‘The ephemeral’ crime story and longer investigations: Journalism and recent Australian creative non-fiction

Janine Little

Peer-reviewed paper published in the Conference Proceedings of the Media, Investigative Journalism and Technology Conference, AUT University, Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, 4-5 December 2010.

Abstract

This paper compares two works of book-length journalism on Australian criminal court cases in order to make some observations about the role of creative non-fiction in countering what George Orwell called ‘the ephemeral’ nature of journalism. (Keeble, 2007)

Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and Honeymoon Dive (2010) by Lindsay Simpson and Jennifer Cooke are read as part of the trend of writing longer creative non-fiction about criminal cases. The technique was adopted most famously in America, by Truman Capote in the internationally acclaimed In Cold Blood. In Australia, creative non-fiction about true crime dates back to some of its first serial publications: the Australian Journal’s 19th century stories by Mary Fortune are an early example (Brown, 2007). Acclaimed author and journalist Helen Garner has become a leading proponent of the creative non-fictional foray into journalism’s traditional court reporting round. In contemporary social contexts, extended court- based narrative portrays ‘real people’ in the fullness of their experience of often horrific events; the spectacular dramas of the O.J. Simpson murder trial (Dunne, 2001) and the Australian case of baby Azaria Chamberlain (Bryson, 1985) are two prominent examples. Their saga proportions are a reference point for the way that hard news offers creative non-fiction the investigative muscle for its extended observations of matters of why and how, whether for Capote in early 1960s America, or for writers now publishing in the genre in Australia. In their contrasting

1 | Page journalistic approaches, and in the questions they raise about some of journalism’s central practices, Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner and Honeymoon Dive by Lindsay Simpson and Jennifer Cooke, enable a comparative perspective.

Introduction The book-length true crime stories by Helen Garner and Lindsay Simpson and Jennifer Cooke followed multiple daily news reports of court cases. The first: Anu Singh was charged with the manslaughter of her boyfriend, Australian university student Joe Cinque, in the late 1990s. The second: a decade later, the international news media found “the honeymoon killer”. American scuba diver Gabe Watson returned voluntarily to Queensland to plead guilty to the manslaughter of his new bride, Tina, on their honeymoon in Far North Queensland. He admitted to a court that he failed to render adequate aid to her during a Great Barrier Reef dive, but that was not the end of the story. The newlywed Watsons had 11 days together before the dive when 26-year-old Tina died. In the earlier case, Joe Cinque and Anu Singh had met at law school, and had a relationship that also ended in tragedy. It has been follow-up creative non-fiction that has fostered both investigative projects (as they turned out to be) but not, as has mostly always been the case with such stories, without contention. Matters of the appropriate categorisation of works of longer fact-based research and writing (is it journalism?), its descriptive content and its backfilling with background information (it embellishes), and its involvement with sources (it is not objective) are key contentious issues (Ricketson, 2010, p. 91; Keeble & Wheeler, 2007, p.10). These key issues for journalism, generally, along with an appeal from Nepali Times publisher Kunda Dixit in his keynote address to the Pacific Media Centre’s Media, Investigative Journalism, and Technology Conference (December 4-5, 2010, Auckland), inform this article.

Dixit’s call was for greater ingenuity in journalistic practice, for innovative and creative approaches to critiquing current global and social problems (Dixit, 2010; c.f. Neiger et al, 2010, p. 377). I would argue that creative non-fiction and literary journalism’s role in this critique is, by its narrative disposition, to assist with private and public negotiations of the effects of violence, loss, and grief on individuals and communities. It happens that true crime provides the factual event and consequence for this performative dimension of journalism (Innes, 2004, p.19). It is this, rather than the question of whether reader reception is shaped by genre (Ricketson, 2010b,

2 | Page p.90) that I want to emphasise, in the sense of journalism and literature’s mutual interest in comprehending the often incomprehensible (c.f. Underwood, 2008, p. 17- 18).

