Few journalists are more versed in guns and gun violence than Mark Follman. As national affairs editor for Mother Jones, Follman has led a series of landmark investigations into everything from mass shootings to child gun deaths. Even now, with President Trump occupying much of the magazine’s time and resources, Follman still finds time to report on the gun epidemic.

Perhaps his most groundbreaking project came  in mid-2015, when Mother Jones published a package titled “The True Cost of Gun Violence in America.” It was the culmination of a year working with an economist to collect and analyze data, and to present, for possibly the first time, a highly scientific look at the financial costs of gun violence on society.

The numbers were eye-popping: $229 billion a year in direct costs (emergency services, police investigations, short- and long-term care) and indirect ones (lost income, impact on quality of life).

To construct a narrative around the data, Follman and his team of half a dozen reporters, research fellows and producers found innovative and affecting ways to present the data. I interviewed Follman by phone about tackling a project with no precedent, building a narrative around numbers and avoiding the pitfalls of politicization.

The interview has been slightly edited for length and flow.

In the story, you mention that Mother Jones was interested in the cost of gun violence since the mass shooting in Aurora in 2012. Were you involved in that initial interest, and can you talk about it?

It’s not so specific to that shooting per se, but that was just the point in time where I became much more invested in the subject of mass shootings, really focusing on it and conducting data research on it. I wrote that into the context of the piece as kind of a benchmark of time, because I had covered gun violence prior to that, but 2012 was really a major pivot point for me with that attack in Aurora. That’s the point I really started to think about: What’s going on with these mass shootings? Why isn’t there more information about this problem? And we started developing bigger projects around gun violence, too. Mass shootings have been a big focus for me and at Mother Jones, but I’ve also done projects looking at child gun deaths, and a lot of data work back then around the ways laws were changing at the state level.

What triggered this particular package, on the financial costs of gun violence in America?

It was something I had been thinking about from that time and been talking about with others on my team and with our editors as an area that really seems to almost never be discussed with respect to gun violence. I was also thinking about it in the context of mass shootings in particular, because they tend to be inordinately impactful in all sorts of ways. Psychologically, with the emotional trauma they can have, the response to them, the ripple effects they had were really intense. So part of that equation in my mind had to be the financial impact as well. And we saw that there was really no data on it, because it’s been this kind of political suppression of research over the years, it’s a difficult thing to measure, and so on. But as I pointed out in the piece, there are some difficult societal questions that have been studied in this way, so the big question became, why not this one?

We realized it was an opportunity to set out and do that. Our first step was to find out what, if any, economists were out there that had studied this. There are few, if any, who have tackled it at all.

This was a major package, with the main analytical feature, video and a separate piece with a number of gunshot survivor stories. What kind of time investment was this for you, the other reporters, the magazine?

It was a deep investment. I think, and I’m a little hazy on the details, but I think we spent about a year in total working on this, and about the last three or four months of it were pretty full time. We had a team of three reporters, including myself acting in a dual role reporting and editing, and we had a producer doing video and some research help from our fellows. It was a team of about a half-dozen people working on it full time for three or four months, and that was a culmination of about a year-long project of digging into data. It took us a long time initially just to figure out how to do the data project, involving a lot of conversations with Ted Miller, who was the economist we worked with on the data, just figuring out how to parse that in a way that made sense and would give us a good, understandable estimate of the problem but would still be a conservative estimate. We wanted to be careful not to overstate it, because there are some less tangible things we included. And I think we ended up with a conservative estimate, and the costs are likely significantly higher.

For a piece that largely highlighted the financial costs through data collection and analysis, you started and ended the story with the story of one individual, Jennifer Longdon, who had experienced gun violence and its rippling costs. Why?

We really had two components we set out to do. One was to figure out the data equation, which was quite complex, to figure out the methodology and then gather that data and analyze it. Then the other component was that I knew from the outset that I wanted to have a narrative story to wrap around it so that people would be able to relate to it. Data work is often pretty thick, and you want to combine that with good storytelling, so I was on the lookout for a good personal story that could kind of be the centerpiece. I had gotten to know Jennifer Longdon at that point through some other reporting I had done on gun violence, maybe the prior year. I had a sense of how big her financial burden was, so I started talking to her about whether she’d be willing to share more of that with me. Soon we were off and running with that, and spent time reporting her story out, too. Those were the two kind of tracks we brought together for the package.

Then as we were building it, we also thought we wanted to show this in some different ways too with some other kind of mini-portraits, so we started gathering that other group of survivors we wanted to profile as well.

Were you hesitant or concerned that Longdon’s story, since it was anecdotal and isolated, would cost you some of the objectivity and validity of your data?

I wouldn’t say that I was concerned about it. I think it was necessary to really get people to engage with the difficult computations of what these numbers mean. Because ultimately, the cost to a gun violence victim, both personally and then locally, within the immediate orbit of that person, to translate that, you really need a story you can relate to. It’s really a classic convention of good data journalism at this point. But on the other hand, I also felt like her story was really good for distilling these concepts, because you could see some very big costs to her that were direct and specific, but I think her story also was a good way to show these ideas of, what are the more intangible costs that are long-lasting that affect a person’s life and the people around them?

And that’s also why we wanted to have the other survivor mini-profiles, too, because we wanted to suggest that, you know, this is just one version of this. But I thought her story was very powerful when I started digging into the details of what she experienced, because the physical and psychological trauma she experienced was so intense, and the costs were so big that I thought it was a good way to show -- kind of in miniature -- these much bigger numbers. Really, they’re hard to relate to. We say at the top that the big grand conclusion from this is that gun violence costs the country more than $229 billion a year. How do you relate to that? You can compare it to the revenue of Apple computers, but it’s not going to give you the same sense of understanding and scale that a personal story like Jennifer Longdon’s does. So instead of taking away from it, I think it really added to the thrust of the data quite dramatically, and quite profoundly.

I agree, but I feel that as affecting and profound as that story was, I could imagine strident gun rights advocates saying something like, “Her story is an anomaly. You’re pulling that one out to distort the real evidence.” We’re living in a moment where everything that can, will be politicized.

Well, people can take a story like that and politicize it in a number of ways. But, I think it’s important to point out that one of the driving reasons why we were interested in doing this story and why were so invested is because, for me personally, I wanted to find ways to tackle the subject that are really strongly data-driven and really show the scope of the problem without getting into the political debate. There’s so much of that political debate about gun control versus gun rights, and anyone who reads about that topic is familiar with those arguments, but our goal with a project like this is to really show the problem empirically, through the data, through the stories of people who have experienced it, and let readers decide for themselves. Sure, you could say most people don’t experience what Jennifer Longdon did, but I don’t know if that’s true. I think many people understand that many people who experience gun violence have debilitating injuries, lots of people end up in wheelchairs. We had another one in the smaller survivor profiles, a young man from Richmond, Calif., who had come out of that setting of urban gang violence. I think many people would come out of her story thinking that this in fact may be more common than I realized, not a total exception.

People can and will continue to have those debates ad nauseam, but that wasn’t the intention of this project at all. The intention was to show this problem in vivid detail with a particular focus on that question that I think is fundamental and in some ways very simple: What does this cost society? And it’s interesting to me that to this day, that question comes up very little in all the debates about gun policy. There’s enormous financial impact from this problem that people still don’t really talk about.

Since you had reported on gun violence prior, did you find anything over the course of reporting that really shocked you, whether about the numbers or the survivor stories or something else? Or was it just a matter of organizing and contextualizing these things for your audience?

I would say some of both. I had a sense of where this investigation was headed, but of course we didn’t know what the numbers were until we really dug into it. But I would say that the over-arching numbers we found were pretty eye-popping. That the cost was that significant on an annual basis, and the comparisons we ended up making to it, like the cost of Medicaid, or what we spend to fight obesity or Apple’s annual revenue, these are major societal problems that it’s on par with financially.

I think in particular I was surprised in regard to mass shootings, that was something that really stood out to me, too. Looking at the cost of it, which I got into a little bit with the example of the shooting at Clackamas Town Center, the mall in Portland. If you take a mass shooting and isolate it and try to apply this methodology to a mass shooting, the numbers there I thought were quite stark. And it makes sense, in the ways that mass shootings tend to have an inordinate impact in general, that it would also be true with the financial. I started measuring, looking at how many people responded to this, the shutdown of the mall for nearly a week during Christmas season and the lost revenue from that, things that a more conventional shooting wouldn’t see an impact on. But in a mass shooting you see these things that have a much more dramatic impact. There was something like 115 investigators involved in the aftermath, doing their work and developing a report. That’s a lot of paid hours of work. Things like that add up into the millions of dollars. Or in the case of the Colorado mass shooting, the cost to the justice system to carry out the trial of James Holmes, just what they had to do to seat a jury, the cost of the time and number of people involved.

You mention the “indirect costs” of gun violence, which come from lost wages and impact on victims’ quality of life. Were you interested at all in going beyond that, to the almost tertiary costs, like cooling effects on local economies in urban areas, or how entire at-risk communities can be devastated by frequent violence?

I think certainly in concept I was interested in that, and some of that is shaded into the piece. There’s some discussion there in terms of when you get these communities that are locked into this terrible cycle, gun violence can very much be a root of broader problems like that. That’s why I think one of the economists in the piece mentions that the first thing mayors of major cities talk about when they want to fix a blighted neighborhood is the gun problem. It keeps businesses away, and kids aren’t safe going to school, and so on and so forth. So you can extrapolate out even further into the socioeconomic issues that gun violence can create in a community. And then it gets even more difficult to quantify the cost. One of the techniques economists use for that is something they call quality-of-life measurements, and that is an interesting area that bears further exploration.

One thing I just remembered that stood out to me as really surprising was the shocking lack of data on the mental health costs of gun violence. There have been virtually no studies that have been done on that. The study we had to use to kind of extrapolate off of was one Ted Miller had done with a colleague back in the 1990s, I believe. And even that is a fairly small sample. There’s obviously a huge cost in terms of mental trauma and treatment people need, or aren’t getting, when they experience gun violence, and I think the numbers we ended up putting around that were very conservative. I think if you were able to get a real look at the data, it would be a much more significant cost, not just in terms of money but in terms of the quality of people’s lives, in post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that.

It’s pretty incredible that something so common, and so devastating to so many, could have so little funding for research from the government.

Oh yeah. That was a very strong theme I found among public health experts and researchers, that there was a real chill on studying this subject. Not only because there’s a lack of funds from the government, but there’s been a political chill. People know that if they get into these waters, they’re going to get attacked. I thought that was an important part of this piece, too, to convey that. We’re really leaving ourselves blind on a major societal problem because of the politics of this. People just don’t want to study it. They’d rather do other things. They don’t want to worry about the NRA coming after them. That would have real implications for people working in academia, or government. It’s not just a matter of being criticized; it’s a matter of potentially losing funding for something else if they were to kick this particular hornets’ nest.

The post 5(ish) Questions: Mark Follman and “The True Cost of Gun Violence in America” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Over his career at the Los Angeles Times, Thomas Curwen has written and edited for the Outdoor section, the Book Review, the features desk and the Metro desk. Despite his wide-ranging interests, his enduring passion is for stories that, as he puts it, depict “the split-second events that change the predictable course of life.” That passion paid off in his Pulitzer-winning contribution as part of the team that reported on the San Bernardino terrorist attack, and his Pulitzer finalist work about a grizzly bear attack in Montana.

A story on gun violence, then, would fit nicely with Curwen’s interests. But when he set out to report a story on the ratcheting trend in 2013, on the heels the Sandy Hook massacre, Curwen noticed the market was saturated with pieces that focused on gunmen or the victims. So he found a different main subject: the trauma surgeon.

Five months after securing clearance to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Curwen and a photographer witnessed, from inside the operating room, as Dr. Brant Putnam raced to save the life of a teenage boy. The resulting story is a pulsating and spare tick-tock of an all-too-common phenomenon in American hospitals.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’ve worn a lot of hats at the Times over the years. When you reported this piece, were you on a specific beat? How did you find this story?

Gun violence in America had once again moved to the front page, and most stories, it seemed, focused on the shooters and the dead. I wanted to find a different angle. Two years earlier, I had written about the firefighters and paramedics who arrived on the scene of a similar tragedy at a hair salon in Seal Beach, and I knew that every time a bullet found its victim, it set off a ripple of effect, concentric rings running throughout our society, changing the lives of families, bystanders, medical professionals, even those reading the news.

I wanted to see how surgeons and emergency room personnel cope with these senseless, almost daily shootings, and I began calling local hospitals to see if I might be able to report this story from their perspective.

For you, is this a gun violence story or a trauma surgeon story? Or both? Or neither?

This is the story about a random act of violence that upended the life of the victim and his family, but by focusing on the surgeon who treats gunshot wounds almost every day, I wanted to see if the experience was somehow uneventful. This intrigued me: How can the world collapse at the point of a gun, bringing with it death and tragedy, and leave some unscathed, even undeterred by these events? How do they understand gun violence (and this country’s inability to stop the bloodshed)?

In terms of your final narrative product, it feels spare, or at least as though it could’ve been much longer, with far more context and backstory. Why did you choose to focus the aperture in this way?

After reporting the story, I realized I had a straightforward chronology. I just needed to get the clock running in the most efficient and economical way, introducing the reader to the emergency room and the two main characters: the surgeon and the boy. Beyond that, I wanted to get out of the way, laying out each detail in the most clear and economic manner, avoiding unnecessary detours and medical jargon. When writing action sequences, I find that short sentences are the most effective, staccato bursts of language, that convey speed, franticness and urgency. Longer sentences would have slowed the rhythm of the prose, and these are no moments to linger over. A life was at stake.

Similarly, I felt that too much backstory – those detours – would have distracted the reader. This account had to be as focused and as sharp as possible.

In many ways, this story reminded me of Jon Franklin’s famous piece “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” which won the first Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Are you familiar with that story? Did you take inspiration from that or any other writing when putting this together?

I am flattered by the association, and yes, I am familiar with Franklin’s masterful story. It certainly has become the hallmark for medical narratives, to which I would add Tom Hallman’s “The Boy Behind the Mask.”

As much as I admire these stories, I don’t know if I can say if they influenced me. I read widely, drawing upon a lot of different narrative styles, and in this case, I credit my sources, namely Dr. Putnam. Once I had completed a draft of the story, I met with him, and we talked about our four hours in the operating room, a conversation that allowed me re-report the story and go deeper in the material.

You mentioned to me that one of the most difficult aspects of reporting was getting access to the surgical operation. How did that process work? Did you feel that being in the room while it was happening was essential?

The challenge of reporting any story in a hospital setting is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which prohibits medical personnel from disclosing information about their patients.

In the past, I’ve secured permission from patients before I began reporting. They would sign a waiver allowing me access to their records and histories.

In this case, however, any individual coming into a hospital with a gunshot wound would not be in any position – physically or mentally – to sign any waiver, let alone understand who I was and what I was attempting to do.

As a result, the photographer on the story – Barbara Davidson – and I were able to work out an arrangement with the hospital and their attorneys to report the story under the condition that once the patient was in recovery, we would explain our intentions. If the patient agreed – and then signed the waiver – we could proceed. If the patient did not agree, we would destroy my notes and images.

It was a gamble, and we were fortunate that Harbor-UCLA Medical Center agreed to these terms. In the end, the hospital staff – and the patient and his family – understood the importance of our work.

The story reads quickly, at times during the surgery almost like an avalanche, an assault on the senses. Was it intentional to create a sweeping energy like that?

It’s a good observation, and yes, that was the intent: to capture the chaos, the uncertainty, the fear and terror of this moment, these seconds that passed as hours on the operating table.

Surgeon races to save a life during L.A.’s shooting season

By Thomas Curwen

Originally published August 18, 2013

From the entry wound — the size of a nickel — Dr. Brant Putnam guesses that the bullet is a .45, but it's what he can't see that worries him most. [annotation q="What went into your decision to start in the hospital, almost inside the head of the surgeon we haven’t met?" a="I am great advocate for telling a story as close to the point of view of the protagonist as possible. This story is Dr. Putnam’s story, and I wanted to establish from the very beginning. All that we’re seeing and experiencing comes from his perspective. Technically, this makes attributions more invisible and creates a more immediate, less intrusive reading experience."]

The boy, a teenager most likely, lies naked on Bed 2 in a trauma bay at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. His brown skin, slick with sweat, is ashen.

"What's your name?" a resident asks as half a dozen doctors and nurses circle him.

The boy can't answer.

"Ohhh," he moans.

"How old are you, sir?"

"Awww."

The boy's hipbones delicately protrude from his narrow waist. He has a woman's name tattooed down his right arm from elbow to wrist and the bullet hole is to the right of his navel. [annotation q="These details are incredibly intimate. What purpose was served by including them here?" a="I wanted to capture the vulnerability of the human body, most obvious when it is stripped naked. The boy’s skinny frame and his tattoo were the canvas of his youth, possibly his innocence, and the bullet hole, the stunning interruption. I also believe that the more intimate the detail, the more universal the appreciation. I didn’t want the reader to be distracted by questions of race which often figure in stories about gun violence. I wanted these hipbones, that right arm, that naval help connect us immediately to this stranger, this boy, just like all of us."]

Putnam, chief of trauma, stands back and watches and listens. He is puzzled that the wound is hardly bleeding.

"Sit up for me."

"Ohhh."

There is no sign of an exit wound.

"Hey. Wake up."

A resident slaps the boy. They need him conscious.

Putnam knows the surge of adrenaline that brought the boy this far is nearly spent. If his blood pressure crashes, his heart will stop. Putnam wonders if it is too late.

"Let's go to the OR," he says, loud enough to get everyone's attention.

The season of shootings has begun on time. [annotation q="Were you not worried that this “season of shootings” may need some explaining?" a="It is always a challenge to weave statistics into a narrative, but in this case, they are critical. They explain the urgency of this story and lay out why we are here in the first place. So rather than present the numbers like a news story (107 GSWs in three months), I wanted to set them up with a quick lead-in – alliterative, perhaps disarmingly poetic – with the hope that any confusion would quickly be answered by the consecutive sentences."]

Last year, from July through September, this Torrance hospital treated 107 gunshot victims, the highest number in the county.

This year, four GSWs — medical shorthand for gunshot wounds — arrived on the first day of summer. One was a suicide and three were assaults. Three died and one would probably be discharged in a few days.

Now, on June 23, two more have come in, both teenagers, both assaults. They walked through the front door at 2:25 a.m., no EMTs, no police. [annotation q="Were you spending the night in the hospital, waiting for a shooting victim to come in? What was it like when one did come in? Relief? Fear?" a="Barbara and I had spent three previous Saturdays at the hospital from 3 p.m. until 1 a.m., just waiting. We picked Saturdays, we picked the summer, we picked late nights because these are prime-time for shootings. On each occasion, nothing happened, and yes, we were surprised. It was our fourth night, around 2:15 a.m., and we were just about to call it quits – resigned to another night coming up with nothing – when these two boys walked into the emergency room. The chaos of their sudden arrival caught us off-guard, and suddenly we were off and running. With no time for reflection, for relief or fear, we were running with Dr. Putnam from the ER to the OR, changing into gowns, masks and boots and trying to stay out of the way."]

The hospital staff calls it the homeboy ambulance service: patients brought in with injuries often from gang shootings.

Putnam can see that one of the boys will be OK. He has a clean wound through the shoulder.

The boy with the nickel-sized bullet hole is far worse, and they know nothing about him. No name, no age, no family. For now, they call him Zinc, one of the pseudonyms the hospital uses for its John Does.

Emergency departments in hospitals throughout America have physicians like Putnam, doctors who specialize in saving the lives of shooting victims.

Other traumas, like concussions and automobile accidents, can be subtle and require imaging to see what's hidden. Gun injuries don't hide their tracks, but they are just as much a mystery, a puzzle put together by the surgeon as seconds race by.

No matter the clarity of the injury, the damage can extend like concentric rings beyond the trajectory of the bullet. There is the blast effect, the sometimes fatal bruising that can occur to organs in the vicinity of a wound. There is the so-called triad of death, the interplay between body temperature, blood acidity and coagulation.

There is ancillary debris — shards of glass, pieces of clothing, even upholstery if the bullet has passed through furniture — and there are always infections from bacteria carried into the wound. [annotation q="Did your original drafts include more detail about this process? I’m sure books have been written about what bullets do to bodies, but you managed to tease out the essentials. How difficult was that?" a="I wanted to keep it simple. I could have named the types of bacteria, even described various infections, but that would have cluttered, even interrupted the narrative. This boy was close to death, and I wanted to stay focused on this detail."]

Putnam, 44, estimates that he has treated about 5,000 GSWs and consulted on nearly 2,000 more over the last 20 years, 10 of them at Harbor-UCLA. The victims he remembers the most are the children and women, the bystanders hit by stray fire, the wounded who spoke to him in the ER but died in the operating room.

Whenever he loses a patient, he hears his mother asking him what he could have done differently. And whenever he saves a life, he knows that success is often just a matter of luck.

Medicine and technology have come far in recent years in balancing the odds, but when it comes to gun violence, the numbers are overwhelming.

"Why guns?" Putnam asks. "Why so many guns? It once was fistfights. It once was stabbings. Now it's a whole new world out there, and with guns, it's just too much." [annotation q="In today’s world where guns and gun violence are such a serious and debated issue, this quote feels almost of a different, simpler time, before every news network had dissected congressional gun laws. Why did you include it?" a="I was grateful that Dr. Putnam was as insightful as he was, and I liked this quote because it accomplished exactly what you describe. It reminds us of Dr. Putnam’s long experience with GSWs, and it takes us back to a more simple time, conveying in brief measure how quickly gun violence in America has grown out of hand."]

The emergency room team washes the boy with an antiseptic. He has been intubated and anesthetized. Blood transfusions have begun.

"Sticky blues," Putnam calls out. No time to wait for the antiseptic to dry. Nurses drape blue cloths around the boy until he disappears, with only a torso remaining.

Putnam, dressed in surgical scrubs, gloves, cap and headlamp, makes the initial incision from sternum to pubic bone, bowing around the navel.

Chief resident Carrie Luu follows the scalpel with a "Bovie," a pen-shaped tool that cauterizes the open blood vessels with electrical current. [annotation q="Were these specifics of the operation confirmed after, or are you familiar with surgery and the tools needed?" a="The surgery was chaotic, bloody and disorienting. In taking my notes, I tried to capture as best as I could what I was seeing. But there was a lot that I didn’t know: the materials, the procedures, the anatomy. I was lucky, however, to be standing beside an intern who answered my questions. When I got home later that morning, I typed my notes, capturing the fresh impressions as imprecise as they were. Then when I had a draft, I met with Dr. Putnam, and he and I talked through the particular moments of the surgery, filling in the details, capturing his impressions and fact-checking everything that I saw."]

The air smells of singed flesh; tendrils of smoke rise into the lights. [annotation q="This is such a sickening and yet somehow beautiful combination of the senses. Can you talk about how you come up with such language?" a="There is no forgetting the smell of singed flesh; it’s a memory that goes back to the first time we had a mishap with a burner on the stove or barbecue. But here it was at such an industrial scale, given the amount of cutting and cauterizing. And the lighting in the operating room was so cinematic, almost too bright, that the smoke was brilliantly illuminated as it moved and curled upward. As for “tendril,” it’s comes from – of all places – an art history class in college where the professor was describing cigarette posters from the Art Nouveau era. The artists loved to represent those languid strings of smoke, the tendrils, that patterned the air."]

