t get around to doing it really quick, it tortures me because I feel that the idea can’t leave your head; it’s stuck in there. I honestly picture them like orphans, the ideas that I don’t get to. They feel like orphans that are just getting older without being adopted and they never go outside and they’re, like, fighting over who sleeps where and showing each other the chore wheels. Their little faces are pressed against the glass, and they’re never going to go outside. So I try to get my ideas out. — Starlee Kine, This American Life contributor

Two of the lessons that I’ve learned doing this are: First, if you start to pursue something like this, you say “This is the thing I love: I love narrative journalism, and I’m going to see if I can find a way to make some.” You can find other people who will join up with you, and whatever they want to do, you should take them on, particularly if you find someone skilled in ways that you aren’t. We wouldn’t exist if it was just me because it really required someone who was willing to have the same love for creating that I had, and spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unpaid hours putting this sort of thing together. — Evan Ratliff, founder, The Atavist

If you don’t yell back at the TV at that politician that you hate, you’re gonna hear what they’re saying. If you let that person act like a male chauvinist pig maybe you’ll understand a little of their motivation. It doesn’t make it right, but the world is full of people that form what I like to call the different constellations of reality. They put shit together, and they fucking believe it. They believe that you’re going to Heaven and that you’re going to play the harp. People believe that. People fight over that. We all think that we know the truth. — Mike Sager, Esquire

I love betrayal. Betrayal gets me going. Triumph. They don’t all have to be sad, right? They don’t all have to be like shame. Your themes don’t all have to be sad. I happen to like sad. I mean I’m one of those people that actually wouldn’t be turned off by someone saying they’re writing a book about shame. Actually I would think that’s when the conversation just got interesting. Talk about shame! Yeah! I want to hear your shame! I want to share my shame with you! — Alex Tizon, winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting

When you’re writing keep in mind the end of your story; look back and think. Stare at the scenes and the dialogue and the images that you’ve collected and push back against the conclusions that you’ve come to. Find the ambiguity. Find a moment that questions what you think your story is about. — Pat Walters, Radiolab

Gardner

I do know that sensation is why, when asked about my favorite nonfiction writers, I rarely mention Gary Smith. I suspect I’m not alone. Listing Gary Smith comes with the obligation of explaining why Gary Smith. And anyone who’s been affected by his stories in Sports Illustrated – about coaches flattened by cancer, say, or an integrated high school team during segregation – knows that the pieces are hard to describe, that by the time you reach the end you’re emotionally drained but unable to articulate why. So I’ll talk about Tom Wolfe’s explosive sentences or David Grann’s knack for plot twists or John Hersey’s masterful pacing. But I’ll hardly ever refer to the guy at the top of my list, and that, I suppose, is a lie of omission.

My favorite Gary Smith story, as it turns out, is about a liar. On Dec. 13, 2001, George O’Leary lost his dream job as Notre Dame’s head football coach after a reporter discovered lies that had skulked in his resume for decades: a fictitious master’s degree from NYU and a bogus stint as a college football player. O’Leary became an instant national joke, the subject of newspaper cartoons, a punch line on Leno. Five months later, Sports Illustrated published Smith’s chronicle of the coach’s rise and “flaming fall from grace.” I first read the story shortly after it won the National Magazine Award for profile writing and was struck by the way Smith employs questions to both fling the narrative forward and slow it down. There are 64 interrogative sentences in the piece, beginning with, literally, “Where, then, to start the story…?”

Smith knows damn well where the story should begin, but he asks his audience anyway, in order to gun rapid introductions to a handful of characters, starting with O’Leary himself, whom we find in a hotel room, rubbing his face and contemplating suicide. Or do we start with this other guy over here? Smith probes, and drops us into another scene only to yank us out just as quickly – a gambit he pulls off three more times, until we’ve met the characters most crucial to the plot.

And that’s just the first six paragraphs.

The lens finally settles on O’Leary’s former boss, Luke LaPorta, a 77-year-old Italian who’s known about the coach’s penchant for fabrication for more than 20 years. As a high school athletic director, LaPorta chose not to rat out O’Leary, allowing him to steam ahead toward his date with disaster. Smith frames the piece by placing us in LaPorta’s head, as the old Italian considers whether he made the right choice all those years ago. It’s a subject we’ll soon revisit.

The bulk of the remaining story, though, loosely structured like a resume, takes us through the life of George O’Leary in more or less linear fashion, starting with a lie he told at age 7. But Smith isn’t done with the question marks. No, as we root around in O’Leary’s past we hit questions that ping us past less consequential or nonambiguous nodes in the coach’s biography and onto the deeply psychological scenes that Smith is known for.

And that’s where things get interesting. The questions cease to be pistons in Smith’s plot engine, and instead deepen our involvement with the story:

Have you located it yet? Where could a lie, an exaggeration that would make a national disgrace of a man, take root in that house?

We sink further and further in. The coach considers what to tell his team about his college playing career, which he deserted before it even began, and we hear his justification for the con:

A man who made quitting seem so repulsive, so weak, who convinced so many boys that anything was possible if they refused to quit…. Why, he couldn’t have quit, could he?

The thing is, we like George O’Leary, especially after hearing from men whose lives he changed for the better. Unfortunately, O’Leary thought that he could gain their respect only by puffing up his past. But we learn that no one gave a shit about his past:

The lies had been wasted. George O’Leary: the chipmunk trying to pass for a squirrel, when everyone saw him as a lion.

Though Smith has significantly slowed the pace, we are reminded that catastrophe looms. “It was ticking now. So softly that even he couldn’t hear it. So softly that no one could, and nearly every article and anecdote about George hinged on his extraordinary honesty, his painful honesty, and all the perpendicular adjectives – upstanding, upright, up-front, straightforward – echoed again and again.” Our fondness for O’Leary makes Smith’s clock, as we see the day of reckoning ahead – and hear “those last… few… ticks….” – all the more heart-stopping. I always find myself almost yelling at the page: George! Stop!

But here it comes. We wend through the coach’s many jobs and deceptions until we reach his hiring at Notre Dame, the quick discovery of his deceit, his resignation, and near-suicidal ruin. We read five paragraphs about O’Leary’s redemption, or at least the closest he’ll come to redemption in this story: another new job. Then we’re back with LaPorta, who asks himself again if he was right not to derail the fib-prone coach’s career back in the day. He decides he was. But the most important question in “Lying in Wait” is yet to come.

It turns out that the question of whether to cut a liar some slack, after taking the full measure of his life, isn’t for athletic directors or college presidents or O’Leary’s family members to answer. After more than 9,000 words of endless inquiry, it’s not even presented in the form of a question.

No, Smith ends with one staccato line:

“So. That was Luke’s choice. Now it’s your turn.”

James Ross Gardner (@jamesrgardner) is a senior editor at Seattle Met magazine. His writing has also appeared in Esquire and GQ. “The Girl on the Bridge,” his story about the race to stop a suicide, was a finalist for the City and Regional Magazine Association’s 2012 feature writing award.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” see our archives. And check back each week for a new shot of inspiration and insight.

Storyboard: If you’d been on Twitter the other day you might’ve seen a conversation among readers who think the story is amazing. Some said they couldn’t finish it because they couldn’t stand the details —

Mooney

Mooney: I was very worried about that, actually. I was concerned that people would stop reading it.

How did you handle that?

By trying to find exactly the right balance. My editor, Tim Rogers, and I talked about that for a long time. Ultimately we ended up putting about 20 to 30 percent of the available details into the story, maybe not even that high a percentage. We talked about what kind of effect we wanted to have. You could write that story as a story about (rapist Jeffrey Maxwell) and how he could’ve gone so long and not gotten caught, or about Lois Pearson. Her story was the story I wanted to tell; I thought it was really about the endurance of the human spirit. I wanted to put enough detail in that people could understand how much she went through but without it turning into gore porn.

Talk about how you got the story idea.

It started with a story in the Dallas Morning News. Tim and I were talking about some stories that I could work on, and I think he initially said, “There’s something really interesting here.” The trial was coming up. I went to the trial and talked to everybody involved outside the trial as well, and I spent a significant amount of time in Weatherford, which is pretty different than Dallas.

How long did the trial last?

A little longer than a week.

You got the entire narrative from the trial, then?

Yeah. I understood from the police reports vaguely what had happened, but in trial a lot of the details came out, including gruesome details that we couldn’t print. But I did sit and talk to Lois, too, less about the specifics about the most gruesome parts and more just kind of walking her through the emotion that she went through. Originally I thought the trial was going to be the center of the story, very much like Eli Sanders’ story “The Bravest Woman in Seattle.” This was before he won the Pulitzer. When I learned that Lois would be testifying, Eli’s was the first story I thought of because I also envisioned mine as a trial-centered story. Then as soon as I looked at everything we had I thought, “The trial is not the right way to go on this.”

What convinced you?

The incredible details. And I think a trial story would’ve been similar to Eli’s. And it’s very difficult, wrapping the narrative around a trial. I really wanted the story to be from Lois’ perspective as much as possible.

How much of the detail that you used came out at trial and how much came from your conversations with her?  

I’d say 85 percent came out at trial. The kind of smaller details – when she was smelling stuff or worried about things, little details about what she felt –  came out in interviews. Honestly, it wasn’t even me asking questions, it was me trying not to be offensive, trying to be as sensitive as possible, and taking whatever she gave me.

How did you initially approach her? 

I approached her a little bit at the trial. I kind of introduced myself and told her I was going to do a longer story. After the trial she said she didn’t want to do any more interviews. She gave a mini-press conference at court, on the last day of sentencing, and told the prosecutor she didn’t want to talk anymore. So I wrote a letter to her and brought chocolates and flowers to her house. And then she wrote me a letter back and we started talking.

You wrote her an old-school letter? Saying what?

She doesn’t have email, and I think she had a phone by then but I wasn’t about to just call her randomly and start that way. And I knew she liked writing letters. I knew she had a typewriter. So I wrote her a letter and told her I’d like to do the story. I said, “I think what you’ve been through is incredible and I think you showed incredible bravery in testifying and in so many stages of this, and if you’d be interested I’d really like to talk to you a little bit more.” I bought some flowers and, I think, Belgian chocolates – one of her friends told me that she liked candy. She loved the flowers – they turned out to be her favorite color, purple.

And what’d you do with it? Left it at her doorstep?

