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'The Ephemeral' Crime Story and Longer Investigations: Journalism

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'The Ephemeral' Crime Story and Longer Investigations: Journalism ‘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). 3 | Page 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).
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