Putnam sets a clock running in his mind. Two hours is optimum. Three is the limit. Anything longer compounds the trauma with a phenomena known as physiologic exhaustion, when the body has worn itself out trying to compensate for the injury.

Putnam and Luu begin by separating the small intestine and colon from their ligaments. They notice a few holes in the bowel, but those repairs can come later.

Lifting the intestine out of the torso, they find a pool of blood the size of a football flooding the back of the abdomen. This explains why the entry wound was dry. The boy is losing more blood than they can give him. Putnam wonders again if they are too late. [annotation q="I feel now we are almost inside the mind of Putnam, with this level of detail and intimacy. Was he wondering this aloud? Did he tell you this after?" a="Yes, this was the advantage of working with Dr. Putnam after the first draft was written. I was able to ask him about his feelings and thoughts during the surgery."]

He orders more transfusions. A resident begins suctioning the abdomen.

"Minus 8," a nurse calls out. It's a measure of the blood's acidity, a reminder of the triad of death. A normal reading — zero — means blood clots can form naturally.

As patients lose blood, lactic acid accumulates in the cells, and the enzyme that helps coagulation doesn't function. The more acid, the more bleeding, and patients' temperatures drop until there's no stopping the loss.

Trauma teams try to interrupt this cycle. Transfusions and warming blankets help. The OR's thermostat is set as high as it will go: 85 degrees. The boy lies on a pad that's heated to 100 degrees, but still his temperature has fallen to 93.

Unable to see beyond the blood collecting in the abdomen, Putnam reaches in, and his fingers find the inferior vena cava — a vein nearly an inch in diameter — that channels blood from the lower half of the body back into the heart.

He pushes down on it, and the bleeding slows. When he eases up, he can hear a whoosh. The vena cava has been punctured.

Fired from a handgun, a .45-caliber bullet averages 900 feet per second, and unless it hits a bone, it usually follows a straight line.

This bullet's journey passed through the skin and the colon, the intestine and then the vena cava. It stopped just behind the pancreas, with its point boring nearly two inches into the spine at an angle, just missing the spinal cord.

Putnam probes the vertebra. He feels sharp fragments of bone and a hole in the L-3 vertebra no larger than his little finger. If the bullet posed a risk for pain or infection, he would remove it, but experience tells him it is safe to leave behind.

With the blood drained, he can see the damage to the vena cava: two holes in the vein, most of the tissue shredded. There will be no repairing it. Each end will have to be tied off permanently, and the other veins will have to adjust by carrying blood back to the heart.

But ligating the vena cava is tricky. Unlike arteries with their thick muscular walls, veins are as fragile as tissue paper.

Putnam puts a clamp with long pincers on the vein, which swells like a garden hose. [annotation q="In this graf and the one above, you’ve used everyday, relatable things to such great effect: tissue paper, a garden hose. Is that why you chose them, so people could really connect to what’s going on?" a="That’s a nice observation, and yes, it’s true. When a story comes close to being technical (L-3 vertebra, vena cava, etc), I think it’s important for us to step away from the textbook and find an explanation, a picture, an analogy that renders the detail in the most ordinary terms possible. Not only does it make the reading experience effortless (critical for narratives, in my opinion), but it also represents my effort to help demystify the world, which – especially in the fields of science and medicine – has become so specialized as to be almost alienating. I think it’s incumbent on writers, narrative writers, to help break down those walls."] Even in the best of circumstances, fewer than half of patients with similar injuries survive.

The boy jerks, a sudden reflex.

"Can you paralyze him so he'll stop bucking?" Putnam asks. [annotation q="This quote seems removed, almost inhumane. Do you think Putnam still sees all of the people he operates on as people?" a="I believe that all surgeons understand that our bodies have minds of their own, and in this instance, like a broken machine, are subject to involuntary reflexes that can interfere with the business of living. In moments of such profound trauma, the body and soul become strangers to one another, which is natural and does not take away from our humanity."]

More paralytics are added to the cocktail of intravenous drugs.

Putnam guides Luu, the chief resident, as she starts to tie off the vein. The stitch reverses direction with each pass and looks like the threads on a baseball.

"Minus 11," a nurse calls out. They have been working for almost 90 minutes.

"Come on," Putnam says, encouraging Luu. "This is where all these things really matter."

She is having trouble. Sideways torque in the needle tears out the suture. Luu is still learning — and Harbor-UCLA is a teaching hospital — but now Putnam has to take over.

"Big pledgets," he calls out, asking for the felt-like material, nearly an inch in diameter, that will act like gaskets to support each suture against the tissue. "Hurry, please."

His hands rise and fall quickly, deftly, with the grace of a pianist. His stitches, though, aren't perfect. He learned long ago that there was no call for elegance in surgeries like this. A perfect stitch could mean a dead patient.

With a little more than 12 passes, the lower portion of the vein is closed. They are almost two hours in. Putnam is sweating and splattered with blood. The room is stifling.

"Watch your eyes," Putnam announces as he removes the clamps and tests the sutures. Given the pressure in the vein, blood could spray across the room if the sutures don't hold. [annotation q="I love the commonsense yet ghoulish instructions. You convey information here in a simple yet dramatic way. How do you choose these moments?" a="With every narrative, there is an inherent – and critical – tension between the action sequences (“Watch your eyes…”) and the exposition that explains why and helps orient the reader. I love playing with this rhythm, pushing the story ahead and then backing off, trying to gauge the reader’s capacity for each. Generally speaking, the stronger the action sequences, the easier it is to interrupt the flow with some explanation, which in my mind should always be – whenever possible – as brief as a haiku."]

They hold.

"Still very oozy," he says. The body's normal coagulants haven't begun to stop the other sources of bleeding.

He and Luu staple the top portion of the vena cava and turn to the intestine. They draw the long, serpentine tube through their hands inch by inch, stapling and stitching any tear.

A cloth is tossed on the floor to mop the blood at Putnam's feet. By now, almost 80% of the boy's blood has been replaced.

Loosely positioning the intestine inside the abdomen, Putnam begins bandaging. He won't close the incision because he plans to open the boy again in two days to reassess the work and to see how the body is healing.

"OK, we're moving," the scrub tech announces as soon as Putnam steps back and begins to strip out of his surgical gown.

Putnam remembers all the bad news he's ever delivered. He won't have to remember this one. [annotation q="It strikes me that, for anybody other than a shooting-trauma surgeon, experiencing any part of this would be an unforgettable experience. What does it say about Putnam that he only remembers the ones that go wrong?" a="It is  common in emergency room setting that the doctors and nurses only remember the lives they were unable to save. These are the lives that are shrouded in the tears, in the wailing, the sudden outpouring of grief that comes when the family members learn the outcome in the waiting room. For Dr. Putnam, these memories are tied up with his own sorrow – and second-guessing – as he relives the surgeries that didn’t end favorably."]

At 5:25 a.m., three hours after arrival, he pronounces the boy in critical condition, expected to live.

A little before 6 a.m., Putnam goes looking for the family. He still doesn't have any information about the boy.

Sleeping families fill the waiting rooms, and in the ER, Putnam speaks with the other victim, who says he doesn't know his friend's name.

Then a call comes in. A woman is asking if the hospital has seen a young man with the name Connie tattooed on the underside of his right arm.

Within an hour, Connie Greene and her husband meet Putnam in the ICU. She is the boy's mother, and his name is Leandrus Benton. He is 16.

"He's OK," Putnam tells the parents. "He lost a lot of blood, and we almost lost him."

Connie starts to cry. In the last five years, two of her nephews have been killed in street shootings.

Leandrus — or Lee, as he's known to his family and friends — had been walking home from a party in Wilmington that night. As he would later explain, he and his friend thought it would be safer to take the alley than the street. Lee had heard the gun but didn't see the shooter. The bullet, he said, burned through his gut. [annotation q="Did you want to speak to Leandrus more, or his family? Or was the idea not to individualize the victim too much, since this is more a story about all shooting trauma victims and those who help them?" a="That’s a good question, and you’re right. Of course I was tempted to tell more of Leandrus’ story, but when Barbara and I visited him at his home just a few days after he had been released from the hospital, he was weak and still in shock. And it didn’t feel right to do anything more than to introduce ourselves and explain what I wanted to do with this story. And, as I have noted, we have read about the gunshot victims before, and this is a story about Dr. Putnam, his skill, his training and his familiarity with the terrible things that guns can do. By association, I hope his story can help readers understand that gun violence isn’t just between the shooter and the shot, but that it touches dozens, if not hundreds, of other individuals who live in a world conscribed by reluctant politicians, the Second Amendment and the pain and suffering of neighborhoods where poverty and violence are so tragically interrelated."]

Putnam walks the couple into the ICU, and as they wash their hands, he pulls out gowns, gloves and masks for them. He then takes them to Lee, waits a minute and draws the curtain around them so they can be alone with their son. [annotation q="The rhythm of the last words is lovely. I also like the image of the curtain, because the surgery was like theater, and the doctor is playing a role for a brief yet vital moment in the boy’s life, then steps away from it. Talk about choosing this ending." a="Writing is a collaborative art: Every writer needs an editor. I had two excellent editors on this piece, Drex Heikes, and Kari Howard, now editor of Storyboard, but both proposed a rewrite on my original. The first ending that I had written shifted the attention from the scene in the ICU to Putnam’s reflections on the night. I had wanted to use his words to channel my thoughts about the terrible relentlessness of these shootings. Clearly I was too close to the material. Drex and Kari felt that his quotes broke from the narrative and wanted me to try a subtler approach. So we decided instead to highlight this moment of tenderness and privacy, letting readers ask their own questions and walk away with their own sense of futility and perhaps sorrow. "]

Writer's note: Here is the original ending:

Within an hour, Connie Green and her husband meet Putnam in the ICU. The boy is 16 and his name is Leandrus Benton.

“He’s OK,” Putnam tells the parents. “He lost a lot of blood, and we almost lost him.”

Connie starts to cry. Two of her nephews had been killed in shootings in Long Beach.

Putnam walks the couple into the ICU and to their son’s bed. He draws a curtain around them.

They will learn later that Leandrus had been walking home from a party in Wilmington. He and his friend decided they would be safer to take the alley than the street.  Leandrus heard a gun but didn’t see a shooter. A bullet suddenly burned like fire in his gut.

After being on duty nearly 24 hours, Putnam relaxes and reflects on the day.

“Traumas are random,” he says. “They leave you asking not just why did this happen, but – when things looked so bad – how did they turn around?

“It takes a lot of luck and the sense that someone is watching over us.”

Putnam is weary. “I just need to get through the shift,” he says.

But he knows that once he gets home, he will start wondering.

“Why guns? Why so many guns? Why do young people get status through guns? It once was fist fights. It once was stabbings. Now it’s a whole new world out there, and with guns, it’s just too much.”

The post Thomas Curwen and “Surgeon races to save a life during L.A.’s shooting season” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Gun violence is one of America’s most pervasive, polarizing issues, and journalism has responded with thousands of articles tackling the subject, including a raft of forgettable think pieces, trend pieces, explainers and data-driven dross.

And then there’s Jason Fagone’s recent, revelatory story for Huffington Post Highline, “What Bullets Do to Bodies.”

Early in the piece, Fagone writes: “We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot.”

Trauma surgeon Amy Goldberg does.

Like many of the protagonists that pepper Fagone’s articles and books, Goldberg is a master of her craft, a larger-than-life figure with special access to something most of us don’t know. Goldberg has spent almost her entire 30-year career as a trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, located in one of the most dangerous areas of the country. She has treated hundreds if not thousands of gun violence patients, witnessed the intransigence of Congress and started her own gun-violence programs through the hospital.

Through the profile of Goldberg, Fagone was able to inhabit a fresh ecosystem within the predictable world of gun violence journalism.

I spoke to Fagone by phone, where we discussed overnight reporting trips to the trauma wing at Temple, finding hope in despair, the many barriers to reporting in a hospital and the bittersweet reader reactions.

The interview has been edited slightly for length and flow.

Can you talk about how this story got off the ground? What was your original concept for the piece?

I had been out with friends a couple of years ago, and one of them was a former Philadelphia city prosecutor who worked on gun cases. We were just talking in a cab, and he was telling me about Temple Hospital, and said if I really wanted to understand the gun epidemic in Philly, I should go spend a weekend at Temple University Hospital and watch them treating gunshot patients coming in. I thought that was interesting, that that would be something worth doing, and it was something I didn’t know anything about. I thought it would be worth doing because trauma surgeons see a part of the epidemic that the rest of us don’t. They’re really the only ones that can’t look away from gun violence, because it’s their job to fix people who are hurt.

But I kind of put it in the back of my mind, because in the beginning, I had the sense that it would be tough to get access to the trauma ward of a hospital. Then recently, I saw a news story about Dr. Amy Goldberg becoming chair of surgery, and then I thought that was interesting, because I imagined there weren’t a lot of women chairs of surgery at major teaching hospitals, and that turns out to be true: There are 16 in the United States. So, that seemed significant, and then I read about some of their outreach programs where they go into the community and bring members of the community into the hospital and actually teach them about what trauma surgeons have to do to save people who are shot. I pitched them a simple profile of Goldberg, asking to shadow Goldberg on a call shift, watch her perform surgery and try to understand her view of gun violence and what she sees in the trauma bay. At that point there were some back-and-forth negotiations about patient privacy. We ended up signing a piece of paper with them saying that I’m not a doctor, I’m not going to be performing any surgery in the hospital, and that I must abide by patient privacy regulations and cannot use any information or interview anyone who has not given consent.

What do you think you were able to reveal about gun violence in general — the various costs, to physical life, to emotional well-being, to communities, to doctors and surgeons — by narrowing your narrative down to this individual surgeon?

I think with any profile, you’re not just writing about the person but about the world that they move in. You’re learning about the person, but at the same time you’re learning about the world that they have access to but you don’t, that you don’t normally get to see. Kind of the idea with pitching a profile of Goldberg was that not only is she, in her own right, a compelling person, someone who has worked for 30 years in the same institution doing this very intense, difficult and high-stakes work, but she also has a view, a window into this bigger problem that most people don’t have.

Then I had that first conversation with her, which ended up in the lead of the story, where almost straight off the bat she was almost berating me — and berating all journalists by extension — about our impotence in being able to get the story across, or affecting any type of change. I think it was right after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, which was horrifying, and I think she was horrified. Horrified. She’s being doing this for 30 years. How many regular, week-in, week-out handgun shootings has she seen? And that’s where she made the connection from mass shootings and the kind of violence she deals with in north Philly, which is what she says later in the piece, something like, “If America didn’t care about 20 white kids getting murdered in Sandy Hook, there’s no way they can care about black patients that I treat in north Philadelphia.”

I wanted to ask about that quote. It feels like a real cynicism towards change. Yet she is doing so much, on top of her surgery, to change the violence outcomes in her community.

Something about that really resonated with me. How does someone who’s been doing this work fight that despair, in a culture that’s not doing anything about it? There’s no help that’s coming through. The cavalry isn’t coming. She has to know that, and she has to go into work every day knowing that, and find a way to keep doing it, and find a way to keep marshaling resources of her hospital within a larger culture that’s not giving her any help. Eventually the story became about that despair, both the larger despair of the national gun debate, and the smaller despair that she deals with every day, and how she overcomes that.

What was your experience like in the hospital, shadowing Goldberg?

I spent around 100 hours with Goldberg on call, two or three 24-hour shifts and the rest 12-hour overnight shifts. Obviously she’s not performing surgery all of that time. A lot of that time was down time, where nothing’s happening. Basically we were just there with a trauma pager, and whenever it would go off, we would make a decision about whether to go down to the ER and try to get into the trauma bay. Whenever it was a gunshot patient, we went, as well as for some other types of surgeries.

I didn’t see a thoracotomy, so I didn’t see the most dramatic intervention they have to do, where they have to open the chest. It was partially the randomness of the days, the unpredictability of the days, and the fact that on all the days I went, those were not days that needed thoracotomies. I did observe gun surgeries and other kinds of trauma surgeries, like pedestrians hit by automobiles, and so on.

Could you have done this with a regular trauma surgeon? How was the story made whole by the character of Goldberg?

I think you really need that central person to hold your attention. Don’t you think so? I kind of felt that you need that person who can hold your hand and walk you through it, and someone who is willing to be open about these things in a way that doctors often aren’t. And also patient privacy regulations are very onerous, so it’s a little bit of a risk to let a reporter into a hospital. Hospitals are sort of inimical environments to journalists. So we were very concerned about that, and very aware of that the whole time. We worked very closely with them to make sure we weren’t putting any patient privacy rights at risk. There were two levels of consent. If there was verbal consent, I could observe a surgery, but beyond that if I wanted to interview a patient, it required signing a consent form. There were a lot of people who said no, and a lot where it just wasn’t possible because the people weren’t conscious when they came in. That’s one of the reasons the story took so long to do, because it’s just extremely difficult for journalists working in a hospital.

But the story really required a commitment to openness from Goldberg, her colleagues and the hospital. They had to really want to tell the story, and without that commitment, it wouldn’t have been possible.

Looking at all that Goldberg has had to do, almost unilaterally, to prevent and intervene on gun violence, it presents a damning case against our government’s intransigence. Is that what you were trying to build, but not blatantly say (except in the article’s description)? Do you think that these community-based efforts could be more effective than federal policies?

That’s a good question. I really don’t know; I feel like I’m not qualified to answer that. Part of what appealed to me about that story was that it kind of sidestepped a lot of the usual ways of talking about gun violence. I find a lot of arguments about gun violence to be saturated, in a really irritating way, with statistics about risk, or a distorting, beside-the-point focus on crime rates going down or crime rates going up. I wasn’t as interested in that as I was in Goldberg’s lived experience of doing this work for 30 years. In the way that this story connected with people, I think that’s what they connected with. It’s not really talking about it in the usual way, right. It’s talking about this one person’s efforts, and her team’s efforts, to help their patients in their part of the city. And doing heroically, I’d say, and very methodically, with a lot of meticulous research, and doing it kind of day-in, month-in, year-in and year-out. That’s what striking about it to me. And I also probably absorbed some of their disdain with how lots of journalists and experts talk about it. They’re not as interested in speaking on panels, but more interested in doing things in the science, gathering data and doing things in small concrete ways that make things better. Scott Charles’ gun lock program is emblematic of that, to me. Gun locks are a small, concrete way of making gun violence better. Scott found a source of gun locks and just started giving them away for free. And I think he would rather give away a box of gun locks than go speak on a dais somewhere, and that’s kind of the whole ethos of the program.

What was the reaction to the piece like?

It surprised me, because the story began with the futility of our journalistic endeavors around guns, but I think people connected to it because they connected to her. The story resonated because something about her experience — and her way of speaking about her experience — resonated. That’s been really gratifying. I’ve gotten emails from readers of the story that are unlike emails I’ve gotten on any other story. The other day I got an email from a guy who said he was a staunch Second Amendment supporter before he read the story, and it made him rethink his views. I got a number of emails from people who said they don’t normally like the media that much [chuckles], they don’t like reporters, but they thought the story had more depth than things they normally read. Those are kind of bittersweet emails to get, I guess. But yeah, I feel like it really did resonate with people somehow. I’m not exactly certain why, but I know that it did.

What are you looking for with a story, and how did this fit?

I’m always looking for someone like Goldberg. A master at what they do, who has access to a world that we don’t normally see or know that much about. To watch a professional work at that level is always great. And her being willing to talk about it, and be fairly open about the emotional toll that it takes on her and other people, that’s something else you look for: Someone who is willing to speak to you, fairly candidly. And the aspect of it where I was getting to see and be shown something people don’t normally see, that was a goal, too. I hate having to compete with other reporters. I just despise it. I’ve done kinds of reporting where I’m in the room with 30 other journalists, and I will do anything to not have to do that. If it means I will have to go very far out of my way, I will, because I can’t stand reporting a story other journalists are reporting.

I live in Philly, I’m not that far from the hospital, so I could take my time with it. I was local to them, so I could get into the hospital fairly easily and come back again and again. It wasn’t like I was flying in from somewhere else and if I didn’t get the story in one day, that’s it. And this was a story that I felt fairly passionate about. As soon as I got in, and soon as I talked to Goldberg, I just saw how passionate they were about what they do. They had such a unique perspective on this national issue, and you combine that with their passion and their belief, and it was really kind of novel to me. There’s something compelling, really irresistible about that. That keeps you going, and that was definitely the case here.

You’re from Philly and the story is a very Philly-centric one. Since this was for a national outlet, were you tempted to nationalize the story at all?

No. Why? No. There was never a discussion about that with our editors, either. They wanted to know about her experience at Temple University Hospital in north Philadelphia. I think it speaks to other hospitals and other trauma centers around the country, too, though. There’s nothing that a surgeon at the Cook County trauma center in Chicago, or in Los Angeles, or Atlanta, wouldn’t recognize as being part of their experience. Temple isn’t unique in that sense. It’s very similar to these other trauma centers in large urban areas around the country, and the kinds of expertise that they have, and the types of interventions they do is similar to what is done everywhere. But I do think there are very few people like Goldberg, who has spent 30 years at the same large trauma center and literally treated thousands of gunshot patients. Thirty years. There’s just so few people who have her broad view of it, and her standing to speak about it.

The post Notable Narrative: Jason Fagone and “What Bullets Do to Bodies” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Susan Dominus set out to write a story about relationships and romance for The New York Times Magazine, her initial assignment had her talking to couples who have experienced, and recovered from, infidelity. The relationship therapists she spoke with pointed her in a different direction: couples who had opened their marriages.

Those conversations were the spark of more than a year spent reporting and writing about open relationships. Dominus embedded with couples at every stage of the open relationship, from the beginners struggling to acclimate to a married couple who lived with the wife’s boyfriend. Yes, you read that right. Along the way, Dominus danced with her own visceral reactions to the subject matter, creating an internal monologue that she wove into the larger narrative, creating a revealing, emotive and intimate portrait of a new kind of romance.

In our conversation, Dominus, a staff writer for the magazine, talked about why she focused on the couples she did, why she included her own reactions and what she thinks about the incensed comments from readers.

This is a topic that anyone in any kind of long-term relationship has probably thought about, however briefly, at one time or another. What made you want to approach the story at all, and then in the way that you did?

Well, the story started out when my editor wanted me to look into how a couple who has experienced an infidelity recovers from that, and how they rebuild trust in a relationship. They wanted to do a really close look at one couple and follow their story. I reached out to a couple therapists in the hopes of meeting such a couple, but couples who have dealt with an infidelity are actually very ashamed, often, both the perpetrator and the victim of the affair. They didn’t really want to talk. But in the course of these interviews with the psychologists, one of them said, “You know, sometimes what these couples decide to do is open their marriages after they’ve had an affair.” And I thought, from a pure narrative point of view, I’d be really curious to see what that’s like, as a couple takes these risks for the first time in their lives, going out and meeting other people and coming back and reporting to each other about it. So I pitched it to my editors and everybody went for it.