1. Two died: Joe Cinque and Tina Watson On October 26, 1999, a bright young student, Joe Cinque, died from a heroin overdose injected two days earlier by his girlfriend, Anu Singh, on top of a dose of the sedative drug, Rohypnol. A court would later hear how Cinque lay asleep in their Canberra flat as Singh administered the lethal dose. Singh had said she wanted to marry Cinque, but instead planned a murder-suicide and a macabre farewell dinner party for their friends (Garner, 2004, pp.16 &164-165). As Helen Garner’s book elucidates, Singh backed out of the plan. She waited two days before making a triple-0 call to seek help for a dying Cinque (Garner, 2004, p.16-17). The call transcript provides newspapers, and then Garner, with the documentary base for a chilling introduction to a narrative of court depositions, facts from police charge sheets, interviews and first-hand observation that is offered up as the “consolation” of the book’s title.

Garner was probably finishing off final proof checks on Joe Cinque’s Consolation when Gabe and Tina Watson went diving off the coast of Townsville. October 22, 2003: Gabe swam back to the surface, away from his bride, who was in trouble and sinking to the ocean floor. Lindsay Simpson and Jennifer Cooke’s Honeymoon Dive, published just before Watson completed a jail term for manslaughter, makes much of his swim away from a dying Tina. Media headlined as “the honeymoon killer”, Watson, 31, now faces allegations that he plotted to kill Tina, and had planned the crime even before their wedding in Alabama. The Australian and US news media covered the case vigorously, especially after public outrage over a Queensland court’s sentencing of Watson to 15 months jail. Alabama’s District Attorney Troy King campaigned most of that time to secure a grand jury hearing of evidence to determine whether Watson should stand trial back in the US (Ogle, 2010; ABC, 2010). Tina’s father, William (Tommy) Thomas, police in their home town of Birmingham, and detectives in Townsville, campaigned for more charges against Watson. Subsequently, Watson was deported to Alabama in early December last year (Koch, 2010). He was released on $100,000 bail to await trial for murder (Norrington, 2010; Mitchell, 2010).

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Watson was only taken out of Australia from Melbourne’s Marybernong detention centre after repeated undertakings from US authorities that the death penalty was precluded from sentencing on a “guilty” verdict. Australia’s international human rights obligations meant that compelling a non-Australian citizen to return to a life- endangering scenario would be contrary to the rule of law. While daily media reports disseminate this information as running hard news stories, longer creative non-fiction can humanise the administrative decisions through descriptions of their social and psychological impact. This recognises, as does the existence of trauma studies and research relating to journalism, that public outrage and private grief can make and shape a news angle as much as the reporting of a material fact or finding from police or a court hearing. Given that attributed sources can verify either material fact or psychological-emotional reaction, their centrality to news and creative non-fiction can be seen as a site of concurrence. What remains contentious for creative non-fiction’s interrelationship with investigative journalism, via source relationships and objective fact, is the shared central claim to be pursuing truth. Comparing the Gabe Watson-“honeymoon killer” case with the earlier story of the killing of Joe Cinque does not seek to resolve this critical tension. It points to approaches to the two compared works that treat the effects of social and personal grief as being critically important, and the legal-moral implications of those effects as having a public interest most immediately in how justice is experienced and administered. Whether journalists could or should advocate for any position in this complexity, and of whether creative non-fiction is disassociated from journalism when it does, informs this article but is not its main concern. Its main concern is the effects and implications described above, as they are narrated in comparative works about true crime in Australia.

2. News copy to Narrative Investigation After Joe Cinque’s death in 1997, 25-year-old Anu Singh was afforded a similar clemency to that shown to Gabe Watson about two years ago in a Brisbane court. In 1998, Singh was convicted of manslaughter and ordered to serve four years of a 10- year jail sentence. She was released in 2002, and resumed her life with new postgraduate qualifications in criminology and a self-declared desire to work with victims of crime, especially, as she later said in a radio interview, the Cinques. She had been able to attend day classes at university campus in Sydney as part of her

4 | Page sentence. Joe Cinque’s parents, interviewed by ABC radio’s Philip Adams in 2004, said they never wanted to see Singh again. They asked why Singh did not kill herself, too, when she had told friends, police and the court that she had planned to do so (Adams, 2004, September 23). Around the same time, in Birmingham, Alabama, Cindy and Tommy Thomas were anguishing over why Gabe Watson, a certified rescue diver, did not try to save his new wife, their daughter, and instead chose to swim to the surface to seek help. Both the Cinques and Thomases, in their inconsolable grief, looked for justice and could not find it, at least not in the facts that had been afforded to them so far, or in the ‘honeymoon killer’ headlines, in the tickers and the television specials.

