Susan Clairmont and her colleague John Rennison are fleeing to safety. It’s April 2003 and Clairmont is covering the case of Maria Figliola, who stands accused of hiring a hitman to kill her husband. According to prosecutors, she wanted her husband gone and she wanted his money so she could continue to buy her boyfriend lavish gifts such as a slick Mercedes-Benz and a steady supply of cocaine. Clairmont is outside Figliola’s home, but a man at the residence is unhappy with the reporter’s presence. He berates her and Rennison with angry threats of violence. He smashes Rennison’s camera and a car window before the pair manages to get away. They drive to the local hospital where a police car waits.

“It was definitely one of the scariest moments of my career,” says Clairmont, who has been a crime reporter and columnist at the Hamilton Spectator for 17 years, covering numerous murders and tragedies. Her crime coverage has taken her across Hamilton, creating what her husband jokingly calls her “murder tour.” When she drives by quiet homes and suburban streets, she talks openly about the cases that led her there.

Murder has always captivated journalists. The notorious Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London in the late 1880s, is still infamous today. By the 20th century, stories of American serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer made national headlines. Then, in the early 1990s, Canadians became engrossed in the case of Paul Bernardo and
Karla Homolka.

Today, the widespread success of Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial has tapped into the human attraction to true crime stories. The first season of the series analyzes the minute details of a single case: the murder of teenager Hae Min Lee in 1999. The podcast recounts in 12 episodes Koenig’s year-long research into Adnan Syed’s controversial trials and conviction for Lee’s murder. The former Baltimore Sun reporter draws listeners in by taking them through the events of the investigation into Syed’s case. Often, when listeners form opinions about Syed’s guilt, Koenig presents information that casts doubt and changes minds. She expresses her own confusion with the case and shares her views with the listener. The podcast forces listeners to ponder life behind bars, or worse, life as a wrongly convicted prison inmate. Koenig becomes a character herself, the model of a reporter-turned-detective digging deeply into a case. One of the reasons Serial is successful is that it involves listeners in the story by raising questions, inciting empathy and encouraging opinion. Serial, created by four women—Koenig and her production team—is an example of crime reporting at its best.

Historical stereotypes see the crime beat, like much of journalism, as primarily a man’s game. But in Canada, women have been strong voices in crime reporting for decades. Female reporters have helped redefine crime journalism and they’re responsible for some of this country’s most powerful stories.

***

While some reporters say gender no longer plays a major role in the newsroom, an academic paper published in 2012 by Ann Rauhala, April Lindgren and Sahar Fatima of Ryerson University found otherwise. “Influential beats such as politics and crime remain male-dominated, with women covering a third of those stories,” it states. Their paper cites studies that found women reported only 37 percent of crime stories in 2005, even though crime and politics (two male-dominated beats grouped together in the report) accounted for 50 percent of all news stories.

Still, women are increasingly some of Canada’s leading crime reporters—from Rhiannon Russell at the Whitehorse Star, to April Cunningham at The Telegraph-Journal in Saint John, New Brunswick and Kim Bolan at The Vancouver Sun. Catherine McKercher, a journalism professor emeritus at Carleton University, says it was inevitable for women to become leading voices in crime reporting as more and more women enter newsrooms once overpopulated with male reporters. Chasing criminals, she says, is unpredictable regardless of the reporter’s gender. “It’s a dangerous place for a man to be, too. Why is it more difficult for a reporter just because she’s a woman?”

Clairmont has never questioned her place as a crime reporter. She was always a curious person. On a day when she stayed home sick from grade school, she browsed her mother’s extensive book collection, choosing Truman Capote’s true crime classic In Cold Blood from the shelf. The book contributed to her fascination with crime.

“If I didn’t get into journalism school, I would’ve gone to law school,” she says. Her interest in crime was piqued again when one of her graduate journalism school classes sat in on the
infamous Guy Paul Morin murder and rape trial. In the
courtroom, the case of a man who would be convicted and later exonerated held her attention. She found herself returning to the trial without her classmates.

After completing graduate school, Clairmont began working the crime beat following a gig as a general assignment reporter at The Peterborough Examiner. She was unfazed by danger. While five-months pregnant with her first child, she spent a week covering 9/11 in New York City. “That probably wasn’t the smartest thing I could’ve done,” Clairmont admits, but her curiosity makes her someone who cannot stay away from a story.