Very quickly, I found couples who were not only open already, but I was able to find a couple on the brink of opening it for the first time, and were willing to let me come with them on that journey from a journalistic point of view. I was surprised that that was something I was able to find, but I did.

So is that why you started the story with Daniel and Elizabeth, who were undergoing this process in real time, and made them such an integral part of it? You must’ve spent a lot of time with them, as well, to elicit this level of detail.

Exactly, that’s why I worked with them, and yes, I spoke to them often on the phone, I visited them, I met their children. I’m going to meet them for dinner next week, so I always had a feeling we would keep in touch. They’re really wonderful people.

There was another couple that was about to open their marriage when I met them -- near the end of the piece, there’s that couple that ends up divorcing? I had literally been there in their apartment as they were writing each other’s Tinder profiles. They were really gearing up for it. But there were things that were problematic about their relationship beforehand that made me think the openness was going to be a Band-Aid that wasn’t going to fix it. I was surprised, because for a while things were going very well between them, but ultimately their differences and attitudes towards monogamy were what broke them up.

Could you have written this story from a strictly objective point of view? Did you always plan to include yourself and your own existential crises and hang-ups in the piece?

I think it could be done, of course every story could be done that way and be done really, really well. I just felt that because I was taking readers so far out of their comfort zone, it might connect them to the material to have someone who herself was kind of on this journey, and starting out in one place and ending up somewhere else. Which is not to say open to open marriage, but  I wrote those sections really quickly and naturally, and they felt really fun to write and my editors really liked them, so we kept them in.

Looking back now, did you find that ultimate value, in the final story, of making yourself a character to help the reader along?

I mean, yes and no, I guess. It’s hard to know, because the comments were so vitriolic, for the most part. What was really fascinating to me about the comments was how taboo the subject matter was. Even how people in my life responded to me, being subtly or overtly kind of hostile to me when speaking about it, as if I had been proselytizing for this rather than simply writing about it. I think it just kicks up a lot of emotions for people and makes them feel uncomfortable in ways they’re not even aware of.

It seems that where our country cannot locate consensus on anything from abortion to guns to mass incarceration, the NYT comments section can at least agree that what these couples are practicing is ridiculous, impossible, a bridge too far even for progressive-minded couples. Does that kind of vitriolic reaction affect your approach as a writer?

One thing I would say is that people who have complicated emotions don’t usually feel compelled to write something in the comments. There were probably a lot of people who read the piece and thought: “You know, I don’t know what I think. These people do seem kind of crazy, but on the other hand, monogamy does seem kind of repressive. And also, they do seem kind of happy. Huh!”

Those people don’t post. The people who post want to feel good about whatever moral stance they’re taking and feel like they’re exercising their moral muscles and patting themselves on the back for having really strong convictions. The comments don’t necessarily reflect the range of reader experiences; they reflect the extreme reactions most people do have to open marriages.

I was particularly struck by the Zaeli Kane and Joe Spurr (and Blake Wilson) anecdote, as it seems you were. They seem to have reached the enlightened plane that every couple that embarks on an open relationship is looking for. Reading it, I felt, like you did in the piece, a mix of disgust, at myself for my own reactionary conservatism, and admiration for what they were doing. Were you intentionally trying to push readers to explore their own thoughts on relationships, or were you just telling your sources’ story?

As I said, I feel like the entire piece was taking the reader on a journey. You know, here’s a kind of suburban married couple, and one of them is seeing someone outside of their relationship, but it’s a committed, loving thing. In some ways that seemed like the easiest jumping-off point, and then I wanted to end the piece with the hardest concept to grasp, which was that these three people are living together, two are kissing each other in front of the other partner, and then to sort of admit and recognize, about myself, that there’s a limit to my open-mindedness. It was a good way of getting at that as open-minded as I am about the idea, there’s something visceral, maybe primal, in me that rebels at the concept of that.

Where did you ultimately end up on this topic? And is it normal for you to be affected by a story on these emotional levels?

 I would say the story had a more visceral effect on me than most, but the thing that I admired most about these couples is that you may not like the way that they were committing themselves to the idea of love, but they all took love incredibly seriously. They spent a lot of time thinking about what they wanted out of their relationships in life. I’m very, very happily married, but like many couples in which the parents work and there are two kids, sometimes you do coast on autopilot. And reporting this story, I did suddenly think that my marriage is one of the best things I have in my life, and yet I don’t appreciate it, we don’t really rejoice in it, we don’t dedicate ourselves to it, we don’t spend enough time making it better. I did really feel like I was coasting, rather than being really present in my relationship.

Where do you go from here? More relationship and romance stories, or something else?

I’m hugely relieved to have moved on from this topic. [Laughs] It was really interesting, and I really care about the people I reported on. I learned a lot, but it’s very hard doing that kind of intimate reporting. Also, to be honest, there is so much going on in the news and in the world right now that on the one hand, I think it’s important to acknowledge that our private lives are hugely significant and how we conduct ourselves in our homes is a big part of who we are, but it’s also nice to turn outward. And I’d like to do more of that.

The post Notable Narrative: Susan Dominus and “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Sitting across a dinner table in Mexico City back in 2009, Nathan Thornburgh and Matt Goulding hatched an idea. Thornburgh, a longtime foreign correspondent for Time magazine, and Goulding, a roving food writer and editor who pioneered the bestselling “Eat This, Not That” series for Men’s Health, had an idea for a travel website that would publish stories that alchemized their two principal interests: food and politics.

The resulting site, Roads & Kingdoms, is a testament to both co-founders’ journalistic vision (and the digital design sense of the third co-founder, Doug Hughmanick), as well as their stubbornness to stick with longform for longform’s sake.

These are young guys but firmly old media, and that dissonance may be the secret to their success. There are no ads or sponsored posts. Roads & Kingdoms traffics in old-school authenticity, an increasingly rare commodity on today’s web. Any R&K story must have what Thornburgh calls an “intramural element,” meaning it is not a story only about food, or war, or demagoguery or sports, but some combination of these foundational themes. This gives the site the initial look and feel of a traditional travel magazine, until the shot of adrenaline kicks in, followed by a healthy dose of ground-level grittiness.

After five years in business — a lifetime in the online journalism world — Roads & Kingdoms has widened its scope, padded its profit margin, bolstered its staff and added Anthony Bourdain as a contributing editor. At last month’s South By Southwest, the R&K team announced a new collaboration with Bourdain and CNN. With the recently launched digital site Explore Parts Unknown, the R&K team will go deeper into each episode of Bourdain’s hit food-and-politics travel show to provide a 360-degree view of each location Bourdain visits.

They’ve experienced all this growth while maintaining, as Thornburgh puts it, the feeling that “this, what we do, is personal to us.”

I spoke to Thornburgh over a series of phone conversations on one of his stopovers back at his home base in Brooklyn. We talked about the site as a whole, as well as the story in which he traveled to Peru and drank the powerful hallucinogen ayahuasca, which has long drawn seekers like William S. Burroughs to South America to partake in what the writer called “a complete derangement of the senses.” Lately, it has become the alternative medicine du jour, attracting everyone from tech tycoons to soldiers suffering from PTSD.

Thornburgh’s piece, which took him years to finish and covers, among other personal anguish, his grueling cancer treatment, perfectly encapsulates R&K’s strange — and strangely stirring — brew of entertainment, vulnerability, authority and storytelling that have become the site’s editorial hallmarks.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

It seems like you have adhered to a unique editorial philosophy for the lifespan of the site. Is that true?

Have we stuck with it? Yeah. The level of fidelity has been super-high. That’s one of the things you win with your independence, and our kind of financially independent state. If we had large amounts of Silicon Valley money, then the business would have a very different trajectory, but every business model warps content on some level. You’re either going to go super-broad and hot-takey if you need to reach scale, or if you’re trying to go Hollywood scale and get stuff greenlighted, you’re only going to go with massive, deeply investigated stories. There are compromises everywhere. But I don’t worry about the partnership with CNN warping what we’re doing. R&K.com and all the R&K-stamped media, whether it’s the events or the podcast or the content, that’s all well within our control. I foresee it being a gloriously independent and somewhat futile business (laughs) for the years to come.

Looking back on the past five years, how do you think you’ve not only survived, but built a loyal audience?

Our voice is different, and I think probably custom-made almost for the internet and really our demographic. The key difference from what we do and traditional magazine-ing is that we don’t mind privileging the first person on some level to make sure our readers know who our writers are. It’s about establishing authority for the author. Part of that course is that we want to use writers who are local to the region they’re writing about, to find someone from that culture that they’re writing about, and can use that perspective in the story. That’s an important thing for readers these days, because the definitions of trust are different now than they used to be. It’s not a single, monotone, organizational voice. It’s about who are you and why are you telling this story. The length, and the desire to have every story we do reported from that place, it’s expensive, and hard to pull off, and the opposite of low-hanging fruit. That’s a really interesting challenge.

On a practical level, the thing that’s allowed us to survive is our deep fiscal conservatism. As a company, we’ve been very cautious, pay ourselves dirt and have a lot of sweat equity. We’re cautious. We haven’t made big bets on building a community hub, or something like that that is expensive and still very unproven. It’s funny how there’s a lot of high-level worry about this industry, but sometimes you can just answer it with the same kind of approach that every small or midsized business has to take: Don’t spend a dollar you don’t earn. That’s surprisingly effective as a way of staying in business.

Many people may know R&K best as one of Anthony Bourdain’s many side projects, and the site and he seem to have similar guiding philosophies. How did the relationship with him start?

Matt and I had both met him in previous jobs. One of my editing jobs at Time was to run the 10 Questions page, and I had picked Bourdain out. I didn’t know that much about him, but had seen “No Reservations” a couple times and thought he’d be outspoken and ready to go to print. He came by, and he was great. Interviewing celebrities is like one long humiliation. Whether it’s them or their handlers, there’s someone there to remind you that you are an insignificant blot, a stain on this man’s calendar. Tony was totally the opposite. I think he took the subway, had no entourage, spent all the time we needed. The guy spits fire. He knows how to talk like nobody I’ve ever met, but was also really interested in the work we were doing and the journalism. So I had a good impression from that.

We asked when we started it, “Who would be an ally for us in this march?” We had a launch party at SXSW when we started the website in 2012, and we sent Tony an email to ask him to come out. It was no high-ticket event — it was at my brother’s house — and we got an email immediately that said, “No.” We were super-excited. He emailed us back! From there, though, we’ve gotten a few yeses from him, which, if nothing else, show us that we were creatively like-minded. And I’ll say this about Tony: He’s a guy who does what he says. He’s always very forthright, and he’s not going to tell you pretty little nothings he doesn’t mean. Everything he has said that we wanted to do with R&K, he has done. Particularly for a man with so many obligations and demands on his time, to put follow-through at the top of his list of values, I really appreciate that about him.

What’s the pitching process for R&K like? I’ve pitched before, and I assume any other writing-oriented traveler (and there are many of us) has considered it as well. Is there an archetypal R&K contributor?

We have a stable of writers we love and go back to often, and certainly our editors here, part of their job is to look at the world and say: “This is happening here. How do we make this an R&K story?” However, we do work a lot with people who approach us through the website and are interested in what we’re doing. A lot of them do come from folks who are not the usual British/American/Canadian/Australian suspects, and recognize we’re open to working with people from a lot of different places. A recent piece that’s made us really happy is the Azov Dolphins piece, about an American-style football team in Ukraine. This Ukrainian photographer got in touch and thought we would be interested, and that to me is a great example of a story where we didn’t go out and say, “We need to find an NFL team in a war zone,” but once we saw that story come in, it was the perfect story.

Is there something specific you’re looking for in a story? Perusing your site just now, I’m struck, as I usually am, by the variety of the articles. There’s a guide to getting drunk at Disney World just below a Q&A with an Iraqi fixer. Is there an editorial mindset that allows those to coexist?

I think that perfect story has to have some kind of intramural element. A perfect story for me would never be purely a food story, or purely a war story. It’s kind of got to combine elements, and that feeling of being a cross-section of elements, that to me is an R&K story. It’s really built into the name, two things connected with an ampersand. War and football? We’ll take it. Food and politics? That’s a typical piece for us. That’s how we look at it: Get a couple different surprising elements in the same room and kind of go from there.

You haven’t written a ton of articles lately. Why did the one on ayahuasca strike a particular chord for you?

In the first couple of years, Matt and I were traveling a lot as a kind of proof of concept, and our co-founder Doug was traveling with us as well. We picked countries that had a mix of politics and food culture that gave us kind of the meat we were looking for. For us that meant South Africa, Myanmar, Denmark and Peru. Peru was an interesting place because it has this super-interesting culinary scene that’s the South American answer to what’s happening in Northern Europe. Matt was really interested in that and covering that, and I wanted a feature story to kind of sink my teeth into, and one thing that was happening in travel and tourism in Peru was this travel for ayahuasca. There’s that curiosity of, “What the hell is that about? Is it what it seems in the news reports?” I did a quick Lexis-Nexis search, a lot of which were short-hit articles about a kid who almost died, or somebody got robbed, these little negatives of the experience. But I could tell there was no way for news articles like that to get into the why. Yes, there are negatives, but there has to be some value there, people traveling for it, wanting to bring it back to the States.

There’s no better way to understand something than to jump in it. Trying to describe what’s happening while you’re stone-cold sober, you’re not going to come out of that with anything more than when you started. So the freedom to go and take these drugs and take the ride, that’s what I’ve won for having this scrappy and, at times, struggling media company.

What was your reporting process like, once you were “pulled into the ether?” I imagine you weren’t taking notes, even really mental ones, due to the drug’s power, so how did you document it?

I had good fortune with the shaman. He was very accommodating, so I did a lot of interviews and I was recording through the ceremony. We’re going to use some of the audio from the story in a new podcast we’re starting. (The producer promised she wouldn’t use any of the vomiting audio.) Now, anyone who’s ever been high on anything and had a pretty deep thought, and tried to engage that thought the next morning, will recognize that I had a bunch of tape, a bunch of stuff, but listening back I couldn’t really figure out what I was finding so incredible about what was happening. But I think from my mind, that’s a pretty interesting part about it. You can write the words, but what’s actually happening behind them? How do you get real meaning from it? I’m not sure. Really, at least in part, as I mentioned in the article, there’s a huge lag between when I did the ayahuasca, did all my notes, starting the article, and then finishing and publishing it. A couple of years. It took me a long time to put it into context. I had cancer, and eventually had some incontrovertible, fact-based stuff about Western medicine to compare that experience with.

Were you at all reluctant to do the second ceremony, after having what seems to be the best possible experience during the first?

That is a great question. I think context matters, when it comes to hallucinogens, and I think if you’re really feeling in the right frame of mind, then you’ll metabolize those things. I saw a lot of gory things on my good trips, so I wouldn’t say it’s a sanitized experience even when it’s going well, and since you’re writing for a journalism publication, the main question I had for Mother Ayahuasca was about journalism. I was having a lot of personal conflict and doubt about the things I had done as a journalist. Which is not to say I had been unethical according to our standards, but the kind of journalism I was doing was going and prying into people’s lives that are in tremendous tumult, grieving, death and so on, and asking a ton of questions about it. That was my job and I got to do it for TIME and it was a dream job, but I wanted to know, morally, am I good person doing this? I wanted to hear from this diety, from this experience, that it was OK, that I was still a good person. Here’s where it gets pretty good. All of this stuff is happening in your own mind, so lo and behold, I came out with a clean slate of approval from Mother Ayahuasca, which is very convenient. So I may have just been reassuring myself, but either way I came out thinking, you know what? It’s OK.

I was leaving the most corporate news magazine there is and starting my own thing, and suddenly I’m dosing in the jungle. I had kids, I had a family, and I had a lot of questions. That’s one of the things I love about ayahuasca, if you have a big life question, or death question, it can be really good for taking another look at those.

My sister went through a nearly two-year slog with cancer — surgery, radiation, chemo, infections from the radiation — and I can’t help but think, after reading your article, that ayahuasca would have given her that existential reassurance you talk about. Do you think the concoction will continue to become more mainstream? Perhaps not a doctor-recommended treatment, but at least one without the requisite stigmas? 

The experience of going through and realizing I had cancer when I was down there, and Mother Ayahuasca had politely declined to mention that, had made me feel like it was medically less effective than they were claiming, but psychologically more valuable or important. There are many moments with cancer where you don’t know which way it’s going to go, what your particular prognosis is or whether this can be a much worse thing than they are saying. I always felt like in conversation with doctors, I felt like ‘Fuck it, if I get really bad news here, I’m going back down to the jungle, do ayahuasca and think about it.’ We’re all going to die, so if you’re looking at the road and it’s a crappy one, ayahuasca can help with that. I saw a lot of things without fear on ayahuasca, and that’s not my normal.

The post 5(ish) Questions: Nathan Thornburgh talks mind-blowing drugs and Anthony Bourdain appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Some people are made for what they do. Steph Curry was made to play basketball. Dave Chappelle to deliver jokes. You get that feeling with Kent Russell and his writing. He makes the difficult appear effortless.  Don’t believe me? Why don’t you try making a 10,000-word story about the ritual burning of witches in Papua New Guinea both wryly funny and utterly gut-wrenching?

That is one of Russell’s many feats in his 2015 story for Huffington Post’s digital magazine, Highline, on the witch hunts -- and ritual murders -- that continue to plague aboriginal society in Papua New Guinea.

An autodidact in philosophy (he also has degrees in journalism, Russian and cultural reporting and criticism), Russell said that the theories of the Frenchman Rene Girard on the use of scapegoating in societies both advanced and primitive was a major influence on the story. That existential stream flows under the surface, as Russell takes the reader on a heart-pounding, mind-expanding ride through the time warp of Papua New Guinea’s highlands.

Russell's greatest feat is a first-person narration that feels both unfussy and fundamental to the story. In fact, he's so good at inserting himself into his stories in ways that drive the narrative and avoid the narcissism, he could teach a class on it. Somebody else must have thought so, too, because when he’s not writing essays exploring his own masculinity, or trekking 1,000 miles across Florida on foot for another story, Russell serves as an adjunct professor of gonzo journalism in the undergraduate writing program at Columbia University.

This interview took place over a series of phone conversations. It has been condensed and edited.

This seems like something of a departure from the norm, for you, from what I’ve been able to research of your work. Am I totally in the wrong there?

It doesn’t seem like a departure for me, necessarily, because of where the idea came from. Normally with other ideas that I’ve had -- especially with the book I wrote -- the seed of the idea was very often a simple question that I’d ask myself, and it would germinate. I had a graduate school professor, David Samuels, and his advice was if you can think of something kind of nuts and build a realistic idea of it in your mind, it probably exists in the world somewhere. I’ve often used that as a springing-off point. In the past, I’ve often been propelled by the Nietzschean aphorism of what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. And with some rudimentary research, I find people who try to make themselves immune to all the snake venoms in the world, or something like that. In this case, it was kind of similar, I just kind of asked myself, “Are there still witch hunts still being perpetrated in the world?” And a rudimentary Lexis-Nexis search brought up all these stories, not only in PNG but all over the world. For me, it all came out of that same wellspring. And also it’s not a departure because I’m typically drawn to pretty bleak shit.

This was your first piece for Huffington Post. How did that relationship start? Did you have any say in the way they produced the story, with the cascading, “Scary Stories”-esque art?

That vertical, Highline, was started by a buddy of mine that I’ve worked with on a bunch of stories, a guy by the name of Greg Veis. He was last at the New Republic before everybody kind of walked the fuck out. That happened the night before I was supposed to get on a plane to go to PNG for the story, that I was going to write for them. I had written three stories for them before, and was a contributing editor there at the time. So, everything went to shit and Vies was telling me maybe don’t go quite yet, we’ll see what happens here, and I just said fuck it, I had already bought the plane tickets. I prefer to do things less pitching and working hand-in-glove with an editor but going off, incurring incredible expense, writing a first draft, then pitching it. After I reported it, I told him all about it. I was still under contract with New Republic, which was under new editorship at the time, but they weren’t really interested in it. My friend and editor Veis joined up with another former TNR editor, and they created and continued to edit Huffington Post Highline. They got that thing off the ground, and like you said they are doing some great narrative work with great design and editing work. They just won a National Magazine Award [ed.: in the Multimedia category, for ‘The 21st Century Gold Rush’]. But I had nothing to do with the design and layout, and was just as blown away as anyone else when I saw it.

I’ve never written for the actual Huffington Post, but working with the Highline was a continuation of a previous relationship I had had. I’m always hankering to work with them again; they’re some of the best.

In the story, you say your motivation behind the trip was to figure out how these witch hunts could be possible in the modern era. Was the impetus really that simple?

I guess it was a little more complex than that, insofar as the kinds of questions I have about something that lead to ideas. I had been reading a lot of a philosopher named René Girard, a French literary theorist who created or discovered this categorical, all-encompassing theory for literature and also the way societies are maintained. He’s got a theory that explains scapegoating violence and says it’s the foundation of society, especially of primitive societies and religions. He believes a tight-knit community will come to a head, and everyone will have a bunch of internecine fights and eventually it comes to a head where they scapegoat, someone on which to blame all the bad shit that’s been going down. They either kill that person or force them out, and in doing that, it kind of reinforces the communal aspect. Anyway, I was doing a lot of reading from that guy’s stuff. I found it really interesting, if not totally believable, and was thinking a lot about the role of scapegoats and scapegoating somebody. The witch idea kind of came out of that, and like you were saying, I came across a fair number of stories chronicling the violence in PNG. There were a bunch of excellent pieces that tried to give some nuance and depth to it, and I kind of felt the things that most interested me, and what I kind of found wasn’t being addressed in these stories were the things I wanted to go investigate. It was both as simple as wanting to see if this was still going on, but it was also out of a desire to kind of see if the idea of scapegoating people, if that theory, holds any water.

That question seems kind of simple and facile, but really I was asking: How is this still happening? Why is it happening? Clearly, it wouldn’t be so widespread in this country if there wasn’t some imagined value to it. It didn’t just seem like it was random violence, you know. I just wanted to see if some sense could be made, or see the phenomenon from the point of view of the people who were there, and almost make sense of it from under the bubble of the culture in a society where this would happen -- if it’s even possible for some white doofus to fly in for three weeks and try to diagnose this.

In many ways this resembles a travel dispatch, except for the, you know, ritual burnings of other humans. It’s a really entertaining story, and the parts that make it bearable, in a way, are your often funny and always insightful travel notes. Did you intend to channel your inner Bill Bryson? Or is that your natural writing style?

I think it’s a combination. I didn’t want to add comic relief to this thing, necessarily, but I think in general I have a wryly ironic sensibility that comes through. To include myself, obviously, that was necessary to me because the idea of some relatively ignorant, youngish white dude parachuting in here and giving the narrative of this thing is not just kind of absurd but also really off-putting and offensive. For me it felt necessary to frame it through my experience. I often frame my narratives through a pretty heavy personal lens. I use myself as a prism, or a host organism, to look at such things. In this instance, I am an interloper, possibly an orientalist, all these things where I’m trying not to couch it too heavily in terms of me because people are being murdered, there’s horrific violence, and you’re trying to do justice to the other characters and their stories.

