My career as a teller of true stories has been influenced—in part shaped—by audio and video technology. When I started as a newspaper reporter in the 1970s, it was rare to have photo, video, or audio of anything I wrote about. Today, it is not rare. And while such material is a great boon to anyone crafting a dramatic story about a real event, it also poses challenges—like the one I faced writing my latest book, The Last Stone. As with so many things that define modern life, the sheer volume of data can be overwhelming.
Years ago, recordings existed for events covered by news organizations or for some unanticipated reason. In crime stories there was sometimes surveillance, or film shot by chance, someone with a camera rolling at just the right time and place—such as the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It was relatively rare. Today cameras are everywhere. Every store, library, bank, highway intersection or toll booth, stadium, building lobby, parking lot, and city street corner has one running continually, and nearly every citizen owns a cellphone capable of not just recording but of publishing, or “posting,” the results to the world. Police increasingly wear cameras or have them mounted on their vehicles. The military mounts video cameras on drones that can watch over entire cities, and use software that can zero in on specific vehicles, intersections, or houses over time. Increasingly video surfaces for the most private of human interactions. Often raw clips of a crime surface before anything else—a sports figure striking a woman on an elevator, a cop shooting a fleeing suspect, a bomb exploding on a busy street—and then drives the reporting that follows. Much news coverage about controversial events today concerns interpreting what we have already seen or heard.
In some ways, this is a much richer world for nonfiction writers. Recreating past events, writing a narrative rich with scenes, with characters, action, and dialogue, has long been the hardest part of telling true stories. Unless you witness a thing for yourself, the only way to obtain such scenes is by reconstructing them from written records and the memories of participants. Until fairly recently, this is how all of history has been written down, and the process is, of course, imperfect. Memory is always iffy. Records are sometimes wrong. I learned long ago to seek as many different accounts of a scene as I could before arriving at a version I could trust. My rule, when relying on interviews to recreate scenes, has been to let the reader know, either in the text or in a footnote, where the information comes from—three sources are good, two are strong, one is sketchy at best. A writer seeking to recreate scenes in a true story needs far more detail than ordinary reporting demands. You don’t just ask, What did you do? Or, What did you say? You ask, What exactly did you do? What exactly did you say? What were you wearing? Was it cold or warm? Night or day? Rainy or sunny? Where were you standing? What did the place where you were smell like? Sound like? Which hand did you use? People look at you funny when you start down this path, but drafting a compelling scene on the page depends on such minute seemingly irrelevant detail. Which is why, years ago, when I found audio or video of a scene, it was like a gift from God.
In 1984, I wrote my first extended narrative. It concerned a police corruption scandal in Philadelphia. Entitled “Cops on the Take,” it ran over four Sundays in the magazine of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Police scandals are a somewhat routine occurrence in Philly, where historically the city’s premiere organized crime syndicate is its police department. Unless unearthed by the newspaper itself—and the Inquirer has won several Pulitzers for doing so—these scandals tended to unfold for newspaper readers backwards and jumbled. First came conspiracy indictments, which in a sense began the story at its end; the alleged crime having concluded, the task of assigning blame and consequences begun. Indictment stories also were thick with courtroom terminology—solicitation, conspiracy, falsification of documents, misconduct, etc.—which rarely conveyed a clear picture of what had happened. They delivered mostly dry details, little or nothing about character, action, or motive. The juicy stuff came later as the conspiracy cases come to trial, often many months later, and it usually came piecemeal, with details from separate trials concerning different defendants who played discrete roles in the overall crime. For “Cops on the Take,” I wanted to wrest a coherent story from this confusion, one showed exactly who had been doing what to whom, when and why.
The officers in this case had been charged after a long FBI investigation, where secret cameras had captured them in various encounters with informants and victims, mostly bar and brothel owners making payoffs to protect illegal gambling and prostitution. These recordings had been played at trial, and when clerks at the federal courthouse balked at letting me see them, a judge promptly ruled that evidence presented in court was part of the trial record, hence public. Those FBI tapes provided me with vivid and entirely accurate scenes, around which I built the narrative. It still took determined reporting to understand what each video showed, to grasp context and character, motives and intentions, and to grasp the import of each to the overall story. When I was done, the story—what the cops had been doing—was related for the first time in comprehensive, very real terms, exposing all of the petty sleaziness (and drama) hidden behind the dignified jargon of jurisprudence. Its publication prompted the police department to parade down Broad Street before the Inquirer building, protesting not my telling of the story, but the clever and perfectly apt decision to illustrate it with an actual Philadelphia police badge altered to display, not an ID number, but dollar signs.
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Fifteen years later, as I was finishing work on the book Black Hawk Down, about the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, I was shown aerial video of portions of the fight, and found snippets of audio—and thousands of pages of transcripts—from actual radio traffic during key parts of the fight. The communications between convoys, helicopters, infantry commanders, and headquarters had all been recorded and transcribed. While the story I told is drawn primarily from the memory of participants, the video vastly improved my ability to describe important events vividly and accurately. Nearly all radio dialogue reported in the book is literally true. And the transcripts proved valuable in another way. This was a sprawling, 18-hour urban firefight involving hundreds, if not thousands, of participants, a violent and highly confusing event. The radio transcripts gave me a true, minutely-detailed (literally second-by-second) timeline into which I could plug all the stories I had gathered over years of interviewing.
