Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism, revised and updated edition

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to fit facts.

—SHERLOCK HOLMES, FROM “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA,” QUOTED ON JEFF LEEN’S OFFICE WALL

Imagine attending this story meeting held by Washington Post editors and reporters in the fall of 1998. Jeff Leen notes his investigative team’s probe of the high toll of shootings by District of Columbia police, a dark footnote in the city that had become the murder capital of the nation. Taking turns going around the room, the Post “poverty beat” reporter Katherine Boo is pursuing a story about D.C. homes for the mentally retarded, where she’s uncovered horrid conditions. Both sound like winners. Were they ever.

In 1999 and 2000, a newspaper won consecutive Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service for the first time—for reporting on projects that had overlapped in their newsroom. “You could have a thousand of these meetings and not have that occur,” says Leen, who had moved to the Post in 1997 from the Miami Herald as a forty-year-old investigative specialist. He remembers thinking, “I’ve got a good story, but she’s got a good story, too. I wonder if all the stories around here are like that.”

The two projects were very different. The intensive nine-month investigation of police shootings was driven by computer-assisted reporting and involved three main reporters, several editors, and a raft of staffers in supporting roles. Kate Boo’s was essentially a one-woman operation built on a combination of interviews, old-fashioned data mining, and prose that filled her editors with awe. “She writes like a poet, but she’s got the skill of an investigative reporter,” says Leen, who served as one of her editors during what evolved as two connected series in 1999. “She wrote with a lyrical sensitivity without becoming purple, and without getting in the way of the facts.”¹

Although the two projects might seem a reflection of the same investigative tradition that flowed from Watergate in the 1970s, this newer coverage was in the form of planned projects rather than the day-to-day incremental approach of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting. Woodward, now known more as an author of books on Washington politics than as a Post assistant managing editor, represents both traditions. After Watergate, he became Metro editor—“I was not good at it,” he says with a laugh²—and was involved with the creation of the Post investigative unit, which he led for more than a decade.

A Job for Teamcop

The 1999 gold medal started with a simple statistic. Jo Craven McGinty, a computer-assisted reporting specialist who was being considered for a job at the Post, noted a high number of “Category 81s”—justifiable shootings by city police, charted by the FBI. D.C. officers had killed fifteen citizens in 1995. The memo wrote, just before Christmas in 1997: “When measured against the average population for the five-year period, District police racked up 8.7 homicides per 100,000 residents—the highest rate in the country among cities of at least 100,000. It is almost twice the rate of Atlanta, at 4.9, nearly three times the rate of Los Angeles, at 3.4, and more than four times the rate of New York City, which measured 2.1”³

The spike the numbers formed over Washington raised eyebrows in the newsroom. “Based on that information, though, you could write about eight paragraphs,” says Jeff Leen, who was assigned by investigative editor Rick Atkinson to work with McGinty. Leen would decide what to do next with the computer pattern.

Such work was familiar to him from his time at the Miami Herald. He had worked on investigative stories during the Hurricane Andrew coverage in 1992. Other projects had included one on lawyers who billed for more than twenty-four hours a day and, with partner Guy Gugliotta, work that first identified Colombia’s Medellin and Cali cartels and their role in the U.S. cocaine trade.

For the Post police gunplay story, he started with basic updating. “I spent two weeks reading ten years of Washington Post clips on shootings and I discovered a number of bad shootings, and a number involving cars,” he says. Usually the driver had been struck with a bullet. Another element: the introduction of the controversial Glock 9-millimeter sidearm, which tended to fire too easily. Next came a stroll to the police department’s public relations office, where McGinty and Leen were told the department did not keep statistics on police shootings. Leen laughs at the wave of embarrassment that came over him as he sat next to the Post job applicant. “I’m thinking, boy, I look like an idiot here. She’s looking to me thinking, What do we do now? And I’m thinking I can’t just walk out of here and say, Thank you very much. So I say, ‘You do a press release, right?’” Yeah, the P.R. officer replies, there’s a stack of them over there. “So I say, ‘We want that stack.’”

