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FEATURES: Decisions: Killer On Line 1 Take a hotly competitive news market like Tampa, toss in a cop-killer, a car chase, and a tense hostage standoff. What do you get? News coverage that some felt was unforgivable. by Abigail Pogrebin Issue Date: September 1998 The drama began on a hot, sunny Tuesday morning, May 19, at a fire station near downtown Tampa. That's when Hank Earl Carr, 30, arrived, carrying a bloody four-year-old in his arms. The boy, Joey Bennett, the son of Carr's girlfriend, had been shot in the head. As firefighters feverishly tried to revive the child, Carr explained that Joey had been playing with Carr's rifle when it accidentally discharged. The CPR was futile; Joey was mortally wounded. When Carr realized that the firefighters had called the police, he took off for home, which is where the cops found him. Carr identified himself as Joseph Lee Bennett (Joey's biological father). In fact, Carr was a gun enthusiast with a long criminal record, including convictions for burglary, domestic violence, assault, grand larceny, and cocaine possession. He was also wanted for aggravated assault. While the two detectives interviewing him didn't know Carr's real identity, they became suspicious when he bolted a second time. Caught hiding in the bushes, Carr was handcuffed for the ride to police headquarters. Career criminal that he was, Carr was prepared for such occasions: He carried a "master" handcuff key, which the officers hadn't discovered while searching him. Carr freed himself, seized one of the officers' guns, and fatally shot both detectives. He then carjacked a truck and fled north on Interstate 75. When a Florida state trooper finally pulled him over, Carr killed him, too-a 24-year-old rookie on the force for less than a year. Carr then raced off with police cruisers in pursuit, trading fire with them as he drove. Finally, wounded in the buttocks, he pulled into a Shell gas station in Hernando County, about an hour north of Tampa. Stephanie Kramer, 27, had the bad luck to be the only employee inside the station. Carr took her hostage. Quickly, more than 150 police officers-including SWAT teams from four jurisdictions-surrounded the station. Police helicopters circled at 500 feet. Above them, at 1,500 feet, television choppers hovered. The standoff had begun, and the media was in overdrive. For the next six hours, local television stations would devote their airtime to this crisis. Months later, the Tampa press is still arguing about its performance and whether the biggest local story in years had brought out its worst behavior. Many felt that what began as a tragedy ended as a comedy of media errors, one complete with charges of endangering the life of a story subject, ambush journalism, and broadcast theft. It all started with one phone call. Sue Treccase admits it was her idea. The 36-year-old program director at WFLA-AM radio, the area's all-news market leader, is a two-pack-a-day smoker with a Dorothy Hamill bob and a tart tongue, who comes off as a hard-bitten newshound. As soon as she heard that Carr was surrounded at the Shell station, Treccase instructed the station's weekend anchor, Robin Rilley, who'd only been on staff a few days, to get the phone number and start calling. "You're not going to believe this, but it's true," Treccase says. "At that point, it didn't occur to me that he was in the Shell station." She says she was just hoping to reach any eyewitnesses at the scene. "Now, isn't that boring?" Treccase asks. "Isn't that a lot less interesting than the maniacal news director saying, 'let's call the f--king hostage?'" When Rilley reported back that she was getting a busy signal, Treccase says she told her to "keep dialing until your fingers fall off." And when it became clear that the gunman was inside the gas station, Treccase acknowledges that she did not tell Rilley to stop. Forty-five minutes later, Treccase remembers, Rilley "came out in the hallway, and said 'there's a guy on the phone that says he's the killer.'" Treccase says her first thought was that some "crackpot" had called WFLA claiming to be the gunman, so she instructed Rilley to ask anchorman Don Richards to talk to the man on the line (but off the air) to determine who he was. Richards, 55, a Webster Hubbell lookalike with a mellifluous voice who is also WFLA-AM's news director, has been a highly respected station anchor for ten years. While Richards was on the phone, Treccase heard Rilley make an off-hand comment that stopped her dead in her tracks: "I couldn't believe I finally got through," said Rilley. It hit Treccase then that she had put her station at ground zero of the story. Back at the anchor desk, Richards ended his brief conversation and hung up. He related that the man on the line was "probably the guy." Treccase says Rilley told her the gunman wanted them to call back in ten minutes. At that point, Treccase and her team could have chosen not to go any further. But Treccase maintains it was already too late to turn