WHEN I FIRST CONSIDERED taking on the role of founding dean of a brand new journalism school, I initially thought of it as a personal capstone – the culmination of a lifetime in journalism and a chance to pass on my experience to the next generation. Boy, was I wrong. As the journalism world changed in content and delivery, I was the one who became a student.

To be perfectly candid, the new world seemed upside down to me. In the traditional world I knew best, we journalists took great pride in acting as trustworthy gatekeepers, professionals who filtered the news for you, who sifted through the glut of information to tell you what was important and why – and who uncovered stories you wouldn’t think of asking for on a Google search.

Suddenly, our traditional model was shattered. The people formerly known as the audience could now talk back. In fact, anyone could now be a journalist – or at least commit an act of journalism on their blogs or websites. Then, all of a sudden there was something called Twitter, something called Facebook. As journalism became decentralized, we professionals were dethroned. It was a psychic shock, a loss of esteem, as well as a loss of livelihood for many people.

Not surprisingly, my instinct was to be defensive – to protect the world I knew and treasured. Only gradually, and sometimes with great reluctance, did I come to see the value of the new technologies. Only gradually did I realize that digital technology would enrich journalism, creating an interactive, multimedia form of storytelling that invited community participation, that could be personalized, that could be delivered on a vast array of mobile devices, that could be consumed globally, that could be distributed using social media. And so, slowly, I finally managed to embrace the changes necessary to create a new school for a new age.

CUNY J-School Prof. Sandeep Junnarkar shows students how to use a GoPano attachment with a DSLR camera, turning photos and videos into panoramas.
(Photo © Skyler Reid)

My personal passage is, of course, a microcosm of the larger struggle within the journalism profession to come to terms with the digital reckoning. Though many mainstream media companies have been hollowed out by all those layoffs, a parallel universe is slowly growing in journalism. Everywhere you look, new digital outlets are springing up that offer promising alternatives – from Politico and ProPublica to the Texas Tribune and Kaiser Health News, to say nothing of blogs, websites, and hyperlocal ventures. This year, something called Inside Climate News won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and a blog named California Watch was a Pulitzer finalist for Public Service. There is more journalism produced today by more people on more platforms than ever before. And much of it is reaching new audiences through social media, creating new communities of like-minded readers.

No, the real problem is not journalism per se. The defining issue is now financial: The traditional business model that sustained journalism, based largely on a lucrative stream of advertising revenue, has seriously eroded.

The new technologies, as dazzling as they seem, are but a means to an overriding end. And that end is journalism.

I am not a futurist. I do not claim to know how the public will consume media 10 years from now or what the next Twitter will be. But I do believe that we will find new revenue streams for quality journalism in the digital age. Readers are now starting to pay for content, advertisers are developing new ways to target digital readers, and publishers are learning to use e-commerce. Some publishers are even becoming more than just newspapers and magazines; they are learning to be information platforms for their communities, building deeper relationships with their communities – whether those communities are geographic or demographic.

In this new era, and whatever the new formats, I think we must keep technological change in perspective. The new technologies, as dazzling as they seem, are but a means to an overriding end. And that end is journalism.

And I mean a special kind of journalism – a journalism that is vitally needed in this era of media fragmentation and information overload. I’m talking about in-depth reporting, community engagement, analysis, deep understanding – and, yes, something approaching wisdom. This is the stuff of great journalism.

Our children will get this wisdom delivered in new ways, perhaps even sent to a wireless appliance implanted in their brains. So be it. But I believe, in the smithy of my soul, that even if the medium ultimately changes – and it will – the intellectual need, the human need, for thoughtful journalism will never, ever go away. ■

Vendors peddling their wares to bus passengers traveling into northern Uganda
(Photo by Rebecca Sesny)

GULU, Uganda – If it’s not one war, it’s another in this dusty town in northern Uganda. Until a few years ago, Gulu was home to the Lord’s Resistance Army and its leader, Joseph Kony, who terrorized the region – destroying villages, mutilating and killing parents, and forcing children to join his forces.

The Ugandan army finally drove Kony and his rebel forces into central Africa. But a different, more lethal kind of war still devastates Gulu. Families grieving over their losses to Kony are fighting for survival in one of the world’s epicenters of deadly diseases. Foreign donors, medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies have come in to help this remote region, located in the heart of Uganda’s HIV/AIDS zone, but the latest war is creating its own painful divisions.

Past the old rusted tin roofs and mud huts of this region sits a building so modern that it looks out of place. Half a dozen years ago, it housed government troops. It has since become home to the Joint Clinical Research Centre, Gulu Regional Centre of Excellence. The clinic has two roles. It treats thousands of Ugandans with conventional therapies. It also tests new drugs on patients. That makes this clinic part of a booming drug trial business in Uganda, bolstering the government’s struggling health care system.

The dual role creates two tracks at the Gulu clinic – or, as some critics call it, a system of haves and have-nots. Some of the millions of dollars of international support help fund costly treatment for HIV/AIDS patients – not enough, caregivers say. And some of those dollars go to finance drug trials seeking new and better treatments for HIV/AIDS and other diseases.

Trials are closely monitored and fully supplied, according to researchers, creating a dilemma for Ugandan patients: to opt for proven treatments that may be in short supply, or to sign up for a possibly risky clinical trial and at least be assured of a full course of treatments.

Signing up for a trial is voluntary, but that doesn’t make the decision easier – especially for parents who must decide what is best for their children.

“The problem is that inadequate medical care creates a strong impetus for parents to agree to have their kids in research,” said Elizabeth Woeckner, president of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research, an organization that works to protect people who are the subjects of scientific research. “What should be voluntary is not quite so.”

The bars represent the number of pharmaceutical trials started in Uganda during a particular year.
(Photo and Chart by Rebecca Sesny. Source: U.S. National Institutes of Health)

Countless lives are at stake. About 1.4 million Ugandans live with HIV/AIDS, a number that ranks their nation among the world’s top 10 in victims of the disease. Within Uganda, seven out of 100 people in the region around Gulu are infected, one of the highest rates in the country.

All the same, drugs approved for fighting the infection are in short supply at the Joint Clinical Research Centre, say its leaders.

“My work is to make you not miss your drugs,” said Dr. Willy Abongs, who was interviewed in August 2012 when he was the clinic’s director. “But we are operating with drug supplies at 70 percent” of what is needed.

The clinic has had problems getting the proper amounts of the right drugs to patients, Abongs said. Its orders from National Medical Stores, a drug supply company owned by the government and charged with delivering medicine to clinics across the country, consistently fall short.

The lack of resources is possible to see at the Joint Clinical Research Centre. During a reporter’s visit in August, some cabinets were filled with expired medicine waiting to be removed and destroyed. Shelves in the pharmacy were barren.

A shortage of government finances is only one factor keeping the shelves empty. Many medications have ended up in the black market instead of arriving at the clinics that need them most. Other drugs are stolen or lost during overseas shipments and long travel to remote regions, according to caregivers.

Then there are the problems caused by the logistical realities of distributing medicinal drugs in Uganda. “A clinic way up north is not going to get as much as a clinic in the capital, and that’s assuming ideal conditions,” said Woeckner of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research.

Patients have trouble getting to and from clinics, paying for medication, receiving treatments on time, getting tested for a disease, and getting regular blood work done.

Doctors at the Gulu clinic have to split dosages among several patients and wait until the next supply is delivered, Abongs said. Doctors ask patients to come back for the rest of their doses when the drugs are available. Some, however, don’t make the trip back. Getting patients to make medical appointments is a recurring problem, and requiring additional visits because of drug shortages only makes the problem worse.

Lablite, a London-based organization that tracks health issues in African nations, conducted a survey last year that supports what Abongs said. It examined whether HIV/AIDS testing kits and key medications were getting to adults and children in Uganda. The results documented that shortages were “frequent,” with delays for drugs sometimes lasting weeks, and other times several months.

Patients encounter immense difficulty receiving medication. They have trouble getting to and from clinics, paying for medication, receiving treatments on time, getting tested for a disease, and getting regular blood work done.

Those in a drug trial, by contrast, face a much easier regimen. More than a dozen clinical trials are being conducted at the Joint Clinical Research Centre, including Chapas 3, a drug trial for children infected with HIV/AIDS. For all their risks – the drug combinations have not been approved for general use – These trials are touted as the best hope for combating an epidemic ravaging the developing world.

“In a trial kids are followed more carefully and regularly, staff, have generally more time (as funded by trial) and drugs never run out,” said Diana Gibb, trial coordinator of the Medical Research Council, a British group that supports biomedical research. She responded to questions by email.

In trials, medicines remain firmly under the control of the clinicians conducting the tests, Abongs confirmed. “One reason families were happy for their children to be enrolled in a trial is that it was a way to ensure a continuous supply of drugs,” he said.

In addition to adequate drug supplies and regularly monitored patients, there are other perks for those willing to sign up for trials.

“Help for families for transport is provided by the trial,” said Gibb. “We generally have very low drop-out rates. So all possible is done to help families attend with their children, and the trial team keep in contact in other ways as well.”

Among northern Uganda’s afflictions is a mysterious condition known as nodding disease. The thousands of children affected by the problem, whose cause is unknown, suffer seizures that can resemble rapid nodding at the sight of food. The condition leads to mental and physical disabilities. The girl shown in this photo (and in our cover photo), Nancy Lwamwaka, is tied to a tree to prevent her from wandering into danger.
(Photo by Edward Echwalu)

While HIV/AIDS and malaria dominate international registries of drug trials conducted in Uganda, those are not the only diseases subject to pharmaceutical tests. Among others are tuberculosis and meningitis.

In the last five years, drug trials in Uganda have nearly doubled. There were 37 clinical trials in the country before 2007. Since then the number has grown by more than 100 in the last five years.

Records of the U.S. National Institutes of Health show that in 2000, only two new trials were approved for Uganda. But beginning in 2005 Uganda became the fourth most popular site for clinical trials in Africa, behind Egypt, South Africa and Kenya. The same rate of growth also makes Uganda one of the most popular sites for trials among developing countries worldwide.

Drug companies such as Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Novartis, as well as American agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, work in places like Uganda because of the low cost and the number of patients who will sign up quickly for tests.

The major drug companies recognize that their research offers benefits and risks to the volunteers under treatment, according to Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group. However, the group said in a statement on its web site, “Medical progress is not possible without human research.”

Along with the promise of solving major health issues, drug trials can bring enormous economic benefit. As a growing source of foreign revenue, clinical trials can mean millions of dollars in spending for developing nations. They also can save money for the companies conducting the tests.

“Conducting clinical trials in low-and-middle-income countries can often reduce overall trial costs by 50 percent and increase the speed of patient enrollment by several fold,” said Thomas Bollyky, chairman of the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank that examines policies affecting developing nations.

Along with economic gains for Uganda come other benefits. Not only are new medicines and vaccines tried out, but local Ugandan health workers can make gains by learning from international researchers. The money brought in also helps make up the gap in much needed health care spending.

“Government budgets for global health are tightening,” said Bollyky, “and new donor funding for delivery is increasingly scarce.”

More than a dozen clinical trials are being conducted at the Joint Clinical Research Centre in Gulu. In Chapas 3, the trial for children infected with HIV/AIDS, parents have to agree to allow HIV/AIDS-infected babies as young as one month old to be part of the study. The testing, which began in 2010, is set to end this year. About 475 children in the central African nations of Uganda and Zambia are enrolled in the long-term experiment, including 55 in Gulu. Those 55 are less than one percent of all the HIV/AIDS-infected patients getting care at the Gulu clinic.

The trial uses two drugs as a control and tests three others: Stavudine, Zidovudine, and Abacivor. Studies have shown that these drugs have adverse side effects in adults, but researchers do not know the impact on children.

Abacivor, a relatively costly drug, can cause severe allergic reactions, including nausea, fever, rash and in some instances death, according to the National Institutes of Health. It is also connected with serious liver problems. Researchers stated they have seen few side effects in African children.

Zidovudine, among other side effects, can cause severe anemia, according to the NIH. That is a major concern for children in Uganda, where malaria, which can also cause anemia, is a serious problem. This HIV/AIDS drug may make the anemia problem worse.

Stavudine is often used in clinical trials across the developing world because of its availability on the inexpensive, generic pharmaceutical market. However, it is known for a condition that can cause severe nerve damage to a patient’s feet, legs and hands.

Despite safeguards, since the late 1990s a number of well-publicized cases have highlighted tests that appeared to violate ethical standards and regulations.

On World AIDS Day in 2009, the World Health Organization called on all countries to phase out the use of Stavudine in HIV/AIDs treatment and research; however, it is still approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, allowing clinical trials receiving U.S. funding to continue the use of Stavudine on patients.

