Fact Checking Mark Bowden's Curious Vanity Fair Article on Stephanie Lazarus, Part VII

Complete Series on Fact Checking Mark Bowden's Article HERE.

Continued from Part VI...

As my readers know, the Rasmussen family's lawsuit against the LAPD ended on February 20th, when the California Supreme Court declined to take up the family's appeal. The California Courts of Appeal had rejected the Rasmussen's lawsuit in November 2012, on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.

Thankfully, there is no statute of limitations on crimes against journalism, so I've decided to revisit this series.

Mark Bowden’s article on the Stephanie Lazarus case ran in the July 2012 issue of Vanity Fair.  The first time I read Bowden's article, something immediately struck me as off.  I began writing about it a few weeks later, pointing out a number of factual mistakes in Bowden's piece. I also pointed out a number of places in the article where Bowden's quotes did not match the official court transcript of Stephanie's 2009 pre-arrest interview. It was one of Bowden's misquotes that initially inspired me to fact-check the rest of the article. Vanity Fair did not respond or make any corrections.

A week later I wrote another post, raising more questions. Vanity Fair again ignored me.  Additional posts followed in July (Part III) and August (Part IV).  In September, Poynter picked up the story.  Craig Silverman's lengthy post included numerous quotes from Cullen Murphy, Bowden's editor at Vanity Fair, but no quotes from Bowden himself.  Vanity Fair offered a series of changing explanations for how Bowden's article came to be published with so many mistakes. Some of Vanity Fair's statements impugned my credibility, which I found ironic, since Craig Silverman's findings substantiated my claims. Cullen Murphy also told Poynter that at Vanity Fair, “We take fact-checking very seriously, and when issues arise we look into them carefully.”

After Poynter’s story ran, Vanity Fair quietly made some corrections to the online version of Bowden’s article but left many others uncorrected.  To date, Vanity Fair has refused to run any correction in the print magazine.

Last October, I contacted Cullen Murphy via email and tried to engage him. Murphy would not speak with me on the record about Bowden's article.  I expressed my interest in communicating with Bowden via email. I made it clear that I was very interested to hear from Bowden, but it would need to be on the record.

Through all of this, Bowden has been curiously silent. Until recently, I'd never met Mark Bowden.  For the record, I have nothing against him personally. I think he's an amazing storyteller. He's also a professor of journalism.  I thought I would try to contact him directly.

Through a source, I obtained Mark Bowden’s email address. I first emailed him on October 25th:

Dear Mr. Bowden,

I’m sorry I haven’t written you sooner.  I only recently learned your email address. 

I understand you were interested in having a conversation with me.  Was there something specific you wanted to ask or tell me?

Sincerely,
Betsy A. Ross, Owner
Trials & Tribulations Blog

When I didn’t hear back, I thought maybe I had his address wrong.  So I wrote him again on November 5th, this time cc’ing Cullen Murphy, whose email address I did have.

Dear Mr. Bowden,

I emailed you on October 25th (see below).  In case you missed it or I had your address wrong, I am cc-ing your editor at Vanity Fair, Cullen Murphy, who I corresponded with last month.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

Betsy A. Ross, Owner
Trials & Tribulations Blog

On November 9th, I tried one more time:

Dear Mr. Bowden,

I’m disappointed I’ve not heard back from you. 

Was there something specific you wanted to tell me? Is there anything at all you would like to say to my readers?

I hope to include your perspective in my next post.  If you respond by Tuesday evening, I will publish your response in full.

Sincerely,
Betsy A. Ross, Owner
Trials & Tribulations Blog

A week later I learned that Bowden's book tour for his latest book, The Finish, included a stop at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena on November 17th.  I thought I would take the opportunity to introduce myself to Bowden and see if he would engage me and hopefully speak on the record. I've always loved going to Vroman's, a literary landmark that’s been in business for 118 years.  I’ve been there many times to meet authors and get books signed.  I marked the date on my calendar.

That Saturday afternoon I arrived early at the bookstore and bought a copy of The Finish. Not knowing how Bowden would react when I introduced myself, I took a friend for moral support. I climbed the stairs to the lecture area and took a seat in the back row.  I got comfortable and waited for the lecture to begin.

Bowden spoke extemporaneously for half an hour about his book and his career in journalism. Bowden said something about his writing becoming history that seems relevant to his article on the Stephanie Lazarus case. He said, “I found over and over again in my career, that the story -- if I told a story well enough -- that it is remembered. And that it enters our popular memory. It becomes a piece of history.”

