The two Crazy Joes
Dublin Core
Title
The two Crazy Joes
Subject
Spaziano, Crazy Joe
Description
As two newspapers, the Herald and the Sentinel, cover the same story of Joseph "Crazy Joe" Spaziano, they report two completely different stories. David Barstow evaluates why these two reliable newspapers published two different views of the case, as well as asking the question of which one was correct in the end.
Creator
Barstow, David
Source
Barstow, David. "The two Crazy Joes." St. Petersburg Times, February, 1996.
Publisher
HIST 298, University of Mary Washington
Date
02-25-1996
Rights
The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source.
Format
5 JPGS
Language
English
Coverage
St. Petersburg, FL
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
[Page One]
[Title]
The two Crazy Joes
[Photographs of Joseph Spaziano during his first trial and one of his appeals to court]
[Caption]
Two photographs, one man. As different as Joseph “Crazy Joe” Spaziano looks in these pictures is about as different as the coverage of his case in the Miami Herald and the Orlando Sentinel.
[Page Two]
[Column One]
With the help of God and the Miami herald, we’ll cross the finish line together. And alive. And free.
Attorney Michael Mello, in a letter to his client, death row inmate Joe Spaziano
The Sentinel will write whatever it wants, and if another (death) warrant comes, your blood will be on their hands.
Mello, in another letter to Spaziano
Last summer, two newspapers—the Miami Herald and the Orlando Sentinel—set out to do the same thing.
Each dedicated itself to finding The Truth in the case of Joseph “Crazy Joe” Spaziano, the Outlaw biker condemned to death 20 years ago for the murder of a young Orlando medical clerk. Each produced a stream of news stories based on standard reporting techniques: digging up records, tracking down witnesses, pumping sources, talking to key participants.
But a strange thing happened on the trail to truth.
In eight months of compelling coverage, as execution dates came and went, the two newspapers arrived at separate truths about Crazy Joe’s case, truths as incompatible as life and death.
The Herald found in Spaziano a pathetic victim of injustice. The Sentinel found a “dead-eyed” rapist-killer.
The Herald found shabby evidence, shaky witnesses and a lead detective who drove around the countryside in a squad car with a psychic holding a skull in her lap. The Sentinel described incriminating evidence, unshakable witnesses and a former Outlaw enforcer called Gatemouth who said Spaziano bragged that sex was best after a killing.
The Herald found a guild-ridden prosecution witness who had motives to lie 20 years ago but now
[End of First Column]
[Beginning of Second Column]
wanted to set the record straight? The Sentinel described the same witness as a troubled flake with reasons to spring forth with a bogus recantation.
This extraordinary divergence was neatly summarized in headlines on editorials last month, when a judge ordered a new trial for Spaziano.
The Herald: “Justice Awakens.”
The Sentinel:”Justice Clearly Cheated.”
How could two newspapers—both pro-death penalty and each committed to the truth—see the same case so differently?
The coverage was shaped by forces unseen by readers. These newspapers pursued different questions and were driven by different ideas about the proper role of journalism. Their coverage was molded by ego and instinct. Stories were affected by reactions to what the other newspaper was writing, and by the manipulations of a few key sources. Coverage was even affected by one reporter’s premature delivery of a baby and another reporter’s childhood memories.
The stakes were high: Either an innocent man was about to be executed, or a murderer was going to beat the system.
“I think they were both zealously going after the truth, or what they perceived to be the truth,” says Ron Sachs, a former reporter who until recently was Gov. Lawton Chiles’ spokesman. ‘And I have no doubt in my mind that they were guided and motivated by pure altruism. That doesn’t mean they got closer to the truth. Both papers wrote accurate stories—factual stories.
“But this was a classic example of how you can vigorously pursue a particular viewpoint and generate the facts to support your viewpoint.
“The trouble is, at least one of these great newspapers is probably wrong.”
Please see CRAZY JOE 8a
[Heading]
Crazy Joe from IA
[Page Three]
[First Column]
Early last May, Michael Mello nervously dialed the number of Gene Miller, an editor at the Miami Herald. They knew each other by reputation alone.
Mello teaches law in Vermont. He also represented death row inmates, including Spaziano. Mello usually avoided the media and confined his advocacy to the strict procedural rules that govern death penalty appeals. But this case was different. Of the 70 men he had represented on death row, Spaziano was the first Mello thought truly innocent. With appeals exhausted and the hour of execution drawing near, Mello decided to approach the Media. It was the first such phone call he says he had ever made.
Gene Miller is a legend in journalism circles. He has built a career crusading against miscarriages of justice. His first Pulitzer Prize, in 1967, was for stories that cleared two convicts of murder they did not commit. His second Pulitzer, in 1976, came for reporting that led to the release and pardon of Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, sentenced to death for murdering two Panhandle gas station attendants.
Plenty of people want Miller to crusade for them, but he thinks most “innocent-man” claims are baseless. When Mello called and asked him to review Spaziano’s case, Miller agreed—expecting that he would take a quick look and toss it aside. But his interest surged when he saw Joe McCawley’s name in Mello’s records.
