They Caught A 'Predator.' Then This Guy Caught Them.

Have you read this story yet? The one in this month's Esquire? About how the good folks at Dateline, in their zeal to show you footage of themselves catching predators, manipulated the police into storming in on a man who may or may not have been a predator?

Go read it. Then come back and check out our interview with its author, Luke Dittrich, whose name you probably should get to know.

Start to finish, how long did this story take you to write? How long after the incident did you get started? Did you pitch it, or was it an assignment?

Dave Katz, articles editor at Esquire, emailed me in mid-February, told me a little bit about the Bill Conradt case, and asked me to send him a brief pitch outlining how I would approach the story. I'd never seen "To Catch A Predator," and when I received Dave's email I was in Chile, en route to Antarctica, where I was going to run a marathon. Luckily, the MSNBC website hosts streaming versions of most of the TCAP episodes, and I had access to wi-fi. I started watching the show on my laptop, read a little about Conradt, and sent Dave an email with a few of my initial thoughts. Dave gave me the assignment right before I left for Antarctica. I made my first reporting trip to Dallas in mid-March, soon after I got back. We were still making changes to the proofs in July, so in all I worked on this piece for more than three months.

One thing that heightens the story's impact is your success at getting incriminating information from local police officers -- Sam Love, Gator Weiss, Jimmy Patterson, in particular. Cops often seem to be an impenetrable brotherhood. How'd you get these guys to dish?

Of the men you mentioned, Sam Love was the first to open up. He was understandably wary at first, but not as wary as Jimmy Patterson, who initially didn't want to talk at all. I think the key to getting Patterson to tell his story was the fact that someone else had told me that the Murphy P.D. had mistaken Patterson for a "predator" and drawn guns on him. When I asked Patterson about the incident, the memory of it riled him enough to get him talking. (Also, I built the Patterson section using a combination of the information he had personally relayed to me and information from an affidavit he had given to the Texas Rangers. I got the affidavit through an open records act request. The Texas open records act is strong, and I used it often during my reporting of this story.) Of all my sources, Gator Weiss was probably the hardest to track down. Friends of Gator started approaching him on my behalf during my first week in Texas, but I don't think I actually met him until at least two months had passed. By the time he did agree to meet, however, he was ready to talk. I'm grateful to all three of these guys for telling me their stories.

Was it difficult to get Conradt's friends to tell you about him?

Sometimes. His best friend wouldn't talk until late in the game. Another friend, a retired judge, told me he'd only agreed to meet with me because he'd heard that so many other friends had already done so. Whenever I did manage to talk with one of Conradt's friends, I made sure to ask him or her who else I should talk to, so my list of potential contacts kept growing.

Reading through the story, I get the sense that some of it is based on unaired footage from Dateline cameras. Is that true? If so, how'd you get it?

Yes, I do have several DVDs containing raw Dateline footage. I don't want to tell you how I got them, because I haven't asked my source if he or she minds my doing so. The footage was invaluable.

I loved the way you used a seemingly innocuous detail from the video footage -- the green wheelbarrow -- as an excuse to dive into Conradt's backstory and illuminate his character. What gave you the inspiration to do that?

I was lucky to have heard the wheelbarrow anecdote before I watched the footage. I knew I was going to use it as soon as I heard it, though I didn't know where or how. When I watched the footage, and saw the wheelbarrow, the story's lead immediately started to take shape. The fact that Dateline's raw footage happened to contain a shot of a wheelbarrow is the sort of blessed coincidence that I find often occurs during the reporting and writing process.

OK, so you're done reporting and sitting in front of your computer screen. What's next?

Lots of cups of coffee. Then... I don't know. Depends on the piece. With this one, I knew I wanted to start with the sergeant in the doorway and the wheelbarrow, so I cued that part of the raw footage up on my laptop and played it over and over while I wrote the first graf. I remember not being able to identify the bush that the cameraman lingered on, and thinking I would go back and insert that bit of info, but by the time I found someone who could tell me what kind of bush it was (a holly) I realized that identifying it wouldn't add anything to the story. For the next few grafs, I probably wrote without referring to any notes or interview transcripts. Later I went back and made sure I had the facts straight. (And I should mention that Bob Scheffler, Esquire's research editor, was a huge help. He caught a lot of flubs.) I often don't use an outline. Sometimes I'll use a very rough one. With this story, I think I started writing with a pretty clear sense of what my first three sections would be, and a pretty good idea of where I would end -- the whole "We having fun?" thing -- but no more than a basic idea of the steps that would take me from ABC to Z.

