LOS ANGELES — Linda Deutsch, the Associated Press special correspondent who for nearly 50 years wrote good first drafts of the histories of lots of the country's most vital criminal and civil trials — including those of Charles Manson, OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson — died Sunday. She was 80.
Deutsch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2022 and underwent successful treatment, but this summer the cancer returned. She died at her home in Los Angeles surrounded by family and friends, said nurse Narek Petrosian of Olympia Hospice Care.
Edith Lederer, AP's chief correspondent on the United Nations, was amongst those that ended up working with Deutsch. The two were friends for greater than 50 years and pioneering female reporters once they joined AP within the late Nineteen Sixties.
“She was an incomparable friend to hundreds of people who will miss her wit, wisdom, charm and constant curiosity,” Lederer said.
One of America's best-known trial reporters when she retired in 2015, Deutsch's profession as a judge began in 1969 with the trial and conviction of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's murderer, Sirhan Sirhan. She later reported on a who's who of the accused — Manson, Simpson, Jackson, Patty Hearst, Phil Spector, the Menendez brothers, “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and cops filed charges for the beating of driver Rodney King.
She was in a Los Angeles courtroom in 1995 to finish the “trial of the century” through which Simpson, an NFL Hall of Famer, was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. Thirteen years later, Deutsch was in a Las Vegas courtroom when Simpson was convicted of kidnapping and robbery and sentenced to prison.
“When a major trial came up, AP editors didn't have to ask who should get the assignment. No, the immediate question was, 'Is Linda available?'” recalls Louis D. Boccardi, who served as AP's managing editor for 10 years and president and CEO for 18 years. “She mastered the art of covering celebrity trials and became something of a media celebrity in the process.”
For a long time, Deutsch reported on every appeal and parole hearing of every convicted member of the Manson Family. Other historic moments included the 1976 conviction of newspaper heiress Hearst on bank robbery and other charges, the 2005 acquittal of Jackson on child molestation charges, and the 2009 conviction of famed music producer Spector on murder charges.
“Linda was a fearless reporter who loved to get on the big stories — and she did indeed report on some of the biggest,” said Julie Pace, AP's editor in chief and senior vp. “She was a true trailblazer whose mastery of her subject matter and tireless work ethic made her an inspiration to so many journalists at AP and throughout our industry.”
Her work, at all times written with verve, was not limited to celebrities—other cases also involved fraud, conspiracy, environmental disasters and immigration—and eventually earned her the title of special correspondent, essentially the most prestigious name for an AP reporter.
Defense attorney Thomas Mesereau, who represented Jackson, called Deutsch the “epitome of ethics and professionalism in journalism.”
“I can’t imagine anyone reaching her level,” he said of Deutsch when she retired.
Deutsch was only 25 when she covered Sirhan's conviction. She then turned her attention to the bizarre case of Charles Manson, a profession criminal who had reinvented himself as a hippie guru, proselytizing and supplying psychedelic drugs to a gaggle of disillusioned youths.
The Manson Family, as they later became known, terrorized Los Angeles over several summer nights in 1969, breaking into homes in two affluent neighborhoods and killing seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate. Most of the victims were stabbed multiple times and their blood was used to scrawl “pig” and other words on the partitions of the homes.
When Manson and three of his young female followers went on trial for murder in 1970, they turned the months-long trial right into a “surreal spectacle.” how German would write when Manson died in 2017.
“People in the courtroom were having LSD flashbacks, and at one point Charlie is jumping across the lawyer's table toward the judge with a pencil in his hand and the girls are jumping up and down singing,” Deutsch recalled in a 2014 interview.
Because Deutsch had only covered one major trial, the AP initially sent a more experienced reporter from New York to steer coverage of the Manson trial. After a month of witnessing such antics, he returned home disgusted and left Deutsch in charge.
“I thought, 'Oh, this is really something,'” Deutsch recalls, laughing. “I didn't know that court proceedings could be like this.”
Nevertheless, she was enthusiastic and formed close contacts with the journalists who got here day-after-day for nine months.
But an excellent greater trial that began in the fashionable television age would eclipse Manson greater than 20 years later. When Simpson, one in every of America's hottest celebrities and sports stars, was charged with stabbing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman to death in a fit of rage, news agencies from world wide sent reporters to cover the case.
The judge made Deutsch, now a well-known face within the courthouse, the one reporter covering jury selection. She was an omnipresent presence on television, reporting what was happening within the courtroom to a worldwide audience.
After Simpson was acquitted 11 months later. he called to thank her for what he considered to be fair and objective reporting. The conversation led to what was the primary of a series of Exclusive interviews he gave her over time.
Not all of her cases involved celebrities. Deutsch spent five months in Alaska and reported the trial of Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez which caused one in every of the worst environmental disasters within the USA in 1989 with the leak of 41 million litres of crude oil.
She was also present on the 1973 espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, which revealed unsavory details about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Times published a series of articles in regards to the contents that helped turn the general public against the Vietnam War.
Deutsch reported on the trial against Ramirez, the serial killer “Night Stalker”, To hear witness statements that were so gruesome that they brought tears to the eyes of reporters. But it was the 1992 Trial of 4 Los Angeles cops who were caught on video beating King, which shocked Deutsch essentially the most. Their acquittals sparked riots in Los Angeles that left 55 people dead and caused $1 billion in property damage.
“It almost destroyed my faith in the legal system,” she said in 2014. “I believe a jury usually gets it right, but in this case it didn't. It was the wrong conclusion. It was the wrong verdict and it almost destroyed my city.”
Like so many others, Deutsch fell in love with Los Angeles after moving from elsewhere. Born and raised in New Jersey, she became all for journalism at age 12 when she began a world Elvis Presley fan club newsletter in her hometown of Perth Amboy. The lifelong Presley fan traveled to the musician's Graceland home in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2002. on the occasion of his twenty fifth death anniversary.
During her sophomore 12 months at Monmouth College in New Jersey – now Monmouth University – she landed a part-time job at her hometown newspaper, where she convinced the editor to permit her to travel to Washington, D.C. in 1963 to cover the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
After graduating, she got here to Southern California and worked briefly for the San Bernardino Sun before joining AP in 1967. Deutsch originally desired to be an entertainment reporter and took years off from her court reporting to assist cover the Academy Awards.
In 1975, after the autumn of Saigon ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam, she was sent to the Pacific island of Guam to interview evacuees and help bring locally hired AP staffers safely to the United States.
“It's as old as Shakespeare and as old as Socrates,” she said in an interview in 2007. “It's an extremely powerful theater that tells us something about ourselves and about the people on trial. And I always find it fascinating.”
Preparations for the funeral were still pending.
John Rogers, the lead creator of this obituary, retired from the Associated Press in 2021.
Originally published:
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