HAVE PEN, WILL TRAVEL: PART THREE

Memoirs of a Freelance Journalist

Stability with three core clients: Money, The Journal of Commerce and The National Law Journal

My association with Money magazine began shortly after my departure from Ampersand and the transition to an office in my apartment. It occurred unexpectedly when I received a phone call from an editor there inviting me to become the magazine’s first contract correspondent in a decision borne from an internal Time-Life empire political dispute with Time magazine. Besides the namesakes Time and Life, the company published a number of sister magazines such as Fortune, People, Discover and Money. Each of those publications relied on the various Time news bureaus for reporting services like those I had been providing to Time since 1981.

By 1983, however, Money had ridden the growth of the Baby Boomer population into a prominent position within the empire. Launched in 1972 as a personal finance magazine, Money thrived from providing information about investments, spending, saving and anything that might affect its readers’ pocketbooks. As the boomer population aged into its more productive middle years when it sought that kind of information with more interest, circulation increases drove a growth in advertising revenue that provided Money’s editors more muscle to flex inside the Time-Life shelter. But correspondents at the various Time bureaus refused to pay Money the proper respect. When assignments arrived from Money editors, the Time correspondents routinely ignored them or provided only cursory effort at finding interview subjects to answer the questions—except in Houston, where the Time correspondent had an ambitious stringer named Gary Taylor willing to tackle any reporting assignments requested from New York.

Thus, I already had been handling the Money assignments in Houston almost by default when Susan called in 1983 with her job offer. Fed up with the routine rejections by Time correspondents around the country, she said she wanted to use me as a demonstration to show that Money needed its own slate of contract correspondents. Under her terms, I would continue to accept assignments for Time as well. She had no need to poach the bureau’s busiest stringer. But she wanted me to agree to accept all assignments from her in addition to those from Time. She could not guarantee any monthly income figure, but assured me there would be regular work with payment on an hourly basis for reporting files, just like I’d been doing for Time. She would bypass the Time correspondent in Houston and send the Money assignments directly to me. It sounded like the perfect way to fill the vacancy created by the failure of Southwest Racquetball while joining a more prominent and reliable alternative.

While assignments for Time covered a wide range of subjects on a weekly basis, the monthly Money assignments focused most often on finding individuals willing to share their personal investment information in what the magazine described as “model portfolios.” A typical Money assignment, for example, might ask me to find a single woman with two children starting to build their educational investment portfolio. When I found her, I would write a profile including all the details of her finances. Then the magazine would recruit a panel of top financial advisors to review it and provide specific recommendations on investment options.

This typical Money cover from November 1984 promoted my analysis on the investment portfolio of Houston TV anchor Shara Fryer.

In the early 1980s, this type of assignment did not prove as difficult as it might sound. I began developing sources in the Houston financial planner community, contacting them for access to willing clients. The planners proved more than eager to assist because they could expect prominent attention if quoted in this magazine demonstrating their talents. I could always find individuals willing to share their details in exchange for free consultations with top planners or brokers. And I used my imagination to locate subjects outside the planning community, developing connections with all sorts of neighborhood organizations, school groups or anyone with access to a wide range of friends. Facebook would have been a perfect portal for recruiting regular folks to interview had it and the Internet been available back then.

In addition to the model portfolios, Money also had a wide variety of other assignments. The editors there believed that they could find a Money angle to any news event and they instructed me often to find financial experts in Houston to interview on a range of topics. A couple of times, Money assigned me to produce full freelance features that would include my byline. On one occasion, I researched and wrote an article on office football pools. Using the knowledge gained on that assignment, I even did a bit of recycling for a local magazine, giving it a version focused specifically on the Houston football pool activities.

On another assignment for a story titled “How to Divorce a Millionaire,” I interviewed several of Houston’s high-profile divorce lawyers asking the question: “What advice would you provide if a client approached in confidence with plans to divorce their millionaire spouse within the next six months?” One of them even connected me for interviews with a female client who actually had plotted out her six-month divorce strategy as directed, gathering all financial materials so she could ambush her husband at the courthouse.

Another time, Money sent me to spend a week in Mexico investigating whether Americans really could retire there on $300 per month. I discovered a colony of transplants from the U.S. and Canada living in Guadalajara in style, but complaining about access to medical care and devaluation of the peso. One had been forced to operate a secret illegal side-business making yogurt after losing half his retirement savings because he had placed it all in a Mexican bank account before devaluation.

