The Rest and the Real Story

A year ago this week, 5thEstate.com was the first to write about the County Coroner being investigated by Attorney General’s office. (Click Here To Read Our Exclusive Story On Raid!) Now we give an EXCLUSIVE insider’s peak into what went wrong and who did wrong at Lancaster Newspaper (LNP). This story is literally 10 times longer than our average story. That being said, I felt like our readers would want to know the details and compare the TRUTH to the spin that LNP is currently using! It reveals that the 73 year old Dr. Kirchner was more of a victim of threats from LNP report Brett Lovelace than we have previously known. The story also shows that Lancaster Newspapers is in potential legal hot water for jeopardizing investigations!

Stay tune as 5thEstate.com will soon be providing another statement that no one else but 5thEstate.com will make available to the public. Why do people give us exclusive? They know that we can be trusted to do the right thing with the information. They know that 5thEstate.com alone with give them unfiltered, unedited access to the public. At 5thEstate.com we trust the readers with all the information they need to decide. We don't tell you what they said - we let you hear it in their own words. In the following story, let me apologize in advance for the crude language from one of LNP's editors. 5thEstate.com, we give what no one else can! Please note the publicity photo LNP gives out when Lovelace is getting an award. Too bad that don't give the same courtesy to Commissioner Shellenberger!

I don’t like reading so much on the computer so I provide a link to printable version of this story right here!

Editor and publisher, Ron Harper Jr.

Intelligencer Journal reporters Brett Lovelace and P.J. Reilly obtained the Lancaster County Coroner’s username and password and used it frequently to access the private website used by law enforcement for confidential communication during investigations.

Lovelace and Reilly say they don’t know where username and password came from, but we now know it probably came from Carrie Caldwell Cassidy.

On a warm Saturday in August 2005, law enforcement officials learned newspaper reporters were regularly (and illegally) accessing their website. It began with a small six-inch article with no byline.

There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the article. It simply said the coroner’s office hadn’t determined the cause or manner of death of a man reportedly found dead in his apartment.

The man’s death was later ruled a suicide, according to subsequent accounts, but the ramifications of that small article would shake journalism in Lancaster County to its very foundations.

The Begining of the End!

For weeks, Intel reporter Paula Holzman (a former Intelligencer Journal intern whose first job out of college was working for the Intelligencer Journal) had been bugging the editors about covering the police beat in the absence of Lovelace, the regular police beat reporter. After repeated requests, the editors – against their better judgment – relented and scheduled Holzman for the shift.

The day before her first shift, she met with Lovelace to review her responsibilities. During this meeting, Lovelace provided her with the Coroner’s username and password with explicit instructions NOT to use the website for attribution. It was to be used for reference only, Lovelace said. Lovelace was confident Holzman understood.

The day of her shift, Holzman checked the website as part of her regular routine, just as Lovelace had instructed her. When she saw the online discussion between police about the death of the man found in the apartment, Holzman tried to find out more information on her own. She poked around through conventional sources, but couldn’t get anybody to open up and give her information about it.

Holzman is known as having a quick-tempered when she doesn’t get her way. When law enforcement officials smugly refused to corroborate the woman's death and she found she had no leverage for a story, Holzman figured the police were withholding the information for a reason. Maybe they were holding it for one of the other papers. Maybe they just didn’t like her pushy style. That was a regular obstacle for her. She had put pressure on herself to deliver a big story on her first day, and this could be it.

Undaunted by her lack of success, Holzman decided she would write the story anyway. She’d put it right in the faces of those law enforcement officials who had slighted her. They could read in the paper how clever she was at running down the lead.

The problem, of course, was Holzman had no other source for the information besides the website. In the grand scheme of things, her own thirst for a successful first day on the police beat apparently outweighed Lovelace’s warnings against attributing information to the website. Holzman’s in-the-moment thinking went unchecked by Editor Bill Hannegan.

The small unassuming article about the man’s death appeared the following day. It was one of the only stories the Intelligencer Journal ever published by Holzman that did not contain her byline.

Paula Holzman had committed a crime and reported it to the world.

When reporters at the opposing daily paper, The Lancaster New Era, read the story the following morning, they were annoyed that they didn’t have access to the website. One of them called countywide communications to demand admittance to the site. The dispatcher was confused, and said she didn’t know why the Intelligencer Journal had access. After all, no one – especially the media – is supposed to have access to that information. It was highly-confidential material that was not supposed to be available to the public. It certainly was not supposed to be printed and reprinted for discussion in 45,000 households across Lancaster County.

