The new reporter Sam was planning to blindside was staring at a giant map of the Twin Cities hanging over the newsroom assignment desk. Tomorrow, he’d be thrown on the street to bring back a story. But today, he was getting to know the anchors, producers, and other behind-the-scenes players at Channel 3.
He’d apparently offered to listen to the police scanner and that pleased the bosses, because for most of us, the constant cop chatter was just more newsroom white noise.
Clay Burrel had been working at a TV station in Corpus Christi along the Gulf of Mexico when our news director, Noreen Banks, saw something special in his résumé tape and brought him north. A nice career move for him. Market size 129 to market size 15. I figured Noreen got him cheap.
He walked like a man who’s good-looking and knows it, not unusual in television newsrooms. More unusual was his footwear, cowboy boots of an exotic gray and white reptile skin.
“Glad to be working together, Clay,” I said, trying to live up to our Minnesota Nice reputation. “I just want to give you a little heads-up …” I started to warn him about the gossip writer when he suddenly went, “Hush, little lady.”
“There it goes again,” he said. “Most definitely 10-89. Homicide.” He pointed to the 10-codes taped on the wall next to the scanner box.
And because his ears heard news gold in a homicide call, within minutes he was on his way to get crime scene video with a station photographer and was soon leading the evening newscast with the EXCLUSIVE story of a decapitated woman—her nude body dumped in Theodore Wirth Park, about ten minutes from the station.
Wirth Park has a bird sanctuary, a wildflower garden, and a woodsy lake and creek framed by lush fall colors this time of year. But it also has a reputation for danger that’s stuck with it for the last decade or so after two prostitutes were found murdered there. In all fairness, their bodies were dumped. So they could have been killed anywhere, even the suburbs. And frankly, unless you count unleashed dogs and occasional complaints about sodomy in the bushes, the crime there isn’t any worse than in any other Minneapolis park.
Yet, when the news hit that another dead body had been found in Wirth, all across town, folks nodded knowingly.
Minneapolis Park Police had been waiting for this day to come and had installed a surveillance camera in the parking lot to record any future criminal suspect’s vehicle. But there was apparently a problem that night and the machine malfunctioned. So authorities had no video leads in the grisly slaying.
I was impressed—okay, I’ll admit it, jealous—as Clay Burrel broke one scoop after another regarding the homicide, starting with the fact that the woman’s head was missing.
((CLAY, LIVE))
WITHOUT THE VICTIM’S
HEAD … IDENTIFICATION IS
DIFFICULT UNLESS HER DNA
OR FINGERPRINTS ARE ON
FILE … AND SO FAR,
EMPTY ON THAT END.
Besides making it problematic for the police, I’ve often found that without the victim’s name, face, or history, it’s difficult to get viewers to care about a specific murder amid so much crime.
So at first, it didn’t bother me that I was missing out on the missing-head case. The way news assignments generally work, if you claim a story, it’s yours. You eat what you kill. Clay found the story; Clay owned it.
But interest in the murder continued to escalate as our new reporter explained that the victim had a nice manicure and pedicure, thus eliminating homeless women and making the deceased seem a whole lot like all the other women sitting home watching the news, doing their nails.
Or maybe it was simply curiosity about Clay Burrel that made them click their remotes in our direction.
With his Texas background, he was a little more flamboyant than the rest of the Channel 3 news team. Though he didn’t wear a cliché ten-gallon hat, he had several pairs of distinctive cowboy boots. (I suspected he wore them to appear taller. With the six-foot-five-inch exception of NBC’s David Gregory, many TV news guys, like Clay, tend to be on the short side—and self-conscious about it.) But viewers seemed instantly enamored with Burrel’s faint drawl and Texas colloquialisms as he chatted with the anchors about the status of the mystery.
((CLAY/ANCHOR/SPLIT BOX))
SERIOUSLY, SOPHIE, WITHOUT
THE WOMAN’S HEAD, POLICE
STAND ABOUT AS MUCH
CHANCE OF SOLVING THIS
MURDER AS A GNAT IN A
HAILSTORM.
I could see him becoming as popular as Dan Rather once was on election nights.
Noreen was thrilled with her young and hungry new hire because for the first time since she had taken over the newsroom four years ago, her job was on the line.
Channel 3’s market share was tanking after Nielsen installed a new ratings-measuring system in the Twin Cities—electronic people meters. The media-monitoring company claimed the devices were more accurate than the former handwritten diary system and could reveal ratings year-round instead of just in designated sweeps months.
This was supposed to take the drama out of February, May, and November, when television stations artificially stacked their newscasts with sensational stories of sin and scandal. In reality, newsrooms were now finding every month becoming a sweeps month.
“When it’s done, it airs,” Noreen had told us in a recent news meeting. Which introduced, in my opinion, an unhealthy—even desperate—speed-up factor to news investigations.
“I’m not interested in philosophy,” she responded when I tried to discuss the matter. “I’m interested in results.”
Not these results. How many people are watching the news isn’t as important as which people are watching. And women viewers ages twenty-five to fifty-four are the prize demographic.
Under the new ratings system, Channel 3 had fallen from a normally close second in that coveted tier to a distant third. That audience drop made our newscasts less attractive to advertisers and meant our sales staff couldn’t charge as much for the ads they did land. Barely six hundred people meters are used in the Minneapolis–St. Paul market to gauge the television habits of three million viewers. The station’s owners cried foul over how the new Nielsen households were selected. But Nielsen didn’t care.
Then Clay Burrel came along with tantalizing tidbits of murder and mayhem, and overnight, the numbers started shifting.
I was in the station green room, pulling a ceramic hot iron and styling brush out of my cubby for a quick touch-up before leaving to shoot a standup about identity theft. As I gazed in the mirror while I flipped my hair under, I appreciated the decades of history the green walls reflected.
Besides news talent, famous guests—presidents, athletes, even a rock star fond of the color purple—signed their names on these walls. I noticed a fresh addition, larger than the rest, as conspicuous as John Hancock’s on the Declaration of Independence. The sweeping signature read “Clay Burrel.” I actually wasn’t surprised, as I’d heard more than once over the last couple of days that everything was bigger in Texas.
As if on cue, Clay walked in to powder his nose and share with me the news that he was about to go on the air and inform viewers that “sources now tell” him the victim in the missing-head case was a natural blonde.
I congratulated him on his legwork. Then he started grumbling about how, when he accepted this job, he thought he was joining one of the top news teams in the market. Instead, by the look of things, he was the top.
“I guess what they say about Texans and bragging is true,” I replied, a little miffed he was acting like a star right out the gate.
“If you’ve done it, it ain’t bragging, little lady.”
“Stop calling me that.” The moniker was as condescending as a pat on the head.
“Sure don’t mean anything by it,” he said. “Just keep hearing what a hotshot investigator you are and so far I haven’t seen much investigating. Makes me wonder if you’re all hat and no cattle.”
I threw him a much-practiced If Looks Could Kill glare but instead of shutting up, he told me I was about as “cute as a possum.”
That was when I vowed to steal the headless murder story from him and make it mine.