Kind of at her gate. I didn’t want to knock on her door. She lives out in the country, so I figured if I was driving around she probably saw me anyway. I didn’t want her to feel uncomfortable. So I left the letter, chocolates and flowers. Two or three weeks later I got a letter at the office from her, with a phone number. She loved the letter, loved the flowers, loved the candy. A lot of people at her church had been telling her she should share her story. Especially with religious people, it was a very inspiring story.

How much time did you spend with her, and where?

I went to her house one time, and we talked on the phone probably five or six times for never shorter than an hour. We talked about her life and her views on the world rather than the actual details of the case. I’d ask things like, “What were you thinking when this was going on? What kinds of things were going through your mind?” I asked specifically what she was reading and she told me the Bible, and I was curious about what chapter, things like that. And for the larger picture, I wanted a sense of her religious perspective. She very much believes that had she remained a virgin for eternity she would have received a crown or something similar in heaven. I wanted to know about her views on people beforehand and her views on people now.

The story hinges on the virgin detail. Was that something that came out at trial or in your conversations with her?

She mentioned that at sentencing. That was very much the primary thought that she had during trial. She read a small note to the jury that mentioned that, and so I didn’t even have to ask the question. She felt very passionate about that.

How did you realize that the real story here was her attitude?

I think a different reporter might’ve thought, “How did this (crime) ever come to happen? How was this guy a free man?” But for me, I was just so struck by her talking about (her perspective) in trial. Imagining this happening to me or to somebody I know – it was so terrifying. It was the most horrific thing I’d ever heard. It was the closest to an actual horror movie.

It’s horrific to read not just because of the physical details but also because of the psychological torture.

It was interesting – there were a couple of other reporters covering it, mostly TV people, and in the side room at the courthouse you could hear them talking about what they were doing to not think of this trial. Guys were like, “Oh man, I just went back to the hotel room and watched inane TV last night because it was the only thing I could think of.” I did that too. I actually wrote a bowling story while covering that trial.

Had you ever done trauma reporting or covered anything so graphic?

One time when I was at the Dallas Morning News I wrote a story about a teenager that had been brutalized in a terrible way, by some other teenagers. They had taken a spiked pipe and essentially kicked it through his rectum. And after a year of healing, that teenager then killed himself. I covered that. But this was certainly the most intense longest time I’ve spent dealing with something like this. I watched a lot of inane television. When I was done with the story, I went out for dinner, big celebration. I was so happy to be done. Even thinking about that makes me feel silly, considering what Lois went through.

Feeling relieved is legitimate, though, and readers wonder how journalists deal emotionally with their stories. In fact, on Twitter the other day a reader in Canada, writer Karen K. Ho, wondered what detail hit you the hardest.

The virginity thing. It was very shocking and disturbing. It seemed to elevate the crime in some ways, and it struck me, how personal it was. I don’t know if that sounds right.

Sounds right. It’s deeply personal – there’s the physical violation but also the virginity issue, which is a violation of the soul.

Yeah. Hearing her describe it, it was so upsetting.

How did you deal with it?

Having a really good fiancée helps. Almost every story that I write, my fiancée, Tara, reads it aloud to me, but this story I didn’t want her to, especially early drafts. I knew I’d put in the graphic stuff in the early draft and cut it back, and I didn’t want her seeing that.

Having someone else read your work aloud – I like that, too. I have my students do it, because when you hear someone else –

Yeah! I can read my drafts over and over and not even see where there should be commas like I can when I hear it from someone else. I recognize when I’m repeating a word too much or when I have an awkward sentence. And one time she actually saved me – I’d written 4 1/2 of five sections and accidentally hit select-all and deleted the whole thing without having saved it first. But because she’d read it to me, I was actually able to recreate it.

What does Tara do?

She’s an editor at a book publishing company.

What are you doing while she’s reading your story aloud?

Sometimes making notes, sometimes asking her to stop and change things.

Does she like doing that?

I think so. I hesitate to ask because if she says “no” I’d feel really guilty. I know that she’s very responsible for a lot of the good stuff that I write. Sometimes it’s as small as talking about an idea, other times it’s, “Look, you’re gonna embarrass yourself if you use this word.” And she’s a great writer herself. When I lived in Florida I was a staff writer at an alt-weekly there and she was a nightlife columnist. She wrote about bars and drinking and the eccentric weird people of South Florida. She’s my first outside-my-own-head voice.

In terms of editing the Pearson story, was there something your D editor wanted you to include that you didn’t necessarily want to include?

Yeah. He really wanted that Thoreau line, in that description about Lois. It was very important to him that she be sympathetic. It would be easy to paint her as an eccentric character, but that’s not appropriate; it wouldn’t convey the full intensity of her humanity. Tim very much wanted people to be able to identify with her as a person, even if they weren’t like her. He’s awesome, by the way. He just won a National Magazine Award, for a profile. He’s both a writer and the editor of the magazine. He really is an incredible editor.

How so?

He’s a good combination of trust and flexibility and narrative vision. He can visualize a magazine story very, very well.

How did that vision play out with the Lois Pearson story?

We’d go through and almost create an outline together – where could we start. Her breaking free wasn’t the original opening. The original concept was starting with the fire and then telling it completely chronologically.

I can’t imagine another opening. This is one of the best openings I’ve ever read in a magazine story. Why did you want to start with the fire?

Pam Colloff had a story a couple of years ago about a girl who helped kill her entire family, and it started with a gruesome fire and this father crawling out of the fire, and that image kind of stuck with me. So I think that’s what I was originally thinking.

How did you come around to the escape scene as the opening, then?

When I was describing the story to people, I would try different openings. Once I got to that section, that’s when people paid the most attention.

So you were paying attention to people’s reactions when you told the story out loud.

Yeah, and to the kinds of things they were curious about. I sometimes hear writers say, “If you’re sitting at a bar, the first thing you’d tell someone about a story – you should lead with that.” Sometimes I agree with that, sometimes I don’t.

Your opening sets up the entire story largely by walking us through that horrible crime scene, but with restraint.

I figured that I had to give signals that this was gonna get worse. You couldn’t start with the most graphic part; nobody would read it. I was worried that people would read it and it would sound like the beginning of a story about an innocent man. I wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t a story about police misconduct or something like that. Tim and I talked a decent amount about the Tom Junod story from a while back, “The Rapist Says He’s Sorry,” where you have this horrible, graphic, brutal crime. Junod describes it in detail, but by the time you get to that you’re well aware of how graphic it’s going to be, how bad it really is. By then you’re so committed as a reader, you keep going.

How many drafts did you do?

One draft, and then that draft cut down, and then a cleaner version of that draft. So I don’t even know what that would count as. I always have a hard time counting drafts because the first thing I’ll do is write a really rough draft, like a sketch-outline kind of thing. It’s not even full sentences. It’s letting me know what’s gonna be there. Then I’ll fill it in section by section and rearrange.

How else do you work? From an outline, obviously.

Oh yeah. Always an outline. I’m a firm outliner. Religious outliner. I actually have a notebook that I put my outlines in. I’ll think about the story and think about the story and look at all my notes, and then before I start to write I’ll write my outline in my notebook, and type that outline into a draft. Generally that first thing that I type in is 50 percent of the total word count, but it’s the total story.

You have a special notebook for the outlines?

I do.

For more than one story or just that one story?

It has probably my last 12 or 13 stories in it.

What kind of notebook are we talking about?

It has “I ♥ VY” on it. The “VY” is for Vince Young, the Texas quarterback. Tara got it for Christmas for me, a couple of years ago. It’s college rule. I’ve been told that the print that I use – people say that I write like a serial killer. I write about three lines per college rule line. Really, really small. There are so many things that make me a weird person, and that’s one of them.

What are some others?

Ooh, I shouldn’t have said that.

I always like to ask writers what kind of writing life they want for themselves. What about you? Or do you already have it?

There’s a couple of different answers. The completely unrealistic answer is that I’d love to write novels and nonfiction books and screenplays and hundreds more magazine stories and e-books, and forms of writing that don’t even exist yet. I just really like writing in all forms. I’m pretty grateful for the fact that someone’s willing to pay me to be a writer. In some ways it was such an unbelievable dream, when I was a kid that I couldn’t even tell people I wanted to be a writer. I would tell people that I wanted to be a publishing consultant.

A what? What does that even mean?

It was an imaginary job in which I would sit somewhere and publishing companies would send me books and I would tell them what I thought of them. And they would pay me for that.

That’s a critic, my friend – or no, you mean in-house, so – 

Yeah, internal critic. It turns out writers do not need internal critics.

Do you ever feel like you miss? You do a story, look at it, and go, “Ugh. Missed it,” and if so how do you handle that?

There are some stories I wish that I could have back, some that I wish I could just have another draft of it, some – and this is going way back – where I gave in to editing decisions and I regret not fighting more, for what I thought was right. You work on a story for a long time and you don’t get it back. And a large percentage of readers, that’s the only thing they’re gonna read by you, ever. I think about that a lot. It’s good motivation for when I get tired, for when I’d rather do anything than report or write: I know this is the one chance I’ll get to tell this story.

So, is it working?

We asked Evan Ratliff, an Atavist founder, that question the other day when he dropped by the Nieman Foundation for a visit. Here, edited for clarity and length, is some of the conversation between Ratliff and fellows, staff, guests and Paige Williams, who teaches the foundation’s Narrative Writing seminar.

Williams: Let’s start with an explanation of how The Atavist works.

Of the three people who founded it, two of us came from the magazine world, so we have a very magazine-heavy perspective on how we approach things. One of them is myself – I was a freelancer for 10 years – and the other one is Nick Thompson, who’s an editor at the New Yorker and was my editor at Wired. The third guy, Jefferson Rabb, is the most crucial person. He’s the guy who actually builds everything you see. He’s the coder and the designer and he’s the person without whom we couldn’t do any of this because we’d just be assigning stories and not have anywhere to put them.

Our original idea didn’t have that much to do with multimedia. We just wanted to find a place to tell long stories. You’ve all probably experienced or are intimately familiar with the decline of word counts. I’ve only ever worked in magazines. I never worked for a daily newspaper except in college, so I came into journalism wanting to write 10,000-word stories. That’s what I thought everyone got to do when they got to a certain stage of their career. Come to find out that what used to be the 10,000-word story, if it ever existed, was now the 3,500-word story.

