The Case of the Fake Sherlock

[DaveHerbert]

I'm the author of the story. Happy to answer any questions about the piece.

[elliekelly]

If you’re willing to answer a question a bit beyond the scope I have one that relates to your story but also to your experience as a journalist. It seems like grifters often rely on “reputation laundering” through reputable news & media. They get one small-time outlet to say they’ve done XYZ and then they finagle that into more coverage because the next outlet sees the prior one has reported the grifter has done XYZ so they report on it, too. And on the one hand it seems perfectly reasonable for a journalist to say well XYZ has been reported in all of these reliable publications so it must be true because otherwise someone would have caught it by now. But sometimes, as it seems happened with Richard Walter, it turns out they’ve all just sort of confirmed with one another but no one has actually given XYZ a proper look.

So I guess my question is to what extent do you think this happens because the fraudster deliberately manipulates/exploits the free publicity vs some reporters, for whatever reason, failing to do enough due diligence? Are there any sort of journalistic ethical obligations around “confirming” a fact with an infotainment type of outlet compared to a news outlet? Your story specifically mentions 20/20 as one of the first “big” news outlets that bolstered Walter’s false reputation. (And even now that I’m thinking about it I’m not really sure whether that’s meant to be news or not!)

And I don’t mean to single out journalists here. It’s clear the legal profession bears significant blame for the reputation laundering he was allowed to do through his “expert” testimony. I only ask about the journalism angle specifically because you happen to be a journalist. I’d also love to hear the perspective of any litigators who might be inclined to weigh in.

[entropicdrifter]

I just wanted to say thanks for researching and writing such a carefully composed and in-depth piece. Your prose was both exceptionally clear and unusually concise for this kind of long-form piece.

Often I'll find myself skimming over entire paragraphs of this sort of long-form investigative piece because the author will go off on a tangent or include overly personal or flowery unnecessary details like the shape of a stain on the wall during an interview. I understand the qualitative value of such window-dressing but personally find it to be distastefully biased and a time-wasteful way to fluff up an already long read.

Having a long read like this that so fully focuses on the meat of the issue and its history is incredibly refreshing.

In short, consider me a fan.

[jlg97]

Incredible piece, what exactly was Richard Walter doing in that 10 year gap do you think? Prison time??

[itcrowd]

A bit of a tangent, but I do wonder how you figured out this story was front page on HN?

Thanks for the long read. Worth it!

[etchalon]

How'd you discover Walter, and what led you to write a story about him?

[Sniffnoy]

One bit of the story I'm very confused about -- going by the article, it sounds like the Freeman case was reopened after McGuffin had already been convicted of it, and then he was somehow convicted again of the same crime. Of course you can't be convicted twice of the same crime, so what happened here? I'm quite confused.

[geocrasher]

A few times in the article you mentioned Walter's narcissism. How much of his behavior do you associate with narcissism versus that which can be explained by other means?

[jqgatsby]

Do you know if any attempt is being made to find the real killer by comparing the DNA evidence from the victim's shoes to genealogy databases?

[devindotcom]

How's NY mag to work with editorially?

[ribs]

I notice that this user’s name is in green. Does that mean it’s been verified in some way?

[JasonFruit]

His Wikipedia article [0] is not as skeptical of his abilities and qualifications as I would have expected. Neither is that of the Vidocq Society [1]. Articles on controversial living people are hard to manage, but the Wikipedia articles and the NY Magazine article present opposite views of Walter, and I suspect they're both a bit distorted.

    [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Walter_(psychologist)
    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidocq_Society

[mattigames]

Controversial dead people are also hard to manage by Wikipedia, just read the article about Alister Crowley, portrayed as an intellectual of the "dark arts" and not just another charlatan taking advantage of gullible people, which he was.

[adfgadfhionio]

The sources in that article don't seem to check out. All the ones I've checked directly contradict the claims of the article, make obvious factual errors (e.g. referring to a Dr. Richard Walter), or seem to be paraphrasing other sources. "Criminal profiling: an introduction to behavioral evidence analysis" mentions Walter in a chapter entitled "Criminal Profiling and Forensic Fraud" and describes his perjuries at length. Yet the Wikipedia article cites it as evidence that he is "one of the creators of modern criminal profiling".

[shellac]

I spent 2/3rds of the article assuming 'Nick McGuffin' was a deliberately absurd pseudonym used to protect the real victim of this charlatan.

[tunesmith]

It's crazy, isn't it? A McGuffin is the thing that everyone chases that doesn't really have anything to do with the plot, it's just the thing everyone is after.

[entropicdrifter]

Dude was on national TV. Kinda feels like the cat's out of the bag for his privacy when you can just Google the murder victim's name.

That said, yeah his name does sound incredibly fake

[jonnycomputer]

yes, me too

[rsav]

> Walter refused several requests for an interview. “You have earned one’s distrust that merits severing any contact with you in the future,” he wrote me, veering into strange pronoun usage. “Under no circumstances would himself cooperate in your suspicious activities.”

Sharply written articles like this are a rare treat.

[boomboomsubban]

If he was starting his career now, he'd make a podcast and convince millions he's the modern day Sherlock Holmes.

[a_bonobo]

How many 'thought leaders', 'public experts', podcasters are purely experts at being experts, with no experience or knowledge behind it? I can think of a few public voices, especially in AI right now, who have nothing to say but the ears of thousands

[Sniffnoy]

> Officials at the organization acknowledged in internal memos that Walter had padded his résumé, but they decided to reveal as little as possible about their internal deliberations. “We do have to worry about public appearances,” Don Harper Mills, a pathologist who was chairman of the ethics committee, wrote to his colleagues.

This sort of thing seems to be extremely common and it's immensely frustrating. More specifically, the phenomenon I mean is avoiding expelling fraudsters from one's organization on the basis that people, rather than thinking "oh it's good how this organization has high standards for its members and expels frauds, so other members are likely good", will instead think "oh this organization had a fraudster in it, other members are likely also frauds".

The question then is, how can we get to an equilibrium where the former way of thinking is the norm, so that expelling frauds will be encouraged...?

[tpoacher]

Not sure how to feel about this article. It's not just presentation of boring facts; it vividly goes out of its way to ensure you feel it in your guts just how much this person deserves your hate. It feels like a superbly written character assassination, but of a blatantly guilty and despicable person (if he wasn't before, he certainly is now - and that's kinda the point of the article).

I'm left wondering whether I should be approving of it or be disgusted by it. (in an 'if you tortured and killed Hitler using an elegant but brutal torture chamber, does that make you the good guy or the bad guy' manner).

[steviedotboston]

very disappointed this wasn't about the macintosh software