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What was the genesis of this piece?
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It began with the crime. A man smacks a neighbor kid, shoots the boy's father, has a 14-hour standoff with police and then police find homemade explosives and his dead mother in a block of ice in his basement. Seems like a good place to start.
Many of our stories in the weeks that followed focused on the crimes, the charges, the court appearances, what neighbors knew about the family. But I wanted to know what Philip Schuth's life was like. We knew why he did it, but what led up to that moment when he put his mother in the freezer? How does a man live 52 years without a single person besides his mom getting to know him?
Because a TV reporter managed to sneak her way in to see Schuth not long after his arrest, the jail was on media lockdown. But I managed to get a message and my phone number to Schuth through an acquaintance of his. I said I wanted to tell his story, put an end to all the rumors out there. He called and, $200 in collect calls later, I had the story.
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Please describe your reporting process. How much is reconstruction and how much were you present for? What sort of research did you do?
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Most of the story is reconstruction. I was there for the standoff and the arrest and the court appearances, but everything else is pieced together from the memory of Schuth and other sources. The only research, really, was looking up the military history of Schuth's stepdad, unsuccessfully trying to find Schuth's birth records in England and searching through police reports.
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What challenges did you encounter during the reporting process?
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The main challenge was trying to confirm Philip Schuth's version of his life. The man writes science fiction in his free time, was accused of nine felonies, and has had a fairly loose grip on sanity for years, so taking him at his word wasn't really an option. But he had no family members still alive and the Schuths had been so reclusive that no one really knew them, so it was difficult to verify his recollections.
It took a month, but I managed to confirm nearly everything in the story. I interviewed Schuth's acquaintances and former classmates and former co-workers and former bosses, trying to get a true idea of what he was like. I found the EMTs who took his father to the hospital and saw his maggot-infested stump. I interviewed a veterinarian who had treated the family dog, which had suffered some of the same abuses Philip claimed to have suffered as a kid. A neighbor who took the bleeding dog to the vet all those years ago said Philip's dad had done something to it, and when I told him Philip's pencil story, he put it all together.
To confirm the conditions of his home, he gave me permission to walk through his boarded up house, smell the drums of stale rainwater, see the bed his mother died in, sit in the basement in the dark and listen to noises outside.
Through this process, it didn't take long to realize Philip may be a weird guy, but he wasn't a liar. He was quite self-aware about his lack of social skills and how people perceive him. Knowing all that, it was easier to take his word on the facts I couldn't confirm, like conversations he'd had with his mother, thoughts that ran through his mind, the story of his biological father in England.
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Please describe your process of structuring and writing the piece.
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I think a reader's first impression is that Philip Schuth told me his story and I trusted him and wrote it. That was not the case, obviously, but I didn't want to bog down an already long story, trying to prove how many interviews I'd done. Maybe I'm allergic to quotes, but I just like telling stories in my own words whenever possible.
I enrolled the help of a fantastic editor at the Lincoln Star Journal named Peter Salter, who thought it was a good idea to start with what he thought was the most compelling moment, when his mother died and he put her in the freezer. Originally, I had that further down.
For the rest of the piece, I decided to jump back and forth between sections about the crime and sections about the backstory of his life, trying to write it as if the reader had never heard of Philip Schuth or the case. That way they would be learning about the crime and gaining some understanding of the main character at the same time.
I was concerned that the piece would come across as overtly sympathetic toward a guy who had committed some serious crimes. I fought it through five or six edits, taking out details, then putting them back, until I eventually decided, I'll just tell the story and if he comes across as a sympathetic figure, maybe he is.
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What sort of reaction did you get to the story? Emails? Phone calls? Response from other media?
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Most of the emails and calls were from readers who felt sorry for Schuth. The family who was shot at called to yell at me. I expected some backlash to the disgusting details of the story, but it never happened. Many readers were inspired to give money, and eventually Schuth was able to pay for his mother's burial and headstone. The judge even let him out of jail to go to the funeral, unsupervised, which some thought was a direct result of my story. I rode in a van with him to the funeral and back to jail and wrote a column about that.
The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison ran the entire article with photos, but it was mainly ignored by national media because the buzz about the crime had already died down, especially when it was learned he hadn't murdered his mother and didn't turn out to be a serial killer.
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