Ratliff (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

I had just done (“Vanish”), about when I tried to disappear. It ran at about 14,000 words, and I just felt like this is what I want to be doing. But there was no place to do it. So we thought, “What if we created something online that would allow us to (publish longer stories)?” We started looking at these phones and tablets. I had just moved to New York and I was reading on my phone on the subway. We started saying, “Maybe there’s something we could build for this.” We ended up with (The Atavist).

We assign stories basically just like a magazine. People send us pitches. The outside limits are 5,000 to 35,000 words. Everything is heavily narrative. The multimedia component also grew out of (“Vanish”). Over the course of it I gathered a lot of media, but in the end there was nothing really to do with them because the magazine just didn’t have the resources to build some elaborate construction that included the videos as part of the story. So we had this idea, “What if we took that approach with stories but integrated it into the narrative?”

So what you’re looking at now is our iPad app. The one for iPhone looks the same. We also sell the stories as text-only on Kindle. So we sell them on Kindle, we sell them on Nook, basically as books. “The Kalinka Affair” is our most recent. It looks just like a short book. It’s probably 30 to 50 pages. It’s designed like a book. There are no images in it except for the cover, for a variety of highly technical and financial reasons. The multimedia versions we only sell in our app, or in iBooks we sell a version.

Dina Kraft: So you call it an e-book.

Yes, an e-book.

Carole Osterer: Is the text-only version available in the multimedia version? It wasn’t clear on your website.

Yes and no. This will answer that question. So, “Lifted” is a story that I wrote when we started out. It’s about this robbery in Sweden. These guys stole a helicopter and broke into a cash depot with $150 million in it.

Carlotta Gall: I bought that on my Kindle.

Ah, so you read the text.

Gall: I bought some photos as well.

Early on we were putting photos in the Kindle (version) but we stopped doing that because they were charging us fees for how big the file is, which we didn’t know until we got the (financials) back and said, “Why aren’t we making much money on this?”

So in the Kindle version it would’ve started (with the text-only) Chapter One. In the iPad/iPhone version it starts with the actual surveillance footage from the robbery, which I got from the Swedish prosecutors when I went to report the story. They gave me a DVD with all the footage on it, and I edited it into this sort of condensed version of the guys breaking in. They use a sledgehammer. For some reason the cash depot with $150 million in it has a skylight, which they just smash their way through. And they had a ladder; they had measured it to fit. They’d designed it all based on a heist movie that they’d watched. It’s very dramatic. There were actually cameras inside the cash cages. And so our idea was that this is the real lede to the story, this is the lede as we really want it to be. If you think of this as a lede that’s going to hook somebody and never let them go, it’s hard to do better than this. You can, of course, (do it) with brilliant prose; it’s just a different approach to how to tell the story. (After the video) you’re dropped into Chapter One, where it’s a month before, and two guys are sitting on a bench, plotting this.

To answer your question, (on the iPad/iPhone version) you can get clean text and photos all the way through without links, without any distractions. It’s all about the story. If you see on the side here, there’s a little gray triangle and this thing on the left that says “online extras.” If you tap those you get little bits of text that raise up, which can be anything. Predominantly for us they’re characters, footnotes, maps and timelines.

Anna Griffin: Are you planning that kind of thing as you’re writing or do you think about it afterward?

Generally we do it afterward. Our approach is so new and strange that we have reporters treat it different ways. Some of our writers really get into this stuff, so they’ll show up with everything they want to go into the story, and then other ones could care less.

Griffin: What’s your preference as an editor?

I like it when they care. So I’ll just show you a few other things in different stories. “Piano Demon” is about a jazz musician from the 1920s and ’30s whose name was Teddy Weatherford. He was at one time one of the most famous jazz musicians in the world. And then he was this kind of lost character who went abroad, and he was very famous in China, and then he went to India and he died. This reporter Brendan Koerner had come across him and found all this research on him and spent months and months and months researching, and he also found his music. So his music is laced into the story. It’s the soundtrack, which can play along with the story.

Adam Tanner: Do you have to buy the rights to the various pieces of music?

In some cases yes and in some cases no. These are orphaned works, so for these we’re in some way taking our chances. But because Brendan Koerner probably spent more time trying to track down this guy than any person on earth I’m pretty sure (Weatherford) has no descendants.

Tanner: What about the classical piece (of music) at the start of the heist thing?

That was composed by Jeff, one of my co-founders; he’s trained in music composition. There are audio clips laced into “Piano Demon,” so if you see him talking about ragtime there’s a clip of him playing ragtime. That’s an example of where Brendan was sort of like, No I don’t want that clip there; there’s a better 15-second clip. We had days and days of back-and-forth about what were the appropriate clips.

from "Mother, Stranger," by Cris Beam

Sometimes we’ll do just fun things. “Island of Secrets” is by a writer named Matt Power. He writes for Harper’s and other magazines. This is about – he went to Papua New Guinea to track this guy who was trying to find tree kangaroos on this island in New Britain. We made a kind of in-house animation that’s this sort of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” style. So we try to mix it up. We did a memoir, “Mother, Stranger,” by a writer named Cris Beam. She teaches at Columbia and she’s written about juveniles, and we got her to write about her upbringing, which was very, very dark. Hermother was a prostitute and (Cris) left home when she was 14, never saw her mother again, and she only took a few things with her. One of the things she took with her was her diary from when she was 7 years old. (In the multimedia version) you can flip the pages of it. People are really moved by her talking about the names her mother called her.

We also have audiobooks in every (story), so there’s an actual audio version of the author reading the story. And you can flip back and forth between the audio and the text, and it keeps your place. That’s something you can’t do in print. Book publishers do it, but there’s this sort of legacy thing where book publishers have two revenue streams, the audiobook and the prose book. In (the digital) medium there’s no reason why you shouldn’t put them together and give people the option to do one or the other.

We’re trying to find ways to both integrate the media and to layer in all this other information but also to preserve the power of the story first and also preserve the journalism. Every story is fact-checked, every story is treated like a story at The New Yorker or Harper’s or any other magazine.

In terms of the (fee) model, it’s different than either magazines or books. It’s really like grabbing parts from both. We’ll pay the writer a fee plus 50 percent of the royalties. The royalties come after the platform takes its percentage. Most of these platforms will take 30 percent. After that, whatever we get, we give the author half. Which means that if the story doesn’t do well, the authors end up getting paid maybe what they’d have gotten paid to write for Harper’s. A dollar a word is the standard. But the story also has the possibility to do very well and for the writer to get paid, in some cases, several times what they could’ve gotten even at the highest-end glossy.

Williams: Someone ran a story the other day about what authors were earning. (David) Dobbs was in there, some others.

David Dobbs is a science writer, but the story he wrote for us was this thing called “My Mother’s Lover.” It’s a reported memoir. His mother, on her deathbed, revealed that she’d had this affair 60 years before, during World War II, that had altered her entire life in this very dramatic way. So (Dobbs) spent almost a decade figuring out who the guy was and finding his military records – he disappeared during the war – and contacting his family, and then unspooled this whole narrative.

Williams: What’s the (most recent) story?

It’s by Josh Hammer, who used to be (Africa) bureau chief at Newsweek. It’s a story so well known in France and Germany but less so here. It’s sort of complicated, but this French guy was married. He had a daughter. His wife left him for this German doctor and took the daughter with them. And some years later the daughter suddenly died and it came to light that the doctor had probably raped and killed her. This father then spent three decades trying to bring this guy to justice. The German government wouldn’t deal with him – they basically said there’s not enough evidence – so he essentially hired a kidnapper to go kidnap the guy and – well, I don’t want to spoil the end.

As far as the pay model – David Dobbs pitched his story, actually, to Wired. That’s the way I found out about it. He pitched it as: There are these guys who track down World War II remains all over the world and they use all this high tech. It was a very Wired story but they said no. One of the editors told me about it and a tiny kernel of the pitch was, “This is kind of relevant to me because my mother had this affair in World War II and I contacted these people,” and I said, “Well that sounds like a better story to me than the one you’re trying to pitch.” And if he had gotten it in Wired, he’d have been paid, I’d say, a quarter of what we’ve paid him. And that’s just so far.

Gall: Do you know how many subscribers you have?

We have a weird situation when it comes to subscribers because when we’re selling on Amazon we’re selling single-copy sales. On the iPad, we know how many people have downloaded the app, but it’s very, very difficult to tell who is buying what. We actually don’t even have subscriptions yet. That’s something we’re launching in the next couple of months, where people can subscribe to get 10 of these or 12 of these.

Kraft: Over how long, half a year, a year?

Probably over a year.

Kraft: And there’s no advertising on the pages.

There’s no advertising on the pages.

David Skok: Do you keep data on the users? What they click on and their favorite interactives?

We have analytics on everything that everyone does but it’s fully anonymized. In fact we couldn’t not anonymize it because, as I say, they don’t tell us who the people are. We’ve actually never looked at it.

Skok: Really?

Yeah, and it’s because – it’s experimenting. We’re experimenting with different types of storytelling. It’s entirely possible that nobody watches a video that’s an interstitial chapter, but I’d rather try a larger sample size before I know that. I just feel like we’re putting it all somewhere and building a visualization tool for it, and at some point we’ll go look and see.

Jonathan Blakley: Do you find authors are writing stories with more media in mind?

Now they are. In the beginning it was like pulling teeth to get people to pitch me a story at all because I was saying, “This thing doesn’t exist (but) please pitch me a story.”

(laughter)

But now, yes. At the very least they’ll acknowledge it. They’ll say there’s some great TV footage of the arrest, there’s this, there’s that. We have a guy doing a story in New York who’s a Vietnam vet who’s had a very, very strange life who’s now trying to put on this Shakespeare play. The writer had this whole plan about this video that had been shot and how it will all mix together. I love it when they do it. The rub, though, is they still have to sit down and write a text. They have to be able to write because we have to sell the text version.

The thing I try to stay away from is sending a reporter out who’s sort of juggling all these (multimedia recording) devices and doing everything worse than if they just focused on one thing. I mostly just want them to go report the way they’d normally report. Like when we sent Matt Power to New Guinea, I said, “At some point gather some high-quality digital audio of the jungle.” We already had an idea that we would use that as the soundtrack. So when you start the story, it’s like a 10-minute loop of jungle sounds. You could debate all day whether it adds anything to the story, but I like it. It’s fun.

Williams: What’s also cool is that it’s original to the piece. You didn’t just pipe in some random jungle sounds.

Yeah. Yeah.

Kraft: And in a case like that, the photos are very lush and beautiful. Did (the author) take the photos?