Britain’s Medical Research Council notes that severe side effects from this drug are rare in young children. The council says that its study intends in part to find out when to switch patients from Stavudine to another drug, avoiding such complications.

A drug trial in Uganda or anywhere else that receives any amount of U.S. government funding is subject to oversight. In part, the government uses Institutional Review Boards, or IRBs, which review the ethics of research projects and protect patients’ rights.

A division of the Department of Health and Human Services known as the Office for Human Research Protections determines standards for IRBs. These include requirements that the risk to test subjects be minimized, that all risk be reasonable in relation to anticipated benefit, that the informed consent of prospective test subjects must be legally authorized and that additional safeguards are included to protect vulnerable test subjects.

Despite these safeguards, since the late 1990s a number of well-publicized cases have highlighted tests that appeared to violate ethical standards and regulations.

The Rebecca Project for Human Rights, an organization that advocates for women and girls across the globe, cited several cases of bad drug trials in a report compiled by Dr. David Gisselquist.

“The researchers are effectively unconstrained by U.S. regulations, even through the funding comes from the U.S.,” Gisselquist said. “The public authorities and university researchers have given themselves permission to do unethical research, and who’s to stop them?”

Before a 1997 trial in Uganda funded by the National Institutes of Health for the drug Nevirapine, warnings of toxicity were published by the FDA. These were all but ignored by the research team, according to Gisselquist. During the trial there were serious problems in record keeping and underreporting of life threatening problems, resulting in the deaths of 14 people.

Another study tested the consequences of interrupted treatment. Men were separated into two groups. One continued to receive HIV/AIDS treatment, the other had 12 weeks of treatment and 12 weeks without. After two years the review board found that patients with interrupted treatment had doubled their risk of disease progression, meaning stage four or death. The Rebecca Project alleges that the study pressured participants to remain in the trial, despite the manifest risks.

The Chapas 3 clinical trial in Gulu is set to end this year. At that point, the children enrolled will return to care provided by Uganda’s health system.

The government will do what it can. The Uganda Ministry of Health recently announced a new initiative to decrease mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS infections. The intervention, called Option B+, calls for continuous anti-retroviral treatment for women during and after pregnancy. The Ministry of Health hopes to reduce mother-to-child transmission by 90 percent in the next three years – the kind of major success that Ugandans have long been waiting for. ■

Kamana Shrestha and Alexander Tucciarone contributed to this story.

I want more than 7 percent a year. I’ll need as much money as possible for what I want to spend.
(Illustration by Alassandra  Micheletti)

IT’S AN EARLY MORNING in September. The sky is dark. I am in bed.

And I am still very poor.

For graduate students, early mornings in September are the perverse cousins of early Christmas mornings. Instead of waking up before the sunrise to a Douglas fir, a loving family and presents, I wake up on an early September morning to a cold laptop, a snoring girlfriend and the promise of salvation: more student loan money.

I am refreshing my online bank account every few seconds so that I can see money flow from the federal government – the American people and their nation’s creditors – into my coffers. I have no funds of my own. I am dependent on the largesse of the state.

Three…two…one…click. MONEY.

$10,831.32. Ten thousand bucks needs to last me for the next six months.

I am now less poor, but further in debt.

I consider the money’s weight in my bank account. I need to pay my cell phone bill, $84.69. Next week, I’ll have to buy a Metrocard, $104. And tonight I’ll imbibe at least 3 Guinnesses, $5 a pint.

Chinese takeout three nights a week, a new pair of Chuck Taylor’s, two nosebleed seats at the Barclay’s Center: This money will evaporate quickly.

It seems to me, on a humid September morning beside my girlfriend, who would like me to take her to that new French bistro ($32 for the foie gras and escargot, $75 for a couple of filet mignons and $45 for 2005 Château de Sancerre Rouge), or on a B&B weekend getaway ($200 for a couple of nights at the Shaker Hill Bed and Breakfast in New Hampshire, $140 for a rental car, $120 for a romantic dinner), that $10,000 is not enough. That little black dress that she always wanted costs $1,895. Not to mention $50,000 for a down payment on a starter home and $600,000 to send our two-point-five kids to Dartmouth and Vassar in 2043.

Like a normal American, I want more money.

I need to be an adult and adults invest in things like stocks and bonds and children. I should invest.

But invest in what?

A savings account is out of the question. The Federal Reserve pushed interest rates down so low that a boring CD offers 0.3 percent return on investment. I have $2,000 to play with. My yearly return would be worth a side of frites ($6) at that French restaurant.

How could I do better than that? Hedge funds are for really rich people, and I wouldn’t even know where to start if I had the money. There are something like 28,000 hedge funds in the country and each of them takes 2 percent of your investment and 20 percent of the profit – if there is any. I would need $10 million, at a minimum, to invest with Bridgewater Pure Alpha or Paulson and Co.

The stock market makes sense. The S&P 500 has gone up about 15 percent so far this year. In fact, the S&P has averaged a 7 percent gain a year since the 1950s.

But I want more than 7 percent a year. I want as much money as possible. Besides, there’s no glory in doing as well as the S&P. Anyone can do that. I want to be special.

There is just too much choice. It’s like walking into Ikea and seeing 13 different Swedish names for a pillow.

My girlfriend rolls over and knocks me in the hip with her elbow. The queen-sized Sultan Hogla costs $450 at Ikea. The black leather Karlstad sofa is $919. The Isala coffee table is $199.

I am frustrated and financially illiterate. I am a money cripple. I am Dorothy looking to escape to the green lands of Oz.

And I am not alone. Strewn across the world are hundreds of thousands of investors, which is to say middle managers yearning to build an extension on their kitchen or schoolteachers vacationing at Ocean City or construction workers in need of shoulder surgery. The problem is that these people are just like me: They have no idea what they are doing with their money, and they are scared to death.

Take the 401(k), the tax-free retirement saving vehicle. In a study, almost 60 percent of the staff and faculty at the University of Southern California reported that they took less than one hour to pick what kind of retirement fund they wanted to invest in or how much of their salary they wanted to contribute. A decision that will dictate the quality of their retirement, and three in five employees of a prestigious private school in the second largest city in the U.S. made their selection in less time than an episode of “The Sopranos.” Tuition at USC costs $42,162 a year, by the way.

Another retirement plan in the United Kingdom required no money from the worker; it was paid completely by the employer. If the world were rational, every single worker would have signed up for the plan. Instead, only half did. The other half never summoned the energy to sign up for a program that quite literally handed them free money.

People are dumb about long-term money decisions because there is just too much choice. It’s like walking into Ikea and seeing 13 different Swedish names for a pillow.

Anyone will go anywhere for digestible financial advice. In a chain of Texas supermarkets, employees at each individual supermarket had the same investment strategy, but the strategies varied from supermarket to supermarket.

“It turns out that most of the supermarket employees considered the store butcher to be the investment maven and would turn to him for advice,” wrote economists Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler. “Thus, depending on the investment philosophy of the butcher at each individual location, employees ended up heavily invested in either stocks or bonds.”

People are looking for money answers in the meat department.

“Just put it in a mutual fund, that’s what my dad does, I think,” my girlfriend murmured to me in between a toss and a turn.

I know she doesn’t know what a mutual fund is, that she is parroting the phrase, that she is saying anything to let me let her sleep. But it makes sense.

A mutual fund is run by a professional money manager who raises billions of dollars from small investors and pension funds and uses that money to buy stocks from many companies.

The portfolio manager’s goal is to do better than the market as a whole. In return, the mutual fund owner takes a cut of my money, say 1.5 percent, as a fee.

What I’m really paying for, then, is genius. These guys pore over reams of a company’s SEC filings, obsess over its balance sheets, and drill the company’s senior officer – her plans for growth and market share and world domination. The mutual fund manager wears $30 argyle socks from Saks Fifth Avenue, works in a tall building and makes dolts like me a bit of money in the process.

At least that is how it’s supposed to work.

PERHAPS NO MAN WAS MORE IMPORTANT to the development of the modern mutual fund than Paul Cabot. Born in 1898, Cabot co-founded one of the first mutual fund companies a year after earning his M.B.A. from Harvard. State Street Investment Corporation went gangbusters in the second half of the 1920s, doubling the return of the S&P 500. When mutual fund laws and regulations emerged in the wake of the Great Depressions, Cabot was a chief counselor to Congressional legislators, a voice of authority. He was a man of principle in an era lacking in scruples.

He also changed the lives of millions of people.

A mutual fund uses its millions, or billions, of dollars (from thousands of people like me) to pursue a particular strategy. The fund can be filled with energy-only stocks or solely with foreign debt or dividend stocks or any concoction a fund portfolio manager can imagine.

Thanks to mutual funds, small-time investors like me have a chance to take a stake in America’s biggest companies or fastest rising companies or largest paying dividend companies without actually having to buy the companies themselves.

The author examines a financial instrument.
(Photo by Ken Christensen)

Right now, Apple is trading at a little more than $450 a share. By myself, I could buy four shares. There is nothing more juvenile than owning four shares of Apple. But I could put my $2,000 into some fund and come away with shares in Apple, General Electric and Exxon Mobile. That’s much less juvenile.

Five years after Cabot started State Street Investment Co., the mutual fund industry had a few thousand investors and a few million dollars. By the end of the 1940s, it was a $2 billion industry. Today more than 90 million Americans invest more than $11 trillion – with a T – in thousands of funds. That’s more dollars managed by companies like Vanguard and Fidelity than any national economy is worth, with the exception of the United States.

Started as a small-time financial service in Beantown 90 years ago, the mutual fund has become one of the most important financial innovations ever. If you plan on retiring someday or sending your daughter to Notre Dame or buying a house, you will one day in some fashion put your money in mutual funds.

I am young and poor and my penury is slowly strangling me. I grew up in the Washington D.C. suburbs and I want what my lineage portends – a life of liquid assets (cash in my wallet), fine things (filet mignon and Vermont Bed and Breakfasts) and financial security (cash in my bank account). I want to eventually have a tasteful four-bedroom, three bath, McMansion on an acre of land with clipped bushes, a 100-foot winding driveway and a maid. I want the good life.

So, I need someone smart to give my money to. The portfolio managers who run mutual funds hail from Harvard and Princeton and Stanford, and read hundreds of pages of analysis on the risk associated with investing money with company Y or the chance company X will be able to break into China. They are the grownups.

These professionals pour giant pools of our money into actively managed funds, that is, a mutual fund whose manager is constantly buying and selling securities to earn as much money as possible. The portfolio manager may be in charge of some tens of billions of capital and must allocate that money to stocks that will grow over the long haul. He is called “professional” because he makes his choices rationally.

“First you’ve got to get the facts,” Cabot said of his investment strategy.

“Then you’ve got to face the facts.”

KEVIN PLANK STEPPED UP TO THE PODIUM. Flanked by teleprompters, the ex-college football player’s bespoke suit clung to his bulking frame. Plank stood on the main stage of Lincoln Center’s opera hall. Even from row T, he looked like Hercules.

“We have a strict no-loser-talk rule,” said Plank, founder and CEO of Under Armour. Under Armour makes fleece-like shirts that football players wear underneath their pads. After 17 years, Under Armour is worth just under $2 billion. No loser talk needed.

This was my first time inside the opera hall, and I wasn’t there for “La Bohème.” But I wasn’t there for Plank, either. I was there for the 21st Annual Baron Investment Conference. I was there to see if I should give the host, Ron Baron, my $2,000.

Baron, the billionaire owner of the Baron’s Fund, is known as the Candide of Wall Street, forever optimistic, the man who goes long on the United States equities markets.

To me, he is the Wizard of Oz. I came to the investment conference to listen to the billionaire talk, but so far he hadn’t said a word. I had seen the world he created instead of the man himself.

The Baron Investment Conference was an eight-hour, multimillion-dollar pep rally for investors in Baron Funds. Approximately 4,000 investors showed up from as far as California to hear from CEOs, listen to the musical stylings of Broadway stars, eat “free” food, drink “free” coffee and be in the presence of Baron, whose mystique came from his wealth, which came from managing money for people like those in attendance. Baron spent a reported $100,000 to rent Avery Fisher Hall and seven figures for the Grammy-winner entertainment.

Baron can pay for the party because it is expensive to invest money with him. He charges, depending on the fund, around 1.5 percent of the amount invested as a fee. This is a lot of money, especially over 10 years, and could eat up to 20 percent of my prospective returns.

Like any good consumer, I needed to see with my own eyes if Baron was truly worth 150 basis points – as people in the financial business are determined to refer to 1.5 percent.

Harry Connick Jr. would be singing a set with a nine-piece band in Avery Fisher Hall (for those attendees with a green bracelet).

I did not fit in.

I was an intruder in a world filled with white-collared, white-haired suburbanites who were eager to embrace the warmth of a stable retirement.