Susan’s “experiment” with me as Money’s first contract correspondent proved successful enough that she had added freelancers in at least a dozen more cities around the country within a couple of years. The magazine listed all of our names in its masthead every month, so my name appeared in every edition of Money published between 1983 and 1996. And several times the magazine brought us all to New York City to join the staff in its annual Christmas holiday party. Susan considered us family.

The Journal of Commerce (JOC) emerged as a primary revenue source about two years later through another unexpected turn of events. In fact, I had been unaware of the JOC’s existence until I encountered the newspaper’s Gulf of Mexico correspondent, Joseph Bonney, while attending a conference in Houston to cover a speaker for a Washington D.C.-based newsletter as a freelancer. Seated beside him, we struck a conversation that concluded with his invitation to accept some assignments in Houston under supervision from his office in New Orleans.

Headquartered in New York, the JOC boasted a rich and prominent history as a daily newspaper dating all the way back to 1827 when founded by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. I would learn that the JOC represented a classic example of entrepreneurial journalism, filling a niche in the business information world that few realized existed. As a publication, it was a beast with a global reach and an enormous appetite for copy, particularly from a growth region like Texas and the Mexican border.

The JOC began as a vehicle to fill the void in information for ocean shippers in New York City. Before they could move cargo overseas, those shipping agents had to learn which ships were arriving and leaving, destined where and when. Morse realized he could gather that information in a news product he could sell to the city’s growing community of shippers more cheaply than they could gather that information on their own. The heart of the JOC was a section called “Shipcards” where all the shipping lines could post their schedules. Moreover, he learned he could charge the shipping lines for placement in the Shipcards as advertising while selling that information as a subscription to the agents in the port. The JOC would earn money on both ends of its operation.

As the publication grew from those basic shipping roots, it also developed another revenue stream with all manner of advertising around the shipcards. It had room for news stories, too, that would add value to the newspaper with coverage of the people and businesses related to the shipping community. By the turn of the Twentieth Century, the JOC ranked as a more viable publication than The Wall Street Journal, which would become the nation’s pre-eminent business paper. Of course, a century later, the age of the Internet would destroy the JOC’s reason for existence. Who needs to buy a newspaper for shipcards when shipping schedules post in real time on a computer screen? When I needed the JOC, however, from 1985 through 1996, it ranked as the Bible of shipping, commerce and any sort of business related to or dependent on those fields.

Excited to join the team, I learned that the JOC needed me primarily to cover the Port of Houston, including the politics of the port’s governing body as well as the organized labor activities there. The JOC paid primarily by the published column inch in its news sections. But it also produced special sections several times each week, paying freelancers set article fees—usually $300—for stories like the one I mentioned in Part One about the Mexican market for reinsurance.

In Joe Bonney, I had hitched my wagon to a rising star. Within a couple of years, the JOC had promoted him to editor, moving him to New York and adding New Orleans to my area

of focus. From September of 1985 until June of 1996, my byline would appear 338 times in the JOC on articles covering a wide range of subjects. In 1990, for example, the JOC would provide 28 percent of my annual freelancing revenue--$16,815 of $57,031. 

Contrasting with the accidental nature of my connections to Money and the JOC, I secured my connection to The National Law Journal (NLJ) in 1986 through a concerted, targeted effort spawned by an analysis of what should have been my business strengths as a freelance journalist as well as my failure in 1985 to maximize one of those strengths. As a newspaper reporter from 1969 through 1980, I had spent the lion’s share of my time covering courts and legal affairs. As a freelancer, I had to consider my experience in legal affairs reporting to be a primary strength. Emphasizing that experience in 1983, I had added a publication called The Legal Times to my stable of clients after spotting a classified magazine ad from that weekly newspaper seeking a correspondent in Texas.

The editor there offered to pay me a monthly retainer of $400 to guarantee my availability for assignments in Texas with payment for published articles deducted from that retainer. Basically, he paid me in advance for work that later would be calculated on an hourly basis of $12 per hour.  I quickly realized, however that the complex legal articles required more time than we had anticipated. But he needed to limit my monthly payments to $400. Instead of making bonus payments every month to cover the gap between my actual time and the $400 retainer I already had received, he added the excess payments into the budget for the following month. But he and his assistant editors continued to call me with requests for a wide range of stories, and I quickly reached a point where the paper owed me more than the total of my retainers for several months into the future.

