GEORGE
DeVAULT WRITER
RETIRED FIREFIGHTER
AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST

 
Synopsis

Think Jeffrey Epstein meets Murder on the Orient Express. But no one’s snowbound on a train in the mountains of Croatia. One hundred-plus cops, lawyers, crime victims or their next of kin are locked up in the notorious Ohio Penitentiary with real convicts. Officially, they’re attending a seminar on prison reform, complete with a mock execution on Halloween. Ace crime reporter Ned Stoudt is behind bars with them. He’s covering what could be the story of a lifetime — if it doesn’t kill him first.

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Excerpt

Wednesday, October 25, 1973
1:37 p.m.

Murder is my specialty. But money and music are what bring me into the newsroom early today.

It’s payday. I have to pick up my paycheck. And the entertainment editor has a new record album for me. He needs a review of Frank Zappa’s latest, “Over-Nite Sensation.” Needs it yesterday, if not sooner.

Writing about music keeps me from going insane on a steady diet of murder and mayhem. I turned twenty-two in July, but I already have seven years experience on the bloody breaking news side of the newspaper racket. Covered my first murder when I was fifteen years old.

Yeah. Crazy childhood. I know. Tell me about it.

As a side hustle, I review new records and live concerts. The concerts make my ears ring for a day or two. Songs get stuck in my head. Sometimes, they seem to foretell the future. It’s eerie.

My name is Ned Stoudt. I’m night police reporter at the Columbus Evening Dispatch, circulation 259,127 daily, 371,551 on Sundays.

For a hundred and thirty bucks a week, I work 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Sunday through Thursday. That’s not bad money in 1973 for a kid with no college degree.

My job is simple. If it burns, bleeds or blows up in a 10-county area of Central Ohio during my assigned hours of darkness, I’m responsible for informing the world in both words and photos. I cover everything from arson to zoosadism.

I work out of “the cop shop,” a dingy pressroom in Central Police Headquarters, a depressing Depression Era government building right out of a classic film noir.

I’m trying to fly under the radar today. Get in — and out — of the newsroom with my paycheck and the album before anyone notices. It’s not easy.

At the top of the short flight of steps leading down into the newsroom I freeze.

The view is staggering. Makes me think I’m standing in the top row, the nosebleed section, of the Colosseum in Rome, staring down into the ancient arena. History and tomorrow’s headlines come alive in the same instant. Old-timers say this was once the swimming pool area of the YMCA before the Y moved out and the Dispatch moved in way back in 1923. Little has changed in the newsroom during the last half century.

Below me, spreading out in one huge room that seems almost the size of a football field, are today’s gladiators. Reporters. Copy editors. Proofreaders. Photographers. Artists. All hunkered down over vintage typewriters and telephones, locked in life-and-death struggles with stubborn sources, cranky editors and fast-approaching deadlines. The pounding pulse of the Buckeye state’s capital city.
The sight is an instant adrenaline-caffeine-nicotine cocktail. Gets me high every time.

I shake off the trance. My first step down seems to trigger an invisible tripwire.

A screaming electric guitar riff explodes in my head. Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man.”

The managing editor’s head snaps up from his reading. He peers through the haze of cigarette smoke that always shrouds the cavernous newsroom. His scowl looks as toxic as a Times Square gutter on New Year’s Day.

“Stoudt!” he yells across the newsroom. “See me before you leave.”

Oh, shit! What’d I do wrong now?

Maybe it’s the sheriff. Maybe the sheriff complained. I know he wasn’t happy about me slipping into the County Jail the other night. I crowded onto the prison elevator with the paramedics. An accused serial arsonist had set everything in his cell on fire. Filled the whole jail with smoke. Six inmates wound up in the hospital. My photo of a sweat-streaked inmate trying to revive a half-naked prisoner passed out on the floor wound up on the front page.

The sheriff was not amused. He took a lot of heat for letting a firebug have matches in his cell.

Maybe the editor wants to encourage me to get a haircut, again. A Marine fighter pilot in the Korean War, he still sports a military buzzcut two decades later.

“You’re starting to look like a damn hippie,” he’s told me more than once.

True, my hair is down to my collar. But, I argue, it helps me mix more easily with undercover cops, musicians and most of the people I have to interview.

“After all,” I say, “this is the swinging seventies, not the frumpy fifties.”

“And this isn’t Rolling Stone or that bleeding-heart Washington Post,” he replies.

No kidding. The Dispatch is a conservative, rock-solid Republican paper. The last time the paper endorsed a Democrat over a Republican for president was in 1916 when Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection.

Race figures into it, too. When I photographed my first race riot in 1969 — a few days before my eighteenth birthday — Dispatch style was to identify those arrested by race. “Joe Blow, 34, a Negro …” At least the copy desk capitalized the “N.” The paper doesn’t do that anymore.

But conservatism runs even deeper. When a new study on exercise came out recently, the Dispatch’s headline read, “Jogging Second Best Exercise.”

What was number one? Sex. But not in a headline in a “family newspaper.”

My first instinct is to flip him off. Instead, I flash a hearty thumbs up.

I don’t dawdle at my office mailbox. I grab my paycheck and head straight for the coffee machine. I need coffee, bad. What I get is the last cup of mud from the bottom of the 40-cup urn. It’s thick, black and rich with coffee grounds. Perfect.

Fortified with killer coffee, I stick my head in the editor’s office door.

“You want to see me, Mr. Rhodes?”

“Affirmative.”

Any crocodile would envy his toothy smile.

“Remember me saying that you’re going straight to hell for your sassy leads?”

I cringe. His assessment of my latest editorial sin still smarts. It was a second-day story about two window washers. They’d dangled precariously on the side of a mid-rise office building for hours after their scaffold partially collapsed.

Everyone already knew the fire department rescued the men safely. No one was hurt. The story had a happy ending. So, I figured, what the hell? Why not have a little fun with the piece?

“It was only the start of the work day,” my lead began, “but Joe and Mike were already at the end of their ropes.”

The copy desk loved it. Even worked the play on words into the headline. That afternoon the window washers barged into the newspaper office. They each bought a dozen copies of the paper. Readers howled. But the grumpy old editor growled, “You’ve got a damn lot of gall!”“Well, you’re still going to hell for your cavalier attitude,” he says. “But first, you’re gonna make a little scenic detour.”

“Where to?” I ask.

“Prison. The old Ohio pen. The bloody Buckeye Bastille.”