Baron investors in the half-full theater liked what they saw. One success story, Under Armour, comprised 2.4 percent of the Baron Growth Fund and its stock was up 23 percent since November 2011.

“It took us 15 years to make our first billion, and two to almost make our second,” said CEO Plank. He showed promo videos celebrating Under Armour’s successful rise, then left the stage.

Out walked Baron. This was the moment I’d been waiting for – the moment Baron opened his mouth and I decided whether to give him my money. This was the moment I learned Baron’s secret, the moment I learned if he was worth a damn.

Instead, Baron announced that it was lunchtime. I would have to wait.

Baron told the crowd that Kristin Chenoweth was playing in the Koch Theater (for those attendees with orange bracelets), Joss Stone could be found in the Rock n’ Roll Theater (for those attendees with purple bracelets) and Harry Connick Jr. would be singing a set with a nine-piece band in Avery Fisher Hall (for those attendees with a green bracelet).

“Oh, I love him,” said a woman with a green bracelet.

I was swept outside by the egress of retirees, soon to eat pre-packaged couscous, a dry barbeque sandwich and a moist brownie. Pretty soon, Harry Connick Jr. was going to sing “The Way You Look Tonight,” while Chenoweth belted “Maybe This Time.” The rapt septuagenarians would crinkle their plastic bag of chips during the performance.

As I shuffled out, I looked over Baron’s promotional handouts. There was the Baron Growth Fund, Baron Partners Fund, Baron Focused Growth Fund, Baron Opportunity Fund, Baron International Growth Fund, Baron Asset Fund, Baron Real Estate Fund and the Fifth Avenue Growth Fund.

A double-sided sheet for each laid out the financials in charts and color-coded graphs. Words like “investment principles” and “long term perspective” and “capital appreciation” were strewn across the page. Each of the sheets made it look like Baron Funds was killing the market.

For the first 10 to 15 years, Baron was indeed a killer, making millions for his clients and billions for himself. But since 2007, these funds have done as well as, or worse than, the market. And that’s before taking into account management fees.

It’s difficult for me to assign value to Baron’s feast or famine streaks. One study, for instance, shows that based solely on chance, 10 percent of mutual funds will beat the market over a three-year period. That means that simply by existing, some funds will make their portfolio managers look brilliant.

Still, there are investors like Warren Buffet and Peter Lynch who have done so well for so long that it’s hard not to believe in supreme genius. Maybe Baron is like Buffet. Even economists recognize that some money managers are significantly better than average over time.

But maybe Baron was lucky for a while, and is now coming back down to earth. Maybe he tempted the gods for too long. Maybe his 49th-floor office in the GM building rose too close to the sun.

I don’t know. I still needed to hear him speak. I’d have to eat my lunch first.

NEOCLASSIC ECONOMIC THEORY is based on one simple premise: people are rational with their money. Consumers negotiate how much a product is worth to them based on the quality of the product and the amount of money they are willing to spend.

Left to his own devices, neoclassical economic theory says, a man who wants breakfast will buy a $2 bagel instead of a $3 one, if both bagels are equally delicious. This is absolutely intuitive. When I shop for cereal and I like corn flakes as much as I like Cheerios, I will buy whichever one is cheaper.

Neoclassical economic theory, however, is not right all the time. There are instances where havoc rages, the natural order of capitalism falls apart and nothing makes sense anymore.

This is especially true in the data-driven world of high finance. It turns out that the people in charge of your money are not as rational as they would have you believe.

For instance, stock markets across the world do better on sunnier-than-expected days. If neoclassical economic theory is correct, the weather should not matter. The reason it does, according to research by David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway, is that people, including stockbrokers, are more optimistic when the day is sunnier than expected.

The merry stockbroker goes to his office at 7 a.m. in a good mood, with a ruddier outlook on the world. He starts buying stocks. When brokers buy stocks, the demand for stocks goes up and stock prices appreciate. The sun shines, stockbrokers feel good, and they buy more stocks.

“They incorrectly attribute their good mood to positive economic prospects rather than good weather,” wrote Hirshleifer and Shumway.

And this wasn’t in one city during one particularly fluky year. The sunny-day phenomenon occurred in 18 different countries over a 15-year period.

That’s far from the only irrationality in the market. If neoclassical economic theory were correct, then traders who did poorly at stock picking would leave the business. They would become welders or farmers or something that stopped them from the unprofitable practice of buying high and selling low.

Nonetheless, some bad traders seem to persist. Economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean looked at about 66,000 investors with accounts in large brokerage firms over a five-year period and found that brokers who traded the most earned the least – about five percentage points below the market.

Had those brokers stopped looking for the hot stock and bought an index fund – which simply mimics an index like the S&P 500 – and held onto it for five years, they would have improved their return by 36 percent.

Highly active traders gave up a lot of money for the pleasure of pushing the trade button. They believed they knew more than they did. They were wrong, and paid for it.

Lost in the canyons of Lower Manhattan.

There are plenty of other ways for high-finance folks to act stupidly, i.e. to not make money.

In a report released last May, the Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit that gives grant money to entrepreneurs and children’s education, decided after 20 years to reduce the amount of capital it invested with venture capital funds, which finance new businesses.

“Venture capital has delivered poor returns for more than a decade,” the report’s authors wrote. “VC returns haven’t significantly outperformed the public market since the late 1990s, and, since 1997, less cash has been returned to investors than has been invested in VC.”

Research by Harvard professor Shikhar Ghosh showed that 75 percent of firms backed by venture capitalists never make a return on investment. For the past 15 years, venture capitalists provided less value than anemic U.S. Treasuries.

The list goes on and on. Market analysts hired by the big banks are given to group-think and follow-the-leader tendencies in rating businesses – like a bunch of students cheating off the smartest kid in class.

The mutual fund universe is plagued by its own irrationalities. They are apparent when you compare actively managed funds to index funds.

When you give your money to an active portfolio manager, you are saying that the pro is smarter than the economy as a whole. If the S&P 500 index grows at 7 percent, you are betting the actively managed fund will grow at 9 percent. Beating the S&P 500, or another index, is the reason the actively traded funds exists. It’s why portfolio managers make millions and get to buy estates and go out to fancy restaurants instead of boiling Barilla’s pasta at home.

But as we have seen, it doesn’t always work that way; all those irrationalities start creeping in. On the whole, the index mutual fund – which merely replicates the composition of  a stock or bond index – does at least as well as the actively traded mutual funds run by portfolio managers, at a fraction of the cost.

If you invest in an actively managed mutual fund, where a manager picks stocks or bonds, Gary Belsky told me, “There is no reason at all to assume that this person can pick stocks or bonds any better that you can.”

Belsky, author of “Why Smart People Do Stupid Things with Money,” thinks actively managed mutual funds stink.

“One thing we understand from research and study – nobody has consistently picked stocks better than the average Joe,” Belsky said. “No one can over time beat the market average, which means if you invest in a firm you have just as good chance of performing below average as you do performing above average.”

Every year, Standards & Poor’s publishes a scorecard that compares active funds to those that track some index like the S&P 500. “The only consistent data point we have observed over a five-year horizon is that a majority of active equity bond managers in most categories lag comparable benchmark indices,” wrote the report’s authors.

Imagine the same record of success in another endeavor, say sports. If I was paid $20 million to play third base for the Yankees, but for five years hit no better than .250 or hit no more than 20 homers a season, the Bronx faithful would revolt. I would not be worth my contract (see Rodriguez, Alex). Someone else could do what I did for much less money.

Barber and Odean found that actively managed mutual funds and high-trade investors do worse than their index-managing counterparts. “The investment experience of individual investors is remarkably similar to the investment experience of mutual funds,” they wrote. “As do individual investors, the average mutual fund underperforms a simple market index. Mutual funds trade often and their trading hurts performance.”

In an exhaustive analysis of the mutual fund universe, economist Mark Carhart created a database of diversified stock mutual funds from January 1962 to December 1993. He studied the fees that funds like Baron’s charged customers, the returns those funds generated and the likelihood that funds with high returns would match those high returns in the future. He systemically broke down the market to see if genius was real. His findings were straightforward.

“The results do not support the existence of skilled or informed mutual fund portfolio managers,” Carhart concluded.

RON BARON stepped up to the microphone.

All conference long he had made his presence known, but not felt. He sat on the dais as Kevin Plank (Under Armour CEO) and Frank Coyne (Verisk Analytics CEO) and David Rubenstein (co-founder of private equity monster The Carlyle Group) talked to Baron shareholders about brand penetration and market share and growth.

Baron was the intermediary between the two groups – the investor and the investee, the audience and the actors. He was the matchmaker.

Like all matchmakers, he wanted the two sides to get along, to be simpatico, to fall in love. But the investors only knew the CEOs on stage through Baron’s omniscient eyes. They trusted Carlyle and Under Armour and Verisk because Ron trusted them.

As Baron prepared to speak, his portfolio managers, disciples, sat behind him. All conference long, I had heard the gospel of Ron Baron according to Cliff Greenberg (Baron Small Cap Fund), Andrew Peck (Baron Asset Fund) and Michael Kass (Baron Emerging Markets fund.)

Jeffrey Kolitch (Baron Real Estate Fund) told the 4,000 faithful that when Ron Baron met with a company’s CEO, Baron didn’t ask about the company, he asked about the executive. Baron cared less about income statements and more about what made that executive tick. Ron Baron cared about people.

Now I’d get to hear it from the mouth of god, not just god’s mouthpieces. Because I didn’t really know Ron Baron – yet. So far, he was just the man with the perpetual tan that the well off always have, the one they manufacture in St. Tropez. He was just one of thousands of billionaires. He looked so small on the stage that had held Rodolfo, Carmen and Don Giovanni.

I expected to be dismissive of Ron Baron when he finally addressed the audience – even though the man’s Fifth Avenue office looks over the Pulitzer Fountain and The Pond, and he passes a Lichtenstein on the stroll to his desk. But then he said, “Hi, My name’s Ron Baron.” I was captivated. He seemed so reasonable.

He said that Chairman Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing at the Federal Reserve was raising stock prices, that the shale gas boom would lift Baron’s oil and gas-related investments. He said living standards would appreciate, that Americans would keep buying things and everything would be all right.

He said that Baron Funds was not interested in the hot deal or the new-fangled thing. Baron did not use high frequency trading, and his portfolio managers weren’t cooking up the latest high-tech investing gadget that would turn the world upside down and cause the next flash crash. He used common-sense investing techniques. He got to know the companies he invested in.

He said he cared.

Baron grew up in Brooklyn and went to Ebbets Field as a child. He was a good kid gone great. He was the investors’ best friend. He was their savior.

“If you want to be better than the market,” said Baron, “you should invest with an actively managed portfolio at Baron’s.” Baron hits home runs. Index funds bunt for singles.

I looked down at the glossy that Baron’s PR flaks handed out in the morning. Minimum investment: $2,000. I have $2,000.

Baron’s listeners stopped nibbling on their couscous and nattering to one another. Light beamed onto the stage.

And I let myself believe him.

Despite the fallibility of actively managed funds and despite the varied and unequivocal mistakes that professional money men have made with their money and despite the fact that most money managers are as good at picking stocks as a monkey throwing a dart at the Wall Street Journal, it felt good to have him talk to me this way. It felt like everything was going to be okay.

Baron concluded his talk with a Q&A session. A man from California asked about the fiscal cliff and a woman from Massachusetts asked about Bernanke. Baron avoided politics and gave swift answers in complete sentences.

I grabbed my bag and got ready to head for the exit, happy with what I had found. I knew the stats. I knew that Baron funds were slumping and more expensive than index funds. But if I tithed my money to him, I wouldn’t have to worry about it myself. If Baron lost my money, I could blame him rather than myself. He was a scapegoat.

The audience, unlike me, was restless. The flock in pew T only half-listened to Baron. There was a patch of empty seats here and there and those who were seated bleated to their neighbor or snacked on leftovers from lunch. The 4,000 were waiting for something else.

“It’s now time for the main event,” Baron said.

Baron’s listeners stopped nibbling on their couscous and nattering to one another. Light beamed onto the stage as the theater’s doors opened and attendees who had skipped Baron’s chat filed back to their seats.

The stage lights went dim. Pop music blared from the speakers. The 4,000 collectively whispered the name of the world-famous artist who was about to appear on stage on a late afternoon in Midtown Manhattan.

“I can’t believe she’s here,” one audience member said.

After a five-minute intro video, Celine Dion glided onto the stage in a flowing white bespeckled dress and started to sing. The seraph caroled and the crowd returned silent adulation.

I couldn’t believe it either. I tripped over a pair of feet as I exited stage left.

I had seen all I needed to see. Baron’s 4,000 thought they had invested with Ron Baron to make money. They really invested with him to be a part of the club. The Ron Baron Club.