Yeah, but as it turns out there was a guy who was sort of incidental to the expedition – he was a herpetologist who was along – who was a really, really good photographer. So we ended up buying his photos.

Jones: Compared to like Harper’s or The New Yorker, can you describe what’s a story that you’d want that you know they wouldn’t want?

I don’t think there’s that much difference. We get pitched lots of stories that have already been to The New Yorker, have already been to Harper’s.

Jones: I wondered that about Brendan’s.

Brendan’s was different because he wanted to do it as a book. The other type of story we get is one where there’s not enough there for a book, where the agent might say, “You know, it’s a great story but you’re not gonna spend two years on this and write 200 pages.” I mean I don’t care about a news peg at all. We’ll do historical pieces. We’ll do pieces that are sort of newsy but that don’t have a news peg. The one that was a (digital National Magazine Award) finalist for reporting was about the Egyptian revolution, but we sent the author, David Wolman, there a month after everything had happened. It just so happened that he’d done a story a couple of years ago about some of the activists when they were completely unsuccessful. He had been tracking them all this time, so we sent him back to reconstruct their role in all the events. It was too late to do an Egypt story in the magazine sense. But I don’t really care about that. The main difference for us is, it’s always narrative first. It’s never topic first.

James Geary: Do you know anything about your demographics? Who’s buying? Are they hard-core magazine subscribers? Are they lapsed magazine subscribers? Are they book buyers? Are they not book buyers?

I’d say we only know anecdotally because we don’t have data on who they are. The Kindle people, which are the majority of the people who read our things, are book lovers, because up until recently if you had a Kindle you just had it to read books. I mean that’s why it’s so much easier for us to sell on Kindle, because people are buying books and then suddenly there’s this thing called the Kindle Single, which is way cheaper and hopefully of the same quality. We’re very much in this community of – I don’t know if you’re familiar with longform.org or Longreads, which is this hashtag on Twitter. They’ve grown really large followings of people who love long magazine stories. We get a fair portion of those. We try to go after people who love magazines.

Skok: I’m very curious about your actual team on the development/design side of things. Also, are you licensing what you built to other organizations or publishers as an additional revenue stream but also so they can take advantage of the multimedia?

The answer to the second question is yes, which will illuminate the size of our team. Our team for a long time was me and this guy Jefferson, who made all this stuff, and an intern, who was the only paid person for a long time. In fact, when we started the only people who got paid were the writers, the fact checkers and the copy editors. Now we have two editors, myself and a part-time editor named Alissa Quart – she teaches at the Columbia J-school and writes for the New York Times magazine – and we have two producers who are full time. They do all these multimedia things and also run all of our social media, our Facebook, our Tumblr. We do promotion around each one of these stories when it launches. We place excerpts and go to blogs. Our copy chief is the copy chief at Outside magazine, who’s an old friend of mine who lives in Santa Fe. Fact checkers: We have a rotation of freelancers. A lot of them have worked at Harper’s and The New Yorker. And then the rest are contract people that we bring in, like an animator or a radio producer, to do sound.

On the business side, which is related to licensing the platform, we have three full-time programmers, and a business development person who sells the platform. So this guy Jeff that I was saying is such a genius, he didn’t just build the actual app, he built this whole software platform that allows us to do that, which we do indeed license to other organizations. That’s like our version of advertising. That’s what pays everyone’s salary while we get to do the thing that we really want to do, which is create stories.

Skok: Has anybody approached you to buy you?

Yeah, at the very beginning but maybe we gave off strong signals that we were not for sale. We never raised any money at the beginning. We started with our own money, and part of the reason was that we went to see a venture capitalist and showed them this software, the first thing they said was, “Why are you wasting your time on content? Why don’t you sell this (platform) and make a bunch of money and then you can do whatever you want?” And we just thought: We never want to deal with that again.

(laughter)

Williams: The platform allows you to make changes: add pop-up corrections or updates, epilogues.

And it creates these very interesting new-media dilemmas. I don’t know if any of you saw that Jonathan Franzen said e-books were evil, and everybody made fun of him, but actually the thing that he was really talking about was the fidelity of the text and the ability to change it over time. Which we completely have here. We could change anything and just whitewash whatever happened, so we have to have our own editorial standards. If we correct something we put one of those pop-ups in: “This has been corrected for such-and-such.” Not for typos and things like that, but for substantial corrections. We’ve added epilogues, so like in the Swedish heist case some of the guys went to trial and prison, and so I had an epilogue about that. There are all these things you can do. You can have an open-ended ongoing story or book, and some of the people that we license to are looking to do those sorts of things. They also use it for educational textbooks. TED conferences are producing a line of books.

Raquel Rutledge: What sort of volume are you dealing with and where do you anticipate being in the next year with the number of stories?

Right now we have a pretty good pipeline of assignments. We have 12 pieces assigned, I think. Even when we get a bigger pipeline we won’t accelerate too much because we do like to give (each story) a little publicity, a little runway, like they’re small books. I don’t want to start shoveling them out. I’d like to keep it monthly. We don’t want to overdo it. I recently had to justify that we were a magazine because we were submitted for the National Magazine Awards. Nobody said anything. And then we got picked as a finalist and people said, “It’s not even a magazine, they’re like books!” And my argument is, It’s like a magazine where one story has taken over the feature well. Which has happened: Hiroshima and things like that. I think it’s an okay argument.

Tyler Bridges: The different ways you’re bringing in money – can you elaborate on that?

Editorial revenues are predominantly from Kindle and Apple. Nook, they’re not keeping up right now. Kindle launched Kindle Singles, so they’ve really created a forum for this length of work. They’re assigning their own stories and those (writers) are also doing well because they get the whole percentage. So, Kindle and Apple. And then our licensing revenues are probably five or six times the size of our editorial revenue. Most of what we do runs on the licensing revenues, and pays for the editorial. In terms of growing, we’re kind of in the middle of trying to figure out what we’re going to do this year, but we’re really, really conservative. We sold over 100,000 copies last year and it would be nice to double that, and we’d like to double what we do on the licensing side, so that’s kind of our goal this year. We’re doing okay so far.

Williams: Is there editorial quality control with Kindle Singles? Do they fact-check?

I’m pretty sure they don’t fact-check. I actually don’t like to discourage people from doing Kindle Singles, though, because the guy who runs it is a longtime magazine writer, was an editor at the Village Voice, is a good friend of mine, and they do edit and they certainly copyedit. If you go there, you’re getting 70 percent of the royalties. It’s exclusive to Amazon, so you’d have that, and I don’t know what their fee situation is. I don’t think they pay a fee to most (authors), so if you want to cover your reporting costs, then it’s a matter of how much you want to lay out of your own money. Sometimes we’ll cut the royalty and pay a much higher fee. So writing for us is more akin to writing for a magazine whereas Kindle Singles is closer to a book model.

Tanner: We had Gay Talese come to speak some months ago and we did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on his latest New Yorker story as to time invested to the fee he received –

Never do that.

(laughter)

Tanner: – and we concluded he’s better off working at McDonald’s.

I usually say Starbucks.

Tanner: So based on your experience, is it ultimately just a labor of love that never pays off big time?

I mean it just depends on what your standard of living is, I guess.

Tanner: So if you love extreme poverty this is the way to go?

Extreme poverty? I feel like anyone who says, “I want to be guaranteed a six-figure salary,” they probably didn’t get into journalism in the first place. But if you were to do – well let’s take this new story, “The Kalinka Affair.” (Hammer) is an incredibly professional guy. He knocked that thing out, did all the reporting, all these interviews, all these court documents, and turned in a clean copy, and the whole process took probably three months overall. And he was probably working on two other stories at the time. He could make 35 grand off this story. And if he does another four features this year … I think that’s a pretty good salary, for my standard, but that’s not for everyone. And then again we might have (stories) that continue selling for a lifetime. There’s ones now that sell 1,000 copies a month and they’ve been out for six months.

Williams: To me, that’s part of the attractiveness of this: There’s potentially no end point.

I definitely don’t want to make out like I think it’s some panacea for long-form writers to make a living. Hopefully it’s something alongside of – these writers are all writing for Wired and Harper’s or have a book contract, or they’re working for this sort of set of magazines or websites, and (this is) something that fits in with whatever else they do. But it’s always true for these type of reporters, including myself, and including Paige I’m sure, that you end up getting obsessed with it and you end up spending twice the amount of time than you should have, for the amount of money you’re being paid.

Gall: We had some publishers come recently and they said they’ve tried to do the multimedia for their books and so far they’ve found the expense is not worth it. Are you doing it because you think it’s the future or just because you like it, or do you think you can make it pay?

I would say the reason we’re doing it is mostly that we like it. I would also say, though, that we hear publishers say that all the time. The main reason is because when the iPad first came out and when apps first came out publishers were paying 50 to 100 grand or more to people to build an app around a book, and shooting all this video for it and doing interactive games, all these things. You have to sell an incredible amount to make your money back. There was this Al Gore book by this company called Push Pop Press, which was our biggest competitor on the platform licensing side, and it got bought by Facebook after they produced this one book. It must’ve sold 500,000 copies, because it’s really, really, really elegantly done in terms of the interactivity. They spent a lot of money and definitely made it back many times over. So it’s just a matter of how you allocate your resources. If you do it without too much overhead then you don’t have to sell that many to make your money back.

Gall: And then why did you go into this? Is it because you feel magazines were going to finish, or is it because you wanted to be an editor?

Neither of those. I still don’t want to be an editor.

(laughter)

Although maybe it’ll make me less neurotic if I ever were to get back to writing. It was more out of frustration. It wasn’t that doomsday: “Magazines are dead.” I actually don’t think that. I think magazines are viable, partly because a lot of them have gone back to doing longer pieces, in-depth pieces. That’s what they can actually sell. The short stuff is harder to sell because you can get it for free online everywhere. I did it because if you want to pitch a story that’s just a great yarn and you think maybe it should be 10,000 or 15,000 words, there’s five magazines you can pitch it to and, in the case of The New Yorker, there are hundreds of people pitching them every single day, and they take like two freelance stories at best. The web has infinite space.

Osterer: Did you say who’s licensing your platform?

It’s kind of a motley collection. We license it to journalism schools, so Columbia (licenses it), and Dartmouth Business School licenses it to do case studies. Pearson, which is the gigantic textbook maker that owns Penguin, they’re building a big educational thing with it. TED conferences is launching a line of books. And we have some start-up magazines, so people are actually launching a new sports magazine on it.