back; if they didn't return Carr's call, she says, he might get "ticked off" and harm the hostage. This time, Treccase herself called Carr to confirm that he was the killer. Sure enough, Carr offered chilling details that only he could have known, such as how he had managed to free himself in the police car and grab one of the detectives' Glock 9mm pistols from the front seat. Treccase then asked to speak to the hostage, who got on the line and confirmed that she was unharmed. Carr got back on the phone. "Do you want to go on the radio right now live and say what happened today?" asked Treccase. Within 30 seconds of Carr saying yes, he was on the air with anchor Don Richards. For the next six-plus minutes, WFLA had what few would dispute was a journalistic coup: the riveting, live testimony of a ruthless cop-killer. With detached composure, Carr recounted his bloody day to Richards. "What happened to my son was an accident," Carr declared. "It was a terrible accident, and I don't even think I deserve to live. It's unlikely that I'll come out of this alive....I know I'll fry for the cops." Anchor Richards maintained an even tone, despite his misgivings about the interview. "Don did not want to do this," Treccase admits. "But it's my call at the end of the day." Richards says he understood the delicacy of talking to a killer in the middle of a hostage crisis, and he intentionally asked few questions after his first: "What happened today?" Richards spent the latter part of the conversation urging Carr to release his hostage. Richards: "The best advice I can give you would be to let that lady, who has nothing to do with any of this, out of that store. And, you know, and to follow her yourself....That lady has nothing to do with any of this, and, you know, she's treated you well." Carr: "She's only served her purpose. She's just keeping me alive long enough to where I can see my wife." Richards: "Well, again, let her out and..." Carr: "I just wanted to tell my story. My son was an accident. We don't keep loaded guns around the kids. That gun was supposed to be empty. I don't understand what happened." Richards: "This situation should end peacefully, Hank. Please. Please." Treccase argues that the call provided not just rare drama but vital information for the police. Carr revealed his real name for the first time, he gave a detailed confession, and Treccase had managed to establish that the hostage was alive and as yet unhurt. She thought she'd done a public service. The police didn't see it that way. While Carr calmly recounted his rampage on the radio, Hernando County Sheriff Thomas Mylander had to listen to the gunman chatter, knowing his hostage negotiators were getting a busy signal. Treccase says she assumed if the police had wanted to interrupt the call, they could have done so. (In fact, the phone company was unable to break in.) Eventually, the police called WFLA, asking it to stop the broadcast; the station promptly obliged. Although the interview was wrapping up anyway, Mylander doesn't think the police should have had to spend time getting the media out of the way. "WFLA radio overstepped their bounds and hampered our negotiators," he says. Four and a half hours later, Carr let his hostage go free, and the police showered the building with tear gas to force the gunman out. By the time the fumes had cleared, Carr was dead by his own hand. The crisis was over. The press wars, however, had only just begun. During the interview, virtually every news outlet in Tampa was tuned in, scrambling to tape it and rebroadcast it as fast as possible. Mike Deeson, a reporter from CBS affiliate WTSP-TV, who was broadcasting live from the scene of the detectives' shooting, held his microphone to his own car radio speaker so viewers could hear Carr's voice. Amy Ellis, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, the area's largest newspaper, went Deeson one better. She called the gunman herself from her cell phone, and got him on the line for a second interview. Her reporting was part of the Times's front-page coverage the next morning. Not only was WFLA's interview rerun endlessly on local TV and radio stations, transcripts of it were printed in the local newspapers. The Times put the audiotape on its automated phone system so readers could hear it, The Tampa Tribune loaded the audio on its website, and in a special feature asked several local psychologists to use it to analyze Carr. The national media got into the act: ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's Today, CBS's This Morning, and CNN went with the tape, while newspapers from the New York Post to the Sacramento Bee picked up the story. Both NBC News and the Orlando Sentinel mistakenly reported that Carr had called the radio station. NBC reporter Kerry Sanders even dramatized the fiction, saying, "Wounded and desperate, Carr called a Tampa radio station while holed up." Most journalists just assumed Carr had been the one to place the call. Philip Metlin, vice-president of news for Fox station WTVT-TV, was appalled that