Did a Pulitzer Prize help kill one of its winners?
The amazing news The Concord Monitor won a Pulitzer Prize got me thinking about my former paper, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, which won the Pulitzer in 1988. It ruined the career of Susan Forrest, one of the two reporters who worked on the story. I’ve always wondered if it was an underlying cause of Susan Forrest's premature death ten years later. In her early 30s, she won the highest honor her profession offers, then kept jumping for another one, falling on her face until she couldn’t jump any more.
Susie was an excellent reporter. She had the nerve to go after every kind of story, and was like a pit bull when she got hold of something. She was our editor's star reporter, and she acted like a superstar, which meant she had very few friends in our newsroom.
Nobody, especially Susie, suspected she had bipolar disorder, a chemical imbalance in the brain, which accounted for the way she worked around the clock for days, and then stayed home with a migraine for a while. Young people with bipolar can be brilliant, but the brilliant periods get farther apart, and you lose the ability to psych yourself into one as the disease progresses.
Susie was our crime reporter when she learned that William Horton of Lawrence failed to return to state prison from a three-day furlough. Horton was a sociopath serving life without parole for a sadistic first-degree murder. How does this guy get a three-day vacation from prison? Susie asked.
He fled to Maryland where he invaded a home and sadistically raped a young married couple. Nobody outside the state prison system knew he was missing until the Maryland State Police arrested him for that crime. A Massachusetts law made the entire criminal justice system secret, except the arrest, bail hearing, and trial.
This “C.O.R.I.” law (Confidentiality of Records and Investigations), and the prison furlough program for incorrigible lifers, started under a Republican governor. Gov. Mike Dukakis could easily have said what everybody else was saying: "How could this outrage happen, and how do we make sure it never happens again?"
Instead, for the next year, Dukakis chose to defend the furlough program and the right of prison bureaucrats to work in complete secrecy. Dukakis was the Democratic nominee for president in 1988, when Horton escaped, so Horton became a major issue in the presidential election. While calling Dukakis soft on crime and indifferent to crime victims, a Republican TV ad showed a mug shot of Horton that looked like every woman's worst nightmare of an African-American rapist, who lurks in shadows or invades people's homes.
Dukakis never even contacted the Maryland victims to apologize or offer sympathy on behalf of the state. His public behavior convinced me and millions of voters that he cared more about the rights of criminals and bureaucrats than he did about crime victims.
Susie's reporting exposed and brought down the CORI law and furlough program. She even got Gov. Dukakis to talk to her about the case on the record. She sat in his outer office all day, then collared him on his way home. Dukakis said he talked to her because she didn't act like the "pack reporters" who followed him everywhere asking about Horton. Distinguishing herself from that pack, without concealing her purpose, was pure reporting skill.
It was basically all downhill for Susie after that. She took a job with a Los Angeles paper and left the Horton story in the middle. Another outstanding reporter Barbara Walsh took it over. Susie came back to the Tribune a few months later, and never really explained why. Nobody believed her story that "my heart is in the Merrimack Valley." We speculated that she couldn’t stand not being the staff superstar.
She was assigned to the Mass. Statehouse, and then to the suburban desk to be the ace reporter everywhere but Lawrence. She essentially refused to work until she was put back on the city staff as crime reporter.
A statehouse reporter for the Boston Herald wrote a devastating column about how she talked non-stop about herself and the Horton story while she was there. She told the suburban staff week after week that she was running down the rumor that Linda Kassabian of the Charles Manson family was living on welfare in Haverhill. She never concealed her feeling that suburban staff was the slums.
When the Pulitzer Prize was announced, it was already ruined for Susie because she had to share it with Walsh. Susie and our editor, Daniel J. Warner Sr., immediately declared that they were going to win another Pulitzer this year that Susie would not have to share. Susie never realized that Horton became a Pulitzer Prize story only by coincidence, when it became a major issue in the presidential campaign.
As a writer, Susie could scream, and she could cry, that’s all. Horton was an outrage, and she screamed about it in the paper for months. So for her second Pulitzer, she found another outrage and started screaming about it. She thought that’s how you win a Pulitzer.
In this case, a woman on welfare came up with $10,000 cash on the spot to bail out an accused drug dealer. How does a woman on welfare have $10,000 in cash? It was enough to make Susie scream, not earth-shaking enough to win a Pulitzer Prize.
As the story developed, it became anti-poor people and anti-Hispanic. Susie was managing the story in a grossly unethical way. Each afternoon, in the mayor's office, she'd plan the next day's story with the mayor and the head of the police investigation, who was her boyfriend. She lied when she told her editors they’d broken up. Over the years, Susie got a lot of stories from a lot of boyfriends.
The Latino community called us a racist newspaper. We had only one Latina reporter in that heavily Hispanic community at the time, and she covered fashion. A rebellion started in the newsroom over Susie’s ethics. One reporter threatened to call the Boston Herald to report her and the paper. Before he did that, the editor stopped the story.
Next, Susie reported that a middle school child had been gang raped and “penetrated with sticks” on her way home from school. She took a hysterical call from an uncle at face value and put the story in the paper, then started screaming about a cover-up. On the third day, she went off to Hollywood to interview Jay Leno. A naïve 21-year-old just two weeks out of college was assigned to crack the cover-up. In less than two weeks, the beloved middle school principal died of a heart attack with a copy of our paper in his hand. The young reporter felt like she killed a public official, quit, and became a teacher. An in-house investigation I conducted with another reporter months later found no rape or cover-up.
Susie got a job at the New York Post. The last time I saw her was at an awards banquet. Susie came from New York with her editor/boyfriend. The next thing I heard was that she was on sick leave from the Post taking psychiatric medicine. The last thing I heard was that she died. Her mother told the paper it was an accidental overdose of psych meds.
Susie had been traumatized covering a horrible plane crash near Kennedy Airport, and no longer worked at the Post. She had been working compulsively at Ground Zero after 9/11. No one knows what Susie was thinking or intending when she died. It's hard to die accidentally from psych meds once you'[ve been on them for a while. Her mother probably needed to think it was an accident, or else have that be the story in the newspaper. Suicide survivors suffer horrible self-blame and public shame.
The Eagle-Tribune was sold to a corporation and is nothing like the family-owned paper I worked for from 1985 to 1996. Pulitzers don’t translate into revenue, so corporate business plans for small newspapers don’t allow a reporter to work full time for a year on a Pulitzer story. Long live the Concord Monitor, its editors and reporters, and especially its dedicated, small-business owners.
