by Mike Hoyt

Some see the glass as half full and some see it as half empty. Kevin Heldman will point out the detritus floating in the water. He talks softly and rapidly in a gravel voice, assisted by his hands. He uses the thumb and pinkie to shape a telephone receiver when he mentions phone calls, and makes a knock-knock motion when he talks about approaching people's doors. Both come up a lot. At thirty-four, he covers serial murders for APBnews.com, the crime and criminal justice news site, where he is happy as a clam, in a Kevin Heldman sort of way.

The job involves straight news coverage -- SUSPECT HELD IN PORTLAND SERIAL KILLING -- as well as digging to build and maintain a serial-killer database. This APB feature allows the visitor to click into information on clusters of homicides that appear to be the work of serial murderers (experts believe there are thirty to fifty of them active in the nation at any given time). But what Heldman mostly does is zero in on tales within the world of serial homicide investigation that grab his interest and write magazine-length articles. Full-immersion reporting on dark and significant subjects is what Heldman likes and seems to need to do.

Even on vacation. Last year he went to Japan with his wife, Sumiko Obata, and they spent part of their time there somehow talking their way into Yokosuka prison. Heldman eventually produced an investigation for APB, "Brutality by Design," on the Japanese penal system, a fascinating exposé of a closed institution. One of the disciplinary techniques he covered there was chobastu, in which a prisoner is made to sit rigidly on a box -- knees together, elbows tucked, hands on thighs -- staring at the wall for twelve hours a day, days on end. It weirdly mirrored something Heldman himself had experienced at age sixteen. His background, in fact, explains some of Kevin Heldman's reportorial intensity.

But we are getting ahead of the story.

The Heldman family had a nice house on Long Island with a sod lawn, but there was trouble behind the door. Heldman repeatedly ran away. Eventually he was placed in a rehab center in Manhasset. "Ostensibly for drugs," he says, "but these were fifteen- to sixteen-year olds. Nobody there was a serious user. It was just kids acting out."

It was in Manhasset that Heldman experienced American chobastu. If you broke a rule, he says, the counselors put you in a wooden chair without a back, facing a wall where they had taped "a piece of paper with a philosophy, some nonsense. And you'd have to sit like this without moving, from eight a.m. to maybe six or eight p.m. And you know, for a sixteen-year-old hyperactive kid, it was unbearable."

Heldman resisted; life got worse. "I got kicked out," he says, "and put in a wildly more inappropriate place, which was Phoenix House, with real hard-core users, where I really didn't belong." People with serious cocaine habits, heroin tracks, were there, "adults mixed with teenagers. From all the upstate prisons. It was a real education." He was moved to several Phoenix House locations, ran away again, and finally landed in an upstate branch in a former monastery. There he settled a bit, he says, and eventually became a peer tutor. "A lot of the kids were my age, and were struggling. I miss them sometimes. It's corny, but in that locked environment everything was corny. On my birthday they broke into the staff kitchen and got me little cupcakes, all sitting around the room, these tough kids . . . ." Heldman earned a high school diploma through the teachers at Phoenix House.

At eighteen, after a couple of more twists and turns, Heldman went into the army, which he thought was largely "a lot of wasted nonsense." But in the end, he used the G.I. bill to finance college, at the State University of New York at Purchase. After what he had been through, he says, he tended to appreciate college. "I don't have to paint rocks or clean urinals? I just have to go to class at eleven and talk about a book I just read? I worked like a demon." Things were looking up, in a Kevin Heldman sort of way. He had already, in the army, had the tattoo on his right arm altered. He covered the words "Born to Lose" with ribbons and dice and flowers, and substituted "Live By Chance."

Even as a child, Heldman says, he always wanted to write, and over the years produced "boxes" of stories and journals. In his senior year of college he got a taste of journalism, on a campus newspaper. The piece that first gave him a sense of journalism's power was a descriptive one about the work atmosphere in the college's food-services facility where he washed dishes. Many of the employees were South American immigrants, and Heldman thought management was mistreating and bullying them. So he documented it. On the day the article was published, Heldman recalls, one of the cooks tried to hand him $100. "All the Hispanic workers were extremely grateful. It was really powerful, the impact that something like that could have. And the director came into the kitchen that day, and he said, 'Kevin, is there anything I can do for you? Do you need more guys?'"

After college, Heldman borrowed money and got himself into Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, where some teachers didn't quite connect with the Heldman oeuvre but others thought they saw something. He graduated in 1991 and tried unsuccessfully to get a newspaper job. Thus began a free-lance career. He wrote about such things as "the social implications of rap music" for prisoners on Riker's Island, for Us magazine, and for Vibe, a portrait of adolescent penal boot camps. Magazine editors generally are not sitting and waiting for hard reporting on marginalized people, but a few are open to it. Heldman's first big break came in 1995 with Rolling Stone, to which he sold a piece about how the graffiti subculture in New York had degenerated "from an alternative art form to an expression of violence and obsession."