McCawley was the discredited hypnotist who some say implanted false memories in a key witness in the Pitts and Lee case. Here he was again in the Spaziano case, and his role was even more prominent.
Police had no eyewitnesses or physical evidence tying Spaziano to the murder of 8-year-old Laura Lynn Harberts. Her body left to rot in a dump, was too decomposed to even determine cause of death. The sole evidence linking Spaziano to the murder came from a troubled 17-year-old who, under McCawley’s hypnosis, said Spaziano had taken him to a dump to show off the body. The teenager, an Outlaw wannabe, also said Spaziano bragged of mutilating Herberts’ genitals with a knife while she was alive—testimony that sealed a death sentence for Spaziano.
Miller asked Miami polygraph examiner Warren Holmes to read Spaziano’s trial transcripts. Holmes had worked with Miller in most of his big miscarriage-of-justice stories. Miller considers Homes “a man with a ruthlessly logical mind” and “a superb homicide interrogator.” Holmes told Miller it was obvious that the 17-year-old lied in his testimony. He didn’t even get basic details of the crime scene right.
[End of First Column]
[Beginning of Second Column]
Without conducting a single interview, Miller decided Spaziano was probably innocent. He was appalled that testimony induced by hypnosis—a practice since barred from trials as unreliable—would be enough to send a man to the chair. Yes, the highest courts in the land had blessed the fairness of Spaziano’s trial, including the hypnosis. To Miller, that still didn’t make it right.
In Miller’s aggressive brand of journalism, the reporter’s mission is to find the truth and then persuade others to do something about it. When the clock is ticking on a man’s life, that can mean stepping outside the ordinary boundaries of Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” journalism. It can mean taking a side and advocating a position. It can mean lobbying a governor in person (as he did for Pitts and Lee)m or lining up legal help for the condemned (as he did for Pitts and Lee and others). To those who say journalists should remain neutral and objective, he responds simply:
“ A man’s life is at stake. I think I’m doing the right thing.”
Miller had Mello write an impassioned opinion piece raising doubts about the Spaziano case. Miller edited the piece and arranged its simultaneous publication in Sunday editions of the Herald, the Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. Miller also urged other editors at the Herald to dispatch a reporter to investigate Spaziano’s case.
They decided to focus on a question that already had all but settled in their own minds:
Did Spaziano get a fair trial?
. . .
Reporter Lori Rozsa has never covered an execution.
Working out of Herald’s Palm Beach bureau, she writes mainly about the environment. When Gov. Chiles scheduled Spaziano’s execution for June 27, 1995, Rozsa’s editors asked if she had any qualms about witnessing an execution. She didn’t. She believes the Ted Bundys of the world probably deserve to die.
Like Miller, Rozsa felt strong misgivings as she read through the trial records. The key to the case was the 17-year-old witness, Tony DiLisio. The prosecutor admitted he didn’t have a case without him. Rozsa, 35, flew to Pensacola to interview DiLisio.
Nobody was home the first two times she visited. The third time he shut the door on her foot and threatened to call 911. The fourth time he said a few words then cut her short.
Rozsa didn’t give up. On her fifth try, DiLisio began to talk. At first, he said he couldn’t remember a thing about the case. The longer he talked, the closer he edged toward saying his trial testimony had been a lie. He called hypnosis “witchcraft.” He said he was just a scared, confused kid. He said Spaziano never took him to the dump to see a body.
[End of Second Column]
[Beginning of Third Column]
He said the execution should be halted.
Rozsa’s gut told her DiLisio was being truthful. To her, it was significant that he had been so reluctant to talk. After the interview, Rozsa called Mello from her hotel. “She couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t believe it,” Mello recalls.” She was on cloud five or six.”
Until then, Rozsa had remained skeptic about Spaziano’s claim of innocence. DiLisio’s recantation convinced her Spaziano was an innocent victim of an outrageous miscarriage of justice.
“That sealed it for me,” she says.
. . .
Rozsa’s story describing DiLisio’s recantation ran on page one of the Herald on June 11.
Remember, the murder occurred not in Miami, but near Orlando. As sometimes happens when newspapers get scooped in their own back yard, the Orlando Sentinel was slow to react to the story. The governor was not. He immediately asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate.
Days later, the Sentinel ran a short Associated Press story about the FDLE investigation. The story was buried inside the paper. When Chiles stayed Spaziano’s execution, the Sentinel finally had its own reporter write a story. In it, he included references to the Herald’s work. His editors at the Sentinel wanted to cut out any references to other newspapers.
“They didn’t want to admit that the story got by us,” recalls the reporter, Michael Griffin, the Sentinel’s Tallahassee bureau chief.
Griffin was upset with his newspaper. He had asked permission to pursue the Spaziano case after the Sentinel published Mello’s opinion article. “I read that and thought,’Holy Christ, this guy could be innocent,’” he says. His editors put him off, and the Spaziano story languished in another bureau of the newspaper. When Griffin read Rozsa’s page one story about DiLisio’s recantation, he thought,” This should have been our story. This is our story.”