a reporter would call into the middle of a hostage crisis. "It simply should never be done," he says. "One does not interfere with a police situation when lives are at stake. You don't call inside the bank when there's a holdup." If someone in his newsroom made a similar call, he says, "it would be grounds for dismissal." But that didn't stop Metlin from airing WFLA's tape within minutes. "The fact that it was everywhere swayed me," he says. "It was already out, being played on the other stations. I'm not unhappy that we aired it, except that it possibly lends credence to the action." "It was real information," says Dan Bradley, news director for NBC affiliate WFLA-TV (which is not connected to the radio station), who also decided to run the tape. "But I'm troubled by the fact that they initiated the call." Bradley says he was scarred by a similar situation five years ago when a wealthy 41-year-old businessman, Bruce Larson, in the midst of a bitter custody fight, abducted his two children, ages nine and five, barricaded himself in his home with a gun, and called Bradley's news anchor, Bill Ratliff, to tell his side of the story. Ratliff: "You're not going to harm the kids, I know that." Larson: "Oh, I am not going to harm my children. We are going to stay here forever if we have to." Ratliff asked to hear the children's voices, and Larson put them on a speaker phone. The kids said they were fine, but hours after the station hung up, Larson shot both children dead before turning the gun on himself. Bradley says he'll never forget it. In the Carr case, however, the radio interview was already in play, and the killer's diatribe was hard to ignore. "The mug's on me, too," says Bradley. "I used it. Hell, I used it." Radio anchor Richard's on-air comportment was widely praised, but his critics say that is besides the point. The standoff might not have ended as peacefully as it did-WFLA was dealing with someone it knew was on edge and prone to homicide-and Richards is the first to agree that he was lucky. "This thing ended without us changing the course of the story," he says. "But don't try this at home. Don't try this at work." Treccase says she has no trouble debating whether she did the right thing. What infuriates her are accusations that she sensationalized the story, when the people pointing fingers are the same ones who tripped over each other to get their hands on the interview. "What I will not tolerate is to have a bunch of media outlets who told me 'Hey, that was great! How'd you do that?', then get on the air and act like I'd gone out in the street with an Uzi and shot people. This was not done lightly. "The people who are criticizing us for being part of the news are the people who made us part of the news," Treccase continues. "We ran an interview of a first-hand account of what happened that day. The television stations and newspapers that took our interview, played it, commented on it, debated the ethics of it-they are the ones who made us part of the story. Do you think for one minute that if that interview had run on my air, and my air only, that you'd be talking to me right now?" When pressed, Treccase admits that, despite the tragedy, she takes some pleasure in WFLA's scoop. "That's the perversity of this," she says. "That, at the end of the day, we did better than anyone else in town because we had a live interview with a spree killer, hours before he committed suicide, is perverse. But it's the truth." The Carr story, in fact, was a bonus for virtually every news outlet in the Tampa area. "The first day, the big pop was phenomenal," says Philip Valenti, the Tribune's circulation director. "And we had higher sales for the whole rest of the week." The day after the story broke, the Tribune sold 13,000 extra copies on the street; its rival, the Times, sold an extra 12,000. TV stations reported higher numbers as well: Ratings for the ABC and CBS affiliates jumped 50 percent during the standoff. Melinda Bacon, marketing director for WFLA-TV, notes that while it was a tragic story, it was also a particularly well-timed one, because it occurred during the May "sweeps" period, when TV station viewership is tracked. "We're glad that it happened in a rating period, when it counts," she admits. The media feast did not end after Carr was carried out of the Shell station. It simply shifted to a small town 50 miles north of Tampa called Ridge Manor, the home of Ted and Paula Hill, the parents of Stephanie Kramer's boyfriend. The Hills became Kramer's press representatives and her first line of defense. Overnight, Kramer had turned into the Monica Lewinsky of rural Florida; a "hostage exclusive" was now the Holy Grail, and Kramer was once again a captive, this time of the media. Reporters staked out the Hills' home, flooded their answering machine, knocked on their door, and basically refused to leave for three days. The Hills told everyone that Kramer would do an interview when she felt ready, and that they had nothing to say until then. Which didn't make the reporters go away. Ted