After Bowden's remarks and some audience questions, I got in the long line of people waiting to get their books signed.  It was evident that Bowden was enjoying the attention of his fans. The man in line in front of me was very excited to meet Bowden and asked for a picture with him.  Smiling, Bowden stood beside his fan for the photo op. And then it was my turn.  I stepped up to the table, smiled at Bowden and said, “I’m so glad I came to hear you speak today. Hello Mr. Bowden, I’m Betsy Ross, the blogger.”

Bowden's smile immediately left his face when I introduced myself.  “Oh... hi,” he replied.  I reminded Bowden that I had sent him some emails.  Bowden confirmed that he had received them by telling me,  “Well, you asked if I had any questions of you, and I don’t.” He then added: “But if you had any questions for me."  I asked him if he would answer an email. Bowden was non-committal. There were people waiting in line behind me, so I thanked Bowden and handed him my book.

The next day I wrote to Bowden again:

Dear Mr. Bowden,

I enjoyed listening to you speak at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena yesterday, as well as meeting you in person.

During our brief conversation, you said you had not replied to my earlier emails because you didn’t have questions for me. You then asked if I had any questions for you.  I have several questions about your article on the Stephanie Lazarus case.

In a story published by Poynter in late September, your editor at Vanity Fair, Cullen Murphy, provided the following detailed statement:

"The central charge made by T&T is that Mark Bowden does not accurately quote the interrogation of Stephanie Lazarus and in one instance even adds his own material. This is false... The author of the T&T post relied on a transcript of the interrogation. Bowden, rather than use some unknown person’s transcript—transcripts are notoriously unreliable—went to the actual videos of the interrogation to confirm his quotations. Further, to make sure the speakers were being identified correctly, the quotations were read back to Detectives Stearns and Jaramillo of the LAPD. When the article was published, Vanity Fair put the videos online to make the source readily available. On review, we confirmed that Bowden’s quotations are indeed accurate and that the transcript is not. (We did find that two sentences in a single quotation in the VF piece had been inadvertently transposed, with no impact on meaning.)"

In a second statement to Poynter, Murphy acknowledged “we were mistaken” and apologized for “inadvertently introducing a red herring.”

I don’t understand how such a detailed statement could be made inadvertently. Did you provide the information for Murphy’s initial statement? To your knowledge, is any part of Murphy’s initial statement true?

Are you aware that there are additional quotes you attribute to Stephanie Lazarus and Detectives Jaramillo and Stearns that do not match the video and official transcript? The official transcript I’m referring to was released to the public in November 2010, eighteen months before your article hit newsstands. Can you explain how these inaccurate quotes came to be published?   As a journalist, do you still stand behind your account of the interview?

Thank you for signing my book and I hope to hear from you soon.  If you respond by next Sunday (November 25th), I will include your full response in my next post.

Sincerely,
Betsy A. Ross, Owner
Trials and Tribulations

I'm still waiting to hear from Bowden. 

Continued in Part VIII....

Fact Checking Mark Bowden's Curious Vanity Fair Article on Stephanie Lazarus, Part V

Continued from Part IV.....

Complete Series on Fact Checking Mark Bowden's Article HERE. 
UPDATE: 10/17: spelling of Murrow
UPDATE: October 17th, 2012: VANITY FAIR CORRECTS MORE ERRORS IN MARK BOWDEN'S ARTICLE

Vanity Fair quietly added numerous corrections to the online version of Mark Bowden's article.

Stay tuned for more on this series...

UPDATE 10/2/2012 Correct VF November 2007, to September 2007

UPDATE 10/1/2012
A few developments to tell T&T readers.  Last Friday,  Craig Silverman of Poynter.org, a journalism watchdog site published a story about this five part series.  Today, someone at Advance Publications, the parent company of Vanity Fair, visited T&T again from a link on Silverman's story.  They also hit the Stephanie Lazarus Quick Links page and searched T&T for the words "Vanity Fair."

T&T's StatCounter® Page

Here's a little known fact that my long-time readers might remember.  If you search Vanity Fair's website for the words "Betsy Ross," you will find that the late writer Dominck Dunne mentioned me in his story Cheating on Phil With Paris that appeared in Vanity Fair's September 2007 issue.

