One helluva team

The Louisa County Courthouse

Thursday, Feb. 13, 1975, began as an ordinary day in the Channel 6 newsroom.

At mid-morning, there was no clear lead story on the horizon. The half-hour noon newscast went well, but still no compelling story surfaced. I ate lunch at my desk and monitored our radios and the scanners.

It was a telephone call just after 2 p.m. that changed all that. A source at the County Courthouse in Louisa -- about an hour northwest of Richmond, straight up Route 33 -- tipped us that a judge had been shot to death in his courtroom.

I had one crew that had just wrapped up an assignment. I sent them racing to Louisa. By the time they got there, a little after 3 p.m., we had worked the phones and filled in the story. The shooter had walked into General District Court at 2 p.m. with a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun concealed beneath his coat. In front of about a dozen courtroom spectators, he raised his shotgun and fired once, hitting a wall. Judge S.A. Cunningham rose from his seat behind the bench, and the shooter fired again, hitting the judge in the head and killing him. A deputy sheriff on duty near the judge took a minor hit to his side from the second blast.

An eyewitness said the shooter moved quickly next door to the clerk's office, where he shouted "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch" and then shot Sheriff Henry A. Kennon in the arm as the sheriff drew his gun.

The deputy sheriff who had been shot in the courtroom gave chase as the shooter fled the courthouse in a pickup truck. The deputy fired at the truck and told colleagues he thought he had hit the shooter. The deputy grabbed a sheriff's car and began pursuit, but he lost sight of the pickup. He called for police help.

Some of this we knew before our crew got to the courthouse. (Ours was the first TV crew to reach the scene.) They learned much more as they filmed interviews with eyewitnesses and the wounded sheriff himself. The crew then filmed establishing shots of the courthouse and the scene and were ready to head back to Richmond, where we waited to get the film processed and edited in time for the 6 p.m. portion of "News/90."

But before he left Louisa, our reporter heard from police at the courthouse that the shooter had been found holed up on a farm not far away. Dozens of state and county police were moving in.

That created a problem. Should I bring the crew home so we'd have film for the 6 p.m. newscast? Or should I send them to where the shooter was cornered and take a chance on having no film at all until 7? I decided to bring them home and send a second crew to the farm. It turned out to be a good call.

The second WTVR crew got to the farm just after 4 p.m., not long before state police opened up on the shooter. The Channel 6 crew got dramatic film and audio as the shooter exchanged gunfire with police. A police dog was sent in to help subdue the wounded shooter, and he was taken into custody.

Our crew got film of the shooter being loaded onto a police helicopter to be flown to Richmond's Medical College of Virginia Hospital. Then they headed back to the studio, where we hoped to have film of the capture in time for the 7 p.m. portion of "News/90." It would be tight, and we'd have to make a special processor run, but we thought we could do it. It was almost 6 p.m. by the time their film hit the processor.

Meanwhile, I sent the night reporter and photographer to MCV to get film of the helicopter arriving with the wounded shooter. In the photo lab, photographers were frantically editing the courthouse film for the 6 p.m. newscast. In the newsroom, I was pulling a script together as the reporter from the courthouse wrote his story and recorded his narration.

Just before 6 p.m., the crew from MCV radioed in to tell us they were on the way back with film of the shooter's arrival by helicopter. I was rapidly adding up times to see if there was any way we could get it on the air at 7 p.m. At this point, I was juggling lineups for two different broadcasts, the 6 p.m. and the 7 p.m., and beginning to think about the 11 p.m. I decided to take a chance. I scheduled another processor run for the 7 o'clock show.

Just before 6 o'clock, the film lab rushed the edited courthouse story up to the master control room, where it was barely loaded onto a projector before the broadcast started. I handed new scripts to the anchorman and then watched the show from master control. Our coverage looked great. The anchorman tagged the story with new information about the capture of the shooter, promising film from the scene at 7.

By 6:10 I was back in the newsroom, just as the crew from MCV arrived with their film. The lab tech loaded it into the processor. In the newsroom, the courthouse crew updated their story for 7 p.m., and the crew from the scene of the capture wrote and edited their new story for the 7 o'clock show. If luck was with us, we'd be able to tag it with fresh film of the shooter arriving at MCV.

Into this newsroom madhouse walked Preston Glazebrook, our veteran crime-beat stringer, waving his camera. "I've got film from MCV," he said. I told him our crew had already started processing film of the helicopter arrival and the shooter being whisked into the emergency room. "I've got something better," he told me. "I shot film inside the hospital while they worked on that son of a bitch who shot the judge." Preston hadn't stopped filming at the ER door. He'd followed the shooter's gurney right into the emergency room and continued filming while MCV doctors worked on him. Several minutes passed before somebody noticed Preston and kicked him out.

"Tack Preston's film onto the end of the processor run and let's see if we can get it on the air at 7," I told the lab tech. At 6:15, Preston's film hit the soup. At 6:45, the "News/90" director was screaming for scripts and film. All I could do was give him anchor lead-ins and tell him I'd be in the control room with him: "We'll wing it."

The journalism gods were with us. We led the 7 p.m. newscast with the re-worked and updated version of the courthouse interviews and film. We followed with the dramatic report of the shootout and capture at the farm. The film of the helicopter arrival was loaded on the projector just as it was being introduced. The newscast worked flawlessly. We had every aspect of the story nailed, right up to images of the moment when the emergency room staff ripped open the shooter's shirt and began to suction out his bloody wounds. All told, we devoted 10 minutes to three separate reports on the story. And even though we had taken enormous chances and pushed people and equipment to their limits, to the viewer it looked as smooth as silk.

I've never been so proud as I was that day of what our WTVR news staff could do under pressure. We were a helluva team.