Hill says he realizes "they were just doing their job," but he feels one TV station in particular crossed the line-WTSP-TV, Tampa's CBS affiliate. On May 20, the day after the standoff, Chris Hill, Kramer's boyfriend, was approached outside his home by WTSP-TV reporter Elaine Lucadano. According to Ted Hill, who says he is speaking on behalf of his son, Lucadano asked to interview Chris. The 31-year-old replied that he had nothing to say and would appreciate it if she left. Lucadano, Ted Hill says, assured Chris the camera was not rolling, and Chris remembers the cameraman standing some distance away. Lucadano started asking questions about Kramer's experience, and Chris answered them. However, he says he saw no microphone, and did not think he was being recorded. That night, to the Hills' astonishment, WTSP trumpeted the first interview with the hostage's boyfriend: "This is a story you'll see only on [Channel] 10." Lucadano insists she did nothing underhanded. "As an experienced journalist, I always adhere to a high standard of ethics," she says. "It was made obvious to him we were recording our conversation. I never made any attempt to hide my intentions. I never did or would ever do what he accused me of." But the Hills claim Chris was ambushed and his na•vetŽ exploited. The segment does look fishy. It's shot from a distance, instead of the way TV interviews usually are done-with the cameraman standing close to the reporter, framing the subject's face straight on. Unlike most of the other reporters pursuing the story, WFLA-TV's Marcia Crawley didn't leave a message on the Hills' phone machine. She just left a note. Crawley says she can't remember exactly what she wrote. "I told her that 'our thoughts and prayers are with you, along with the well-wishes of many of our viewers.' I put in there that she may want to consider doing an interview with one person and allowing other stations to have the tape." The police, according to the Hills, had made the same recommendation, so that Kramer could avoid the strain of having to relive her trauma more than once. In press lingo, the police had proposed a "pool" arrangement, often used in courtrooms, where one reporter or cameraperson is allowed into an event and then immediately shares the resulting notes or videotape with other media outlets. But this particular pool arrangement gave rise not to a sense of cooperation, but to a bitter feud among Tampa's media that has yet to be resolved. On Thursday evening, May 21, Crawley got the brass ring. Paula Hill called to say Stephanie Kramer had chosen Crawley and wanted other stations to have a copy of the videotape. Crawley agreed, but after consulting with her managers, she asked the Hills if her station could air the story first and share it with the competition afterward-about 15 minutes later. The Hills gave their blessing. "It was our way of saying thank you," says Paula Hill. While no one disputes that the family acquiesced to Crawley's request, some believe it should not have been made in the first place-that Crawley was exploiting her access to the Hills to manipulate the terms in her favor. But Crawley says the Hills knew what they were doing when they said she could air first, share later. "Ted Hill said something like, 'If they'd all been as nice as you have and left us alone, maybe they'd be getting the scoop, too,'" she recalls. Crawley's boss, news director Dan Bradley, says it's hypocritical to beat up on a reporter for a job well done. "We are always telling our reporters to break away from the pack, try to find a way to go at it differently. You can't tell them to do that, and then tell them to turn around and share it with everybody." But some continue to fault the way Crawley distinguished herself. People keep mentioning the flowers-the fresh blossoms that Crawley picked from her own garden the night before the interview to bring to Kramer. "I had quite a few people say that they thought that wasn't really appropriate," Crawley says. "You can't win for losing. It was simply an act of kindness-not, 'Here's your reward for doing this interview with me,' but a way of saying, 'You're not just another interview. You're an important person.'" As Crawley prepared for what was now essentially an exclusive interview, the print media was starting to feel left out. Dan DeWitt of the St. Petersburg Times was one of many reporters who stopped by the Hills' home periodically after the Tuesday standoff. On Friday morning, when Ted Hill informed him of the pool arrangement with WFLA-TV, DeWitt made a case for his inclusion, explaining that both print and broadcast organizations are usually represented in a pool interview. Hill says he agreed, in part because DeWitt's pitch, like Crawley's, was low-key and concerned. "He came out a couple times just to see how the kids were doing-Stephanie and Chris. To me that means a lot. He was a very caring person and seemed to have a feeling for what they were going through." "He said that?" asks DeWitt, sounding embarrassed. "I thought we were hounding them