UPDATE 9/26/2012
Today, Advance Publications, the parent company of Vanity Fair revisited T&T several times via a link on Mark Bowden's Wikipedia page.

Screen shot of T&T Stat Counter Page

Originally Published September 20th, 2012
Back in June, when I first wrote about Mark Bowden’s article on the Stephanie Lazarus case in the July issue of Vanity Fair, I never thought I’d still be writing about it. But three months and many posts later, here we are.  As legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow once said: "The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer."

Late last week, I noticed that Vanity Fair quietly posted some corrections to the online version of Bowden’s article. To find the corrections, you must click through to the seventh page and scroll down to the very bottom.  Here is what they corrected:

An earlier version of this story misidentified Sherri Rasmussen's alma mater. It is Loma Linda University, not U.C.L.A. The date on which Stephanie Lazarus was mentioned in the case file is November 19, 1987, not November 19, 1986. A cup and straw introduced into evidence were used outside Costco, and not inside, and the DNA from the sample was identified two days later, not three days later.

I applaud Vanity Fair for correcting a few of the factual errors that I pointed out back in June. But what about the other ones?

Oddly, Vanity Fair did not to correct what might be Bowden’s most egregious misstatement of fact, that John Ruetten and Stephanie’s relationship ended in Hawaii in 1989. (Page 146: “Their relationship did not outlast the vacation.”)

Actually, as John testified over two days in February 2012, he and Stephanie reconnected in Los Angeles in the early 1990s and were sexually intimate at least twice.  It’s hard to imagine how Bowden and Vanity Fair’s fact checkers missed this.  John’s testimony was extensively covered by the media.  The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, The Criminal Report Daily, and other news outlets reported it.  It was heart wrenching to watch John admit, in front of Sherri Rasmussen’s family and dozens of strangers, that he had sex with Stephanie during his engagement and after the Hawaii trip.  Given that Bowden's article was published in the July issue of Vanity Fair, more than three months after Ruetten testified, how did Bowden get this wrong?  How can his editors defend not correcting it?

There are at least four other significant errors that Vanity Fair has not corrected:

Page 124: "Before they entered the holding area, as a matter of routine, they checked their weapons." Stephanie Lazarus left her weapon at her desk and was unarmed when she entered the jail (which by the way was on the second floor of Parker Center, and not in the "building's basement jail facility," as Bowden described it).

Page 126:  "The saliva swab showed that whoever had bitten Sherri's left forearm had a different blood type from hers." The bite mark swab, which was the crucial evidence in the case, was never tested for blood type in 1986.  It wasn’t tested at all until 2004, when it was tested for DNA, not blood type.

Page 148: "What did 'PO' mean? When they guessed 'police officer,' they ran the name through the department directory and came up with their esteemed colleague in the art-theft division." Van Nuys Homicide detectives never "guessed" Stephanie Lazarus was an LAPD officer. They were told that fact by John Ruetten.

Page 148: Mark Bowden asserts in his article:

Whoever had come looking for Sherri had come to kill her. Sherri had apparently run downstairs, trying to reach the panic button on the security panel. The killer pursued, and stopped her before she got there. They fought savagely. Sherri apparently managed to briefly wrest her assailant’s gun away and place her in a headlock. The killer then bit Sherri’s forearm to break free, and picked up the heavy gray ceramic vase from the living-room shelf and crashed it hard into her forehead. The blow was enough to daze Sherri, if not knock her to the floor. The killer then retrieved the gun and fired the first shot that hit Sherri. It went clean through Sherri’s chest. She began bleeding internally and would have had only minutes to live. She was down now for good. Using the blanket to muffle the sound, the killer then fired two more rounds into her chest, finishing the job.

There was no evidence presented at trial about Stephanie Lazarus's state of mind the morning she killed Sherri Rasmussen, or that she went to Sherri's home with the specific intent to kill her. Former FBI profiler and crime scene analyst Mark Safarik testified during the trial that it is impossible to know for certain the exact sequence of events that transpired when Sherri Rasmussen was killed. 

How does Mark Bowden know Stephanie Lazarus's state of mind the morning of the murder?  How did he reach his conclusions? 


Continued in Part VI.........

Fact Checking Mark Bowden's Curious Vanity Fair Article on Stephanie Lazarus, Part IV

Continued from Part III.....

