By late January, Team Jill was feeling the strain of the situation and was exhausted from its protracted efforts to seek Carroll’s release. The kidnapping had become an obsession. Initially each lead, each contact had raised their hopes. But as days turned into weeks, morale waned. When the occasional faint lead popped up, it could be days or weeks before they discovered that they were being used or that it was an inaccurate report. They were second-guessing themselves. Still, Ingwerson was glad they were working as a team who could put their heads together and talk things through.

Watch Newcomb discuss her role with the Carroll family

Carroll’s kidnapping weighed especially hard on Peterson and Murphy because of their friendship with her and their role in mentoring/recruiting her for the Baghdad bureau. “They were there. They knew Jill,” Ingwerson says. He was aware they were wearing themselves out chasing leads, their days ending at 3 a.m. only to begin again a few hours later. The two correspondents resisted taking a break, which became a point of contention between them and the Boston newsroom. Foreign Editor Scott, says Cook, was “just beside himself.” ^[22]

Watch Peterson discuss filtering information, tracking down leads

Scott raised the idea of going to Baghdad to give his two correspondents some time off. “The guys weren’t keen on that, because even though I’d been a reporter, and I have good relationships with them, I still think I’m a little bit of a suit to them,” he says. Nonetheless, Bergenheim, Ingwerson, and Scott debated the idea a little longer before abandoning it. Bergenheim felt Scott would be more valuable to the team in Boston. Scott eventually agreed. “I would play a much more limited role there than I would here,” he says. “But I felt I needed to at least raise the question of, ‘would it be better?’ Also as a signal to the family, like how committed we are to this, that we would send someone higher up in the organization there, to be on the scene.”

Like the others, Ingwerson could not leave his work on behalf of Carroll at the office. One night at home, seeking diversion, he turned on the TV to watch a drama. “Should I be doing this?” he thought. “Here’s this phony adventure of life and death and terrorism.” He could be doing more for Carroll instead of watching an hour-long show. But the distraction helped him relax temporarily.

On weekends, he spread his notes out on the kitchen table and made more phone calls. His wife found their 8-year-old daughter crying on the porch one evening. She told her mother, Ingwerson recalls, that “I feel so bad about that girl, and I wish it could be me who was caught instead. I wish she was let go so that Daddy could have fun again.” Ingwerson comments: “I hadn’t been aware that I had been morose.”