For journalists, the somewhat dramatic and sudden deaths of Tina Watson and Joe Cinque made strong news copy. Their deaths, and the turn of suspicion toward Singh and, years later in Queensland, Watson, would have been hearty police rounds fare for any news editor. However, the moral and judicial inflections of cruelty and clemency make the two cases – the American diver who decided to swim away from his bride as she sunk to the sea bed, and the young woman who watched her boyfriend die an awful death from a drug overdose -- the ideal current affairs and feature article propositions. Media content on the Watson case swelled like a tidal current, and included Simpson and Cooke’s publication of Honeymoon Dive and a slightly earlier two-part ABC television documentary produced by Australian Story (2010, August 2 & 9). News outlets ran follow-ups through October to December last year when Gabe Watson was released from jail and flown to Melbourne to sit out a deportation hearing outcome. The fury of Tina’s grieving family, and the loyal determination of Gabe’s parents to stand by their son were evident in the coverage (Robinson, 2010) but, according to the Australian’s National correspondent Hedley Thomas, so were a lack of balance and fairness in the ABC TV Australian Story feature (Thomas, 2010a) and the Townsville police investigation (Thomas, 2010b). Australian Story titled its two hours of television on Tina Watson’s suspicious underwater death, “Unfathomable”, which seemed first to capture the general public reception of the death of a 26-year-old tourist on her honeymoon, and then the happenstance photograph, taken by another American tourist dive couple, of Tina’s body in the background of an underwater holiday shot. It might also be useful to read the title, discursively, as a marker of the spot in mediated discussion of the Watson case where news coverage exhausted its ability to report factually as well as

5 | Page fairly, with an operative legal-moral gaze across both sides of the story and towards an integral claim to truth.

News reports fulfilled an informative function by publicising fact and attributed comment on the police and court matters that followed both deaths. However, hard news (and news features) could not do what the force of private and public outrage over what was being mediated -- with escalating persuasiveness -- as two pre- meditated murders, demanded. Few newsrooms can spare staff reporters the time to sit with families, police, friends, and court proceedings for what can turn out to be months, or years, of judicial processes, and few cases would, pragmatically, warrant that investment. Yet, a 24-hour news cycle’s waxing and waning interest in cause and effect could mean that longer investigative projects rely, sometimes, on the recourse to creative non-fiction.

3. Objective facts, legal-moral subjects Literary journalism (or narrative journalism, or creative non-fiction as again contested borderlands of entitlement) is a mode of investigation that relies on the practicality, and also, significantly, the flexibility of its form and technique in the longer discursive mode. In this way, the earlier mentioned contentions over whether it is journalism, over its embellishments, and its perceived lapses in objectivity would be the topic of another discussion around epistemological notions of truth. Marcel Broersma’s (2009) article, “The unbearable limitations of journalism” does not extend that far, but it does reflect upon how “civic journalism, focused on solving social problems rather than finding the truth, does not meet with much response in the profession” (p.31). So, too, Kunda Dixit’s call for journalists to advocate a position if doing so is the only route to balanced journalism, suggests that the pressing problems that New Journalists of the 1960s and 1970s wrote about, hardly need finding. These are useful observations for the comparative reading of Garner and Simpson and Cooke, since balance in a mediated world does not equate to fairness, and nor does truth collapse obediently into the performance of any claim towards it (c.f. Broersma, 2009). The argument is made similarly by literary journalism scholars such as Richard Keeble and Sharon Wheeler (2007), and Kathy Roberts Forde (2008), who, in relation to Janet Malcolm’s ultimately successful defence of a libel suit brought against her by a New York psychiatrist, said that the facts of the story were only part of the character profile’s claim to truth in its broader social and

6 | Page psychological terrain. Forde observes in her conclusion to her study of the landmark American case Masson v New Yorker [1987 and appeals up to 1996] that what was really being contested was the right of journalists to pursue truth but not to foreclose on either the performance of that pursuit, or its representation in various media (2008, p. 204).