On that one, Heldman demonstrated his penchant for throwing himself into the work. He found "JA," a twenty-four-year-old who lives the graffiti life, such as it is, as a kind of anti-authority poem, and who had become the number-one target of the cops on the graffiti beat. Heldman did much of the reporting before even pitching the idea, climbing through some dark places. "I was in the subway tunnels with those guys and they were doped up, and the train is coming. There's all these places you shouldn't stand, and I didn't know, and I'm asking the guy and the train is bearing down and he's like, 'You've got to understand the philosophy, man; it doesn't matter where you stand; you stand graphically.' And I'm saying 'tell me where the fuck to stand!'"

In December 1994, a group of homeless young teenagers surviving on prostitution and drugs and whatever in a Houston neighborhood called Montrose kidnapped a fellow runaway and tortured him for three days. They bit off part of his nose and set him on fire with lighter fluid, among other vile things. As the case neared trial Rolling Stone sent its new writer, who seemed to have such an affinity for lost souls, to write about this group of them. Heldman's September '95 piece, "Welcome to the Jungle," quickly gets to a long description of the kids on the front stoop of the Houston Institute for the Protection of Youth, a drop-in center:

. . . Others are checking beepers, trying to arrange deals on the inside phone, fielding calls from tricks, boyfriends and parents, talking about going to Astroworld stoned to ride the rides with a head. They're going in and out the door for cups of soda and smashing the empties on the spiked fence outside, fingers too greasy to open another bag of chips . . . . They're calling each other bitch, faggot, punk . . . . They're saying they need some weed, X, acid; going into the surrounding inner-city wards for crack; reciting Slayer lyrics . . . . Bored out of their minds, they Mace one another, urinate on the grounds and play Monopoly with staff members, conspicuously cheating for attention . . . .

Without diminishing the evil of what some of them had done, even highlighting it, Heldman somehow evokes the humanity of the runaways as well as the self-loathing that surely fueled the crime. It is clear from the piece that they let Heldman into their troubled solar system, spoke to him as an elder statesman who had once logged some orbits there.

By his own admission, Heldman can be difficult to edit. He's not at all a sour person, and straightforward, easy to talk to. But he often feels that he must "advocate," as he puts it, for a piece. Robert Love, Rolling Stone's managing editor, remembers "a tough edit. He wants to do things his own way. He didn't want to use quotations, for example; he wanted to put all the quotes in italics. But we don't do that." Still, Love was drawn to Heldman's "ability to recreate dialogue in a truthful way. He really listened to kids. He really got them. The authenticity of what he was doing was clear."

Heldman broke with Rolling Stone after his next piece, which Love recalls as "not up to our standards." It was a bleak piece with a large target -- the U.S. Army. Heldman looked at life on Yongsan U.S. Army Garrison, one of many U.S. military bases in South Korea, and at the liquor- and prostitution-fueled purgatory just outside. The picture he drew looked less like the "Be All That You Can Be" commercials than a corner of a Hieronymus Bosch. It included reporting about the low numbers of G.I.s who actually end up using their college benefits, and spoke to a number of soldiers who joined to better themselves and felt wasted. After a series of discouraging rejections, the article eventually ran in Z magazine at the end of 1996, and then on a Web site about Korean affairs called Kimsoft.com. There it drew more reaction, Heldman says, than any piece he has ever written. He still hears, he says, from G.I.s who read it.

On assignment for Spin, Heldman spent two months as a volunteer in a London homeless shelter, exploring the tension of attraction and repulsion at "the intersection of charity and need." But he pulled the piece from Spin over editorial difficulties and gave it to City Limits, a small, brave urban affairs magazine in New York City. Soon he took a job at the alternative Dallas Observer, and moved to Texas. There he produced an eleven-page cover piece about a schizophrenic's long fall through a torn safety net. And was promptly fired over troubles in the editing. The assigning editor had left the magazine, Heldman explains, and the Observer had farmed it out to somebody who he felt didn't understand it. "Some former music critic," he says.

He returned to New York. At 3 a.m. one morning, he walked into the lobby of Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center, in Brooklyn, and told the guard there he was looking for psychiatric help. He was, indeed, mildly depressed over his apparently derailed journalism career. But Heldman was in the hospital on assignment for City Limits -- to see how ordinary people who need psychiatric aid get treated. He had pitched the idea from Texas. "I had done a lot of reporting. I knew a lot of people who went through the psychiatric system. I had tons of statistics. I knew this world. I mean, if they had treated me with kindness and compassion and decency, I would have written that. I'm not supposed to have my mind made up. But I knew they would treat me like junkie scum."