Although I produced eight memorable articles for The Legal Times, including a lengthy 3,865-word profile of Austin’s entire legal community in 1984, relations with the staff grew strained as I refused to accept some assignments in an attempt to let the paper catch up on its payments. Rather than attempt to renegotiate my retainer with an editor who seemed satisfied with my work, I started cutting corners to spend less time on assignments for him. The inevitable showdown occurred in the summer of 1985 when he rejected my manuscript previewing what was destined to become one of the most significant trials in U.S. history between oil giant Texaco and Houston oil independent Pennzoil. I eventually would cover the result of that trial for Time a year later, earning one of its precious bylines. But my initial effort for The Legal Times clearly lacked the effort, and I realized the editor was correct. When he rejected my story, I terminated our agreement in July of 1985 in a letter explaining I just couldn’t provide the complex service he needed for $400 per month.

Despite the loss of $400 per month and the shot to my self-esteem for getting fired for the first time in my life, I managed to salvage some positives from that experience. I feared that the paper had been abusing my services by paying just $12 per hour even if that amount equals $40 per hour in 2021. I also realized the difficulties facing my negotiations in the future assessing offers for service. I concluded I needed to become more creative in formulating compensation schemes. I also had delivered eight strong legal articles to enhance my portfolio of work samples, including one about the creation of a new Houston law firm that I managed to recycle into a more general interest version for Houston City magazine in 1985 for a $1,500 fee.

With Time, Money, JOC and the AAPG Explorer as regular clients by the start of 1986, I decided to make another attempt to land a publication in the legal field. Reviewing a large reference book of magazines and newspapers, I discovered a brief profile of a weekly newspaper in New York called The National Law Journal (NLJ). I did not know it at the time, but the NLJ ranked as an extremely successful national publication associated with The New York Law Journal, which enjoyed unique status as the official daily paper of legal record for New York. Lawyers were required to advertise all lawsuits in the daily paper. As a result, one of the NLJ’s editors would later explain to me, The New York Law Journal represented a license to “print money.”  The publisher of the daily New York paper had launched NLJ as a national show horse for his stable of legal news. As a weekly newspaper, the NLJ appeared to fit my reporting talents perfectly.

After plotting my campaign, I mailed a proposal to the editor of the NLJ, inquiring about his interest in having a Texas correspondent. He called immediately to say he actually had been considering the addition of correspondents, particularly in Texas where he thought Dallas ranked as a more likely location. But he described himself as stumped about the most equitable way to compensate a freelancer for regular services.

“Funny you should ask,” I thought, then I proposed my plan. If the NLJ could pay me a monthly retainer of $275, I said, I could send a list of potential story ideas twice each month. Then he and the other editors could select from that list and assign articles based on the paper’s standard article fees: Front page features paid $700, inside news stories paid $100 to $200 depending on length, and shorter department articles paid as little as $25 to $50 each. Essentially, I explained, the NLJ would be paying me $275 each month to scout for news in Texas and feel confident the editors knew about every potential story in Texas. To myself, I thought: Can I really persuade a magazine to pay me just to pitch queries?  He pondered my proposal for about a day, then agreed to give it a try.

For starters, he also assigned me one of his ideas as my first NLJ front page feature, analyzing the impact of the oil patch bankruptcy boom on Houston’s bankruptcy bar. I had to laugh because I had produced a story on the same subject just two years earlier for The Legal Times and already had a lot of the basic information and legal contacts in my files.

My NLJ Debut Feature

To succeed with the NLJ, I realized I needed a more efficient means of scouting for legal news items. The paper covered all manner of legal news, from colorful lawsuit and court activity to inhouse gossip and politics at law firms. In addition, my focus area covered the entire state. That mission statement required a wider view of the state. So, I invested some money in additional subscriptions to publications within the state. Besides the two Houston dailies, I added subscriptions to the weekly business newspapers published in each of the five largest cities.

And I discovered a true fountain of news tips in a relatively new weekly publication called Texas Lawyer. Technically a rival for the NLJ, Texas Lawyer covered the same news territory with a focus only on Texas. It published stories with much greater detail than needed by the NLJ so I could always turn its stories into something unique without plagiarizing it. In those days before the Internet, the NLJ editors lacked real-time access to Texas Lawyer, but I’m sure they had a subscription and received their copy in the mail just like me. They never complained about my use of Texas Lawyer as a tip service as long as I developed the resulting stories on my own. Of course, Texas Lawyer was scooping me all the time, producing its in-depth articles several weeks before I could report a matching story. But even when I worked in daily newspapers, I had always believed I could respond to any scoop by writing a follow-up story with new and unique information.