Your book of essays explored different types of masculinity. Was that a thought as you ventured into the PNG highlands, where there is an almost prehistoric masculine ideal?

To be honest, it really wasn’t. It wasn’t until I started doing research and reaching out to people that I realized there was this kind of preserved-in-amber patriarchal society that had only recently been exposed to the outside world. Which made me wonder if I would always subconsciously be drawn to this type of subject. It’s the same kind of thing where I have colleagues and friends of mine who are women who joke that I finally wrote about women, but of course I wrote about women getting murdered and burned at the stake and stuff like that, so I don’t know if it was anything consciously chosen on my behalf. But when I started reading about the culture and history of that place, it gave me a little bit of pause and also scared the shit out of me.

My questions are in red, his responses in blue.

They Burn Witches Here

And then they upload the photos to social media. A journey to an island caught between the ancient world and 2015.

By Kent Russell

Originally published on Huffington Post Highline in October 2015.

The men pack the witch’s mouth with rags. The time for confessions has come and gone. Neighbors crowd into a circle around her, here on this hill of rubbish next to their settlement, Warakum. They watch as the men blindfold her before tying her arms, legs and stomach to a log. They watch as wood is stacked and gasoline poured. They watch as their witch is pushed facedown onto the pyre. Camera phones are held up and aimed. The match is struck and thrown.

This is the consequence of rending the social fabric, of exercising divisive power, the men say to the thing in their midst. This creature at the center of the settlement dwellers is not a friend or a relative, as the crowd might have once thought. It is a poisonous weed, a snek-no-gut underfoot. Adulterers, the AIDS-marked unclean and witches such as this one—these evils must be uprooted from the community. It has been so for as long as any can remember.

The crowd can feel the shush of the flames against the skin of their faces. Then—a low, wet, chewing sound, a sound like a hive of insects eating and eating, as the fire feeds on the pile of refuse. The men roll truck tires over the witch’s trussed, prone figure. The crowd says nothing. This is self-defense. This is a body doing what a body does when a harmful foreign object is located. It marshals its strength, it pushes the object out, it becomes whole and healthy once again. [annotation q="This is, quite simply, the most shocking lede to a piece of journalism I have ever read. Were you cautious to start here, and with such brutally honest language? Why did you choose to begin with this anecdote?" a=">Part of what kind of drew my interest here was that the stories I would read about the witch hunts were almost all based around the Leniata story. It made the news in the United States and all over the world. “Oh my god, look at this savagery, look at this weird anachronistic juxtaposition,” and then everyone just kind of drops the story. This story was never followed up, so one of the things I thought I’d do was the case, and what kind of astounded me in a lot of ways when I went around, was that I would go to a university in Goroka and talk to some experts on this stuff, and historians, and ask them about it, and their faces just went blank. Either they didn’t know what I was talking about or didn’t want to talk about her. I got the sense that the only thing special about the Leniata case is that the rest of the world heard about it. In fact, there had been x amount of murders at that same spot before her, and y amount after her, and realized there was almost like a ritual happening here. So how it became both the opening and kind of the throughline for this piece was that to me it seemed that this was a ritual, a performance, acting out something as almost a service to the community. To me it seemed like it was almost a special case, but in many ways it wasn’t special at all. You obviously weren’t there to see this incident. How did you create the atmosphere -- “a hive of insects eating and eating” for this event?" a="It was similar to overlaying the sacrificial victims on top of one another, because they’re so similar, it was a combination of going to the place, interviewing the people. In PNG, there were these fires burning all the time, for clearing area or cooking or whatever, so even when I was in the highlands and in that particular area, I was able to observe garbage fires. Thankfully I did not witness a witch burning, but it was a combination of interviews, research and first-hand experience."]

The witch was a 20-year-old mother of two who had been blamed for the death of a 6-year-old neighbor boy in her Papua New Guinean shantytown in 2013. Based on his symptoms, the cause of the boy’s death was most likely rheumatic fever. But in PNG, any death that cannot be chalked up to simple old age is believed to have a malevolent agent behind it.

A group of 50 or so of the dead boy’s relatives apprehended the young mother, stripped her, tortured her and burned her alive in the settlement’s landfill, just outside the city of Mount Hagen. A number of bystanders were uniformed police officers who helped turn back a fire engine when it whined to the scene.

This particular witch killing splashed across the homepages of international tabloids because members of the crowd had snapped photos and shared them proudly on social media. Journalists descended, ascertaining a few grisly details as well as the woman’s identity (which cannot be said for many victims of sorcery-related violence in PNG): Her name was Kepari Leniata.

The context that their stories lacked, the thing these journalists neglected to mention, was this: In PNG (which was fully “opened” to the outside world only in the late 19th century), the tradition of witch hunting has not simply persisted in the face of Western intervention—it has become much worse. The ritual is warping, the violence is metastasizing.

Witch hunts, which had been a part of many if not all traditional Papua New Guinean cultures, are now commonplace throughout the villages, townships and small cities dotting the country. Mobs are publicly humiliating and brutally torturing neighbors, family members, friends—often but not always women—and then murdering them, or else forcing them out of their communities, which in a deeply tribal society like Papua New Guinea amounts to much the same thing.

No one is sure how many supposed witches have been killed—are being killed—in Papua New Guinea. The country’s Constitutional and Law Reform Commission recently estimated 150 killings per year throughout the developing island nation, which lies just off the northernmost cape of Australia. Religious organizations, the people most involved on the ground, dispute this number. The United Nations reported that more than 200 killings take place every year in just one of Papua New Guinea’s 20 provinces alone.

Kepari Leniata’s public execution was at least the third committed at the Warakum settlement’s trash dump between 2009 and 2013. Two more have occurred there since. A third was set to take place in December 2014, near the end of a trip I took to the area in hopes of understanding how and why. How anyone with a camera phone could still believe in witches, and why this violence was now going from endemic to epidemic.

But there, I happened across a most rare thing in Papua New Guinea: an intercession.

II.

I wasn’t prepared for the airport in Port Moresby, PNG’s capital. And I don’t mean that in a kind of Orientalist, “I couldn’t believe the strange wonders I encountered” type of way. I mean: There was hardly any information available. At the time of my visit, Jacksons International Airport was un-Google-able.

Connecting through Tokyo, my flight was listed on the departures board, but it didn’t have a check-in number, a gate number or any status updates. It was the only gap in the stories-high flipboard. When I asked young Japanese attendants for help, their eyes grew wide above their surgical masks. [annotation q="This is a great detail, and helps ground the setting -- which is otherwise totally foreign to most readers -- in something they are familiar with. Is that why you included it?" a="When there’s travel involved, or a long journey, I’m constantly taking note of everything because you never know what’s going to be used in the narrative. There was a lot, a lot of travel involved here, and I had all these notes on what it’s like to go to a place like this. It doesn’t show up on the big board, you can’t really spot other people going to this place. I almost lost my bag, so trying to get that and get it checked in. There’s only one flight there, and I don’t want to miss it. There’s this strange experience where I’m trying to pay attention to everything that’s happening and experiencing consciousness, since I’m not yet sure what the story is going to be. The experience was everybody was saying: “What are you talking about? Where are you going?” And the people who did know about it did almost a Looney Tunes loosening of the collar. It was truly bizarre being in Tokyo in this modern, sprawling, incredibly efficient airport, and then the strange hiccup in this efficiency happened to be where I was going."]

After an overnight flight, my plane dumped me on the tarmac. The humidity reminded me every step of the way that “the atmosphere” was not a thing that started at some point far above my head. This South Pacific atmosphere was everywhere around me, reaching under my shirt, into my ears, my nostrils, hugging my whole body until nodes of sweat pipped up between the hairs of my eyebrows and mustache. I was drenched in sweat by the time I found a taxi.

Cities were recent developments in PNG, I learned. Anything that we would consider a “development” was recent. As a result, Moresby—pronounced Mosbi in Tok Pisin, PNG’s creole mashup of English, Malay and a smattering of other languages—has neither the bustle of an Indian slum nor the resourcefulness of a Brazilian one. Only 345,000 people live here, and unemployment hovers between 60 and 90 percent. Ashy wood smoke hangs over everything. Each low, cement building is fenced or walled, and the fences and walls are topped with broken glass or razor wire. On one side of the city are bare, brown hills. On the other: a shallow tongue of bay, packed with natural-gas tanker ships.

Moresby proper is largely free from the sorcery-related violence that plagues the rural interior of the country, where there remain tribes of people—citizens—who are living much the same as they have for the last 10 millennia. Still, it is the third-least-livable city on Earth, according to researchers at The Economist, behind Damascus and Dhaka, the city in Bangladesh where a factory collapse killed a thousand people.

The scant number of expats living in Moresby are typically concerned with one of two things: saving souls, or siphoning money out of the ground. The latter, the oilmen, rarely leave the handful of supermax high-rises near the bay. The former, the missionaries, stay in small compounds studded throughout the city. Upon touchdown, I called one such compound named Mapang and booked a shared room.

On the short ride there, about a block and a half from the window I’d sleep under, my taxi was stopped at a checkpoint by policemen who wore short-sleeved blue shirts and the bemused expressions of men expectant of bribes. My driver asked them what the problem was. They explained that a few hours earlier, predawn, members of the police and members of the army had engaged in a gunfight right here. [annotation q="Did you have a translator/fixer with you? Related question: A practically unlivable city, a shootout between the army and police, witch hunts. Were you fearful of your safety?" a="I definitely felt like I fucked up irrevocably by not having a fixer. I’m not doing this parachute journalism where you normally have a fixer and they’ve worked with your publication before -- I’ve never done anything like that; I didn’t even know who I was writing this for at this point. It was kind of fly-by-night, but I did know Monica going in, and that I would meet her at some point, come what may. I had the idea that Monica would be my Virgil character here, but I spent about five days hanging out in Port Moresby by myself, which is inadvisable. I was staying at a Lutheran guest house -- there aren’t many hotels, but there is a lot of missionary infrastructure. I was in this heavily barbed-wire compound with all these missionaries of various Protestant denominations. I just started reporting as much as I possibly could. It must have been bizarre to be in a place that seems almost fictional, with very few (if any) analogues in the developed world." a=">Yeah, I’ve done quite a bit of traveling, and in most places, you can obviously kind of draw comparisons. In this instance, there was really nothing I could have compared it to. It was a big shock to the system, especially for some white American dude. I got the sense that there was no way I could prepare for it, but I definitely didn’t do enough to prepare for it. Those first couple days in Port Moresby, while not wanting to impose any judgment on a place I didn’t know, I kind of walked mute and wide-eyed everywhere I went."]

The police officers leaned into the window and searched my driver’s face for any hint of gladness or anger. Any kind of reaction at all. Had we heard about it? they asked. The shooting? This was in Boroko, a relatively upscale suburb of Moresby. There had been many injuries, the police said, and a few unconfirmed fatalities.

Halted for now, my cabby and I got out of the car to take a look around. An informal market was assembling itself on the dried mud beneath a single, bare tree. The ground there was sprinkled with broken glass and the husks of betel nuts.

Practically every man, woman and child in PNG chews betel nut, a mild stimulant. Intense salivation, and therefore a constant need to spit, is its main side effect. Chewing betel nut is technically illegal, but betel nuts were being sold under umbrellas at every street corner. The police who’d stopped my taxi were chewing betel nut. It didn’t matter where I went in PNG—gashes of viscid red spit were everywhere, making the violence seem that much fresher and thicker. [annotation q="Did you try betel nut while you were there?" a="Hell no! I liked the idea of it in principle, but I have a weird thing with people who dip and spit in a bottle or something, it drives me insane. No, I didn’t want to do any of that. But it was incredible how widespread betel nut is. If you want to add to the surreality of everything, it’s not just the landscape and the city and everything, it’s also the fact that everybody’s just a little bit amped on this mild stimulant, and their teeth just looked blood red, as if they had just bitten into someone’s neck. It was just another element to add to the sense that I had no reference point for this, and that it would behoove me not to even try to draw any analogy."]

My taxi driver spat carefully but frequently as we walked around the marketplace. With his help, I learned that the gun battle between the army and police had lasted for some four hours. The vendors told us this while spreading blankets, arranging wares, beginning just another day. They explained that soldiers had emerged from a makeshift nightclub late last night and were drinking hard when a police patrol asked them to go back inside. A scuffle ensued, and after one soldier was locked up in the nearby station, the other soldiers returned with reinforcements and sprang their partner from jail, Wild West style. As all hell broke loose, some shops adjacent to the marketplace were looted, and now these looted goods were being put out alongside the vendors’ regular fare.

By the time we got to the missionary compound, my cabbie was demanding 100 kina, or about $40. When I refused and offered him half of his price, he laughed vigorously, as if proud of my aptitude. Then he demanded I high-five him.

♦ ♦ ♦

At Mapang, there were gates, guards and razor wire. Darting birds and bougainvillea. Tin roofs, slatted glass windows, listless ceiling fans running off solar power. The main room was hung with a portrait of the staff, as well as an admonition to ALERT US if anyone not in the picture was seen walking the grounds.

This was a waystation for missionaries on their way into or out of the bush. That first day, around the breakfast table, I fell in with two of them, John and Marciana. John was a Kentuckian; Marciana, a Floridian like me, albeit from the third and strangest Florida, the Panhandle. They were my age or younger, anywhere from 23 to 30, and they had three little children: two boys and a baby girl, each named something Levitical. John was making them jam sandwiches out of the free breakfast fixings, to save money.

About a year earlier, he’d started a mission deep in the jungle of Gulf Province. “New Guinea’s Louisiana,” John called it, hoping to sum up for me the dire poverty and feverish customs of his village congregants. He’d come with his family to Moresby in order to load up on dry goods. They said I could tag along on their shopping runs.

Marciana had a pinch of moles sprinkled about her mouth and more than a few misgivings about being in-country. “In America, I’m considered black,” she said as we headed for their vehicle, a Toyota SUV with “BAPTIST CHURCH” stenciled talismanically on all four sides. “And here,” she said, “in PNG, I’m considered white. I can’t catch a break.” She smiled, she was being ironic, and then she kept on speaking, branching off on tangents, rarely falling silent whenever I was around her and her family. She seemed genuinely pleased to avail herself of a new audience after months in the jungle. I was reminded then of a term that one of PNG’s great anthropologists, Bronislaw Malinowski, used to describe the effect the bush had on outsiders: tropenkoller, or “tropical frenzy.” [annotation q="Speaking of this, what was the preparation for PNG like? It seems like it would be a challenge to simply exist there, much less perform journalistic acts." a=">Most of the time, I was just eating Luna bars that I brought with me. The coffee was excellent there, which is one of the big exports in the highlands. I did have some meals with Monica from time to time. It was a lot of pork -- somebody had killed their pig and you’d get to eat it, which was very nice. I drank the water, it was fine. I was less concerned about that -- I like to think I have a pretty hardy constitution. But I was more focused on being there and focused on reporting, noticing details and talking to as many people as I could, and figuring out to get around well enough to report on my own when Monica had to go to funerals, or spirit some woman away from a murderous domestic situation. It was just trying to maintain integrity long enough to get the story I was hoping to get while I was there."]

“There were these other two missionaries, older friends of ours,” John said, pulling us into surprisingly thick traffic. “These two missionaries, they got into a bad accident here in Moresby. They rolled their car. And the people, they came running. I mean running.” John had a vacuum-sealed tautness about his body that called to mind fire-and-brimstone preaching; actually, though, he was more that type of chill-dude campus minister.

“The people stripped it of everything,” he went on. “Bags, electronics, seat covers. ‘Run,’ one of the looters told them. ‘Your life is more important than your stuff.’ Our missionary friends said they were more afraid after the crash.”

We drove past a field alive with fires that had been set to clear the brush and scrub around Moresby’s one mosque. The mosque had leopard spots of light shining through its rusty dome. I asked what had happened here. Marciana told me that Americans, unlike Australians, are still welcomed in PNG because Americans didn’t stay after World War II and occupy land. One story goes that, in a show of support post-9/11, the Moresby police surrounded the mosque and shot it up with machine guns.

John and Marciana understood of course that theirs were but the latest in a long line of Western designs on a country well known for rebuffing Western designs. Europeans first set foot here in 1526. But compared to the other New Worlds, this island was hellish: daunting countryside, no obvious wealth, man-eating natives. It remained a lazy and malicious host in the eyes of white men until the mid-19th century. And even then, the British, Dutch, French, Germans, Russians—a thousand Hungarians—continually gag-gifted PNG among themselves.

Most of the contact the white men made was with the tribes of the coasts. Further exploration was rendered impossible by the spine of steep mountains that runs east-west along the length of the island. What lay within these walls—thousands of feet high, with clouds balancing on their rims as if about to tumble inward—seemed dark and unknowable. Until the advent of the airplane.

In the 1930s, two Australian brothers flew into the mountains figuring there to be gold in the remote central Highlands. What they found instead were paleolithic farming villages that had existed, more or less untouched, for tens of thousands of years. There was no metalworking, no domesticated beasts of burden. The Highlanders hadn't had reason to think up the wheel. To them, the two white brothers appeared to be the ghosts of their ancestors, come down from the mist.

In a gesture of peace, the brothers cranked out some Italian opera on a gramophone they’d brought with them. The Highlanders loved it. They clapped and stomped and laughed to the music. The brothers were thrilled. They believed they had transcended cultural gulfs via art. A little later, though, with the help of some pantomime translation, the Australian brothers learned that that was not at all what had happened. The Highlanders fancied the music not because it was beautiful. They liked it, they explained, because the trumpets sounded exactly like the brassy screams of captive women selected for feasting. [annotation q="Now this is the way to give some historical context – make it entertaining. Are you mindful of that, doing the spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down thing?" a="For sure. That’s kind of funny, the spoonful of sugar thing, but yes, I am kind of mindful of that. I think just in general, I tend not to speak with any kind of authoritative, almost scholarly, dry, straightforward prose, even in a piece such as this one where it is a very serious and somewhat dark narrative. For better or worse, any kind of narrative I’m spinning will be drenched in my sensibility, worldview and my voice. It goes back to the idea of including myself in such a dark story. The gaze is outward -- it’s very much not about MY journey to Papua New Guinea, but in terms of how I write and see the world through a subjective filter, to act as if that’s not there, I think it would ring false. I didn’t want to contort the narrative into something that wouldn’t feel true. My personal outlook is a little darkly comic, so if there was any kind of conscious move, it’s to be sure that when I am being a smart-ass or cracking wise, it’s not flying in the face of these dark events."]

The question as to whether this wide gulf could ever have been slowly bridged is moot; this gulf is being forcibly, abruptly sutured shut. In the span of little more than a century, the people here have had to shift from stone to steel to silicon. In some spots, they have jumped directly from hunter-gatherer existence to devotional pictures of Jesus on their iPhones. And the recent discovery of natural gas reserves has only exacerbated change, turning the nation’s previously stagnant economy into one of the world’s fastest-growing.

John and Marciana drove me to Vision City, a three-story shopping mall built recently by Asian investors where, after we had been patted down and metal-detected by a few of the security guards on duty, we ordered dinner at an Australian-themed restaurant that nevertheless had American license plates stapled to the wall. Inside, the wives of oilmen and construction magnates were wearing yoga pants and brave faces. Chinese businessmen were getting absolutely hammered at the bar.

“There’s been a bit of culture clash here between the people and the Chinese who come to supervise investment,” John said, understating the case. He detailed a recent incident in which a Chinese engineer was hacked to death with a machete following an argument with his Papua New Guinean contractors. Next came the tale of the usurious Chinese vendor who was decapitated not far from Vision City.

This influx of foreign influence, money and durable goods has brought conspicuous consumption to PNG, complete with its attendant resentment and envy. Previously, there had been systems of prohibition integrated into many of PNG’s traditional societies that regulated public exhibitions of wealth or standing, such as pigs and shells. The preening of one’s status wasn’t just tabu; it was dangerous. The person who threw many large feasts or cultivated many fruitful gardens ran the risk of making his or her clanspeople jelas, a word that goes beyond mere “jealousy” to convey something akin to “a state of uncontrollable, angry covetousness.” Nowadays, a person can make others jelas by owning a car or running a successful highway-side concession stand. Making others jelas is to be avoided, especially since it is believed that witches are very jelas and vindictive creatures indeed.

“I try not to stop and stare at anything—a waterfall, a pretty tree, that—” John said, nodding at a balcony where the legs of empty chairs were casting lengthening shadows in the face of a limpid sunset. “Our tribe thinks white people have a supernatural power that lets us hear precious metals vibrating in the earth.”

That has been one of the constants, John told me, underlying so much piled-on change: the belief that witches are behind most of the negative transformations rocking PNG. “We call them ‘baby Christians,’” John said of the native population. “A lot of them convert because they want the prosperity they see in Christian nations and cultures. But they just slap it on top of their traditional beliefs.” [annotation q="This missionary family must really be true believers. It seems like their plight must be one of the most difficult for anybody doing that kind of work." a="This family, I spent the most time with them, and putting aside the historical question of Christian missionaries, they were as wonderful people as you could ask to be around, as wonderful and as giving as I could’ve asked for. You’re exactly right -- what definitely struck me was not just how devoted they were to what they believed to be their own mission, but they seemed indefatigable. They were in the bush. They had a couple of solar panels, but they had to walk several days to reach an airstrip to be able to get anywhere. They had to learn the separate dialect of the people they were living with. They had three young children, and both of them were younger than I was, and the resolve and belief really boggled my mind. They relayed some anecdotes to me where I was just like, “Good god. What are you doing?” But from what I know, the only outside contact the people of PNG have are either with people there to extract resources, or people there to save their souls. I’m sure that kind of exacerbated the strangeness of the mixing of modern, technological, Western religious beliefs and the anachronisms found in the country."]

In a nation with little to no infrastructure, missionaries remain a primary point of contact between rural PNGers and the West. Much of the medical care and humanitarian aid dispensed in the bush is still provided by the Catholic and Lutheran churches. As such, more than 96 percent of Papua New Guineans identify as Christian. Yet theirs is a fluid, syncretic Christianity, not unlike the Christianity of the Middle Ages, one that has been grafted onto a long-established cosmology rife with demons, witches and relics imbued with power.

John and Marciana themselves seemed rather gleeful about their congregants’ belief in sorcery. I got the sense that it strengthened their self-conception, their missionary bonafides, as if the continued practice of something as heathenistic as witch hunting made their experience that much more authentic.

“You can’t use logic with them,” Marciana said. “Everything needs to be ‘story.’ You only convince them through narrative. How do you think they passed the time out there all those centuries? They tell themselves stories that make sense of what’s happening to them, what’s going on in their lives. All through the night, until 1 or 2 am. Then the pigs get restless at four, and they do it all over again the next day.”

The first tribespeople John and Marciana encountered at their mission did not have a word for the concept of goodness. There was only not-evil. Likewise, there was no such thing as truth; there was only not-lying. When people died, they became spirits, and the world was thick with these ancestral spirits, who did harm if not appeased. These ancestral spirits were what the people worshipped.