The releases became one of several streams of information the Post created, together with news clippings, to reveal the large number of related lawsuits that had been filed. “I expected to get five or six, and there were seventy on the final list,” Leen says. The clippings, releases, and lawsuits led to interviews with lawyers and other sources. In talking with attorneys, Leen and McGinty obtained a powerful new data stream: a paper copy of the very police list of shootings that the department had said did not exist. (Not long after the reporting began, the Post made a full-time hire of McGinty—a former University of Missouri journalism school employee. She later worked at Newsday and the New York Times before moving to the Wall Street Journal.) Leen called that list the crown jewels. It showed every time a police gun had been fired between 1994 and 1997, accounting for 464 incidents involving 576 officers and 2,271 bullets. “That was very useful,” Leen says, “because, it turned out, they literally, in their statistics, did not have as many shootings as we were able to develop from our four streams of information.”

Leen talks of “Eureka moments” that occur during investigations—usually early in the data gathering. During Hurricane Andrew, one such moment was the discovery of the pattern showing that “the newer the house, the worse the destruction.” The numbers proved that more recent building codes, designed to reduce storm damage levels, were being violated. “When I saw that, I thought, ‘You’ve got it,’” he says of that Miami investigation. In the Washington police probe, as Leen and McGinty saw the data streams all point to the same conclusion—that training lapses and other factors were leading to the high rate of civilian shootings by D.C. police—“I knew we had it, and it would hit like a hydrogen bomb. It would withstand any criticism.”

Leen next exercised the “honest man” approach. He went out to find someone with no ax to grind, who simply knew the situation backward and forward. While he won’t identify the individual by name, a 2002 book by the Post editors Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril, gives the source as former D.C. deputy chief Bob Klotz. “He just laid it out to me,” says Leen of his source: standards were steadily slipping and being abused. Initially the rule was not to shoot unless an officer was threatened by a weapon. That had deteriorated to a possible threat from what appeared to be the flash of a weapon and then just a flash of movement. Leen asked the source about the car shooting incidents. Officers shoot at cars to stop them, Leen was told, and that is against procedure. The assurances of such a high-ranking expert carried weight with the reporter. “There was a problem with police shootings in the District,” his source told him. Leen adds, “If he had said there wasn’t, I’m not sure what I would have done.”⁴

A Break for Monica

When news broke about Monica Lewinsky’s relationship with President Bill Clinton, it stalled the Post’s shooting investigation. The paper assigned Leen to join others on that story while McGinty plugged away at the police data gathering. The paper used a Freedom of Information Act request to the District’s corporation counsel to obtain a list of five years of cases in which the city had defended thirty-one police shootings. Leen selected thirteen for close examination, and McGinty pulled them from Superior Court. Next came a March 13 memo in which McGinty summarized the cases, hinting at what investigative editor Rick Atkinson called “a clear sense of human drama and shattered lives behind our statistical scaffold.” One question in McGinty’s memo: “Is it acceptable for an officer to step in front of a car, then shoot the driver if he fails to stop?”

By month’s end, meetings resumed on the police story, and Leen soon broke free of Lewinsky duty. Marilyn Thompson, who had been away for a time, rejoined Atkinson in investigative editing. Possible approaches for narrowing the story were discussed: concentrate on car shootings—which seemed particularly egregious to Leen—or focus on the peak year of police shootings, 1995. They decided to keep the focus broad and not pick one year or one type of incident.

For the first time, they also discussed a time frame for the series. “This is gigantic,” Leen said to Atkinson and Thompson. “How big do you want to make it? Three months? Six months? Nine months? I’ll never forget what they said, because it made me so proud to work at the Washington Post. Rick and Marilyn said, ‘Don’t put a limit on it; do what you think needs to be done.’”

If Bob Woodward calls teaming the creation of a “perfect journalistic brain,” Jeff Leen compares it to the planning of a perfect bank robbery. “You need an inside man, you need a safecracker, you need a driver.” The Post team added an investigative specialist with police department knowledge, Sari Horwitz, and a recent Chicago Tribune hire, David Jackson. They also gained an office nickname: Teamcop.

An electronic database version of the “crown-jewel” shootings printout was created, and three years of data quickly yielded a shocking new statistic: D.C. averaged roughly one car shooting per month by police officers. The number “floored criminologists and law enforcement experts we interviewed,” according to a summary of the investigation that Atkinson prepared later. Another court file the Post discovered listed more than six hundred suits that alleged excessive force used by D.C. police officers over four years—nearly half of them settled. “This gift horse, however, implied that non-shooting, excessive force was widespread in the District and caused us to broaden our investigation again,” according to the Atkinson summary.