Beyond the smidgen of in-depth articles published by Texas Lawyer, the standard news articles represented fair game. Court decisions or law firm mergers are events with the same details regardless of which reporter is reporting them. I considered Texas Lawyer to be an outstanding example of regional, industry-specific journalism and had great respect for its staffers, some of whom I had known from working with them in the Houston newspaper community a decade before. One of them joked on occasion that I probably couldn’t do my job at the NLJ if he wasn’t doing his for Texas Lawyer. I imagined him mumbling to himself: “It’s sketchy enough for Taylor to recycle his own stories, why does he have to recycle mine?” I accused him of exaggerating the threat. Had I been offered a staff position at Texas Lawyer in the 1980s, however, I likely would have accepted.

But the NLJ proved a match made in freelancer heaven for me. After faxing my initial list of story ideas to the NLJ’s desk, I received a call from an assignments editor named Anthony Paonita raving about the magic of having a dozen article suggestions just plop on his desk. He assigned several for me that first week and encouraged me to keep them coming. I would learn that Anthony, like most NLJ staffers, boasted a law degree but enjoyed journalism more than legal work. I also recognized quickly the need for accuracy, considering that lawyers comprised the majority of the NLJ’s reading audience and serious libel lawsuits loomed just one misquote away.

Just as with Money, the experiment with me at NLJ prompted it to duplicate my suggested compensation scheme, recruiting freelancers in various other cities from Miami to Chicago to supplement the production by the staff in New York and full-time correspondents in California. Within a couple of years, the paper was flying us all into New York annually for a staff meeting and party. During the decade from 1986 until 1996, the paper would carry my byline 705 times below headlines on a wide range of legal topics. A law professor in San Diego regularly used my front-page 1995 feature on the proliferation of fake evidence as a required reading assignment for her law students. I discovered I could earn a more efficient payment from the shorter $25 or $50 articles on humorous events. Employing the Rockford Rule, I could churn out those things in 30 minutes or less including the research, easily earning more than $25 per hour. In 1990 when the JOC generated 28 per cent of my income with $16,815, for example, the NLJ added 16 percent with $9,204—equivalent to about $18,000 in 2021.

If Time and Ampersand had represented a vegetable garden and chicken coop in 1981, by 1988 the combination of Money, JOC and NLJ had expanded my regular food sources into fields of corn and wheat with pigs and cattle always available. Around that agricultural bounty, I still could hunt big game from magazines and other publications as opportunities arose.

Rather than relying only on my three core contracts, I forced myself to keep three or four random magazine assignments circulating at all times, leaving me busy both mentally and physically. I continued to build my story ideas inventory files and practice my ability to pitch them as time would allow. This financial security prompted a new assessment about freelancing as a business. Where I once considered it synonymous with unemployment, I now saw the advantages.

Old friends from The Houston Post constantly worried aloud about losing their one job and source of income if rumors of that paper’s demise proved true—as it eventually would in 1995. In contrast, however, I would need five or six of my client publications to fail simultaneously before seriously affecting my earnings. I realized I enjoyed more security from a variety of employers than my old colleagues had from their sole source of income. In fact, I would grow a bit nervous upon noticing that any one of my publications represented more than 25 per cent of my income.

But I felt like I was running on an endless treadmill. I had four or five part-time jobs that equaled a couple of full-time positions. Luckily, I was still young enough to handle the pressure, and my personal life had taken a turn toward more stability as well.

That turn began emotionally for me after my ex-wife had relocated to central Texas in late 1981. Until then, she had shared a lot of the responsibilities for parenting despite my control of custody. With her gone, however, I had them all the time and had to adjust. I began thinking about more domestic permanence for us. The following year I had moved us out of the city and into the Southwest Houston suburbs. By 1983 I was expecting to have both girls attending the same Vanguard magnet school for the next school year with Erin in third grade and Shannon in first, traveling by bus every day. I wanted to keep them as busy as possible with activities that would stimulate friendships and growth.

In February of 1983, Erin came home with a flyer about joining a girls fastpitch softball league in our neighborhood. So, I signed her up at Southwest Houston Girls Softball

Mr. Ladybug with Shannon and Erin in 1985.