And that’s how the investigation began.

LNP Hurts Crime Solving...

Not long after Holzman’s story ran, Lovelace noticed that the username and password he and Reilly had been using for more than a year suddenly stopped working. He couldn’t figure out what was going on, so he asked Reilly if he was having trouble with the username and password. P.J., a full-timer who covered the county commissioners and occasionally the police beat, tried it out. Sure enough, the username and password wouldn’t work for him either.

Lovelace began to panic. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He had used the information from that website for more than a year. He had written several highly controversial articles based on the information he gleaned from that site.

When no one could squeeze any information from law enforcement officials about the circumstances of Cortney Fry’s murder, it was Lovelace who “uncovered” and wrote details about the crime scene. Lancaster County District Attorney Donald Totaro was furious. The information written by Lovelace and subsequently published by his editors was information only Fry’s killer could have known. Now, if even if law enforcement made an arrest in the case, the worst lawyer in Lancaster County could probably get the suspect off. Forget about a confession. Even if the killer gave one, his defense lawyer could argue that everyone in Lancaster County had access to the same set of information.

And that wasn’t the only time law enforcement officials were confounded by one of Lovelace’s articles. There was the case of Baby Allison, an infant who was killed and discarded into a trash can shortly after her birth. Law enforcement had kept autopsy details in that case a secret. Lovelace spilled the beans publicly, however, by reporting on specific injuries to the child that only a handful of people knew about.

Totaro blamed Lovelace directly for the stalled investigations in both cases. Lovelace, meanwhile, was earning a reputation as one of the best reporters at the paper. He was revered by his editors for his ability to “dig out” stories with what they called “good old-fashioned hard work.” He was becoming the golden boy of the newsroom.

Given his amazing track record, Lovelace’s panic was understandable. Without access to the website, he would have to resort to conventional methods of investigation, which are limited for reporters. Witness statements would still be an option, but Lovelace’s many controversial stories had alienated him to many law enforcement officials, who are traditionally a police reporter’s bread and butter.

Lovelace turned to the only person he could for help. He immediately sent e-mails to Kirchner demanding to know why the username and password weren’t working. Kirchner, who was on amicable terms with Lovelace couldn’t explain it. In fact, he told Lovelace, it was his username and password and now he could no longer access the website.

It was now every man for himself, and Kirchner had no interest in helping Lovelace access the investigators’ website. Lovelace could feel his once-soaring stock begin to sink.

Kirchner The Victim?

It was about this time that Intelligencer Journal court reporter Justin Quinn came across a settlement agreement with Dr. G. Gary Kirchner’s name on it. It was a lawsuit Kirchner had filed against two local medical societies before he had been elected coroner. Kirchner’s complaint was legit. The medical societies, upset that Kirchner was giving second opinions to patients as part of his consultation business, accused Kirchner of practicing medicine without a license. When the case was initially filed, Kirchner gave an interview to Quinn, but hours later asked him not to publish it. Quinn reluctantly agreed, under the condition that he be allowed to use it at the time of settlement. Kirchner agreed, but was unaware that one of the terms of his settlement with the medical societies would be his public silence on the subject.

When Kirchner apprised Quinn of this detail, the reporter objected loudly. Angrily, he told his editors about how the coroner had gone back on his word. The editors, “in the interests of maintaining a good relationship with the coroner,” told Quinn not to use the interview. Quinn was very unhappy.

Lovelace overheard this debate between Quinn and the editors. Before Quinn had a chance to call the coroner to tell him that the interview was going to be taken out of the story, Lovelace intercepted him.

Artfully, Lovelace convinced Quinn that it would be better for Kirchner to hear about these developments from someone uninvolved in the story. He told Quinn he was really upset and might say something to the coroner that he would regret. Quinn, who had no desire to speak to Kirchner again, much less tell him how his story had been thwarted, agreed to leave it up to Lovelace.

Right or wrong, Lovelace believed he finally had the necessary leverage to get Kirchner working on his behalf. Lovelace began to pound Kirchner with demands for his help. In one particularly frosty exchange, Lovelace led Kirchner to believe it was he who had talked Quinn out of using the interview for the lawsuit story. Quinn, an old-school reporter with a reputation for ethical journalism, had no idea Lovelace was using the story to leverage information from the coroner.

The implication from Lovelace’s e-mail was clear: “I talked Justin out of using the interview you gave him \. Now you owe me a favor.”

