By Jim Yavorcik
It was not the kind of story you would expect a college newspaper to write about.
Even in the “Watergate era,” college papers were still writing mostly about campus activities, faculty or student government issues, athletics, and entertainment. Given the readership, those topics were on target.
But in September 1975, editors of The Lantern decided to investigate a murder . . . of a non-OSU student . . . that occurred off-campus . . . and one that police had already solved.
A few weeks before Autumn Quarter had begun, 14-year-old Christie Mullins was found beaten to death in a wooded area near Graceland Shopping Center, some five miles north of campus. An eyewitness helped police with a sketch of a man seen running from the crime scene. Within days, police arrested a man who looked like the sketch, a mentally challenged 25-year-old named Jack Carmen.
Within 14 days Carmen confessed, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. It was a swift and severe punishment, the kind the public often demands when a vicious crime is committed.
However, in this case, folks who lived near the crime scene were skeptical about the police account of the case. Some in the community felt the accused man was railroaded through the justice system.
Lantern editors, gathering at a cookout before classes started, thought the case deserved another look. Lantern Faculty Adviser Paul Williams (himself a Pulitzer winner) agreed.
I was assigned to take on this story.
At the time, I was taking the Lantern reporting class (J 421.01) and had hoped to cover the OSU football beat. I arrived on campus two weeks before classes started since the first game was September 13. However, the football beat was already taken. For a brief time, I was assigned to cover the “police” but on September 11, the editors told me I did not have to submit the usual 20 stories to pass the course.
I only needed to write one.
With no meaningful knowledge of the court system or investigative journalism, I first read a packet of news clips from the Dispatch and the Citizen-Journal on the case. Then I went to the downtown housing shelter where I learned Carmen was seen picking up a paycheck on the day of the murder. After interviewing witnesses, I took a bus to the crime site, as Carmen had told police that is how he got to Graceland.
I determined that Carmen could not have made it to the murder site in time to commit the crime if the folks at the shelter were accurate in their accounts. In just a few hours, I had established his alibi. I traversed the neighborhood near the crime scene and spoke multiple times with the victim’s father. Norman Mullins, who wanted to “strangle the real killer with his bare hands,” harbored doubts as to whether the police had the right man behind bars.
There were many other leads to be followed. So, Lantern City Editor Tom Loftus suggested adding another student reporter to the case. I told Tom that I wanted Rick Kelly assigned, as Kelly had just published an impressive investigative piece on campus drug use.
The two of us interviewed the key eyewitness (Henry Newell) in his home. He bragged about his artistic ability and showed us his black velvet Jesus paintings. (The accused had long hair and a beard, also.) We had separate “Deep Throat” sources in law enforcement who gave us copies of the eyewitness Newell’s “rap sheet.” When we confronted him, Newell admitted to us that he had a lengthy criminal record. Some in the neighborhood were already questioning whether this “eyewitness” had something to do with the killing.
We should have been frightened by this guy, but we were too young and too naïve to be afraid. We just knocked on his door and started questioning him.
As we worked the story, we became more confident in our ability to uncover key facts and “put it together.” Somehow, we obtained the confidential autopsy report and got an assistant coroner to acknowledge that the victim was not raped. This statement contradicted the police account and the charge Carmen pleaded guilty to. The Columbus police were none too happy with us and considered us troublemakers.
The Lantern ran my story on Page One on Oct. 31, 1975, with Kelly’s detailed sidebar inside, setting forth the chronology. We were then asked to re-write and expand the story for Columbus Monthly magazine. It was the cover story in January 1976 and the first hard-hitting investigative piece for the fledgling magazine. We continued working the case even after our class assignment was over. Kelly interviewed Carmen in the Franklin County Jail and learned first-hand how this man could be led to say something that was not true, like having played golf previously with Kelly. I attended court hearings and obtained a crash course in criminal procedure. We wrote follow-up stories for The Lantern until June 1976, when we graduated.
Carmen’ s new attorney convinced the judge to allow the defendant to withdraw his guilty plea. He eventually went to trial and was acquitted by a jury even with the police confession admitted as evidence.
My Lantern piece won a Hearst award and the Columbus Monthly story was awarded best magazine non-fiction piece nationally by the Society of Professional Journalists. Rick Kelly and I have remained life-long friends. We both worked at The Toledo Blade as reporters. I went on to work as an assistant county prosecutor. In an ironic twist of fate in 1985, I argued a murder case in the Ohio Supreme Court in Columbus and Kelly covered the oral argument as the Blade’s Columbus bureau chief.
As a board-certified Civil Trial Advocate in private practice, I still represent victims of injuries and families who have suffered the wrongful death of a loved one.
But it was at The Lantern that I first learned how to:
- Interview a witness,
- Confront an accused, and
- Speak with kindness and understanding to the family members of a crime victim.
The knowledge I gained by going to Common Pleas Court for the Lantern stories in 1975-76 was invaluable to me as I covered the police and courthouse beat for the Blade while in law school.
Looking back, I wish I had written a stronger story pointing the finger at the highly suspicious Newell. I wish I had offered a line or two about the black velvet Jesus paintings in the story; this would have provided an explanation for how Newell came up with the sketch police put out. In my opinion, Newell just described to police what he had drawn himself many times.
Newell was finally identified by Columbus Police as the true killer of Christie Mullins 40 years later. This followed an e-book authored by John Oller, another Lantern reporter a few years behind us in school. He got a family member of Newell to share Newell’s confession to her.
The Christie Mullins story did not happen with my work alone. Besides Rick Kelly, editors Tom Loftus, Lisa Holstein and Lee Ann Hamilton (as well as Dan Rowland, a teaching assistant) helped push this story to the finish line.
Our professor Paul Williams critiqued our work in a sidebar to the Columbus Monthly article about The Lantern (“A Daily Laboratory Newspaper”). He said, “It was almost too much for our reporters, but they gained a lot from it.”
We sure did. That “one story” in The Lantern was a life-changing experience for both me and Rick.
Editor’s Note: Jim Yavorcik is co-owner and an attorney at Cubbon & Associates in Toledo. Rick Kelly is a senior consultant for Triad Strategies, a crisis management and communications firm in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