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Association (SWHGSA) in Bayland Park, where she joined the roster of the Ladybugs—a team for ages 7-9. A new team created to meet the demands of an expanding population, the Ladybugs were coached by a pair of young women in their twenties, who quickly realized they had volunteered for more trouble than they anticipated. They had underestimated the aberrant psychology of little league parents. Some day I will write a separate article about my years involved with fastpitch softball for girls and women and perhaps entitle it “Blood Along the Baseline.”

Coaching in 1990.

For this article, however, I only need note that I became intricately involved with SWHGSA to a point where I even served one year as president and spent the next twelve years coaching girls as they aged through high school. Besides keeping us busy in the neighborhood, the softball league also provided the opportunity for my next long-term domestic relationship when I recruited one of the single mothers with a daughter on the Ladybugs to serve as their team mother in 1984, after I had become the coach. Before the end of that season, we had decided to rent a house together so her two daughters and mine could have a better living environment.

“Taylor will do anything to get a pitcher,” cracked one of my rival coaches when he heard about our new arrangement. Of course, we found a house near the park and set about to create our own little version of “The Brady Bunch.” Two years later we would buy a house in the area. Even with the four girls grown up and gone by 1995, we continued our arrangement through the present time.

Beyond the impact on my family, the relocation of my freelance business into a house provided significant benefits for stability. Moving August of 1986 into a house where I would live until 2013, I sequestered the dining room and adjoining living room for office space. I installed my desk, computer, fax and printer in the dining room and filled the living room wall-to-wall with four-drawer filing cabinets to hold my ever-growing morgue of magazine and newspaper clippings. By this time, I had my stable of regular clients in place with Money, JOC, NLJ and the AAPG Explorer.

But I also supplemented that income stream with assignments from a wide variety of additional publications, some of which became fairly regular as well, even if they did not last throughout my freelancing career to 1996. My records list annual freelance revenues for the rest of that decade as $54,210 in 1987, $50,116 in 1988 and $47,732 in 1989.

Among the various publications, two stand out in particular as regular contributors; Southwest Airlines’ Spirit in-flight magazine and the two city magazines for Houston in this period, Houston City and Houston Metropolitan. From 1984 into 1988, Spirit had assigned me to produce a monthly column summarizing all significant business news in the southwestern United States. Since magazine production lagged copy submission by about two months, this feature made absolutely no sense to me. Everything in my columns had occurred more than two months earlier than passengers could read about it. I assumed the editor just wanted to present her magazine as some sort of official publication of record for the Southwest region.

I researched these columns by subscribing to the weekly city business journals across the area, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Denver. And I collected $300 per month plus telephone expenses to provide a summary. Added to the fees for feature articles in 1986, Spirit ranked as my most important client that year with 17 percent of my income, just barely beating JOC with 16 percent and Money with 15 percent from a total of $36,512 (or about $92,142 equivalent in 2021). A new Spirit editor in 1988 decided he didn’t need this feature any more and terminated my contract. I responded by immediately canceling my subscriptions to most of the weekly business newspapers I had been reading just to produce the column and wondering how I could make up the missing $300/month.

The previous editor answered that question a year later, calling to introduce herself as the new editor for Houston Metropolitan and recruit me for another monthly business column for her at that magazine. Instead of summarizing old news, however, she wanted me to provide original reporting. I could write about anything in the business sector without a query for $500 per month.

“Of all the nerve,” I laughed: “You want original reporting?”

Besides recycling wherever feasible, I actually did produce a lot of original magazine reporting in those years. In addition to the column for Metropolitan, I sold her some of my most interesting feature ideas. One in particular I had wanted to do for some time about what I called “windfall psychology.” I wanted to locate several individuals who had suddenly received a large sum of money and find out how it affected them. That feature ran in Metropolitan’s December 1991 editions under the title: “Be Careful of What You Wish For.” I republished that article as a blog post in 2019.

In a bid to expand my opportunities with national publications, I joined the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA)—a well-respected organization that required applicants to qualify for membership while also paying annual dues of $160. The ASJA published an annual membership directory listing freelancers available for assignments by geography and areas of expertise. I stood out as one of the few freelancers available in Houston boasting expertise in many subject areas from business and general interest to sports and legal affairs.

