The call came early in the morning.
Three teenagers died in a car crash on their way to school. The Eagle-Tribune’s city editor told me to go to their homes and get information about the youths. Nervous and scared, I knocked on the first family’s door. Inside, a woman was screaming. A man opened the door and let me in. He sat at the dining room table and sobbed as he shared stories about his daughter.
The next family swore at me as I stood on their doorstep. The third teen’s family gave me a few details before breaking down and asking me to leave. By the time I got to the newsroom, I was shaking. I cried as I wrote the story on deadline.
I was 24, a rookie reporter, and I had never interviewed families whose kids died tragically. After I finished the story, I made my way to Executive Editor Dan Warner’s office.
“Why do we do this?” I asked.
“Because we want people to know that these kids mattered,” Dan told me. “That they were more than a statistic, a number.”
I nodded and left his office. I went on to interview many more families whose loved ones were murdered or died in tragic accidents. I still cried after or even sometimes during the interviews, but I understood why I was there.
It was one of the many important lessons Dan taught me. You need to know why you are telling the story. Why it matters. Why it is important.
I worked for Dan in the 1980s when journalism was king, before the internet, before global news streamed 24/7, before social media churned out influencers and wannabe journalists. Back then, people relied on and trusted their newspaper to tell them what they needed to know in their communities. And Dan was hellbent that we kept our readers informed on news that mattered.
He was an old-fashioned newsman who believed in shoe-leather reporting, pounding the pavement, knocking on doors to get facts and interviews. If you were in the newsroom phoning sources, you weren’t doing your job.
And there was no stonewalling Dan Warner. If city hall, the police, fire or school departments wouldn’t give us answers, Dan demanded we get the information elsewhere − anywhere.
“Get the damn story,” he’d tell us.
When I first started working at The Eagle Tribune, I was terrified of Dan. He was a yeller, a smaller version of the fabled TV show newsman Lou Grant. Dan didn’t suffer fools or excuses. If you screwed up, you got yelled at. And heaven help you if you made the same mistake twice.
Deadlines were also sacred to Dan. He believed reporters should write concisely and quickly. One morning, I fell short of Dan’s standards. There was a shooting in Lawrence a few hours before the afternoon paper’s deadline. I was assigned to take notes from reporters on the scene and write the story. As I attempted to craft a snappy lede, the red light flickered on the newsroom ceiling. The presses were running − the newspaper printing machines had started to produce that day’s paper.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dan march out of his office. “Walsh!” he hollered. “Where’s the damn story!”
He stomped over to my desk, stared at my unfinished article and began dictating: “There was a shooting on the streets of Lawrence today. Period. One man was shot. Period. Another was injured. Period. We have no more information at this time. Period! Now send the damn story!”
Dan didn’t believe in flowery prose. He preferred staccato simple sentences. “Just tell the story,” he’d say. “What do people need to know?”
I learned my biggest lesson from Dan when I was assigned to work on a story about William Horton Jr., a convicted first-degree killer. Horton was sentenced to life without parole for stabbing 17-year-old Joseph Fournier to death during a 1974 gas station robbery in Lawrence.
In the spring of 1987 while The Eagle-Tribune reported on historic flooding in the Lawrence area, we learned that Horton had escaped from prison. As details emerged, we discovered he had been released on his 10th unsupervised weekend furlough and decided not to return to Walpole, the most secure prison in Massachusetts.
No one − not the police, prosecutors, nor Joseph Fournier’s family − knew about the state’s furlough program that allowed rapists and killers to leave prison on unsupervised weekend passes.
After Horton escaped, he fled to Maryland where he broke into the home of a young couple and terrorized them for 12 hours. He raped the woman at gunpoint, tied her fiancé up and repeatedly stabbed him. Thankfully, the couple escaped.
Fournier’s family, the Lawrence police, lawmakers and the community were outraged. Why were murderers being let out of prison on the weekend?
Under siege from the media, police and politicians, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections refused to release information about Horton or the furlough program.
The agency’s arrogance infuriated Dan.
“We’re not going away,” he told the newsroom. “We’re going to write about this every single day.”
And we did. For nearly a year, we wrote about Horton, the furlough program and the trauma Horton inflicted on the Maryland couple and Joey Fournier’s family.
While corrections officials repeatedly said, “no comment,” we staked out the homes of prison guards, trying to get them to talk off the record. We visited Walpole and talked to other murderers who knew about Horton and the furlough program. We fought and petitioned state agencies, demanding records on Horton and other prisoners’ weekend passes.
Correction officials claimed the Massachusetts furlough program was similar to those in other states. Federal sources couldn’t confirm their claim; there wasn’t a nationwide survey on furloughs. So, I did my own. I called corrections departments in 49 states and learned Massachusetts had one of the most liberal furlough programs in the country. Most states allowed prisoners on weekend passes months before they were released, so they could find housing and a job. Furloughing a first-degree killer like Horton was out of the question, they said.
Over the course of nine months, we wrote 200 stories about Horton and Massachusetts’ flawed furlough program. Those stories changed laws − killers don’t get out on weekend passes anymore. Our stories also affected the 1988 presidential election between George Bush Sr. and Massachusetts’ Governor Michael Dukakis, and we earned journalism’s highest honor: the Pulitzer Prize.
Dan’s dogged pursuit of the truth taught me the power of journalism and the tremendous responsibility reporting demands.
For the next four decades, I held Dan’s lessons close as I pursued other stories at newspapers in Florida and Maine. Though I worked for some terrific editors during my career, none compared to Dan. He had fire in his belly, news ink in his veins and an unbridled passion for journalism — a passion that inspired legions of reporters.
I will never forget him or the twinkle in his eyes when you handed in a story that met his expectations. “Great job,” he’d say. And those two words made you hungry for another story, eager to earn his praise once more.
For this cub reporter, there was no better gift than to work for Dan Warner during journalism’s heyday. His lessons live on and his mantra still echoes in my mind, “Just tell the damn story.”
Barbara A. Walsh is a veteran journalist and the author of seven books. A native of Pelham, New Hampshire, she has worked for newspapers in Ireland, Massachusetts, Maine and Florida. She was one of two Eagle-Tribune reporters assigned to the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Horton Jr. story for nearly a year. You can email her at bwalshauthor@gmail.com