In cold type

Behind the Globe’s front-page mea culpa; the Herald overhypes a theory

BY DAN KENNEDY

It was late at night on Thursday, February 15, and the mood at One Herald Square was grim. The first edition of Friday’s Boston Globe, which had just arrived, led with a blockbuster story. The headline: love affair eyed in n.h. killings; husband involved with unidentified woman, officials say. “Oh, holy shit. They got us,” is how one Herald staffer who was in the newsroom that night describes the reaction of his colleagues.

The gloom lifted pretty quickly. By early afternoon on Friday, Andrew Gully, the Herald’s managing editor for news, was telling folks that the Globe’s story was falling apart. No kidding. But even with New Hampshire attorney general Philip McLaughlin publicly denouncing the Globe, and with authorities identifying two teenagers as the true suspects, editor Matt Storin spent the weekend issuing statements that he continued to stand behind the story.

That is, until Wednesday of this week, when the Globe published an extraordinary page-one, above-the-fold statement, headlined to our readers and signed by Storin, admitting — after going into some detail to defend his paper’s reliance on three anonymous sources — that “the extramarital affair theory is not correct.”

What went wrong? In fact, it doesn’t take any high-level detective work to figure it out. The Friday story, by veteran reporters Mitchell Zuckoff and Shelley Murphy, may have been accurate in every respect. But the central thesis of their report was built entirely on the speculation of anonymous law-enforcement officials that the murders of Dartmouth College professors Half and Susanne Zantop were motivated by a love affair involving Half. Wrote Zuckoff and Murphy: “The sources declined to say how they developed their theory linking an alleged affair to the killings. While focusing their work on that scenario, investigators said that they remained open to other possibilities.”

Storin, in his front-page statement, wrote that “we put our trust in three law-enforcement officials who we had every reason to believe had intimate, up-to-date knowledge of the investigation. It was certainly never our intent to increase the suffering of the Zantop family, their friends, or the Dartmouth College community, and we express regret for the pain our story undoubtedly caused them.” Well, one way to prevent such regrettable occurrences is not to run a speculative piece — one that you’ve admitted in advance might prove to be wrong — that casts aspersions on the life of a murder victim.

Not that the rest of the media have clean hands. The Herald, for instance, took a legitimate aspect of the investigation — an Arizona professor who was friends with the Zantops and who was questioned by authorities — and, for a brief time, rode it so hard that it looked as if he were a suspect when in fact he wasn’t (about which more below). But the Herald, at least, was reporting something that actually came up at a news conference called by the attorney general’s office. The Globe took a theory and transformed it into an exclusive. It’s an exclusive the paper would love to take back.

That embarrassment went national pretty quickly. Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz wrote a piece on the front page of Wednesday’s Style section headlined boston globe apologizes for ‘love triangle’ story. Storin’s statement and Kurtz’s piece were featured prominently on Jim Romenesko’s Web site MediaNews.org. The Drudge Report hyped it, too. All in all, not a good day at 135 Morrissey Boulevard.

Yet, despite Storin’s statement, both he and Bradlee continue to insist that they went with the best information they had available, and that they had every reason to believe they had it right.

“We believed it to be the working theory of the case at the time we wrote it,” says Bradlee. “I still believe it was true when it was written.” Bradlee says that the Globe’s last contact with its sources was on Thursday evening; Tulloch and Parker were questioned for the first time later that night. On Friday morning, New Hampshire authorities reported they had matched fingerprints found at the scene with those of Tulloch and Parker. “This is history on the run,” Bradlee says. “Investigations are fluid. Things happened.”

Bradlee adds: “If you knew the identity of the sources, you would only be reassured. We’re not talking about a couple of campus cops rolling off the turnip truck. We trust our reporters and we trusted our sources.”

Storin, for his part, says that without revealing the identity of the sources or the nature of the information they were providing, he can’t adequately explain why he felt confident going with a speculative story such as Zuckoff and Murphy’s. “We felt that this was the leading theory they thought was going to lead to the killers,” Storin says. “You also have to factor in that we had two of our best reporters and one of our best editors involved in this. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20.”