With overlapping assignments from so many different publications, explaining my business to outsiders proved a bit like presenting a jigsaw puzzle. On one resume in 1996, I divided my historical client list into three groups: contract assignments; books; and, publications with occasional assignments and byline credits. Beyond my work for the regular contract publications already discussed, here is a quick look at the publications that provided extra income between 1981 and 1996:

The New York Times, USA Today, Newsday, Fortune, Compute, Wireless Week, Guest Informant, Discover, Vacations, PC Today, NG Magazine, Healthweek, International Business, Cuisine, Genetic Engineering News, Computerland, On Patrol, Business Month, Institutional Investor, Plants Sites & Parks, Southern Living and The Houston Press.

Next in Part Four: Beyond magazines to books and PR.

Solving Historical Cold Cases With Modern Techniques

Cold case true crime appears to be a popular entertainment genre these days. I know at least one retired cop who has been a regular on the series Cold Justice, which features him assisting former Harris County Prosecutor Kelly Siegler in a long list of unsolved crimes from the recent past. Besides that show, I often find the other true crime programs occasionally delving into the cold case realm for a look at other unsolved crimes.

Beyond the entertainment value, however, I’ve found an educational angle to the exercise of reviewing a mystery from the perspective of time. As witnesses age and their relationships shift, they often become more willing to share details than they had in the emotional moment of the crime. Viewers also have a chance to examine the actions of the suspects or relatives during the months or years following a crime. You get a more satisfying picture and a better understanding of the procedural strategies involved in solving a crime.

Still, I wondered recently why former Houston Homicide Detective Johnny Bonds was able to find a crucial witness 30 years after he’d been missed at the scene of a kidnapping by the small town cops who initially caught the case.

But how about those really, really cold cases—the dry ice variety. I thought about that recently when I spotted the CBS 48 Hours program revisiting one of the country’s ultimate cold cases in the 1892 Lizzie Borden murders in Fall River, Massachusetts, complete with a mock trial to determine if her 1893 acquittal had been correct.

That show reminded me of an interesting feature I wrote in 1993 for The National Law Journal about the burgeoning trend toward using modern forensics and legal strategy to unravel historical mysteries. Here’s the story published June 21, 1993, under the headline:

Historical figures get their day.

Legal ‘ghostbusters’ say serious issues are at stake

Earlier this year in Richmond, Va., convicted Lincoln assassination co-conspirator Dr. Samuel Mudd successfully appealed the 127-year-old verdict that sent him to prison for life.

Two years ago in San Antonio, accused Alamo deserter Moses Rose won a claim for return of his veterans’ benefits—more than a century after they were denied.

And today there’s an investigation under way to determine if legendary Louisiana Purchase explorer Meriwether Lewis actually committed suicide in 1809 as reported.

Has the nation’s legal community suddenly become lost in a time warp? Perhaps so. For it seems Messrs. Mudd, Rose and Lewis are merely the vanguard of a parade of dead people finally getting their day in court. While these modern verdicts in old cases technically cannot override judgments from earlier days, they still give descendants ammunition that can be used to persuade legislatures or government officials to provide some sort of latter-day relief.

New technology and courtroom techniques have given legal history buffs their first real chance to ride in a time machine. And the race is on to find the most captivating old cases and review them in a modern light.

While some have questioned the purpose of exhuming the century-old corpses, others insist there is much to be learned about the law and society from these excursions back in time. Still others tout the entertainment value of historical re-creations as a way to raise funds to pay the tab on more serious educational activities.

Whatever the purpose, the trend undoubtedly will gather steam because no one seems irritated enough to stand in the way.

“It's not controversial yet because everyone has better things to do than to make a cause out of this,” says Melvin B. Lewis, a professor at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. A specialist in expert witnesses and forensic sciences and a sidelines observer, he adds: “Is it a waste of time? It all depends on how it is done and its objective. If it is entertainment, it can be counterproductive.”

Trials and Evidence

Everyone from the American Bar Association to Texas Public Radio in San Antonio to the Smithsonian Institution has answered the call to solve some lingering legal mysteries.

“Every time I go in and prove the value of science in historic cases, I prove it has value in the contemporary,” says James E. Starrs, in explaining his motivation for becoming one of the nation's most visible legal ghostbusters from the forensic sciences camp.

For 17 years, Professor Starrs, a professor of forensic sciences law at the National Law Center at George Washington University in Washington. DC, has published a quarterly newsletter, Scientific Sleuthing Review, which now boasts about 1,000 subscribers.

