The murder of a Navy pilot’s wife went unsolved for 44 years until a cold-case detective used a new method to find the killer.
Rarely do you get the chance to hear the step-by-step process of how a cold case murder is solved from the people who tracked down the killer.
A true-crime documentary about a Navy pilot’s wife who was raped and stabbed to death 44 years ago is told expertly in a 30-minute documentary special by WAVY, Nexstar’s NBC affiliate in Portsmouth, Va.
The special, Catching Kathleen’s Killer, aired at 7 p.m. in late September on WVBT, the Fox affiliate licensed to Virginia Beach also owned by Nexstar. The two stations share studios in Portsmouth.
The entire story is told by just the two people who solved it—a Norfolk detective and a forensics genetic genealogist—and there’s no reporter or announcer track.
Jeff Myers, WAVY’s news operations manager and chief photographer, says that’s a technique the station uses on a regular basis.
“We ask very direct questions so we can have the storyline go from beginning to end through just the sound bites,” Myers says.
But it’s typically done in one-or two-minute stories, and much more difficult to do in a half-hour special.
Catching Kathleen’s Killer was shot and edited by Kevin Romm, a WAVY photojournalist who started as an intern five years ago.
“That is something that Kevin has really, really done a good job with because if you don’t do that in the way that he did it, it could be kind of convoluted and the story doesn’t make any sense if you are not careful,” Myers says.
Romm’s shooting and editing caught the attention of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), which is dedicated to promoting visual journalism.
Romm’s submission of Catching Kathleen’s Killer earned first place in the NPPA’s In-depth/Investigative Category for the East Region in the third quarter of 2023.
CLICK HERE to see a list of all the East Regional 2023 winners.
Here are some comments from the NPPA judges:
“I’m not one who likes to see a lot of interview shots up on the screen. But this worked because it was great to hear this story from the detective and the woman from tha ONA research company without a reporter’s interpretation. That is what made it interesting is the entire story was told by the main players of the story, well done.”
“Really solid and creative piece. This is really impressive with this kind of piece to be a nat pkg on top of it all.”
“Nice work, very captivating, was interested throughout, you did a nice job telling this story.”
If you’re going to tell a 22-minute story using just the interviews of two people, you need to be prepared. First, you’re going to need to be able to shoot with two different cameras.
Romm says he wanted to be able to cut from one camera that was set up wide and another set up as medium-wide.
“I will typically wait maybe eight to ten minutes and then switch one of them to be a little bit tighter just so I have that wide range of options when I am going through the editing process,” Romm says.
At one point, Romm felt something was missing, so he hopped in the car with the detective to drive by the house where the murder took place.
“It gives them the ability to loosen up a little bit and just have a more conversational response to some of the questions that I have,” Romm says.
Catching Kathleen’s Killer is the seventh in a series of local unsolved homicides that WAVY has done under the umbrella of Unsolved.
Romm says he uses the same technique of just talking to those involved and letting them tell the story in their own words in each one.
Myers says this formula of letting the people involved tell the story demonstrates the power of photojournalism.
“It is a very compelling way to tell a story, a very powerful form of storytelling,” he says.
New Jobs Posted To TVNewsCheck
New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include an opening for a Senior Director of Sports.
Comments (0)
Reader Interactions