Complete Series on Fact Checking Mark Bowden's Article HERE.
UPDATE: Monday, August 20th, 2012 11:30 PM

I had lots of traffic on the blog today from Advance Publications, the parent company of Vanity Fair.

T&T StatCounter® Screen Shots

As  you can see above, someone at Advance Publications and/or Vanity Fair reread Part I of this series on Monday at 10:48 AM PT.  A few minutes later,  someone read Part II. Shortly after noon, Part III and Part IV were  also read.  All told, between 10:48 AM and 3:44 PM, T&T received 26 visits from Advance Publications.

This puts to rest the question of whether Vanity Fair is aware of  the errors and fabricated quotes in Mark Bowden's article. Bowden and Vanity  Fair owe their readers an explanation.  
________

UPDATE: August 15th, for clarity

August 13th, 2012
With all the recent journalism stories about plagiarism and fabrication in the news, I thought it was time to revisit this series, Fact Checking Mark Bowden’s Curious Vanity Fair Article on the Sherri Rasmussen case.

Recap
Bowden’s story, A Case So Cold It Was Blue, appeared in the July 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, which hit newsstands in early June.  A week and a half later, the entire lengthy article – more than 9,500 words –went up on the Vanity Fair website, where it’s still online.

A few days later, on June 20th, I posted Part I of this series. Part I detailed numerous factual errors in the Vanity Fair article. Considering the subject, a murder committed by a LAPD detective, these were not insignificant mistakes. Among the facts Bowden gets wrong is what year Stephanie Lazarus’ sexual relationship with John Ruetten ended, as well as when lab testing was done of the bite-mark swab and what that testing revealed. None of these facts were late-breaking news. Stephanie Lazarus’ trial ended on March 8th, 2012, almost three months before Bowden's article. Part I also documented numerous places where Bowden misquotes Stephanie Lazarus’ June 2009 videotaped interview. In at least one instance, Bowden fabricated a line of dialogue that is never said, and does not appear in the video or transcript. The video and transcript have been public documents since November 2010.

In Part II, posted on June 26th, I questioned how Bowden was able to describe Lazarus’ private thoughts and feelings during the interview, and how he arrived at his characterizations of Lazarus' personality and career.

On July 2nd, Part III revealed that Bowden never interviewed any of the individuals involved in the case before publishing his article.

The August 2012 issue of Vanity Fair came out soon after the 4th of July.  Below is an image of page 47 of the August issue. Vanity Fair did correct one error from the July 2012 issue but nothing regarding Bowden’s article.

Vanity Fair August 2012, published corrections

To me, getting the facts right in a story involving the murder of an innocent woman by an active-duty police officer seems more important than some book title. But maybe that's just me. Since Vanity Fair is a magazine that has a long lead time, I thought it might take them a bit longer to verify all the errors I pointed out in Part I and run a correction.  So I waited for the September issue.

 

The September 2012 issue of Vanity Fair hit newsstands August 2nd.  Below is an image of page 152.  This time, Vanity Fair corrected another story from the July 2012 issue, but still nothing on Bowden's piece.

Vanity Fair September 2012, published corrections

Two issues of Vanity Fair have been published since Bowden’s article ran. In each one, corrections were made to other articles in the July 2012 issue. Neither of those corrections approach the seriousness of Sherri Rasmussen's case.

Does Vanity Fair Know?
Since I began this series six weeks ago, a few T&T readers have suggested I write a letter to Vanity Fair’s editor, pointing out the errors in Bowden's article.  The problem I have with that is the magazine’s letters policy, which you can read in the above images. I believe the best platform for my reporting is right here where it's always been, on my blog.

Besides, within a day of publishing Part I, I knew there was no need to send a letter to Vanity Fair, since they are well aware of my blog.

Part I went live on June 20th at 9:00 PM PST. Below is a screenshot of my Statcounter® log showing a visitor from "Advance Publications" the very next morning, to my first post on Bowden's article.  The parent company of Vanity Fair is Advance Publications. As the image shows, there have been other visits from Advance Publications since then.

T&T StatCounter®

Since it's clear that Vanity Fair is aware of the factual misstatements in their Lazarus article, when will the magazine acknowledge them, and offer an explanation as to what went wrong? How did those altered quotes make it into print? Did Vanity Fair's fact checking department drop the ball, or did Bowden overrule them?  This Vanity Fair reader is waiting to know.

Stephanie Lazarus Trial Quick Links -- Complete Case Coverage

Continued in Part V.....