A 1977 Kidnapping in Indianapolis Forced Journalists to Reevaluate the Ethics of Live Coverage

On the morning of February 8, 1977, journalist Tom Cochrun was in the newsroom of WIBC-AM, the Indianapolis radio station where he worked, when he heard about something strange happening in midtown. A man named Tony Kiritsis had taken mortgage broker Dick Hall hostage and was marching him down the city’s snowy streets with a sawed-off shotgun.

Police officers were following Kiritsis, and journalists were filming him—but nobody was stopping him, because he’d tied a wire around his own neck and connected it to the gun’s trigger. Kiritsis had also tied a wire around Hall’s neck to keep his head in front of the gun barrel. Kiritsis warned police that if they shot him, the drop of his body would trigger the “dead man’s line” and kill Hall.

Kiritsis forced Hall into the driver’s seat of a police car and had Hall drive them both to Kiritsis’s apartment complex with police and journalists following closely behind. Once there, Kiritsis held Hall hostage in his apartment, falsely claiming he’d wired his home with explosives that would go off if anyone tried to get in.

Cochrun and other Indianapolis journalists spent the next two and a half days covering the bizarre hostage situation, which ended with Kiritsis giving an expletive-filled press conference while holding a shotgun to Hall’s head. The ordeal raised several moral and ethical questions for reporters, one of them being: Was it ethical to air live footage of a man holding a gun to another man’s head, knowing that he could shoot him at any moment?

“It was just absolutely fraught, from the very beginning, with ethical issues,” Cochrun tells A&E Crime + Investigation of his experience reporting from Kiritsis’s Crestwood Village apartment complex. “First of all: Are we giving in to this fellow’s demands?”

Reporters understood that Kiritsis wanted the attention he was receiving from the press: He used his airtime to claim Hall was trying to swindle a property from him and demanded an apology, $5 million and a promise of immunity from prosecution. At the same time, journalists at WIBC felt this story was too significant to ignore, and they tried to contextualize Kiritsis’s claims by researching and reporting on the dispute between him and Hall’s company.

Another ethical issue arose when Cochrun and his WIBC news team realized Kiritsis was listening to their radio coverage and that it was affecting his behavior. After hearing a WIBC reporter ask authorities if they would ever consider storming Kiritsis’s apartment, Cochrun says Kiritsis misunderstood and thought a SWAT team was about to burst in, and he began threatening to shoot Hall right then and there. To stop Kiritsis from killing Hall, WIBC got someone on the air to say that there was no plan to rush his apartment. 

“At that point, what we were doing was not so much broadcasting to everybody,” Cochrun says. “We realized that we’re now talking to this hostage taker, and that our coverage was having [an] impact on his emotional state, his behavior and, in essence, the fate of Dick Hall.”

Cochrun and his colleagues discussed this issue and decided that, while they should be sensitive to the impact their reporting had on the situation, “our purpose is not to be concerned only about the outcome,” he says. “Our purpose was to report what we knew, what we could verify, to the public.”

There was another ethical problem the reporters didn’t see coming. At some point, Cochrun and his colleagues learned that their boss, WIBC News Director Fred Heckman, was having private phone conversations with Kiritsis and had become a key part of law enforcement’s hostage negotiations.

Heckman was a well-known radio news anchor, whom Cochrun describes as “the Walter Cronkite of Indianapolis at that time.” About a day into the hostage situation, Kiritsis called WIBC and had a conversation with Heckman in which he laid out his grievances and demands. Heckman recorded the call and broadcast it over the air. (Before playing it, he apologized to listeners for the strong language they were about to hear.)

After this, law enforcement began using Heckman as an intermediary in its negotiations with Kiritsis. Heckman started having calls with Kiritsis that he didn’t broadcast, and Cochrun says his boss was no longer sharing all of the information he learned about the situation with his news team.

Cochrun remembers confronting Heckman about the conflict of interest and telling him he should step down from covering the story as a reporter. Heckman resisted this at first but eventually told Cochrun to do what he thought was right. From then on, WIBC reported on Heckman’s role in the negotiations and treated him like a source, not a fellow reporter.

The Kiritsis kidnapping came to a dramatic ending on the evening of February 10. Convinced his demands had been met, Kiritsis requested a press conference before he surrendered.

During the half-hour press conference, Kiritsis yelled, cursed and held the shotgun barrel to Hall’s head. Even as journalists feared that Kiritsis might kill Hall at any moment, local affiliate stations for CBS and NBC kept the cameras rolling. In contrast, ABC affiliate station WTHR cut away after a few minutes and apologized to viewers for the language. The WTHR news director later explained, “We would not go back until the gun was down and there was no possibility of Hall being killed on the air.”

After Kiritsis released Hall, police arrested Kiritsis. Eight months later, a jury later found him not guilty by reason of insanity, and he spent the next decade in a mental institution before he died in 2005. Yet even after it was all over, the case remained extremely relevant to broadcast journalists, who were navigating both the relatively new technology of live TV coverage, and the complexities of covering other hostage situations. Just a month after Kiritsis’s kidnapping, a terrorist group held nearly 150 people hostage in Washington, D.C. during a three-day standoff.

The Kiritsis kidnapping was a significant event in the history of broadcast journalism. Stacey Woelfel, a professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism, recalls discussing the case when he attended journalism school in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

“Being able to go live [on television] was so new that people needed cases like this to be able to talk about, ‘What will we do?’” he tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “If somebody said, ‘Dream up a situation you might have to cover in the newsroom,’ nobody would come up with this.”

After the Kiritsis kidnapping, different newsrooms and journalism organizations developed guidelines for how to cover terrorist or hostage situations. In November 1977, the United Press International National Broadcast Advisory Board published a set of guidelines that touched on something WIBC had faced in the Kiritsis case: “Reporters should avoid deliberately injecting themselves into the story as intermediaries or negotiators.”

CBS News also issued guidelines about how to cover terrorists in April 1977. One stated, “except in the most compelling circumstances…there should be no live coverage of the terrorist/kidnapper since we may fall into the trap of providing an unedited platform for him.”

While Woelfel feels that such guidelines still play a role in broadcast coverage, Cochrun fears that the creep of corporate business interests into modern newsrooms have changed the way some journalists approach stories.

UPI’s 1977 guidelines advise reporters to “judge each story on its own and if the story is newsworthy, cover it.” Importantly, the emphasis is on whether covering a story is in the public interest, not whether journalists think it will capture the public’s attention. Yet today, Cochrun argues, “The bottom line in newsrooms is not so much the public’s right to know as much as it is building an audience.”