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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
The story that would send me to jail for refusing to name confidential sources 27 years ago began with a letter: three typewritten pages that would not only change my life and the lives of others but also lead to a blistering clash between the First and Sixth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. When the case ended, three years later, it had become a story about a reporter as much as it was a reporter's story--different from the one that sent New York Times reporter Judith Miller to jail for refusing to name a source this July, but in important ways the same.
In June 1975, when the letter arrived at the New York Times newsroom, I was a 37- year-old reporter there. An editor named Mike Levitas handed it to me. The letter was from a woman who had something very chilling to say: she had heard that the chief surgeon at a hospital had murdered 30 to 40 patients a decade earlier.
Her letter didn't name the surgeon, or the hospital. There were no clues to where this had happened, if indeed it had. But like Levitas, who had met the letter writer and didn't think she was a crank, I knew this story had to be pursued, even without her cooperation. My first job was to identify the hospital. The letter suggested that drugs might have killed the patients, so I contacted sources in the world of forensic toxicology. Fortunately, one remembered having been consulted about a "suspicious" case like this at Riverdell, a private hospital in Bergen County, New Jersey.
Over the next half year, I roamed North Jersey and other parts of the country, trying to piece together what had happened in 1965 and 1966 at the hospital (which had since closed); trying to find people who knew about the case; and trying to persuade those who were reluctant to talk to me to do so, in confidence if necessary. Ultimately, my confidential sources would provide information that was vital to getting stories about the deaths into print.
The chief surgeon at the time of the deaths, I learned, had been Mario E. Jascalevich, who had been born and raised in Argentina and trained in America. He seemed never to lose patients after surgery, but the postoperative mortality rate of a surgeon new to Riverdell was soaring. The new surgeon couldn't understand it until he, and then equally puzzled doctor-directors at the hospital, opened Jascalevich's locker on...
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