New York

After reading the Times for an hour each morning, Isobel Gitlin accessed the online editions of nearly fifty newspapers nationwide. She looked for flares of human interest, compelling hometown eulogies (the late mayor once jailed for smuggling parrots, the plumber who croaked fitting brass at ninety-six); little, sparkling, readable bits headed nowhere but for Isobel’s keen, unquenchable eye. Amid the endless obits crossing her screen, Isobel noticed other things. Now, on the page beside the obits in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, she glimpsed five lines on the death of Floyd Ochs. When “Knowland & Sons” bounced up from the screen, she called Laticia Glover, the reporter at the Memphis paper.

Twenty minutes later she was storming the office of Ed Macmillan’s boss, a man known mostly by his nickname, the Moose. She said, “I’ve got a triple connection on three murders, two of them very high profile. My information indicates a single killer for all three deaths. And I’ve got them all connected to the big E. coli meat disaster.” He nodded his head to confirm the seemingly impossible. Then she injected a bold, ironic note: “It practically wiped out the South?”

“Yeah, I heard about it,” he said.

“Nobody has this story yet.” The last part seemed to get his attention.

Waiting for a reply, Isobel noted with pleasure that she’d not strangled a single sound.

Mel Gold was twice her age, and, as everybody agreed, closely resembled a moose. His thick gray hair fell forward exactly as a moose’s might. His pendulous chins obscured a brown necktie resting at half-mast on his mountainous paunch. A disconcerting forward thrust lent vigor to his tan, wrinkled, endlessly bumpy face. Gold was rumored to be ill-tempered and grim. She’d avoided him until now. “Close the door and sit down,” he said, in the street-tough rumbling voice that, in fact, sounded like that of a moose. “Exactly what the fuck do you think you have?”

Having done its heroic best when she needed it most, her stutter returned with moderate force. Gold, unlike others, did not seem to notice. She supposed he’d interviewed too many toothless people, and some, no doubt, without very much of their faces left in place.

Pacing herself, Isobel outlined the history: MacNeal’s sale of Knowland to Hopman’s gang, and the link created between those two and the great E. coli disaster. Then, hard on those killings, the Ochs affair and all that she’d learned from the Memphis reporter of Ochs’s connection to Knowland & Sons, and the subsequent talk about who was asleep at the packing plant switch at the time, and all of them—Ochs, Billy Mac, and Hopman—blasted to bits out of nowhere, all gunned down and hooked up by corporate ties, all circling around a single, deadly drain. “If this is a supermarket story I’ll be the first to s-s-say so,” Isobel ended, eloquently she thought. “There are no news people on this, are there?” His silence told her all she needed to know.

She asked for time and resources. Gold made another rumbling sound; one, she thought, if very much louder, might have attracted females of his persuasion. Moving that ponderous head to the side for a one-eyed view of the Fijian wonder (he’d heard all of that without interest), Isobel thought he might very well have smiled. She’d heard him called the Moose, and even once someone referred to Mel Gold as an ancient elk. She could not have known then, but now there was no mistaking it: he was no elk, ancient or otherwise. The elk, Isobel knew, was a herd animal. The bull moose walked alone.

He gave her a week and a barely adequate budget, assured her that she would get no other help, and declared himself a fool for fools and children.

“I need to report directly to you,” she said. “Otherwise this will get killed.”

It did not wash. “You give whatever you get to Macmillan. If he doesn’t think you’ve got anything, that’s what you’ve got.”

“Bu, bu, but—”

“No buts at all. You’ve got a week. Take it, and do not make me look like the asshole I probably am.”

By mid-afternoon she was on her way to Houston. Two days later she landed in Memphis, rented a car, and drove to Lucas. By week’s end she was in Boston. She shuttled to LaGuardia late Friday and took
a cab to her office at the Times. Saturday morning she met with Ed Macmillan. The next day she saw her article situated two inches below the fold of the most influential front page printed in America, the Sunday edition of the New York Times.