Kraft: What’s the appeal, do you think, of this specific format, and how many pitches are you getting per month and how many are you taking?

The appeal to me or to the public?

Kraft: To the public.

I think the appeal to the public – it’s like inverting this question that I used to get all the time. People would say, “Well don’t you think attention span has declined and people don’t really want to read this long stuff?” I was always having to say there’s no real evidence that nobody reads anything anymore. Then I realized we could just turn that on its head and say, “They’re short books.” I actually think that is the appeal, especially on Kindle: (stories) at their appropriate length. As a nonfiction writer and as a person who loves nonfiction books (I think) some nonfiction books are too long. A lot of nonfiction books are (published) because (a writer) gets a book contract out of a magazine story and they’ve got to just pump it up.

So the length has a certain appeal. The multimedia is still unclear.

And then pitches: We have a story meeting once a month and generally 40 or 50 (pitches) have come in. We usually talk about 15 or 20 of them at the meeting and then we’ll probably pick two. Sometimes none. Sometimes five. In some ways, as I said, I set this up because I was so frustrated because I was pitching places and it was always like, No, no, no, but we’re so small we’ve created another version of that problem and we have to say, No, no, no.

Other people are also starting similar (platforms). There was another one that started after us, called Byliner. And people out in San Francisco just raised $100,000 on Kickstarter to do a long-form science thing. So I think there’re going to be a lot more of these slightly different models but in the same genre, giving the author a cut of what they sell.

Williams: What do you look for in pitches in terms of the perfect narrative? What elements need to be there for you to say yes?

I feel like after all this time of saying narrative, narrative, narrative, I should be better at articulating what that means, but I’m not, so I come up with tricks for how I describe it. The typical New York Times magazine story, to take an example: They do what people call narrative stories but they’re actually very topic-based. So they’ll pick something like pregnancy, say, and then find a character, and (a reporter) will follow that character, and the lede is about that character and their experience, and then there’s a broader section about science, and then one about policy, and then you get back to the character. That’s not really what I mean by narrative, but a lot of people refer to that as narrative.

Williams: Those are news features.

Yeah. And we get a lot of pitches like that, so I’m always trying to find ways to explain why I said no. The best way I’ve come up with to describe it is: If someone is telling me a story and then they stop in the middle, and I say, “Well, what happens next?” That’s the kind of story we do.

The kind of story where you say, Well, there’s a lot of adoption of Chinese babies in Oklahoma – that’s a really interesting topic, and there’s probably a magazine story in that, but that’s not a narrative the way we want to do it. So we’re always saying characters first, plot first. So, “A” happens, “B” happens, “C” happens.

Jones: And no nut graf.

No nut graph. We don’t want the kind of “Here’s what this story’s about” (graf) but sometimes we’ll have it. Because we can go too far in the other direction, which is just characters doing crazy things. You do want some sort of gravity, significance. We have this story called “Baghdad Country Club,” which was a bar in Baghdad during the war that this British paratrooper opened in the Green Zone. It’s a little bit “M*A*S*H” and a little bit “Casablanca,” in the movie sense, and it’s very light relative to the environment in which it’s set, so we did have to insert these sort of heavier passages about the Green Zone and its relationship to the rest of Baghdad. Otherwise it just read like the writer was ignorant of the significance of the Iraq war.

Alysia Abbott: Have you thought about if a film studio were to say, “We want to make this into a movie?” Has that happened yet?

Yes. We’re actually represented by CAA in L.A. I should’ve said that when we were talking about the author model, because that’s another unique aspect of what we do, which some writers don’t like at all. We split any film and TV options 50-50 should they happen. We have this representation in L.A., so they’d be responsible for shepherding the story in that environment. The good thing for the writer is that they know their story is going to get looked at by some at least marginally powerful person in Hollywood. The downside is, Michael Lewis is never gonna sign up for that, or David Grann. We have one (story) that’s in legal negotiations now and another one that may have some interest. But it’s so random. I know writers who’ve made an excellent, excellent living on top of their journalism by optioning things, and (the films) never get made. It’s something you hope for but don’t really count on.

*Ratliff appeared as part of the Narrative Writing class’ speaker series. A contributing editor at Wired magazine, he also writes for The New Yorker and National Geographic. This conversation was edited for clarity and length. (Disclosure: Williams is an upcoming Atavist author.)

In the meantime, Paige Williams will be acting editor of Storyboard beginning April 1. A National Magazine Award winner, Williams also teaches narrative nonfiction writing to the fellows and affiliates of the Nieman Foundation. She has been a Storyboard contributor since 2010 and served on the Editors’ Roundtable in 2011.

We’ll continue to look at nonfiction storytelling in every medium and explore the future of narrative journalism. And you can still reach us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org with information on narrative projects or events you’d like to see covered on Storyboard.

Williams & Jones (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

Now Esquire’s writer at large (as well as ESPN The Magazine’s new back-page columnist), Jones has written about presidential candidates, astronauts, soldiers, movie stars and game shows, and has won two National Magazine Awards, the highest honor in magazine writing. One ASME award was for “The Things That Carried Him,” about the return of a soldier’s body from Iraq, and the other was for “Home,” which became the basis for his nonfiction book “Out of Orbit: The Incredible True Story of Three Astronauts Who Were Hundreds of Miles Above Earth When They Lost Their Ride Home.”

“When you read one of his stories, you’re putting on the Chris Jones suit of clothes and walking through this world, and you’re seeing and feeling things the way he does,” his Esquire editor, Peter Griffin, told me the other day. [Read our 2009 interview with Griffin here, for Jones’ “The End of Mystery.”] “But it’s frictionless. Part of the reason is, he’s obsessive. He works a story until he gets it right.”

On his second day visiting Harvard, Jones appeared with Gay Talese. But his first day on campus he sat down with this year’s Nieman fellows to share details about his career and thoughts on writing. What follows are some excerpts from my conversation with him and the discussion with fellows that followed.

You’ve worked in both newspapers and magazines. What adjustments did you have to make in order to move from newspapers to magazines, from the daily news beat?

When I started at the paper I was a beat guy, so I did the 600-word sports stories, mostly about baseball and boxing. Then I started working in features. The paper I worked at was a paper called the National Post, which at the time Conrad Black had sunk a bajillion dollars into, and [it] had exactly no ads, so you could write a 3,000-word feature, and you could pitch anything. I remember we sent one reporter to Mongolia to watch a meteor shower, and it was cloudy so she got no story. And that was my impression of newspapers; that was my first job ever, so I was like, This is how it is. I just didn’t know any better. So I was a feature writer. But then when I started at Esquire my very first sit-down with my new editor was – and this is no insult to anyone who works in newspapers – he said, I don’t want to read a single sentence in your stories that I could have read in a newspaper.

What did he mean by that?

I think sometimes in newspapers you sort of fall into that, you write a paragraph you put in a quote, you write a paragraph, you put in a quote –

Formula.

– formula kind of template-y stuff, and you also write thinking they might cut the last four inches off the story. With a magazine you probably don’t put that many quotes in, the story has more of a full-circle feeling to it. At Esquire if you get assigned 5,000 words you’re gonna have 5,000 words of space. There’s no cutting for space. So it wasn’t so much a language change, it was more a structural change, how the piece fits together.

And I think what you also get in magazine stories that you don’t always have time to do in newspapers is, the story might be about something on the surface but a great magazine story is also about something beyond that – an idea; there’s a theme to it. The story about Joey Montgomery was about his body coming back, but really that was a story about war, and he was one guy representing everybody who died there. In newspapers you maybe don’t get the time to craft that kind of narrative.

Newspaper writers sometimes think, “Oh if I could only write for a magazine I’d have all this freedom,” but then you get into magazines and –

It’s a different kind of hard.

Yeah.

Newspapers weren’t a great fit for me because I always wanted to spend more time on a story. I hated writing on deadline. I always lay awake at night worried that I’d made a terrible mistake, that I got the score wrong. The nice thing about working at newspapers is the immediacy of it; if you don’t like a story you’re working on you’re done the next day, and you do something else. The other nice thing about newspapers is, if you write five stories a week and one is really good and three are fine and one is kind of crappy, that’s not a bad average. With Esquire my contract is six stories a year; I can’t have a dud.

Six features a year. What sort of average length are we talking about?

Our minimum would be something like 3,000 words. I’d say average real feature is around six. Celebrity profiles are around three, and those count as features.

The longest you’ve written was the war piece, wasn’t it? Like 12,000 words?

It actually ran at 17,000, and was assigned at six. I delivered 22,000.

Did you let them know they were getting 22,000?

Yeah, it was an awkward conversation with Peter, actually, because – that story’s in sections; there’s like 13 sections. I wrote it in the order that I had the material, I didn’t leave it all till the end. So I wrote the first section, which was the section where they fly Joey back from Dover, they fly to Seymour. I wrote that section and it came out at like 2,000 words, and I thought, That math is not good. So I called Peter and said it might be more like 10. I blew past 10 and said, It’s gonna be more than that. He said, Listen, just write it and we’ll figure it out. To Esquire’s credit they just burned that whole issue.

Like Hersey and Hiroshima in The New Yorker.

We had a Jessica Simpson story, [it] was the other story in that issue.

Well, the world thanks you for burning –

Oh no, it got in. It was the cover.

So you cut 5,000 words. Did you cut it or did they?

We cut it together. One of the great things about working there, my editor Peter, we’ve been together for eight years now; you only write for one editor. Like that’s your relationship and no one else touches the story.

It doesn’t go up to [Editor in Chief David] Granger?

Well he’ll read it, but there’s no changes.

[At some other magazines] everybody gets their fingerprints on it.

And stories inevitably suffer. I think that’s a bad process. Peter and I just have this – we know what each other is looking for. If I bumped from editor to editor I’d have a hard time. You just develop a trust that I think is important to doing the best work you can.

What, then, for people who don’t get the pleasure –

Totally screwed.

[laughter]

Newspaper reporters – sometimes you’re working for different sections –

No, it’s hard. I like being edited. In newspapers I was writing sports stories at 11 o’clock at night, it just went in. I never got edited. And I didn’t like it. I know some people think of editors as evil and they’re messing with your art, but for me Peter is – I mean he’s a fantastic editor. I tell students all the time: You’ll never do your best work until you find that editor who is your perfect match. By a series of flukes I got Peter and we work perfectly together. My stuff would not be nearly as good without Peter.

