Free Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir by Gary Taylor Page B

for
finding scoops, The Enquirer employed a bounty system. It paid a hundred-dollar
fee to anyone—staffer, reader or kook—who suggested an idea that
eventually became a published story, even if someone else ended up
writing it. Many staffers spent their weekends sitting in the local
library pouring through arcane medical and scientific journals,
seeking overlooked footnotes on potentially exciting breakthroughs
and discoveries that might turn into articles of public
significance. I got caught up in the frenzy for generating story
ideas, and, when I returned to Houston, I put it to work at The Post , listing all
sorts of ideas for local stories that might turn into something
there.

    I didn't have long
to wait for that habit to pay off with what would be the strongest
story I ever reported, one that would see me nominated for a
Pulitzer Prize. That adventure began when I convinced my editors
at The Post to let
me research a story on old men in Texas prisons. I didn't really
know what I would find. But roaming around the geriatrics ward at
TDC's hospital behind The Walls in Huntsville, I struck up a
conversation with an addled eighty-three-year-old con named Gene
Winchester who couldn't even remember why he was there. Checking
his file a little later to get the facts, I saw that he had
received a fifty-year sentence in 1918 for murder. I did a quick
calculation and realized he'd actually been locked up for
fifty-eight years with no mention in his file of additional crimes.
I showed the discrepancy to the prison bosses and waited several
days for an explanation.

    When it arrived, that explanation
revealed a more interesting problem. Winchester had killed another
inmate in 1920, and, instead of charging him in that crime, the
prison simply shipped him off to the state mental hospital in Rusk,
where he sat until 1968. He returned to TDC that year as part of a
clearance at the hospital, and the state's attorney general had
decreed he would not receive credit for the forty-eight years in
Rusk. Not only had Winchester been lost in the system for several
generations, he still had several more to serve. Although the state
had locked him up since 1918 on a fifty-year term, official records
showed he had served only ten of those years. I had exposed a
bureaucratic mess with no apparent solution that triggered cries of
outrage from legislators and penal reform advocates. It also drew a
phone call from a woman who claimed Winchester as her "Uncle
Gene"—a family icon believed to have died in prison forty years
before.

    Eager to take
Winchester's story further, I buckled down and negotiated his
release by brokering a deal between the Social Security
Administration, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and a nursing
home south of Houston. The Board agreed to release him on parole
while Social Security determined him eligible for special benefits.
The nursing home offered a room. Within a month, I was back in
Huntsville covering the release of Gene Winchester. He worried me a
bit when I asked him about his plans only to hear him say with a
sickening grin: "Goin' to find me a woman." I recognized him as a
strong and healthy specimen for his age and wondered, What have I done ?

    After arriving in Huntsville
fifty-eight years before in a horse-drawn cart, Winchester left
with me in a car driving sixty miles per hour down an interstate
highway. He had missed everything in the century, including women's
lib. But he was destined to live several more years in that home
without incident. Winning Winchester's release easily ranked as the
high point in my reporting career. Besides the satisfaction of
seeing justice properly done and helping an old man land a few
years of rest before his death, I also gleaned greater appreciation
for my powers as a journalist.

    Although I didn't win the Pulitzer,
the nomination alone was an accolade that continued to impress
acquaintances even more than the awards I actually did collect in
the next couple of years