My Favorite Story: How a Newspaper Article Freed an Old Man from Prison

 Wrapping a journalism career of 45 years in 2012, I entered retirement with two filing cabinets full of clips. I have no way to count how many stories I wrote and published between 1969 and 2012, but I can safely estimate the number at more than 16,000. They ranged from short, three-paragraph news items to lengthy feature articles of 10,000 words or more, including investigative projects as well as human interest features.

In looking back, I wanted to pull a few of the most memorable writing projects from those cabinets and list them according to certain criteria. My career actually divided neatly into three more specific eras of journalism: Newspaper reporter (1969-1980), freelance writer (1980-1997) and business reporter for two large corporate publishing concerns (1997-2012). I hope to use this blog as an archive for analyzing some of the most memorable and meaningful projects and have narrowed those down to top 10 list covering many years. They include coverage as diverse and infamous as the Huntsville prison hostage siege of 1974 to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill of 2010; the Jacinto City police corruption scandal of 1978 and the Ken Lay Enron trial of 2009; the trials of Houston mass murderers Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks as well as the trials of Fort Worth billionaire T. Cullen Davis in 1978 and two Houston police officers tried in 1977 in the death of Joe Campos Torres.

For anyone interested in my career (my children and grandchildren, perhaps?), reviewing this list seems a lot easier than digging through my filing cabinets. For anyone interested in the mechanics of journalism and coverage of news events, I hope to provide some nuggets of understanding about the ways that stories are told in the media, or at least how they were told during my years of telling them. And for anyone who recalls some of these events, I hope to provide additional perspective of an historical context.

Given the significance of those other events, the top story on my list might seem a bit unusual. Whenever I’ve been asked to name my finest moment as a reporter, however, I’ve never hesitated in citing the stories I wrote about a man named Gene Winchester as a reporter for The Houston Post in 1976. For Winchester, they resulted in release from prison, and for me they resulted in a nomination by The Post for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. I didn’t win it.

But I did succeed in accomplishing what ranks as the mythical holy grail for any reporter—the near-impossible mission of forcing the state to release someone from prison. So, the degree of difficulty with the Gene Winchester story ranks about nine on a ten-point-scale. That quest has served as the theme for several movies all the way back to Jimmy Stewart’s 1948 portrayal of a troubled reporter in Call Northside 777.  In addition to those accomplishments, the story of Gene Winchester ranks also as a mesmerizing yarn. When I’ve mentioned it to friends in bars they always want to hear it all, shaking their heads at each turn of the plot.

My discovery of Winchester began about as innocuously as any newspaper investigation could begin. There wasn’t a leaker or a whistleblower or an anonymous tip. There was just me looking to do a human interest feature story about old men in prison. During this period at the paper, I had cultivated a mini-beat of covering the Texas Department of Corrections, convincing my editors to let me visit prison units a couple of times each month just looking for interesting tales. This beat had unearthed a number of fascinating stories about inmates as well as the administrators who guarded the gates. I had become a welcome visitor at several TDC units, particularly the main facility in Huntsville known affectionately by everyone simply as “The Walls.”

For example, I had written one story about an inmate known for his abilities as a jailhouse lawyer, and another story about the editor of TDC inmate newspaper, The Echo. I also had written about the top administrators, George Beto and Jim Estelle. I dined regularly in the inmate cafeteria. I had spent three days with one inmate released after serving a term for marijuana possession, penning a three-part series on his efforts to rejoin society. I also had covered the major story in 1974 of a 13-day prison hostage siege that made international headlines, and I will share more details about that event later. I wrote another story about a female inmate giving birth while incarcerated.

Like many reporters, I maintained a list of story ideas, adding new thoughts every day. Each month I would review my list, pick a topic that appealed to me, and then pitch my editors to see if they would allow me to risk my time pursuing an idea that might not even result in a finished story. By 1976, they had gained enough confidence in me, however, that just about anything I suggested would receive a green light. This system might surprise those who have thought reporters just sit around reacting to events as they occur. At least in my newspaper years, every reporter kept a list of story ideas, waiting for that proverbial slow news day when they could create a story out of nothing but a thought.