The understated but quietly ferocious piece that resulted was titled "7 ^1/2 Days," for the length of time Heldman was held in the facility. During those 179 hours, as the City Limits cover lines put it, "his treatment consisted of three hours of group counseling, four hours of dancing and stretching, and 25 minutes with psychiatrists. Total charges, $8,400." The piece portrays a group of frightened patients desperate for human contact, trapped in a system that didn't much care.

These days, at APB.com, Heldman worries occasionally about the effect of a steady paycheck on the motors that drive him. "It's easy to lose that empathy," he says. "I feel that it's not as strong as I wish it was nowadays. The further removed I am from Phoenix House . . ." He doesn't finish the sentence, as is sometimes the case with Heldman. "I have money in my pocket. I can pay the bar tabs with credit cards and not care. I have health insurance." He doesn't mention the stock options that APB provides to its employees. "I'm a professional. It's harder to relate to . . . you have to find more and more extreme things to make you...you know, it just puts you in a different frame of mind." He smiles, then shrugs. "I guess all I have to do is get fired and start free-lancing again, and I'll be right in there."

Not likely. Heldman's bosses seem quite high on him. He was among their first hires back in October 1998, when APB was basically three men with an idea. One of the three, Mark Sauter, APB's c.o.o, served in Korea in the army infantry, and had read Heldman's piece about army life there back when it came out. He didn't like it, at least at first. "I told Kevin that piece had really pissed me off in some ways," he says. "But I realized when I thought about it that one of the reasons it pissed me off is that it was so on the mark." Sauter says Heldman struck him as "a risk-taker," and since APB.com was trying to build a credible online news operation from scratch in about ninety days, that's the kind of person he thought he needed.

The clip that struck Hoag Levins, executive editor and vice president, was the one in which Heldman turned himself in to a mental hospital, partly because Levins had done something similar earlier in his journalism career and "I had a keen sense of what it takes to do that." Levins says he needed driven reporters. "You follow your instincts. I thought, 'well, he's not your normal kind of guy, but I think he really has it.' And it turned out that he does." Within about forty-eight hours, Heldman had dug up a previously unreported serial murder cluster along I-10 in California, and local TV there was picking up on APB's coverage. Sauter and Levins were ecstatic. Heldman became APB's Serial Killer Bureau.

One piece of work Heldman's editors point to is a big June package with several follow-up stories on what APB christened the "Florida Hog Trail Killings" -- a cluster of six grisly murders in an isolated area crisscrossed by wild boar paths, inland from the Gulf Coast. Between 1994 and 1997 six bodies were found within a ten-mile radius, all male, all nude. Two of them were mutilated and three had rope marks. At the time of the story, a man named Daniel Conahan was suspected in several of the killings but had been charged with just one of them. Conahan admitted only to a penchant for bondage.

In a way, Heldman's stories on the murders amounted to a trial before the trial. The articles walked a visitor through the locale of the murders, the trailer parks and gay pickup areas that its victims inhabited, and through the thicket of evidence.

And the package demonstrates the evolving journalistic potential of the Web. Along with his stories, Heldman was able to post reports and documents from the investigation on APB. He also put up material supplied by the accused killer, including a Details of Investigation report from the sheriff's department that Conahan had annotated -- "lies . . . lies," he wrote in the margin. Conahan was convicted and now waits on death row.

"He has a way with people," Levins says. "Cops talk to him." This is partly because Heldman has learned to talk detective -- Was the body disarticulated? Was a VICAP form (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) filled out? He gets substantial e-mail from detectives and, of course, tips from readers, some worthless, others maybe not. Heldman spends time checking them out and, occasionally, he passes one along to the police, with permission, although he frets about being a conduit. On the other hand he does not, he says, try to play junior detective.

Heldman can occasionally warm up a cold case. He happened upon one in Elko, Nevada, last year, involving an unidentified body of a woman that had been found in a remote desert area, in October 1996. The body had been found with several intriguing clues, but detectives could not identify the dead woman. After Heldman's visit, they tried once more to match a latent print on a cosmetic case that had been at the scene. This time they got a match, which led them to a mug shot of a woman who had been arrested in Oregon and Texas in the early 1990s, but apparently under a false name. Heldman then posted her mug shot on APB, and a relative of the dead woman subsequently identified her as a troubled mother of three who had been estranged from her family. Evidence from the case was later presented to a regional task force investigating the killings of twelve women in the Great Basin area, although the case has not advanced further.

He likes his strange beat. But "Ideally, I'd like to do a wider variety of stories, if it was up to me," Heldman says. "There are other things that interest me -- prison stories, terrorism stories, political stories, Japan, whatever. I just propose anything to do with crime."

Except white-collar crime. He's not all that interested in it. "Maybe it's the life and death part. A guy calls me from county jail and says they're gonna move to death row -- that's real. It reminds me not to be complacent. It makes me feel like life matters. You know what I mean?"

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