ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704040016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
SOURCE: DENNIS ANDERSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
From Sheppard to Simpson, Theo Wilson covered the juciest bits of American jurisprudence.
The night she died, postwar America's ace trial reporter put on a sassy dress and prepared to head out to a limousine that would take her to a television interview with Tom Snyder.
Theo Wilson never made it to the car; a massive cerebral hemorrhage ended her life at the age of 79 in January. Not only did it end a remarkable career that spanned more than 40 years, but her interview with Snyder was to be the first on behalf of her memoir ``Headline Justice.''
``She was just about to get the glory,'' recalls Wilson's friend, Linda Deutsch, the Associated Press court reporter who wrote the forward to ``Headline Justice.''
``She was all dressed up,'' Deutsch remarked. ``Some people would say that's the way to go, looking great and getting ready to get in the limo.''
The fast-talking Wilson lived a zesty, energetic life. Once described as a ``nuclear pixie,'' she was 5-feet, 1-inch tall, weighing 101 pounds dripping wet. No one was a better raconteur, and the hotel rooms she occupied became the unofficial salons of the trials she covered.
Her friends and admirers, and she had many, included Barbara Walters, Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel.
``Headline Justice'' is a pocket history of American jurisprudence in the turbulent years following World War II. Wilson's book covers some of the most sensational trials of our times, from Dr. Sam Sheppard to O.J. Simpson.
Wilson's reminiscences revisit the mystery and surprise of the Sheppard trials, the psychedelic antics of the Charles Manson ``Family'' mass-murder trial and the rebellion of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
All were grist for Wilson's deftly handled reports for The New York Daily News. During her three decades writing for ``the elegant tabloid,'' it was the nation's largest daily, with 2.5 million circulation on weekdays and 4 million on Sunday.
Throughout the city billboards proclaimed ``Read Theo Wilson in The Daily News.''
Wherever the trial was, or whatever the story might be, Wilson always found a ride. Ever the New Yorker, she never bothered with driving.
But lack of a driver's license didn't stop her from getting the hundreds of miles from Los Angeles to the central California hamlet of Chowchilla to cover the infamous kidnapping of a school bus load of children in 1976.
``I took a cab,'' she said, matter-of-factly, when asked by rival reporters how she beat them to the story. If Wilson couldn't find a cab, plenty of friends were willing to drive her.
Wilson considered trials ``great theater ... filled with revelations of human weakness and folly, with violence and sorrow and humor and pity and passion....
``These trials tell us about ourselves, our own facades, our own potential for good and evil, just as do the stage plays that most intrigue us.''
Once asked if she didn't consider herself a voyeur, she responded, ``Is that how you feel when you go see `Macbeth' or `Hamlet'?''
Outside the courtroom, she covered a world of moonshiners, space shots and trips with Jackie Kennedy. She once impersonated a chambermaid to penetrate hotel security when the Beatles arrived for their first U.S. tour.
She considered herself deeply lucky - lucky to write for the Evansville (Ind.) Press, the Richmond (Va.) News Leader, the Philadelphia Bulletin, or luckiest of all, to report for The New York Daily News.
Praise for Wilson didn't stop at the boundary of the press gallery. Judge and attorney alike found her reporting a valuable component of the trial experience.
A recent memorial for Wilson drew about 500 people who formed an overflow crowd that packed the upper floor of the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
F. Lee Bailey, the legendary trial attorney whose courtroom exploits were tracked in Wilson's New York Daily News reports, said he felt comfortable using her reports ``as a substitute for a trial transcript.''
Wilson, who began her career as a $10-a-week reporter in Evansville, Ind., elevated trial reporting to an art in the era before cameras covered the courtroom.
The goal she set for herself was to follow novelist Joseph Conrad's imperative that the writer's job was ``above all, to make you see.''
``She always got the meat of what had been presented,'' Bailey observed. ``She knew the criminal process so well that frequently she was able to predict what was likely to happen...''
Wilson's motivation for giving the job her all flowed from her millions of readers, those irreverent subway straphangers who would open a letter to her, ``Dear Mr. Wilson, you jerk! If you News guys had a brain in your head...,'' and close, ``With sincere regards, your friend.''
Along with the demise of daily newspapers through the 1980s, Wilson's departure from the Daily News in the middle of the decade signaled the fading of an era characterized by an irreverent, colorful elite of trial reporters.
Of all the standards she set for herself, she could make the reader ``see'' with passages like this about autopsy photos from the 1954 Sam Sheppard trial:
``Cleveland, Nov. 4 - Marilyn Sheppard's face in death, her forehead and skull bloody with gaping wounds, her eyes closed and swollen, her nose cut and broken, was shown today in a shocked and sickened courtroom.
``Her husband, accused of Marilyn's murder, deliberately sat out of view of the exhibit and wept.''
As Wilson notes in ``Headline Justice,'' Sheppard, set free on appeal, went to his grave declaring his innocence. So, she reasoned, it will likely be the same with Simpson, and people will argue the matter for years to come.
After leaving the Daily News, Wilson wrote for several publications and went to work on her memoir. With her career finally down on paper, and her life near an end, the virtuoso of the trial story pleaded that the excesses of the Simpson trial shouldn't be used as an excuse to shoo cameras out of the courtroom.
``The camera, that honest and unbiased eye, should be used so that the public can watch a trial without the media circus, and see our criminal justice system in action, working as it has for centuries,'' she wrote. ``It may not be the best system, it may need changes, but I know of no other in the world that is better.''
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS. Former New York Daily News reporterby CNBTheo Wilson, shown in an undated file photo taken in the late 1980s
with her cat, Lois Lane, died in January. Her memoir, ``Headline
Justice,'' is a pocket history of American trials.