Lament of the investigative reporter

There's an old story about Bob Woodward; after his parents' divorce, he suspected that his step-siblings would getting more Christmas presents than he would, so he went downstairs early one Christmas morning and carefully counted them all before anyone else was up. He substantiated his thesis.

It's a familiar situation to anyone who has ever worked as an investigative reporter. We always seem to have to fight the urge to know more about whatever it is that interests us, and of course that is what we got rewarded for when we did that work. The way we pursue subjects is by chasing a hypothesis. But the key to doing the work well is being able to adjust your hypothesis when the facts don't bear it out.

I was reminded of this yesterday while talking to a veteran investigative reporter. We agreed that the best stories often come from surprises -- when we find out we were wrong about a key assumption.

For years, I have a helped a friend work on investigating a cold case -- the murder of her mother over 30 years ago. We have had dozens of hypotheses as we sort through complex piles of evidence, and we are still discovering new leads this many years later.

These days, the tools at our disposal have expanded rapidly. It has become easy to trace unlisted cell phone numbers via the Internet, for example. Just the other day, I ran a check on one in another case and got a surprise result that altered a hypothesis of mine, possibly susbtantially. I'm still trying to assimilate this new information into my view of how things work in that particular case.

Underneath the investigator's urge is the desire to always know more. The hardest thing, for us, is to know when to back away and not try to learn more. Sometimes, that is the appropriate next step: to stop. But the urge remains, which is why we so often get drawn back into the game.

No doubt, we are driven by intuitions that something is wrong about what we've been told. Someone may be lying. Something doesn't add up.

Then again, things don't always add up, do they? And, operating under a false set of assumptions is a sure way to convince yourself someone is guilty when they are not, or something is unjust when there's a more complex explanation hidden in the data.

Personally, I kind of like surprises in stories. I didn't mind finding out I was wrong, since my worst fears or assumptions can perhaps now be replaced with more innocent explanations. After all, the most likely explanation for how two events are connected is always straight line -- i.e., the shortest distance -- between them.

Pattern recognition. The investigator's best friend.