Let us in a bit, if you would, on the Esquire editing process. Is the published story wildly different from the version you first submitted?

The final version was way better than my first draft. That's thanks to Dave Katz. He had some great ideas on both the big-picture and line-edit level, and pushed me really hard. My first draft ran a little more than 8,000 words. The final came in at, I think, more than 12,000. In the first draft, I had tethered all of the scenes in one way or another to Dateline's video footage. This device, as Dave pointed out, limited the story's scope. The final version contained pretty much all of the original scenes, but also added a lot of new ones, like, for example, most of the ones inside Conradt's home.

This part at the end is especially powerful:

"Although the events of the last couple of days provoke a lot of questions, perhaps the one Lieutenant Barber now asks is the most pertinent. When law enforcement and television entertainment have commingled so completely and so lethally, perhaps there is really only one question left that matters at all.

"'We having fun?'"

If I had written this story (but I can only wish), I would have ended it right there. You decided to go on for two short paragraphs. What do you think those two grafs add to the story?

I can imagine a good argument for ending with Barber's quote, but to me it felt right to end with the tape running out and the screen going blank. The reader, I hope, is reminded that a lot of what happened in Murphy and Terrell played out in front of cameras, and that were it not for the cameras, and the people directing the cameras, some of the things that happened might not have happened at all.

What sort of response have you had for this story in the short time since it's been released?

I've been receiving a lot of gratifying feedback. Probably most importantly, my sources -- at least the ones I've heard from -- have told me I got their stories right.

One issue this story raises is that of cooperation between law enforcement and the media. This is something we in newspapers deal with all the time: we print pictures of wanted fugitives, for example, and sometimes cops let us tag along on sting operations. We depend on them to release the news that fills our pages and our airtime, and they depend on us to distribute their message. Is it a slippery slope? Should the two entities be utterly independent?

Tough question. I don't think a show like "COPS," for example, is necessarily unethical. That show's cameras, in principle, are simply documenting what would have happened regardless of the cameras' presence. Likewise, I don't think there's necessarily a problem with journalists doing ride-alongs with police. The problems arise when police begin to influence journalists and vice-versa.

Tell us about yourself. Where are you from? Where'd you go to school? Ever write for a newspaper? How'd you break into the magazine business?

I was born in Boston but have spent most of my life elsewhere. I moved to Cairo, Egypt, shortly after getting my B.A. in history at the University of Chicago in 1996. I was teaching English, living on a houseboat, no real clue what to do with myself. One day, while rowing a single scull on the Nile, I noticed a dead body bobbing along beside me. I followed it for about a half-hour, trying to explain the situation to people on shore with a combination of pathetic Arabic and frenzied hand-signals. I later wrote down the experience and submitted it to a local English-language newspaper, The Middle-East Times. They accepted it, then later killed it, deciding it wasn't "journalistic" enough. I submitted a second piece to them, about a short desert trek on a blind horse, and they ran it. That was my first published article. A few months later I freelanced my way into a staff writer position at an English-language magazine called Egypt Today. Egypt was a great place to start. That was ten years ago.

Who taught you the craft?

I've gotten a lot of help from a lot of editors, and I don't want to slight any by omission, but here are a few that stand out: Mirette Mabrouk and Mary Kelly at Egypt Today, Marc Smirnoff at The Oxford American, Lee Walburn and Rebecca Burns at Atlanta Magazine, Terry Noland at Esquire and Men's Journal, Dave Katz at Esquire. More generally, I think whatever I'm reading affects whatever I'm writing. For what it's worth, I read several Cormac McCarthy novels and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking while working on this story.

What sorts of things do you do to keep becoming better?

When I'm working on a draft I like to read it aloud, over the phone or in person, to any friends or relatives who will listen. My mom is probably the person I read to the most. She usually tells me I take too long to get to the point.

Who are the best writers in American journalism right now?

Here are seven writers whose stories I almost always read when I spot their bylines: Tom Junod, William Langewiesche, Mike Sager, Susan Orlean, Jon Lee Anderson, John McPhee, David Foster Wallace.

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So. This story proves yet again what we already knew: that investigative reporting and narrative writing can meet in a bar one night, knock back a couple of Coronas and then start having some real fun.

Readers: Tell us about some other stories that exposed wrongdoing and also made you desperate to know what would happen next.