Dogged pursuit of story paid off

Forty-five years ago, Bob Mullins, the Price Bureau chief for what was then known as the Deseret News and Salt Lake Telegram, was in his front yard celebrating the Fourth of July with his daughter, 4-year-old Gina Maria.

Mullins, a 36-year-old World War II veteran who had been with the paper for 10 years, was lighting sparklers when the telephone rang. Inside the house, his wife, Donna, answered a call from her husband's editors in Salt Lake City.

"Donna gave me the phone and they told me there was a murder, so I jumped in my car," recalled Mullins, who retired from the News in 1987 and now lives with Donna in Las Vegas. "That was kind of the end of the July Fourth celebration in the Mullins family."

And the beginning of a weeklong adventure of risk taking, fierce determination, indefatigable reporting, creative resourcefulness — and a little luck — that led to Mullins winning journalism's highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize.

Two hours after leaving Price, Mullins was in the Grand County sheriff's office and suddenly was an unwitting suspect in a murder, a dangerous wounding and a kidnapping near Dead Horse Point.

The suspect was known to be a stocky, dark-haired man driving a light-colored car with a license plate beginning with "CJ."

"Bob Mullins is short, built like a fullback and has black hair. He had a light-colored car," the paper noted in 1962. Then-columnist Steve Hale wrote that Mullins' license plate "bears a CJ prefix."

A Moab police officer watched Mullins carefully for two days. He invited Mullins to have a cup of coffee in a local cafe. "He was hesitant to talk too much," Mullins recalled.

Eventually, Grand County Sheriff John Stocks arrived. "I knew him and he knew me," Mullins said. That cleared up the suspicion.

'Stay down there'

"The sheriff told me about this truck driver who came upon the scene and reported (the crime) soon after it happened," he added. The driver, an oil-rig worker, was headed toward Dead Horse Point, and the suspect's car was going the other way, swerving a bit.

National media converged on southeastern Utah. As the FBI and other law enforcement agencies scoured the region, Mullins took photos and filed reports with the newspaper's Salt Lake office.

"I heard from him a lot when he was out chasing around, trying to find out what was going on," said Maxine Martz, a veteran reporter who retired in 1986. She was a skilled rewrite person who could piece together a vibrant story from notes dictated on the run.

During a lull in the story Mullins wanted to go home to Price, but managing editor Theron Liddle told him, "Stay down there."