If you’re willing to answer a question a bit beyond the scope I have one that relates to your story but also to your experience as a journalist. It seems like grifters often rely on “reputation laundering” through reputable news & media. They get one small-time outlet to say they’ve done XYZ and then they finagle that into more coverage because the next outlet sees the prior one has reported the grifter has done XYZ so they report on it, too. And on the one hand it seems perfectly reasonable for a journalist to say well XYZ has been reported in all of these reliable publications so it must be true because otherwise someone would have caught it by now. But sometimes, as it seems happened with Richard Walter, it turns out they’ve all just sort of confirmed with one another but no one has actually given XYZ a proper look.
So I guess my question is to what extent do you think this happens because the fraudster deliberately manipulates/exploits the free publicity vs some reporters, for whatever reason, failing to do enough due diligence? Are there any sort of journalistic ethical obligations around “confirming” a fact with an infotainment type of outlet compared to a news outlet? Your story specifically mentions 20/20 as one of the first “big” news outlets that bolstered Walter’s false reputation. (And even now that I’m thinking about it I’m not really sure whether that’s meant to be news or not!)
And I don’t mean to single out journalists here. It’s clear the legal profession bears significant blame for the reputation laundering he was allowed to do through his “expert” testimony. I only ask about the journalism angle specifically because you happen to be a journalist. I’d also love to hear the perspective of any litigators who might be inclined to weigh in.
Good questions. Journalists often rely on the previous reporting of their peers. If newspaper reporters, who work on tight deadlines, needed to fact check every single word in a story, they'd never publish anything. Instead, they check an old NYT story, confirm the details as previously reported, and move on.
This reasonable instinct can also give way to a broader laziness in reporting, though. Existing narratives are repeated verbatim, and we forget to go back to the bare facts and ask "what really happened, here?"
In this case, I saw the official narrative that the press had reported for 40 years. And then I saw scattered breadcrumbs that told a very different story about Richard Walter. I followed that trail, and here we are.
I just wanted to say thanks for researching and writing such a carefully composed and in-depth piece. Your prose was both exceptionally clear and unusually concise for this kind of long-form piece.
Often I'll find myself skimming over entire paragraphs of this sort of long-form investigative piece because the author will go off on a tangent or include overly personal or flowery unnecessary details like the shape of a stain on the wall during an interview. I understand the qualitative value of such window-dressing but personally find it to be distastefully biased and a time-wasteful way to fluff up an already long read.
Having a long read like this that so fully focuses on the meat of the issue and its history is incredibly refreshing.
One bit of the story I'm very confused about -- going by the article, it sounds like the Freeman case was reopened after McGuffin had already been convicted of it, and then he was somehow convicted again of the same crime. Of course you can't be convicted twice of the same crime, so what happened here? I'm quite confused.
We open the story on the McGuffin case, and then go back in time to the 1950s, and then catch up with the story in 2010. He's just convicted the one time.
Oh, I see, thanks for clarifying. The 10-year time jump forward in the opening, that I notice upon rereading, is confusing; I read the opening as all occurring contiguously. The confusing thing isn't the jump backward in the middle, that's clearly a flashback interlude; it's that A. the opening isn't contiguous but contains a 10-year jump, and B. when we return to the Freeman case, we've returned to it at a point behind where we left off, rather than continuing from there.
A few times in the article you mentioned Walter's narcissism. How much of his behavior do you associate with narcissism versus that which can be explained by other means?
I highly recommend the experience. They have fantastic editors, and the fact-checking team is among the strongest and most thorough that I've ever worked with.
So I guess my question is to what extent do you think this happens because the fraudster deliberately manipulates/exploits the free publicity vs some reporters, for whatever reason, failing to do enough due diligence? Are there any sort of journalistic ethical obligations around “confirming” a fact with an infotainment type of outlet compared to a news outlet? Your story specifically mentions 20/20 as one of the first “big” news outlets that bolstered Walter’s false reputation. (And even now that I’m thinking about it I’m not really sure whether that’s meant to be news or not!)
And I don’t mean to single out journalists here. It’s clear the legal profession bears significant blame for the reputation laundering he was allowed to do through his “expert” testimony. I only ask about the journalism angle specifically because you happen to be a journalist. I’d also love to hear the perspective of any litigators who might be inclined to weigh in.