I wasn’t in the market for a club. I don’t like Celine Dion, or Harry Connick Jr. I don’t need to hear CEOs talk up their companies or to eat pre-packaged plastic containers of couscous.

I was in the market for financial guidance, for a grown-up to show me the way to buy my girlfriend a Bergdorf’s little black dress or save for our not-yet-born child’s college education. Someday I want a house.

As I left the great Opera cathedral, I thought of Broadway star Kelli O’Hara hymning “Someone to Watch Over Me” earlier in the day as the 4,000 came back from lunch.

I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood

I know I could, always be good

To one who’ll watch over me

Ron Baron was the shepherd and the 4,000 his flock. I’m not yet ready to be religious. But I can see the appeal. It’s always nicer to think there is an angel on your shoulder. Everyone wants to believe that someone out there in the skies of Manhattan is answering their prayers for a secure retirement.

I don’t need angels. No matter how reasonable the Ron Barons appear, they don’t know the things they claim to. No one does.

My $2,000 will remain in my bank account and, thanks to inflation and low interest rates, effectively lose value. At least for now. At least until I grow up a bit. At least until I actually have some money to play with.

At least I understand bank accounts.

I reached into my wallet and felt around for the rumpled 20. I’ll buy my girlfriend a few Guinnesses when she gets home from work. Then we’ll go to Chez Moi for date night.

She’s paying.

‘I’m trying to capture the pulse of what is happening somewhere in real time.’
(Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

As the Arab Spring swept through North Africa and the Middle East, Andy Carvin (@acarvin), the senior social media strategist for NPR, tweeted the news from his home near Washington almost without rest. His Twitter feed covered the breakout rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt, their spread to Bahrain, Libya and Yemen, and the ongoing tragedy in Syria. In the process, Carvin developed ways to enhance the journalistic value of social media, scouring online tweets and videos for the best sources providing the most trustworthy information. In his new book, “Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution” (CUNY Journalism Press, 2013), Carvin describes his journalistic breakthroughs and evokes the human dramas that he covered daily. The following excerpts of his conversation with Mikhael Simmonds were edited for length and clarity.

Do you consider yourself a journalist?
Yeah, I do consider myself a journalist, but I’m also somewhat leery about defining who is a journalist and who is not, because I think many of us who have no experience in reporting have the capacity of creating journalism either when the muse strikes them or the opportunity strikes them. Random acts of journalism happen all the time and they’re not always conducted by professional journalists.

You say on your Twitter profile that you’re a professional Information DJ. What do you mean by that?
That kind of started as a joke. For the last two years people have really struggled to describe exactly what I do. I struggle to describe what I do. I’m not necessarily creating products, news products out of my work. Instead, I tend to be online a lot and I’m trying to capture the pulse of what is happening somewhere in real time. I don’t remember who it was, but someone described what I did as something like what a DJ does. I have access to real-time information. I choose what gets spun out at any given moment, and it’s my responsibility to decide if it’s something that my audience is going to be able to react to or not. One can easily argue that what I’m doing isn’t really that different from what a news host or presenter does on a live broadcast. They are being given large amounts of information by staff in their news studio and they’re working with producers and editors to sort it out in real time. Then they present it to the public live in a way that ideally creates a compelling narrative. Essentially I’m trying to do the same thing. I don’t have the studio and I don’t have the staff working with me for the most part, but instead I have my Twitter followers and they work with me as volunteers to help me figure out what’s going on.

In the book you have people from Syria, from Egypt, and they’re all cross referencing each other. How do you go about making sense of all this “music?”
Well I generally use a lot of Twitter lists. And I use Twitter client software like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite or one of these tools that allow you to set up individual columns for specific topics.
At the height of the Arab Spring, if you leaned over my shoulder, you would see at least half a dozen of these columns across my screen. One for Yemen, one for Syria, one for Libya. Depending on which one was being more volatile that day, I would move the columns around to make sure they were in my sight lines. Over time I was also able to determine who in these countries, or related to these countries, seemed to have the best information. So I also I created what you may call a greatest hits Twitter list of people representing all these countries.

When did you have time to sleep?
During part of the Arab Spring I was online up to 18 hours a day. I would be checking Twitter at 6 a.m. while having breakfast. I would be checking Twitter before going to bed just before midnight, and I was on most of the time in between. Somehow I managed to actually get sleep in between and so I was able to keep this pace seven days a week for months and months on end. You know there is a certain level of adrenaline rush that goes on when you are covering a story that’s very dynamic and you know it’s history in the making. I think part of it had to do with the fact that for e a country like Egypt, it’s not unusual for the protest to begin after afternoon prayers, which was around one in the afternoon their time, that time of year. So when I got online at 6 a.m., generally speaking, I hadn’t missed much in Egypt yet because they were just getting started. For other places like Libya and Syria, because the fighting has been so much more intense in those places – it’s 24 hours a day – there is no way I can choose the right hours and capture everything I would want to. I just have to accept the fact that I can’t do everything. I’m not a robot.

Do you think what you do in social media undermines traditional news?
I don’t think it undermines journalism. I think it’s a part of journalism. Historically, there have always been situations where reporters are unable to get to a place and are still expected to report on it. Reporting on stories remotely isn’t new to journalism. What I think is new here is that you don’t have these bottlenecks of information flowing to the public anymore. I mean, if you think about the word media it comes from the Latin word for the middle. Journalists are essentially middlemen between information about what’s going on in the world and the public’s appetite for it. And what social media has done is it allows people both caught in the action of the news story or interested in the news story to do an end run around traditional media sources and interact directly with the people on the ground. I like to try thinking of what I do as really complementing what happens in mainstream media. Look at the countries I focus on, like Syria, for example. I am able to do a lot trying to authenticate videos, find new sources, tell stories of people over the course of time. But I also work with colleagues at NPR who risk their lives all the time sneaking across the border and visiting hotspots across the country to tell stories in a ways I never could. So, if you’re on the ground covering a story you can tell very compelling emotional, powerful stories through your presence there and your ability to look a person in the eye and interview them. I can’t accomplish that with the type of reporting I’m doing. But there are other things I can accomplish. I am able to interact with many more people in real time, and I’m able to intermix parallel stories. I am able to get feedback from the public in real time and integrate it into how I tell stories. They’re just different ways of reporting. I don’t think one undermines the other. I think they complement each other and I’m proud to be doing this, working at a mainstream media organization that takes its reporting on the ground very seriously but also encourages new forms of journalism.

You have access to many different media tools. Why did you decide to present your story in the form of a book?
I did this for myself, really. Initially, I was using the tool Storify to capture some of the methods I had used in some of the stories or to recall certain incidents such as the battle in Tahrir Square. And as I was doing this – like in April, May, June 2011 – it became clear to me it was getting harder and harder for me to find the source material from social media that was just a few months old at that point. Social media can be very ephemeral. It’s very hard to do deep searches on the Internet for stuff that’s even a few month old. So I kind of felt that there was a window of opportunity for me to capture these stories and organize them in such a way that we won’t forget them. It’s not unusual for people to publish diaries and memoirs after a war or after a revolution. [But] this is really the first series of conflicts where participants are able to share these stories while they’re happening. You can feel and hear and see their stories in real time and you can actually interact with them. And it was really unlike anything we have ever seen on a scale like that before. And I wanted to see if I could capture that in written form – and also maybe turn it into a book.

What’s the future of social media and journalism?
Oh, who knows! If I had an answer to where this is going I would try to make a few phone calls to a few venture capitalists to come up with an idea and retire young hopefully from whatever I produced out of it. It’s so hard to predict what will happen because things are changing all the time. In terms of what stories get covered, I think a lot is going to depend on the state of the digital divide in those locations – as well as whether there is a critical mass of experts or a critical mass of eyewitnesses who can use social media to record them. As for the tools themselves, I think there is much more of an appetite in news organizations to use social media effectively. We’re all trying to figure out how to curate this information better, how to authenticate it, how to find our sources quickly, how to do it on the run.

Rue Oberkampf: There is something deeply uncomfortable about assuming nothing
(Photo by Gueorgui Tcherednitchenko via Flickr)

DURING THE SUMMER of 2006, when I was 22, I flew to Paris. I knew virtually no one, and I spent the first week or two walking the city, buying bread in halting French, reading and smoking cigarettes I rolled myself to save money and pass time.

One evening I went to dinner at the flat of a family friend, an American journalist who had for years lived abroad, working for Reuters in Moscow in the 1980s, and later for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. It was a warm night and we ate on the balcony. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I can still see her measure tablespoons of oil and vinegar into a wooden salad bowl, and taste the frisée she tossed and served at the end of the meal. I went home carrying a slim book from the shelves that lined one wall of the apartment – Paul Auster’s “The Invention of Solitude” – which I read with my feet propped on the edge of the tall casement windows in the tiny room I rented on Rue Oberkampf, just off the Parmentier stop in the 11th Arrondissement.

Auster is an observer of coincidence. His fiction borrows heavily from fact, building stories from his collection of examples of real-world strangeness. He tells of one in “The Invention of Solitude” – a summer in which he encountered two pianos, miles apart, somehow missing the same key. “It was at that moment, perhaps, that A. realized the world would go on eluding him forever.”

All of this is true. I was in Paris. I ate that salad. I read that book in that window of the room with two hot plates and a bathroom with a shower so small one had to climb in sideways. But I begin here not only because it is true, but because the details – that a journalist gave me that book that I would later think of as I tried to become a journalist myself – offer a place to begin.

What does it mean to tell true stories? Get your facts right. Don’t lie. But it goes further. To try to tell the truth, rather than to just tell the truth, is to operate on the belief that the way a narrative unravels can offer insight beyond the who, what, when and where.

I thought about that as I wrote “Unfair Fate” for this magazine, the story of Diana Newton Wood, Daryl Whitley and the murder case that engulfed both of their lives. I was in graduate school when I began investigating the case. I had not been reporting for very long, and this story had its difficulties. The catalyzing event had occurred nearly 30 years prior – before, in fact, I was born. One of the key characters – Detective Jerry Giorgio – told me in our single, brief conversation that he would not talk to me again.

Exploring coincidence
(Photo by Ines Bebea)

My first effort at a narrative was a series of illustrative missteps interrupted by occasional successes. I ferreted out every article written about the story over 28 years. I read transcripts of the trial. I went down to the clerk’s office at 100 Center Street and shoved quarter after quarter into the rickety Xerox machine to copy the case file. I read every article, and book, that mentioned Jerry Giorgio, and bought the “Law and Order” movie on Amazon.com so I could watch his TV-cop cameo. I went to speak with Daryl Whitley in prison, and Diana Newton Wood and her son at her home in Massachusetts. It was a process of piecing together conflicting facts and faulty memories, filling some holes and finding that others must necessarily be left empty.

To be a working reporter is to have the privilege to wonder at the world for pay. But with that comes responsibility – to avoid making too much of things, to walk the line between being brave enough to ask the hard questions, and acknowledging that some won’t have answers.

I cringe when I think of questions that I did not ask, or asked in the wrong way, at the wrong time and place. But I came away with a sense that true stories, well told, may pose questions as well as answer them. One can begin with a question of what happened that night in November 1981, and end by asking what exactly does justice mean?

Maybe when it comes to true stories, the dangling threads are the point.

“If a novelist had used these little incidents of broken piano keys,” Auster writes, “the reader would be forced to take note, to assume the novelist was trying to make some point about his characters in the world. … In a work of fiction, one assumes there is a conscious mind behind the words on the page. In the presence of happenings in the so-called real world, one assumes nothing.”

There is something deeply uncomfortable about assuming nothing. It requires one to ask stupid questions, to keep one’s mouth shut, to take copious notes on facial tics and the color of wallpaper. To be a reader of happenings, which is, in essence, a journalist’s work, is to be tasked with making something of the little incidents. It is also always to risk making too much of them, to misread the ultimate meaning. One of the reasons true stories do not work the same way as novels is that they have no fixed beginning, middle or end.

So we look for the moments in which the real world reflects itself not to say, Here is the key, but because part of the reason to tell true stories is precisely to remind ourselves that the world will go on eluding us forever.

This past Thanksgiving, a draft into this essay and six years after I returned from Paris, I was in a bar on New York City’s Lower East Side. A group of friends from journalism school had gathered. Friends of ours, now living abroad, were back for the holidays. One woman is now living in Paris, working for a TV station there. We sat at wooden tables in the dark bar, and she told me she had the week before moved to a new apartment, one big enough to have people stay, and that I should visit. I asked her where it was.

Off the Parmentier stop, she said, on Rue Oberkampf.■

We created this J-school publication several classes ago as a showcase for our students’ long-form work, and it will keep that mission. Under founding editor Tim Harper, the site published wonderful stories from the city and around the world and won a major award for investigative reporting. All of that great work remains in the magazine’s archives. Now that Tim has moved on to oversee our book-publishing initiative, I will take over the editing job at the magazine and guide it through its next phase.

