"The (Orlando) 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 Florida 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 months of competing 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 took advice from a psychic holding a skull. The Sentinel described incriminating evidence, unshakable witnesses and a fellow biker who said Spaziano bragged that sex was best after a killing.

This extraordinary divergence was neatly summarized in headlines on editorials earlier this year, 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. The newspapers pursued different questions and were driven by different ideas about the proper role of journalists. 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 by 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.

"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 Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles' spokesman.

"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 very wrong."

In May 1995, 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. Of his 70 death row clients, 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 has built a career - and won two Pulitzer Prizes - crusading against miscarriages of justice.

Plenty of people want Miller to crusade for them, but experience has taught him that most "innocent man" claims are baseless. When Mello asked him to review Spaziano's case, Miller agreed - expecting to toss it aside after a quick look. His interest surged when he saw in Mello's records the name of hypnotist Joe B. McCawley. Miller had discredited McCawley in another murder case, leading to pardons of two death row inmates and his second Pulitzer in 1976.

Here McCawley 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 18-year-old Laura Lynn Harberts. Her body was too decomposed to determine cause of death. The sole evidence 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 teen-ager also said Spaziano bragged of mutilating Harberts' genitals with a knife while she was alive - unsupported 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 on most of his big miscarriage-of-justice stories. Miller considers Holmes "a man with a ruthlessly logical mind," and when Holmes concluded that the 17-year-old kid must have lied in his testimony, Miller was convinced. He decided Spaziano probably was 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.

To Miller, 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 Joe Friday "just the facts, ma'am" journalism. It can mean taking a side. It can mean lobbying a governor in person, or lining up legal help for the condemned. To those who say journalists should remain neutral, he responds simply: "A man's life is at stake. I think I'm doing the right thing."

Miller began his crusade. He had Mello write an opinion piece raising doubts about the Spaziano case and arranged its simultaneous publication in 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 they already had all but settled in their own minds: Did Spaziano get a fair trial?

At the Herald

Working out of the 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, Fla., to interview DiLisio. He shut the door on her foot and threatened to call 911.

Rozsa didn't give up. On her fifth try, DiLisio began to talk. 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.

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. Rozsa called Mello after the interview. "She was on Cloud 5 or 6," Mello recalled.

Until then, Rozsa had remained skeptical 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.

At the Sentinel

Days later, the Sentinel ran a short Associated Press story about the FDLE investigation buried inside the paper. The Sentinel finally had its own reporter write a story after the governor stayed Spaziano's execution. The reporter included references to the Herald's work: his editors wanted to cut any reference 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'd asked permission to pursue the Spaziano case after the Sentinel published Mello's opinion article. 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 threw 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 victim. "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.

The 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.

They made no mention of the hypnotist's 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 teen-ager. They quoted friends and relatives who said DiLisio was a compulsive liar - but that he is telling the truth now.

They barely mentioned DiLisio's recent troubles with the law. Rozsa would see Sentinel stories and wonder, "Are they reading the same stuff I am?"

Griffin, 34, 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 well the reputation of the local Outlaws in the '70s. There were tales of gang rapes and killings, and he recalled his parents keeping him inside at night as 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 was trying to counter the Herald's depiction of Crazy Joe as a clownish charmer - "the most popular guy on death row."

On Aug. 24, 1995, Gov. Chiles reset Spaziano's execution date. He said FDLE investigators turned up new evidence of Spaziano's guilt. 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 death 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. His strategy for saving Spaziano depended on generating sympathetic coverage.

But as the Sentinel's stories began to take a spin unfavorable to his client, Mello publicly labeled the paper 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 wanted to uncover what was "righteous and real." But when Rozsa wrote a page one story about flaws and errors in his 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 its reporters. He fed them information he hoped "would set the record straight."

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 Harberts. But Rozsa was pregnant, and her baby girl 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 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 banner, page one headline on the first day of a crucial court hearing to decide if Spaziano should get a new trial: "Former Outlaw: Spaziano enjoyed killing."

(Michael Griffin cringed. "The headline," he says, "was just way over the top.")

The newsroom reactions

In the Herald newsroom, some suspected the Sentinel of climbing into bed with the governor's office to knock down their findings. What better way to 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 get a guy off death row?

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 a wrongful murder conviction. The book left him 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 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, but a judge has granted him a new trial.

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 Sentinel will be there, each in pursuit of The Truth.

St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times researchers Kitty Benett and Carolyn Hardnett contributed to this article.

Barstow is a reporter for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, where this article originally appeared.