As the first outlet to know Clark ’s name, the Independent had a jump in the race to get information about him. Using a public database, Bailey learned he was from Branford , Connecticut , a coastal town eight miles east of New Haven , and that he currently lived in Middletown , Connecticut . The Independent had a reporter, Marcia Chambers, stationed in Branford, and she began looking into his background. With Chambers involved, the Independent had five reporters on the story.

Stuart, the Hartford reporter, went on Tuesday, September 15, to the Middletown apartment where Clark lived. By Tuesday afternoon, TV stations had named Clark , and other reporters showed up at his apartment. As reported by Stuart in a story written by Bailey, the journalists “traipsed up and down outside the Middletown apartment” and “knocked on doors in search of clues to his identity.” [1] What Stuart noticed—and other reporters apparently didn’t—was the woman’s name on the door along with Clark ’s. Stuart gave the name to Bailey, who found a blog on MySpace belonging to the woman and Clark.

The blog was public, so Bailey felt comfortable using material from it, but she decided not to use the woman’s name or photo so as not to risk exposing her to public attention. “I’d already deleted plenty of nasty anonymous comments sent in to our site, several wishing violence on Clark ,” she says. From the blog, Bailey learned that Clark and the woman were engaged. This gave Bailey her lede: “The target in the slaying of Yale graduate student Annie Le had something in common with the victim—he, too, was engaged.” Minutes before Bailey went up with the story, the woman removed some parts of the blog from public view, but Bailey had captured them with a screenshot.

The ex-girlfriend. Meanwhile Chambers, the Branford reporter, checked with her sources to see if they had anything on Clark . It wasn’t long before she had her hands on a police report filed in 2003 by Jessica Del Rocco, Clark ’s high school girlfriend. A dispute between Del Rocco and Clark had led a school official to call the police. In the report, Del Rocco alleged that Clark had confronted her and written on her locker after she had tried to break up with him. Subsequently, the report said, Del Rocco went to the police station with her mother and alleged that Clark had forced her to have sex with him. She didn’t want to press charges, however.

The report was journalistic “gold,” Bailey says. Chambers had promised her sources that she would use the police report only after the police had named Clark , which they did on Tuesday evening. The Independent went up with the story the next morning. It didn’t name Del Rocco (who went public by choice the following week). But the scoop drew more attention to this feisty little online outfit. “People were calling us, begging us for this police report,” Bailey says. “The New York Times came in and practically tried to arm wrestle Paul.”

Bailey “ friends ” Del Rocco . After her luck on MySpace, Bailey decided to trawl online social networks for information about Del Rocco. On Wednesday, September 16, she found a page on Facebook belonging to someone named Jessica Del Rocco. Because Facebook listed people by location, Bailey could be confident that this one, listed as living in Branford, was the right Jessica.

Bailey sent a request to become Del Rocco’s Facebook “friend,” meaning that Bailey would have access to postings, or “status updates,” that Del Rocco put up behind a privacy wall accessible only to designated individuals—her “friends.” Del Rocco quickly accepted, and Bailey discovered that a day earlier, in her “friends only” space, Del Rocco had responded to the news that her ex-boyfriend was a murder suspect.

“I feel like I’m sixteen all over again,” Del Rocco wrote. “It’s just [sic] bringing back everything.” She said she had known since Sunday that Clark was a possible suspect. “It’s been a rough few days,” she wrote. She also said that she “was in total and utter shock” and that she couldn’t “believe this is true.” These comments—an “evocative series of statements,” Bailey says—would add newsworthy color and currency to the story about the police report.

Through Facebook, Bailey sent Del Rocco a message identifying herself as a reporter and asked if she was willing to be interviewed. “If I did the whole thing over again, I would identify myself as a reporter when I friended her,” Bailey says. Del Rocco politely declined to be interviewed but kept Bailey as a friend.

Bailey had another scoop in her sights, but was she on ethically safe ground using this information? On the one hand, it was difficult to consider the postings private given that Del Rocco had some 350 Facebook friends. Moreover, even if they were private, hadn’t Del Rocco granted Bailey access to them by not removing her as a friend once she’d learned she was a reporter? But on the other hand, was giving a reporter access to information the same thing as allowing it to be used in an article? Could the Independent protect itself, in any case, by guarding Del Rocco’s identity?