How long did you spend on that [war] piece?

I spent maybe eight months on that story.

Exclusively?

In the middle I did a Scarlett Johansson feature. I flew from the mortuary at Dover to sit with her at a diner [in California]. It was a surreal juxtaposition.

A lot of what makes that story work so well is the detail. Every passage is so tight, every sentence almost seems to be built with a specific mission in mind. How’d you wind it up so much without ruining it?

Once I realized how long it was going to be, my standard for a sentence was it had to have a fact. And the way I structured it in the end – I thought, It’s so long and the material’s so difficult that people wouldn’t read it in one sitting, so every section starts with a different person. It goes from person to person to person, and the last section is Joey. Then I tried to find little details that would help guide you, because it was backward and I was worried about losing people. So there’s things like the girl in the flowered dress, little cues that I hoped would sort of ground people.

But then Peter, when we took those 5,000 words out, really tightened it – I mean we cut a feature. A simple line edit with a story that length, you can lose a thousand or two words. We lost some whole scenes, which at the time was like – there was one scene that I spent months reporting; it was the funeral they held in Iraq. The soldiers have their own memorial service in Iraq. Soldiers are tough interviews and it was a tough scene, you know? It was hard all the way around. It was probably about 1,500 words, and I spent a long time writing it, and we just cut it.

How do you report your scenes? That’s something we talk about in class – when you’re reconstructing scenes and when you’re at the mercy of people’s memories and at the mercy, in this case, of soldiers who are sort of programmed to talk like athletes, who say a lot without saying anything –

Any interview I do for a narrative story, particularly with people who don’t speak to reporters normally, I usually have a preamble where I talk about the questions I’m going to ask. I tell them, A story like this relies on details, I’m going to ask you what might seem like some really strange questions. If you don’t remember, that’s okay, don’t force yourself to remember things; don’t think anything’s stupid, if I ask a question you don’t like, tell me you don’t like it. Like with Joey’s story people were worried that I was gonna do it dirty on him, that I was going to somehow sully his memory. All you can do there is try to convince them you’re a good person. It’s a lot easier if you actually are a good person. I like to think that I’m a good person. So I told them: You can trust me. And when I said it I meant it: I’m not here to mess with Joey. And if you spend enough time with people they get comfortable. And two very important things with that story: I had the time, and I did every interview in person.

Oh wow.

Which I think makes a huge difference.

So do I.

And every interview was often somewhere very awkward. Like Aunt Vicki, I talked to her over lunch at a Cracker Barrel, and so we’re both sitting in this Cracker Barrel, and I was bawling, she was bawling, and everybody in the room going, What the hell? But it was not sitting in a house. It was almost like a date. We met at the restaurant; it was the first time we met. It was just easier that way.

I think the key to reporting a story like that – and I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant – you gotta see when people are giving you little windows. There’s a scene in that story – the girl in the flowered dress, the National Guard people who carried the casket from the plane to the family. There, I interviewed them in a group; there were six of us sitting around a table. My starting question was How do you keep your game face? That’s what they call it when you don’t show emotion. It was a general question, so they gave a general answer, which was, You don’t look at the family, you look at something else. I said, Do any of you happen to remember what you were looking at that day? The first guy, Schnieders, said, I was looking at the logo on the sheriff’s car. Then these two female soldiers started whispering together, and I said, What are you guys talking about? And that was the girl in the flowered dress, where one of them had said, Look at the girl, look at the dress, pick out a flower on the dress.

For me the girl in the flowered dress is my favorite detail. And this started with How do you keep your emotions? and gradually whittled down to this moment. So you’ve got to be aware of when somebody is giving you an opening. And then you winnow it down.

In narrative you have to be on, all the time, because every moment might matter. It’s almost like being hyper-vigilant. You just can’t be asleep.

Yeah and you have to really listen. You know, when I started that story I was worried that I’d be doing so many interviews that I’d forget stuff. But when you’re doing stuff like that, you don’t forget stuff.

But you’re thinking long term too – it’s almost like you can see the story in the making, and how certain details will serve the narrative.

Yeah. You gradually develop an instinct – this is gonna sound crass as hell, but literally I have a cash-register sound that goes off in my head. Like, cha-ching. It’s annoying. Like, the girl in the flowered dress was cha-ching. I knew that was going in. You know, it’s a spidey sense. When I first sit down to write even a story of that length, I figure if I can remember it, then it’s an important detail.

When you’re talking about details [writers] sort of over – “he was wearing a gray sweater” and there were these pants and – those don’t really matter. At Esquire our goal is always to report the story so well we can sit down at a bar and I can just tell you the story. I did 101 interviews for that story and I could go through that story right now and tell you everyone who’s in it. You just remember. You remember the stuff that counts. So a lot of [writers] are like, I’m worried I’m gonna miss something great; well if you’ve forgotten it, it probably wasn’t great. And that’s how you know the details that are great and the details that aren’t. Then you go back to your notes and tapes and make sure you’re right.

The idea of detail that doesn’t move the action forward, that doesn’t advance any ideas – gratuitous detail –

It’s just clutter. The detail has to have some purpose to it, it has to mean something. Even if it doesn’t mean anything right away, it gradually builds some picture in your head gets you where you’re going.

And nothing’s a throwaway, because you might need it. It might come back in some way.

Yeah. This is a very hard thing to explain but – I’m gonna backtrack. I don’t outline. And I know this is a great debate in narrative. Like, Gay Talese, if you come tomorrow, Gay Talese outlines in ridiculous ways, for me. He will have 17 shirt boards with the story mapped out, and for me the risk of outlining is you miss those little connections that you maybe wouldn’t see if you were sitting there thinking, How am I gonna tell this story? I love when you’re writing and you see this little connection that you wouldn’t have seen [otherwise] – little echoes that count again later when you come back to it. Sometimes I’m asked, How did you know – I didn’t know that. It was only once I started writing that I saw it. Sometimes I see Gay Talese’s outlines and I think I’m doing it wrong, but I think what you might lose then is that sort of spontaneous connection.

And you can’t teach that. You can teach people to be aware always, and to look for opportunities, but it’s like teaching an ear – do you think that’s true? You can teach writing, absolutely, but the music, and those ghostly things that happen in Story –

I don’t think you can take a bad writer and make them great. I think you can make a bad writer passable and a passable writer good and a good writer great, but you can’t make massive jumps. It sounds harsh, but, excluding me from the conversation, there’s kind of an “it,” or whatever, that [good writers] just have. Like music. I’m tone deaf. You can never make me a great pianist. It would never happen. Writing is a similar kind of thing.

Okay.

It’s a terrible thing to say.

No it isn’t.

I mean you guys know: This is a tough business and there are a lot of effing good people at it, and there are lots of good people who can’t work. If you’re not good you’ve got no shot. I mean maybe you want this, you want it so bad, but if you’re not good at it, it’s not gonna happen. And you just have to be honest. It sounds brutal as it’s coming out of my mouth.

No it doesn’t.

But I don’t believe in false hope. Or there’s a sweet spot for different [types of writing] – you gotta find that spot. If you want to be a journalist, which is such a huge field, you’ve got to find your sweet spot.

Let’s talk about the origin of stories. You see Story in places where other people don’t see it.

[In magazine writing] you gotta find those stories that don’t change, and yet that no one else has written about. You’re always on the lookout for the stuff that fell through the cracks. If you’re pitching magazines, you can’t pitch a story that’s happened and that everyone’s writing about, or that’s happening in two months. For me, I get most of my ideas from newspapers, where the reporter I used to be – some poor dude only had three hours and 400 words to tell a story and you can see –

The bigger story.

The bigger story. So “Home” was a 400-word story about [the astronauts’] return. The soldier story was a 600-word piece on CNN.com. The Price Is Right was my own obsession. Roger Ebert was, like, his blog, which was just out there. No one had asked Roger Ebert to do a story – it was just sitting there. Those are the things you gotta find when you’re doing magazine stuff.

Yeah.

The great magazine stories you’re like, How the hell did no one else write this story?

That hardly ever happens though.

That hardly ever happens. I’ve been at Esquire for nine years and probably have done five or six stories that I think were good, just because it’s so hard to find that perfect mix of idea, material, your writing was good, everything worked.

It takes a massive amount of organization to keep track of the material for stories like “The Things That Carried Him” because you’re dealing with different characters, different points of view, different time periods, different countries. How do you organize everything and at what point do you write?

Because that story was so big, I wrote it in chunks, and that’s why it almost reads like a collection of little stories. With a regular story I often don’t write it front to back. Usually I know my ending, and often I’ll write my ending first. That’s from school. I had a professor telling me, How do you know how to get there if you don’t know where you’re going? That stuck with me for some reason. I also think endings are the most important part of the story. From my newspaper days I got scarred because all my endings got cut off. But with magazines, for me, it’s your finishing note; it’s how you’re leaving company with people. Ideally your story has built to this sort of crescendo and it’s like, here’s your moment. So I usually know what my ending is, and then I’ll start writing wherever I feel like writing.

But the sheer reporting. What are your tools? I didn’t realize you don’t record anything.

I record sit-down interviews. And in the soldier story I recorded – [at Esquire] it’s the only time they let you use the interns, to transcribe your tapes, but I never do it because I don’t want them to hear me stumbling and bumbling through my crap. The humiliation factor is just like – I don’t want anyone listening to this. It’s like what I do in the bathroom, you know?

Great.

So what I work toward in the reporting – I mean I sort of have two rules. For me writing is pretty hard, so my attitude has always been – my great fear is sitting down to write a 5,000-word story with 3,000 words of material. Like that’s my death. I’m not a very flowery writer. There are a lot of writers who could get away with that but I have no imagination. I think everyone would see this is where he ran out of shit and now he’s lying. I report as hard as I do so I can avoid that oh-crap feeling where you sit down and go I don’t have it. The other thing I sort of work for – Esquire’s fact checkers are beautiful, beautiful people; they are insane. My favorite fact checker story: I was writing about a fight, and I had a little joke, Shaquille O’Neal tripped over some lighting cables. The [fact checker] spent days trying to make sure they were lighting cables and not sound cables. And I was like, Dude, we can just call them cables. And he was like, Well, shit.