So it was in February of 1976 that I reviewed my list on unwritten epics and spotted an entry that made me think: “What happens to old men in prison?” I had jotted this question one day after watching a couple of older inmates in the yard at The Walls, arousing my curiosity. How do they get along with younger inmates? What kind of special care do they need? How difficult is life for them as they age in a confined setting? What kind of crimes placed them in this situation?

The next day I was on my way to Huntsville, about 70 miles north of Houston, after alerting my TDC contacts I wanted to visit their geriatric unit in the hospital at The Walls. After getting the official tour of the unit and an overview of the situation from the administrators, I started wandering around so I could interview some of the inmates. The first one I approached was an 82-year-old convict named Gene Winchester.

Bald and toothless, Winchester was still a large imposing man, well over six-feet tall and muscular. He was willing to chat, but really failed to make much sense. I immediately feared this story would not work very well. I didn’t want to write a sugar-coated account of the great things TDC did for its aging inmates. But it looked like I might have trouble getting information from the inmates’ view if Winchester was any example of the senility among them there. He told me he had killed a soldier and wanted to go to New York where he could make $12.50 per day working on the railroad.

But I had invested a day in this endeavor and knew I needed to produce some kind of copy. I interviewed a couple of other geriatric inmates, but they didn’t seem that interesting. Winchester couldn’t even remember when he had come to prison, but did recall he had killed somebody a long time ago. So I visited an acquaintance who worked in the TDC public information office for additional details about this guy.

She really wasn’t allowed to share prison files with a reporter, but I had come to know her well and she respected the stories I had done about the prison system. She opened his file, left it on her desk and told me she needed to take a break—code from sources who want to share information without actually granting permission. I sat in her chair and read the Winchester file, where something caught my eye. I’m sure she had no idea about the problem in his file. And later she confided she had no regrets about letting me read it because of the way things unraveled.

“Here’s my question,” I said when she returned. “Gene Winchester was sentenced to 50 years in 1917. It’s now 1976 and he’s still here. There’s no indication of an extension for infractions, no second sentence for anything. Why is he still in prison nine years after his full term has ended?”

She stammered and grabbed the file to read it herself. Finally, she looked up and said, “I don’t know. This must be a clerical error. I can’t make sense of this. We’ll have to investigate this discrepancy.”

Suddenly, my slice-of-life “human interest” feature on old timers in prison had shifted focus to one old timer who appeared to have been lost in the system. I told her I would need to learn more tomorrow because I intended to write a story about Winchester one way or the other. If I had no answers, I would just list the open questions in my story while the “investigation” was under way.

When she called me the next day to reveal what she’d found, I was expecting a blast from the bureaucratic fog machine and excuses. Instead, her candor made my story even better. After coming to prison for murder in 1917, she explained, Winchester had killed another inmate two years later. Instead of charging him with a second murder, prison officials shipped him off as a “lunatic” to the state mental hospital at Rusk, where he remained until 1969. He returned then to TDC, but he did not receive credit for time served in the mental facility between 1919 and 1958, due to a ruling by the Texas Attorney General’s office.

I was stunned. Not only had he now been locked up for nine years more than his original 50-year sentence, Winchester only had credit for 24 years total—the two he served from 1917 to 1919 and the 18 he had served since 1958 plus good time. He still had 26 years left on his sentence from 1917! And TDC was emphatic there was nothing it could do about him. So I started seeking a solution.

On Wednesday, March 17, 1976, I introduced Gene Winchester to the world with a story that began above the masthead of The Houston Post and beneath the headline: “50-Year Sentence Closer to Life.” It began: “Although Gene Winchester, 82, has never been sentenced to serve more than 50 years in prison, the State of Texas has kept him locked up since 1917.” I noted that unless pardoned or paroled, Winchester would be 111 years old when released in 2005.

