Ajc Know When You Are Dead
Photograph by Michael Cooper/Getty Images Sport
This column originally appeared in our July 2003 issue.
I recognized her immediately. She starting time appears on page 79 of Jack Warner'due south riveting novel, Shikar. Warner changed her proper name, of class. In the book, she is Kathleen Bentley. But there's no mistaking Kathy Scruggs.
In the thriller, Kathleen Bentley is a husky-voiced reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who barges into a N Georgia woods with a photographer in search of a man-eating Bengal tiger that is gobbling hill folk.
This is precisely what Scruggs would take done, had the globe non fallen on her shoulders after the 1996 Olympics and had a 12-pes tiger invaded the wilds of North Georgia instead of Warner's fertile imagination.
In her heyday, Scruggs was a hard-drinking, tough-talking police reporter who wasn't afraid of anything.
Kathleen Bentley is not the first fictional character inspired past Scruggs. Atlanta author Robert Coram borrowed liberally from Scruggs to reporter Kitty O'Hara in his 1997 Atlanta Heat. "Yous can tell how desperately she needs a story by how brusque her skirt is that twenty-four hours," the cops say in the book. Scruggs later laughed most the portrait over drinks with Coram at Manuel's Tavern.
Her raucous sense of humour was what I loved most about Scruggs. One morning when I worked at the AJC, I read a brief she wrote about a guy who was arrested for conveying a shotgun in his pants.
"Hey, Kathy!" I shouted. "This is not news! I often carry a shotgun in my pants!"
"Yeah," she growled. "Sawed-off."
Cops still talk in amazement virtually her bravado. She once beat the police to a murder scene and brazenly crawled in through a back window. When the officers arrived, Scruggs was waiting with the corpse. "Where have you been?" she demanded.
"The cops merely loved her," Coram says. "I don't think there has been a reporter in town since Orville Gaines who had the sort of trust and access she did." Gaines was the Atlanta Journal law reporter from 1947 to 1988.
Scruggs grew up in a prominent family in Athens, attended the University of Georgia and graduated from prissy Queens College in Charlotte. Just she acted more similar the Queen of the Silver Dollar.
She was blonde and wore miniskirts and gaudy stockings. She smoked. She drank. She cussed. She flaunted her sexuality. She dated Lewis Grizzard. She dated an editor who allegedly vanquish her with a telephone. She dated cops, including one who was defendant of stealing money from the pockets of the dead. "Kathy was a bigger-than-life effigy," Coram says. "She was over the top in many ways."
She too had a keen eye. David Pendered, a veteran AJC reporter, told this story about her: Scruggs was trying to rails downwardly the mother of a shooting victim. Relatives said the woman had gone to a beauty parlor to look nice for her son'south funeral. Scruggs took off and tracked downwardly the woman, who was walking with hat in hand. "Whatever woman carrying her hat instead of wearing it had to be coming home from the beauty parlor," Scruggs explained.
Seven years ago this calendar month, Scruggs' career and life came to a head when she was the lead reporter on the biggest story in the world. On July thirty, 1996, she broke the story that security guard Richard Jewell was the focus of the federal investigation into the flop that killed one person and injured 100 at Centennial Olympic Park.
A couple of days after the story ran I congratulated her on the scoop. "Yeah," she said. "We think he'due south the guy."
But he wasn't the guy. Jewell was cleared and sued The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a bunch of other news outlets. Most of them settled. The AJC fought the suit and, in 1999, Scruggs was ordered to jail if she didn't reveal her source for the story. She refused and avoided jail on appeal.
I think the Jewell example killed Kathy Scruggs. Certainly, the stress that plagued her in the aftermath of the story contributed to the health problems that pb to her unspeakably sad expiry.
She was constitute expressionless in her Cherokee County dwelling, wearing an Atlanta Motor Speedway T-shirt and panties, on September 2, 2001, just 24 days shy of her 43rd birthday. The crusade of expiry was astute morphine toxicity, according to the GBI medical examiner, who was unable to determine whether the overdose was intentional or accidental. The examiner also said astringent coronary artery atherosclerosis might have contributed to her death. Cherokee Coroner Earl Darby said Scruggs appeared to have died peacefully in her sleep.
I've often wondered what would accept happened to Scruggs if the AJC had just admitted the obvious fact that it made errors and settled with Jewell. But Scruggs never wanted the paper to settle. She doggedly felt she had done zip wrong. She was a reporter who came back with the story from her sources and went to her grave protecting their identities. The essence of her initial story was right: At the fourth dimension, investigators were indeed looking at Jewell.
Just equally presently as she brought back the scoop, her work was fed into an editorial meat grinder that spewed out re-create like chum. In story after story, the newspaper'south relentless coverage of Jewell, with Scruggs as the cardinal reporter, was the journalistic equivalent of a "shock and awe" campaign. Critics later said the AJC failed to exercise healthy skepticism virtually information from law enforcement sources. And some cops and friends feel Scruggs became the scapegoat for errors of fact and judgement made past her editors.
The paper said Jewell contacted the paper looking for publicity, which wasn't true. The contact was made by a public relations man for AT&T, which had hired the visitor Jewell worked for. An editor inserted that line into the story. The paper also published a column comparing Jewell to convicted murderer Wayne Williams, merely it was written by Dave Kindred, non Scruggs.
Scruggs may be dead, but the Jewell libel instance is still alive. Information technology was hobbled when a judge ruled that Jewell was a public figure. The FBI's current doubtable, Eric Robert Rudolph, escaped capture until May. [Editor'due south Note: In 2011, the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the AJC, noting that "the articles in their entirety were essentially true at the time they were published." In 2005, Rudolph plead guilty to the Centennial Olympic Park bombing and 3 other bombings and was bedevilled and sentenced to four life sentences.]
The stress of the libel lawsuit took a terrible toll on Scruggs over the years. She didn't go to jail for refusing to identify her source, but she was arrested twice in Buckhead on charges involving intoxication. A friend thinks she was slipped a engagement-rape drug in i of the incidents.
Scruggs' health declined horribly. She was hospitalized and had intestinal surgery. She moved from her Cross Creek condo well-nigh Buckhead to a remote place in Cherokee County that had a big lawn for a new dog. She was trying to get better. But she was too under stress from fiscal problems as her medical bills mounted. She felt treated as a pariah in the newsroom and complained that she no longer had a desk.
All my feelings about Scruggs were stirred by Jack Warner'southward respectful memorial to a controversial, colorful and troubled reporter. I due east-mailed Warner, a legendary UPI editor and old AJC writer now living in retirement in New Mexico. He confirmed Scruggs had read the novel and approved of the Kathleen Bentley character long before the book was published.
Every bit I read Shikar, I got a powerful feeling that Warner created a graphic symbol that imbues the retention of Kathy Scruggs with lasting dignity and dignity. He perfectly captured what she might be doing in sky: talking tough and tracking tigers.
Doug Monroe is a announcer and longtime contributor to Atlanta mag. This article was part of his monthly column for the magazine, The Monroe Doctrine.
This column originally appeared in our July 2003 issue.
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Source: https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/requiem-for-a-reporter-kathy-scruggs/
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