Griffin’s editors belatedly agreed and quickly threw a platoon of eight reporters at the story. But their mission was shaped by journalism principles far different from the ones guiding the Herald.
“You don’t have an opinion in this case,” Sentinel editor John Haile told his news staff.
Haile considered it “terribly presumptuous” for any reporter to judge the fairness of a 20-year-old trial and decades of subsequent appeals.
“I’m not sure where we are vested with this authority to say,’We know better than you,’” Haile says.
He didn’t want his reporters crusading. Spaziano deserved justice, but so did the
[End of Page Three]
[Beginning of Page Four]
[First Column]
Victim, Laura Harberts. “We didn’t set out to try and free anybody; we didn’t set out to try and convict anybody,” Haile says. “A reporter’s job is to go out and find the truth, whatever that may be.
The Herald began with the question: Did Spaziano receive a fair trial? The Sentinel’s editors decided to focus narrowly on a different question: Is Tony DiLisio telling the truth now?
Like Lori Rozsa before him, Michael Griffin went to Pensacola to interview DiLisio. But where Rozsa left DiLisio’s home certain his recantation was genuine, Griffin left his interview equally certain that DiLisio was lying.
“I caught the guy in the first 15 minutes in a half-dozen lies,” Griffin recalls. DiLisio said he had been “Christian and clean” for more than a decade. Griffin knew DiLisio had been arrested twice for DUI, and twice more for hitting a former girlfriend.
Rozsa’s and Griffin’s opposite impressions of DiLisio resulted in distinctively different coverage.
Believing DiLisio’s recantation was bogus, Griffin and other Sentinel reporters wrote stories tearing into his credibility now. They explored his recent brushes with the law. They quoted friends and relatives who said DiLisio is a compulsive liar—but that he was telling the truth 20 years ago. Sentinel reporters emphasized DiLisio’s motives to lie now—possible fear of the Outlaws, maybe to cash in with tabloid TV. They dissected inconsistencies in his current story.
They made not mention of the hypnosis checkered past.
Certain DiLisio’s recantation was real, Rozsa and other Herald reporters wrote stories ripping into DiLisio’s credibility 20 years ago. They described him as a desperate, drugged-out teenager. They quoted friends and relatives who said DiLisio was a compulsive liar—but that he is telling the truth now. Herald reporters emphasized DiLisio’s motives to lie then—because Spaziano had supposedly raped DiLisio’s stepmother, because he wanted to please the police, because his father told him to. They dissected inconsistencies in his testimony from 20 years ago.
They barely mentioned DiLisio’s recent troubles with the law.
Rozsa would see Sentinel stories and wonder,” Are they reading the same stuff as me?”
Griffin was no less dumbfounded by the Herald. “For the life of me I cannot understand how you can look at the same amount of material that we both looked at and come back with such widely different takes on this.”
At times, Griffin felt he had to set the record straight. He thought the Herald painted too rosy a picture of Spaziano and his fellow Outlaws. Griffin, 34, grew up in Orlando, and he remembered the fearsome reputation of the local Outlaws in the 70s. There were tales of gang rapes and killings, and he recalled his parents keep-
[End of Column One]
[Beginning of Column Two]
-ing him inside at night when women’s bodies began turning up in local dumps. After Spaziano was arrested for one of the “dump murders,” the newspapers were filled with Spaziano’s violent exploits.
When Griffin wrote that Spaziano lived “a misfit’s life of spontaneous brutality and murder,” he says he was trying to counter the Herald’s depiction of Crazy Joe as a clownish charmer—”the most popular guy on death row.”
“I was aiming that at his supporters, and I include the Miami Herald in that,” he says.
On Aug. 24, 1995, Gov. Chiles reset Spaziano’s execution date. He said FDLE investigators turned up new evidence of Spaziano’s guilt, including witnesses who said DiLisio talked of seeing a body at the dump long before he talked to police and the hypnotist.
The Sentinel had the story first.
“It was a bad, bad day when Chiles signed that death warrant,” Rozsa recalls.
She was upset at being scooped, of course. More deeply, she was upset that Spaziano seemed destined for the chair. Obviously I haven’t done my job,” she thought. If it came to it, she decided, she would not attend the execution. She could not bear to watch the electrocution of a man she believed to be innocent.
. . .
In politics, they say, perception can become reality. The same can hold true for journalism. In the Spaziano case, perceptions that the newspapers were biased only widened the split in the coverage.
Spaziano’s attorney, Michael Mello, had assumed early on that the Sentinel would largely echo the Herald’s coverage, and he was thrilled when Griffin first called him about the case. Mello offered to open up his records to the newspaper. His strategy for saving Spaziano depended on generating sympathetic coverage that would put pressure on Chiles.
When the Sentinel stories began to tail spin unfavorable to his client, Mello worried his strategy had backfired. The way he figured, the Sentinel was giving Chiles political cover to execute Spaziano.
In response, Mello publicly labeled the Sentinel an “accomplice to murder.” He stopped taking Sentinel phone calls. He withdrew his offer to allow them full access to his files. He instructed Spaziano not to talk to the Sentinel. Tony DiLisio also clammed up on the Sentinel.
