The Cardinal Rule

During my first six months assigned to the crime beat as a cub reporter for the Missoulian daily newspaper, I covered at least as many murders, which meant receiving a crash course in criminology. For me, those legal lessons weren’t nearly as onerous as learning to practice the cardinal rule of journalism — talk to everybody. 

The job was equal parts fascinating and frightening, in part because my beat provided a front-row seat to a veritable theater of the macabre, but also because I was paralytically shy, a condition whose code I’d been trying to override since childhood, and which made practicing the cardinal rule an exercise in psychic torture. 

One July morning, I was loitering in the breakroom at the sheriff’s office, trying to glean details about the death of a man whose wife had enlisted her daughter’s 16-year-old boyfriend to murder. The teen complied, shooting the man in the head with a .22-caliber rifle while he slept outside the family’s trailer home. The boyfriend then burrito-wrapped the body in a carpet and set it ablaze in a backyard fire ring, scooping the cremains into a pickle jar that he squirreled away beneath the front stoop. He was arrested the next day. So was the wife.

I was nervously pressing the desk sergeant for the particulars of the case, feigning confidence, when the captain of detectives wandered in, his antennae carefully calibrated to discern the soft underbellies of timorous youth pretending to be tough.

He was holding a pickle jar.

“Hey kid, you want a tip?” the captain asked me, jiggling the jar for dramatic effect. “If you need to get rid of evidence, don’t do it at a backyard weenie roast. Now, how about a pickle?”

I stared wide-eyed at the jar, my Adam’s apple bobbing cartoonishly as I gulped. “Captain, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” I murmured, regaining my composure.

He waved me inside his office, bones rattling inside the jar like a maraca. He invited me to ask my questions.

I learned that the victim’s wife had endured decades of chronic physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her former husband, and that investigators, having dispatched deputies to escalating reports of domestic violence for 20 years, now had no choice but to charge a scared kid with murder and a mistreated woman with solicitation. The gallows humor the captain had employed so deftly was a defense mechanism reserved for situations that, under the constraints of our justice system, could not be justly rendered.

But I could still tell a fair story, I reasoned, so I set out to talk to everybody, repressing my inhibitions beneath a self-possessed alter-ego. Under the guise of my secret identity, I cold-called neighbors and plied them for information. I stationed myself outside the office of the criminal defense attorney who accepted the case pro bono, a gruff and towering man behind whose intimidating stature lay hidden fathoms of compassion. I visited the defendants in jail, listening as they shared their chilling experiences. And I spoke with the county attorney tasked with prosecuting a heinous crime even as he recognized its mitigating circumstances.

At some point in the reporting process, I shed my alter-ego. I didn’t need it to do my job, I merely needed to care about the work. Perhaps it’s a case of the mask eating the face, or maybe I just grew up. Either way, I still talk to everybody.