How to treat the question of brutality continued to be a sticky issue for what was essentially a story about shootings. From June through August the discussion was over whether the brutality element detracted from the central gunplay line of the story. Less data supported the brutality charges, and team members worried that investigating beatings could stretch the informal deadline they had set. In the end, brutality was retained as a critical part of the project; it illustrated a “continuum of force” principal by which the department operated—and trained its new officers. Shootings grew from that.

Elements of the story were divvied up. Leen took the overall case pattern, the elements of shootings into cars, and problems with the Glock sidearm. Jackson took all other shooting cases. Horwitz took the issue of brutality. Leen made a presentation for executive editor Len Downie and managing editor Steve Coll. It wasn’t easy for Leen. “I was the new guy,” he says. “I was nervous and had a pretty dry mouth.” But their response was a tonic. “Steve said it was a great project, just go and do it.”

Publisher Donald Graham—who once had been a policeman—visited the team about the cop story he was hearing about. “It wasn’t one of these pro-forma visits,” says Leen. “He asked great questions. He was 100 percent behind it. I was just blown away by that.” In Leen’s experience at the Herald, he says, the publisher’s only involvement with investigations had been to cut their budgets.

A “Good Shooting”

Sari Horwitz had started as an intern in 1984. “Like so many journalists I came into journalism and was inspired by Watergate, and Bob Woodward, and wanted to be a political journalist and uncover some huge scandal in the country,” she says. When she was offered the “the cop shop” she balked, and it took Ben Bradlee to persuade her to take it. “If you want to write about real life, about love and hate and greed and the human condition, go on the police beat,” she remembers being told by the then-executive editor. She did, and she loved it. “I was on the night police beat for a while, which is where I really began to learn how to make sources. It was a significant time in the District, because the murder rate went soaring. And all kinds of things were going on in the city that were really fascinating. One was that Congress decided to give more money to the D.C. police to fight crime, but only if they could get a thousand more officers on the street by a certain deadline.”⁵

And things were not always easy getting police stories approved by editors either, even at the Post. One idea for a three-part series on “dangers in the future” posed by this group of deficient trainees was rejected. “It was very frustrating,” she says, “and it’s a very tricky thing to talk about.” But about the same time, Horwitz took a year off and had a baby and came back to another beat when she returned in the 1990s. (She had felt “sweet satisfaction,” she adds, when two other Post reporters pulled together their own police training story along the lines she had envisioned, using some material she provided. Their work was a finalist for the 1995 Investigative Pulitzer Prize.)

Called in 1998 to join the police shootings team, Horwitz saw a great opportunity to dig through old files she had kept at home. “I went back in my basement and found the old notebooks, including one that said, ‘This officer is a lawsuit waiting to happen.’” Teamcop would find a place for that example in the series. Horwitz was assigned to develop a story on a “good shooting,” one in which all the rules were followed, and the shots fired were clearly necessary. “That turned out to be a very good idea,” Horwitz says. “Police work is complicated, and there’s a really tough time on the streets, and we needed to tell that story, too.”

The good shooting story also gave her a chance to get back to her first love in journalism: reporting about people. “At first I was frustrated that it was such a dry story. All they had was statistics, and I wanted to get at the human story,” she says. When she found the perfect “shooter” for her case, though, he did not want to cooperate. Officer Keith DeVille had fired on a person who had suddenly, shockingly shot DeVille’s partner point-blank in the head. “He had witnessed that, and had to respond,” Horwitz says. “And in the gunfight that ensued, he killed the suspect. He was never the same. His marriage fell apart. He ended up drinking. He said no to me three times. No, no, no.”

She managed to change his mind, leading to an emotional interview. “He broke down in tears,” Horwitz says. (Something nearly brought the reporter to tears too: in the middle of their talk, her tape recorder jammed, leaving her to try to restructure her notes later. “I don’t think I’ve used a tape recorder since,” she says.) But DeVille’s story would be one of the highlights of the series.

As the reporting progressed, summaries of sixteen shooting cases were collected and sent to several experts in the use of police force. “Expert” quotes were avoided for publication for fear of populating the story with “talking heads.” But privately experts confirmed their assessments. Editors continually encouraged the team to spend time with the police, who were about to be grilled in the series. Horwitz and other reporters went on ride-alongs with officers and shot the Glock at the firing range.

