LETTERS: STORY WAS SHAMELESS SENSATIONALISM

To the editor:

Your Jan. 8 front-page article, "Convicted killer dies at Missouri mental hospital," only pretends to be a report of my son, Kenneth Stone's, death. It is, instead, an example of blatant and shameless sensationalism. Your reporter's call to me the evening after my son died was deceptive and came to me under the pretense and disguise of gathering details surrounding the cause of his death. But the article you published proves otherwise. It is a rehash of incidents dredged out of the files, old news from nearly two years ago, something your reporter failed to mention was his true intent.

Although the murder trial the article discusses is long since over, your article contains courtroom quotations from Morley Swingle and a whole grocery list of highly selective trial evidence. And as the article itself reveals, the headline is incorrect. My son died at a medical hospital in Columbia, Mo., not the much more sensational sounding "mental hospital" your headline indicates.

Jeffrey Jackson's article is unconscionable, totally lacking in common human decency and factually incorrect, and it demonstrates a complete disregard for a family's grief and sorrow.

But ours is a proud and strong family. I am certain we can live with our grief and our loss if your newspaper can live with the apparent lengths it is willing to go to sensationalize a young man's tragic life and death, to intrude so callously and wantonly into a family's pain and anguish, and to give prosecutor Morley Swingle a political plug, just as it gave him a plug the day before my son's trial began by touting in an article Mr. Swingle's courtroom skill and lauding the fact that he had never lost a murder case, a hell of a coincidence in timing and of highly questionable propriety, especially when considering a jury for my son's trial had not get been picked.

My mother, who pleaded with the Missourian to allow our family to grieve quietly and in peace and who has managed to live for 70-odd years and still maintain a deep and abiding faith in the goodness, kindness and decency of human beings has been forced, along with the rest of us, to face the fact that there are those who walk among us who neither share those beliefs nor respect them.

But happily there are many more who do, and the outpouring of support and sympathy from them in our time of grief tells us that everyone is not, thank God, of the same cut as the Missourian.

I cannot help but think of Tennessee Williams, a man who greatly understood pain and human suffering, when he wrote at the end of one of his plays, "Oh, God, can't we stop now? Finally? Please?"

JAMES W. STONE

Farmington