Diana Harrington has spent more time talking to reporters than any "civilian" should have to in one lifetime. ....
In her own words: Reporter tells about covering Wallace case
By MAUREEN HAYDEN Courier & Press staff writer
October 16,
Diana Harrington has spent more time talking to reporters than any "civilian" should have to in one lifetime.
She didn't choose a public life, but it was thrust upon her when her sister was brutally murdered in 1980, in a senseless crime that claimed the lives of four people: Diana's sister, Theresa Gilligan; her brother-in-law, Patrick; and the couple's two young children, Lisa, 5, and Gregory, 4.
I'd been part of a cadre of reporters that had written about the crime and its aftermath, including the 25-year legal drama that culminated in March with the execution of the Gilligan's killer. Before that execution, I wrote a series of stories about the Gilligan family's murders and their murderer.
That series provoked an enormous response among readers, including some angry cries of protest. At the time, I knew Diana Harrington and her husband Ted had approved of us reporting and writing the stories. Long before they were published, I had been in contact with the couple, who now live outside of Louisville. The Harringtons went on the WNIN-PBS9 program "Shively & Shoulders" after the series ran, and expressed their gratitude for how the Evansville Courier & Press handled the stories, and told program viewers of the relationship they had established with me and my editors.
Still, when I recently read a copy of the manuscript written by Diana Harrington for a book she's titled: "Surviving the Death Penalty," I was surprised, honored and humbled, to read her defense of the newspaper. Harrington had no reason to single me or the newspaper out in her book, but she did. What I wasn't surprised to read was her description of how I looked the night before the execution of Donald Ray Wallace, Jr. My colleague Brian Corbin had gone to Michigan City, Ind., to cover the execution, while I stayed in Evansville to cover a prayer vigil for the Gilligan family.
"Maureen looked exhausted," Harrington writes in her book. I was. But I was also grateful to the Harringtons for letting me into their lives and for trusting me with such a sacred and enormous obligation.
Goldie's daughter Chili Pepper leaves the Flirting With Food TV show & moves to Portland Oregon as Executive Chef at a new restaurant. But there is a rash of murders, all in the Pettygrove mansion where she lives with roommates.