Please join our creative work and keep up with our progress through our Facebook page and @219Magazine.

You will notice that the magazine now is identified simply as something “Published in Times Square, New York City.” That label requires every story to be as lively and colorful as our polyglot neighborhood. As an editor with a background in newsmagazine writing, I love stories that showcase a writer’s commitment, personality and point of view. The site now features three of the kinds of stories I have in mind:

The president has four more years to prove that the faded Obama posters are as valuable today as they were in 2008
(Illustration by Chester Soria)

ON THE NIGHT of his reelection, President Barack Obama promised four initiatives in a second term: trim the deficit, rework the nation’s tax code, revisit immigration reform and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

Each of these things matters to young Americans. But teenagers and 20-somethings – who turned out in greater numbers than in 2008 and gave Obama 60 percent of their vote – have their own urgent priorities. Young people need jobs, health care and a piece of the promised immigration reforms. And they’ll be watching for progress as the president shapes his next administration.

Not so funemployed

While Obama’s encore is likely to be defined by an economic recovery, he will have to make a concerted political effort to ensure that young Americans have a shot at getting good jobs. Unfortunately for those who have become all too cozy in their parents’ basements, this is unlikely to happen. A new economy based on science and technology sounds great, but Obama’s record on job creation has almost singularly concentrated on old-school labor such as car manufacturing.

Since the Great Recession, anybody under the age of 30 has probably learned the hard way that finding a 9-to-5 with a solid salary and benefits package is a job in and of itself. Most cobble together some semblance of a living: a part-time job or two, some freelance work here and there, or even a check from Grandma in the mail. For those who have been living this way for a few years now, it may finally be sinking in that this is what the economy looks like now.

Obama’s second term jobs plan, released in a hurry during the waning days of the campaign, makes no mention of young people.

There are some good ideas to make this model work. For example, Washington could create risk pools that allow freelancers to enjoy the same lower-cost health insurance offered to employees of big companies. And independent workers should be able to contribute to a pre-tax fund that they can tap when their careers hit a dry spell. These ideas represent the kinds of policy changes necessary to cope with a new, post-recession economy.

But Obama’s second term jobs plan, released in a hurry during the waning days of the campaign, makes the kind of vague and grandiose appeal to voting blocs that tends to grab headlines around election time. It makes no mention of young people entering – or languishing outside of – the workforce

While Obama has made some effort to tackle the other elephant in the room – student loan debt – there aren’t many proposals to help young people find a sustainable living after graduation. And we shouldn’t expect many new commitments. It’s not a matter of if, but rather what Obama will agree to cut from the federal budget during fiscal-cliff negotiations with Republicans.

American DREAMers

In 2008, Obama made a qualified promise on comprehensive immigration reform. “I cannot guarantee that it is going to be in the first 100 days,” the then-candidate said. “But what I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support and that I’m promoting. And I want to move that forward as quickly as possible.”

Unfortunately, “quickly as possible” still hasn’t happened. Young Latinos who unwittingly crossed the border illegally have spent years asking Congress to pass the DREAM Act, giving them a legal path to residency and citizenship. It’s an issue that speaks not just to those immigrants but also to the young citizens who grew up around them.

Obama issued an order allowing certain young immigrants to legally work in the country, but the decree is still a far cry from what DREAMers have been asking for. After the election, the question is not whether Republicans, embarking on a newfound mission to expand their base, can match Obama’s interest in immigration reform. The question is who will lead. The president’s second term might be his – and the Democrats’ – last foreseeable window of opportunity to lead on immigration.

In sickness and health

Much has been made of the benefits for young people in Obama’s Affordable Care Act, such as the provision that allows those under 26 to stay on their parents’ health plan. But there are still plenty of other concerns.

Few pundits and politicians mention that in order for 26-year-olds to stay on their parents’ plan, the parents need a plan to begin with. What happens to the children of parents who lack health insurance? That is a rarely discussed problem, even at a time when 48.6 million people are still uninsured.

Some uninsured Americans enroll in government programs that give them a modicum of security. In particular, an increasing number will now rely on Medicaid. Under Obamacare, Medicaid will expand, opening up coverage for as many as 15 million Americans between the ages of 19 and 34, according to the Urban Institute.

But with negotiations on the impending fiscal cliff raging in Washington and on the trail, it’s difficult to see how a deal can be struck without touching entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare – and Medicaid. Obama is more likely to make a bargain that preserves his legacy as the president who fixed the budget rather than the leader who preserved the social safety net for future generations.

None of this is to say that there aren’t other issues that weigh heavily on young Americans. Included in their ranks, for example, are more than 1.4 million military veterans under the age of 34. Obama needs to rehabilitate a deficient Department of Veterans Affairs to better meet the needs of an increasing number of young men and women who served during the longest period of warfare in American history.

The president has four more years to prove he can see through his agenda for young Americans, both from the 2012 campaign and from 2008. It’s the only way he can prove to young citizens that their faded Obama posters are just as valuable today as they were four years ago. ■

A sandy new view, blasted through the backyard of a Manhattan Beach home
(Photo by Gabrielle Sierra)

“WE ARE OUT OF SLICED HAM,” my mother says over the phone. “That is our chief concern at the moment.” It is October 29, 2012, at 10 in the morning, and my parents Samantha and Joe and my brother Joshua are making breakfast in Zone A. Hurricane Sandy is on her way and the residents of Manhattan Beach, a Brooklyn community located on a peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and Sheepshead Bay, have been told to evacuate. My parents have decided to stay, as have most of their friends and neighbors. “If a tree falls in the house,” my mother jokes, “we want to be here to hear it. And to clean up after it.”

I always describe my childhood in Manhattan Beach as growing up in a suburb of Brooklyn. It is tiny, pretty, and safe. A wooden footbridge connects the residential community to stores and the subway on the other side. It takes an hour riding the subway to reach the city. On our side of the bridge, cops get around in tiny one-man cars. It’s a boring place to be a kid, but you grow to love it as an adult.

My parents still live in my childhood home, a two-family house on Mackenzie Street. They live on the second floor, which is 17 steps up from street level. My grandmother lives on the first floor. My mother grew up in the house with her sisters, and most of our family members have lived or stayed there at one time or another. The best part of the house is its proximity to the water. From the front porch you can see the masts of boats as they pass by on the bay. In the summer you can hear shouts and laughter from the beach a block away.

Manhattan Beach was declared a Mandatory Evacuation Zone last year during Hurricane Irene. My parents remained in the house that time too. They ate dinner and watched some television. They went to bed early. It rained and the water rose, but not far enough to damage the house. Those who stayed drank water bottlesbottled water so they would feel less silly for buying so many water bottles.

“I ain’t afraid of nothing, fool. It’s just a little drizzle.”

“But this hurricane warning feels a little different,” I tell my brother, who is living there for a few months while looking for a new apartment. It is late afternoon, and many Manhattan Beach neighbors are already seeing flood- level waters. Two of them scramble to evacuate at the last minute, leaving sandbags at their doors and prayers in the wet air. My grandmother, who lives with her aide, Avis, has also been evacuated. Avis took her safely to Zone C, where she has her apartment.

Safe but isolated in my Williamsburg studio, I browse through Manhattan Beach photos posted by local websites. The water is already up over the bay walls. I describe the photos to my brother. “I ain’t afraid of nothing, fool,” Joshua says. “It’s just a little drizzle.” He threatens to call the “whambulance” if I don’t stop whining.

My mother sifts through soggy mementos
(Photo by Gabrielle Sierra)

I phone a few of my friends. My house has always been a hang-out spot for them; there is always an open door, food in the fridge, and at least three dogs to play with. My entire high school soccer team used to meet in the kitchen to eat my mother’s organic snacks while waiting for rides home. My elementary and junior high school friends recall sleepovers when I still lived downstairs, sleeping all mushed together on our lumpy fold-out couch. They’re worried, and it makes me feel better and worse. I hang up and listen to the wind make ghost noises against my windows.

At 6:46 that evening my mother calls. The water is up over the grass and into the driveway. “I think we might be in trouble,” she says. She sounds pissed off, like the weather has betrayed an unspoken understanding.

At 7:29 she calls again. My dad’s car has been lifted by the choppy floodwaters that have washed up the driveway. The car, which we call Blue-y, has been in the family for 23 years. My parents bought it the same year my brother was born. The wind has slammed the car into the garage door, breaking through to the inside. Water pours in through the holes and there is no way to stop it. “The water has somehow made all of the car lights turn on, all of the cars on the block,” my mother says. “They are just floating, lit up in the dark.” She pauses before telling me that all of our childhood drawings, toys, and books are in boxes on the garage floor. “I feel sick,” she says. Then she hangs up.

At 7:40 I call the house. No one answers.

My brother rescues two stray kittens that float by him in the yard.

At 8 my father calls me back. The ground floor of our house has flooded, filling my grandmother’s apartment. The gushing water pushes the air conditioner out of her back window. When we lived down here this was the room where my brother and I used to sleep, our childhood walls painted by my father. Garbage and branches swirl around her living room. This is where we had our first Christmas tree. He assures me that the rest of the family is safe and dry on the second floor, but helpless to stop what is going on below. He sees a few sparks jumping to the roof from a nearby power line, and then the lights go out.

Throughout the rest of the night the calls come and go. The water continues to rise quickly, covering fences, hydrants, and mailboxes. At one point everyone smells smoke and sees bright lights reflected in the sky. They later learn about the catastrophic fire in Breezy Point, a beach neighborhood just across the water from ours. The fire would destroy 80 houses before it could be stopped.

Neighbors from the ground floor apartment of the two-family house next-door are forced to evacuate, and they wade over to my parents’ house for some wine and dry clothes. A teen attempts to check on his car down the block and falls in the high fast water. My brother wades out and helps him come inside.

The rescued kittens
(Photo by Samantha Sierra)

Everyone plays cards and other games, which is a family tradition after holiday dinners. Nearly every celebration is held at Mackenzie Street. I recently put together a photo book for my mother’s 60th birthday, and it documented more than 50 years of family photos taken on the same front steps. Many of these same photos were in books on a bottom shelf in my grandmother’s living room.

After another hour or so the water starts to recede, leaving debris scattered in the dark.

Finally it is morning. My father calls. “Everything looks worse,” he says. He has just walked to the bay. “Cars are flipped over everywhere like toys. Trees are all over the roads. Everything is wet and dirty. But we are safe and dry upstairs.”

He tells me that the sailboats are all loose in the bay. The footbridge connecting our neighborhood to greater Brooklyn has been partially swept away. Cars have been thrown into local shops, breaking through glass windows, shattering storefronts. “We just never expected it would get that bad,” my father says. “We are so lucky that we are safe.”

After we hang up I check in with others who grew up in Manhattan Beach. “My parent’s’ house had thirteen 13 feet of water in it last night,” says a childhood friend. I remembered all the pool parties and dress-up contests in that house.

“We lost everything,” says another neighbor, who evacuated at the last minute with her husband and baby. She had recently hosted a house-warming party.

We all tell stories. We joke about the past. We tag one another on Facebook. We share links and photos.

Our lives are altered in ways we have yet to realize. I grew up in the house on Mackenzie Street, and my mother as well. We share family histories with so many others. We all attended elementary school in the neighborhood, and have crossed the footbridge thousands of times. We wonder if the small stores across the water will have the money to clean up and reopen. We wonder about the damage to the beach and park. We guess about our favorite spots.

At 4 p.m. on October 30, 2012, I call home and speak to my father. This morning they smelled gas, but have yet to hear back from Con Edison. The garage door is still stuck, and the car is filled with garbage. But he sounds optimistic, telling me that a few neighbors are going to sleep over, and that he is ordering pizza for everyone. Yes, Domino’s is delivering.

Before we hang up he asks how I am. ■

After the flood receded, Corbin Place was a pile of rubble
(Photo by Gabrielle Sierra)

A bleak Cold-War landscape: Barbara (Nina Hoss) and André (Ronald Zehrfeld)
(Photo courtesy of New York Film Festival)

There’s not an ounce of fat on “Barbara,” Christian Petzold’s precisely paced Cold War drama, set in 1980, about a Berlin doctor who finds herself banished to a bleak small-town clinic in East Germany as punishment for applying for an exit visa.

Barbara (Nina Hoss) struggles to adjust to the narrowed scope of her life, while plotting escape via her West German boyfriend, Klaus (Rainier Bock). Barbara’s daily existence at the clinic is dreary and confined, but Hoss infuses her with a restrained, steady-gazed warmth that saves the film from feeling too clinical.

