When Fran Williams dashed out of her Virginia Beach home Tuesday morning and headed for work, she didn’t have time to stop to read — much less look at — the morning paper.
During the day, Williams read parts of The Pilot on line, especially coverage of the execution of Timothy McVeigh for the senseless deaths of 168 people in 1995′s Oklahoma City bombing.
Arriving at her Brigadoon home Tuesday evening, she spied The Pilot, its front page upside down, on the kitchen table. “I thought it was an ad,” said Williams, recalling her first thought viewing the paper from a distance.
Up close, she saw that most of Tuesday’s front page consisted of a tiny photo of McVeigh clad in orange prison garb, dwarfed by individual photos of the bombing victims. “Their killer is dead,” was the small headline.
“That is so nice that they did that,” Williams thought. “It really just hit me. That was better than any article. It just made you stop and think how fragile life is.”
Not surprisingly, Tuesday’s front page — and the subject of McVeigh’s execution — spurred others, like Williams, to contact The Pilot to share their thoughts and feelings about our treatment of the execution. Some even debated the pros and cons of execution.
While reader reaction to Tuesday’s front page was mostly favorable, the comments ran the gamut — from “Absolutely great . . . may be the finest front page The Pilot has ever produced” to “Shame on you.”
“McVeigh’s picture in the center of the paper surrounded by the victims elevated him to center stage,” said one reader.
“What more could a radical, government-hating, self-centered extremist want?” asked Kay Fleetwood of Norfolk, who thought the Pilot’s front page amounted to a “glorious memorial” to McVeigh.
More callers thought just the opposite.
“The way you chose to place the focus and the emphasis on the victims as opposed to Mr. McVeigh was masterful. The headline . . . was brilliant as well and extremely sensitive,” wrote Mary Ann Collins of Chesapeake, who said her husband agreed. “We were both blown away.”
In light of the reader response, I chatted with Pilot news editor Paul Nelson and page designer Jonathon (J.R.) Withers about how the front page came together.
Nelson said that he and Jim Haag, who was originally scheduled to design A1, had been discussing the presentation since April.
“Jim worked up some pages using images of Timothy McVeigh and the bombed-out building,’ Nelson said. “Some also incorporated the time and date of the bombing with the time and date of the execution.”
But none seemed to capture the magnitude of the event, Nelson said. “They used the same images that everyone had seen for years on TV and in newspapers. They just didn’t match the tone of what was happening — the execution of an American terrorist who killed 168 people.”
Nelson mentioned this dilemma to his wife, Helen, who suggested that the paper focus on the victims.
“The trouble was, we didn’t have a way to do that at the time,” Nelson recalled. “Nothing new about the victims had been released in the past five years.
“As the new execution date approached, it was looking more like we would go with a standard presentation that used the most story-telling photo of the day with a headline. The Friday night before the execution I checked to see if the Associated Press had sent any new photos related to McVeigh or the bombing.
“It turned out that they had sent photos from the Oklahoma City National Memorial museum of the victims set in shadow boxes with small mementos. They were very touching pictures with a great deal of humanity and served as an instant reminder of the loss and heartache caused by McVeigh.”
Withers, who had worked on several versions of the page on the night of Saturday, June 9, said that Nelson “gave me the idea of the tone we were looking for with the page and told me to brainstorm. Once I had the photos Paul found, I felt we had something that could really convey what we were trying to say in an appropriate manner.”
Nelson: “J.R. came back about an hour later with what essentially was the page that we published. I was concerned that it might look jumbled or undignified, but J.R. did a great job getting it right.”
“Paul did a lot of extra work, even coming in on his day off, to make the page look great,” Withers added.
It was Nelson who suggested the “Their killer is dead” headline with the thought that it would be “straightforward and not editorializing or overly dramatic.”
I asked Nelson if there was any concern leading up to publication that we might be overdoing it.
“Not once the basic design was nailed down,” he said. “It focused on the victims and the loss, did not glorify McVeigh and had a solemn tone that reflected what had happened.”
