Unholy Week

A confession, and a lesson.

This is a parable about ignorance and inexperience, of the sort that dominates the Trump Administration. But it is also an appalling story about me — a long-ago Holy Week episode in which my own misplaced sense of justice, duty and righteous zeal were devastating for all involved.

It is not easy to tell this story, which began on Easter Monday 1979, but if ever there were a time to unburden myself it is now.

This was in the Jimmy Carter years, which is relevant because he was widely regarded as not being up to the job of running the U.S. Government. The place was South Temple, Pa., a working-class suburb just north of the small city of Reading, where I was a 23-year-old reporter at the Reading Times, fresh off the obituary desk and maybe two months on the police beat. I arrived at work at 1 pm Monday to learn of a brutal rape and murder that morning in South Temple. The community is what journalists call a “tidy suburb” of Reading, lined with modest post-war houses and generally free of crime. The victim was a 50-something widowed nurse, Myrtle Rupp, who had been recovering from foot surgery and was discovered by her neighbor, in her bed, bound in the sash cord of her living room drapes.

That neighbor, whom I will call Mr. N, had been helping Mrs. Rupp with trash and other household jobs during her convalescence. On this day, the scrupulously neat house was a scene of horror. Needless to say, the gruesome killing was a shock for the neighbors, apparently none more than Mr. N.

The crime was discovered on the news cycle of the afternoon paper, the Reading Eagle, so my job was what we call a “second-day story” — to harvest what details I could about the thus far unavailing police investigation and canvass the neighborhood for information, amounting to predictable expressions of shock and trepidation. My first stop, naturally, was Mr. N. He opened his door for me and, with some gusto, answered my obvious questions. Indeed, he was the focus of my story, because he was most animated, voicing his fear and vowing to install security lights for the protection of his own. As if there were some sort of deranged serial killer on the loose. And why not? His kindly next-door neighbor was dead and the cops had absolutely nothing. The killer left behind at most a half of a fingerprint. This was long before the testing and data-basing of crime-scene DNA.

The chief of police was a nice fellow called Harley Smith. I asked him, by the by, if the neighbors all had alibis. The answer was yes. And so went the routine second-day story, 20 column inches stuffed with lots of words and no insight. About a month later, I got a call from Chief Smith. He wanted to know why I asked about alibis.

“I dunno,” I said, “the next-door neighbor, Mr. N, was so voluble, it was almost as if he were playacting.”

“That’s interesting,” Harley said. “His alibi has fallen apart. He told us he was at work, but we saw his time cards and he was off when the murder went down.”

It was more than that. Harley had brought in the Pennsylvania State Police, who had given the case to a profiler and propounded a theory of the crime. As they saw it, Mr. N wasn’t just a neighbor who cheerfully helped the victim during her recuperation; he was an ardent secret admirer whose fantasies finally got the better of him. On Easter Monday, they surmised, he used the key Rupp had given him to enter her house. Then he surprised her, made sexual advances, was spurned and, in his lust and humiliation, committed the ghastly crime. Unfortunately, the only physical evidence they had to work with was that half-fingerprint, which might or might not have belonged to the killer, and Mr. N, through a lawyer, had flatly refused to supply his own. Which was suspicious in itself.

“Have you gone through his trash for a beer bottle or something?” I asked the chief.

“Yeah,” Harley said. “Nothin’.”

A reporter’s duty in such a circumstance is either to write a story about how the police investigation has focused on the neighborhood itself, or even a specific unnamed person of interest, or to write nothing at all. But as I’ve previously noted, I was very green and had no idea what I was doing. In college, where I’d been less than a year earlier, I was an English major. I read a lot of novels, but had taken one journalism course, introductory newswriting. I’d done an internship at a tiny daily newspaper, where I wrote mainly about milk marketing, a Renaissance festival and tiny filler shorts. One I recall was about trash and litter around Greece’s Colossus of Rhodes. The headline I came up with was Colossal Rhodes Squalor. The pun was pretty good, but not exactly rich with journalistic fundamentals. Also, I misspelled “Colossal.”

Still, now filling the role of hard-bitten cops reporter, I was determined to journalize the fuck out of the Rupp murder story. And I had a plan. I went to see Chief Smith. What if, I proposed, I personally were to go back to Mr. N’s door, on the pretext of writing an update on the investigation? And what if I were to be holding a pen and my notebook? And what if I were to drop my pen at his feet? And what if he were to pick it up for me, leaving his fingerprints on my pen?

Harley loved the idea, perhaps unaware as I was that it constituted a shocking and absolute breach of journalistic ethics, which dictate that news organizations cover the government, not act as its agents. And not misrepresent ourselves to sources, much less entrap them. And not conduct our business with three police cars just around the corner, in the event things get ugly. No matter how guilty that subject may be.

Thus commenced my very brief career as an undercover detective. On the appointed morning, I knocked on Mr. N’s door. He answered it, in foul humor. The police, after all, had been treating him like a criminal. When I explained my assignment to update the Rupp story, he demurred. “I’m done with you people. Leave me be.”

That’s when the black Flair felt-tip pen “slipped” out of my hand and dropped to his feet. Mr. N looked at it. I looked at it. I looked at Mr. N. Mr. N. looked at me. I looked at the pen, which rested undisturbed on the threshold. Mr. N, too, stood motionless.

“I got that,” I said, and retrieved my own pen. Thus ended my very brief career as an undercover detective. Because I was not only unaware of the unforgivable journalistic sin I was committing, I was also a bumbling idiot. (I employ the past tense to leave the impression that somehow over the decades I have become the very picture of savoir faire.)

For the next 29 years, I dined out on the story of both my ridiculous behavior and the sorry limits of criminal justice. Mr. N, meanwhile, fell into alcoholism and died. It was a tragedy upon a tragedy, but did strike me as some sort of karmic justice. Then in 2008, a Pennsylvania cold-case investigator, who was following up on unsolved crimes with DNA evidence that technology had caught up with, tested the blood and semen on Myrtle Rupp’s bedspread. It led directly to the culprit:

Timothy Krajcir, a convicted rapist and murderer who at the time was serving consecutive life sentences in a maximum security prison for other crimes. No, not Mr. N. Yes, a serial killer. I can offer no words sufficient to convey the damage from my ignorant zeal in such a misplaced and malignantly incompetent expression of civic duty.

All of the forgoing might confirm your worst suspicions about journalists. Let me say only this: I was 23 years old, I had no formal education in journalism, I had not the best of role models and I eventually found equilibrium. In fact, I soon became pretty good at my job. Obviously, I accept full responsibility for my naive bravado, but this is what happens when you entrust important responsibilities to those with neither the experience, nor the understanding, nor the temperament, nor the humility to cosplay as guardian of the people. And now those people — Hegseth, Noem, Rubio, Bondi, Bessent, Patel, McMahon, Vought, Gabbard, Miller, Loughler, Burgum, Collins, Bongino and Vance — are driving innocent democracy into an early grave.