The nexus of material facts and truths about human relations and social justice is, ideally, what journalism finds and strengthens, even as commercial pressures work increasingly against this project in core rounds like police and court reporting. As Broersma notes in response to Nick Davies book lamenting the decline of journalistic standards, “the system crash Davies observes has more to do with journalism weakening as an economic institution than with journalism as a profession”. (2009, p. 30). In contracting spaces of corporate organisational support for investigative projects, works of creative non-fiction can extended the critical capacity (and also the critical mass) of journalism at an equally crucial time in its history. Ricketson (2010) observes in a recent Walkley Magazine article about literary journalism that the magazine’s namesake award considered creative non-fiction so important to Australian journalism that it introduced a separate category to acknowledge its best form practitioners (2010: 34). Previous winners in the Walkley category have included Chris Masters’ Jonestown (2007), Don Watson’s American Journeys (2008), and Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island was shortlisted in 2008 after her stories for The Monthly won in the Magazine Feature Writing category two years earlier. As with Helen Garner, Hooper attended court hearings, including coronial inquests on Palm Island, so that she could form a primary and secondary research material base for her subsequent book, The Tall Man. The aforementioned writers shared an additional approach: their writing of the stories sustained both authorial and public reflection on the material facts and consequences, and elevated to public discussion and consideration the historical conditions of wrongful death in social, cultural and community life. Journalism in its conventional forms does all of this, too, but is less likely to situate itself within the story. The question of whether creative non-fiction’s stylistic and structural interests in the repercussions of crime, grief, and loss (as in both the Garner and Simpson and Cooke examples) manifests as legal-moral imperative in public understanding goes to informing a discussion, too, of whether it is journalism. With the Mulrunji and Watson cases, the surrounding systemic malfunction that is familiar to any Queensland journalist who

7 | Page was around in the Bjelke-Petersen era makes such a resultant historical memory vital to contemporary investigative projects, or even just to an individual, professional respect for fairness. At least, then, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and Simpson and Cooke’s Honeymoon Dive are two examples of how the pragmatic limitations of daily reporting – Orwell’s concerns about the “ephemeral” nature of news can be ameliorated by creative non-fiction.

George Orwell used creative non-fiction (as well as realist fiction) to attempt this extension of his reach in describing the world and its big stories, but it is not the purpose of this article to deliberate on where the journalism departed from his other use of form to tell fact-based stories. It is to emphasise how, in Garner’s book about Joe Cinque and Simpson and Cooke’s work, what might have otherwise remained two “emphemeral” reports of criminal cases joined the tradition of journalism that also seeks to examine, contextualise, deconstruct, and hopefully resist violence in its multiple and often insidious enactments. As with Orwell, and with Truman Capote in his American classic, In Cold Blood, the writers of Honeymoon Dive and Joe Cinque’s Consolation make claims to truth by their determination to pursue it. Journalism does this, too, by tradition and method, but not always with pause for extended reflection.