His critics usually accuse him of using science to promote himself, but Professor Starrs says he believes the publicity from his adventures assists his primary cause of boosting an interest in forensic science among law enforcement and legal authorities He considers himself a spokesman for the dead, an emissary from the present come to solve the mysteries of the past.

“They say, ‘Let the dead rest in peace.’ But how do we know they are in peace?” the professor asks. “I provide a voice for the dead. The dead deserve the truth. I give them an opportunity to respond. It’s the lawyer in me. I’m giving them their day in court.”

‘Caliban of Colorado’

In the summer of 1989,  Professor Starrs led a team of forensic scientists into the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, where they recovered the remains of five supposed victims of Alfred Packer, a prospector convicted twice in the 1880s of murdering and eating them during a snowstorm in 1874.

Professor Starrs verified the record of Mr. Packer’s guilt, which had come under attack over the years by skeptics protesting Mr. Packer’s innocence. That exhumation, like the others, cost money. The professor says he’s made no profit from his projects and notes that he took out a second mortgage on his home to finance one mission He paid the tab for the cannibal victims dig by selling T-shirts decorated with skulls and skeletons.

The Colorado expedition serves as a textbook example of the prescribed method for historic inquiries. The team functioned like detectives investigating a homicide that had happened only days—not 125 years—before. They employed subsurface radar to find the graves and recover the skeletons; then the bones were cleaned, preserved and pieced together for scientific evaluation by the Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson. They reviewed records of the trials of Mr. Packer, studied his confession and testimony, and then compared the wound marks evident on the victims’ bones with his version of the events.

The researchers reported evidence of “substantial defleshing” in the bones of all five victims—“so thoroughgoiug, so conscientious and so exact as to be unmistakable proof of cannibalism.”

Armed with a modern autopsy report, Professor Starr asserts that prosecutors of the 19th century easily would have destroyed Mr. Packer's contention that he only nibbled on two of the corpses to quell hunger pangs temporarily.

“Alfred Packer was as guilty as sin, and his sins were all mortal ones,” the team concluded in its report. “It remained for this scientific investigation to prove with overwhelming conviction that Alfred Packer was not only the Colorado man-eater, not merely America's most celebrated anthropophagist, but also the ‘Caliban of Colorado,’ who butchered his five fellow prospectors.”

Code of Ethics

Professor Starrs is ever alert for new old mysteries to solve—he hopes soon to have a chance to locate and study the remains of Meriwether Lewis to determine if the famed explorer was actually the victim of a homicide or an accident, instead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1809. But the resulting publicity has caused him to develop his own code of ethics. “I’m going to give a talk soon about exhumations I'll never conduct,” he says. “I turn down 50 for every one I would do.”

Before determining whether an exhumation has scientific value, Professor Starrs first asks three questions:

·       Are there significant scientific issues to be resolved? He says science must be able to make a positive contribution to warrant an exhumation.

·       Is there a new scientific development, technology or understanding that could be used now that was not available or not applied to the original evidence?

·       Is it likely that the remains will be in analyzable condition?

Among the top names on his hit parade of exhumations is John Wilkes Booth, who is rumored actually to have survived a shootout with federal troops after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Did a body switch occur? Professor Starrs says he believes that only an exhumation of the body buried in Baltimore will answer the nagging question.

“In each and every case it behooves the investigator to look at whether there is an historical question that is relevant,” says another member of the scientific sector, William R. Maples, curator and professor of anthropology at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

Professor Maples has examined the deaths of President Zachary Taylor and Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro, and is working with Russian authorities on an investigation into the death of the Romanov family; he hopes to determine if the mysterious daughter Anastasia is indeed among the dead. Unlike Professor Starrs, Professor Maples says he's found a lot of grant money available for projects.

“To a certain extent there is a race under way to find ripe cases,” says Professor Maples.

Mock Trials

As the scientific sector of the historic re-creation subculture continues to time-travel with technological gadgetry, the second school of legal re-creationists—the mock trial gang—appears content to employ rhetoric and modern litigation strategies to review existing records.

Mock trial proponents seek unanswered or untried controversies and use the legal process to reach a conclusion about facts already in the record. Witnesses familiar with the issues help present them through interrogation by the attorneys. Critics argue that historic mock trials risk emphasizing too much show business at the expense of the truth. But the proponents say they work hard to ensure that entertainment value won‘t discolor the results.

San Antonio sole practitioner Pat Maloney helped represent an obscure dead man seeking return of his veterans’ benefits two years ago. His client was Louis “Moses” Rose, long vilified in Texas lore as the only man to desert the Alamo as the Mexican army approached in 1835.

