For the second time in recent months, Lancaster County is caught in the harsh glare of the media spotlight.
By Jane Holahan
Published Apr 14, 2006 13:16
But he knew very well the parking lot behind the office would be filling up as the morning progressed.
TV crews from Lancaster, York, Reading and Harrisburg arrived, as did newspaper reporters and photographers. The Associated Press showed up.
Todd Connor, a news anchor at Fox News Channel’s New York headquarters, was diverted from another story to report live. A number of Philadelphia news outlets were there too. A dozen vans with satellite dishes on top and colorful logos on the side crowded the parking lot.
By early afternoon, the place was packed. Dozens of cameras stood poised on shoulders and in hands, reporters held microphones and notebooks, waiting for the money shot.
Jesse Dee Wise, accused of strangling and bludgeoning to death six members of his family and then leaving them wrapped in sheets and blankets in the basement for several days, was due to arrive for his arraignment.
It was the worst mass murder in modern Lancaster County history. And it came just months after David Ludwig allegedly killed his girlfriend’s parents and then ran off with her in a police chase that lasted several days.
Once again, Lancaster County, or as many in the national media prefer to call it, Amish Country, was at the center of a lurid tragedy. A media frenzy was sure to follow.
“I call it a three-ring circus,” said Rupp, who’s covered a number of local stories that have become national ones, from Three Mile Island to the Lisa Michelle Lambert case to the Ludwig case last November.
“There is so much TV news out there, you’ve got to feed the hungry beast,“ Rupp said. “Everyone says something like this can’t happen in Lancaster County. That’s what draws the national exposure.”
WGAL would be sending feeds to other parts of the Hearst Argyle network, including stations in Baltimore, Des Moines, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., among others.
While most of the reporters and the men and women behind the cameras there simply were doing their jobs — covering a huge story — the work they did throughout the day would fuel newspapers and Web sites across the country, the cable news shows and the tabloids.
“For us, it’s a story, and we have to dig out the details,” said photographer Brad Bower, working for the Associated Press. His photograph of Wise would show up in newspapers and on Web sites across the world. “We disseminate it to the newspapers, and how they choose to present it is up to them.”
Versions of the AP’s story are appearing today in just about every newspaper and newspaper Web site in the country, from the Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune to the New York Times.
And the Sydney Morning Herald and BBC News are just two of the international news organizations running the story.
While most news articles are featuring headlines about bodies found in a home in Pennsylvania, others are pointing to the small-town, Amish setting of the murders.
“Horror in the Heartland,” screamed this morning’s cover headline from the Philadelphia Daily News.
Fox News proclaimed “Murder in the heart of Amish Country” every time it mentioned the story.
And MSNBC’s Rita Cosby on her show, “Live & Direct,” breathlessly talked about the “developing story in the middle of Pennsylvania Amish County,” in between stories about missing teenager Natalee Holloway and the Duke University rape case.
Thursday evening, Nancy Grace, who has a self-titled show on CNN Headline News, was having a field day with references to Amish culture.
She talked about how the Amish shun modern technology, even buttons and kitchen aids, and she showed a video of a buggy.
A reporter who works for the show felt it necessary to point out that the Amish are against violence, and noted that Lancaster County is famous for Turkey Hill ice cream.
Then Grace and one of her guests, Pat Brown, who describes himself as a criminal profiler, made some leaps into darker details, going from the tradition of rumspringa to what Brown said is “a big problem with crystal meth up there.”
Rumspringa is a tradition in which Amish teens go out into the regular world and sow their wild oats before deciding to join the church. However, Brown claimed the tradition often involved drinking and drugs.
It didn’t take long for Brown and Grace to suggest that crystal meth was linked to the crime.
“You know what? You know what?” Grace said. “That is really interesting. I was doing a little research today about drugs, not necessarily drug use, but drug possession and to distribute amongst the Amish, a very — not to the majority of the Amish, but a growing concern for them, who have remained for so many hundreds of years so pure as to the outside world.”
What did this tragic murder have to do with the Amish?
In reality, probably nothing at all. In the midst of a media frenzy, the “connection” was pure gold.