Lovelace also led Kirchner to believe Quinn still had the notes from his interview with the coroner. The implication there was, “Give me what I want, or I tell Justin to run the story.”

Little did Kirchner realize that Lovelace was bluffing. While Quinn still had the notes, Editor John Ferguson – not Quinn – had decided the interview would never be printed.

In either case, Lovelace’s demand was the same: “I want your new username and password … or else.”

Kirchner, meanwhile, had been struggling with the issue himself. His fellow law enforcement officials still had not issued him a new username and password, and it appeared they weren’t going to.

Kirchner had had several well-publicized disagreements with Totaro over the previous two years regarding the tight-lipped policy of local police investigations. Lovelace’s sensational stories had caused authorities in Lancaster County to clamp down hard on public information. Kirchner had given several interviews questioning this policy and urging a more open relationship with the media. Kirchner went so far as to criticize Totaro for his self-contained approach to solving crimes and suggested law enforcement stood a greater chance of solving crimes if the public was involved.

Totaro blasted back at Kirchner in one of the Intelligencer Journal’s competing newspapers. Totaro said it was Kichner’s failure to close off crime scenes and his inexperience as an investigator that was jeopardizing homicide cases. He demanded Kirchner begin paying closer attention to his duties as a coroner and less attention to improving law enforcement policies in Lancaster County. An open letter to Kirchner from Totaro and other police officials accompanied the District Attorney’s interview.

Totaro was now involved in two full-blown feuds; one with the Intelligencer Journal and one with the Lancaster County Coroner.

Now it seemed, Kirchner not only was being frozen out of investigations, he was also being strong-armed by a reporter who wanted something he was unable to produce. Kirchner’s responses to Lovelace during this time were desperate. Kirchner explained to Lovelace how difficult it would be for him to approach the county’s information technology wizards without giving away what he was after. He explained to Lovelace that he was also unable to access the website.

It began to dawn on both of them that something was terribly wrong here.

LNP Lawyers UP - Leaves Quinn in the Dark!

Over the next two months, Lovelace, Holzman and Reilly began to meet regularly with Lancaster Newspapers’ attorneys. They were all the subjects of a grand-jury investigation into the illegal access of the countywide communications’ website. They had all been subpoenaed to testify before the grand-jury. Quinn also was being targeted, although he didn’t know about it until much later. In fact, Quinn knew nothing about the website access until Lovelace confided in him one day before work.

Brett said he was particularly upset because over the weekend Lancaster City Police Detective Christopher Erb and an investigator with the state Attorney General’s office had shown up on his doorstep at 8 a.m. Luckily, Lovelace said, he had just gotten out of bed, so he was able to invite them in. He said he was kind of groggy and figured they were there to discuss a recent double-murder that had taken place the previous week.

A couple minutes into the conversation, however, Lovelace said he realized they weren’t there to talk about the murders at all. They were asking him about how he logs on to the computer, what websites he visits. No novice to police investigations, Lovelace determined he was being interviewed and asked them to leave.

Quinn stopped Lovelace at that point and asked him what the big deal was. Lovelace explained that the part of the website he accessed is a private part used by investigators to communicate with one another. Most of the public doesn’t have access to this part of the site, he said. Lovelace said he used the website every day as part of his general routine. He’d come in, log on and see what was going on. He used it for tip purposes. He said emphatically that he never realized he was doing anything wrong.

Lovelace portrayed himself as the innocent victim of an overzealous district attorney and painted Totaro as a master puppeteer who was pulling the strings of the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office to get them to ouster his two worst enemies, Lovelace and Kirchner.

After hearing this altered version of the facts, Quinn asked Lovelace point-blank if he knew there was anything illegal about accessing the site. Lovelace again said he didn’t, but said there is a warning on the site, which only went up in March of 2005, that explicitly mentions criminal prosecution for unauthorized access. Until that warning was posted, however, Lovelace said the website had no authorization note of any kind, so he figured it was OK to look.

Something about what he said, though, didn’t jibe with Quinn. Nevertheless, he wanted to believe his colleague, so he did. In the back of his mind, though, Quinn couldn’t help but wonder how, if he knew there was nothing wrong with looking, Lovelace knew not to attribute information from the website in his stories. This incontrovertible fact was so simple in its betrayal of what Lovelace had said. Justin knew Brett was lying.

