COVERING THE CRIMES

I got my first start in free-lance journalism twenty years ago in North Carolina, writing about murder and the criminal justice system. My big break came in the case of Joan Little, a young black woman accused of murdering a white jailer she lured into her cell. With their client facing an all-white jury and the possibility of the death penalty, Little's attorneys argued successfully -- that the woman had acted in self-defense while being sexually assaulted.

From then on I bounded around the southeastern United States, from courthouse to courthouse, investigating and writing about similar cases, usually involving race, sex, class, and the death penalty. Many of the defendants became better known by city and number than by name: the Wilmington Ten, the Charlotte Three, the Dawson Five, and Tarboro Three.

During this period, any transient twinges I felt about profiting from others' pain were offset by the sense that in the process I was rescuing a few people who had been dropped onto the fast track to the electric chair and occasionally exposing injustice in pockets of the rural South largely bypassed by the civil rights movement.

In due course the defendants in the cases I wrote about shifted from the poor, black, and often innocent to the middle class, white, and often guilty. By that point, I felt no socially redeeming value in the work I was doing: all I was exposing was the depth of depravity people were capable of.

The nadir came in 1978, when I found myself commuting between Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was covering the trial of Green Beret Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, accused of killing his pregnant wife and two small children, and Miami, where I reported on the murder trial of accused serial killer Ted Bundy, with whom I had previously had an exclusive interview in his Tallahassee jail cell. After yet another day of viewing color slides of Bundy's mutilated victims in the Miami courtroom, I simply broke down during dinner with a television reporter and began to weep.

Despite the free-lancer's truism that "murder sells," I felt I couldn't do any of this anymore, and resolved to give it up. But less than a year later, on a Saturday morning in November 1979, I got a call from the national desk of The New York Times, my main client. I raced from my home in Durham, to Greensboro, North Carolina, to report on a political confrontation between a group of young communists and members of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi party that had turned deadly. Some of the killed and wounded, I discovered in the hospital emergency room, were college classmates and acquaintances. After I had covered the funerals and the subsequent state and federal trials, I decided I was through with the murder beat.

Twelve years later, by which time I was a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times's Orange County edition, I received a message from the editor to come to her office. The recession and accompanying staff buy-outs and draw-down dictated that my arts reporting slot evaporate. I would be returning to the city room, where I had worked before, and -- for three months -- I would be covering criminal courts. I objected offering a condensed version of the above, with success.

I felt I could do anything for three months. While the workload of the court beat is heavy and almost always on deadline, the work itself isn't that hard, especially now that tape recorders are permitted in California courtrooms. So I gritted my teeth and set to work.

The promised three months on the beat became six months, then nine, with no relief in sight. Even by late-twentieth-century American standards, the list of cases I covered was a nasty one, replete with mindless acts of violence, mostly against women and children:

* An unbalanced woman, abandoned and humiliated by her husband, shot and killed her two young daughters and unsuccessfully tried to kill herself. found not guilty by reason of insanity, she was committed to a state mental hospital.

* An abused and probably braindamaged man, fired from his fast-food restaurant job and high on drugs, kidnapped a nine-year-old girl on the way to school, sexually abused her, suffocated her in a motel room, and dumped her body in a park. During the trial, he barked like a dog, but the jury recommended the death penalty nonetheless.

* An eighteen-year-old got a life prison term for shooting to death a high school classmate in what he claimed was an accident. Four years earlier, the same youth shot to death a thirteen-year-old friend under nearly identical circumstances, a slaying that was ruled accidental at the time.

* A twenty-one-year-old man got a short prison sentence for the driving-while-intoxicated, hit-and-run killing of a mother of three in an alley behind her home as her children looked on. The killing was videotaped by the man's companion in the stolen truck, who was also drunk.

* A thirty-year-old man stalked his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child, chased her down on the street, and shot her point blank with a shotgun as she begged for her life. He then doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire, leaving him severely disfigured. He was sentenced to from twenty-nine year to life.

* With the help of a girlfriend, two career thugs gained entry into the home of a Japanese-American couple on the pretext of buying their car. The thugs then dragged the couple into a bedroom, put their heads between the mattress and the boxspring, and -- despite the chanted Buddhist prayers of the wife -- shot them both in the head, leaving the woman dead and the man paralyzed. One of the thugs was sentenced to death, the other to life without parole.

* A thrill-killing couple raped, sexually assaulted, and murdered two young women in six days. Both the man and woman were sentenced to death.

There was never enough time to sit through one trial from beginning to end. Daily, I was flitting from one to another for quick hits -- opening statements, most lurid/critical testimony, closing arguments, verdicts, and sentencing. I found the pace unrelenting, the beat more grueling than ever.

It wasn't that the murder beat had changed over the year. I had. By this time, I was forty-four, married, and the father of two small children. My father had died and my mother was a cancer patient. Mortality, vulnerability, and loss in my own life were no longer issues I could brush aside. The pressure was getting to me. Four days a week I listened to testimony, looked at evidence, and interviewed tearful parents and siblings after the verdicts. On Fridays, sentencing days, I listened as friends and relatives of the slain and maimed told the judge why murderers should be executed or sent to prison forever. Gloom turned to depression. Sleeping became difficult. My home life was affected.

Only by taking comp time to spend my birthday with my son did I avoid having to write about the opening stage of the trial of a twenty-year-old woman later sentenced to the death penalty for killing a nine-year-old girl, stabbing her fifty times to make sure there would be no witness to a burglary.

Certainly, there are many occupations more psychologically battering and wearing on the spirit than covering criminal courts -- oncologist, emergency room physician, paramedic, psychiatric social worker, cop on the beat, to name a few. On the other hand, these people attempt to help those they attend to, something I could not fairly say I was doing. Bearing witness as society's surrogate was no longer enough. I wanted off the beat, but editors -- citing my competence and output and their staffing problems -- have so far declined to move me.

The court beat is a good job for an ambitious young reporter or anyone who can see what these trials offer: fodder for career-building, a guarantee of frequent bylines and good display. Some people thrive on it. My predecessor, who was promoted to columnist, almost had to be dragged off the beat after nine years. He told me that he approached trial coverage as if it were a jigsaw puzzle and that he enjoyed watching good attorneys -- and the system itself -- work.

The key to effective and sensitive court coverage, I think, is to avoid the two major pitfalls in dealing with murder cases on a regular basis. That is, if you protect yourself too much by screening out the unpleasantness, you cheat the reader by failing to convey the horror, which is, after all, your job.

On the other hand, if you allow yourself to absorb the reality of what you see and hear, you run the risk of destroying yourself emotionally. When you can no longer walk that fine line, you should be able to leave the beat.

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