Petzold wisely avoids music. Barbara’s life is measured by other sounds—running water, the clicking of sensible shoes down the hospital’s tile hallway, and every now and then a few carefully chosen words. The film’s only sustained music is a sleazy lounge number Klaus plays during a hotel tryst, a tune that suggests Barbara might be better off with André (Ronald Zehrfeld), a colleague who’s been smitten with her all along.

Of course, you can only take so much silence, and Petzold relieves the quiet tension every now and then with lovely, gusty wide shots of Barbara riding her bike through the countryside in the wind. It feels a little chilly, but it’s the kind of bracing cold that does you good. ■

Diana Newton Wood, Daryl Whitley and John Chase Wood, Jr.
(Photo montage by Lisa Riordan Seville)

THE DAY AFTER John Chase Wood Jr.’s 31st birthday, his wife woke up feeling ill.

Diana Newton Wood was newly married, madly in love and almost a mother, but the first five months of her pregnancy had been difficult. She was often sick, and she spent every third night alone, with only the dogs and John’s French horns for company, while her husband worked his 36-hour shifts as a resident at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

That day, November 2, 1981, was one in which ordinary troubles seemed too much to bear. A man shouted at Diana in the elevator at the hospital where she worked as a nurse. Construction snarled her ride home down the Henry Hudson Parkway on Manhattan’s West Side. When she opened the door to the apartment at 159-00 Riverside Drive that afternoon, she found that Molly, one of two strays John had taken in, had nosed her way into a cabinet and covered the floors in dried egg noodles.

Though Diana came from New England stock, people who spent carefully and weathered cold winters with a set jaw, that day shook her. She called John in tears. His soothing words did not comfort her. He said he would come home.

He stepped out of the hospital for the last time into the mild autumn night, wearing his white doctor’s coat.

• • •

“An almost perfect person”
November 2, 1981, 7:30 p.m.

Though John Chase Wood came into his looks late, by 31 he was the catch of the hospital. Behind the thick mustache was a Renaissance man. People would recall particular qualities when they began to speak of him in the past tense: how gently he threaded the IV into the narrow vein of a child, his mastery of the French horn, his wry humor. Later someone would describe him as “an almost perfect person.”

Five months dating, five months engaged, he and Diana were now five months married. Their courtship had been a fairy tale told in a 14-bed ward. As the story would go, they met “over the stumps of Clarence Hightower.” Diana remembers John coaxing her, then a 23-year-old nurses’ aide, to help him irrigate the wounds of the double amputee.

Marriage came not long after, at the parish church in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where Diana’s mother worshiped. A quartet of John’s friends played chamber music at the reception at her grandparents’ house where years later she would come to live.

Plans had been laid. Raised in a home with a mudroom and a cookie jar, John wanted nothing more than a big family and a drafty old house. At 24, Diana was not quite ready for marriage, for a child, for the stay-at-home motherhood she thought life very well might bring. But John was, and it was John she wanted most. When John was done with his pediatric surgery residency in New York City, they decided they would leave the apartment on Riverside Drive and take their young family to a house in the suburbs.

John walked through the door and settle on the edge of the bed beside his young wife with the soft brown hair and the round belly. With her husband close, Diana felt herself settle back into kilter. About 8:45 p.m., he plucked a can of Coca-Cola from the kitchen and left to finish his shift. She tucked in. M*A*S*H was almost on.

• • •

“I’m going to put your lights out”
November 2, 1981, 8:45 p.m.

His white coat billowed in the breeze on Riverside Drive. Though the light was bad, and the night was dark and it was New York City in the early 1980s, John chose the near-abandoned street on the edge of the city for his short stroll back to the hospital. He liked to walk beneath the trees.

Dorothy Howze was pushing her baby girl in her carriage when she saw two men come up behind the doctor, brushing close. Young, they looked to her, young and dark. At first she thought they knew the man. Then the voices got louder. They began to pat the doctor down. They asked for money. They asked for pills. One slapped the doctor’s face. “You give me something or I’m going to put your lights out,” she heard him say.

Howze saw the movement first, the twirling object that solidified into a silver .22 revolver. Two shots fired.

John Wood stumbled out toward the street as the men dissolved into the night. He fell as he reached the road, his body splayed into the street. Blood seeped through the white fabric of his coat. Howze wheeled the carriage over to him. His eyes widened and rolled back. She reached down to hold his head, and began to scream.

• • •

“Youth and rage and guns”
November 4-6, 1981

Surgeon’s Slaying Stuns Upper West Side sprawled across page B1 of The New York Times on November 4. Of the 573 murders in Manhattan in 1981, that of Dr. John Chase Wood, a white man killed by strangers on the street, was an outlier. Most of the victims whose deaths put Manhattan’s murder rate among the nation’s highest were young, black or brown, and knew their killer. In the wake of white flight, after the Bronx had burned and Harlem’s abandoned buildings all around Columbia Presbyterian Hospital winked their empty windows, the Wood murder carried a particular resonance.

The papers returned to the story day after day to make the point that the .22-caliber bullet had not pierced just the heart of a man, or a family. It shot through Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, penetrating an institution.

Five hundred mourners gathered in the plain white church in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, on November 6, where the minister called the killing an act of “youth and rage and guns.” Many in the pews were John’s colleagues who had arrived that morning on charter buses, the memory still fresh of opening their friend’s chest to try to pump the life back in.

New York City joined their outrage. On the evening of November 6, thousands read in The Times the words of Dr. Michael Katz, the head of pediatrics at Presbyterian: “I know that when my anger subsides, when my irrational need for revenge passes, my thoughts of John will be joyous,” he said. “I will remember him for his humanity, his whimsy, his self-directed humor and for his music. But for now, I am enraged.”

Diana was there to listen to the eulogy, but her rage burned more privately—at the neighborhood, at her fate, at John. “John, whether it was intentional or not, abandoned Johnny, and me,” she remembered years later. “And how could you ever say that? Because it wasn’t his intention. But yet it did happen.”

Why not just give them the five dollars that you had? she would ask her absent husband. He would for months remain as real to her as the scene on Riverside Drive that revolved in her mind—the white coat, the young men, the silver gun, her husband’s refusal.

She could hear him saying “No.” It was in character. She could hear him saying “No, I don’t think so,” in his matter-of-fact way.

As the service ended and the casket came out, she knew cameras would be waiting. On the church steps, she balled her fist and closed her eyes. Shutters flapped in unison. The image in the evening paper on November 6, 1981, shows the young widow in a high-collared shirt with a dark smock over her rounded belly, eyes shut tight against a world trying to take her in.

• • •

“I try to remember”
December 1981 and Later

In the year that followed the killing, Diana lived with the illusions that often follow sudden death. Their life together had been so brief, and she had often spent nights alone while he was on call. “I could almost pretend that he was just away for the evening,” she said. Diana pressed on with the life they had talked about living. In the New Year, she moved to the suburbs, to a little two-story house on a quiet street in Teaneck, New Jersey.

With time, the meaning of murder would shift. The hospital, ever resilient, forged on. In her way, Diana did too. A few years later she would enroll in the medical school, joining the young students who still came to Columbia looking for opportunity, thinking that to become a doctor would give her something nobody could take away.

Near the first anniversary of John’s death, Diana opened her door to a columnist from The Times. The reporter had an eye for detail: She related an image of the son, John III, 5 months old and just cutting teeth, padding on the oriental carpet in an aqua romper. Diana, the mother, brown hair twisted up into a messy bun, looking impossibly young, in “the fashion of the times.”

The story about a murder that sent shivers through an institution had become a family affair. Diana was the keeper of her husband’s story. “I try to remember John,” Diana told The Times. “I keep him in my mind. If I forget John, he dies again, only this time it’s my fault.”

Calls from the NYPD, already rare, had stopped by November 1983, when, on the second anniversary of John’s death, Diana penned a piece that ran in U.S. News & World Report. “Unfair fate,” she wrote. She saw justice as a series of compromises. “The only way the police are going to find them is if someone looking to plea-bargain says, ‘If you give me a break, I’ll tell you who killed the surgeon.’ John’s death will be a bargaining chip in the criminal justice system.”

Diana boxed up her grief somewhere hard to find, and moved on. She did not know how right she would be.

• • •

“Big Daddy Uptown”
December 10, 1981 – February 1982

In the early days, Detective Gennaro Giorgio was one of dozens of police officers assigned to investigate the killing of Dr. John Chase Wood Jr. If one were to cast him, Jerry Giorgio would play the good cop. A big man with a round belly and a soft face, Giorgio already had two decades on the force, a nickname—“Big Daddy Uptown”—and a reputation as a third-degree man.” He could pull a tale out of a suspect like string, the story went, then knot him in it.

Giorgio believed in the human impulse to spin yarns. “Everybody down deep wants to tell his or her story,” he would tell a reporter years later. “It’s true. No matter how damaging it is to them, no matter how important it is for them to keep quiet, they want to tell their story.”

“If you give them half a reason to do it, they’ll tell you everything.”

For years after John Wood’s death, Giorgio carried case No. 1744 in a briefcase, along with other cases gone cold. Mug shots of suspects in the Wood case, which he called his “hit parade,” he kept tucked in his steno book. It was Giorgio’s drive that would turn a forgotten robbery gone wrong into a Manhattan murder mystery.

There were other suspects, but from early on, Patrick Raynard McDowell was number one in Giorgio’s hit parade. McDowell was 17 years old when Wood was shot. He and another neighborhood kid, 19-year-old Daryl Whitley, had been questioned in the Wood case, along with nearly every other young black kid in west Harlem. Police had done a catch and release, hoping someone they pulled in knew something he could be persuaded to tell. In December 1981, a month after Wood’s death, McDowell and Whitley found themselves at the center of Giorgio’s attention.

Daryl had a way of finding himself places, like the night he drank himself numb and wandered onto the autobahn, hoping to meet a car that wouldn’t swerve.

If Giorgio was obsessed with the case, Daryl Whitley was about to be engulfed by it. Whitley had recently returned from an Army base in Germany. Enlisting had seemed an opportunity, but abroad he felt isolated and strange. The best part was visiting the lot at a Mercedes dealer, where he would imagine his wide, gummy smile reflected in the rear-view mirror of that shiny burgundy Benz.

Daryl had a way of finding himself places, like the night he drank himself numb and wandered onto the autobahn, hoping to meet a car that wouldn’t swerve. Somehow every driver missed. He ended the night pissing on the floor of the barracks. That, on top of a history of fights and mouthing off to higher-ups, bought him a discharge and a ticket home. The neighborhood that welcomed him back was one where young men rolled through Harlem in cars hot as fish grease, trying to impress women and each other, small timers in an era when it was easy to play American gangster.

On December 10, 1981, Daryl and McDowell, who was known by family as Raynard and by friends as “Toast,” stepped into somebody’s milky white, big-bodied Mercedes Benz and took a ride.

Reginald Stephen, the third man in the car that night, was known to walk the neighborhood carrying a boom box big enough to put Radio Raheem’s to shame. As they cruised south, the smooth, graceful speed of the German automobile seduced Daryl. It felt good. They cruised the white Benz from Harlem to a tony apartment building on the Upper East Side where Sylvia Killian, a 40-something British showgirl, was making her way from limo to lobby.

Daryl waited outside. The other two walked in. Reg and Raynard went to rob somebody, but they ended up shooting. The papers ate up the story of the former Playboy bunny killed in the early morning heist.

By February 1982, the trio was in prison in connection with the robbery and shooting. A robbery that ended in death these days would be called felony murder, but things were different then. McDowell got eight to 16 for manslaughter. Stephen got a six-year sentence. Whitley, who most thought was just along for the ride, got off lighter: two to seven.

To Jerry Giorgio, Killian’s death looked too much like the Wood killing, a little more than a month earlier, to be coincidence. Years would not dull that suspicion. For more than a decade, Giorgio would call in familiar faces and some new ones, leaning on them to see what clues might slide out. Arrest was opportunity for many in the neighborhood, and because the right words could turn a cuffed man free, information flowed loosely and in several directions.

• • •

“I can get you out of this trouble”
February 1984

Neither Jerry Giorgio nor Bernard Barnes, another Harlem local who would later testify against Whitley, could remember years later the exact details of how they came to be sitting across from one another in the 34th precinct in February 1984. Could have been Barnes was pulled in a crack arrest. Could have just been a strong suggestion from Giorgio that they chat. Barnes knew the detective from around the way. Barnes regularly traded tips for favors, present or future, which is how he would come to remember his talk with Giorgio that day.

“He was telling me, I can get you out of this trouble if you give me this information,” Barnes told a Grand Jury in 1995. “So, that’s when I went along with the program.” Giorgio handed Barnes a pen and told him to write down what he knew.

