Related story: Ex-sect member describes notes about boy's decline

By Paul Edward Parker
Journal Staff Writer

Long before the trial of religious sect elder Jacques Robidoux began, I had decided on a broad writing strategy to employ in my coverage: I wanted to tell a story each day.

I wanted each article to read like a short piece of fiction -- except, of course, none of it would be fictional. I did not want to do the typical so-and-so testified about such-and-such coverage.

This strategy succeeded marvelously on some days and failed miserably on others.

Fortunately, more of the stories, including this one about former sect member Dennis Mingo's testimony, fell into the success category than in the failure category.

The first challenge was deciding what should be the lede. The natural inclination would be toward a narrative lede of Mingo searching through the sect's farmhouse, looking for clues about the recent birth of a baby.

This inclination was so natural that I had already used it in a story about the case more than a year before the trial. So, I rejected the ``best possible'' lede and looked for something that would be fresh to readers who had followed the lengthy saga and would be compelling enough to hold readers until Mingo played detective.

So I took a step back in the narrative and told the story of how it came to be that Mingo had left the sect:

``Dennis B. Mingo had become a foreigner in his own home.''

Then, after a quick attribution to establish that everything Mingo was saying was from his court testimony, I went into descriptions of life within the sect.

My first inclination was to use a number of colorful quotes from Mingo describing the strictures of the group. But I decided he was too wordy and rambling, so I used a series of rapid-fire paraphrases, and concluded with the snappiest quote:

``Birthdays are a very selfish day, and you are supposed to live a very selfless life. And bad things happen on people's birthdays in the Bible.''

Then a quick quote and more paraphrasing to compress the narrative of Mingo's exile, ending the section with a double cliffhanger:

``But Mingo would be back.

``And his return would spell trouble for the sect.''

Convinced this created enough dramatic tension to hold the reader for a few moments, I stepped back and put in some context and background, before returning to the narrative with Mingo's detective mission.