5. Honeymoon Dive Simpson and Cooke’s Honeymoon Dive was published in mid-2010 after more than a year of news media coverage of the Gabe Watson case that had dubbed him, internationally, “the honeymoon killer”. The 452-page book’s acknowledgements state that the authors are “indebted to Truman Capote, master of ‘creative non- fiction’’’, and it is easy to understand why. Stylistically, Honeymoon Dive emulates Capote’s In Cold Blood in its sequencing of description, factual detail from an omniscient third-person narrator, and in the use of dialogue. The book opens with a prologue that describes the Townsville surrounds of the SS Yongala wreck at the Great Barrier Reef, which is reminiscent of Capote’s opening chapter in Holcomb, Kansas. Readers who followed the honeymoon killer story in the news knew that this was where Gabe Watson took Tina on the ill-fated diving expedition. The first and subsequent six and a half chapters are then set back in Birmingham, Alabama, with the Watson and Thomas families and their fairly comfortable life in the American south. Truman Capote deployed the same descriptive scene-setting for In

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Cold Blood when he visited Holcomb to gather background information for his story about the mass murder of a farming family. The structural technique was a way of writing the story larger on the American cultural canvas than the short news report that prompted it. Capote’s book became a national and international modern classic of violent crime and punishment, and would inspire Honeymoon Dive to aim for similar heights. “May the truth come out,” write Simpson and Cooke, “so those people whose lives changed after Christina Mae Watson’s death can have some resolution” (Simpson & Cooke, 2010, p. ii).

As with some of Capote’s approaches to the Clutter mass murder story in late 1950s- early 1960s America, however, Simpson and Cooke’s research and writing of the book was not received well by all still struggling with their grief back in Birmingham, Alabama. Tina Watson’s mother, Cindy, had reportedly accused the authors of “stepping on my daughter’s grave” by writing the book (Toulson, 2010a & b). Indeed, the haunting jacket photograph for Honeymoon Dive would not be easy viewing for any of those whose lives were altered by what it depicts. It shows not only where Tina died but, in all likelihood, the last moments of her life. A scuba diver is treading water in the picture’s foreground while checking depth gauges. Another diver is in the background, lying prone on the sandy sea bed. Later in the book, Simpson and Cooke recreated a scene where fellow honeymooning couple, Dawn Asano and Gary Stempler, discover this coincidental shot of a dying Tina in their underwater photography from that day. The couple speculate about its possible relevance to a police investigation (Simpson & Cooke, 2010, p. 172), with the omniscient, third-person narrators knowing from news reports that the photograph would be central to the ensuing campaign to bring Gabe Watson back to Queensland to face charges over Tina’s death. Simpson and Cooke’s book was released about a month before a grand jury in Alabama voted to try Watson for murder, but whether its publication in Australia would be construed as prejudicing a US jury is yet to be argued before a court. As the authors write on the last page of their book, “in spite of legal proceedings drawing to a close in Australia, there remains a lack of closure”. (452) a comparison with Helen Garner’s book, Joe Cinque’s Consolation points to a discussion of how this privately rendered experience of a lack of closure can be represented in journalism as a claim to truth. A truth-claim, though, is not the same as what Marcel Broersma refers to as journalism’s performative pursuit of truth as

9 | Page only ever mediated, rather than objectified (2009, p. 31). Helen Garner comes to conclude.

6. Joe Cinque’s Consolation Like Truman Capote, Helen Garner was a novelist before she wrote non-fiction narrative, starting with The First Stone in 1995 and achieving bestseller status almost a decade later with Joe Cinque’s Consolation. Unlike Capote, and Simpson and Cooke in Honeymoon Dive, however, Garner is a participant observer within the narrative, writing of her own subjective responses to the fraught, sometimes volatile, and necessarily irreconcilable legal-moral dialectic that extends from the material facts. “I understand now that I went to Canberra because the break-up of my marriage had left me humiliated and angry,” Garner wrote as the part two opening in Joe Cinque’s Consolation as she heads off to Canberra to “slip quietly into court with my notebook for a shield” and cover the 1999 trial of Anu Singh (p. 25). “I wanted to look at women who were accused of murder,” Garner writes of her decision to hunt down the story of Singh and her best friend, Madhavi Rau (ibid.). Rau, according to evidence put before the court, was Singh’s confidante leading up to the night of the planned murder-suicide. Garner writes that a journalist friend had called her to put her onto the case (Garner, 2004, p.13), describing the gothic creepiness of the planned farewell dinner party and suicide but then the fact that Joe Cinque was dead (p. 296) and Singh would go to trial for manslaughter. She would be jailed, as was Gabe Watson, but unlike Watson, had pleaded not guilty. Garner asked the obvious question of her journalist friend, “‘If it’s such a good story, how come you’re not writing it? ‘Look,’ said the journalist patiently. ‘I can do history. I can do politics. I can even do economics, at a pinch. But I can’t do psychology.’” (Garner, 2004 p. 13)