The Herald—whom Mello referred to as his “investigative partner”—continued to get red-carpet treatment.
Another key source was John Gordy, the FDLE agent in charge of the governor’s investigation into the Spaziano case. Early on, he spoke several times with Lori Rozsa. She impressed Gordy as a reporter who
[End of Second Column]
[Beginning of Second Column]
Wanted to uncover what was “righteous and real.”
But when Rozsa wrote a page one story about flaws and errors in Gordy’s investigation, Gordy felt betrayed. He and other law enforcement sources began to view Rozsa and the Herald as an extension of Spaziano’s defense team.
“We ended our relationship,” he says.
Gordy did not, however, end his relationship with the Sentinel. If anything, Gordy talked even more openly with Sentinel reporters. He fed them information he hoped would “set the record straight.
One Sentinel story reported that DiLisio’s attorney declined comment, followed by this small dig: “He and DiLisio then walked down the street with a Miami Herald reporter, who first reported DiLisio’s recantation in June.”
With key sources taking sides, perception became reality. “If you’re only hearing one side of the story, it’s kind of hard to be objective and balanced,” Griffin says.
Editors and reporters at both papers say they strived to keep their stories balanced and their minds open. Sometimes fate interfered. Having written so much about Spaziano and DiLisio, Rozsa planned to write a profile of the victim, Laura Harbert. But Rozsa was pregnant, and her baby came several weeks early; the Harberts profile was scratched.
To the discomfort of the reporters, both newspapers fueled perceptions of bias—and not just with their editorials (Herald—free him; Sentinel—fry him.)
The Herald helped line up one of the state’s best law firms to represent Spaziano for free. And Gene Miller wrote a several page letter to Ron Sachs, the governor press secretary, explaining “why I think the state is very close to executing a man who in all probability is innocent.” In the letter, Miller offered to make Rozsa available to the governor, even providing her home number.
(“I was wondering why he did that,” Rozsa says.)
The Sentinel, on the other hand, ran this page one banner headline last month, on the first day of a crucial court hearing to decide whether Spaziano should get a new trial:
“Former Outlaw: Spaziano Enjoyed Killing.”
(Michael Griffin cringed when he saw that. “The headline,” he says,”was just way over the top.”)
. . .
In the Herald newsroom, some suspected the Sentinel of climbing into bed with the governor’s office to knock down
[End of Fourth Page]
[Beginning of Fifth Page]
[Heading]
At the Miami Herald
[Photograph of Gene Miller]
Gene Miller, a Miami Herald editor, had won two Pulitzer Prizes crusading against unfair convictions.
[Photograph of Lori Rozsa]
Herald reporter Lori Rozsa wasn’t sure if Spaziano was innocent until after the state’s star witness told her his trial testimony was a lie.
[Heading]
The witness
[Photograph of Tony Dilisio]
Tony Dilisio testified in 1976 that Spaziano showed him the victim’s body; 20 years later, he took it all back after Rozsa knocked on his door.
[Heading]
At the Orlando Sentinel
[Photograph of John Haile]
Sentinel editor John Haile didn’t want his reporters trying to judge whether Spaziano received a fair trial 20 years ago.
[Photograph of Michael Griffin]
Reporter Michael Griffin says he has never worked harder on a story. “I’m proud of the newspaper, proud of the way we did this story.”
[Column One]
their findings. What better what ease the sting of being scooped on your home turf?
At the Sentinel, some suspected the Herald of climbing into bed with Spaziano’s attorneys. What better way to win a Pulitzer Prize than to get a guy off death row?
People at the Herald took offense when a Sentinel reporter asked one of their writers,” Has the Herald lost its objectivity on the story?”
Likewise, some at the Sentinel were angered by a letter Gene Miller wrote to the editor of the Sentinel’s editorial page, an old friend of Miller’s. Miller argued for Spaziano’s innocence and he included copies of the Herald’s coverage.
In the Sentinel newsroom, Miller’s letter was taken as arrogance and insult. As if they hadn’t been reading the Herald’s coverage!
Years ago, in college, Michael Griffin was an enthusiastic proponent of the death penalty. Then he read Invitation to a Lynching, Gene Miller’s 1976 book about the Pitts and Lee case. The book left him far more skeptical of the death penalty, though not quite an opponent. It also made him an admirer of Miller and his brand of crusading journalism.
Covering the Spaziano story has changed Griffin’s mind—about Miller and the death penalty.
“I am 100 percent opposed to the death penalty,” he says. How can the ultimate punishment possibly be fair if it is subject to the whims and judgments of newspapers?
“Cops don’t matter, prosecutors don’t matter, judges don’t matter, juries don’t matter. Gene Miller is all that matters,” Griffin says bitterly. “He’s gonna sit back 20 years later and decide this guy is innocent.”
So which newspaper got it right? Only Spaziano knows for sure.
Last month a judge granted him a new trial. “In the United States of America every person, no matter how unsavory, is entitled to due process of the law and a fair trial,” the judge ruled. “The defendant received neither.”