[laughter]

Fact checkers also make you feel like the least funny person on earth. Because you have to explain jokes. I had this basketball player who had like 17 different devices on his waistband so I was like: The Motorola fax/pager/copier on his waist – and the fact-checker was like, Well I called Motorola, and they don’t have a fax/copier/pager that goes on the waist – and I’m like Shit, dude, that’s not a real thing.

[laughter]

I love fact checkers; they allow me to sleep at night. But fact checking is torturous, and on a 17,000-word story it is hell. So that story in particular I kept ridiculous notes. I kept every phone number, every name, so they could verify everything easily – you just have to do it –

Well not all writers do it, though. You’re probably beloved for that –

I always warn them when I’m coming: Sorry guys, I’ve got another one coming down the pipe.

Annotating is your friend.

Again, going back to my newspaper days I’d have killed for that. I like that part of the process. So as long as I can get through those two things I’ve done my job and then I can write.

Dina Kraft: I have a question about structure on “The Things That Carried Him.” Were you working with a spokesperson for the Army? Did you think, This is a good possible [story subject] for me, I’ll jump over to Indiana?

Well I saw the story on CNN and that was Joey. Really it was about life at the forward operating base and it included a vignette on carrying the body back, and it turned out to be Joey. I spent probably a couple of weeks – this sounds ghoulish – but looking at other possibilities. And I kept going back to Joey. I liked that he was from a small town in Indiana; I just thought it was better than New York or L.A. And I felt sort of a weird connection – we had similar sort of adolescences. I felt like I kind of understood him. The very first thing I did was call his mom. No matter who we did, I wanted the family’s permission. So I called his mom, and it was terrible. I thought I was calling her at home. I thought, I’ll call her in the middle of the day, I’ll leave a message on her home machine and she’ll call me back if she wants. But the number I’d been given was her work, and she answered.

This is something that’s really hard to explain but, what do you say? So I was like, Hi I’m Chris, I write for Esquire magazine and I really want to write a story about how a soldier is returned from Iraq and I’d really like that soldier to be Joey. And she just started bawling. I felt so bad that I’d ruined her day, but we ended up talking for probably an hour and a half. At the end she said, You can do it, but I want to be [interviewed] last; if this story falls apart anywhere along the way I don’t want to have gone through it for nothing.

At that time there were a lot of stories about how hard it was – you couldn’t take a photo of a flag-draped casket. I thought, This is gonna be really hard. So I called the mortuary in Dover and they said, You need Pentagon approval. I said, Well who is the Pentagon? They gave me a name. I called him up and did the same schpiel. He said okay. I was like, Okay what? He said, You’ve got Pentagon approval. I said, You sure? And that was it. And I never once had a roadblock. Everything just fell into place. It was one of those spooky – I have countless examples of moments where I was like, That’s nuts. When I went to Dover – they pray over every planeload. Chaplain Sparks had done 700 planes and he said, I do a different prayer for every plane. And I said, You have no idea what you’d have said [at Joey’s]? And then he went back to his desk – and this was months later – and sitting on top of his pile was the prayer he said on Joey’s plane. He had the manifest and on the back was the prayer. He came back and looked like he’d been hit by a board. And there was countless moments of stuff like that.

The last thing I did was go to Scottsburg. The other nice thing about doing it that way was, I could tell [Joey’s family] what I knew.

Did they ask?

They asked. And one of the lessons about that story for me was, I was really worried about Gail reading it. She’d lost two husbands, her son, just this litany of tragedy, and I didn’t really want to add to it. And when I wrote the scene in the mortuary the first time I wrote it Peter called and said, You’re hedging, you’re holding back; every other part of the story is so detailed and here you’re kind of skimming it. I was like, Yeah it was really gory and I didn’t know how much detail to go into. He said, You’ve gotta go all the way with it. I was like, Okay.

Gail didn’t know Joey had lost his legs. I called her before the story came out and said, Gail, you might not want to read this, there’s stuff in there you might not want to know. She was like, Give me an example. I said, Joey didn’t have any legs. That was sort of the big – and she was okay. You know? And it’s true about writing about yourself: If you write about yourself you’ve gotta be 100 percent honest; people know if you’re holding back. And with this, Peter picked it out right away: You’re not telling me everything you know. And if you’re gonna write a story like that, you’ve got to go 100 percent.

Carlotta Gall: That’s interesting because that’s the one passage I would have cut if I was your editor.

It’s definitely the most technical. And it’s the least detailed. There you can’t say to the mortician, Do you remember that particular – there’s four morticians who’ve done thousands of bodies. It’s definitely the weakest section, it always was. You just couldn’t get the girl in the flowered dress in the mortuary. It just didn’t exist.

Claudia Mendez Arriaza: What makes Peter a great editor?

I’ll call Peter a lot when I’m reporting, and I’ll tell him I had a cash register moment, or if I’m having a problem. We’ll sort of talk it out. I think a great editor is almost part therapist in some ways. You know, writers spend a lot of time by themselves, and I’m on the road by myself a lot, so he’s just a good guy for me to talk to me about stories. I think my favorite thing that Peter does is his cuts, his actual removal of things. Like Paige was talking about with “The Things That Carried Him,” the tightness of it, that there’s no sentiment in it, that’s because of Peter. The very first section of that story, now it ends with something like, “They spend a lot of time like that.” I talk about Chaz walking out, holding hands, and they’re not talking, they spend a lot of time like that. I had, “They spend a lot of time like that, talking only with their hands.” And just that little cut makes that story better. So he’s like that 10 percent restraint, like a reining in. If I go too far with the sentimentality or the emotion he pulls it back. It’s very nice when people talk about the restraint in my stories, but that’s Peter, that’s not me. Because it’s really hard to know where the line is for the emotional.

Rema Nagarajan: Is there a time when you don’t agree with him and then what happens?

Yeah, you know that old cliché about you read your story and find your favorite line, and that’s the line you should cut? It’s kind of true. Peter has a way of [lots of sound effects here meant to represent Peter cutting, and also the sound Jones likens to being waxed].

You get waxed often then?

Yeah, all the time. It’s better not to be super-hairy.

[laughter]

It goes back to the trust thing. If Peter does it I’m like, well Peter is my swami, and he is totally correct. But yeah, he’s part therapist, part cheerleader and a hard-core ass-kicking editor.

You don’t call in wringing your hands.

I don’t often call him with a problem. I usually call Peter when I’m excited. I usually call Peter when I have that moment where I’m like, Oh this is actually gonna work, especially when it’s a story that I’ve pitched hard and I’m nervous about. The Price Is Right story, I called him after the Drew Carey interview, which was one of the great interviews of my life. We’re backstage and he just went off, like F F F F F. There was this publicist who’d been a pain in my ass – CBS was worse than the Pentagon. She was sitting there and she wouldn’t leave, and she said, You cannot ask about Terry rolling The Price Is Right. So I’m sitting there with Drew, and he kind of brought it up. He says, There’s this guy – I’m like, Yeah, Terry. And I hear behind me like a thunk, and I turn around and her head’s on the table. As soon as I was in the parking lot I called Peter and said, I got it I got it I got it. I don’t call him saying, It’s not working.

He also told me you sometimes call and say, I’m gonna go another way but I can’t tell you what it is. He trusts you to just go do it.

See I’m a writer because I can’t really talk. Like I can’t explain – so something will come up but I can’t –

Articulate it.

So it’s like, Let me try it in words. It’s like instead of me trying to explain this let me just write it. If you don’t like it, fine. Like the Price Is Right we went into it not knowing the twist about Ted, the guy in the audience who was yelling out the numbers. Instead of telling all that to Peter, I just said, Listen there’s a thing, there’s this guy Ted, I’m just gonna write it and you’ll see. That’s how we dealt with that.

No surprises.

I feel like if I’ve sold it as something I’ve gotta – it sounds like I’m bragging about the length of “The Things That Carried Him,” but I felt bad. Usually I’m within 100 words of my assigned length. I try very hard to hit that. People get offside about this, but journalism is a business. You’re expecting people to buy a product. You’re being paid for your work. Your editor is a customer; your readers are customers. So I feel this responsibility – I don’t think of it as I’m conducting my orchestra, and I’m doing my art and blah blah. For me it’s a contract. You’re paying me to do a job. I’m gonna deliver on time, I’m gonna deliver at the length you’re asking for, I’m not gonna be a pain in your ass, if you don’t like something I’ll fix it. I try to be –

Professional.

Is that the word?

I don’t know.

I try to do the job. So the soldier story was a weird – I just can’t see how you’d do it in 6,000 words.

Tyler Bridges: You said earlier that you don’t see yourself as a lyrical writer, and I’m certainly not a lyrical writer either, and if I do something that’s okay, it’s because of the reporting. But you take reporting to an extra level and I’m wondering if you have to constantly remind yourself what the person’s wearing, what the weather’s like – whether you have little tricks or it’s so natural now that you are able to get all these details –

I think it’s gotten more natural. One thing I still do is ask the people, Can I call you back? Like, If I go home and start writing and I need a little spackle can we talk about it? Because sometimes you don’t know until you’re writing it that you need this little bit that gets you from this paragraph to this paragraph. I think it’s okay not to get it all on the first run.

Bridges: Do you have little tricks to make sure you’re attendant to everything that’s going on or is it just natural to do that?

I don’t really know how to talk about this stuff without sounding like a jerk.

Just say it.

Well, I’m mildly autistic. It was a hindrance as a child, but as a reporter it’s kind of helpful because I find myself noticing things. And I think I have a good memory. So things will just sort of jump out sometimes, things I’m maybe not supposed to be looking at.

Bridges: I have trouble describing what someone looks like.

That is hard. That was one of my early lessons, that you always have to include a paragraph of description of the person because you can’t pretend that people know what people look like. In the Scarlett Johansson story I have a paragraph describing her face and it’s easily the most overwritten thing I’ve ever written. Because I mean how the hell do you describe a face? I mean you start with the forehead – I don’t know, big? Nose? It’s nose-like. So you kind of come up with all this language, and that’s when it gets fussy for me. Probably every other writer at Esquire is a much better writer than I am. Tom Junod could write 3,000 words about Scarlet Johansson’s face, but I can’t, so I try to get by with other stuff.

John Diedrich: I covered the military, great job on this piece. I’m curious about when you survey what’s been done on a subject area, and when you detect –

Jim Sheeler.

Diedrich: Jim Sheeler. He was covering it from a different angle. But how far will you read something – do you read everything that’s out there?