In studying the Glock’s problems, Leen had another Eureka moment. Reading through a lawsuit, he found a quote in a deposition describing policeman Frederick Broomfield’s accidental shooting by his roommate, Officer Juan “Jay” Martinez Jr. Martinez had been unloading a Glock in his bedroom when Broomfield entered the room to ask Martinez how he wanted his chicken cooked, and the gun went off. “I looked down and I seen smoke coming from my crotch and then after that, you know, I looked at Jay and I said, ‘Damn, Jay.’ Then my leg started shaking and I fell.” The case provided one of many macabre moments in the series.

Scooped by City Paper

Teamcop was clearly developing synergy. “We worked very, very closely for several months, at a rapid clip and under the scrutiny of the paper, the police department and the legal community. Our team worked because we trusted each other with moral questions and reportorial dilemmas alike,” wrote Dave Jackson later.⁶ “And on those last weekends when there was only Dominoes pizza to glue our frayed souls together, we enjoyed each others’ company.” Horwitz agrees. “I’d come in and say something, and Dave would push me to go further on it,” she says.

A six-page e-mail to editor Len Downie and managing editor Steve Coll laid out the plan for a series targeted for the week of November 15, and reporters were asked to “defend” the leads they had constructed. In mid-October the two editors received a note on “home-stretch issues”—photos, layout, and a length suggestion of a six-day package. Drafts of the main stories for the first three days were provided.

Then came a crisis—one all too familiar to reporters and editors working on long-term projects. The team discovered that the rival City Paper was preparing a story on what was to be Jackson’s third-day lead article. The lawyer who was a Jackson source, it seems, had been talking to both papers. “We’re driving a real big battleship, while the City Paper is like a speedboat,” says Leen. “The story came out, and it was over 200 inches long, and I have to say they did a pretty good job on it.” The Post cut back the Jackson story to a long sidebar and shortened the entire series to five days. It took a while for the team to bounce back. “I don’t know if David Jackson ever did recover,” says Leen, “although he ended up doing a great day-three story.”

Teamcop went through a final November 9 checklist. Graphics were refined, and everything was in order for Sunday the 15th. Then on Saturday President Bill Clinton called for an attack against Iraq. Just as suddenly the attack was canceled. After a heart-stopping meeting between Atkinson and Coll, the Sunday run date for the police series was reconfirmed. “Summer into fall was very intense,” says Horwitz. “There was some question toward the end: Should we have four pieces or five pieces in the series? And some people—especially me, working on the last piece—felt very strongly we needed that last piece. Others thought, How do we keep people reading?”

The way was to write it compellingly. After the overview, the second day covered shootings into cars; the third, problems with police investigations of shootings; the fourth, the Glock and training issues; and the fifth, brutality and the “continuum of force.” The first-day story, carrying all for bylines, ran under the headline “D.C. Police Lead Nation in Shootings; Lack of Training, Supervision Implicated as Key Factors.” It began:

The District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department has shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other large American city police force.

Many shootings by Washington police officers were acts of courage and even heroism. But internal police files and court records reveal a pattern of reckless and indiscriminate gunplay by officers sent into the streets with inadequate training and little oversight, an eight-month Washington Post investigation has found.

Washington’s officers fire their weapons at more than double the rate of police in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Miami. Deaths and injuries in D.C. police shooting cases have resulted in nearly $8 million in court settlements and judgments against the District in the last six months alone.

“We shoot too often, and we shoot too much when we do shoot,” said Executive Assistant Chief of Police Terrance W. Gainer, who became the department’s second in command in May.⁷

Unlike Ben Bradlee, who says he relishes the moment when a big story actually rolls off the press, Leen finds publication of a long-planned series anticlimactic. “We have this pattern, and when people see it they’re not going to believe it,” he says. But for the team, the pattern has been old news for months. When Leen had first seen the police database he realized that they could not even keep track of their shootings. “That’s what sustained me when we took the hit from the David Jackson story being scooped,” he says.

Investigative journalism isn’t for everyone, Sari Horwitz cautions. “Lots of reporters don’t want to do this. It’s tedious. You’ve got to go through boxes and boxes to find the needle in the haystack.” But for a reporter who is not driven by the need for a daily deadline or byline, the rewards are great. “The thing we have is the luxury of time, which a daily reporter doesn’t have,” she says.

“I don’t think any of us were thinking of a prize, but we were so excited by the story,” Horwitz adds. “We were excited when the new police chief said to the mayor, ‘We’re going to go back and look at all these shootings.’ And we said, ‘Whoa, this story actually made something happen.’ I certainly had never been on a story with that kind of impact before.” New training procedures were installed across the thirty-five-hundred-officer police force, and investigation techniques were revised. The changes were strictly monitored. In 1998, thirty-two people had been shot by D.C. policemen, twelve fatally. In 2000, the number killed had fallen to one.