Prosecutors are appealing. It could be months before that appeal is resolved, and even longer if a jury ever gets a chance to sort through this tangled case.
If and when that happens, count on one thing. The Herald and the Sentinel will be there, each in pursuit of the truth.
Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Carolyn Hardnett contributed to this story.
[End of Article]
[Title]
The two Crazy Joes
[Photographs of Joseph Spaziano during his first trial and one of his appeals to court]
[Caption]
Two photographs, one man. As different as Joseph “Crazy Joe” Spaziano looks in these pictures is about as different as the coverage of his case in the Miami Herald and the Orlando Sentinel.
[Page Two]
[Column One]
With the help of God and the Miami herald, we’ll cross the finish line together. And alive. And free.
Attorney Michael Mello, in a letter to his client, death row inmate Joe Spaziano
The Sentinel will write whatever it wants, and if another (death) warrant comes, your blood will be on their hands.
Mello, in another letter to Spaziano
Last summer, two newspapers—the Miami Herald and the Orlando Sentinel—set out to do the same thing.
Each dedicated itself to finding The Truth in the case of Joseph “Crazy Joe” Spaziano, the Outlaw biker condemned to death 20 years ago for the murder of a young Orlando medical clerk. Each produced a stream of news stories based on standard reporting techniques: digging up records, tracking down witnesses, pumping sources, talking to key participants.
But a strange thing happened on the trail to truth.
In eight months of compelling coverage, as execution dates came and went, the two newspapers arrived at separate truths about Crazy Joe’s case, truths as incompatible as life and death.
The Herald found in Spaziano a pathetic victim of injustice. The Sentinel found a “dead-eyed” rapist-killer.
The Herald found shabby evidence, shaky witnesses and a lead detective who drove around the countryside in a squad car with a psychic holding a skull in her lap. The Sentinel described incriminating evidence, unshakable witnesses and a former Outlaw enforcer called Gatemouth who said Spaziano bragged that sex was best after a killing.
The Herald found a guild-ridden prosecution witness who had motives to lie 20 years ago but now
[End of First Column]
[Beginning of Second Column]
wanted to set the record straight? The Sentinel described the same witness as a troubled flake with reasons to spring forth with a bogus recantation.
This extraordinary divergence was neatly summarized in headlines on editorials last month, when a judge ordered a new trial for Spaziano.
The Herald: “Justice Awakens.”
The Sentinel:”Justice Clearly Cheated.”
How could two newspapers—both pro-death penalty and each committed to the truth—see the same case so differently?
The coverage was shaped by forces unseen by readers. These newspapers pursued different questions and were driven by different ideas about the proper role of journalism. Their coverage was molded by ego and instinct. Stories were affected by reactions to what the other newspaper was writing, and by the manipulations of a few key sources. Coverage was even affected by one reporter’s premature delivery of a baby and another reporter’s childhood memories.
The stakes were high: Either an innocent man was about to be executed, or a murderer was going to beat the system.
“I think they were both zealously going after the truth, or what they perceived to be the truth,” says Ron Sachs, a former reporter who until recently was Gov. Lawton Chiles’ spokesman. ‘And I have no doubt in my mind that they were guided and motivated by pure altruism. That doesn’t mean they got closer to the truth. Both papers wrote accurate stories—factual stories.
“But this was a classic example of how you can vigorously pursue a particular viewpoint and generate the facts to support your viewpoint.
“The trouble is, at least one of these great newspapers is probably wrong.”
Please see CRAZY JOE 8a
[Heading]
Crazy Joe from IA
[Page Three]
[First Column]
Early last May, Michael Mello nervously dialed the number of Gene Miller, an editor at the Miami Herald. They knew each other by reputation alone.
Mello teaches law in Vermont. He also represented death row inmates, including Spaziano. Mello usually avoided the media and confined his advocacy to the strict procedural rules that govern death penalty appeals. But this case was different. Of the 70 men he had represented on death row, Spaziano was the first Mello thought truly innocent. With appeals exhausted and the hour of execution drawing near, Mello decided to approach the Media. It was the first such phone call he says he had ever made.
Gene Miller is a legend in journalism circles. He has built a career crusading against miscarriages of justice. His first Pulitzer Prize, in 1967, was for stories that cleared two convicts of murder they did not commit. His second Pulitzer, in 1976, came for reporting that led to the release and pardon of Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, sentenced to death for murdering two Panhandle gas station attendants.
Plenty of people want Miller to crusade for them, but he thinks most “innocent-man” claims are baseless. When Mello called and asked him to review Spaziano’s case, Miller agreed—expecting that he would take a quick look and toss it aside. But his interest surged when he saw Joe McCawley’s name in Mello’s records.
McCawley was the discredited hypnotist who some say implanted false memories in a key witness in the Pitts and Lee case. Here he was again in the Spaziano case, and his role was even more prominent.
