This freed her to imagine the rest of the story.
Sympathy for the Devil
In his writing office in Bozeman, Mont. -- an 8-foot-by-6-foot former janitor's closet in a converted elementary school -- Michael Finkel keeps a battered copy of "The Journalist and the Murderer" by Janet Malcolm. "I've literally read it 20 times," he says.
Small wonder. For anyone familiar with Malcolm's work, Finkel's recently published "True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa" can't help but bring her to mind.
Malcolm's book is a meditation on the relationship of journalists to their subjects. It takes off from a libel suit brought by convicted family killer Jeffrey MacDonald against writer Joe McGinniss, author of "Fatal Vision." MacDonald had been outraged to discover, when McGinniss's book came out, that the "friend" who'd seemed so sympathetic during years of correspondence and interviews had believed him guilty all along. Malcolm saw the episode as "a grotesquely magnified version of the normal journalistic encounter."
Finkel's book, too, involves a journalist and a murderer -- but you could never call this relationship "normal." It's too impossibly weird.
The story begins with Finkel's humiliating dismissal as a contract writer for the New York Times Magazine in February 2002. He'd been sent to West Africa to investigate reports of "child slavery" on the cocoa bean plantations there. Finkel became suspicious of the slavery narrative. His reporting eventually convinced him it was false. What he could write instead, he figured, was a story about "the crushing cycle of poverty, and about the suffering that young people were willing to endure in order to eke out a living."
His editor wasn't enthusiastic. Maybe, she suggested, he could tell his poverty story through a detailed portrait of one boy?
Finkel didn't have such a portrait in his notebooks. Rather than admit this, he committed a journalistic felony, creating a composite character from a number of interviewees. "I wrote a fake story about a fake story," he says -- and he got caught. The Times prepared to run an editorial note that he assumed would end his writing career.
At this extreme low point, the real weirdness kicked in.
He got a phone call from a reporter who told him that a man named Christian Longo, wanted on charges of killing his wife and three children in Oregon, had been apprehended in Mexico. Longo had adopted a false identity while on the lam: He'd been posing as New York Times writer Michael Finkel.
The real Finkel sensed that "the beginnings of my redemption" were at hand. Two weeks later, he was on the case.
"Dear Mr. Longo," he wrote. "Yes, it is actually me -- Michael Finkel of The New York Times. Or, rather, formerly of The New York Times." He wrote that he didn't mind Longo using his name. He told Longo he'd like to talk to him, "because at the same time that you were using my name, I lost my own," meaning his reputation as a writer. He wrote that he would be "grateful and honored" if Longo would consider talking to him.