Garner would spend the next seven years on the book, researching documents and interviewing primary figures in family and police circles. It is just 25 pages into her 329-page exemplar of new new journalism (Boynton, 2005) when Garner disqualifies her work from much of any traditional (Forde, 2008, p. 204) journalistic truth-claim grounded on notions of detached objectivity or presumptive authority:

I could watch and listen for a while, satisfy my curiosity and wander out again at will, unscathed and free of obligation. But I was about to learn a hard lesson. A story lies in wait for a writer. It flashes out silent signals.

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Without knowing she is doing it, the writer receives the message, drops everything, and turns to follow (2004, p. 25).

She followed the story of Joe Cinque’s death into the centre of his family, gathering primary interviews with Nino and Maria Cinque at their Newcastle home. Although Singh’s father agreed to be interviewed for the book, there was no direct interview with Anu Singh included in it, even though Garner describes how she attempted to obtain it. Singh told ABC Radio’s Philip Adams (2004) that Garner had requested an interview but that she wondered why the writer did not pursue a direct interview with her after her release from jail in 2002. Something of an answer is presaged by Garner’s in-text comments about the participant observation process and the lesson that immersion in a story teaches a journalist convinced of their capacity for sustained objectivity and detachment. Another answer comes later in the book, when Garner describes what occurred when she contacted Maria Cinque to tell her that after several setbacks, including the lack of an interview with Anu Singh, she could not proceed with writing the book after all: For several minutes there was nothing on the line but the sound of her weeping. I was dumb with shame. How could I have thought that when I couldn’t bend the story to my will I could just lay it down, apologise for inconvenience caused, and walk away? Her son’s murder was not an opportunity for me to speculate on images of disharmony and disintegration. It was not a convenient screen on to which I could project sorrows of my own that I was too numb to feel. It was not even a ‘story’. It was real. It was the brutal hand that fate had dealt her. It was the unendurable that she had to endure. Never in my life had I felt so weak, so vain, so stupid. (p. 270)

The deeply private response that Garner has to her source’s reaction becomes, in its personalised representation, something of an affirmative argument for journalism’s central tenet of reporting truth with fairness, accuracy, and rigorous attention to fact-checking and source verification.

Conclusion Garner’s work arrives, near its conclusion, back at the objective facts: that Joe Cinque is dead, and that Anu Singh watched him die. It extends, then, into the “unbearable limitations of journalism” (Broersma, 2010) to “do psychology” or even contain, within its specialised language, the enormities of grief, and violence, and loss that drive the narratives of Joe Cinque’s Consolation and Honeymoon Dive into larger public consciousness. However, journalism’s integral pursuit of truth could be contingent, partly, on the premise that it does not purport to do any of that. In

11 | Page creative non-fiction, there is a blend of material and discursive human relationship that attempts to communicate complex realities by telling more of the why and how of a given story. In terms of actual truth, that is as close to mimetic certainty that any media representation might get to stand.

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Toulson, A. (2010b, August 31). Mother of US diver Tina Watson angry over book about her death in Australia. Courier-Mail, Brisbane [online]. Retrieved on 20 December 2010, from www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/mother-of-us-diver-tina-watson-angry-over-book- about-her-death-in-australia/story-e6freoof-1225912183291

Underwood, D. (2008). Reporters as novelists and the making of contemporary journalistic fiction, 1890–today: Rudyard Kipling to Joan Didion. In Underwood, D. Journalism and the novel: Truth and fiction, 1700-2000 (pp. 135-157). Leiden: Cambridge University Press.

Dr Janine Little is senior lecturer in journalism in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Geelong, Vic., Australia.

© Copyright 2010 Dr Janine Little

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