Police had no eyewitnesses or physical evidence tying Spaziano to the murder of 8-year-old Laura Lynn Harberts. Her body left to rot in a dump, was too decomposed to even determine cause of death. The sole evidence linking Spaziano to the murder came from a troubled 17-year-old who, under McCawley’s hypnosis, said Spaziano had taken him to a dump to show off the body. The teenager, an Outlaw wannabe, also said Spaziano bragged of mutilating Herberts’ genitals with a knife while she was alive—testimony that sealed a death sentence for Spaziano.
Miller asked Miami polygraph examiner Warren Holmes to read Spaziano’s trial transcripts. Holmes had worked with Miller in most of his big miscarriage-of-justice stories. Miller considers Homes “a man with a ruthlessly logical mind” and “a superb homicide interrogator.” Holmes told Miller it was obvious that the 17-year-old lied in his testimony. He didn’t even get basic details of the crime scene right.
[End of First Column]
[Beginning of Second Column]
Without conducting a single interview, Miller decided Spaziano was probably innocent. He was appalled that testimony induced by hypnosis—a practice since barred from trials as unreliable—would be enough to send a man to the chair. Yes, the highest courts in the land had blessed the fairness of Spaziano’s trial, including the hypnosis. To Miller, that still didn’t make it right.
In Miller’s aggressive brand of journalism, the reporter’s mission is to find the truth and then persuade others to do something about it. When the clock is ticking on a man’s life, that can mean stepping outside the ordinary boundaries of Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” journalism. It can mean taking a side and advocating a position. It can mean lobbying a governor in person (as he did for Pitts and Lee)m or lining up legal help for the condemned (as he did for Pitts and Lee and others). To those who say journalists should remain neutral and objective, he responds simply:
“ A man’s life is at stake. I think I’m doing the right thing.”
Miller had Mello write an impassioned opinion piece raising doubts about the Spaziano case. Miller edited the piece and arranged its simultaneous publication in Sunday editions of the Herald, the Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. Miller also urged other editors at the Herald to dispatch a reporter to investigate Spaziano’s case.
They decided to focus on a question that already had all but settled in their own minds:
Did Spaziano get a fair trial?
. . .
Reporter Lori Rozsa has never covered an execution.
Working out of Herald’s Palm Beach bureau, she writes mainly about the environment. When Gov. Chiles scheduled Spaziano’s execution for June 27, 1995, Rozsa’s editors asked if she had any qualms about witnessing an execution. She didn’t. She believes the Ted Bundys of the world probably deserve to die.
Like Miller, Rozsa felt strong misgivings as she read through the trial records. The key to the case was the 17-year-old witness, Tony DiLisio. The prosecutor admitted he didn’t have a case without him. Rozsa, 35, flew to Pensacola to interview DiLisio.
Nobody was home the first two times she visited. The third time he shut the door on her foot and threatened to call 911. The fourth time he said a few words then cut her short.
Rozsa didn’t give up. On her fifth try, DiLisio began to talk. At first, he said he couldn’t remember a thing about the case. The longer he talked, the closer he edged toward saying his trial testimony had been a lie. He called hypnosis “witchcraft.” He said he was just a scared, confused kid. He said Spaziano never took him to the dump to see a body.
[End of Second Column]
[Beginning of Third Column]
He said the execution should be halted.
Rozsa’s gut told her DiLisio was being truthful. To her, it was significant that he had been so reluctant to talk. After the interview, Rozsa called Mello from her hotel. “She couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t believe it,” Mello recalls.” She was on cloud five or six.”
Until then, Rozsa had remained skeptic about Spaziano’s claim of innocence. DiLisio’s recantation convinced her Spaziano was an innocent victim of an outrageous miscarriage of justice.
“That sealed it for me,” she says.
. . .
Rozsa’s story describing DiLisio’s recantation ran on page one of the Herald on June 11.
Remember, the murder occurred not in Miami, but near Orlando. As sometimes happens when newspapers get scooped in their own back yard, the Orlando Sentinel was slow to react to the story. The governor was not. He immediately asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate.
Days later, the Sentinel ran a short Associated Press story about the FDLE investigation. The story was buried inside the paper. When Chiles stayed Spaziano’s execution, the Sentinel finally had its own reporter write a story. In it, he included references to the Herald’s work. His editors at the Sentinel wanted to cut out any references to other newspapers.
“They didn’t want to admit that the story got by us,” recalls the reporter, Michael Griffin, the Sentinel’s Tallahassee bureau chief.
Griffin was upset with his newspaper. He had asked permission to pursue the Spaziano case after the Sentinel published Mello’s opinion article. “I read that and thought,’Holy Christ, this guy could be innocent,’” he says. His editors put him off, and the Spaziano story languished in another bureau of the newspaper. When Griffin read Rozsa’s page one story about DiLisio’s recantation, he thought,” This should have been our story. This is our story.”
Griffin’s editors belatedly agreed and quickly threw a platoon of eight reporters at the story. But their mission was shaped by journalism principles far different from the ones guiding the Herald.
“You don’t have an opinion in this case,” Sentinel editor John Haile told his news staff.
