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How did you first hear about Vernetta Cockerham, and how well did you get to know her? |
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My last job was at the Winston-Salem Journal, and she lived in one of the counties covered by a reporter who worked for me. Another paper did a big piece about her a year and a half before I left the Journal. I thought this would be an unbelievable story to do for a national magazine.
I got to know her quite well. The first time I met her was at her attorney’s office. She agreed to go out with me to the town where all this happened. We spent a day together in Jonesville [N.C.], and I probably interviewed her again in her home two or three more times. Then we had several more conversations by phone and a lot of shorter talks to check little details.
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At what point did you know what your story structure would be, that you would start with the day Cockerham’s daughter was murdered?
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The first draft of the story was quite different, because I started with a lot less space than I ended up with. The idea had been to tell a couple other stories in more detail. But the article always started with the morning of the attack, and it always returned to that point later in the story. Originally, there was quite a bit more about the judge out of Kentucky, and how he got interested in this kind of work. And there was more about Jessica Lenahan, whose case went to the US Supreme Court. The original idea was to tell three stories.
What I’d pitched to the editors was Vernetta’s story, but in conversations back and forth, they wanted something broader with a national scope. Later, it became clear that Vernetta’s story was so strong that it made the most sense to go in as close to her as possible.
The national scope stayed important, but the things that happened to her shed light on so many of the themes that the experts were talking about. It was originally much less of a narrative and much more of a regular feature. But her story and her character were so strong that the narrative elements became more dominant.
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Still, there seems to be a deliberate step back from a more narrative approach to Cockerham’s story. Can you talk a little about that?
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With the lawsuit still pending, I was a little concerned about using too much narrative style when the facts of the case weren’t fully established. We finally felt that the opening, where it’s so clearly told from her point of view, was fine, as long as we made it clear that some of the facts were contested. I felt that it was ok, that the reader would understand that we were shifting back and forth between her point of view and one external to her. |
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What do you think you accomplished with this approach that couldn’t have been done with a traditional feature format?
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I don’t know that I’ve ever written what a purist would call a truly narrative piece. I don’t know that I could have worked in as much of the national context of the issues, which I think was really important. With a pure narrative, I would have had a hard time hitting those issues in depth. The issue is a criminal justice issue—whether our criminal justice system is protecting those in danger.
And secondly, there were disputed facts about her case. To do it right, you might need a double or triple-layered narrative, but I didn’t have the same access to police that I had to Vernetta.
But the power of doing these kinds of stories with a bunch of narrative elements is that readers can really experience what she went through. That gives a lot of power to something that’s essentially a story about an issue.
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There’s a good deal of violence and graphic detail in some scenes. How did you decide what to include?
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I didn’t worry about voyeurism in writing the piece. But there were definitely times I was asking for details I felt very uncomfortable demanding.
This is the thing that makes any kind of narrative writing work—the richness of the detail. It meant having Vernetta rehash this horrific event five or six times. But I had explained to her in advance that I would be asking hard questions, and it meant a lot to her to have her story told, for her to have the sense that she was bringing about reform. She knew that getting the story in a big magazine would change things. When I worried I was exploiting her history, I reconciled myself to asking [those questions] because of her understanding of the situation.
I’ve interviewed lots of people after traumatic events. But I don’t think I’d ever interviewed anyone in that much detail about an event that was this traumatic. It gave me pause to be asking some things over and over, “When he stabbed you the first time, did you feel pain then?” “Did you know your daughter was dead at that point?” I felt kind of cruddy asking her those questions.
It’s so odd. You’re trained not to be all that concerned if you’re going for a piece of writing that will capture how things really are. But if she had felt violated, I think I would have had regrets.
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How has response been to the piece? |
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I’ve gotten a fair number of emails from people in the domestic violence movement who are thrilled with it. I haven’t gotten any complaints, and from working at a newspaper, I’m used to getting complaints. The update on what’s happened is that Vernetta ended up receiving a settlement—she got about $430,000. The other thing that has happened is that she had been lobbying for a law that would require mandatory arrest [for violating a protective order]. It was passed in the middle of July and should be finalized soon.
None of that was as a result of the magazine piece, but I think the experience for Vernetta was very positive, and having a national magazine take her case seriously enough to have a reporter spend that kind of time and to send a photographer down was an empowering experience for her.
The experience of telling her story and having somebody understand in detail what had happened to her—I don’t think that she had had that experience yet. The lawsuit was focused on a much narrower question. Her attorneys hadn’t been interested in piecing together the complexity of her relationship with her husband, the complexity of coercive control. But I think the experience of having somebody put all that together as a narrative helped her make sense of her own story.
One of the things that I learned when I was doing the innocence cases is to always put together a detailed timeline, because it helps establish the chronology of the events. So it was interesting to me and then interesting to her to see the full chronology of what had happened. Piecing that together helped me understand the full story.
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How do you manage to get close enough to a source to do a story like this without becoming an advocate?
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It’s true that when you get to know people really well, it’s hard not to be supportive of their causes or efforts. I try really hard to balance. It would be hard to tell this kind of story as a pure narrative unless you could get just as close to some of the police officers and tell their story. I think it’s really important to do that with criminal justice stories, because usually the reasons something like this happens is that there were flaws in the system, or very human mistakes that occurred.
At one point, one officer said that Vernetta’s situation “looked like a back and forth” between a couple. It’s very hard for officers to recognize the most manipulative abusers, for them to figure out exactly what’s going on.
Actually, one of the things about striking the balance that was reinforced by working on this piece is how important it is to almost not believe what anybody has to tell you. With Vernetta’s case, when I first stumbled across her arrest in Surrey County, if I had come across that record in a total advocacy mode, I might have felt compelled to ignore it.
Finding that information forced me to step back and take a critical look at her. In the end, it made the piece stronger, because it explained how some of the record reflected poorly on her.
If you’re too soft and see yourself as the champion of the underdog, you can miss important facts that can shed even more light on things. There were a few times where I thought “This is not making sense. Maybe she isn’t telling me the truth.”
When I came across the fact that she was arrested and charged with assault, I had this moment of “Oh, maybe this isn’t such a good story to be telling.” But then I talked with the DA and found out that in his opinion, the police had been manipulated into arresting her, which strengthened her story and gave her even more credibility. |