for an interview." DeWitt's understanding of the interview arrangement conflicts with Crawley's. He thought that the interview would be available to everybody-print and broadcast-right away. "They had used the word 'pool' to convince Stephanie Kramer to talk to them," he says. "And 'pool' to me means that everyone is going to share equally in the material that you get. And that wasn't the case. They put it on their six o'clock, and no one else had it." But someone else took it. Here's what happened: Crawley and her crew went to the Hills' house at about 2:30 P.M., shot the interview, and raced back to the station to edit their material in time for the six o'clock broadcast. As Crawley edited the story, rival stations circled the wagons outside, setting up live trucks in the parking lot to wait for a copy of the tape, which WFLA said it would provide after its own piece aired. Not everyone was willing to be patient. Steve Majors, news director for ABC affiliate WFTS-TV, ordered his troops to storm the NBC station and get a copy of the tape. "We called them and bombarded them," says Majors. "We sent a live truck over to their station and created a barricade and demanded the tape." WFLA news director Bradley says WFTS was desperately trying to save face because the station has been mired in fourth place in news ratings. "They had been getting beat pretty severely by everybody all week long, so at this point, they're licking their wounds and feeling battle-scarred," he says. Majors was angry not just that WFLA was hoarding the interview, but that nobody had even told him it was taking place. He had to learn about it from WFLA's promotional spots. Majors figures the NBC station never had any intention of telling him the interview was taking place-and WFLA's Bradley says he's right. Bradley had no plans to alert ABC, or any other station, for that matter, and he says he didn't have to. The pool, contends Bradley, means that he was obligated to share the interview with anyone who asked for it, not to offer it up. "Since when has it become a rule or a custom for us to sit down and worry about if everyone knows what everybody else has?" Bradley asks. "The idea that WFLA had some obligation to call [WFTS] and tell them they were missing a part of a major story is absurd." Kramer's interview was gripping television. She spoke for the first time about the harrowing hours Carr made her sit in front of him as a human shield from the snipers outside.She told how, when Carr rested his head down, she debated whether to hit him and try to get away, but feared it might be a fatal mistake; how she had to listen to him cry about the child he said he didn't shoot; and how, finally, she confronted him and begged for her freedom: "I started crying and I said, 'Please, I've done nothing to you.... I have a family out there that wants to see me and I want to see them. Please let me go.'" By that dramatic point, WFTS's Majors had taken matters into his own hands. As WFLA was airing the interview, the ABC station recorded it, quickly edited it to excise Crawley's questions and the NBC logo, and then rebroadcast it minutes later as its own. "Where I come from, that's plagiarism," says WFLA's Bradley. "I don't think there's any doubt they crossed the line. If you're going to use someone else's material, you need to give credit. You don't doctor it and make it seem as if it's your own." Speaking in his station's defense, Majors says once WFLA broke the pool agreement as he'd understood it, all bets were off. "We believed morally we had a right to the interview," says Majors. "A 15-minute embargo on a local newscast is the same as a five-hour embargo." Bradley says that even if he mishandled the pool arrangement, the ABC station didn't have a license to steal. "That doesn't give you authority to take material, electronically alter it, and broadcast it as your own," he says. Months later, Majors is clearly still smarting from the incident. "I'm offended that they would try to score points on a story like this. Three law enforcement officers were killed, a little boy was killed. It's a story where local broadcasters were seen as part of the community. The competitive feeling is gone. It's about how are we going to heal the community." Perhaps. Yet scoring points off the Hank Carr story was exactly what most members of the Tampa media did all along-with one notable exception. While the TV types were fighting in the sandbox, the Times was distributing DeWitt's notes to the rival Tribune and its sister publication, Hernando Today, and to the Associated Press. Bob Nolte, Today's editor, was pleasantly surprised by the gesture, although he confesses he would not have been so generous had his reporter been the one invited inside the Hill home. "I think newspaper reporters and editors despise the pool thing," says Nolte. "The fun of journalism is beating the hell out of the competition." SUBSCRIBE | ABOUT | MESSAGE BOARDS | ARCHIVE Copyright Brill Media Ventures, L.P. 1998

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