For some time now, Clairmont has been covering the double murder trial of Mark Staples, who was arrested in 2010 for the murder of his father and sister. His motive, according to the prosecutors, was money. On a day in late October, the modern, chilly room on the sixth floor of the John Sopinka Courthouse in Hamilton, Ontario, is almost devoid of Staples supporters. While the lawyers present evidence and witnesses take the stand, Clairmont listens intently and occasionally stops taking notes on her iPad to grab her smartphone and live-tweet case updates, which her newsroom colleagues later post on Storify. On an hour-long recess, Clairmont retreats to the media office at the courthouse, uploading a quick brief about the morning’s events.

During her lunch breaks throughout the trial, Clairmont frequently sees Staples. But encountering those accused of heinous crimes outside the courtroom does not seem to throw her—Clairmont has covered some of the most grisly crimes in the city. She reconciles gruesome details and ordinary human interaction every day.

When she started at the Examiner, she primarily worked with men and says she sought to mimic their unemotional attitudes and their focus on perpetrators. Now, her coverage focuses on more than just the accused. She’s particularly passionate about the victims, sometimes preferring to write about them rather than the accused. In reporting on the Staples case, she uncovered that his sister, Rhonda Borelli, had a son whom she gave up after the boy’s father died. She tracked him down and wrote an article introducing readers to a sweet 21-year-old named William Swayze, whose biological parents were both dead by the time he was four.

***

On the west coast, Kim Bolan has spent more than 30 years on the job. During that time, she has covered murders, gangs and terrorism in B.C. Crime had always sparked her interest, but her reporting on the bombing of Air India Flight 182 solidified her status as a crime-reporting legend. For three years after the explosion that killed 329 people, she followed three men accused of being involved in the bombing. Years later, she still speaks to families of victims and attends memorial services, writing about them to help the community remember those who were lost. She reported the story despite the assassination of fellow journalist Tara Singh Hayer and the harassment of witnesses, newspaper publishers and reporters. While chasing the story, she travelled to Punjab, India, five times in 20 years, meeting with high-ranking Sikh extremists, along with victims of their violence. She also followed one of the accused men to Pakistan before he was slain in India and tracked down other suspects across the country and in England.

In 1998, Bolan received information that a group she was covering held a meeting to discuss “knocking people off.” Police warned her that she was a target and to exercise caution. In July, while her family was asleep, the sound of a gunshot resonated outside her home. She was awake to hear the shot and a car speeding away. She ran to her bathroom and called 911. Police suspected that people close to the Air India bombers were behind the warning shot. Sikh fundamentalist groups had previously sent her death threats. She investigated terrorist groups in B.C. and was later placed under police protection. The bullet, she says, was meant as both a retaliation and a warning to silence her.

Bolan is gruff and intimidating. She worked with police informant Micheal Plante, who infiltrated the Vancouver chapter of Hells Angels and became a part of the Angels’ drug enterprise. She eventually wrote a six-part series about his time with the gang. The Vancouver Sun exclusive detailed how Plante’s undercover work led to the arrest and conviction of a dozen members and associates of the gang. The investigative series about Plante’s time undercover came largely from Bolan’s experience interviewing him directly, rather than from information provided by the authorities. If she can’t get what she needs from the police, she says, she’ll get it straight from those with firsthand experience.

In the early 2000s, Bolan helped investigate the disappearances of 45 Vancouver-area women, mostly sex workers from the Downtown Eastside. As the list of missing women grew, Bolan and Sun colleague Lindsay Kines kept the story on the front page.

Bolan was on the driveway of Robert Pickton’s Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm the night the police executed their first warrant. Her reportage recognized the tragedy of what she witnessed, but was clear and informative. After speaking to an RCMP constable, she wrote: “The excavation and search for human remains at the [farm] resembles the massive undertaking at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center disaster.” Her writing often shows great empathy. She interviewed Pickton’s sister, Linda, who had pleaded with journalists to leave her and her family alone. After Linda reluctantly agreed to speak publicly, Bolan wrote an article discussing the family’s lives after Robert was charged, mixing facts about the family’s finances with clear sympathy for their emotional trauma.

In both 2011 and 2012, Bolan won the Canadian Association of Journalists prize for Daily Excellence. The Vancouver Sun’s editor-in-chief Harold Munro praised her work: “Kim is the best crime reporter in Canada because of her passion for storytelling and relentless pursuit of the truth. She courageously takes on difficult stories—even in the face of tremendous risk to her personal safety.” More than a decade after Pickton’s arrest, Bolan wrote a follow-up about several missing sex workers in a post-Pickton B.C.

***

A new generation is continuing the crime-reporting tradition in its own way, leaving a mark on a beat that always draws attention. Before Robyn Doolittle became known as the Toronto Star reporter who exposed Rob Ford’s crack use, she got her start working the crime beat and making important connections in the police force.