No I don’t read everything. I read Sheeler’s piece, and it’s a great piece. I mean it won a Pulitzer, right? It’s the definitive piece about the messengers. For me, it’s not good for me to read other stuff, not so much because I worry I’m gonna steal something but because I’m pretty naturally insecure. Like reading Sheeler’s piece was like, Shit, but it was good because it was a boot in my butt. I was like, Well, if that’s the bar. But no, I won’t sit there and survey the landscape because I don’t know what good could come from it.

Diedrich: So would you stay away from that aspect?

I didn’t purposely stay away from it. It was just different from the start. I mean I included the moment of notification. What was strange in this case is after reading Sheeler’s story I thought, Oh this is what this scene is gonna be like, but it wasn’t like that, because she found out from her sister. So that’s the one part of the process I thought I knew, and it was totally different. I mean if you’re doing certain stories you have to read to get the knowledge. If you’re doing a geology story you have to read about geology.

Samiha Shafy: I would like to hear the story about how you talked your way into Esquire with a box of donuts. The second is, you said you’re writing six stories a year, which doesn’t sound like a big number but considering the effort you put into each story how do you make sure you pick the right stories, and is it like two months per story or four months for one or?

Yeah, it can be six weeks – a celebrity story you might spend three weeks on and another story you might spend six months on. I’ll answer your second question first. So the hardest part of the job is the idea. You can take the best writer in the world and give them a crap idea and they’ll come out with a crap story, and you can take an awesome idea and give it to a not very good writer and they’ll probably come out with a pretty good story. Again this is part of the editorial process – pitching and pitching and pitching. So many stories I really like I had to pitch for a long time. Ebert I pitched for eight or 10 months. The space story I pitched for close to a year. The Price Is Right, I had to make that bet. [[The editors weren’t interested in the Price Is Right story at first. Convinced it was a good story, Jones bet Granger: He’d pay his own expenses and eat them if it turned out to be a non-story, but if Esquire ran the piece the editors had to pay him double his expenses. Which they did./pw]]

I think one of the tests at Esquire is if you can’t let it go, that’s when they’ll finally say yes. Like Ebert happened – I was supposed to write about Taylor Swift. At Esquire – I’m 37, I’m the young guy, so I get Taylor Swift. I’m still 37 trying to write about some 17-year-old girl, so I’m gonna be the pervert in the corner of the room. Luckily she canceled at the last minute. I was like, How about Roger? And that’s when I finally got to do it.

The donut story: So this is because I’m an idiot. I’m not very socially aware. When I was still at the National Post I really wanted to work for Esquire –

Having never written for a magazine before.

Having never written for a magazine. I got my job at the National Post having never written a published story before, so for me this was how it works. Actually I’m gonna tell my National Post story. So when I got my paper job there was a magazine in Canada called Saturday Night. I got my degree in urban planning. I thought it was gonna be like Lego. It’s not. It’s super-bureaucratic and terrible. So I had this headmaster who was a journalist and who set me up with a job interview with this guy named Ken White, who was the editor in chief of Saturday Night, which is like I guess our New Yorker. So I went for a job with Ken White and he kept saying newspaper, and I kept correcting him, saying, This is a magazine. It was like the worst job interview ever. Afterward I called my parents and said, I don’t know what that was but I’m not gonna be a writer.

And then they offered me a job at the paper. The paper was brand new. They stuck anyone with no experience, like me, in this bureau in Toronto, and if you were good enough you got pulled up. I started getting phone calls from the news editor and the sports editor, and in my head I’m like, They’re fighting over me. Meanwhile up at the paper Ken White was going, One of you has to take him. Years later I found this out. Finally I went to Sports because I wouldn’t count against their hiring quota. And I literally sat there for three months doing nothing, just sitting at my table, like ballast.

But the magazine – I walked into the Esquire building –

Wait, you flew to New York?

I was already there anyway, doing a Mets/Blue Jays series. And I walked in the building because I assumed that David Granger, the editor in chief, would want to meet with me. I was like, Clearly he’ll say yes. So the security guard was sitting there at the desk. I said, I’m here to see David Granger. He said, Do you have an appointment? I said, Nope. He said, Well, no. I was like, Can I make an appointment? He said, No, no, I don’t think you can.

So I was leaving and there was a janitor sweeping the lobby and he said, Do you want a job at Esquire? I said, Not as a janitor.

[laughter]

He said, No, no, no, there’s an editor, Andy Ward, young guy, really good guy, loves sports, you need to talk to Andy. So I went back to the security guard and said, Can I call Andy Ward? So I called up Andy, and he answers and I say, Hey I’m Chris, I write for a newspaper, I really want to work for you one day, I wonder if we could meet. He was like, Oh, when are you coming to town? I said, I’m in your lobby, the janitor said to call you.

[laughter]

And Andy said, Well, I’ve got this meeting to go to but come back at two.

And Andy’s the nicest dude on earth.

The janitor was totally right – he knew the guy I needed to talk to. So I got two boxes of donuts. I got one for the janitor, [and] was like, Thank you. I took a box of donuts to Andy, and some clips. [[I later asked Andy about this, and what kind of donuts Jones brought. Andy said Krispy Kreme, because Jones wanted to make a point that Krispy Kremes are better than Dunkin’ Donuts. Which, sorry Boston, they are./pw]] And again going back to the socially awkward thing I’m sitting there with Andy, we’re talking, he’s very nice, and I said, Can you read some of my stuff? He said, Yeah, I’ll read it. And I said, Can you read it now? He was like, While you’re sitting here? I was like, Yeah, I just kind of want to know is this even possible. So he’s reading and he’s like, Yeah, we wouldn’t use so many one-sentence paragraphs but it’s not bad. I said, Okay, great.

So, I kind of forgot about it. I quit my job at the paper, was traveling around. I ran out of money in Arizona, I was in Flagstaff. Got an email from Andy saying, We’ve got a job, 10 guys are gonna write a story, best story gets it. And this is the job I want more than anything. And I was flat broke. I mean I was busted. I had left the paper in a hissy fit, which was a terrible mistake  – and I wanted that job so bad, so I wrote my story –

What was the story?

I wrote about Barry Zito, the baseball player –

You could choose any story?

I had to pitch 10 stories – this was specifically to be the sports columnist. That’s how I started at Esquire. And it was only years later that I found out the competition was bullshit. It had never happened. I spent years trying to find out – because the business isn’t that big – who are these other nine people? I was asking around, Are you one of the people? So whenever students ask how to get a job in journalism: Well, you act like an idiot, you go places you’re not supposed to go, you bring donuts, you run out of money and get super lucky.

Jonathan Blakley: With Roger Ebert – I love that story – one of the reasons I really loved it is, I’m a little older than you but I think we both grew up watching him. Suddenly you’re there. Was that one day with him?

No, parts of four days. And Roger was also awesome in the sense that, when I first emailed about doing the story he said, You know, I can’t talk, so we should probably do this by email, and I said, Well it would be better if we actually met. Roger actually started his career as a feature writer, including stuff for Esquire, so once he got past the idea of me coming, which did take some convincing –

Gosh – sorry to interrupt but that surprises me that he wouldn’t get that you needed to be in the room –

He hadn’t really been out at that point. He didn’t want people seeing his face.

Still –

Yeah. Once he got on board he was like, Oh he’s gonna need scenes – we’ll go out for dinner. All I said was, I want to go to the movies with you. Everything else was him. He knew what I needed. It’s funny – we talked afterward, and he had written the story. He was like, I’m surprised you didn’t put this in.

[laughter]

And there was a great moment that I didn’t put in, because in order for it to work I had to be in there, and I didn’t want to be in the story.

What was it?

They were cleaning the house before I got there and Chaz, his wife, had their wedding album out and Roger was like, Why the hell do you have the wedding pictures out? And she put it away. And after I’d been there maybe 15 minutes he was like, Chaz, bring out the wedding pictures! Anyway, he was like, I would’ve led with that, and …

[laughter]

I tell you the hot-sweat moment – he was mad about the picture. He was like, I’m kind of surprised you did the full face, like a whole page –

Bridges: Oh, but it’s such an amazing photo, though.

But all he sees is the damage, right? And it was a full page in the magazine. And he said, I’m surprised you spent so much time on my sickness.

Really?

And I was like, Oh shit. I said, Listen, if we don’t have the photo people are gonna spend the whole story wondering what you look like and they’re not gonna read the story. So you get that right out of the way. And with your sickness, nobody knows about this stuff. It’s important to establish why you can’t talk.

Bridges: Do you read stuff to Roger Ebert or whoever?

Oh no, no. This is always a tricky situation. I wanted Roger to love the story. I really like Roger. For me that was – I’ll never be able to relate what it was like to be sitting there pulling Post-It notes off his fingers. Like, I went there – I’d had this waffly kind of bad-head period where I was depressed or whatever, and I left there and thought, What the hell. I’m gonna leave here and I’m gonna have a root beer, and that moment on its own – it was a transformative experience, doing that story. I wanted him to like it, but you have to play this game where, I hope he likes it but I can’t be writing it for him.

And the fact checking – oh God I had this awful moment where I described the hole in his face. Originally I had it as the size of a small fist. And the fact checker called him and said, Roger do you have a hole the size of a small fist? And he immediately emailed me going, What are you talking about, this hole? I said, You have this hole, it’s there. I made it a plum, I think, in the end. But he was upset, and that kind of stuff bothered me. The reaction to the story was so positive he got on board.

Diedrich: The headline for “The Things That Carried Him” is clearly a nod to “The Things They Carried” – how aware are you when you’re writing that you’re in this legacy of people who’ve written about soldiers?

The title is a funny – I always put a headline on my stories because I find it helps me –

Focus.

If I find myself drifting I can go back to the headline. If it’s hard to write a headline for your story your story is probably unfocused. My headline was “The 3,431st.” I thought it sounded vaguely military, I thought it got across the idea of one of these thousands. Then Peter put that headline on it and I was like, Argh. Like “The Things They Carried” is one of the great pieces of war literature of all time, and when he put that headline on it I thought it sounded like hubris. But again, it was that 75th anniversary year, the original “The Things They Carried,” the short story, was in Esquire. I still never quite loved the headline. I really like headlines like “The Body.” There’s a story in the current issue that’s just called “Hood.” I like headlines like that. Very rarely is the headline that I put on my story the headline. Like this one, Roger Ebert, was [ultimately] called “The Essential Man,” or something. I like having a headline as my compass point.

For more from Chris Jones, check out his conversation with narrative legend Gay Talese.