1999—The Washington Post for its series that identified and analyzed patterns of reckless gunplay by city police officers who had little training or supervision.⁸

“Invisible Lives, Invisible Deaths”

Not long after the Post won its 1999 gold medal, Jeff Leen was named an editor on the investigative staff. “I’d been a reporter for twenty years,” he says. “I asked myself, Where do I go from the police-shooting series? I thought, If I don’t take that editing job, I’m going to get a boss I don’t like.”⁹ His first assignment as editor was prickly. Marilyn Thompson—who had taken over as chief investigative editor after Rick Atkinson left to write a book—handed Leen a draft of Kate Boo’s story on institutions for the mentally retarded and told him he should consider putting a different lead on it.

Leen remembers picturing how his meeting with Boo might go. “I’m going to end up telling her about putting a new lead on this thing she’s been working on for a year?” Leen and Boo had lunch. “They think you should change the lead,” Leen said. Boo, a 1988 Barnard College Phi Beta Kappa graduate, replied, “Who’s they?” Welcome to the world of editing at the Post.

Things would turn out very well for the Boo piece “Invisible Lives.” But the work on that draft also began a year-long process that eventually led to a second project, delving into the heartbreaking world of D.C. homes for the mentally retarded: “Invisible Deaths.” By the end of 2000, the stories would lead to the closure of group homes and would prompt federal and local investigations. City officials would be fired and several officials would be indicted. “These stories began in the dark,” was the way Len Downie’s Pulitzer nomination letter started. And in more ways than one that was the truth.¹⁰

Kate Boo had been covering the Post’s poverty beat, working late nights on a series on welfare reform. A non-driver, she sometimes relied on friends for a ride, and one evening her driver friend had to make a stop at one of the District’s homes for the mentally retarded. Boo was shocked by what she saw. “The home had no electricity and it was just swarming with bugs,” she says. “And everybody was just sitting around this table, with deformities—physical deformities, mental deformities…. It was just so different from my perception.” Boo, like many Washingtonians, had thought that various reforms over the years had turned such homes into model institutions.

Once the welfare reform story was reported, she chose mental institutions for her next project. She began to see that her first visit had only revealed shadows of what was really wrong. Legal reforms had clearly not done much to improve the situation in institutions. “You could burn somebody or rape somebody, whatever, and the institutions would never be penalized because there was this minor bylaw that hadn’t been passed,” she says.¹¹ Boo started visiting homes. She interviewed staffers. She met the residents. She was hooked.

Elroy was one of 1,100 “beneficiaries” of the publicly funded, community-based group homes. Elroy’s home, like others in the system, operated under a lucrative contract with entrepreneur Rollie Washington, who lived on a so-called manor farm. Elroy, DeWitt Stith, and others from the home also worked at the farm. They received $5 a day cleaning horse stalls and doing other menial labor as part of what Washington called “reality therapy.” Boo followed Elroy’s and Stith’s lives closely, and she delved into Rollie Washington’s business. She established that Elroy had been repeatedly raped in the house and had become suicidal.

One of her reporting techniques was the impromptu visit. Showing up at Rollie Washington’s farm on a Saturday, she managed to get him to sit down and talk. “His general position was the essential point of the story: that I’m every bit as good as the District needed,” says Boo. “There it was.” Some unscheduled visits to homes led to calls to police, who kept her out. For others, though, she saw what she needed to see.

Boo and her editors set certain standards for the story as she reported. It needed to show that past reforms were not working and also that employees were being abusive. Many reporters aim to concentrate on how taxpayers’ money is being squandered, and that makes a good story, she says. “But that’s never been the thing for me.” Her first goal is to write about people and what happened to them. “The second part is about profit,” she says. “That’s the way it should be in my mind.”

By concentrating on Elroy, DeWitt, and others, she achieved the personal emphasis she sought, although the financial picture was hardly lost. Her first story—headlined, in part, “Who Cares?”—began:

Elroy lives here. Tiny, half-blind, mentally retarded, 39-year-old Elroy. To find him, go past the counselor flirting on the phone. Past the broken chairs, the roach-dappled kitchen and the housemates whose neglect in this group home has been chronicled for a decade in the files of city agencies. Head upstairs to Elroy’s single bed.