She wasn’t the only one. Tamara Cherry moved from writing about crime in The Toronto Sun to reporting crime on television for CTV, covering many high-profile cases in and around Toronto. Cherry has occasionally felt uncomfortable—when canvassing high-crime areas, for instance—but she says she’s never found herself in a position that “my mother would worry about.”

At 30, Cherry’s passion for the crime beat is clear. “I once wanted to go work in Detroit because the crime rate was so high and I thought it would be an exciting place to be a crime reporter,” she says. She decided against the move because she read a local newspaper and noticed most murders did not receive much attention. “I’m happy to live in a country where every murder is a big deal, where we haven’t become complacent when it comes to crime even though our numbers are drastically lower than those south of the border.”

Last May, shortly after Dellen Millard was arrested for the murder of Tim Bosma, Cherry revealed that Millard had exchanged 13 phone calls with another missing person, 23-year-old Laura Babcock. Police had access to the phone records, but it was Cherry’s investigative work that connected these two cases.

Journalists who deliver the best crime coverage recognize their duty to uncover a story, write about it and capture the reader’s attention. And more and more, in Canada at least, if the question is “Whodunit?” women are increasingly the ones answering.

Photos by Megan Matsuda

Through the static of Rob Lamberti’s police scanner, the calm, detached voice of a female dispatcher announces that a car has crashed and is on fire on Queens Quay West. “Maybe we’ll get a Pepsodent smile tonight,” The Toronto Sun reporter says with a wry grin as he floors his red jeep and heads for the accident. Lamberti’s words are intended to shock, as he explains that a Pepsodent smile refers to the pearly white death grin of a blackened body. The thrill of the chase suddenly loses some of its appeal, but for the seasoned Sun reporter it is the first hot story of the night.
Lamberti, 35, is dressed for the night in a black jacket, black jeans and black Dr. Martens boots. His glasses cover a weathered face that has seen many tragedies during his eight years on the beat.
At the accident scene, billowing smoke obscures the interior of a black Alfa Romeo as five firefighters in yellow rubber suits douse the smashed remains of the sports car. The acrid smell of the fire hangs in the cold air, but tonight it is from burnt plastic and leather, not human flesh. The driver has likely fled after crashing the stolen car, and without a victim, the accident is just a crime statistic to Lamberti. He returns to his jeep and heads off to find a better story.

Lamberti’s dark humour and his hunt for human tragedy at first seem disrespectful and callous, but this is the reality of police-beat reporting in an increasingly violent and crime-ridden city. While the tragic stories receive much attention, the effect on the people who cover them does not. The beat changes many reporters, making them more cynical, more detached and sometimes more paranoid. Nick Pron, 43, of The 1Oronto Star has been covering crime for nearly a dozen years, and says he has received five or six death threats during his career. He claims they generally don’t bother him much; he says he’s more afraid of the ones he doesn’t get.
But one threat did hit home. Pron was told he’d better look under the hood of his car by a disgruntled interview subject. Pron didn’t really believe there was ever a bomb, but he still keeps his door open when he starts his car-hoping he’ll be thrown out if it blows up.
Starting out on such a stressful beat can be difficult. John Duncanson of the Star says police-beat reporters go through a period of adjustment to the job. He was affected by one of the first murder stories he worked on. “You become deranged, you can’t sleep, you can only think about the one murder.” Rob Lamberti even has his own term for what happens to reporters on the beat. He calls it “cop-reporter syndrome.” The police-beat reporters are on 24-hour call, and there was one year when Lamberti was the reporter who lived closest to downtown, where the majority of incidents take place. To Lamberti, it seemed like he was out on a call every night. Finally, it started to get to him. “I couldn’t sleep, I was lying awake waiting for a call. It’s almost like being a homicide detective.”
The erratic, late night hours also took their toll on his marriage, which he feels broke up in part because of his job.
People close to crime reporters see the impact of the beat. Mary Ellen Bench still remembers the first gory story her husband John Schmied covered for the Sun. A young woman had been run over by a truck and Schmied says seeing the remains allover the road really shook him up. “It was all he could talk about for a while,” says Bench. Now she says he has seen a lot worse and can cope with it. “He’s lost a lot of that innocence.” Schmied says that now when he sees a body, he views it only as an object. Seeing children hurt or killed is one of the toughest situations to deal with. Schmied thinks that when he has kids of his own, these situations will likely be even harder to handle.
Writing about the victim’s life helps many reporters deal with the tragedies they routinely cover. Some say that adding the human element to a story and making the victim more than just a name is its own therapy. Many newspapers offer specialized programs to help reporters deal with stresses both in their working and personal lives. Ann McKeown is head of a counselling service used by The Hamilton Spectator’s employee-assistance program. For more than 10 years she worked at the Spectator, offering counselling for anything from job stress and marital problems to drug and alcohol dependence. She feels that while reporters don’t become completely inured to tragedy, they do learn to cope with the stress, because it is a part of their job.
Bryan Cantley, manager of editorial services at the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association, says he is unaware of any studies of job stress on police beat reporters in Canada, but describes it as one of many areas in journalism that could use further research. Tragedy and stress, however, are not always a constant part of the beat. More often than not, the job is to hurry up and wait by their scanners and radios. “It”s like a cop’s job. It’s hours and hours of boredom with about 20 seconds of excitement and then hours and hours of boredom,” says Jim, a former British policeman turned freelance reporter (who doesn’t want his full name used).