“Papua New Guinea didn’t have a single god prior to the white man,” John said on the drive back to the missionary compound. The eldest of his children demanded that the soundtrack to Disney’s Frozen be played again and again as we sped through streets that had cleared out after nightfall. A few individuals could be seen moving between trees or through doorways under the sodium lamps that had not been shot out. “The people here lived—continue to live—in an enchanted world,” John added. “The line between personal agency and impersonal force is not clearly drawn.”

“Kind of like with Catholics,” Marciana joked from the back seat.

I announced that I was planning to meet up with an accused witch and maybe travel with her to the Highlands, where the sorcery-related murder is rampant. John briefly took his eyes off of the road to stare at me, aghast. “The violence up there spreads like fire,” he said. “If you pick a fight with a guy, you’re picking a fight with his cousins, his brothers’ cousins, everyone.” It would be bad enough if I were simply traveling to the Highlands alone, Marciana said. But that I might be traveling with a supposed witch made matters infinitely more dangerous.

“If anyone begins to give you or her trouble,” John said, “just get out. If you get in the middle, don’t watch. Just turn the other way. Run.” [annotation q="What were you thinking in this moment? Were you tempted to say, “Screw this, I don’t need this in my life”?" a=">It was never a question for me. I had come so far, I was definitely going to go up there. When I mentioned that walk across Florida that I undertook, I went with a friend of mine and we didn’t really prepare, we had these big packs. It was extremely dangerous, and somebody had recently gotten killed not far from where we were walking, another guy who was also doing something similar. After less than a week, me and my friend were talking and thinking we must be the dictionary definition of a certain kind of privilege, where those obvious and rational fears that any normal person would deem incredibly unsafe didn’t apply to us. That kind of speaks if not to a certain dumbness, at least to never having been confronted with instances where I was in a position where I actually don’t control what’s going to happen to me."]

III.

The process begins as it has before and since, in a dirt-packed hut where a family is weeping over a corpse. Some relatives grab at the dead boy’s torso, his arms, his face. Others sit cross-legged, smearing black and white mud on their bodies. Most moan, and their moans swirl around the tight space, harmonizing intermittently. This is their haus krai, the traditional ceremony in which every member of an extended family clan comes and sees and grieves for one of their own.

Watch for fireflies, some men whisper. Watch how they move.

Someone should step on the boy’s lower leg, others say. Step on it and wait for a sign to appear.

These relatives believe the dead boy’s spirit has gone over to a large and borderless place. They are very afraid for him. They are very afraid of him. Most of all, they are vengeful. [annotation q="I’m interested by the level of fear and paranoia on display here. I have a personal philosophy that the modern, capitalist, avaricious system we live in has made us all fearful and paranoid, and life was simpler before. But this bucks that notion. Were you surprised by that?" a="Again, any writer who’s going into these situations are going to have lenses through which they view this stuff. Beyond being a white guy from the first world, but more than that. I was raised Catholic, raised to disbelieve in the idea of the Rousseauian natural man, raised to believe that humanity is fundamentally flawed and anywhere you go you’re going to see endemic, shitty behavior or warps in the wood. I certainly didn’t expect to find this Edenic, noble savage idea. Even in the nature of the violence of the witch hunts, I hope I made clear in the story that the white man had a whole lot to do with that. I wasn’t expecting some pristine scene up there. I was obviously shocked at the horrific violence, but without sounding like a jaded asshole, I was like, all right, I can believe that, human beings can be pretty shitty to each other."]

They reflect on anything he could have said or done to bring about his misfortune. Did anyone want him dead? Who could possibly want a boy dead? Who was his last contact with? Did anyone offer him food or drink?

Someone should hold a length of bamboo and call out names, one man offers. The bamboo will move when the witch is called.

An older relative speaks up. What about the neighboring wives? she asks. Other women nod enthusiastically. They speculate on the neighbors’ comings and goings in the days leading up to the boy’s death.

Whose behavior had been out of the ordinary? they wonder. Who had been wandering after sunset? Who had been staring?

Who had unsettled debts? Who was jelas?

Sitting or standing around the hut, the women wonder these things while keeping tight control over their bodies. They are being monitored closely by the men. None of the women dares to rest her head on her hand. Such an expression might be taken to mean that she is communicating with another witch. None of them dares to yawn. Covering her mouth might be taken to mean that she has a devil inside her, a devil she wishes to keep. The men watch for such signs, the small details out of place. The women know this, and so grieve theatrically.

One woman coughs. The chatter stops. This woman speaks softly, offering a medical explanation for the boy’s death. It was an ordinary death, she is saying. The boy caught an illness in his stomach. He simply died.

And what caused his illness? shoots back another.

There is only one explanation they can agree on: A witch had extracted the boy’s heart. She had stolen it, and she was eating it piece by piece, savoring it like a crocodile with its drowned prey. If the clanspeople did not hurry, if they did not find the witch and retrieve the boy’s heart, he would surely walk alone in the spirit world forever.

The younger relatives do not know much of their tradition. Their tradition is contained by no book or photograph; their tradition had been one unbroken story passed from lips to ears. Yet they know of this—witchcraft, sorcery, puri puri, mura mura dikana, kumo, sanguma. The young have been told that the witches are behind their people’s unraveling, and they have been taught to fear them very much, regardless of what the missionaries and the white men say. How can the missionaries and the white men say that sorcery isn’t real while also talking of a good God? If God is good, who is doing evil in His world? No, evil is real. Witches are real.

It is decided: The relatives will hire a glas meri, a witch who now uses her powers for good. For a large fee, the glas meri will divine for them the one responsible. And then they will capture this evil creature. They will retrieve the boy’s heart and destroy the witch before she can bring more chaos upon the people of the settlement.

------

The United Nations' worldwide Human Rights Day coincided with my time in Moresby. Speeches and seminars were held in a hotel’s dusty conference room, where many women in long, flowing, floral-patterned gowns known as meri dresses explained how bad things were to a few white U.N. agents. Two male members of parliament were present, saying things like, "Gender-based violence is the most pressing human rights issue in our country."

Whenever a speaker intimated anything relating to change or optimism, 60 people clapped politely, and one woman in a meri dress laughed hard. She was seated in the rear of the room, where she was free to throw back her head and flail her arms with each bright, three-note titter. This was Monica Paulus, the witch savior of Papua New Guinea. [annotation q="This is a great way to introduce her, in contrast to sanctimonious chatter. It comes fairly late in the story, for a central character. Did you consider having this higher?" a="The story is centered around Monica; she’s definitely the main character. Without her, I don’t know what I would’ve done. But similar to the idea that I couldn’t write this from a righteous, third-person perspective, if we opened directly with Monica, it would not have rung true for me as I experienced it or as it does when I look back on it. So for me to start with her would have assumed a level of understanding or a comprehensive knowledge that I didn’t have. So for me to come as this person with this limited, slowly developing understanding of this place, it’s not until this person shows up that I can finally begin to really start traveling around, getting involved and coming to understand. My editor was also encouraging me to have Monica show up earlier, but the nature of the experience of the story felt like we’ve kind of got to slowly edge our way up to this point because there’s such necessary context and background that I had gotten -- and I thought the reader needed. I wanted to show that it was really an act of faith for me to find her at all, then what a relief it was to find her but also show how much a realist she was about this whole situation."]

About 15 years ago, Monica had been a typical PNG wife, caring for her children and her many subsistence gardens, until her father died suddenly from a heart attack. As the eldest child, she was entitled to inherit his house, but her younger brother wanted it badly and accused her of killing their father with witchcraft. Jelasy like his is very often a motivating factor in Highlands witchcraft accusations. The accuser knows that the supposed witch will be killed or forced to flee, leaving the object of his jelasy—the witch’s house, possessions or land—free for the taking.

“I walked away for some time, lived in another province for some time,” Monica told me, demurring when I asked how she had escaped torture. But she couldn’t ignore or rationalize the violence anymore, now that she had been in the witches’ position. “So I came back to [the Highlands] where it started."

Monica now spends her days assisting supposed witches by hiding them in safe houses, relocating them to new provinces, providing them with food or medical care and presenting their cases to anyone who will listen. They are primarily women, and often they bring their children with them, because in many of PNG’s traditional systems of belief, evil spirits reside in the womb. In return for helping these women, Monica and a number of her female colleagues receive death threats every day.

Before leaving New York to come to PNG, I’d done a small bit of correspondence with Monica via email and patchy Skype. We were able to piece together an understanding: She would show me around the country, and I would bring outside attention to what I saw. Aside from that, she said, all she wanted in return were a few cans of duty-free beer.

After presentations on rape and spousal abuse—marital rape wasn’t criminalized in PNG until 2003, and spousal abuse not until 2013—Monica got up in front of the room and delivered a presentation of her own. Her head barely peeked over the lectern. She had a tight perm, black as a burnt match, and the stout physique that is most prevalent among PNG's Highlanders. It's a build and bone structure that screams pugnacious.

“I felt like, 'If I don't do it, who else is going to do this work?’” Monica said over the clatter of porcelain, as servers set down coffee and sandwiches in the rear of the room. Someone asked how many lives she’s saved. Monica said that she wasn’t sure. At least 20 in the Highlands. She couldn’t think of anyone who was doing this work before her.

Which was not to say that there's no such thing as practitioners of the occult arts, Monica clarified. There were—and are—people who engage in witchcraft, sorcery, sanguma. The rites are passed down, the spells fiercely guarded. "It is not just that it’s practiced," Monica said. "It is that everybody believes in it. The prime minister believes in it. The police chief in the city of Kundiawa believes in it. They had a national sorcery conference last year, an academic conference, and more than half of the scholars in attendance said they believed in witchcraft.

“I believed in it, before I was accused,” Monica admitted. When she was younger, she was sure that witches were behind the unseen, unencumbered forces pulling her land apart. She believed that their terrible crimes must be met with an equally terrible punishment. She threw her head back and laughed.

Until 2013, the right to kill a witch in self-defense had been codified in PNG’s constitution, under a provision known as the Sorcery Act. Faced with international pressure post-Kepari Leniata, the government repealed the act and reinstated the death penalty for cases in which an accused witch is murdered. But Monica believed that the death penalty made things more dangerous for her, as those complicit in the murder of a witch—in many cases, whole villages—would sooner kill a compliant witness than face prosecution.

“Talking to people outside of my country, I will tell them I was accused as a witch," Monica said. "But within my own country, I don’t say that a lot. There are people who will say, 'OK, because she’s doing this work, she’s supporting her kind. She’s helping witches like herself.'”

Monica gestured with a notebook in hand. In it were the phone numbers and addresses of practically every suspected witch in PNG. Its cardboard cover had gone limp and cottony from handling. “You can do something,” she said, scanning for the white faces in the audience. "Are you interested in saving lives? You’ve got the money, you’ve got the resources there.” She outlined her ideal set-up: rapid-response teams situated throughout the country with access to vehicles, gasoline—and sums of cash to pay off mobs of would-be killers. “If you want us to do it … give us the necessary things we will use to do it, and just get out of our way."

The white U.N. agents as well as the women in meri dresses applauded her. They applauded everybody. Today was a day for acknowledging that PNG was in the depths of a crisis. Tomorrow, and each day after that, was for combatting the paradox at its center: How does a nation outlaw its ontology, its belief?

Once Monica came down from the dais, I introduced myself. She hugged me and told me to gird myself for the Highlands, where the culture remains overwhelmingly, defensively masculine. We would attract a lot of attention, she said, because associating with a woman in public is considered something of a sign of weakness. In the Highlands, you suffered offenses according to your ability—or lack thereof—to protect yourself.

IV.

The glas meri divined three suspects for the dead boy's relatives. Two were elderly women who had come to Warakum from the province of Chimbu, which was notorious for its witches; the third was a 20-year-old mother from the grieving family’s own ancestral province, Enga. It was one of these three that stole your son’s heart in the night, the glas meri explained.

And so, the men of the dead boy’s family tracked down the two crones who were hiding in the bush. When the men apprehended them, they wondered of them, If you are innocent, why did you flee?

The men struck a fire. They thrust iron rods into the flames, and they turned them until their upper lengths glowed orange to white. If you are innocent, they wondered of the women, why do you fear?

The men tore away the women’s clothes. They struck the crones, who cried out. The men knew that their blows would simply bounce off of them if they were witches. Witches have skin like rubber. Not only this: If they were witches, their treachery would include crying out that these blows were harming them, even when the blows were not. [annotation q="The amount of circuitous logic reminds me of pledging a fraternity, or basic training for the military, when someone is forced to act, but anything they do will be met with suspicion. How did you judge the morality of the witch-hunters?" a=">Well, again, I do believe in the idea of a universal human nature, so even when you speak of something like a vicious circle, or the circuitous nature of violence, I try to be as empathic as I could. I tried to kind of understand it from the point of view of something as simple as a gang or a blood feud or something like that. Where, like, especially if you believe there’s a direct agent behind every misfortune, or a boon behind the opposite, especially if you’re from behind a clan-based society where blood is very important, I tried to understand as best I could through the lens of the developing world, and the circuitous violence that can happen there. Obviously it’s an abhorrent and monstrous cycle of violence. One way I thought about ending the story was kind of an appeal in that regard, saying that in fact these aren’t some backward people who will be met by progress at some point and all of this will eventually be gone. The line of good and evil runs through everyone’s heart, and the judgment there -- speaking of judgment -- is always kind of a he-who-throws-the-first-stone thing."]

How can you defend your actions? the men asked. How can accused such as you be defended? By witnesses? Witchcraft is, by its evil nature, an invisible crime. Who may possibly be witness to it? The witch and the victim, they said. None other.

We can’t expect you to accuse yourselves, can we? they asked. We must rely upon your victims. And they do testify. The body of the child you killed did testify. The good sorcery of the glas meri saw to that.

The men removed the rods from the fire and applied them to the skin of the witches, which closed over the wounds even as the hot irons were being applied. The men were deaf to their cries. Tell us where you put it, they demanded. Tell us where you put the young boy’s heart. Give it back to us so that we can make him whole again. Tell us where you put the heart so we can bring him back.

It wasn’t us! the crones said, sounding exactly like begging women. Please! they screamed.

Give us the name of the real witch, the men demanded. They rolled the irons through the coals.

Yes! Yes! the pair said. We admit to practicing sorcery! But we did not practice it on that boy. We had nothing to do with that boy.

Kolim nem, the gang demanded. Call the name.

Spare us, and we can tell you who did it.

Kolim nem.

The girl, they said. The third one. Kepari Leniata. They said the name over and over. A timeless wail: Not I, sirs, but her. [annotation q="This is very effective, an aria of blame and self-salvation. Did you see it as being almost operatic, this scene but also the story as a whole?" a="There was a conscious decision there to demonstrate this kind of ritual nature of the witch hunts. They were honestly undertaken, but as a ritual it was kind of performative. There were people who were playing their roles and enact this kind of opera, or play, or liturgy -- any kind of narrative where people have a prescribed role in carrying this thing out. In playing this thing out, we’re getting rid of the evil, coming closer together, pushing the spirit out of our community and becoming whole again. There was a kind of conscious choice to couch it in this Arthur Millerian, “Crucible” nature of a stage play, where it’s all action verbs and stage direction. There’s not a lot of introspection going on, but people are playing a part in this kind of ancient thing that has become warped with the modernity and encroaching outside influences. I definitely wanted to play up that ritual nature of this."]

----

Monica and I dropped out of dense, milky clouds as our propeller plane neared the small city of Goroka. Below us, swaths of algal-green jungle retreated from the spine of PNG’s central mountains. Gullies were veined with thatched and smoking villages.

The Highlands are a kind of agricultural island within an island. The nation’s only arable land allowed complex societies to entrench themselves. More than 800 languages, or about one eighth of the world’s linguistic total, are spoken here. Yet so many distinct languages developed across this craggy terrain because Highlanders tended not to venture more than 10 miles from their familial village over the course of their lives. Of the three options available to anyone making contact with another—confrontation, retreat or dialogue—history seems to indicate that the Highlanders most often opted for confrontation or retreat.

But in the past decade or so, Monica told me, scores of these villager-farmers have been trickling down from the mountains. They’re looking for work in Mount Hagen and Moresby, where Exxon expects its newly switched-on pipeline to more than double GDP. That, or they are themselves refugees from sorcery-related violence. These migrants live in crowded shantytowns on the cities’ outskirts, surrounded by strangers from far-flung clans. Men grow frustrated, and turn to powerful home-brew alcohol known as stim. Sometimes, they join up with bands of criminals known as raskols. Theft, rape and murder abound in the settlements.

At the same time, the migrants are bombarded with images of Western culture and status. They have satellite televisions and smartphones. They watch expats speed through their settlements in bulletproof Range Rovers. And their capacity for jelasy—as well as their keenness to detect potential sorcery—increases proportionally. These migrants, vulnerable people cut off from their support systems, see in the ruthless methods of Highland witch hunters—methods perhaps discussed with a new neighbor or an acquaintance on social media—a form of collective action that might be powerful enough to check the forces of entropy.

And, should some of these migrants return home, they bring with them this new, more virulent strain of the ritual. Traditional communities no longer decide upon their witch, enter her hut under cover of darkness, stitch her into a bag and toss her in the river or off a cliff. Now, suspected witches are tried publicly before they are roasted over open flames, crucified, dragged behind vehicles, strung up and beaten to death, buried alive, beheaded, forced to drink gasoline or stoned.

“It is the blowing of the wind,” Monica said. “It moves everything now.”

A few hours before we left for the Highlands, Monica had received a frantic 4 am text message from the executive director of an Australian NGO. A suspected witch was being tortured and interrogated in the Mount Hagen settlement of Warakum. If Monica couldn’t organize a rescue operation in time, another execution would take place at the Kerebug dump, the site of Kepari Leniata’s death in 2013.

Off the plane, the thin, gray air of Goroka felt like a physical relief following Moresby’s stifling closeness. Monica led me toward the Lutheran Guest House, pushing our way across a trampled field where some men were doing a brisk business selling actual snake oil from the bed of a Toyota Hi-Lux. “Now we will see what good the U.N. delegation was, in how the Hagen human rights defenders respond," Monica said.

Monica has lived in Goroka since May 2014, splitting time between the houses of several friends. It’s not exactly safe for her here, but she continues to work out of this small valley city because it is accessible to PNG’s one highway through the mountains, meaning she can get to the sites of potential witch killings relatively quickly. The village where she grew up is in the adjoining province of Chimbu, yet Monica rarely returns for fear of reprisal; according to the twisted logic of the witch hunt, the fact that she was able to flee confirmed Monica’s guilt in the eyes of her community. Her clanspeople ended up setting fire to her house.

This was perhaps the most important thing to understand about the brutal nature of PNG, Monica said—no one owns the violence in this country. There is no monopoly on it, state-held or otherwise. PNG counts about 4,800 police officers, total, for a far-flung nation of seven million. And this constabulary lacks everything from uniforms, to pay, to fuel for their vehicles. To file an assault report with the police, one must first obtain a medical statement, which costs more than most Papua New Guineans can afford. Also, a victim has to provide investigators with gasoline. All of which keeps the likelihood of a criminal’s being caught and prosecuted in PNG hovering around 3 percent.

At the Lutheran Guest House, Monica made a command center out of the upstairs common room. She got on the horn—in her case, an Android handset with a wonky battery—and called Cathy Wali, one of the defenders from Mount Hagen. "Cathy," she said, "go to the police station. Collect information from locals, but be careful! You don’t know who’s a perpetrator. … No, no, just tok tok with some of them around this place. See if the woman is still alive, or if they are already gathering the tires."

Purple clouds time-lapsed across the open windows before a lightning bolt spiked a nearby radio tower, causing us both to shrink into a cringe. From the couch, Monica sent a text to the NGO director who first alerted her to the new Warakum witch trial. The director texted back, saying that he was in communication with the Mount Hagen Family and Sexual Violence unit. He was on the case, he reassured her. The lights in the Guest House flickered, and then they went dark.

Monica tried to make a few more calls, but her phone ran out of prepaid minutes, so we walked to a liquor-store hut down the path from the Guest House. There, I bought her a few phone cards; she scratched off their access codes while "Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town" played on a boom box behind the chicken-wired countertop. On the way back, we saw that the Mount Hagen Family and Sexual Violence unit’s truck was nowhere near the Kerebug dump, but here, in Goroka, parked in front of the one Western-style restaurant in town.

Monica’s reactivated phone buzzed with backed-up texts and status updates. She tried the Australian NGO several times; her calls went straight to voicemail. She tried the director’s secretary. “Me, ah, Monica here,” she said, sliding from Tok Pisin into English. “A woman has been held hostage, and they are preparing to burn her maybe tomorrow or tonight. … The police and the team in Hagen are not responding. … I just want you to help me to get other people at the national level so we could all work together to save this woman, before these things happen? Pleeeease? Yes, now! Because they will kill her.” Monica hung up. [annotation q="This builds the tension really well. Do you like using pure scene as dramatic device?" a=">Absolutely. Like I was saying before, I don’t consider myself particularly smart or comprehensive about this situations I might find myself, I don’t necessarily feel comfortable having a more kind of New Yorker, at a remove kind of storytelling. Not to reduce it to a dichotomy of show v. tell, but I just don’t think I have the wherewithal to be able to explain it at all, so it’s both a crutch and I also kind of enjoy it more when a piece has that kind of forward momentum. When you pull that double duty, where you’re both moving the narrative forward and revealing character in turn."]

As rain fell, thickening from light to torrential in a matter of minutes, the common area grew very dim. Monica gripped her phone and whispered, Come on.

“It is the same people as were involved with the Kepari Leniata case," she said. "I am absolutely sure of this."

A few hours later, a new message announced itself. It was from the NGO director, a Facebook post that read: "Hi Monica—People are watching an helpless lady. Please can you please intervene before she is tortured to death. God please help save this young girl dying in the hands of those heartless animals." The comments laddered underneath the post said things like, "Monica, please!" "Come on, Monica!" "Do something!” Monica wondered aloud if these people weren’t themselves in the crowd, doing nothing.

“I’m trying to do something on the ground, and you’re posting on Facebook?" she asked the absent director. "What is it? Am I God? Do I make miracles? I am sorry for this woman, but what else can I do?”

The common area was almost completely dark, and rain drummed steadily on the tin roof. Curtains were billowing with gusts of wind before collapsing against the open windows. Finally a call came in from Father Phil Gibbs, a missionary from New Zealand and 40-year veteran of the Highlands. Monica gave him the rundown. Father Gibbs jumped into his car and drove post-haste to Mount Hagen from Enga Province, where he’d been helping four unrelated women go into hiding following their own witchcraft accusations.

Throughout the night, Monica continued to act as a kind of conduit, an emergency switchboard operator receiving warnings, relaying messages and scrambling first responders. At 4 a.m., she finally tracked down someone willing to rent us a vehicle—the provincial police commander, who wanted $400 for the single-day use of his newish van, and who also wanted nothing to do with the rescue operation we were undertaking.

