CORRECTION APPENDED
Right under the noses of police, out in the open in rural Iowa, a prostitution ring involving children flourished. How could this happen? How widespread is prostitution in rural America?
The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa)
Gazette launched an investigation and produced an
impressive multimedia Web site and a 14-part series of stories.
The reporter,
Jennifer Hemmingsen, worked on the story while also covering her everyday crime and courts beat.
The Gazette has five staff photographers and two managers in the photo department. Brian Ray, the photographer for this project, is the only photographer in the Iowa City newsroom. (In the e-mail version of this report I incorrectly said he was the only staff photographer.)
The Gazette provided this background for the project:
By poring over hundreds of court records and reports, and through more than two dozen interviews, The Gazette has pieced together over the last year and a half the story of how Robert Sallis and Betty Thompson were able in late 2004 and 2005 to operate a prostitution business right under the noses of police, able to prostitute the 13-year-old M.B. throughout Eastern Iowa for weeks even as their house was being watched by Williamsburg patrol officers.
The secret to their success? Sticking to small towns, keeping a low profile and counting on the silence of their customers and associates.
I interviewed Hemmingsen about the project by e-mail and, as you will see below, I asked some more questions of her and photojournalist Brian Ray via Skype. You can see the video below.
Tompkins: Prostitution? In rural Iowa? How did this investigation start? What's more, why did it start?Hemmingsen: In 2005 and 2006, then-public safety reporter Zack Kucharski began covering a number of court cases accusing men of sexually abusing the same 13-year-old girl. He learned the charges were connected to a massive investigation involving a drug investigation, a prostitution ring and a girl who had been kidnapped and trafficked from Minnesota.
Gazette Senior Editor Lyle Muller, who is himself from a small Iowa town, wanted to know how this could have happened in such rural areas -- the girl was victimized in towns with populations as low as 250 people.
I was hired last March when Zack took another job in the newsroom, and they sat me down to tell me what they knew so far. Charges were still being filed, so I went to more hearings in 2007 and started gathering records. Once Robert Sallis and Betty Thompson were sentenced, investigators agreed to tell us about the case and I started interviewing them, prosecutors and as many people involved with the ring who would talk to me.
Researching the criminal histories ... took a long time, but I think it was worth it -- I also lucked out and found a way to get some investigator and court documents we generally never get to see. All those records gave me a hard-and-fast chronology and a lot of detail to work with when explaining what was going on and who was involved.
In this massive project, no passage stands out more than the opening paragraphs in part one: In the basement of an ordinary-looking Williamsburg home, the 13-year-old girl was given a choice. Either she would have sex with two men nearly twice her age or she would be given back to her kidnapper.
Already in the week since Demont Bowie told the suburban Minneapolis girl she belonged to him, he'd beaten and abused her, starved her and deprived her of sleep. He traded her body to his friends and even a mechanic. When Demont told her to do something to someone, she did. There was no refusing. He'd said he'd kill her, kill her family, if she tried to leave.
She believed him.
How and why did you select that as the opening to this project?
| AN EDITOR'S PERSPECTIVE |
Lyle Muller, Gazette senior editor, discusses why the newspaper decided to present this story as a narrative and how he worked with Hemmingsen to give her time to report and write the stories. | |
Hemmingsen: Lyle always tells me a lead should be like a "punch in the nose." He asked me what the most dramatic moment was in this long, complicated saga and I thought immediately of that basement. It's a very rough moment and also a pivotal one -- the girl is free of Demont, who terrorized her, but she's dumped into this whole other nightmare where she's going to be sent out to work as a prostitute for Naughty-bi-Nature. We thought it was a good, central spot to start with before I backed way up and showed how the girl got to that point. I was also hoping it would resonate with readers when the story wound its way back around to that basement scene about halfway through the series -- by that time, they'd have the background to put it all in context.
Based on your reporting in this case, how widespread do you think this kind of child exploitation is in rural America?Hemmingsen: I don't think it's unusual at all. Betty Thompson started prostituting in Cedar Rapids, Iowa when she was young. She had previously been convicted of prostituting an underage Cedar Rapids-area girl in Milwaukee. While the series was running, I got a phone call from a man who said one of the other "escort" services that had previously advertised in
The Gazette was offering young girls, although I don't have proof of that.
Cedar Rapids-based family therapist Virgil Gooding sent us a paper he published in the
Journal of Rural Mental Health (V. 31, No. 2, Spring 2007) talking about a proliferation of a "gangster value system" in smaller communities in which young girls are used to deliver drugs, carry weapons and have sex with and prostitute for the group. He told me on the phone he's talked to 50 girls who have been in the kind of situation we describe, but that people in the wider community haven't listened because no one wants to believe it happens in smaller towns.
Explain how this project ran in the paper and how important the fairly sizable online display was to your journalism. How did the online project come together? Hemmingsen: It ran 1A every day for 14 days. Days 1, 8 and 14 were centerpieces. On the other days it was positioned at the bottom of the page. Brian can speak more to the art challenges -- we knew we wanted it to look different from the rest of the paper, and it wasn't a very art-friendly story. Brian did this cool thing with the black and white photos (they're actually process color) to give them more depth. Design used just a small amount of color so the series had a very distinct look and feel.
Lyle thought it was important that everyone felt invested in the project and had enough time to really bring their strengths. We started meeting with Jason Kristufek, our online editor, in February. Brian, videographer Mike Barnes and I went on a tour of all the locations so I could explain to them what had happened there and where it fit in to the story. Mike had just started working for us a few weeks before the series was set to start running, so he had to catch up fast.
What has the public reaction been to this project? What has changed?Hemmingsen: Most of the feedback has been very positive. People were glued to the story and shocked by the facts. We did get a few calls from people who thought it was too graphic or who thought we were making too big a deal of it, sensationalizing. I'm not sure yet what the long-term effect will be. I did talk to a church group (recently) and the people there were talking about what they might be able to do.
To what extent was race a factor in the public reaction, given that your community is almost all white and the criminals (as well as the victims) all appear to have been black? The johns, as best I can tell from the stories, appeared to all be white.
Hemmingsen: Not as much as I expected. At least one reader commented that it was racist for me to identify the racial and ethnic background of most of the players. The story isn't about race, it's about this criminal organization; but race is definitely there in ways I don't think I completely understand. I have heard from a lot more African American readers about this series than I have on other stories. Not with positive or negative comments per se, but just to talk about the stories or about other stuff that's happening here along the lines of prostitution and the drug trade. Iowans are really reluctant to talk about this stuff. It's something I'm still sort of trying to figure out.
I have to notice that Naughty-bi-Nature, the prostitution company at the center of all of this, advertised in your paper. The public comments online even criticized the paper for accepting escort ads. Has anything changed at the paper because of this?It was a no-brainer that we would include in the story the fact that this business had advertised in our paper. It was one of 25 such businesses that were approved to advertise with
The Gazette because they had provided documentation of a state tax ID number. We were talking about interviewing the ad department for a sidebar, but
The Gazette decided while we were reporting this story to stop accepting ads for spas and escorts. They
announced it while the series was running.
How they pulled it offBelow is another interview I did with Hemmingsen and photojournalist Brian Ray (via Skype). We talk about how they managed their workflow, given that they were nearly always working on other daily stories while they did this project.
Ray also explains how he went about photographing a story that had essentially "already occurred." How can a photojournalist in that situation make photographs of buildings and houses interesting and valuable to the story? And you will hear their advice for how other journalists can look into this story in their rural areas.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article had the incorrect number of photojournalists at The Gazette.
