Dogged pursuit of story paid off

Mullins photographed the suspect as he was lifted out of the ambulance on a stretcher, a cloth over his face. The suspect died two hours after he shot himself, and the story broke that he had taken his own life. The picture of the ambulance scene ran on the front page.

Soon after the suspect's death, attention shifted to a remote area called Polar Mesa, a uranium mining camp near the Colorado border. A cook at Polar Mesa told officers she had talked to the suspect, who had been camping there.

Mullins drove the dirt roads to Polar Mesa, southeast of Moab. "Somehow I found the right turnoff," he said.

At the camp, officers found clothes belonging to the suspect hidden under a bush. They also found the .22 rifle and a short-handled shovel, but no sign of the missing teenager.

There were "a lot of ore mines down there," Mullins said. "They searched some of them, but they couldn't find her."

The operator

A radio-telephone setup connected Polar Mesa with the outside world, but it usually only functioned at night and in the early morning, when sunlight didn't interfere with the transmissions.

Mullins needed to contact the paper immediately, during the day, with an update on the discovery of the murder weapon. "They said nobody gets through in the daytime," he remembered. But having experience working radios, Mullins managed to reach an operator in Grand Junction, Colo.

"I was screaming my head off" trying to get her attention, he recalled. "I could barely hear her."

But she could hear Mullins, and he dictated information to her as fast as he could. "I told her to call the Deseret News" and relay the story, which she did.

"I never did get her name. . . . She was a great help to the Deseret News in getting the story out."

The rifle's discovery was reported in a bulletin inserted in a story by Mullins about searching Polar Mesa. It began, "A .22-caliber bolt action rifle, similar to one believed used in the kidnap-murder near Dead Horse Point, was found Monday at 10 a.m. on Polar Mesa."

The bulletin was in that evening's paper, Monday, July 10, 1961.

Columnist Steve Hale wrote later, "Because of Bob, that story got back to Salt Lake City before the local FBI office heard about the find."

For his work, the Pulitzer Prize for "local reporting against deadline pressure" was awarded to Mullins in May 1962.

Mullins remains grateful to those who helped with the story, including editors and writers who pieced together his dictations and others who worked with the photos. But he especially mentions the kindness of the unknown phone operator who relayed his information.

"The only reason I won the Pulitzer," said Mullins, now 81, "was I was able to get that woman on the radio."

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com