“I went visit Daryl Whitley at Rikers Island and he was talking,” Barnes wrote about a visit when Daryl was locked up for the Killian murder. “And then he stared talking about a robbery that him, and Patrick, and Richard went on, in which it was the doctor’s case. And he said, Patrick had a gun, and they robbed the doctor. The doctor put up a struggle, and they killed the doctor.”

Giorgio would later describe the investigation as a jigsaw puzzle, but it looked more like a line of dominoes. “Leverage is the key,” Giorgio would say. Barnes was the first bit of pressure meant to make the tiles topple at Patrick Raynard McDowell’s feet.

• • •

Fact and fiction
March 1984

Giorgio traveled 200 miles north to Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The middle-aged Italian detective settled into an uncomfortable chair in a cinderblock room. Daryl Whitley, then 20 and in his second year of prison life, sat across. “He was up there fishing,” Daryl recalled, “looking for information.” Raynard was the one Giorgio was after. Daryl was a pawn, and he knew it.

Giorgio read Daryl his Miranda warnings from a small standard-issue card. Daryl told Giorgio he was not on Riverside Drive that night. He didn’t do the doctor. Daryl had heard about it, of course, everyone had heard about the doctor killed on November 10, 1981. Giorgio took down what Daryl said. The date was wrong, but “I didn’t try to get him to change it,” Giorgio later explained. Both fact and fiction have their place.

Giorgio told Daryl that people were saying he was with Raynard and another guy named Richard the night the doctor was killed.

“You should go and talk to them,” Daryl told him.

“I’ll try to talk to them,” said Giorgio. “But I’m here to talk to you.”

Whatever story Giorgio wanted to hear, Daryl didn’t tell. But the talk had nudged open the door. Giorgio returned to New York and added the notes from the interview to his files, which would eventually grow to fill a line of cardboard boxes stamped “City of New York Police Department.” He shuffled case documents like playing cards, hoping one day to pull a trump.

• • •

“You got a girl?”
1984 – 1989

Time passed. Raynard continued to serve out his 10-year sentence for the Killian shooting. Daryl walked out of prison after 30 months. He was 21, with only a spotty army stint and a knack for hot-wiring cars to recommend him. Within a year, he was arrested for selling $20 worth of crack to an undercover police officer.

Daryl was always one to play the odds. He rarely played them well. Rather than taking a plea, he took the crack case to trial. The judge handed him a heavy sentence: four to nine years. It was the late ’80s and he was already back at McGregor Prison. This time he landed a gig mopping the prison catwalks, $6 every two weeks.

“You got a girl?” he said a fellow prisoner asked him one day as he wiped the slick floor clean.

Daryl said he didn’t.

“I’m gonna hook you up with Tammy,” the man told him. “She’s a good girl.”

In prison, a girl is more than just a girl. New York is one of the few states that still allow conjugal visits, so finding the right woman, then marrying her, can mean companionship, letters, commissary money and a couple of trips to the trailers each year, a weekend illusion of life on the outside. Every now and then, it means love.

At first, Daryl and Tammy wrote letters. Daryl was by that time at Wende Correctional Facility, far north in Erie County. Tammy Futch made the seven-hour trip upstate with a friend, to one of the festivals the prison sometimes held for inmates and families. Daryl, by now in his late 20s, was a gentleman. Tammy lost her shoe going into the bounce house. He picked it up and slipped it on her foot. When she got back to Paterson Houses in the Bronx, she sent him $50 for his commissary and a picture of herself in a bathing suit, a medallion shining around her neck. “Once a woman choose you, that’s it,” Daryl says. “Tammy chose.”

They married on March 4, 1989. “It’s not much of a love story,” Tammy told a Daily News reporter years later, “but it’s all I got.”

• • •

A man to share a long life with
The 1990s

Diana Newton Wood also found a modern love story. For 13 years, she had lived in a depression she barely registered. Columbia Medical School had waived tuition when she enrolled there. Ambition had done the rest. In 1988 she moved back to Massachusetts, where she became an anesthesiologist. Her family helped to care for Johnny while she did her rounds at the Brigham, the hospital where her father and grandfather had also been residents. By 1994, she was 37 years old, and practiced in the art of numbing pain.

Family, work and long rounds at the hospital left little time for grief. Time had taken care of much of Diana’s anger, but she saw a legacy of loss in her son. John wanted siblings desperately. Diana was also ready for a fuller family. “I didn’t want to marry someone I was madly in love with,” said Diana. Instead, she wanted a man to share a long life with, an experience wholly apart from the abrupt ending handed to her a decade before.

Diana’s first marriage had been born in a hospital ward. Her second began in AOL’s New Member Lounge. Over a dial-up modem, Diana began talking with Gregg Dunphy, a computer programmer in Michigan. Both were ready to pave over the past and begin anew.

In New York, Daryl was coming up for parole. Tammy was already a mother of two. And in Pennsylvania, a Harlem drug dealer named Glenn Richardson had just signed a plea agreement that would shape all of their lives.

• • •

“The detective is very eager”
Spring 1994

Richardson was Jerry Giorgio’s big break.

By May 10, 1994, when Giorgio walked into the federal building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, “Big Daddy” had become his own brand of celebrity. He had parlayed his reputation into a regular consulting gig on Law & Order, earning a seat around the table at Elaine’s restaurant with New York’s toughest TV cops. He brought with him an insider view and war stories. Successes chronicled by the press over the years featured hypnotists, psychics, lost fingerprints, all characters in a story about how Jerry Giorgio had cracked the coldest of cases. The Wood case was the one he had worked the longest. This one he could taste.

On the 11th floor of the federal building, a flat façade reflecting the city like a trooper’s mirrored shades, Giorgio met Richardson, then a resident of Allenwood Penitentiary, a federal prison camp in Pennsylvania.

Richardson grew up on 152nd Street in Harlem. Like most of the people who would come to testify in the trials of Patrick Raynard McDowell and Daryl Whitley, he knew the men from the block. In the ’80s, when more legitimate businesses were trying to uplift Harlem through urban renewal, Richardson was buying cocaine, cutting it with an adulterant, and peddling it on Harlem corners. He built his business, hiring a couple of workers and expanding operations to Pennsylvania, just about the time federal authorities moved in and slapped him with 20 to life for drug conspiracy. But that was negotiable.

“Many are called, but few are chosen,” the U.S. Attorney said at Richardson’s sentencing. Richardson was one of the chosen. His sentenced was reduced to 75 months. The feds would later use him as an expert witness in the art of dealing. He also agreed to cooperate with “any and all agencies, local, federal and state.”

Giorgio told Richardson he was working on a case, a high profile case with a lot of press—one that involved a young doctor. The detective made clear that failure to remember answers to questions could cost Richardson his government deal. “This detective is very eager to solve this case,” Richardson wrote in a letter to a judge a few weeks later. “I assured him I wanted to help, but after 13 years I didn’t think I would be able to recall much on such short notice.”

He said that Giorgio helped him recall how me met Raynard on the stairway of the apartment on 152nd Street and loaned him a .22-caliber pistol. Richardson went looking for it back, but Raynard, he testified later, “said he had used it, and couldn’t return it to me.”

Richardson then said he went looking to see if Daryl knew anything about the gun. Daryl, he said, asked if he had heard about the doctor. “He got silent after that,” Richardson told a jury in 1997. Daryl seemed to implicate Raynard in the killing, Richardson testified, recounting how Daryl “told me in Pig Latin, ‘He didn’t have to do that.’”

Justice in the killing of John Chase Wood Jr. would come to be defined, and redefined, by what Daryl Whitley did and did not say, in English, in silence and in Pig Latin.

• • •

“They caught your father’s killers”
1994 – 1995

On July 29, 1994, John III was at camp and Diana Newton Wood was in a cabin on Cape Cod, where her family spent time each summer. For the first time, Gregg was there with her. On that Friday, Diana walked out onto the porch of the cabin, the salty sea not far off, and called back a number she did not recognize. It was The New York Times.

News stories of the time tell how Giorgio had called her a few days earlier when Raynard McDowell was arrested, but in her memory The Times gave her the news first.

“Oh yes, we will go to the trial,” she told the paper. “All of us will, not only to give us some closure to this very traumatic event, but to make people realize that we have not faded into the woodwork—that this event changed all of our lives.”

Giorgio and the story of the doctor killed in the night would appear in The Times, the Associated Press, on Eye to Eye and A Current Affair. The prospect of solving a senseless New York murder sounded a rare hopeful note in a crime wave that seemed never to end. America has always had a taste for a good crime story, and as the murder rate soared in the early 1990s, the national appetite craved one with a happy ending—a crime solved, criminals arrested, and victory for Jerry Giorgio, the dogged detective with a nose for guilt and a heart of gold.

“You plan on getting the conviction on this one?” the Eye to Eye correspondent asked Detective Giorgio.

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely.”

Diana spoke to every person who called. It was her effort to keep John’s memory alive, and to show that cinematic tragedy happens not to characters but to “people, individual people.”

America has always had a taste for a good crime story, and as the murder rate soared in the early 1990s, the national appetite craved one with a happy ending.

But her words were often fraught. “Did I experience a sense of justice or vengeance?” Diana said when the reporter asked about the arrests. “No, not really, but I think our son, Johnny, must have had some thoughts of that kind.”

The arrests brought the prospect of justice, but the family found itself living under the weight of a story, and the memory of an almost perfect man long dead.

“When John was killed I was 24 years old and pregnant,” she told The Times when a reporter called again in January 1995. “I could not think too much about what had happened. I had Johnny to think of. I do not think I really grieved. It was like that Emily Dickinson poem that says, ‘After a great pain a formal healing comes.’”

But to John Chase Wood Jr.’s 13-year-old son, the arrests were a beginning rather than an end. When he remembers that time now, it feels like all of life changed in a blur. It seems his mother said all at once, “They caught your father’s killers,” and “I’m getting remarried.”

John III remembers vividly the day in late 1994 when Eye to Eye came to Weston, Massachusetts. “All of the sudden there was this huge explosion,” John said. ”It became real for me.”

Cameramen carried the heavy equipment into the Woods’ living room. John watched them fiddle with the camera focus. Shots of their town, their home, the photograph of John Chase Wood Jr. over Johnny’s bed would flicker over the television screen when the segment aired the following January.

At first, the buzz felt like fun and games. “Then afterwards,” John said, “I realized it wasn’t.”

“My father had been dead my entire life, and it was almost easier not knowing what had happened, only having bits and pieces of information,” he said. “When this all happened I started to learn about what had really transpired and the media circus that it was, and I didn’t want to be a part of that. I didn’t want to go to the trials, I didn’t want to see these people.”

“And so, I didn’t.”

• • •

“Why do you keep coming to me?”
March 1995

In December 1994, after completing his sentence for selling crack, Daryl Whitley went down to stay with his father in North Carolina. At age 32, Daryl had by then spent more than a decade of his adult life behind bars. He was a father of two, Daryl Jr. and Darylnique, then just a year old. Giorgio got a call from parole that winter saying Whitely, who had moved up to the top of the detective’s hit parade, had been pulled into custody in North Carolina for a traffic violation. Police found marijuana in the car, and ran Whitley’s name, and found he was a parolee. They called up north. Giorgio flew south. In the Wake County jail, the detective pressed Daryl again. Giorgio “just had it in for Raynard,” Daryl remembered. Daryl told the detective again he was not there that night in 1981. Giorgio took Daryl, free less than a year, back to New York, and to prison, for violating his parole.

On March 23, 1995, five days after Diana Newton Wood married Gregg K. Dunphy, Giorgio sat down across from Daryl in another cinderblock room, this one at Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, New York. Giorgio lit a cigarette. “Officer,” Whitley remembers a guard saying, “you can’t smoke in here.”

Giorgio told Daryl he had a strong case against Raynard. “If you have Raynard,” Daryl said, ”why do you keep coming to me?”

Giorgio kept coming because the case was spotty. He needed more. He had no physical evidence, no eyewitnesses, no priests or saints or “upstanding” citizens upon which to build his case. He had stories, stories from people who had more incentive to tell them than not. A veteran snitch. A career burglar. A lifelong addict. All had criminal records, all had questionable intentions, all had reasons to testify, even those who no longer wanted to, including the one who refused, and spent 30 days in jail for contempt. Giorgio had, of course, Glenn Richardson, but the District Attorney had doubts.

Daryl could make the case, and the detective thought that Daryl, given the other robbery he had committed with Raynard and his general trouble with the law, had reason to roll. Then Giorgio would have Patrick Raynard McDowell, the man he was convinced had pulled the trigger.

During more than a decade already spent in prison, Daryl had earned his GED and an education in the criminal justice system. He told the detective he was not there that night in November 1981. He let Giorgio know he knew the detective was fishing.

“You don’t have no case against Raynard,” Daryl told Giorgio. “The only way you’re gonna get Raynard is through me.”