TDC officials admitted they were shocked to learn the circumstances of Winchester’s life. I quoted one saying “Jesus, something should be done. He could probably be helped more in a nursing home than in prison but his time is governed by the 1958 law and opinion.” And that gave me an idea for some follow-up coverage. I also received encouragement from the bosses at The Post.

As soon as the story appeared, I was approached by an assistant managing editor named Jim Holley, the editor who supervised prize submissions among other things at The Post. He said, “You probably have a good shot at a Pulitzer if we can get this guy out of prison. We need to make a list of follow-up stories and do something for him. We need to keep this story on the front page until he gets out.” Holley had been the one who hired me in 1971, when he was city editor. He also had been the architect of the paper’s only Pulitzer win in 1965, when the prize saluted The Post for its work uncovering corruption in the city government of Pasadena, Texas, a Houston suburb. So, I recognized his expertise in managing coverage of a major story and appreciated his suggestions.

I started outlining a strategy that seemed more like a dream at first. But the more people I called, the more plausible it seemed. I knew we couldn’t just release Winchester to die on the streets. I thought he was probably better off in prison. His prison record showed not a single visit from anyone in the course of his life. I would make a search for long-lost relatives, but expected that to lead nowhere. That official’s comment about a nursing home aroused my curiosity. I wondered: What if I can find a nursing home to take him if the governor will grant a pardon? What if I found a way for him to get enough public funding to pay his nursing home bill?

But I also wondered if that would be wise. He still resembled a robust old man, even if he was a tad diminished upstairs. I didn’t want to work to release this guy only to see him kill again. No story or prize would be worth that kind of tragedy. While wrestling with this moral dilemma, however, I moved ahead to see if we really could make anything happen. And I also decided to learn more about the old coot and his crime from 1917.

While I worked away on these angles for additional stories, my first story spawned a life of its own. National and international news wires picked it up, and NBC’s Today show cited it. I got a call from a woman who said, “That’s my uncle Gene. All these years we thought he was dead.” The Texas Nursing Homes Association contacted me with an offer to help. Other would-be relatives starting coming out of the brush pile.

Then I learned that TDC actually had launched a program in 1975 to aid elderly inmates who can’t win parole for issues of senility or indigence. The program already successfully had placed eight aged inmates in nursing homes with a grant from Social Security paying the bills. Winchester’s case was different, however, because he was not yet eligible for parole. He needed a pardon. And I needed to learn his back story.

That mission sent me rooting through the archives of The San Angelo Standard-Times for 1917, reviewing an old book about Texas prison life in those years and interviewing a TDC psychologist who examined Winchester when he returned to prison in 1969. Not trying to generate unwarranted sympathy for Winchester, I truly wanted to learn how safe it might be to set him free. The result was a story that ranks among the best I ever wrote as a journalist. Rather than summarize that article, I’m including it here as the most effective way to tell Winchester’s story.

It appeared on the front page a few days after my initial story under the headline:

“Dice Roll Sent Inmate on Jail Odyssey.”

  Gene Winchester began his long trek toward a prison hospital bed as a journey of friendship 59 years ago when, as a West Texas country boy, he and a pal set out for town.

  The world was engaged in the first war to end all wars. Woodrow Wilson was President. A few people drove cars but things like jet airplanes and television were science fiction dreams.

  And going to town for 23-year-old Gene Winchester and his buddy. George Parramore, 27, meant a visit to San Angelo. Winchester had been urging the trip for some time.

  So, on July 27. 1917, they left the town of Monday and headed for San Angelo. Parramore was never to return alive. And Winchester was sent spinning down a road to oblivion, a road which tunneled through the dark caverns reserved for the crazy in the 1920s, a road which twisted back onto the modern American mainstream of penal philosophy and a road which finally deposited him last week in the midst of controversy with no past and a future of hazy dreams.

  Senile and wasted, he was discovered in a state prison hospital, legally locked away for 59 years on a 50 year term, a lost and ugly reminder the primitive past of our social conscience sleeps just a generation away.