Killings May Be Connected to E. coli Disaster

By Isobel Gitlin

NEW YORK, Aug. 23—Law enforcement officials in three states have acknowledged the possibility that three unsolved murders may be connected to the E. coli outbreak of three years ago that left 864 people dead and thousands more sickened. Three men shot to death since June—Boston businessman Christopher Hopman, shot while on the golf course; Texas tycoon Billy MacNeal, gunned down in Houston; and Floyd Ochs, murdered in Tennessee—all have ties to a Tennessee meat-packing plant implicated as a source for the E. coli–tainted meat. Alliance Inc., where Mr. Hopman was CEO, was involved in a complicated buyout of Mr. MacNeal’s company that counted among its assets the packing plant of Knowland & Sons. Mr. Ochs was the Knowland plant manager in Lucas, Tennessee. Police officials in charge of all three cases tell the New York Times they are now actively investigating the theory that these murders could be connected.

Isobel’s story made the networks and cable news channels. Much of the old E. coli disaster tapes found new life on TV screens across the nation. She took calls from CNN, FOX, the network morning shows, PBS, and NPR. They all wanted her to tell her story on the air. Isobel refused, but did not say that her stutter was why.

There were plenty of other talking heads eager to analyze and dissect the story. The increasingly obvious fact that they knew nothing except what they’d read of Isobel’s reporting (and frequently misunderstood even that) qualified them fully for the work. In a slow news cycle their ongoing blather gave the story durable legs. In her absence from the screen, Isobel’s name was mentioned often, and was almost always praised. At Isobel’s request, the Times did not issue a photo of her, and holding that line required a good deal of bellowing from the Moose. Without having made a single appearance, Isobel Gitlin became—for no more than the allocated fifteen minutes she hoped—a media personality.

Isobel’s story and her insistence on personal privacy caused a stir at the Times. So many of the paper’s reporters fantasized about breaking a story like this one. In daydreams they saw themselves on Hardball and Crossfire or sitting next to Woodward or Bernstein at Larry King’s desk. Isobel had won the lottery, they thought, and refused to collect the prize. People who previously had nothing to say to her went out of their way to greet her. Others looked upon her, and the story of the triple murders, with more than a little skepticism. It was highly unusual for anyone’s byline to go from the obituary page to the front page overnight, and even more unusual for it to stay there. One thing particularly puzzled her: Why hadn’t other, more senior, reporters tried to muscle in, push her out? She asked Gold and the Moose told her bluntly, “They wouldn’t touch it with tongs.”

“Wh-what the hell does that mean?”

He looked at her and for a long moment tried, with his tongue, to loosen a piece of food stuck between two of his upper teeth. In that brief time Mel Gold realized he needed to protect Isobel against the reality of her chosen profession. “A lot of people think it’s bullshit,” he said with as fatherly a tone as he could muster. “The whole thing is crap, and not the kind of crap that belongs in the New York Times.”

“Oh,” said Isobel, shrugging her shoulders, a hint of a smile across her lips. “Wh-wh-what about you?” The Moose rolled his eyes and plunged the last half of a glazed doughnut into his mouth.

“If you’re worried somebody’s going to horn in and steal your story—don’t. Believe me, it’s all yours.”

“Thanks,” she said, and her smile told him she knew it was she riding the tiger and him holding the whip and chair.

She went back to Lucas to write a Sunday Times Magazine cover piece. The story played out across two pages with grainy photos of three dead men layered above an eye-catching shot of ground beef, and behind it was a black and white mural photograph of the one story, brick-sided, Knowland & Sons meat-packing plant. The article began:

Who Is Seeking Revenge?

By Isobel Gitlin

The Knowland & Sons processing plant sits on fertile flatlands next to the Smoke River, dominating the landscape as well as the economy of this small Tennessee city. According to town
fathers, pioneer hunters once roamed the Smoky Mountains’ foothills looking for deer, bear, and other commercial game, and settled in Lucas in the early 1820s. “Meat made this town,” says Ezra Combs, a city councilman with twenty-three years seniority. “Still does,” he adds with a good-natured wink. Like everyone in Lucas, Ezra knows that meat packed in this plant may have caused the deaths of 864 people and made more than seventeen thousand ill three years ago. “There’s good people living here and working hard every day at the plant,” Mr. Combs insists. “I know the folks at Knowland, known them for years. And each and every one of them is doing what’s humanly possible to find out just exactly what happened over there and make sure it don’t never happen again.”

Despite Mr. Combs’s assertion, someone, it appears, is seeking revenge. Whoever it may be is still unknown, and authorities have little to show for their efforts to identify him.