Storin says the Globe received a moderate stream of phone calls on Wednesday morning; about 75 percent criticized the paper for screwing up the story and 25 percent praised it for issuing its statement. E-mails, he adds, were slightly more pro-Globe.

“I understand why people would criticize us, so no surprise there,” he says. “I believe we have a conversation with our readers, and we needed to come clean with them. And we also had to apologize to the family.”

Zuckoff was the lead reporter on the piece; asked whether the three sources were his or Murphy’s, he replied, “I take full responsibility. Let me put it that way.” Zuckoff goes so far as to call it unfair to label his story “speculative,” saying he was confident he’d gotten it right “based on the sources, based on the information, and based on the precautions we took.” He adds, “Obviously, the investigation turned. But they [the sources] weren’t lying to us. We felt confident enough to go with it. There are a lot of journalists out there who may be saying, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”

Over at the Herald, no one is issuing any apologies. Yet the paper — which has devoted more resources to the case and covered it more aggressively since the Zantops’ bodies were discovered on January 27 — pushed a different erroneous theory of what happened in the Zantops’ home.

On February 3, the paper led with the page-one headline off campus; prof slayings probe moves beyond dartmouth. The report, by Franci Richardson and Jose Martinez, revealed that “the investigation appears to be shifting away from Dartmouth, based on ‘chilling’ new developments in the case.” The piece described investigators as being “interested in a middle-aged man who reportedly returned a rental car to Manchester on his way back to the University of Arizona.”

Within a few days, a name was attached to the middle-aged man: Stanley Williams, an Arizona State University professor who’s an expert on volcanoes. And on February 14, deep inside the paper, there appeared a Richardson piece headlined flap follows asu prof questioned in dartmouth case that all but identifies Williams as a possible suspect.

“The Arizona State University professor questioned in connection with the murders of two Dartmouth professors is embroiled in a controversy over the deaths of six of his colleagues during a 1993 volcano eruption,” the article begins. “Volcanologist and ASU professor Stanley N. Williams allegedly failed to heed scientific data that warned of the January 1993 eruption of the Galera Volcano in Colombia, and then falsely claimed to be the only survivor, according to Victoria Bruce, whose book No Apparent Danger is scheduled for release in April.”

The article did go on to say that New Hampshire authorities had returned from Arizona saying “no one there was a suspect,” but the clear impression left by Richardson was that Williams was still a possibility. No wonder Williams, in an interview, told Richardson, “It’s been very problematic. It seems as though the media thinks I’m the only name that exists when there are other important people to interview. It’s been unpleasant for me and for the family. The kids have been terrorized, and my wife’s been extremely upset.”

The Herald was hardly the only news organization to mention the Williams connection; the Globe itself, and the Arizona Republic, both published stories. But the Herald’s coverage was so much more aggressive that a Globe source points to it as an example of how the Herald, too, has strayed. And a Herald source says he felt ill over how hard his paper was pushing the Williams angle.

Richardson could not be reached for comment, but Herald editor Andy Costello defends the coverage. Pressed on whether the paper had identified Williams as a virtual suspect, Costello replied, “I totally disagree.” He notes that the Herald played stories that actually named Williams inside the paper, and adds that — unlike the Globe — “we haven’t been criticized by any of the authorities.”

Not that this is an excuse for either paper, but those who’ve been following the investigation say they’re amazed — impressed, even — at how tightly the New Hampshire attorney general’s office has clamped down on the flow of information right from the beginning.

Such control may well have given the authorities the time and space they needed to develop the case against Tulloch and Parker, even as the media speculated that the investigation was at a dead end. Unfortunately, when no one takes care to feed the infobeast, it will go searching for its own sustenance.

There is much that still isn’t known about the Zantop case. Some, for instance, speculate (that word again) that New Hampshire authorities deliberately gave the Globe a bad steer so that Tulloch and Parker wouldn’t be spooked into fleeing. Wilder theories abound, too.

What’s clear is that the Globe published a page-one story that proved to be horribly wrong, and that the Herald harassed a peripheral figure who was never a suspect. It’s hard to say whether there are even any lessons to be learned. But it hasn’t been pretty. It never is.