What's the Story Behind Nancy Jo Sales' VF Article?

When I was making calls yesterday about Nancy Jo Sales' Vanity Fair piece on Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan, some confusion arose about who wrote it. "Are you sure it was a female reporter?" said a friend who knows a priest tied into the small world of lower-Manhattan Episcopalianism and was interviewed about Father Frank Morales by a male VF contributor. Morales, of course, was at the center of Blake and Duncan's lives in their final months (see yesterday's post).

And today I got a call from someone who was interviewed at length for the piece and was stunned to read at SoMA that Nancy Jo Sales had the byline. Asking not to be named, this person said that, last they knew, VF contributor John Connolly was writing the article, and that it was probably now in final edits, not already on the newsstand.  

Hmmm. Sure sounds like a tale of publishing intrigue here. It's certainly odd that Sales, who is so connected to the story as Morales' ex-wife, wound up with the assignment.

PS: Doesn't Morales' timeline in VF sound fishy? He says the night Theresa died, he was in the rectory garden around 7 when Jeremy returned from work and invited him up for a drink. "Then, about ten minutes later, he sees police cars outside the rectory entrance on East 11th Street. He hurried up to the apartment, where [Jeremy] was in the living room, 'sobbing, pounding the walls with his fist, screaming'... The police were with Duncan's body in the bedroom." That's an awful lot to happen in ten minutes: Jeremy leaves Morales, goes up to his apartment, discovers his girlfriend dead, and calls the police, who arrive and are in the middle of their investigation when Morales bounds in.

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