Criminal Minds: A Day of Attempted Murderers & Rapists

I was going to post my last two and most recent entries about my internship together, but these past few days have been so crazy, I'd rather post one at a time. So here's my entry from last Friday:

In an entry dated 2-19-10:

Criminal Minds: A Day of Attempted Murderers and Rapists

Yesterday, the reporter Joleene had gone out to cover a murder for hire story about a CNY native who offered to pay his friend $15,000 to kill his grandparents in Liverpool, NY. Today we would be doing a follow-up story, trying to get sound from the grandparents and/or their neighbors.

Once we started putting together/setting up interviews, Joleene listened to a message she had received last night from an angry relative of the grandparents. Since she had used the grandparents' names in her story the night before, this relative felt she was defaming them.

This made Joleene pretty uncomfortable about going back to their neighborhood, so instead we interviewed Onondaga County Sheriff Kevin Walsh. We got some decent bites from him, and then he started talking about a completely different story.

Walsh mentioned one of the county's most wanted criminals who was captured earlier that morning in New Jersey. We wound up killing two birds with one stone and interviewing him about that too. When we got back to the station, a VO was already written about the most wanted suspect, but I pulled a SOT from Walsh to make the story a VOSOT.

I spent the rest of the day putting together the package on the murder for hire case. There wasn't much footage to use, but I made it work, and Joleene told me she was impressed with my writing of the story...especially with the lead sentence.

We watched the other stations air pretty much the same murder for hire package that we did, except they had the neighbor reactions that Joleene decided not to do. But we know we had done good work, and I left the station feeling pretty accomplished.