Twenty-four hours after we had been alerted to it, Monica, myself and an imposing driver named John sped toward the torture at the Kerebug dump. We were going to save a life, I kept telling myself, even as my breathing grew shallower. Monica and John carried no weapons, but I made note of the heavy wooden truncheon that was rolling along the betel-stained floor of our van as it climbed the Highlands Highway. I was struck by the lightheadedness that comes with the sense of having lost control of events. We were going to disrupt the ritual. That, or discover another unidentifiably carbonized body in the community’s ash heap. [annotation q="I can’t help but ask what the comedown was like, on your return to the U.S.? You must’ve been completely frayed, like after a long drug trip where everything is completely surreal." a=">It was very unsettling to be there, and talk about this stuff, and hear the stories of these people along the highlands highway. I was able to talk to a lot of these women, and a lot of their stories didn’t end up in the finished narrative. But a lot of them, saying their mothers had been killed, the families dispersed, and so on. I was worried that would make me a little numb, or reduced to steeling myself against humanity and this human horror. When I got back, a friend of mine who was a Marine veteran and had been in Fallujah, had been living with me and it was really awesome to come back and slide back into the roommate slash brother situation, where we could crack a beer and put on an infinite loop of YouTube videos of dads getting blasted in the nards. I live alone now, and I would not have wanted to return home and process that stuff emotionally and psychologically by myself."]

♦ ♦ ♦

It was 110 miles from Goroka to Mount Hagen, but the trip took more than half a day, as the highway’s asphalt had been chewed to gravel by processions of heavy-duty energy-extraction machinery. The jouncing was physically exhausting; at particularly steep junctions, it was terrifying. Monica pointed out the new liquid natural gas pipeline that ran through the Highlands to Moresby and explained that the distribution of its royalties would be yet another point of contention for clans who already fought frequently and viciously over subsistence farmland. We passed many unpaved turnoffs that led to webs of these clans’ villages branching up- and down-mountain.

Each of these villages held at least one story of sorcery-related violence. While in the Highlands, I heard some of them. I heard the story of a parliament member who tortured his wife for his typhoid. After accusing her of hexing his water, the MP invited the police to come by and watch his wife’s ordeal, so they could ensure that everything was proceeding accordingly. I heard the story of a girl who was forced out of PNG altogether because she shared betel nut with a warrior who later died a coward’s death in a tribal fight. The rest of the girl’s family still lived among her accusers, in fear, because they didn’t want to lose their land. "Every week, they pull a woman out of the river without a head," the young girl’s mother told me when I spoke with her. "It’s happening. Tru tru. Like pulling fish."

I also visited a village not far from Monica’s in Chimbu, a part of the country where an estimated 20 sorcery-related murders were committed every month. There, I was granted an audience with its young, progressive, college-educated chief-in-waiting. He was named Anton, and he referred to witchcraft and sorcery-related violence as “a challenge to development.” He took me up a low bluff and swept a hand over the land that would become his. I noticed a couple of charred gaps between huts and asked what they were. "We had to kick out two families, for witchcraft," he said. "A young man died. A young man my age, college-educated. Over there. You can see his grave. After much internal debate, we decided just to force them out and take their lands. Not kill them."

Anton emphasized that it was natural—it made sense—for the average Papua New Guinean to believe in witchcraft. It is the belief that undergirds society; it’s what has upheld order in the absence of strong, centralized government. The great danger in a place like PNG, where there is no real judiciary, where allegiance is tied to blood, is that reprisal will come back around, again and again as in the “vicious circles” of family vendettas and gang wars, force fueling force like a fire fed on the very things thrown over it, the attempts to snuff it out. As such, violence and death must be contained, regulated and explained through the framework of something like witchcraft.

“You visitors,” he told me before sending me off for the day, “you don’t understand—you don’t well understand—that we want to keep this tradition. This is our tradition. This is where the strength of our communities has traditionally come from. Our social harmony was going along until the white man arrived. There wasn’t torture until now. You intrude, and suddenly the things that used to go smoothly no longer do.” [annotation q="This man has quite a Hobbesian view of man in nature. What was your sense of him, as an educated person living within this context?" a="Like we were talking about before, I thought it was important to not just impose my own conclusions on this place, but also know what others thought. And not just the young dudes who got drunk on homemade liquor and hacked at a lady who were “carried along by the wind,” as Monica would call it, but I wanted to talk to somebody who was going to be in a position of power going forward, especially a guy in this patriarchal society. I was excited to be able to hear if this guy thought this was useful. You want to know if somebody believes in the sanctity, or if not that, the autonomy of their culture. It was interesting that any woman could see, from the moment they were accused, what bullshit this was, but I wanted to talk to someone who would be running stuff in a couple of years."]

The sun was high by the time Monica and I reached the wide, unpaved roads of Hagen’s outskirts. Discarded playing cards were sprinkled every couple of steps; gambling was considered such a problem here that police liked to go around forcing poker players to chew and swallow their hands. Monica laughed as she recounted the two times she’d been robbed in Hagen. "They didn’t stab me, at least," she said. She told me about an Australian photojournalist she took to the Warakum settlement. He had been assaulted and relieved of his equipment. "I don’t like to get out of the car," she said. "Except in Father Gibbs’ mission."

When we reached the mission, a sprawling compound of low buildings painted a Marian combination of sky blue and white, we drove the length of its muddy byways several times over, searching for Father Gibbs. Monica grew frenzied. She pushed herself halfway out the van’s open window, screaming at gardeners and nuns, “Where is Father Gibbs? Please!”

Finally we found him walking to his shack at the rear of the compound, a thin older man belted tightly into too-big secondhand clothes. When he saw us, he nodded and held up his palms at chest-level, to calm us. “It’s OK!” Father Gibbs shouted, smiling. The eyes set into his washed-out face glowed glacially blue. Monica and I jogged to him, our jabbered questions wrestling for primacy. He invited us into his shack for tea. "She’s fine,” he said. “Margaret is fine.”

Father Gibbs told us that, apparently, the information Monica received from the Australian NGO was secondhand, and about 12 hours old. “We can thank Facebook for the confusion,” he added. Then he played Margaret’s video testimony, which he had just returned from recording.

Her split and swollen face appeared onscreen, where she said: The dead boy had been very close with her. She had often fed him in her shack, the same Warakum shack she has lived in for 16, 17 years. Margaret fought with this boy’s mother sometimes, but that was natural, who doesn’t argue? “We share betel nut, smoke, money and food with each other,” she said. Yet her sister-in-law’s son died, and two days later at the haus krai, one of the boy’s relatives fell into a trance. She began to wail and speak in tongues, she touched the dead boy’s chest, she claimed that two women—one black, and the other a lighter shade—had stolen the boy’s heart. “Two women were involved, but after further discussions and gossips about my past arguments with my in-law, they included me also,” Margaret said. “You know how women talk when they are together.”

The dead boy’s father got drunk, took a long iron rod and beat Margaret with it. Then, the male neighbors up and down her street joined in. “They attacked me until I thought I was going to die,” Margaret told the camera. “I am a sinner, but that moment I prayed to the Lord and said, ‘Lord, the ordinary people cannot see the inside of me. They cannot operate my skin or body to see my inside. Only you know my inside and my thoughts. I am dying, so I give myself to your hands.’ ... They told me to sit on a chair beside four tires they lined up. They told me, ‘You will sit on the tires and we will burn you.’”

"By the time I got to the settlement," Father Gibbs said, "she’d been freed by her husband and the police. I went to the hospital, but she’d already been sent home.” Both he and Monica were shocked that the police intervened. They thought it might have had something to do with a very recent civil disturbance in Hagen, one in which some clanspeople beat a police officer to death after a traffic accident. Tensions were high, and the police were more likely to flex their muscle.

“The problem," Father Gibbs continued, "was that she had named two more people under torture. She named two more women who were known to have 100-kina debts with the deceased boy’s family." This case wasn’t resolved, they knew. They had not escaped its gravity. Within days or weeks or months, they’d likely have to scramble to save a life related to this boy’s death.

We got up to go. Monica told Father Gibbs that she’d see him sometime soon. I was relieved. Relieved that this woman, Margaret, had not been killed. But there was a truer, more selfish relief effervescing under that one: I was relieved that I did not have to stand up to unanimous violence and act as intercessor. I did not have to do what Monica does every day.

After that, I asked to be taken to Warakum and the Kerebug dump. Monica refused to leave the van. Our driver John did likewise. Warakum was dirt trails, corrugated shacks, scaly dogs and nothing green. I sensed that I was being watched by many eyes. I walked over to Kerebug. There, swineherds tended to their pigs as they rooted through the plastic bags, sodden cartons and discarded tires. Clouds seemed to be wrapping themselves around the mountainside like bandages around a head.

The graveyard where Kepari Leniata’s body lay in an unmarked grave was across the street from Kerebug. Most plots had small cement structures built over them, to deter theft and evil spirits. Some young men with machetes and homemade guns were settling down for the night; they were paid to guard the corpses left out in the open.

It was something of a miracle that Kepari Leniata was buried at all. Her body had decayed in the Mount Hagen morgue for nine months before one private citizen finally took the initiative to have her interred. The government had yet to even issue a certificate of death. At the time of this writing, they are still holding inquiries into her murder. The Western Highlands Police and the offices of the State Solicitor, Public Prosecutor, Solicitor General, Court Clerk and Coroner, as well as the Mount Hagen General Hospital morgue’s officer-in-charge have been summoned to provide evidence. They’ve attested that they have none. No family members or community leaders have come forward on behalf of the deceased.

The people I stopped in Warakum told me that they didn’t know anything about Kepari Leniata’s murder or the murders that came before and after hers. They stared at me, or they laughed, or they answered derisively in creole. To them, I was an interloper, someone outside the circular, self-perpetuating system of their belief. It was pointless to talk to me.

I was reminded of something Father Gibbs, Monica, John and Marciana—practically everyone else I met in PNG—had told me: Sorcery works. Sorcery works in that it will harm you if you believe it can harm you. In much the same way, a witch hunt works, insofar as its perpetrators believe in what they are doing. So long as the perpetrators believe in their scapegoat’s guilt, they aren’t killing one among them—they are coming together to solve a problem, experiencing the closeness born of complicity. This may be the most important graf in the story. Does it go back to your French philosopher?" a=">I didn’t want to come with this framework or mode of understanding and try to shoehorn PNG into it, but what astounded me was both the fact of how widespread the belief was, the totality of it (even the Prime Minister believed in witchcraft, Papua New Guinean scholars were looking into it as a cultural artifact), and also within that, it’s very difficult to conceive of that thing not being true. Certainly when you’ve been accused of witchcraft, and you’re in the middle, that’s when the epiphany hits you that this is all bullshit, a way of maintaining a social order and a coherent moral universe. So I expected that to be true, but that wasn’t really even the case. When I was hanging out at the U.N. beachside resort, I was hanging out with all the native Papua New Guineans who were working to combat gender-related violence, I remember there was one young woman. She had studied abroad in New York City and was as normal as could be, and I remember her being like, ‘Yeah, the first time I saw a man stoned to death for being a witch, he was a guy who owned a coffee farm and was very rich. There was a lot of resentment in the community for him and what were thought to be ill-gotten gains.” In my mind, I was thinking, sure, this makes sense, it’s going to be the false accusation and the redistribution of wealth will come about. It’s this quasi-Rene Girardian thing playing out. Then she was like, “Yeah, so he was a witch, so we killed him.” So I felt like there were a lot of congruences, but if I had tried to apply that theory of mimetic violence to PNG, it would have been forcing it into a framework that didn’t exactly fit. So it didn’t exactly conform to those expectations."]

Was Kepari Leniata a witch? She clearly cast some kind of spell over her community.

Quickly, I got back into the police van. A misty rain began to swirl. People were streaming around the highway, hurrying for shelter ahead of night. A little ways outside of Hagen, a group of villagers had strung a downed power line across the highway. They were massed around it, blocking the road, demanding a toll. Monica told me to lie on the floor underneath the bench seat. I stayed that way for a while, smelling the smoky, loamy, strangely Scotch-like aroma of damp fires smoldering amid the mountains.

V.

During one of our last evenings together, Monica and I shared many cans of SP beer while sitting on the waterfront porch of a hotel south of Moresby. The tide was lurching onto the plastic-littered beach, where small skiffs—used for dynamite fishing, Monica told me—rested on their sides. I asked if she’d ever considered leaving PNG. She said she has thought about moving in with a sister in Australia, but ultimately she couldn’t see herself abandoning her homeland. Monica then asked me about America. Specifically, about the Salem witch trials.

I told her that, no, I didn’t think witch hunts were necessarily some barbarous relic of an ignorant past. I considered them a perennial, recurrent phenomenon. In the West, witch hunts have coincided with periods of change and instability. They can occur when one sociological, economic, religious or political framework displaces another. The decline of feudalism, the waning of the Roman Catholic Church, the decimation of Europe’s population by the plague, the threat to the American way of life posed by independent women on the frontier, the threat to the American way of life posed by Communism—all of these things precipitated witch hunts. [annotation q="I would like to hear more about this. Do you also not think that the developed world has evolved, but not exterminated, witch hunting? Is scapegoating in general not a less violent, but still destructive, form of this?" a=">That’s a funny way of putting it, kind of like when people are the victims of institutional racism, having been so beaten down by institutional racism, will just say, like, “It’s actually refreshing when someone says the slur right to my face.” Like I was talking about before, there were several drafts of this, maybe a dozen in all, but in earlier ones I had this grand idea of quoting Solzhenitsyn and all the rest of the stuff. Obviously, I do believe there are certain ineradicable human behaviors, and that this is one of them that humans have. I’m sure I will find a convenient locus of blame for things or people messing up my life, rather than blaming myself, as everyone does all the time. When I was writing this, I didn’t want to come into the story with any preconceived notion of what I thought the second level of this story would be, but as I was writing I thought to myself, “Oh yeah, it’s kind of interesting to write about something so bald-faced, something that’s such a fundamental part of every society that it’s really hard to talk about write about.” It seems so obvious and yet so not."]

Witch hunts, I said, were like earthquakes and mountain ranges. They popped up in times of seismic change.

What I wanted to know was: What had happened in that moment when she was accused?

Monica looked down and kicked off her sandals, wiping her small, bare feet over the few grains of sand that lay scattered across the cracked cement. “It changed my mindset completely,” she said. It had been her honest-to-God conversion moment. When she found herself at the center of her village, in the middle of her family and neighbors, her most loved ones, with all of them pointing their fingers at her—only then could she see with absolute clarity that the whole mechanism was a sham. The violence being done to her in the name of justice, or the greater good, or the cosmic order was not at all distinct from the violence and suffering it hoped to suppress.

She finally understood that misfortune was oftentimes random, with no one agent behind it, and that this was perhaps more frightening than the prospect of witches. She also understood that she would most likely spend the rest of her life alone, physically and spiritually. Over the course of three decades, Monica had amassed property, family and friends—only to have those same family and friends suddenly cast her out, confiscate her property and invalidate her past life. Her three children still loved her, but her other relatives considered her subhuman. “When my husband dies,” she said, “I know they will come for me.”

The two of us watched as the sun halved itself on the horizon line. “We have to do a lot of work in this country,” she said. “There has to be a lot of educational programs to change the mindset of the upcoming youth.”

PNG’s young people needed to learn that diseases are caused by germs, she said, and that tragedy cannot always be explained. Such knowledge—part and parcel of the Westernization occurring so rapidly throughout the country—would certainly go a long way toward ending the scapegoating of witches. Yet that education will take many years to achieve. Fewer than 60 percent of the PNG children who start primary school finish it, and only about 10 percent enroll in high school. PNG has some universities—but their graduates tend to leave the country for better-paying work overseas.

“Do you think you’ll live to see the change?” I asked Monica.

“It will take generations for it to change,” she said solemnly. She told me that right now, maybe five out of every 100 PNGers had come to disbelieve witchcraft. That meant the next generation might have 10 disbelievers for every 90 witch hunters, and 20 in the generation after that and so on.

I told her that I, personally, believed witch hunting might come to an end much sooner than that. I had a pessimistic kind of optimism about PNG, I said.

In the span of a century, the West has introduced more change than PNG’s traditional system can handle. Globalization, democracy, internal displacement, the jelasy inherent to consumer capitalism—these have inundated the scapegoating mechanism, which is now working more ferociously than it ever has. But the perverse silver lining about this is the ritual of killing witches no longer effects the cohesion and coherence that it once did. The collateral damage—the death, dislocation and scorched earth that used to impact only the witch—is spilling outwards, finally outweighing the ritual’s social utility.

Monica chortled at my explanation. “I don’t know,” she said. The theorizing didn’t seem to interest her. She had her mission. She was going to disregard her own suffering and alleviate others’, one witch at a time, because this was all she could do. Alone, she couldn’t make her kinsmen see themselves as she saw them; she couldn’t make them understand that it is they who stand accused.

As the wavering sun sank completely below the waves, a streak of neon light flared across the water—an atmospheric phenomenon known as the “green flash.” “Look at that!” Monica exclaimed. “Look! It’s really beautiful!”

We watched in silence as the green dissipated. Then she said, “If a stranger saw this, he’d say, ‘Oh, this is where the witches are going.’”

Darkness fell like a curtain. Monica laughed herself hoarse. [annotation q="You started with such a shock of violence, then end on this funny, almost tender moment. Was there any symmetry -- or anti-symmetry -- to that? Or had the story, for you, simply finished?" a="Oh, it was totally my editor, stopping me from being either really fucking sentimental or really stupidly philosophical, just trying to tie my hands behind my back as much as possible. I thought that in all of this, one of the things that struck me the most was Monica’s indefatigability, her true sainthood. Long after I left, Monica is still at work on these issues. I can parachute in and spend three weeks and try to make a narrative, but whatever work my narrative is doing for her, she’s still there in PNG doing this work. I wanted to highlight that fact. And also, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, I have come to see this with rose-colored glasses, but part of me likes the idea of ending with an accused witch, cackling as the sun goes down. Everything sans broomstick. The inversion of what people believe her to be, this rogue element of pure goodness, still cackling as if she was this Halloween witch. But mostly it was leaving with the idea that this would be a long, long process. Shamefully I haven’t kept up with PNG as I should have, but it was always my belief that things would get much worse before they got better, and I kept trying to steer or question Monica on that, that they would have to get really bad for people to finally see that all these killings don’t change anything. She wasn’t hearing any of that. She was like an NFL player in the locker room saying she’s going to take it one day at a time, go out every day and give it my all. So I also wanted to end on that kind of idea."]

The post Annotation Tuesday! Kent Russell and “They Burn Witches Here” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Rich Schapiro is always searching. Whether he’s writing a quick-hit 800-word spot feature for the New York Daily News or a magazine feature that’s taken years to report, Schapiro is on the hunt for deeper meaning -- a “character conflict,” as he calls it -- behind every narrative.

Perhaps it is this instinct that turns up stories about collar bombings, or census-taker hangings, or, most recently, a sweeping profile in Outside magazine of one of the most outsized characters in recent nonfiction memory: Ray Stansel, alias Lee Lafferty, a Florida drug smuggler who faked his own death, fled to Australia and became an environmental activist.

Even when he was still a student at American University, Schapiro wasn’t writing the usual campus life story for the college newspaper. Instead, he spent his time on features built less around a news peg than his own interests. Schapiro sought out and wrote about D.C.’s homeless population, and eventually lived on the streets for 10 days.

Now he works as a kind of roving generalist with the Daily News, but he’s still committed to stories that go beyond the news cycle. (His magazine pursuits remain, in his professional scheme, a sleep-depriving side gig.)

So why did he get into longform, working, as he does, for an outlet where most of his stories run fewer than 800 words?

“The work I do at the Daily News, which is still highly compelling for the most part, it’s a certain kind of writing,” Schapiro said. “Doing longform pieces allows me to tell a story a different way, to think about storytelling in a different way, and I think to challenge myself, to take on a kind of writing that I still consider myself a kind of a novice in.”

Some novice. Schapiro’s aforementioned feature for Outside is an ambitious, pulsating odyssey in which the existential questions of morality compete for top billing with the facts of the extraordinary life of the man in question. It’s just the type of find that makes all that searching worthwhile.

This interview took place over a series of phone conversations. It has been condensed and edited.

At least in your longform, you deal with some pretty gruesome stuff -- collar bombs and census-taker hangings, to name a couple. Is that what piques your interest, or?

There’s nothing in particular that I’m looking for. It’s not as if I go into the process of looking for my next story with something specific in mind or a specific genre. I find I am drawn to stories in which there is a mystery at the heart of it. That was certainly the case with the collar bomb, in searching for who was really behind this, and what were their motivations? Many start out as a kind of search for truth, which I guess you could argue is what all journalism is about. And a mystery that’s embedded in a story that has multiple layers, which is what kind of distinguishes a magazine piece from a thousand-word newspaper article. I’m typically looking for stories that have strong narratives, for sure, but also convey some kind of deeper truths, or say something about the human condition that I find interesting, or reveal some kind of conflict within a character I find compelling -- and that was certainly part of the motivation for this story.

I’m curious about your writing style. You keep it simple and to the point, which is a skill that can go missing in long pieces like this. Was it intentional?

I generally try to let the story tell itself. I sometimes find myself drawn to a story based on a headline, for instance, and it will strike me as being overwritten to the point that I get frustrated in the telling. So I generally try to stay out of the way a little bit, and as you said keep it as simple as possible. I think part of that is that I started out as a newspaper writer, and not just at a newspaper but at a tabloid where space is really at a premium, and you’re often forced to tell a fairly complicated story in 300 words. That’s a real challenge in and of itself, and in some ways more difficult than writing a longer piece.

Did you find Stansel/Lafferty through the Tampa Bay Times article that you mention in the story, which was published soon after his death? How much did you feel was left to report? Was there a moment during the research and reporting when you knew you had a longform article on your hands?

Yes, I found it through that piece. In reading that article, I can’t remember exactly where it was in the piece, but when it brought up the fact he had essentially left behind his first family, that’s what initially told me, “Wow, this is more than the story of a guy who lived an extraordinary life; there was a bigger internal conflict here.” I was interested in pursuing that and the story of his children from his first family, particularly the two that went onto become drug fugitives as well. I was interested in what they thought of the decisions their father made, and that led me to have a pretty long and detailed correspondence with each of them in prison.

With the breadth of this guy’s life, this story must have been a bear to structure, both to get the story across in a digestible way but also make it exciting for the reader. What was that process like?

There is no way to overstate the value of having a talented editor. In this case I had an extremely talented editor in Jonah Ogles at Outside. This was a challenging story, for all the reasons you mentioned. I should note that I was playing around with the structure right up until I filed my first draft, which is unusual for me. Usually I have a very clear sense, and I thought I did, and I gave it to a couple people to read, and based on their feedback it seemed I needed to simplify it a bit. I should also note my original draft was over 10,000 words and the story that appeared in the magazine was a bit over 6,000. I simplified right before filing, and then with Jonah guiding it, we simplified the narrative even further -- in terms of the chronology, and when to reveal certain details. I should note he was also the one who encouraged me to insert myself in the story, which is something I frankly try to avoid. He felt it was important to have someone guiding along the reader, a reference point for the reader and also to make the story feel a bit more present and urgent. In hindsight, I think he was absolutely right. While it still felt strange, I think it was the right move.