To Giorgio, that sounded like a tacit confession, an admission that Daryl could give him Raynard. Daryl would say later it was nothing of the kind. In neat cap letters, Giorgio laid the comment down on the three-page statement. As the detective got up to leave, he asked Daryl what he had heard on the street, almost 14 years ago. “The whole neighborhood was saying Raynard did it,” Daryl answered.

But some evidence pointed at Daryl, as well. In a Manhattan courtroom on March 30, 1995, Giorgio’s years of work led to the indictment of Daryl Whitley for second-degree felony murder in the death of Dr. John Chase Wood, Jr. Daryl packed up his cell and moved to Rikers Island in New York City.

• • •

An element of tragicomedy
April 1995 – February 2002

At the Criminal Court downtown on Center Street, Giorgio’s case against Raynard McDowell fared worse than it had in the news. Deadlocked Jury Forces Mistrial in Doc Slay Case, the Daily News reported on November 28, 1996. The jury acquitted McDowell of a charge of intentionally killing Wood, but deadlocked on whether he may have shot him while committing a robbery. A year later, after McDowell’s second trial, the tabloid told the world that Again, A Jury Acquits Doc Slay Suspect. In the end, neither jury found the evidence—the testimony of a tentative eyewitness and two others with criminal records—convincing. Giorgio had spent more than 16 years building his case against Raynard. On December 17, 1997, the suspect walked out of the courtroom a free man. Double jeopardy protected Raynard from ever again facing charges in the Wood murder.

Daryl lived almost three years at Rikers Island before his case came to trial. His daughter, Darylnique, who had inherited her father’s face along with his name, would by the age of 3 recognize the bus that ferried families to the infamous city jail.

Daryl’s first trial also hung. On December 3, 1997, the jury handed down a note that it was hopelessly deadlocked. It took four years to schedule a new trial. On January 24, 2002, an article in The New York Times announced: New Murder Trial Begins in 1981 Killing of Doctor.

The 2002 case was still built on the suspect stories, and in the intervening years Giorgio and the Manhattan District Attorney had added to the witness list a few more incarcerated men who said Daryl had told them he was involved in the killing. The trial carried an element of tragicomedy. Bernard Barnes, the snitch who told Giorgio he had talked to Daryl about the murder on a visit to Rikers, served 30 days for contempt when he refused to testify at Daryl’s first trial. He took the stand in the second. Like all those who testified against Daryl, Barnes was grilled by the defense on his long history of drugs and crime and unfortunate circumstances. Over the years, each of these witnesses had received favors from the police or District Attorney, some tangible—$1,100 and a stay at the Holiday Inn—some less so. Each man who recounted these favors added that drugs, prior crimes and incentives to talk did not mean that what they said was not true.

Glenn Richardson was not among those who took the stand at the second trial. In 2002, he was out of the Pennsylvania prison and off parole. When subpoenaed to testify before the court, he took the Fifth.

In his absence, the judge ruled the prosecution could use Richardson’s testimony from the 1997 trial. The scene was one of the peculiarities of the courtroom, the place where the jurors are asked to leave their baggage at the door, suspend disbelief and form no opinions until the moment of deliberations. Two employees of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office played the parts of Richardson and the lawyers, first the DA, then the defense attorney. “You are not to speculate on the reasons why this witness is not here testifying before you,” Judge Laura Drager told the jury. “You are only to know that the court has determined it is appropriate for you to hear this evidence in this way.”

In the two days of deliberations, the jury sent out notes every few hours. At 4:05 p.m. on the second day, they asked to hear again Giorgio’s testimony on his conversations with Daryl Whitely. One hour and ten minutes later, they reached a verdict.

Guilty as charged.

• • •

“It just is not fair”
April 18, 2002

At the sentencing on the sixth-floor courtroom in lower Manhattan, Diana Newton Wood sat on the bench next to Whitley’s daughter Darylnique, then 8 years old. Daryl Jr., then 11, was there too, near his mother Tammy.

John’s father, Dr. John Chase Wood Sr., spoke first. Diana rarely saw him anymore. The intensely private Wood family had kept their grief quiet, but a father’s anger and tears rippled through the courtroom that day. “Let me suggest to you that a terrorist from within, rotten apples in our own mix, permitted to fester and contaminate, pose a greater danger to our to nation, to us, over time, than do foreign terrorists,” the father told the court. “Thus, all the considerable efforts by the People to achieve justice in the murder of a single individual are, at the end of the day, worth it.”

Diana gave her statement next. She stood before the courtroom and talked about a different kind of injustice. “My entire second marriage has been colored, over-shadowed by this trial, and re-trial, and Grand Jury, and now this, which has gone for seven years or more,” she said. “And it just is not fair; it’s not fair to my family.”

“There were times when I wished Jerry Giorgio had not been so dogged in his pursuit, because having to come and face this every time has been very, very hard,” she said. “It’s very hard to see your family here, Daryl, because I don’t want to deprive them of what my son has been deprived of forever. Thank you.”

Daryl Whitley was the last to speak. He too spoke of justice. “Counsel told me not to say nothing,” he said. “I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve been judged by man here today. I look forward for the day to be judged by God about this case. That’s all I got to say.”

Then Judge Drager sentenced Daryl Whitley to 22 years to life.

• • •

“Did you hear?”
October 2010, Dutchess County, New York

The visiting room at New York’s Green Haven Correctional Facility is true to its name. The counter that separates an inmate from his family is green. The walls are green. Much of the furniture is green. This maximum-security facility is an honors prison, which does not preclude the men inside from turning one another to pulp over a pack of cigarettes. But it is, as New York prisons go, close to the city, offering inmates who behave well more opportunity to see their families. Soft mesh cribs line the walls, ready for babies who come to see fathers, grandfathers and brothers.

In this visiting room, Daryl had for eight years watched his children grow, their visits melting into the dramas that well up daily in the visiting room.

On a fall day in 2010, the smell of microwaved popcorn mingled in air heavy with gossip and Bible study. Coins slapped the plastic grid of a Connect Four game and a young woman in turquoise velour languidly made out with her man, each sitting on their side of freedom.

Daryl sat in the cinderblock room reserved for meetings between clients and their attorneys, or inmates and the police. He recalled the day last July that seemed to change his fate.

He had just settled down into his cell when another inmate in his block leaned in. News travels fast behind bars, where terms like appeal and DNA and ineffective counsel fly like the kites passed from cell to cell. The words Habeas Corpus, the writ that comes at the end of the appeals process, and is the final hope of an imprisoned man, are treated with reverence.
“Did you hear?” the man asked Whitley. “Your Great Writ was granted.”

• • •

“A shattered-lives situation”
October 2010, Sudbury, Massachusetts

Diana sat curled on the couch of the house in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Leaves throughout the 400 acres of woods buffering the house had turned, a lush ring of color that kept the sounds of the outside world at bay. She now lived in the home where she and John had celebrated their wedding in 1981. This house held her past and her present, and here they did not often talk of the night that shaped this life—the night her first husband was killed.

It seemed like a long time ago. “I just don’t have that many conscious memories of him,” she said. “It’s become more the story.”

Diana opened a red leatherette scrapbook on the coffee table, smoothing down a page. Her hair was short now, and while her glasses perched on the same round nose, bits of worry around her mouth showed that almost 30 years had passed. She ran a hand over the headline: Surgeon’s Slaying Stuns Upper West Side. Newspaper clippings she had gathered told a tale three decades long, much of it clipped from Diana’s mind. She had not yet had a chance to add the last one: Judge Tosses Out Conviction in 1981 Cold-Blooded Murder of Young Doctor John Chase Wood.

A reporter for the Daily News called the house in late July, nearly 15 years to the day after the news of the arrest, to tell Diana that Daryl Whitley’s conviction had been overturned. The news peeled back time. But shock had eased in the intervening months. “It doesn’t matter so much to me personally what happens with Daryl Whitley,” said Diana. “That’s not even the most important part of this story.”

The story, for Diana, was simpler. Closer to home. “John is gone.”

“He didn’t get to have his life,” she said. “The things that he wanted most—his children, and his grandchildren—he didn’t get to experience.”

A gurgle came from her grandson, John Chase Wood IV. Big for 10 months, he roamed the carpet, gumming a red wooden race car. His father, seated in a nearby chair, unfolded one lanky arm to pluck the car from his son’s mouth. John III, now 28 and 6 foot 2, looked very much like his mother. He was a living measure of the time that had passed.

It did not pass smoothly. Each November through his teens brought crippling depression. John III failed out of the local high school and finished his schooling at home. And it was at home he built his life, a second father to his two younger brothers, who, until his own son was born, were the most important thing in his life. He spoke carefully and well, and carried a passionate belief in the death penalty. But after years of living as “the son of a saint,” he had settled into his own life—a father, a brother, a husband.

John III absentmindedly twisted the wedding ring on his finger. It was the same his father once wore, a simple gold band engraved with DCN to JCW. “I guess people said that it was a shattered-lives situation,” John said. “It broke. But it got fixed.”

• • •

“There’s no sense when it comes to justice”
December 2, 2010

The Manhattan District Attorney appealed the ruling that overturned Daryl Whitley’s conviction. At the oral argument on December 2, 2010, Daryl’s white shoe-lawyer, appointed by the court to represent him pro-bono, stood to defend the decision to grant the Great Writ. The federal judge who had overturned the conviction had been right, he said. To allow Glenn Richardson’s testimony to be read without telling the jury Richardson no longer stood behind his memories compromised the due process promised by the Constitution. The District Attorney’s office disagreed.

The Wood family was not among the audience in the cavernous ceremonial courtroom, but Daryl Whitley’s wife and daughter came from the Bronx. After the arguments, Tammy, soft in the middle now, waited on the edges for a translation of the proceedings. Her husband’s attorney introduced himself, and began his assessment with “unfortunately…” Hope, high an hour before, had dimmed. Next to her mother, Darylnique, now a lovely, straight-backed teenager in Nikes and a neat black coat, listened calmly. They would have to wait to see what the panel of three court of appeals judges, rarely sympathetic in these cases, would decide.

Daryl’s family rode the elevator down from the ninth floor with the lawyer from the DA’s office, her girlish face showing her pleasure at the way the argument had played. Tammy glared at her. Darylnique looked uncomfortable, at her mother’s anger and at having to descend nine stories with The People for company. In the marble hallway on the ground floor, Tammy did not want to talk about the trial. “Test his DNA,” she said, what little hope she had now resting on a magic bullet that had little place in this case. “Then this will all be cleared up.”

The Whitleys walked into the little room by the exit to collect Darylnique’s sparkly pink cell phone, Tammy still blustery. I followed them in to collect my own, notebook in hand. Tammy remained wrapped in frustration. As Darylnique walked past me out the door, she touched my arm. “I’m really sorry,” she whispered.

I wanted to tell her the same. Instead, I handed Tammy a card, and asked her to call if she was willing to talk. Tammy gathered herself. “There’s no sense when it comes to justice,” she said. “That’s why I try not to say too much about it.”

• • •

One generation of stories built upon another
October 2012

In June 2011, the appeals court issued its ruling. It sided with The People, and against Daryl Whitley, a technical ruling that found that the claim at the root of his appeal had not been properly raised. Daryl had to stay in prison.

It seemed a somehow inadequate ending for a 30-year-old murder case. Reporters always want a good kicker, a climax that does justice to our readers’ efforts. But after 30 years the message here seemed murky. One generation of stories built upon one another, like the case itself, each apparent ending uncertain.

November 2012 marked 31 years since John Chase Wood died, shot on the day after his 31st birthday. Over those years, Diana Newton Wood found if not peace, then distance, from the crime that changed her life. The court ruling did little to change that. For her, this all ended years ago, she said. “Time flies.”

The years move differently for Daryl Whitley, who remains behind bars at Green Haven Correctional Facility in upstate New York. He will be 50 years old this year.

Tammy still comes to visit, sometimes spending the weekends when their turn comes up for a trailer visit. Darylnique has a daughter. Daryl hasn’t yet seen the baby.

He earns a few dollars a week keeping the grounds around the prison, and still occasionally sifts through piles of documents from his case. He is perhaps the last person for whom the details still matter. Patrick Raynard McDowell is serving a sentence of 15 to life for robbery, his third-strike offence. Jerry Giorgio retired from the police department, and has for several years worked as an investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney.

Daryl has not given up on his case. His appeal was sent back to a lower court, though chances of a different outcome are slim. Not long ago, he sent a letter to the District Attorney’s office asking about evidence collected the night of the murder. His request to resurrect bits and pieces of evidence—the clothes John Chase Wood wore that night, the beeper with a fingerprint mark—were rebuffed. The DA implied that the evidence was there somewhere, but given the years gone by, searching for it would be an “undue burden.” Even the justice system, which keeps its own slow clock, had run out of time for Daryl Whitley. ■