The Best Stories You've nEver Read #20

Robert Henke wants to make a huge contribution to mankind by building an earthquake probe that can predict the way soils will react in a major seismic event. Unfortunately, the effort over 25 years has created a quake of its own.  He lives alone in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, having lost his wife and his home, having spent $1 million of his mother's fortune, and having his 17-year-old son face a prison term. Read Gadi Dechter's account of Henke's Ahab like quest in the Baltimore Sun. 

Here's Gadi's account of how she got the story: 

I’ve been covering higher education at The Sun since July 2006, after two years as a staff writer at the Baltimore City Paper, the local alt-weekly.

I believe it was late last year when Robert Henke sent to The Sun’s publisher a packet of documents including the various letters he’d written to Hopkins officials and politicians, asking for investigations into whether there was a conspiracy to derail his career. He asked the publisher to look into it as well, because he suspected the paper might be complicit in the (lack of) attention. 

The publisher passed the docs down to the editor, who gave them to me. I checked around with Hopkins people, to see if there was any reason to look into the conspiracy angle, and was persuaded there was not. I also called Henke to see if he had any more persuasive evidence to support his claims, and he did not. But in the course of talking to him, it became immediately clear that this was a man open to sharing the most intimate details of a deeply damaged life. He did not strike me as at all crazy.

I thought he might make an interesting profile, so I had several conversations with him lasting several hours, and encouraged him to keep sending me documents he had collected over the years. Still, because of my decidedly junior status at the paper, I didn’t think they’d go for the investment a profile would require and I hesitated to ask, besides. The major problem, as I saw it, was that Henke did not fit the heroic profile mold (he had not triumphed against the odds, or committed any crimes, or done anything else particulary newsworthy.) More troubling, there was no urgency to telling his story; it could be told today, or next year.

I was busy enough with dailies and shorter enterprise stories, and put Henke on a shelf. If my recollection is correct, at some point in the beginning of 2007, the managing editor of the paper asked the front-line editors to gather from reporters pitches for projects and investigations that might be pursued in the coming year.

I had mentioned Henke to my then-editor, who suggested I write up a mock top to the story, to see how it would play out. He seemed to like it, but was then transferred to the D.C. bureau. Shortly afterward, I was assigned a one-month rotation with Michael Ollove, the narrative editor in features, who took on stints with metro reporters as a writing coach.

I had no stories come up that month that needed much of a narrative touch, but I mentioned to Mike the Henke story and he immediately lit up. Somehow, he persuaded news editors that I should be given leave to go down to North Carolina and spend some time with Robert Henke.

I took four days with Henke in North Carolina, and also spent some time with his wife and son, Kevin. It was really very easy to get everyone to talk. Before going down to North Carolina, I had asked Henke to send me a list naming every person at every stage in his life who had known him. So I was able to report many interviews before going down there. The only real reluctance I encountered was with Henke’s colleagues in the geotechnical world. They knew of his  litigious background, and were hesitant to comment on-the-record about their opinions of his science.

Ultimately, the reporting was the easy part. Henke kept meticulous records, as his obsessive character would suggest, and there were virtually no limits to what he would talk about. His wife, even more so. I repeatedly told him that I was interested in a profile of his life, and that his alleged conspiracy would not be the focus, unless I found any evidence that anything untoward was done to him. Still, I believe Henke was motivated to cooperate in the hopes that the conspiracy-angle he was pushing would be validated.

The writing was the hard part. Sorting through the notes, figuring out dates and such. The first thing I did was try and write a polished top of about 15 inches to give to Ollove, the editor. That went over well, and he instructed me to write it all, to worry not a whit about length, and above all, to make sure that at no point did it read like a news story. His main instruction was to focus on “scenes” as much as possible.

My main news editor was very supportive, freeing me up for days at a time to work. Typically, I write 3 stories a week, so without this freedom, I could not have had the time to sustain a prolonged writing effort. Because the writing was so painful, I admit I kept looking for news stories that would distract me from it. Eventually, I had to sequester myself in an office away from the newsroom for an entire week in order to just get a draft of the damn thing out.

The writing was done over 2-3 weeks. I turned in 170 inches and expected Ollove to have a heart attack and call the whole thing off. He did not seem bothered by the length, but had many good – all of them difficult to execute – suggestions about how to chop up the narrative so the bulk of it wasn’t told in one long chronology.

The draft more or less done, it went to the managing editor, where once again I anticipated resistance to the length. But there really was none. Though I never asked, I suspect the main obstacle to getting it in the paper is the story’s fundamental flaw, for a newspaper: no news hook, no timeliness, no illustration of a broader trend. It held for months.

I fully appreciate this problem. As a reader, I go to the paper to find out what happened yesterday, and for “holy shit” investigations that sometimes effect real change in the world. I like succinct stories, and I do not like being distracted from the substance of the story by a writer’s voice or narrative flourish. Perhaps because I nursed in my own twenties a weakness for self-indulgence, navel-gazing and poetical writing, I am deeply suspicious of these tendencies. Writing short is much harder than writing long (as this message attests).

After so much time with Henke, I was frankly unsure up to the day it ran about whether the story was interesting at all, and whether it merited so much of a demand on a reader’s time. I had to eventually just let go and trust Mike Ollove’s instinct on this.

At the top editors’ urging, the final step before publication was to go back to Henke, his wife and son Kevin and let them know exactly what we were going to reveal about their lives. They said they were comfortable with all the details. Henke’s last message to me, in an email, was: “I’m scared to death.” Me, too.

Gadi