It is a Friday night, and Rob Lamberti has been tipped off that a drug bust is going down in the Scarborough neighbourhood around 41 Division. He pulls his jeep into the police parking lot half an hour early for a 9 p.m. meeting with the undercover cops in charge of the bust. Lamberti puts his hand-held radio on the dash and flips through channels on the scanner he’s tucked into the visor above his head. Several Marlboro cigarettes later, the cops still have not appeared.
The inside of Lamberti’s car resembles an office on wheels with its clutter of coffee cups, unopened notepads, loose change and cigarette butts. The inside of the driver’s-side door has been damaged, exposing its metal frame. While Lamberti waits, the chaos of the busy city squawks out of the scanner as it automatically flips from ambulance to fire and police frequencies. At 9:05 p.m. a police dispatcher is heard talking to an officer at Humber College investigating a crime. Lamberti uses a cellular phone to call the police station, but the police won’t give out details. He decides to keep waiting in the parking lot, gambling the drug bust is a better bet for a story-even if it is, as Lamberti acknowledges, something of a public relations exercise.
The scanner continues to flip: an ambulance attendant has injected potassium chloride into a patient; at 9:20 p.m. a building at Queen Street and Gladstone Avenue is reported on fire. Using his hand-held radio, Lamberti contacts the newspaper to make sure a photographer is on his way to the fire.
The police paddy wagon drives out of the parking lot of 41 Division and Lamberti grows impatient. “I wish they’d invited us to the fucking scene,” he mutters under his breath.
Finally, at 10:49 p.m. the paddy wagon returns and a sullen, rag-tag group of 13 men, women and teenaged boys are led out. They stand long enough for the Sun photographer to snap their picture and listen to the rules of the lockup before they’re led inside the station. Lamberti jots down details and learns that more than $100,000 worth of drugs were seized, then heads back to the office to write it up.

According to some policebeat reporters, city crime became noticeably more violent, and more guns began being used about five years ago. They relate the increase to the first appearance of crack cocaine on the streets. Metro Toronto police statistics show that there were 37 homicides in 1986, and 60 in 1987. In 1991, 83 people were murdered and at the end of 1992, 64 murders were recorded. Crimes involving weapons totalled 3,939 in 1990, and reached a high of 4,584 in 1991, before dropping slightly to 4,442 in 1992.
Witnessing so much of the city’s crime often makes reporters over-protective of themselves and their families. Mary Ellen Bench says she would love to live in downtown Toronto, but her husband refuses to. His family has never been the target of violence, but this makes him no less cautious. Schmied is aware of the good and bad neighbourhoods in Toronto. He says that people have called the police desk at the Sun before buying a house. His current house in Mississauga is only two blocks from a police station.
Schmied also admits that the job has made him much more cynical about the people who commit crimes. He describes himself as having gone from being a “bleeding heart Liberal” to believing that the death penalty is justified for some crimes. “I’d even pull the switch in some cases.” Pron, who spent time working on a Master of Social Psychology, has a similar outlook. “I’ve stopped thinking in terms of rehabilitation. Now it’s more like: lock the bastards up.” Pron feels his change in attitude comes from seeing the devastation crime can have on victims and their families.
For many beat reporters, doing pickups of victims’ photos and having to interview victims’ families can be the most heart-wrenching part of the job. Getting the pictures, though, is a source of pride for reporters.
Pron’s toughest pickup involved the families of six women who had been killed when a car ploughed into them during a bike trip in Hamilton. The story, he said, made his stomach turn. At the first house he visited, the relatives slammed the door in his face. At the second, he finally persuaded a victim’s husband to talk with him. He was there for almost eight hours, shared a bottle of whisky and a lot of tears. The husband knew all six victims and “it turned out he had pictures of most of the women,” says Pron. “Then they forgot to put my byline on it after all that.”

