A Scoop Three Decades in the Making

By: Miki Johnson Published in Editor & Publisher March, 2006.

Ask reporter Larry Welborn how long he worked on his "Murder by Suicide?" series that ran in The Orange County (Calif.) Register last month and he can honestly answer, "31 years."

The eight-day series, including full Web treatment, video, and original illustrations, was the culmination of reporting that Welborn -- currently a legal affairs reporter -- has done in his spare time on an unsolved death case he covered in January 1974 that was originally labeled a suicide.

The news peg for the eight-part feature: The arrest of a murder suspect. The lesson for journalists: Never give up on a story.

Welborn was a 25-year-old reporter and new to the job when Linda Cummings was found hanged, naked, in the apartment building he drove past every morning. Her death was ruled a suicide, despite several conflicting accounts and reportedly suspicious behavior by the building's manager, then known as Louie Wiechecki.

Wiechecki was convicted six months later of murdering another of the apartment building's tenants, and Cummings' body was exhumed. Officials learned the introverted girl had sex just before she was killed and she had Thorazine in her system, which Wiechecki had used to subdue his second victim. Incredibly, despite this new evidence, a new investigation into Cummings' death was not opened. So Welborn began to gather evidence on his own.

He quickly talked to Cummings' stepmother -- who was certain Wiechecki was guilty -- and years later interviewed Cummings' best friend, the last person to see her alive. Over the years Welborn gathered support from a handful of law enforcement officials, and after years of research he felt he had more new information on the case than did the police.

When more sophisticated DNA testing became an acceptable court tool in the '90s, Cummings' body was exhumed a second time on July 13, 2004. Although the results garnered were inconclusive, Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin thought Welborn's extensive "crime notebook" -- with more than 60 interviews, photos, and circumstantial evidence -- was sufficient to issue a warrant for Wiechecki's arrest.

Welborn was present on Nov. 17, 2005 when a Henderson, Nev., SWAT Team arrested Weichecki, who by then had become known as David Stanley -- and he was charged in connection with Cummings' death. (His lawyers are working to have the case dismissed.)

Now with a fresh news angle and his final interviews completed, the time had finally come for Welborn to tell the story he'd been working on his entire career. Over three decades he'd written large blocks of the story, saving them first in hard copy from his old Smith Corona and later to the paper's server. But when it came time to publish, almost everyone thought Welborn had left out the most compelling storyline: his own.

"To write about myself is not what I'm trained to do or what I'm comfortable doing," he says. "It took some tooth-pulling on my part to get it right."

Overcoming his aversion to writing in the first person, Welborn created a serial story that interweaved case specifics, developments spurred by his own relentless newsgathering, and his personal reflections. To overcome a dearth of graphical elements, the Register's Craig Pursley created a series of eerie illustrations of key moments in the case. Even more pieces were tied in through an extensive Web page, including an animated timeline, video interviews (with Welborn and others), and images of Cummings' driver's license and death certificate.

"You can't just sit there and write stories for a print edition anymore," Welborn notes. The Web version of the story also contains links that take readers to notes on the sources of specific information. Their sheer volume, he explains, would have disrupted its narrative flow.

"Murder by Suicide?" ran under the Register's "Morning Read" heading, which it introduced about a year ago, envisioned as a "writerly" look at a story beyond the breaking news. Welborn reports getting hundreds of phone calls and e-mails in response: "In this day and age where stories are shorter and shorter ... it's wonderful to get to write a long narrative and flex your writing muscle."

But to Welborn, the most important aspect of his Linda Cummings story was not how it was told, but simply that it was told. On Jan. 24, 32 years after Cummings' death, Welborn -- having finally gained some sense of closure -- met with her family members and readers who wanted to say something at her grave site.

"Readers were saying they were thankful to get to know Linda and to get to grieve her," Welborn said. "That gave me a great deal of satisfaction that I did what I'm supposed to do as a journalist."