  As in the discovery of some unspoiled tribe in New Guinea, officials in charge hastened to find a solution for his existence.

  And the only version of how he arrived in his current position—how it all began—lies in the faded pages of The San Angelo Standard-Times of 1917 where reporters recorded the events that became the case of the State of Texas vs. Gene Winchester.

  Parramore’s body was found in a clump of mesquite bushes near Harriett, the newspaper reported. He had $81 in his blue serge pants and his shirtless body was wrapped in a quilt. His boots were off and wrapped with him. He had last been seen alive a few days before in Miles, buying a shirt with Winchester.

  An autopsy revealed Parramore had been shot in the back of the head with a .32-caliber pistol. The pistol, Parramore’s hat and automobile were found together in Knox County, and Winchester was charged with murder.

  The newspaper reported Winchester intended to plead insanity due to “a kick by a cow to his head at the age of 7.”

  In October the trial began, and Winchester told his story. He and his friend had been shooting dice where they stopped on the way to town. Parramore claimed credit for a crucial seven, which Winchester said had not been rolled.

  They argued, Winchester said, and Parramore headed for his car threatening to kill Winchester with the rifle hidden there.

  So, Winchester said, he shot Parramore and hid the body. The jury deliberated 14 hours and then sentenced him to 50 years.

  He arrived at the state prison Nov. 15, 1917. In those days, the prison, according to an official Texas Department of Corrections history, had very little of which to be proud.

  Inmates lived in shacks and toiled away their time in the fields. One ex-convict from that era described the life which greeted Winchester in a book: Hell in a Texas Pen.

  “I helped dig 26 graves. Only three were from natural causes. The others were beaten to death When a convict did any little thing to displease a guard, they would make him ride a pole stark naked all night--astride three 2x6 timbers nailed together, the sharpened sides up.

  “I was being worked to death and bleeding like a stuck hog. I went down to 96 pounds from 176. A boy couldn't work and the captain beat him until his back bled. He told he boy that if he was sick he should die…and prove it.”

  Death was ever present and old timers have described scenes where guards let fighting inmates battle to the death rather than risk injury stopping them.

  After less than two years in prison, Winchester was accused of killing another inmate, officials recalled, and it was decided he was too dangerous for the prison.

  Winchester had a background of mental problems. Tom Green County records reveal transcripts of “lunacy” proceedings brought against him in 1915 by his mother.

  The record describes a slow-witted youth with a speech impediment who could sit emotionless for hours until asked a question. Then he would explode and, court records cite, “he would say, ‘Dot Damn you, I will det your doat.’”

  The prison system had just the place for inmates like Winchester. There was a new state “lunatics asylum” just opened at Rusk. A brother had assumed custody of the lad before he could be committed. But this time there was no way to stop it. He was declared a lunatic and sent to Rusk.

  The state considered him dangerous and disturbed and he grew old at Rusk. The mental illness faded into senility and the criminal burned out.

  Dr. Robert B. Sheldon, Rusk superintendent, worked at TDC in 1969 when Winchester returned to prison to finish up his term.

  “I am confident he is no longer a danger to anyone,” Sheldon said. “I complained about him going back to prison.”

  When they added up Winchester’s time, officials refused to credit him with the first 40 years he spent at Rusk.

  Officials believe he is the last of three inmates who failed to receive credit for many spent confined at Rusk.

  One is dead, another has been placed in a nursing home. TDC officials hope Winchester will soon be placed in a nursing home.

  Until then he bides his time in the prison hospital at Huntsville. He answers questions with confused phrases, depicting a memory of broken fragments.

  Do you fear death in prison? “No,” he replies. “I’m getting out someday to work on the railroad.”

  The stories he could tell about the things he has seen are probably the best part of his saga. But they lie buried inside his mind where not even he can get at them.