Mr. Maloney was assigned the case by Texas Public Radio in 1991, when the station launched the first of three annual historical trials by reviewing the decision of the state in 1848 to deny Mr. Rose his request for a land grant as a survivor of the Alamo.

Attacking the case like any contemporary matter, Mr. Maloney researched the Alamo saga and quickly focused on the need to establish as fact an unproven legend—whether Alamo commander William B. Travis drew a line in the sand and invited the volunteers to stay or leave.

Like any other Texas lawyer, Mr. Maloney knew he wouldn’t have a hard sell in convincing a San Antonio jury that Col. Travis actually had drawn the fabled line. It’s an incident embraced on faith by most native Texans. Ironically, history reflects that his client, Mr. Rose, was one of the early disciples who spread the tale about the line, even drawing a picture of the event for others to see.

Mr. Maloney bolstered his client’s credibility with testimony about his background, including citations for bravery during battles under Napoleon in Spain, Italy and Russia. And he got a corroborating witness from the history books when he learned that Alamo survivor Susanna Dickinson also had confirmed the legend of the line.

Much as the jurors would have liked to have branded Mr. Rose a coward, several had to agree with Mr. Maloney that the line in the sand transformed his client’s decision into a voluntary one, and the result was a deadlocked panel. The judge jumped in, ruled in favor of Mr. Rose and symbolically awarded him Mr. Maloney's law offices as compensation.

His Name Was Mudd

Another example of the mock trial movement occurred Feb. 12, when the University of Richmond’s T.C. Williams School of Law conducted an appeal of Dr. Mudd's 1865 conviction as a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination. Notorious as the physician who set the assassin's broken leg, Dr. Mudd was tried by a military court and sentenced to life in prison. He served four years before winning a pardon.

As a professor of military law, Richmond’s John Paul Jones focused on the Mudd case as a way to show his students how slow the courts were then to adopt constitutional principles now taken for granted.

Dr. Mudd's appeal quickly attracted three prominent jurists to preside and pitted defense attorney F. Lee Bailey on Dr. Mudd’s behalf against John Jay Douglas, dean of the National College of District Attorneys in Houston.

Student briefs demonstrated that Dr. Mudd had been denied certain procedural rights and noted that civilian courts nearby easily could have assumed jurisdiction instead of the military tribunal.

Mr. Bailey relied on them and employed his own oratorical skills to assert that the military commission had been established “to satisfy the monumental embarrassment of lax security that allowed the president of the United States to be assassinated by an amateur.”

At the hearing’s conclusion, the panel decided that the military commission of 1865 actually had no right to try Dr. Mudd.

“It accomplished my goal of getting people thinking about the history of military law,” says Professor Jones. “We looked at the many procedural errors and learned that Dr. Mudd complained about things that other people could complain about up through World War II.”

Despite the widespread interest in his exercise, Professor Jones says he's reluctant to take the logical next step in the case of Dr. Mudd. Now that the military has been excluded from the case, the school wants to stage a real trial to determine if evidence exists to tie Dr. Mudd to the Lincoln conspiracy

It may be some time before Dr. Mudd again rests in peace, but he undoubtedly will be joined by other historical ghosts, willingly or not, as they roam the hallways of the nation’s courthouses in a belated search for justice.

Update

Since 1993, Professor Starrs has continued to scratch that itch for closure on old cases, as explained in his law school profile. He published a book about the Meriwether Lewis case, and his current Amazon.com author biography summarizes his work:

“James E. Starrs is the author of A Voice for the Dead and a longstanding contributor to The Scientific Sleuthing Review. He is an emeritus professor of law and a professor of forensic sciences at George Washington University as well as a distinguished fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He has been involved in many historical investigations, including the exhumation of Jesse James' remains and the Alfred Packer cannibalism case. He lives in Springfield, Virginia.”

The Lewis mystery generated a 2009 article in Smithsonian Magazine.

Meanwhile, Professor Maples died about four years after I wrote this story. His Wikipedia profile offers a brief review of his work and mentions his 1994 book, Dead Men Do Tell Tales. 

For more information on Moses Rose, Wikipedia offers a lengthy article and the Handbook of Texas Online features its own rendition. Rose’s mock trial attorney, Pat Maloney, died in 2005.   

Of course, if any readers have updates to offer, all comments are welcome.

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.