Nowadays it is commonplace to have such raw material. Twenty years after Black Hawk Down, The Last Stone is built primarily around a dozen long interview sessions the police conducted with its central character, the convicted kidnapper and killer Lloyd Welch. The existence of more than seventy hours of recordings for these sessions is what convinced me to write the book. My interest in the cruel tragedy that befell 12-year-old Sheila and 10-year-old Katherine Lyon in 1975—a story that I covered as a young reporter—would otherwise not have been strong enough for me to revisit it, certainly not at book length. I had no desire to simply exploit the awfulness of the crime. What did interest me was the extraordinary effort made by four Montgomery County, Maryland detectives, with an assist from others in Bedford, Virginia. How did they manage to persuade Welch to admit what he had done forty years later, when doing so was plainly not in his best interests?
When I first learned that Welch had been charged in 2015 I called down to the police headquarters to learn more about it. The fate of those girls had haunted me for forty years. The department allowed me to meet with its principal investigators, Dave Davis, Chris Homrock, Mark Janney, and Katie Leggett. When they told me of their years-long interrogation effort, I asked if there were transcripts. “Better,” they said. “We’ve got video.” I was sold.
The work is improvisational. It unfolds moment by moment in questions and answers, in knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and being alert to capitalize on what and how the subject responds.I was sold because it meant I could see them do it. I didn’t have to rely on their memories or interpretations of those conversations to reconstruct the process, I could observe it from beginning to end myself. My goal is always to understand how and why things happen in the real world, and I am fascinated by how skilled people go about their work. I have written about interrogation in the past, most notably in an essay for The Atlantic called “The Dark Art of Interrogation.” I chose the word “art” deliberately, because there are no formulas or shortcuts to getting an unwilling subject to talk. The work is improvisational. It unfolds moment by moment in questions and answers, in knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and being alert to capitalize on what and how the subject responds. It frequently wanders off topic and sometimes produces serendipitous breakthroughs—a slip of the tongue, a previous statement tellingly misremembered. There is fatigue, frustration, distractions, expressions of disbelief or anger, humor, accusation, threat, persuasion, pleading, and a million other little things that add up to the complete experience. The only way to understand how Welch was led to such damaging admissions was to sign on for the whole ride.
And the interview sessions were only part of the case file. The department obtained wiretaps for various members of his peculiar family, surveillance that continued for months. All that had been recorded. There were grand jury proceedings, and interviews by investigating cops at their headquarters and in the field in Maryland and Virginia, also all recorded, much of it video. Reporting this story was nothing like my search for a few FBI surveillance tapes in 1984. The challenge had now become extracting a coherent story from a mountain of raw material—most of it largely irrelevant.
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I recently saw the new Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary “Apollo 11,” which tells the story of the first successful Moon landing with absorbing immediacy by relying from first to last on audio and video created during the nine-day mission. With few exceptions, documentary films lean heavily on recorded interviews with participants or experts looking back on the events portrayed, and there are no shortage of them still around for Apollo 11 today, notably Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, two of the three astronauts who made the trip. But Miller eschewed this convention. The entire film consists of contemporaneous audio and video. What little narration there is comes from Walter Cronkite, as he reported on the mission for CBS TV viewers in 1969. Miller was able to do this because every minute of the historic mission was recorded in one fashion or another—with audio, video, and still images. His approach is reminiscent of Frederick Weissman’s documentaries, which are likewise free of narration, and consist entirely of what he records on site. Weissman has been making films this way since the 1960s by placing himself in his chosen settings—a high school, a hospital—for weeks at a time. Apollo 11 had cameras and recorders everywhere—indeed, Miller has said he may eventually post online a version that takes in, at least with audio, the entire thing. It will take nine days to listen from beginning to end.
I had to understand why they asked the questions they did, or why they dropped one approach to begin another. I had to know what struck them—again, at the time—about what they were hearing.It will take a particularly determined listener to stay with it for that long. In real life there are long stretches when nothing happens, or when whatever is happening is of virtually no consequence. What Miller and Weissman do, and what I have done in The Last Stone, is to mine that vast trove of material to tell a story. Even with all raw material, for me the effort still involved a great deal of old-fashioned reporting, meeting and interviewing subjects, often repeatedly, reviewing historical material, visiting the places where the story takes place. Most of the recordings are tedious and off-point, but you never know when something significant will pop up. There will undoubtedly be readers who feel that I have included too much of it, even though the interview dialogues in The Last Stone, all told, represent less than one hundredth of one percent of the material I reviewed. I felt that the only way to appreciate the detectives’ work was to enter the interrogation room with them, to endure Welch’s maddening progression of lie upon lie upon lie, until he at last begins to reveal the awful truth—or as much of it as we are ever likely to know. The rest of the book is about establishing context and character, motivation and insight. I had to know what the detectives were thinking each time they sat down to interview Welch, not what they thought looking back on it, but what they thought at the time. I had to understand why they asked the questions they did, or why they dropped one approach to begin another. I had to know what struck them—again, at the time—about what they were hearing. Having the video actually lengthened my reporting process. It also made the story better, and truer.
From this standpoint, the book I finished before this one, Hue 1968, was a throwback. I searched hard for still photographs from that month-long battle, and was lucky enough to be shown all the Hue City film Ken Burns and Lynn Novick managed to locate researching their 2018 series “The Vietnam War,” about 20 minutes worth at best. So that book is based primarily on the memory of participants, as is the case for most of history. No more. We are fast approaching a time when we can dial up video of almost any past event and watch it for ourselves.
This will never negate the importance of telling stories, for making sense out of the raw material of real life. We’ll still need storytellers. Their work will be more accurate, but not necessarily easier.