“You’re in good hands,” reads the Allstate Insurance poster tacked above his mattress—the mattress where the sexual predator would catch him sleeping. Catch him easily. The door between their rooms had fallen from its hinges. Catch him relentlessly—so relentlessly that Elroy tried to commit suicide by running blindly into a busy Southeast Washington street.¹²

“One of the nice things about investigative for me was that there was trust,” says Boo. The editors knew she was working hard and gave her the time she needed.

Still, when it came to convincing editors that a reporter had the facts, the Post’s Janet Cooke legacy remained alive at the paper—especially for stories on poverty issues. Cooke’s 1980 “Jimmy’s World” story, after all, had been a poverty story: the wrenching tale of a supposed eight-year-old heroin addict.¹³ One lesson that the Post had learned from that embarrassing episode was that in writing about obscure people with no voice of their own, standards must be just as high as for profiling public figures.

“Because at the Post I worked in the ghetto—and Janet Cooke worked in the ghetto—you just have to presume in poverty reporting that it’s going to be challenged, that you must get your ducks in a row. That’s not just in this series, it’s in all the work I’ve ever done in the inner city,” says Boo. In this case, Boo found sources to back up everything she heard from the retarded individuals. “The burden of proof has to come from elsewhere—from the public record, or admissions from the people who did the wrongdoing themselves. Then it’s fair.”

In early story development, Boo says, Rick Atkinson helped her shape the project to describe the system rather than one home or one individual case. “The next thing was realizing who was running the homes, and the kind of accountability they had,” according to Boo. Working through the Post lawyers, she filed Freedom of Information Act requests. She followed up on the reports that Elroy had been raped and tried to commit suicide. “The records were saying everything was well and good. It was clear that a false paper trail was being created,” she says.

She persisted in trying to get confirmation that Elroy was raped and finally got it. Yes, the manager of the group homes told her, adding the nuance that the sexual predator who victimized him “was incessant.” The manager told her that “whatever this guy’s taking … is better than Viagra!”

Boo kept detailed documentary backup for the story’s claims, both about specific cases and about the financial peculiarities of the whole system. “I love documents,” she says. “It’s a great shy-person’s kind of journalism. It’s this great intellectual game. What was the relationship of this person, who bought the house for that person. It’s a way of seeing the bigger picture.”

Boo got along especially well with the paper’s attorneys. “The Post lawyers are in a class by themselves in terms of caring about justice, as opposed to caring about not getting sued,” she says. Plus working with lawyers reminds reporters of the value of accuracy on details in the story. “With these kinds of stories, one mistake can take out two thousand facts.”

Unlike most reporters, Boo is “anti-series,” she says. Her “Invisible Lives” project was intended as one story, she says, but had to run as a two-parter because of the sheer amount of information.

The Letdown—and Another Series

Then came the letdown after the story was in print. “There was a superficial level of outrage,” says Boo. “And I got all of that.” There were letters to the editor and statements from officials that heads would roll. But Boo felt stymied by the lack of real action. “What really means something is if they actually do something about it,” she says. “What I care about is if they change the friggin’ law.” It was almost as if the first day’s headline—“Who Cares?”—described the reaction to the series as well. “As always when you write about poverty issues, there’s a hue and cry, and things go back to normal.”

Jeff Leen loved the first series for its lyrical writing and its passion for social justice. With some reporters, passion colors the final product. “She’s probably the only person who could pull that off,” says Leen. “She is so meticulous and fair-minded and precise, and so intelligent, that it amplifies and raises up her work, and doesn’t get in the way of it. She combines these things that most people think are oil and water—incongruous.”

All along he had been intrigued by a sidebar that appeared with the first story. It offered just a hint, he thought, of the stark and inhuman end to which Boo’s subjects’ lives came. “Now,” he told her, “you have to do the deaths.” The reporter was not thrilled at the thought. “Nobody wanted to read about it in the first place; nobody’s going to want to read about it again,” she recalls thinking. So why did she keep at it, aiming for a December run date? “In a way I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.” In the end she found that Leen was right. “It took the deaths to make people care,” she says.

The project, focusing on what happens after individuals from the homes die, was also broken into two parts. Boo found official records showing an unrealistically low number of deaths among the institutionalized people—eleven in six years. (Eventually she obtained an admission from the city that the number was 116.) The lives of some of the deceased had simply been “erased.” Further, manipulation of medical records led to some victims of fatal abuse being listed as dying of natural causes.

