OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT BUT ON THE MARK

Mary Hargrove

'I keep telling people there is an angel that sits with me.'

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 1994

BEST-KNOWN INVESTIGATION: "Juvenile Justice: The War Within," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 1998

FAVORITE INVESTIGATION: A series on the Penn Square Bank in Oklahoma City, The Tulsa Tribune, 1982

Mary Hargrove's career has been as colorful as the many-hued file folders she uses to organize her cases: "Jim Guy Tucker's orange, James McDougal's green . . . ." Tucker's political career is just one of the casualties left in the crusading reporter's wake. Hargrove and her fellow reporters, Michael Whiteley and Don Johnson, felt gratified when the independent counsel Kenneth Starr said he'd read their work and assigned it to his staff. The former Arkansas governor was indicted in connection with the Whitewater case, and later convicted of conspiracy and mail fraud.

Last year Hargrove marked her fiftieth birthday by producing her fiftieth investigative series. As she summarizes her methodology, she laughs. "I keep telling people there's an angel that sits with me."

Her angel takes on some pretty macabre subjects. Hargrove's pieces on pedophilia, child pornography, and child abuse are not meant for breakfast-table consumption. Her 1998 series on juvenile justice won the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize and the Casey Medal; those are the two she's proudest of. The rest are on the floor behind her desk.

Hargrove feels she's living on borrowed time; she loves to tell about the five times she has "dropped dead" because of a disorder she describes as an "electrical shortage in my brain." Her brushes with death assure that she no longer takes a single day for granted. Her sense of humor often borders on the outrageous, and her colleagues respond in kind. For her birthday last year, for example, Democrat-Gazette staffers presented her with a mock defibrillator.

Hargrove attributes some of her tough edges to her childhood. She was close to her father, but faced emotional and sometimes physical abuse from her mother, who struggled with mental illness. It was the family secret. The experience helped her to identify deeply with many of her subjects. The child-abuse cases hit so close to home that Hargrove has developed coping mechanisms to keep from internalizing her subjects' pain. Sometimes she comes home and works in the garden; sometimes she has a massage. One thing she's learned not to do is talk about her work with her friends.

"I used to think it was good to tell people, just to get it out; but they'd get horrified, and then I'd get horrified with them," she says. "The talking about it makes it come alive again. It doesn't help me or them."

Griffin Smith, executive editor at the Democrat-Gazette, flew down to The Miami Herald in 1994 to hire her away. He's glad he did.

"We wanted an absolutely top-flight investigative reporter, which was what we got," Smith says. "Mary shines light into dark corners. There are others who do it, but she's the most experienced; I have to say she's at the top."