Haile considered it “terribly presumptuous” for any reporter to judge the fairness of a 20-year-old trial and decades of subsequent appeals.
“I’m not sure where we are vested with this authority to say,’We know better than you,’” Haile says.
He didn’t want his reporters crusading. Spaziano deserved justice, but so did the
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Victim, Laura Harberts. “We didn’t set out to try and free anybody; we didn’t set out to try and convict anybody,” Haile says. “A reporter’s job is to go out and find the truth, whatever that may be.
The Herald began with the question: Did Spaziano receive a fair trial? The Sentinel’s editors decided to focus narrowly on a different question: Is Tony DiLisio telling the truth now?
Like Lori Rozsa before him, Michael Griffin went to Pensacola to interview DiLisio. But where Rozsa left DiLisio’s home certain his recantation was genuine, Griffin left his interview equally certain that DiLisio was lying.
“I caught the guy in the first 15 minutes in a half-dozen lies,” Griffin recalls. DiLisio said he had been “Christian and clean” for more than a decade. Griffin knew DiLisio had been arrested twice for DUI, and twice more for hitting a former girlfriend.
Rozsa’s and Griffin’s opposite impressions of DiLisio resulted in distinctively different coverage.
Believing DiLisio’s recantation was bogus, Griffin and other Sentinel reporters wrote stories tearing into his credibility now. They explored his recent brushes with the law. They quoted friends and relatives who said DiLisio is a compulsive liar—but that he was telling the truth 20 years ago. Sentinel reporters emphasized DiLisio’s motives to lie now—possible fear of the Outlaws, maybe to cash in with tabloid TV. They dissected inconsistencies in his current story.
They made not mention of the hypnosis checkered past.
Certain DiLisio’s recantation was real, Rozsa and other Herald reporters wrote stories ripping into DiLisio’s credibility 20 years ago. They described him as a desperate, drugged-out teenager. They quoted friends and relatives who said DiLisio was a compulsive liar—but that he is telling the truth now. Herald reporters emphasized DiLisio’s motives to lie then—because Spaziano had supposedly raped DiLisio’s stepmother, because he wanted to please the police, because his father told him to. They dissected inconsistencies in his testimony from 20 years ago.
They barely mentioned DiLisio’s recent troubles with the law.
Rozsa would see Sentinel stories and wonder,” Are they reading the same stuff as me?”
Griffin was no less dumbfounded by the Herald. “For the life of me I cannot understand how you can look at the same amount of material that we both looked at and come back with such widely different takes on this.”
At times, Griffin felt he had to set the record straight. He thought the Herald painted too rosy a picture of Spaziano and his fellow Outlaws. Griffin, 34, grew up in Orlando, and he remembered the fearsome reputation of the local Outlaws in the 70s. There were tales of gang rapes and killings, and he recalled his parents keep-
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-ing him inside at night when women’s bodies began turning up in local dumps. After Spaziano was arrested for one of the “dump murders,” the newspapers were filled with Spaziano’s violent exploits.
When Griffin wrote that Spaziano lived “a misfit’s life of spontaneous brutality and murder,” he says he was trying to counter the Herald’s depiction of Crazy Joe as a clownish charmer—”the most popular guy on death row.”
“I was aiming that at his supporters, and I include the Miami Herald in that,” he says.
On Aug. 24, 1995, Gov. Chiles reset Spaziano’s execution date. He said FDLE investigators turned up new evidence of Spaziano’s guilt, including witnesses who said DiLisio talked of seeing a body at the dump long before he talked to police and the hypnotist.
The Sentinel had the story first.
“It was a bad, bad day when Chiles signed that death warrant,” Rozsa recalls.
She was upset at being scooped, of course. More deeply, she was upset that Spaziano seemed destined for the chair. Obviously I haven’t done my job,” she thought. If it came to it, she decided, she would not attend the execution. She could not bear to watch the electrocution of a man she believed to be innocent.
. . .
In politics, they say, perception can become reality. The same can hold true for journalism. In the Spaziano case, perceptions that the newspapers were biased only widened the split in the coverage.
Spaziano’s attorney, Michael Mello, had assumed early on that the Sentinel would largely echo the Herald’s coverage, and he was thrilled when Griffin first called him about the case. Mello offered to open up his records to the newspaper. His strategy for saving Spaziano depended on generating sympathetic coverage that would put pressure on Chiles.
When the Sentinel stories began to tail spin unfavorable to his client, Mello worried his strategy had backfired. The way he figured, the Sentinel was giving Chiles political cover to execute Spaziano.
In response, Mello publicly labeled the Sentinel an “accomplice to murder.” He stopped taking Sentinel phone calls. He withdrew his offer to allow them full access to his files. He instructed Spaziano not to talk to the Sentinel. Tony DiLisio also clammed up on the Sentinel.
The Herald—whom Mello referred to as his “investigative partner”—continued to get red-carpet treatment.
Another key source was John Gordy, the FDLE agent in charge of the governor’s investigation into the Spaziano case. Early on, he spoke several times with Lori Rozsa. She impressed Gordy as a reporter who
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Wanted to uncover what was “righteous and real.”