By the time we published that back story, some things were starting to snap into place for him. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had moved the day after my first story to launch an investigation into a solution for Winchester, triggered by my story. I learned Winchester actually had been considered for parole seven times in the previous eight years, but denied each time due to his mental condition. So, it turned out, he did not require a pardon. In fact, he and the community would be best served with a normal parole that would allow parole officers to monitor his condition as well as his behavior.

I learned that other aged inmates had behaved well when transferred to nursing homes because they had already become institutionalized. One had even developed a reputation as a “ladies’ man” in one placement, and another had volunteered for a job polishing floors in his home

One member of the parole board went out of her way to salute my reporting and the power of a free press to shine the light on situations like Winchester’s. And Winchester’s 71-year-old sister contacted me for an interview. She had been 11 when her brother went to prison, and verified that he had suffered a head injury at the age of two.

“For 59 years I didn’t know anything about my brother,” she told me. “We’re the only members of our family left.”

When she came to visit him on April 13, I wrote a story about their reunion. It was Winchester’s first recorded visit since 1920 when a brother had seen him in the mental hospital. They talked for an hour and a half, and prison officials said they saw him smile.

I even located relatives of Winchester’s 1917 victim, George Parramore, to sample their attitude toward a parole for him. They did not object.

Although TDC needed a guardian to control Winchester’s Social Security payments, officials were reluctant to use anyone claiming to be a relative. It turned out that the Social Security administration itself was able to make payments for him directly to a nursing home just south of Houston that agreed to take him in. Then Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe got involved. Moved by the coverage he expedited a parole to Winchester.

And so, on April 29, 1976—little more than a month after The Post had published my first story on Gene Winchester, the man who came to prison aboard a horse-drawn wagon in 1917, left The Walls in an automobile headed south for his retirement home.

On the front page of the paper for April 30, 1976, I wrote: “Prison officials retired their oldest inmate number Thursday when Gene Winchester exchanged his white uniform stamped 41811 for the first set of free world duds he had donned since 1917.”

But I was still a bit worried. For his exit interview with me, I asked what he planned to do in his new home. He said quickly, “Going to get me a woman.” Oh oh, I thought. Then I lived in fear for a while of the day I would report for duty in the newsroom only to hear about a multiple homicide at a nursing home perpetrated by some old convict who should have been in prison where he belonged. But it never happened.

I visited Winchester a few weeks later to produce one more follow-up story published June 3, 1976, under the headline: “No Visitors Come; Convict, 82, Leads Quiet Life of Loner.” I interviewed one of his new nursing home pals and a member of the staff who told me Winchester had been timid about socializing. They had persuaded him to attend a picnic where he enjoyed the hamburgers. I attempted an interview, but he couldn’t recognize me.

“He sleeps most of the day,” said a nurse. “He’s a sweet old man whose eyesight is nearly gone. And he’s really a loner.”

Afterward, I checked on him a couple of times each year. When I called on May 20, 1980, the nursing home reported he had died two months earlier after breaking a hip in a fall. He had lived to the ripe old age of 86. A representative told me his sister had visited him several times during the last four years, as well as a parole officer. The representative recalled that Winchester “did not like to be bathed. He hated it. He was a loner.”

Throughout my career I covered a number of “big” stories with national implications that would make the saga of Gene Winchester seem pretty small. But I often thought about that old man as a reminder for my profession. Although my reporting freed him from prison, I believe he might have done more for me than I did for him. The story did not win any journalism prizes. It wasn’t like I had freed an innocent man. And Winchester really wasn’t that sympathetic of a character as a murderer. But at least he had some peace for the last few years of his life. And his sister got closure.

For me, however, he always loomed as a reminder how powerful a free press can be. Any time I had a moment of doubt about my work in the years since then, I could always recall the time I stumbled across Gene Winchester one slow news day in 1976 with the perseverance to ask “Why?” when the dates in his official record failed to reconcile with reality. Reporting 101 requires us to answer five questions in every story: Who? What? When? Where? Why? And How? Of those five, Why? and How? are always the most difficult. But no story is ever complete without them.