Dyer and His 'Monster' Story

By: Allan Wolper Jim Dyer kept his San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News press card to himself after he walked into the state archives in Des Moines to read the records of a 1939 academic atrocity by the University of Iowa.

He seemed to be just one more graduate student trying to make sense of data detailing the lives of 22 children from the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport who were drafted into an experiment that allegedly made six of them stutter.

That masquerade cost him his job. But it shouldn't have. Dyer didn't totally misrepresent his mission at the archives.

He is a graduate student in journalism with a final thesis due this fall on the orphans' experiment, according to John Bennett, the assistant professor who oversees Dyer's project. He isn't a grad student in psychology, which is what the archives-access agreement he signed last October says he is.

Still, his 10,319-word report on the Iowa orphans -- headlined "Ethics and Orphans: The Monster Study" -- published in the Mercury News June 6 and 7 was a sensation in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

The Merc was ecstatic. For a moment, it could counter the bad karma that followed the March resignation of its publisher, Jay T. Harris, over complaints his Knight Ridder bosses were low-balling his editorial budget. The paper then could brag about its investigative unit that already included three Pulitzer Prize winners -- Eric Nalder, Rick Tulsky, and Pete Carey -- and that was put together by Assistant Managing Editor George Jordan. And Dyer's work was surely a Pulitzer contender.

It included an incredible on-the-record interview with Mary Tudor Jacobs, the 84-year-old Moraga, Calif., woman who conducted the stuttering tests as a graduate student for a renowned speech therapist, Dr. Wendell Johnson.

Even more potent was Dyer's disclosure that none of the children in the experiment had ever known what had happened to them because no one ever told them.

The University of Iowa apologized, sent letters to the surviving children in the study or their heirs, braced itself for lawsuits, and fended off editorials demanding Johnson be punished posthumously by taking his name off its speech-pathology building.

But it all came apart for Dyer this summer after The Kansas City (Mo.) Star, a Knight Ridder sibling newspaper, decided to reprint his series because the daughter of one of the children in the orphans' experiment lived in its area. The daughter, according to sources, told Star editors that the Iowa archivist was incensed because the Merc reporter had not said he was working on a story.

"Jim Dyer never once told me he was a reporter," recalled Gordon Hendrickson, the archivist. "I wasn't angry or anything. He just told me he was doing research on his dissertation."

When newspapers began calling Hendrickson, he told them Dyer would not have been allowed into the archives if he had identified himself as a reporter. That was it for Dyer. Those papers pounced on Hendrickson's comments as proof Dyer was guilty of misrepresenting himself.

"The archive ? is not open to journalists," Mercury News Executive Editor and Senior Vice President David Yarnold wrote in a mea culpa, attacking Dyer for not getting permission to play graduate student. Yarnold was wrong. So was Hendrickson.

"I made a mistake," Hendrickson said. "My colleagues reminded me that we had allowed other reporters to look at information that was just as sensitive as the material we gave to Dyer." Had Dyer waited or perhaps filed a freedom-of-information request, he might have found someone who would have corrected Hendrickson and allowed him to access the archives.

Even sadder, Dyer had acquired most of the records he needed from the diaries and notes handwritten by Jacobs, the woman who conducted what she called the "Monster Study." In fact, her thesis -- without the names -- is available for anyone to read at the university library.

Considering how much has been written and said about Dyer's troubles -- he was forced to resign shortly after Yarnold wrote his column -- it is astounding how little any of the principals are willing to say.

Mercury News editors refused to comment, saying Yarnold's column is their last word on the Monster series. They're wrong. They need to tell their readers about Hendrickson's honest mistake and explain that Dyer shouldn't have had to play student to look at public records.

And Dyer needs to break his silence about what he did and why he did it. The lone voice out of his corner is that of Bennett, his professor. "Jim wrote a good piece," insisted Bennett. "He didn't do anything wrong."

Yes, he did. Dyer should have told his bosses what he was up to. And they should have spent more time learning about the ins and outs of life at the Iowa archives.