For some, constantly dealing with human tragedies and invading people’s private grief can be too much. Former Sun reporter Shelley Gillen questioned whether this invasion was worthwhile, despite finding that she had a knack for getting good “sob?’ stories. As a general assignment reporter, she often interviewed the relatives of victims. An interview with a man she described as “an emotional mess” was a factor in her decision to leave the paper. The man’s fiancee had been murdered the week before, and Gillen was unaware that her editor had made a deal with him. The paper agreed to leave him alone if he talked to a reporter.
“His sister brought him,” says Gillen. “She was propping him up while I asked questions.” His father arrived part way through and forced them to stop the interview. When Gillen later returned from a holiday in the fall, she learned that the man and a friend of his fiancee had been part of a murder-suicide. “I wondered, did my talking to him or anything else have an effect on this?” Gillen agonizes. She left the paper the following February with no job to go to. She simply had had enough.
If the job causes so much grief, why do reporters continue to cover the beat? Those who stick with crime reporting truly enjoy covering police, fire and ambulance calls, says Bill Duff, the Sun’s night city-desk editor for the past four years. He says a good crime reporter has a talent for moving quickly when a story breaks, being aggressive and listening to scanners.
Some reporters have been on the police beat as long as 10 years at the Sun, and Duff says a few have been on the beat too long. “They get jaded, but then they look around and ask, ‘Do I really want to cover City Hall or do I prefer covering police and fire?'” The veteran reporters have also built up good contacts, and the beat offers more independence than being on general assignment.
Most police-beat reporters feel that the public needs to know about the crime happening around them. Lamberti feels that stories that make the public aware of the atrocities a criminal has committed, or reporting on a sentence he feels is not tough enough, make the job worthwhile. He admits, though, that he got into the beat because of the excitement. And, it seems, that is the true appeal for most police reporters. Gillen says the beat can be a thrill for reporters. “For a lot of people there’s an adrenalin rush to tragedy and crisis.” Schmied has worked for the Sun for about seven years-first on the police desk, then as a general assignment and Queen’s Park reporter. He continued following crime stories even after he left the police beat by carrying a scanner in his car. Now that he’s back on the crime beat, he says he’s having the most fun he’s had in the past two years.
Pron feels the same way. “If there wasn’t an edge, I wouldn’t do it,” he says. Originally, he thought he was destined to be a political reporter but finally decided he didn’t like that beat. “It was like watching grass grow,” he says. “It took a while to realize that crime was my one true love.” After running through back alleys and climbing on a roof to cover a man threatening people with a gun, Pron was hooked. ‘~lot of us say being a reporter is like being a drug addict. You get a story on the front page and it’s like a shot of adrenalin. Then you start coming down and you’re in the dumpster, and you start looking for another fix.”

It’s 2 a.m. Friday, and Lamberti has been replaced by Jim on the “vampire” shift until about 8 a.m. As the tall, heavy-set freelancer drives up University Avenue, a soft, orange glow from his two scanners lights the interior, while a Bob Marley tape plays softly in the background. Suddenly, the calm is broken by the sound of sirens and excited voices as one of the scanners tunes in to a police chase. “He’s going north on Jane, he’s waving his arms out the window,” says a male police officer. The car’s speed is called out by the officers in pursuit: 100 kilometres, 120 kilometres. “There’s going to be a major pileup,” the reporter predicts. “Hope you haven’t eaten anything recently.”
The former British police officer makes a sharp left off Avenue Road and speeds along Dupont Street looking for the pursuit. The skill of his police training comes through as he stomps on the brakes for a stop sign and then instantly hits the accelerator. Stopping for a red light, he times the green signal with the precision of a drag car racer.
“He’s heading south, now east,” an exasperated sounding police officer reports. “He’s going in circles,” the reporter adds.
The flashing red lights of the police appear down another side street and the reporter’s blue Taurus follows. The police report speeds as high as 150 kilo metres an hour before they are ordered to call the chase off. “That’s no fun, sir,” a female officer replies.
Slowing down, the excitement level drops. The Ontario Provincial Police report that the blue mini van has finally crashed without injury into a median while heading south in the northbound lane of Highway 427. Driving east back along Eglinton Avenue, quiet returns to the car, but a feeling of disappointment that the chase is over remains.
The craving for another crisis is quickly satisfied: the glare of yellow crime-scene tape appears, and it’s time for another fix, investigating a hit and run.