One example was Frederick E. Brandenburg, who Boo proved had been mistakenly drugged and left to die by a careless attendant. His body was then illegally moved and cremated. When she inquired, Boo was told that an autopsy had been declined by Brandenburg’s sisters because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. When she tracked the sisters down, however, one was Baptist, and the other was Catholic.

In the end, Boo says, it helped with her reporting on the Brandenburg story that she was a native Washingtonian, familiar with the city. When she received a call from the person who had shredded the records, the caller was reluctant to talk or give a name. “I knew from the phone exchange exactly where he was, and I knew the one bar in that neighborhood, and I said, ‘I’ll meet you there.’” At the meeting, she was told that employees were rewarded for such shredding. “When I had that, I knew that they couldn’t get out of it,” she says.

Leen admits to being choked with emotion at times during his editing of Boo’s copy. “I still think this was probably the finest series I ever edited,” he says. The first story carried the headline “Lives Erased Without a Word.” It began:

The corpse measured 66 inches from blue toes to jutting ears. In a beige house on Tenley Circle, a dentist-entrepreneur lugged this cargo down the stairs into the basement and laid it to rest by the washer.

The body in plaid pajamas was that of a 57-year-old retarded ward of the District of Columbia. On the streets outside the city-funded group home where he had lived and died, kids sometimes called him Retard-O. Inside, he sweetened the hours by printing the name his mother gave him before she gave him up. Frederick Emory Brandenburg. He blanketed old telephone directories with that name, covered the TV Guides the home’s staffers tossed aside. He glutted the flyleaves of his large-print Living Bible. The immensity of the effort made his hands shake, but the habit seemed as requisite as breath. In this way Brandenburg, whose thick-tongued words were mysteries to many, impressed the fact of his existence on his world.

In January 1997, that existence was obliterated by his caretakers.¹⁴

During production week Leen asked managing editor Steve Coll for an extra page. “The project was supposed to be three open pages,” but for special graphics and subheadlines that were being planned, four pages were needed. Coll’s response: “You got it.” Leen says, “There wasn’t even a blink.”¹⁵

Read It and Weep

But making it into print was a whole other story. On production night, Leen and Boo stayed late in the office, carefully defusing potential problems. There were lots of them. What made the layout tricky was that the subheads and cutlines for the piece were specially designed, with intricate computer coding. Care had to be taken to avoid losing paragraphs when the story “turned” from column to column. As Leen and Boo watched during the evening, type got dropped and was restored with difficulty. When the situation was finally solved, a cheer went up. Leen took Boo to a Burger King on K Street before each went home. Leen turned in for the night satisfied with “the best story I’ve ever edited in my career.”

The next morning Boo was staying with her parents, her ritual when a story was finished. “We always do that,” she says, “because I say that I’ll get to see you one last night before I go to libel jail.” Her father read the story first the next morning. There was a problem, he said. Not libel, but something in the way the story just stopped flowing. Kate read in horror. Missing were several blocks of type, including that hard-earned explanation of how the authorities had lied about Brandenburg being cremated because his next-of-kin were Jehovah’s Witnesses. “I read it that Sunday morning and wept,” she recalls.

Leen got her first call. “Kate was devastated. She was saying that people said it ruined the project. It doesn’t make sense. Talk about a crisis. I didn’t know what to say. I told her that at some point this is going to seem like a very small matter,” he says. “I didn’t even know if that was true.”

The post-mortem on the printing glitch—“it would have taken a presidential commission to figure it out,” says Leen—showed a typesetting error in the pagination system. A well-meaning technician had apparently seen a small problem during the press run after Leen and Boo went home. The technician made a “fix” and the delicately balanced layout imploded. No one caught it. “We did have 30,000 copies that were just perfect,” says Leen.

By 2005, Boo had almost forgotten about it—almost. Looking at the two-part series as a whole, she is proud of the impact it had in the community. Did it occur to her that it might win a Pulitzer? “As a reporter you don’t think about that,” says Boo, who eventually moved to The New Yorker magazine and who in 2013 was named to the Pulitzer Prize board.¹⁶ There she has helped with selecting winners from among the best of twenty-first-century American journalism—and with steering the Pulitzer Prizes into their second century.

2000—The Washington Post, notably for the work of Katherine Boo that disclosed wretched neglect and abuse in the city’s group homes for the mentally retarded, which forced officials to acknowledge the conditions and begin reforms.¹⁷