The True Story of the Fugitive Drug Smuggler Who Became an Environmental Hero

By Rich Schapiro

Originally published on Outside Online on Jan. 16, 2017

When Raymond Stansel was busted in 1974, he was one of Florida’s biggest pot smugglers. Facing trial and years in prison, he jumped bail, changed his name, and holed up in a remote Australian outpost. Even more remarkable than that? His second life as an environmental hero.

Even before he arrived at the accident scene, sergeant Matt Smith knew it would be bad. Smith was in charge of the 12-person police department in Mossman, a speck of a town located along Australia’s remote northeastern edge. He knew from experience that there was a fundamental truth about car wrecks: drivers have a pretty good chance of surviving a crash that’s car versus car, but they rarely walk away from a vehicle that’s slammed into a tree. The call that came over the police radio on that May 26, 2015 afternoon said that a vehicle had struck a tree along a two-lane road hugging the coastline. Smith’s hunch proved true. When he arrived, he found a white Toyota Hilux pickup wrapped around a gum tree as thick as a sumo wrestler. By some miracle bystanders had found a dog, an aging bichon frise, inside the truck, dazed but alive. But the driver had no chance. [annotation q="How did you come to start the story at the end of his life? Was that always the plan?" a="I think it was two-fold. One, as you said, there were a lot of twists and turns in the narrative, and kind of starting at the end and then ending the first section with a sense of what the reader was getting themselves into was a way to kind of set up the story nicely, in a way that would be compelling to the reader as well as make the narrative easy to digest. It was a way to leave the reader thinking, ‘Wow’ at the end of that first section, but also leading them into the story in a way that would make it easy for them to comprehend the twists and turns the story would ultimately take."]

Officers traced the registration to Dennis “Lee” Lafferty, age 75. Everybody knew Lee. Or at least knew of him. He was an American but had spent decades in nearby Daintree, where he operated one of the area’s oldest and most respected tour companies, running boat trips along the crocodile-filled Daintree River.

The river cuts through an ancient tropical rainforest that hosts one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems: rare ribbonwood trees, musky rat-kangaroos, and six-foot-tall southern cassowary birds. Lee was perhaps its greatest champion. It seemed there was no plant or animal he couldn’t identify, and his efforts to protect their habitats had earned him the reputation as one of the region’s most passionate conservationists.

“He was a real gentleman, a lovely man,” said Julia Leu, the mayor of the area. “He had a huge scientific knowledge, and he was definitely one of the people who wanted to preserve what we had.”

Smith spent most of his time at the crash site consoling a small crowd of Lee’s devastated employees, who told him that Lee shouldn’t have been driving. He was on medication for his Parkinson’s disease and prone to nodding off at any moment.

In the coming days, newspapers ran stories about the “local tourism stalwart” who “did not have a bad bone in his body.” There was a packed memorial service. And then everyone but Lee’s family began to move on.

Nearly four weeks after the accident, Smith received a text message from one of his detectives saying that he needed to read an article from a Florida newspaper about Lee. Smith was intrigued. Why would an American publication run a story about a guy in Daintree? The article had appeared in the Tampa Bay Times just a few weeks after Lee’s death.

Sergeant Smith isn’t the sort of person who is easily surprised or impressed. He once walked into a house that a spurned husband had booby-trapped with a speargun and barely flinched. [annotation q="How did you come by this detail?" a="The way you get those details is by earning a source’s trust, and spending a good amount of time with them. I first spoke to Sergeant Smith by phone before I traveled to Australia, and when I got there I met him once in person at the Mossman Police Station, and a few days later he actually drove me out to the accident site. It was actually during that drive where we talked a lot about his previous experiences and his background, and that’s when a lot of those details came out. That’s what you’re always hoping for, to have someone talk to you as if you’re a friend and not a journalist. And not to say he was saying anything compromising, but we knew each other and we felt comfortable around each other. I am always very quick to offer personal details about myself to people I’m interviewing. Part of that is I’m an open person, but part of it is that people are so much more likely to let down their guard if they can relate to you and they can feel like it’s not a one-way transaction."]Following a 2008 cyclone, he chased after a seven­foot-long crocodile gliding up a Mossman road. He has responded to multiple helicopter crashes in the area. When he learned what the article revealed, however, Smith was so amazed that he could utter only one word: “Wow.”

The piece described the life of an American fugitive named Raymond Grady Stansel Jr. In the 1970s, Stansel was a master fisherman who became one of Florida’s biggest pot smugglers, hauling gargantuan 12-ton loads hidden under piles of freshly caught fish. And then he pulled off one of the most dramatic vanishing acts of any outlaw in American history when he skipped bail, faked his own death, and reinvented himself in Australia as Lee Lafferty, tour operator and conservationist.

Since the summer of 2015, I’ve been trying to discover who Stansel truly was. What I ultimately learned—by digging through thousands of pages of court documents and interviewing his closest friends and family on two continents—is that the man lived not one extraordinary life but two.

The west coast of Florida is an angler’s paradise. People come from all over to fish for trout in Tampa Bay, grouper near Madeira Beach, and 100-pound tarpon in Boca Grande. Back in the 1960s, elite fishermen were treated like rock stars. They were invited to cocktail parties, and their exploits were chronicled in the newspapers. Raymond Grady Stansel Jr. was among them. “He was one of my heroes,” Bill Caldwell, who worked as Stansel’s deckhand as a teenager, told me. “He could do anything.”

Stansel was said to be able to back a 46-foot sportfishing boat into a slip with the wind blowing 15 knots and the tide running against him. Legend has it he once single-handedly brought up a 90-foot barge that had sunk in 100-foot waters using only scuba gear and inflatable tubes. [annotation q="What kind of attempts did you make to confirm these stories? There are a lot of them, and a lot of them seem a little larger-than-life." a="I included these kinds of stories because, by all accounts, this was an extraordinary figure and an extraordinary fisherman. If that’s the case, you need to show some examples, so that was the point of including them. In terms of trying to verify, I spoke with numerous of his old friends and acquaintances, who all seem to have good stories about him. They’re good storytellers -- and they’re also known for inflating stores. I typically only used things that had more than one person who was able to confirm them, in detail. That said, I think I did couch it in a way to suggest that I didn’t actually know it. “Legend has it,” “it was said,” things like that. And I was told a lot of things I didn’t include, that seemed like his legend grew in his absence."] He once caught more than 2,000 pounds of grouper in a single weekend. All this despite the fact that he was blind in his left eye, a consequence of being struck in the face with a broom as he and a friend swept the cafeteria floor in middle school.

Stansel was six-foot-two, lean and strong, with wavy dirty blond hair. He’d been raised in a modest house in Saint Petersburg, the son of a commercial fisherman and a Sunday school teacher. His renegade spirit and affinity for the outdoors emerged early in life. By age six, he could use a cast net to catch bait. As a teenager, incensed over the degradation of Florida’s wetlands, he boasted of sinking a massive dredge operating out of Tampa Bay.

When he graduated from high school in 1954, Stansel enlisted in the Air Force, gaining entry by memorizing the eye chart seconds before the exam. He told his friends that he went on to perform one of the Air Force’s most difficult jobs, refueling jets in midair, before he left the military and took up fishing as a profession.

There are several ways to make a living while fishing, from commercial jobs to running a charter boat. Stansel worked his way up to the best gig of all: private captain. He was hired by Clint Murchison Jr., the founder of the Dallas Cowboys, to pilot Murchison’s shimmering 40-foot Miss Centex in 1965. Stansel moved to the Texas side of the Gulf at Murchison’s request, bringing along his wife, Midge, and four kids—Raymond, Ronald, Sabrina, and Terry. They spent their summers in Boca Grande, where Stansel taught his kids to dive, fish for tarpon, and catch stone crabs.

By the late 1960s, though, the Murchison gig had ended. Stansel moved his family back to Florida and ran a charter boat, but the vicissitudes of the weather made things difficult. He tried to compensate for lean times by running stone crab traps in winter. But Stansel struggled alongside the other fishermen, most of whom kept their chins up and pressed on.

“Fishermen are like farmers,” said Bobby Buswell, a longtime friend. “You work your fanny off. You pay your taxes. You make a living. And that’s it.”

Stansel wanted more. There’s some disagreement as to how and when he was first drawn into smuggling. By one account, some dealers with a Jamaican connection approached him in the late 1960s because he was known as an expert boat captain and a family man unlikely to draw the attention of law enforcement. Another version had Stansel pulling off his first run in 1971, after he was recruited by two young smugglers who needed a bigger boat and were intrigued by the 44-foot T-Craft that Stansel had built himself. Wherever the truth lies, Stansel’s pot-smuggling enterprise was booming by the early 1970s. Marijuana was harder to come by in the U.S. in those days, a consequence of President Richard Nixon’s effort to shut off the flow from Mexico. But in Jamaica, buying a few ounces was as easy as buying a piece of fruit. “People would come off the street and offer to sell you their ganja,” recalled Mike Hubbard, who helped orchestrate one of Stansel’s earliest runs.

The marijuana was grown deep in the hills by villagers, who sold their product in 50-pound burlap sacks. Making connections was easy; transporting it back to the States—where it could sell for $175 a pound, a profit of $165—posed a challenge. So dealers turned to guys like Stansel, who knew practically every sheltered cove on the coast.

Word of this new source of income would eventually spread among Florida fishermen, but at the time, Stansel was one of the few players in the game. He soon expanded his operations into Colombia, which produced the most prized pot on the planet, by forming a partnership with a major supplier named Raul “Black Tuna” Davila-Jimeno.

Stansel would pilot his loaded-down boat five days from Jamaica (or ten from Colombia) into Florida’s maze of inlets. Under cover of darkness, they’d transfer the bales of marijuana, which “looked like horse feed,” according to one Stansel associate, right onto the beach, where they were weighed on massive scales. It took years for law enforcement to realize how much was arriving via the Florida coast. (In just two operations in 1974, they reportedly seized more than 200,000 pounds.) [annotation q="Do you know why the War on Drugs crackdown seemed to miss the Florida coast?" a="When I said the final draft being almost half of the first draft, it was sections like this that got a lot of stuff cut out. By the time I finished reporting, I was very steeped in the state of Florida’s battle against the drug trade in the 1960s and early 70s, which I found fascinating. I was fortunate that the prosecutor at the time was extremely generous with his time, and really described what things were like. I also spoke with numerous retired investigators, mostly at the state level, in addition to former smugglers. I also read a couple of books on the matter. I really had more information than I knew what to do with. Stansel’s arrest was an extremely big deal in that he was the first person arrested by this newly formed statewide grand jury, created by the then-governor because they just started getting wind of the amount of marijuana entering the U.S. via Florida. There were a couple massive seizures of boats just before Stansel was arrested -- several tons of pot -- that basically forced the authorities to take action, and to realize just how much marijuana was being smuggled. Up to that point, most of it was coming from Mexico, but these fishermen and other smugglers branched out into Jamaica after Nixon cracked down, and it turned out the weed coming out of Jamaica was far more potent and valuable than Mexico’s stuff, then Colombia became the place producing the finest pot."]

To the guys on Stansel’s crew, smuggling came to feel like just another activity on the water. “We trusted each other. No contracts,” said Hans Geissler, a former French Foreign Legion soldier and elite sailor who Stansel recruited. “We were a pretty close-knit group. Sailing off the beach, jumping waves, surfing, Jimmy Buffett. It was a nice little crowd, and smuggling felt like part of it.”

Stansel soon had more money than he knew what to do with. For a while, he stacked $100 bills in orange crates in his parents’ attic. But when his father found them, Stansel looked for more sophisticated hiding places. He opened a bank account in the Cayman Islands, bought gold bars in Costa Rica, and set up seafood and boat-building companies in Panama and Honduras. He also bought something he’d need to expand his operation: more boats. Soon, workers at the pier noticed that Stansel routinely made trips to sea without any ice—a necessity for anyone planning to catch and sell seafood—and then returned with his vessel riding low in the water, nets bone dry.

On the morning of June 6, 1974, Stansel emerged from room 23 of the Sheraton Bel-Air, a luxury beachside resort in Saint Petersburg. Striding toward the parking lot with a brown briefcase in his hand, he blended in easily with the hotel’s well-heeled clientele. He folded his lanky frame into the driver’s seat of an Avis rental car, keyed the ignition, and turned north on Sunshine Skyway. Seconds later a group of unmarked police cars pulled out behind him. [annotation q="This graf is so cinematic. I can see the camera following him. Do you ever think like a screenwriter or a director,  like you're creating a movie, as you write? And speaking of movies, is anyone trying to make one about him?" a="This was actually how I opened the story in an early draft. I think it can be helpful to think about how a filmmaker would tell your story. Movies are driven by scenes, and I tend to be drawn to those stories that present particularly vivid ones. I try to, whenever possible, knit together scenes that propel the narrative forward but also reveal a deeper meaning about a person or event or whatever the focus is. When writing scenes, you want to provide as much detail as possible, to make the readers feel like they’re there. In essence, to make the stories feel cinematic. I don’t believe a movie about Stansel/Lafferty is currently in the works, but I do hope someone will make one."]

Stansel had been under surveillance since he flew home from Central America a few days earlier. By now he was considered one of the state’s most prolific smugglers. Just after he turned off the highway, police radios crackled with news: a statewide grand jury had issued an indictment against him and three of his partners for conspiracy to possess marijuana. The officers flipped on their sirens and boxed Stansel in. They jumped out of their cars, ordered him to exit his vehicle, and cuffed him without incident. In his pockets he had $5,476 in cash.

At the station, officers cracked open his briefcase to reveal his other possessions: an additional $20,000 in cash stuffed inside a manila envelope; paper currency from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Kenya; photographs of what appeared to be marijuana; blank tourist visas that would allow him to enter Nicaragua whenever he pleased; unused checks from a Swiss bank account; paperwork from Germany showing that his new Mercedes was ready to be picked up; and, finally, his passport, which was so thick that it stretched out like an accordion and indicated that he had been to 12 countries in the past 30 days, including Jamaica, Colombia, Japan, Hong Kong, Panama, and the Cayman Islands. The case against him was already strong—the cops had flipped several of his associates. With the items from his briefcase, Stansel would almost certainly do time. [annotation q="How much digging did it take to get to the court documents with these details?" a="It was a challenge to get the documents, but the difficulty wasn’t really on my end, it was on the end of the people who work at the courthouse where all the documents were located. They really had to dig deep in their archives, and it took quite a lot of time and effort, and I’m in deep gratitude. It took a period of weeks and I think months for them to pull up everything, and it started with some very detailed conversations between me and one of the clerks, going into what was available and the scope of the filings. One of the disappointments was that the marathon bond hearing that led to the judge to reducing his bond -- there is a transcript of that entire hearing which was unfortunately discarded at some point. That was a low point, but in the end I had so much material, and I still have hundreds of pages of documents of people who are witnesses in Honduras after he disappears offering their account of what happened, which are fascinating. That’s always a good problem to have, when you have so much material."]

He was booked on a $1 million bond. At a marathon three-day hearing, his lawyer, a federal prosecutor turned private attorney named Bernard Dempsey Jr., convinced a judge to lower it to $500,000. Three months later, Dempsey produced a cashier’s check in that amount, and Stansel was free. It was, at the time, the largest bond ever posted in Florida history.

The trial opened on a gloomy Monday in January 1975, and it promised to be a full-blown media spectacle. “For a Watergate-fed public still hungry for a big, juicy trial, today there is—Raymond Grady Stansel,” read an article that appeared that morning in the St. Petersburg Times. If convicted, Stansel could be sentenced to five years in prison (this was before the war on drugs), but he would likely face additional charges—and additional time behind bars.

Perhaps no one apart from Stansel had more riding on the trial’s outcome than Emiliano “E. J.” Salcines. The 36-year-old prosecutor had been handpicked by governor Reubin Askew to oversee the grand jury that indicted Stansel (and would later turn its attention to many other Florida drug-trafficking kingpins). Salcines was supremely confident. Even a lawyer as good as Dempsey would have little chance of freeing a guy caught with $25,000 in cash and photographs of marijuana.

Before the proceedings got under way, Stansel’s lawyer made a startling announcement: Raymond Grady Stansel had died on New Year’s Eve in a scuba-diving accident off the coast of Honduras. “He just went down and didn’t come up,” said Dempsey, who added that Stansel’s body had not yet been found.

Salcines seethed. He demanded proof of Stansel’s fate. “We insist not on any foreign documents,” Salcines shouted. “We want the body—dead or alive.”

The tips that came in over the subsequent weeks, months, and years were dizzying. Police departments across Florida were inundated with Stansel sightings reported by anonymous callers, confidential informants, and even jailed traffickers hoping to obtain early release. One week he’d be spotted at a brothel in Belize, the next drinking beer at a bar in St. Pete Beach, Florida. “It’s like chasing a phantom,” lieutenant Michael Hawkins, head of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office’s vice unit, told a reporter at the time. [annotation q="Was there an official record of these sightings, or are these second-hand accounts from sources?" a="There were documents that listed these different sightings that were kept by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Unfortunately, those documents were destroyed, but there were news reports based off them I think from the 80s and early 90s. And then some of the old investigators were able to corroborate them."]

“It was like Elvis,” recalled David McGee, who was a prosecutor assigned to a North Florida drug task force when the Stansel saga was playing out. “He became kind of a legend.”

The leads turned up only dead ends, but you couldn’t find a single cop in the state of Florida who actually believed Stansel was dead. “They’re saying he drowned in a scuba accident,” said one former agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “That man had been on the water his whole life. He was like a fish.”

FDLE agents thought they had him in December 1976, when Honduran officials reported that Stansel had been “detained” in the capital of Tegucigalpa. The agency released a bulletin announcing his capture, and the news spread rapidly through Florida. Agents were preparing to catch a flight to Latin America when the Hondurans inexplicably reported that Stansel had vanished.

Wherever he was, investigators were fairly certain he wasn’t alone. Around the same time that Stansel had disappeared, so had his lover. (He and Midge were estranged by then, and Stansel’s kids were used to seeing him with other women.)

Janet Wood was a free-spirited twentysomething, blond and slender. Stansel first laid eyes on her while visiting the famed Chart Room bar in Key West in 1973. “He was the most exciting, extraordinary, capable man I had ever met,” she told me.

I first reached out to Janet a few months after Lee Lafferty was unmasked as Ray Stansel. When I finally heard from her ten months later, she made it politely clear that she wasn’t interested in speaking to reporters. “I have been offered money and the proverbial 15 minutes of fame (infamy?) and I was and am not interested,” she wrote in an e-mail from her home in Australia. She added that she was wary of how the couple might be portrayed. “We are never so uncomplicated as presented by the media with their limited space and time.”

After a correspondence that stretched to several weeks, Janet changed her mind.[annotation q="How did you finally convince her to tell her story? Could you have told this story without her participation?" a="Let me answer the second part first. I thought I could, but knowing what I know now, I don’t know how I could have possibly pulled off telling the second part of his life in a compelling way without Janet’s cooperation. I consider her agreeing to speak with me to be the one of the major reporting coups, and certainly something that made the story twice what it would’ve been. She was able to give me a sense of what was going on in his head, and to describe him in a way that nobody else could have since she lived so closely to him for so long -- and so many little details. In terms of how it came about, there’s no secret. I did with her what I did with everybody. I’m extremely honest in what I am trying to do in telling this story, and why it’s important to have her input. And then just being really gentle with sources. With Janet, I completely understood her hesitation, and I could imagine what a disorienting experience she was undergoing. You’ve been keeping this secret for so long, suddenly it’s out, and you have all these journalists trying to speak with you and get you to tell them everything. She was going through her own issues. I tried to be very gentle and honest. We first started corresponding by email and it became very clear right away that she was an incredibly thoughtful person, extremely cerebral and very good at expressing herself. Some of her emails were just so well-written and so interesting. Initially we were conversing off the record, and those made it clear to me what an asset it would be to have her full participation. And there were still questions she politely declined to answer. She eventually became more open to the idea after communicating with people I had talked to in Australia. Those people had conveyed to her that I was a serious journalist and was looking to flesh out who he was as a person and kind of tell who he was as a person and not just focus on his life as a drug smuggler."]Stansel had protected her for so long, and now she felt an obligation to protect his legacy. If the story was going to be told, she realized that it wouldn’t serve the man she had loved to stay silent. “They may not be perfect human beings their whole lives, but there are individuals that make quite an impression on the planet,” she said.

Though she wouldn’t give up every detail, Janet finally told me how Raymond Stansel managed to make one of the most impressive escapes in American history.

Once he was released, local police followed Stansel wherever he went. They knew he had connections all over the world, and they didn’t want him to flee the country. In September 1974, barely a week out of jail, Stansel was on his motorcycle, riding away from the Tampa home where he was staying. As he crossed a bridge, he lost his tail, “dodging here, dodging there,” according to Janet. Then he made a dash to a local airstrip, where a friend waited with a private plane. [annotation q="With the complicated, layered nature of this story, it makes sense to structure this chronologically, as you did. Was that always your plan?" a="My first draft -- the 10,000-plus draft -- it had a couple of flashbacks, or a section or two that was outside the chronology that went back to, for instance, the last time his son saw him, or things in his first life that I went back to. I think I also went back to and fleshed out how his sons got into their own troubles, and it just felt like it was going to be hard for the reader to follow along with the narrative and not get confused. And again, this is why you need a good editor, to kind of see these things. But it was pretty much the skeleton to tell it chronologically, and Jonah, the editor, just kind of refined that."]

From there, Stansel flew to Key West to see Janet and convince her to come with him. “He didn’t know what he was going to do,” she told me. “He didn’t have a plan A, plan B, plan C.”

But he did have powerful friends. He somehow made it to Honduras—after all, he’d been smuggling drugs through the Gulf of Mexico for years. Once there, Stansel walked into the American embassy in Tegucigalpa and told officials he had lost his passport and needed a new one. (In fact, the police had kept it after his arrest.) Janet wouldn’t talk about his travel documents or the origin of his new identity, though records show that a 33-year-old named Dennis Lafferty had died in Florida just one year before Stansel slipped out of the U.S.

New passport in hand, Stansel went to the island of Roatán, 45 miles off the northern coast of Honduras, where Janet later met him. During Christmas week, his four kids—all between the ages of 11 and 16—joined them there. They dived during the day and spent the nights eating fresh fish and listening to Janet strum her guitar. A week or so later, the kids went back to their mom in the U.S., where authorities questioned Midge about Stansel’s whereabouts.

Ray and Janet, meanwhile, split ways en route to a predetermined location in Guatemala City. The plan was to sail across the globe in their 40-foot boat. The goal: end up as close as possible to the Great Barrier Reef.

They sailed to Belize, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire. They went on motorcycle treks through Central American mountain ranges. They had a close call in Belize when Janet was mistaken for Patty Hearst and held for 24 hours.

It was an epic introduction to life on the run, and then Janet became ill. She suspected seasickness, but in Bonaire they learned that she was pregnant. Sailing around the world no longer seemed so appealing, so they decided to fly instead. First to Venezuela, then to Peru, Tahiti, and eventually the Pacific island of New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu), where they were married less than two weeks before Janet suffered a miscarriage.

