The Case of the Fake Sherlock | Hacker News Reader

The Case of the Fake Sherlock

nymag.com

96 pointsdanso43 comments

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

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.

Good questions. Journalists often rely on the previous reporting of their peers. If newspaper reporters, who work on tight deadlines, needed to fact check every single word in a story, they'd never publish anything. Instead, they check an old NYT story, confirm the details as previously reported, and move on.

This reasonable instinct can also give way to a broader laziness in reporting, though. Existing narratives are repeated verbatim, and we forget to go back to the bare facts and ask "what really happened, here?"

In this case, I saw the official narrative that the press had reported for 40 years. And then I saw scattered breadcrumbs that told a very different story about Richard Walter. I followed that trail, and here we are.

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.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

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

It's an intriguing question. We still don't know.

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!

I have a family member who works in tech, and he let me know!

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

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.

We open the story on the McGuffin case, and then go back in time to the 1950s, and then catch up with the story in 2010. He's just convicted the one time.

Oh, I see, thanks for clarifying. The 10-year time jump forward in the opening, that I notice upon rereading, is confusing; I read the opening as all occurring contiguously. The confusing thing isn't the jump backward in the middle, that's clearly a flashback interlude; it's that A. the opening isn't contiguous but contains a 10-year jump, and B. when we return to the Freeman case, we've returned to it at a point behind where we left off, rather than continuing from there.

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?

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?

How's NY mag to work with editorially?

I highly recommend the experience. They have fantastic editors, and the fact-checking team is among the strongest and most thorough that I've ever worked with.

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

There's a link at the bottom of every page page which answers this, as well as other frequently asked questions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

(It's also the first hit for me if I Google [Hacker News green username].)

I believe it has to do with the fact that it was just registered today

Green means a new user - if you’re verified your name appears as everyone else’s but it will say “dang”

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

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.

I mean, regardless of what you think about his scruples, he was the single most influential occultist of the 20th century (barring maybe LaVey), and calling him "just another charlatan" kind of ignores the things that actually make him notable. Like calling Houdini "just another street magician".

When I go to Wikipedia I'm far more interested in truth than historical relevance, both are important in its own but I -and many like me- are far more interested in what has been proven and disproven, in how something snaps with our current understanding of reality, history is mostly just a log of the foolishness of mankind, which I don't deny has some anthropological value but it's not my principal aim when I'm visiting Wikipedia, it would have saved me a lot of time if the first paragraph of Crowley's entry said he was a famous 20th century charlatan, but it doesn't, so a lot of mental processing power has to be wasted by me and every other reader of that long article to reach a judgement as easy to fact check such as water being wet.

There's a lot to disagree with there, and I do. I'm very frequently interested in what makes a person or event important to others in the past, and I'm not able to sustain your confidence that 2023 has it all figured out, where every year prior did not.

I never said that it all figured it out, thats an strawman fallacy; at most I implied that we know slightly better than decades before.

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".

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

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.

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

yes, me too

> 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.

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

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

>> podcasters are purely experts at being experts, with no experience or knowledge behind it?

If you are an actual expert in such things, you don't have the time to be doing podcasts.

> If you are an actual expert in such things, you don't have the time to be doing podcasts.

I'm not sure about podcasting, but this is false for blogging. As a mathematician, the first example that springs to mind is Terry Tao's extraordinary blog https://terrytao.wordpress.com , and it's one of the best, but there are tons of others.

If the current lawsuit Dominion vs. Fox News tells us anything it is that providers of "information" provide the kind of "information" their listeners want to hear.

> If the current lawsuit Dominion vs. Fox News tells us anything it is that providers of "information" provide the kind of "information" their listeners want to hear.

I think over-generalizing can be very dangerous here. The lawsuit itself, of course, tells us nothing; just about anyone can sue just about anyone for just about anything. But the evidence tells us that Fox News provides the kind of "information" their listeners want to hear. And of course, to some extent, indeed every provider will tailor what they want to say to their audience—that's part of good communication. But to assume that therefore all information providers display the same bias as Fox News did—or even that Fox News themselves always display the same sort of bias that they did in this case (although I tend to believe that they do)—is probably over-generalizing.

I'm just saying don't blame just the providers of incorrect information, blame also the viewers who want to hear it.

> 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...?

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).

very disappointed this wasn't about the macintosh software

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