The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [3]
Ultimately, though, the highest form of crime reporting, I think, is in the creation of portraits of the criminals themselves. On hearing of a particularly awful or shocking crime, who among us hasn’t asked the question, “Who could do a thing like that?” Several stories in this collection try to answer that fundamental question—again, not with stereotypes or surmise, but with painstaking reporting.
I had to remind myself of the subject of Mark Boal’s “Everyone Will Remember Me as Some Sort of Monster.” It was a spree killing by a kid with a gun; sadly, they all seemed to come in a jumble between Columbine and Virginia Tech. This one was in Omaha, where a skinny nineteen-year-old—“Harry Potter with an AK-47”—mowed down eight people in a shopping mall just before Christmas. As Boal writes, “It was a big story. For about a week.”
But Boal does what a real journalist should—which is unpack a simple story in all its awful complexity. He writes, in essence, a mini-biography of Robert Hawkins, who had bounced from foster home to no home in his sad, short stay on the planet. As with any memorable work of journalism, it’s the details that stay with you. “On Mother’s Day, when patients were told to draw cards for their loved ones,” Boal writes, “Robbie drew a picture of a noose for his stepmother.” Robbie was such a screwup that he tried to roll joints with Post-it notes. But what turned Robbie from a sad sack into a mass murderer? That’s not clear; nor could it be.
The story that best sums up the paradoxes of crime reporting is David Grann’s “True Crime,” which begins in 2000 with the discovery of a bound-and-gagged body in a river in Poland. For years, there are no arrests or suspects. Then, in 2003, the police are alerted to the publication of a novel by Krystian Bala, an obscure Polish writer. The book, called Amok, includes scenes of a homicide that bear a great deal of similarity to the unsolved crime in 2000. An intrepid police detective makes copies of the novel and hands them out to his colleagues. “Everyone was assigned a chapter to ‘interpret’: to try to find any clues, any coded messages, any parallels with reality.”
In the confrontation between detective and author-suspect, Bala denies responsibility for the murder but admits that he drew some of the novel from real life. “Sure, I’m guilty of that. Show me an author who doesn’t do that.” The question at the heart of Grann’s piece is the difference between life and art—and whether any story, of fiction or nonfiction, can ever accurately portray reality.
Grann’s story culminates in a trial—and all of Poland was watching. Bala denied all. The government said his novel proved his guilt. Grann writes, “A trial is predicated on the idea that truth is obtainable.” So is journalism. This collection represents the best of that compelling and imperfect profession.
—Jeffrey Toobin
Calvin Trillin
THE COLOR OF BLOOD
FROM The New Yorker
WHAT HAPPENED AT THE FOOT of the driveway at 40 Independence Way that hot August night in 2006 took less than three minutes. The police later managed to time it precisely, using a surveillance camera that points directly at the street from a house a couple of doors to the north. The readout on the surveillance tape said that it was 23:06:11 when two cars whizzed by going south, toward the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. At 23:09:06, the first car passed back in front of the camera, going north. A minute later, a second car passed in the same direction. In the back seat of that second car—a black Mustang Cobra convertible