Lovelace never mentioned he had used Quinn’s lawsuit story in an unsuccessful attempt to pry a new username and password from the coroner. Quinn discovered that tidbit from the attorney general’s prosecutors – as he was testifying before the grand jury. Quinn found it to be more than just a coincidence that Lovelace had failed to mention it to him.

Within three weeks of the conversation between Brett and Justin, Kirchner e-mailed Quinn about a potential story idea he had about the Lancaster County Commissioners. It was not unusual for Kirchner to contact Quinn. The two enjoyed a good relationship, having had the late Tom Flannery, a journalism legend in Lancaster County, as a mutual friend. Despite Quinn’s frustration with the coroner about the lawsuit story, they remained on good terms. They agreed to meet for lunch to discuss a variety of topics.

At lunch, Kirchner and Quinn discussed several subjects, including their mutual distaste for Totaro. On the heels of this discussion, Quinn mentioned how stressed Lovelace was because of Totaro, and Kirchner asked why. Quinn, pretending the coroner knew nothing about the situation, said there had been a long-standing tension between them, and that Lovelace was now being looked at for allegedly trespassing onto the countywide communications’ website. This was making things worse for Lovelace, Quinn said. “They” were trying to figure out who had given Lovelace the username and password to access it.

Gary said he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t given any passwords to anybody, he said.

Quinn was skeptical. Something was wrong here. Why were Gary and Brett both lying now?

“Later, I told Brett what Gary said, and Brett said he was relieved, and e-mailed Gary to discuss it with him,” Quinn said in an interview. “Apparently, Gary again denied giving him the username and password.”

Quinn said his editor blew his stack.

“When Ray (Shaw) found out about my meeting with Gary and Brett’s subsequent e-mail, he hit the roof. He called Brett and I into his office separately and began screaming at us at the top of his voice.”

Quinn said he was “very” embarrassed.

“I told him the subject only came up because I had no idea what to say to Kirchner when and if this topic was ever broached,” Quinn said. “Ray had never conveyed anything about this to me. He got extremely loud and vulgar with me and said, ‘FUCK YOU, JUSTIN!! FUCK YOU!!! ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW IS WHAT I TELL YOU!!! ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS WHAT I TELL YOU TO DO!’”

In mid-January, 2006, Quinn said word filtered into the newsroom that Kirchner’s house had been raided and all his computers had been taken. The editors decided to have a meeting with the reporters and the newspaper’s attorneys.

This time, Quinn was invited. To his astonishment, he learned he, too, had been under subpoena. The attorneys advised the reporters to take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, when called to testify. Quinn and Reilly angrily refused. Quinn said he never accessed the website, and therefore had done nothing wrong. Reilly, too, maintained his innocence, though he admitted he had accessed the website on numerous occasions. Reilly’s argument, however, was that if the coroner had given reporters permission to use the website, then that constitutes authorization. Eventually, Reilly agreed to take the Fifth. Quinn, however, did not and quickly became the newspaper’s loose cannon.

Within months, Lancaster Newspapers fired Justin Quinn. Intelligencer Journal editor Charles Raymond Shaw accused Quinn of anonymously posting opinions on an online reader forum at the newspaper’s website. Quinn later admitted to the indiscretion, but pointed out that at no time had a policy been in effect at the newspaper that prohibited anonymous postings from reporters. Quinn believed he was simply exercising his first amendment rights and was careful to submit the posts on his own time.

Without warning and without hesitation, Quinn was dismissed. With nothing but accolades in his personnel file, Quinn was not even permitted to return to the newsroom to gather his things.

“I don’t want you upsetting the other reporters,” Shaw said.

Quinn was relieved of his press badge and his passkey to the building’s parking garage. If he went quietly and left by the service entrance to the rear of the building, Shaw said Quinn would be saved the indignity of an escort.

Quinn was stunned. Oddly, his first thoughts were about how he was going to be able to leave the garage. He had no cash on him, and since he had no parking pass, he was unsure whether the garage attendant would let him leave without paying.

Shaw narrowed his eyes and thought about it for awhile. After about 10 seconds, he said, “I’ll call down there and tell them not to charge you.” Standing up, Shaw pointed to the door and told Quinn, “Now you have to leave.”

Where are they now?

Three months after Quinn was fired, he opened Headline Consultants, Inc., a political and public relations consulting firm.

Four months after Quinn was fired, Lovelace was promoted to the highest-ranking and most coveted reporting position in the newsroom and continues to work as the Intelligencer Journal’s court reporter.

Ray Shaw continues to be the editor of the Intelligencer Journal.