Through it all, the couple were looking over their shoulders for whoever was surely hunting them, even as they boarded a plane for what they hoped would be their final destination: Australia.

“For the authorities searching here and there, on the island and God knows where else, it was a job,” Janet wrote in an e-mail. “I do not say this to dismiss a few hard-working professionals, but their devotion to duty can’t compare to devotion to a dream of life, love, and freedom.” [annotation q="What are your thoughts on this dichotomy -- duty vs. love -- especially with regard to this story?" a="When I first undertook this story, I saw it, kind of at its heart, as a redemption story. This is a guy who had committed some what were seen at the time as serious crimes, and who could have very well disappeared and lived in a cabin in the woods for 40 years, living a lonely, solitary life. Were that the case, I would not have pursued that case. What made this story special, what made it unique, is that this guy devoted the second part of his life to protecting this very unique habitat and to basically teach other people about it, and to provide a way for other people to enjoy it. He did that at a pretty significant risk to himself.  To think that a fugitive has started a business that’s designed to bring as many people to him as possible is a pretty bold endeavor, so that was how I kind of saw this piece going into it, and that’s what drew me to it. After reporting it out, I have to say what I thought of him at the outset was confirmed through the reporting. I think whatever admiration I had for him based on that first article only grew as I did more reporting. Now, the one thing that is still difficult to reconcile is him leaving behind his first family. That is something that people who knew him in Australia were also really, really struggling with, because it didn’t fit the devoted family man they knew. That’s something that’s hard to reconcile with everything that I learned about him."]

There’s a saying in Australia’s Far North Queensland region: Your history starts here. For decades this remote stretch of pristine beaches and lush rainforest along the continent’s northeastern edge has attracted an oddball mix of Australian hippies and starry-eyed foreigners seeking a fresh start. You could be a German count or a renegade chemist who supplied LSD to the Grateful Dead. “No one gives a stuff,” said Andrew Forsyth, himself a former pilot who ferried Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth around the world, and relocated to the area in 2002 after first visiting some 40 years prior. [annotation q="This is a great graf. You almost could have started the story here, if you didn't have such other vivid material. Is this one of those stories where you were spoiled for choice on material?" a="One hundred percent. He lived such a remarkable life, and the place he chose to settle in was so unique in terms of its biodiversity, history and the colorful characters it attracts. Probably the hardest part of writing this piece was choosing what to leave out, which in my experience is not all that unusual."]

In the 1970s, there were no traffic lights and few paved roads. Despite its proximity to the Great Barrier Reef, only the most determined travelers ever reached the area. Those who did often stopped in Port Douglas, a sleepy fishing village with a crescent-moon-shaped slice of golden beach. The downtown had a general store, a post office, and a couple of pubs where barefooted locals with names like Pegleg Tommy spun tales of bull sharks seen and giant crocs narrowly avoided.

“You could fire a gun down the street and you wouldn’t hit anybody,” said Norm Clinch, a machinist from Brisbane who often fished out of Port Douglas. “The police? There was one station, and they’d all be in there drunk or asleep.”

It was here in Port Douglas that, one day in the fall of 1975, a beat-up faded green station wagon arrived carrying a sun-baked American couple looking for just such a place. The lanky man who stepped out of the car identified himself as Dennis “Lee” Lafferty. If anyone asked—and few ever did—he was a fisherman from Texas. His wife was Janet Lafferty. If anyone asked—and few ever did—she came from Michigan, and both her parents were dead.

It wasn’t just Australia’s far-off location and proximity to the reef that attracted the couple. Lafferty’s great-uncle had visited in the 1920s and described Far North Queensland as a real-life Shangri-La. It also offered an added benefit: the fishing was world-class.

“We started from the get-go,” recalled Janet, who acted as Lee’s second mate as he relaunched his career.

The waters off Port Douglas were so well stocked, fishermen needed nothing more than a rudimentary lure made out of a four-inch piece of curved metal with a hook attached to have success. It was almost comically primitive. “When was the last time a fish saw a school of spoons going by?” Lee would say.

Lee outfished the locals in part by using live bait—caught with the specially designed cast nets that he and Janet made and sold—and quickly established himself as one of the best Port Douglas had ever known. “I used to say, ‘I’ll back Lee against any of you cunts,’ ” said Clinch, the salty-tongued machinist, who became one of Lee’s first friends. “ ‘He’ll fish you out ten to one.’ ”

If Lee did have access to large sums of money (and Janet insists that he did not), he surely didn’t act like it. At one point, he was running so low on cash that he had to borrow $8,000 from a fellow American expat named Walter Starck to buy an engine for a new boat. “He never bought anything flashy,” Starck said. “They didn’t go out and entertain. They lived a very modest life.”

Five years passed, and no one came looking for them. By then the Laffertys had two daughters—Jessie, born in 1976, and Kianna, in 1980—and though they told the girls about their past, life seemed to settle down. “He was a gentleman’s gentleman,” said Edward Pitt, a local fisherman who lived a few doors down. “He never showed off. He struck me as just a normal worker.” When pressed, his fishing buddies said there was one thing about Lee that was a bit odd. Anytime one of them produced a camera, he would disappear. [annotation q="How excited were you to get this great little detail?" a="That was something that came out late in the reporting, and late into my trip in Australia. The one thing that was working in my favor was that he chose to settle down in a very, very small town where everybody knew each other. Once I got there and people started feeling more comfortable with me, and directing me to different people who knew him well, I was able to uncover some of those little details that, like you said, helped the reader understand what it was like for him to be living as a fugitive."] [annotation q="What was the journalism saturation like in Australia?" a="Right after the Tampa Bay story, there was a lot of follow-up by the papers in Australia, but by the time I got there, there was nobody there, and I don’t think there were many journalists around Daintree, ever. It’s 90 minutes north of Cairns, and that’s the closest city. I find you’re always more successful, anyway, once the attention has subsided. And also when you show up at a place that’s so far away, people are often intrigued by your presence. They’re curious about you, and why you’ve come so far for the story. It was a very good reporting experience in Daintree. People wanted to talk about Lee. They loved him, they admired him, and there were very eager to tell stories about him. Everyone except for his family, who were very reluctant to talk."] [annotation q="What was the family’s reaction to the story?" a="You never know how sources are going to react. In this case, I received very positive feedback from the family. I’m still in close contact with Janet. I received tons of contact from his family, and even some from people I never spoke to, some people I tried to speak to but didn’t speak to me and even they enjoyed the piece. It’s been a very gratifying experience in that way. You’re thinking about the reader as you’re writing, but it’s also nice when the people who have put their trust in you come back to you and tell you how glad they are that they agreed to cooperate, and that they feel like you handled the story with care and in a professional manner."]

In 1982, the Laffertys purchased an overgrown piece of property along the Daintree River’s southern bank. The 80-mile-long waterway snakes through dense rainforest, where you can walk for miles without ­encountering another human being. It’s the kind of place that would have obvious appeal to an international fugitive.

But rather than retreat from society, Lee started a tour venture. The area has always been an ecological wonder, boasting unique species of mangrove trees, bats, birds, frogs, and tree kangaroos. He founded a company focused on exposing people to the best of it. In a span of ten years, the Daintree River Cruise Centre became one of the area’s most vital businesses. “It was classic hiding in plain sight,” Janet told me. “It’s not hard to turn the conversation around and get someone talking about themselves. We both learned that very quickly.”

Lee devoured books on the region’s ecology. He talked to the indigenous population to learn how they used seeds and plants. It wasn’t long before people showed up carrying specimens they hoped Lee could identify.

“I’d say, ‘God, he’s an encyclopedia,’ ” recalled Betty Clinch, who was one of the Cruise Centre’s first employees. As Lee’s understanding of the region’s ecosystem deepened, he dedicated himself to protecting it. He urged farmers to plant vegetation along the river’s edge to stop erosion. He pushed boaters to reduce their speed on the water so that the wake wouldn’t undercut the banks and disturb the microbes that ­inhabit the shallow areas. People close to him estimate that he saved the lives of hundreds of fruit bats that got stuck in the barbed-wire fences used by farmers. How he could spot them with one eye while driving on curvy country roads no one could understand. “Everybody here hates fruit bats, because they eat crops and spread disease,” said Lydia Archer, a longtime family friend. “He’d say they’re the most essential part of the ecosystem, because they spread native seeds throughout the forest.”

Even Norman Duke, one of the world’s foremost authorities on mangrove forests, was impressed. He first met Lee in 2002, when Lee was hosting a research expedition. “He really knew his stuff, and that shined in a place where there are a lot of people who don’t know what they’re talking about and claim they do,” Duke told me. “He easily fit into the tradition of the classic outdoor woodsman, the guy who can make a fire out of nothing in a rainstorm.” [annotation q="How do you know when you’ve got a great quote like that?" a="You hear it, and it’s almost like it jumps out at you in flashing lights. When I walk away from the interview, that’s what’s still echoing in my head. It’s rare that I’ll be going through my notes or going through a recording and I find something that’s a real gem that I hadn’t already recognized. It’s more that somebody says it and right away, I know I’m going to use that. In this story, that happened quite a bit. Having said that, there were quotes that were so good that had to get cut. But in my experience, it’s like an alarm goes off. There are quotes that I’ve gotten that are 10 years old but I still remember so clearly. That’s the fun of the job, engaging people and hearing them say things that are so remarkable and hearing them say things that are put in a way that you were never put them."]

For more than 35 years, Lee and Janet lived peacefully on the river. Then, in June 2011, news broke in Far North Queensland that a fugitive American drug trafficker was living an hour from Daintree. Michael McGoldrick, real name Peyton Eidson, was the leader of a California smuggling ring and went on the run in the mid-1980s. Eidson and his wife and daughter had fled to Australia, where they operated a luxury mountain retreat. They were captured by Aussie police after American authorities discovered that the real McGoldricks were dead.

For weeks the story was the talk of the Cruise Centre. The workers would sit around after-hours talking about the latest developments. It seemed everyone had something to say—except Lee.

Privately, Lee and Janet were both rattled by Eidson’s unmasking. “It did cause some concern, and it did worry Dad,” his daughter Jessie told me. “He certainly did not want to be exposed.”

Lee and Janet had ferociously guarded his secret since arriving in Australia. They had few close friends; he rarely left town and never returned to the U.S. Even after the two separated, in 2011, Janet never said a word to anyone. As careful as they were, the secret still found its way outside the family. When Kianna and Jessie were teens, they took equestrian lessons from a future Olympian named Christine Doan. Years later, Jessie married Doan’s brother and told him about her father's past. The relationship soured, and so did the Doan family’s feelings about the Laffertys. “It’s a psychological crime scene,” Christine told me.

Lee may have succeeded in hiding his worries about Eidson’s arrest from his employees. But the noose was beginning to tighten.

Three years after Eidson’s capture, in late 2014, a tipster contacted a semi­retired Florida newspaper reporter named Lucy Morgan and alleged that Ray Stansel had been living a second life as an environmentalist in Australia. Morgan was used to getting tips about Stansel; she was a 74-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner who had written numerous stories about him and other smugglers. The tip didn’t seem especially promising at first, but she wasn’t the type to let something go without a little investigation. Following the call, Morgan pulled out a set of dusty cardboard boxes that contained every available record on Raymond Grady Stansel Jr.

Lee Lafferty was by then a shell of his former self. Parkinson’s disease had sapped his strength and stiffened his body. His hands shook, making it difficult for him to hold a coffee cup. Walking became a chore.

Every so often he’d say something about his past that raised eyebrows—that he once slept with $2 million under his pillow, for instance—but his employees shrugged the comments off as the medication-induced musings of a sick man.

In early May 2015, a friend took him out in a wooden dory. For weeks, Lee had been begging his buddy to do so. Since he was a boy, there was nowhere Lee felt more capable, more alive, than on the water. But on the river that day, Lee could hardly move on his own; the friend had to lift him into the boat. After less than an hour, Lee said he’d had enough. A couple of weeks later, Lee Lafferty got into his pickup truck for the last time.

Back in Florida, the news of Ray Stansel’s death—and life—in Australia stunned the investigators and prosecutors who had spent years trying to bring him to justice. “He turned out to be a hell of a Houdini,” Salcines, the prosecutor, told me.

His family in Florida had more complicated feelings. “It really just broke my heart when he disappeared,” said his sister, Elaine Schweinsberg. “He never tried to contact us again. I felt so bad that his children had to grow up without him.”

In the years after Stansel vanished, two of his sons, Raymond and Ronald, became drug smugglers and then fugitives after they were indicted for trying to haul half a ton of cocaine into Florida in 1991. Both were eventually arrested—Ronald in Costa Rica in 1992, Raymond in Alaska in 2010—and handed long prison sentences.

Despite being abandoned by their father, both believe he made the right choice. “I think my father picked a good place to have a life and am glad that he won and got out of here when he did,” Raymond Stansel III wrote from the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex near Orlando. “I missed him but used what he taught me and lived without regrets for my life.”

“I don’t blame Dad for not showing up,” Ronald Stansel wrote from the Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola. “I’m sure that he missed certain aspects of what was left behind. It’s like you cut a chunk of your heart out leaving. But things seldom end the way you visualize in life. You can only take your best shot and roll with the punches.” [annotation q="These seem like incredibly magnanimous responses from his two sons. How did you react to them?" a="I wish I had been able to include more from the two of them. When you spend this amount of time reporting, you want to fill the story with as many good details as you can, but in every magazine (or newspaper, for that matter) piece I’ve done, I’ve made agonizing decisions over what to cut. You end up having to kill your kittens. And there was certainly that feeling here, with some of these details. That said, it’s nice when after you publish a story like this, you get people writing you saying they wanted more. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, especially if you’re considering the other ways this could be told. And, yes, to your other question, I agree with you 100%. That was one of the things I was most interested in when I started the story -- what would be the reaction of his sons. I was in touch with them mainly through email -- the federal prison system actually has an excellent email system. But that was one of the main surprises, how magnanimous they were, and how supportive they were of the decision their father had made, and the fact that they both told they would have done the same thing and that it was the right decision.  The things that got cut were some of the recollections of their experience on Roatan, the week they spent with their father before he disappeared. They told me they had no idea what he was planning to do. But their observations from that trip were pretty interesting."]

In fact, it was hard to find a single friend or family member who was troubled by Lee Lafferty’s previous life as a pot smuggler; it even seemed to have made him a legend. “Some people were asking does it change my opinion of him,” Mick Casey, a river guide who worked for him, told me. “It makes me admire the bastard even more.”

People in Far North Queensland often talk about Lee as someone who found redemption: a man running away from a troubled past who transformed himself into a protector of one of the world’s most pristine natural habitats. “Reflecting on it now, it’s just what Australia’s all about,” said Norman Duke. “It’s all about redemption. All about finding a new life.”

Spend long enough in Daintree, and you might also hear another story. Sometime in the early 1980s, Lee and a doctor friend were driving along the road that links Daintree and Mossman. As they neared a small bridge, they spotted a car in the crocodile-infested creek below. A couple of guys were just standing around looking at it. Lee burst from his vehicle and quickly realized that someone was still in the floating car. He dove into the creek, pulled out the unconscious man, and dragged him onto the bank. By the time the police arrived, Lee was long gone. [annotation q="Considering the morally ambiguous nature of his life and times, this seems a perfect place to end, but I’m interested in why you chose this point to wrap up." a="I usually know exactly how I’m going to start and end a piece when I start writing. That’s usually how I know I’m ready to write. In this case, I thought I had it, and as I started writing I was still reporting, talking to Janet and some other people. This anecdote came out a little bit later, and it took a little while to get it confirmed by a couple people, and then when I had it and was thinking about where to put it, I actually remember the moment where it came to me that this has to be the end. It kind of illuminates both who he was as a person and what he was dealing with while he was living in Australia. Even when he was doing something brave and unquestionably noble, in the back of his mind he was always that close to being caught, to being found out. It just kind of captured that in a really vivid way. And also, that last line is pretty subtle. You can linger on it a little, and it takes a few seconds for it to really sink in, why he would have taken off. I love stories that make you feel like you’re hurtling toward an end that you don’t want to ever arrive, and yet, when it does, it takes your breath away a little. That’s what I was going for here."]

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Anyone who’s taken a shortcut and skipped the primer while painting a room knows the kind of results you can get. Uneven. Unpolished. The primer sets the stage for a beautiful wall.

That’s kind of the idea behind the storytelling website Primer Stories, says Tim Lillis, one of the creative minds behind the site, which mixes medium-form written pieces with lots of eye-catching visual effects.

He thinks the stories should be just long enough to prime readers on the subject – about 1,000 words -- while also acting as a primer of intellectual paint.

Story topics can be ambitious, but Lillis and co-creator Joe Alterio were intent on crafting narratives that are digestible for both longform lovers and listicle lushes.

“We realized that somewhere along the line, the important ideas were losing the battle of marketability,” Alterio says. “So, how do we give them a little bit of that flash while still retaining that core, essential part of the idea?”

For Alterio, the former animator who now works as an interactive designer and creative director, the site is akin to a “visual podcast.” And the stories do feel like they could be narrated by Ira Glass, with the written word interspersed with images, GIFs, digital collages and all manner of wacky -- but striking -- animations. (For example, in a recent story, a traced outline of a rat gradually morphs into an X-ray view of the rat as you scroll down the page.)

Lillis, a jack-of-all-design-trades, compares the site’s pieces, or “primers,” to a tapestry woven from a written story and an illustrated story, two parts working together to make a greater whole.

The site works like this: Stories are published as part of a “season,” 10-episode arcs that are organized around a theme and dripped one by one onto the site. Each story feels entirely bespoke but also feels part of a larger whole.

On the spectrum of digital media innovation, it can be difficult to see where, exactly, Primer Stories fits in. On one end, there are longform stories with cascading designs, state-of-the-art graphics and photography. On the other, there are 3D videos, podcasts and virtual reality journalism.

Primer Stories falls somewhere in between, which Lillis and Alterio see as an overlooked niche.

They talked by phone about trying to stake a claim in that niche. Their answers have been edited and condensed.

What’s the origin story behind Primer Stories?

Joe: Tim and I have been friends forever. We grew up together in Massachusetts, and we’ve had our aesthetic interests coalesce because we’re interested in a lot of the same things -- art, comics and drawings and stuff like that -- and we started this project because we’re both of a certain age where we remember the web being a little stranger and more idiosyncratic. The past five or so years, we were pretty dismayed at how templated the web had been getting, especially when it came to sharing important ideas that should be reaching a wider audience. We thought we might employ our skills as storytellers and illustrators and we thought we should try our hand to make the web a little closer to what we want it to be.

You describe Primer Stories as a visual narrative start-up. Can you explain to someone who may have never heard of you what that means?

Joe: I think that people like us and our intrigued by us, and not to toot our own horn here, but people see the site and say: "Wow. I’ve never seen anything like this, ever." I think it’s because we’re taking a lot of sensibility from stuff we love. We lean really heavily on podcasts, really heavily on comics, infographics and cartoons. We’re into bringing aspects from those things we know into the web storytelling space. I think the best descriptor might be what someone else gave us a little while ago: a visual podcast. We’re very story-oriented, we’re very theatrical in nature, we have opening themes and we have pauses and beats in the conversation. It just so happens that we’re plotting it out in a kind of storyboard on the screen.

Tim: We’ve actually tried to get away from that description, because it never works. People are like, ‘Cool! How do you listen to it?’ I think the example of something like Radiolab is really helpful. The way they paint the scene with audio samples and really build the world the story takes place in, I think that’s a good metaphor for what we’re doing with our illustrations. It’s not necessarily just art that illustrates the text. It’s something that helps craft the world and tells a complementary story alongside the text.

What’s the business model right now?

Joe: The business model is something that’s only hit upon in the past four or five months or so. When we first started this, it was just a project, and it started to pick up steam and get traction. Like a lot of online editorial places, we were thinking about native advertising, but we weren’t comfortable blending that with our editorial. We’re not a clickbait venture. We’re more bespoke, so we don’t do enough content to “bury” the native advertising. We hit upon the idea of [also being] a work-for-hire studio, which would be an entirely different project from our editorial, in which we collaborate with companies or foundations.

We’ve got a couple irons in the fire. Our hope is that we have two distinct parts of the venture. We make money with the studio, which funds our editorial efforts. Our hope is that we find different partners who understand that we are good at taking a very complicated idea and making it relatable, so that’s our ultimate goal, whether it’s foundations or government organizations or scientists or something like that.

How does it work with the writers?

Tim: We put out a call for submissions when we finish a season, saying, “Next season’s theme will be so-and-so, and we would love to hear from you if you’re interested in writing something.” It’s a combination of people who come to us and then we also reach out to people whose work we really admire and would love to be able to work with. They usually give us a draft, then we develop the story from there. We see ourselves as kind of film directors. It starts with a screenplay -- their story -- then we break it down to find out how scenes might work and what particular discrete moments are there that should have a distinct feel. That’s our process on our end, applying that visual pacing to go with the story pacing. Joe and I then get together and get into the nuts and bolts of art direction, trading sketches and ultimately come up with what we’d like to think is a very cohesive presentation of the story.

Joe: And there are times when people come to us, like in the “Dragons of the Alps” piece by Anindita Basu Sempere. She kind of came to us with this, and it was nearly perfect. We had to do very little work on it. Then other times, people come with an idea or a general stab in the direction, then we have a lot of editorial back-and-forth.

Despite your taking some techniques from other digital longform, none of your stories would qualify as that. Do you hold to a specific word count?

Joe: The way the stories started playing out, we realized that at a certain point, considering the amount of richness of visuals and stuff like that, we can’t necessarily overwhelm it. We started to fall into this 1,000- to 1,400-word ballpark, and so far it’s seemed to work out correctly.

When I think about journalism as it stands today, there seems to be traditional digital or print writing on one end of the spectrum, and then on the other you’ve got it stretching out to video, virtual reality, innovative podcasting, those kinds of things. You seem to shoot for somewhere in the middle, where you’ve got the written word with some graphics where you scroll down. Was that intentional?

Joe: To answer the second part of the question first, yes. I would say that one of the biggest things that we run across is having to really show people the site to get them to understand what we’re doing. I will say that once people see it, they say: "Oh, this is great. I totally get it, and I can’t believe that stuff like this doesn’t exist more." That tells us that we’re doing something right. As far as why it hasn’t happened yet, I don’t know, honestly.

But you were intending to kind of capture that space? You say on your website that you were looking to have more digestible piece than what we traditionally think of as longform.

Joe: Well, when we do market research on social media and look at what’s out there, as much as I would like to say that when someone posts a 6,000-word piece in The Atlantic that gets 70 likes, the answer is no. It gets a few likes, and they get one person commenting saying, “So sad!”

Tim: It’s the way that things are becoming so visual across the board. And that’s not just laziness. There’s a lot of studies that show that people actually do retain the information when it’s paired with visual experiments. We definitely saw an opportunity to run with some of our strengths and say, “We’re interested in a lot of these things,” but we don’t necessarily have the time to find where they’ll be. That doesn’t mean we’re not interested in the content. So what’s a way to get some of the stuff that’s hiding in plain sight to people who have that interest and that passion but just aren’t able to find it? We’d like to think we’re making the stuff that’s a lot more obscure much more accessible.

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