But when Rozsa wrote a page one story about flaws and errors in Gordy’s investigation, Gordy felt betrayed. He and other law enforcement sources began to view Rozsa and the Herald as an extension of Spaziano’s defense team.
“We ended our relationship,” he says.
Gordy did not, however, end his relationship with the Sentinel. If anything, Gordy talked even more openly with Sentinel reporters. He fed them information he hoped would “set the record straight.
One Sentinel story reported that DiLisio’s attorney declined comment, followed by this small dig: “He and DiLisio then walked down the street with a Miami Herald reporter, who first reported DiLisio’s recantation in June.”
With key sources taking sides, perception became reality. “If you’re only hearing one side of the story, it’s kind of hard to be objective and balanced,” Griffin says.
Editors and reporters at both papers say they strived to keep their stories balanced and their minds open. Sometimes fate interfered. Having written so much about Spaziano and DiLisio, Rozsa planned to write a profile of the victim, Laura Harbert. But Rozsa was pregnant, and her baby came several weeks early; the Harberts profile was scratched.
To the discomfort of the reporters, both newspapers fueled perceptions of bias—and not just with their editorials (Herald—free him; Sentinel—fry him.)
The Herald helped line up one of the state’s best law firms to represent Spaziano for free. And Gene Miller wrote a several page letter to Ron Sachs, the governor press secretary, explaining “why I think the state is very close to executing a man who in all probability is innocent.” In the letter, Miller offered to make Rozsa available to the governor, even providing her home number.
(“I was wondering why he did that,” Rozsa says.)
The Sentinel, on the other hand, ran this page one banner headline last month, on the first day of a crucial court hearing to decide whether Spaziano should get a new trial:
“Former Outlaw: Spaziano Enjoyed Killing.”
(Michael Griffin cringed when he saw that. “The headline,” he says,”was just way over the top.”)
. . .
In the Herald newsroom, some suspected the Sentinel of climbing into bed with the governor’s office to knock down
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[Heading]
At the Miami Herald
[Photograph of Gene Miller]
Gene Miller, a Miami Herald editor, had won two Pulitzer Prizes crusading against unfair convictions.
[Photograph of Lori Rozsa]
Herald reporter Lori Rozsa wasn’t sure if Spaziano was innocent until after the state’s star witness told her his trial testimony was a lie.
[Heading]
The witness
[Photograph of Tony Dilisio]
Tony Dilisio testified in 1976 that Spaziano showed him the victim’s body; 20 years later, he took it all back after Rozsa knocked on his door.
[Heading]
At the Orlando Sentinel
[Photograph of John Haile]
Sentinel editor John Haile didn’t want his reporters trying to judge whether Spaziano received a fair trial 20 years ago.
[Photograph of Michael Griffin]
Reporter Michael Griffin says he has never worked harder on a story. “I’m proud of the newspaper, proud of the way we did this story.”
[Column One]
their findings. What better what ease the sting of being scooped on your home turf?
At the Sentinel, some suspected the Herald of climbing into bed with Spaziano’s attorneys. What better way to win a Pulitzer Prize than to get a guy off death row?
People at the Herald took offense when a Sentinel reporter asked one of their writers,” Has the Herald lost its objectivity on the story?”
Likewise, some at the Sentinel were angered by a letter Gene Miller wrote to the editor of the Sentinel’s editorial page, an old friend of Miller’s. Miller argued for Spaziano’s innocence and he included copies of the Herald’s coverage.
In the Sentinel newsroom, Miller’s letter was taken as arrogance and insult. As if they hadn’t been reading the Herald’s coverage!
Years ago, in college, Michael Griffin was an enthusiastic proponent of the death penalty. Then he read Invitation to a Lynching, Gene Miller’s 1976 book about the Pitts and Lee case. The book left him far more skeptical of the death penalty, though not quite an opponent. It also made him an admirer of Miller and his brand of crusading journalism.
Covering the Spaziano story has changed Griffin’s mind—about Miller and the death penalty.
“I am 100 percent opposed to the death penalty,” he says. How can the ultimate punishment possibly be fair if it is subject to the whims and judgments of newspapers?
“Cops don’t matter, prosecutors don’t matter, judges don’t matter, juries don’t matter. Gene Miller is all that matters,” Griffin says bitterly. “He’s gonna sit back 20 years later and decide this guy is innocent.”
So which newspaper got it right? Only Spaziano knows for sure.
Last month a judge granted him a new trial. “In the United States of America every person, no matter how unsavory, is entitled to due process of the law and a fair trial,” the judge ruled. “The defendant received neither.”
Prosecutors are appealing. It could be months before that appeal is resolved, and even longer if a jury ever gets a chance to sort through this tangled case.
If and when that happens, count on one thing. The Herald and the Sentinel will be there, each in pursuit of the truth.
Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Carolyn Hardnett contributed to this story.
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Original Format
Barstow, David
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Citation
Barstow, David, “The two Crazy Joes,” HIST299, accessed July 12, 2026, https://hist299.umwhistory.org/items/show/249.