By Joe Arney

It’s complicated enough to pitch your editor a story on a woman’s possible murder and how police may have bungled the investigation.

Add in the woman’s role in the bondage, dominance, submission and sadomasochism—or BDSM—community, and you can appreciate how Andy Mannix would have struggled to sell his editors on the value of an investigative report into the death of Heather Mayer.

The results, however, speak for themselves. Multiple years of reporting by Mannix, of the Minnesota Star Tribune, culminated in a compelling investigation of Mayer’s death that detailed how the police and legal system failed the victim, her family and other women in the BDSM community.

Today, the University of Colorado Boulder and the Denver Press Club announced that is the winner of the prestigious Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting.

“A lot of newsrooms would have run screaming away from that one: ‘You want do what?’” said Chuck Plunkett, a judge in the contest and director of CU News Corps, in the university’s College of Media, Communication and Information. “It was a really gutsy piece of journalism done with a lot of heart and a lot of empathy. It’s clear they went the extra mile and then some to do right by the subject matter.”

  “This story not only impacted Heather’s case, but it has the potential to influence how police and society at large view ‘non-perfect victims.’”
Hannah Metzger (Jour’20), staff writer, Westword

Mannix began reporting on the story in 2021, two years after Heather Mayer died of what police called a suicide or “tragic accident” in the home of a man who was a “dominant” in BDSM—someone who consensually uses “submissives” to play with power. Mannix was motivated to pursue the story after being contacted by Mayer’s mother, who felt the police did not conduct a thorough investigation at least in part due to her daughter’s lifestyle.

The detailed storytelling and strong use of multimedia materials—including text messages, videos interviews, police videos and strong photography—made a strong impression on Hannah Metzger (Jour’20), a staff writer with Denver’s Westword and one of the judges.

“It is an incredible feat that Andy was able to get these victims to speak on the record about something so intimate and traumatic,” Metzger said. “This story not only impacted Heather’s case, but it has the potential to influence how police and society at large view ‘non-perfect victims.’

“It's a shining example of the power of local journalism.”

For another judge, Tory Lysik (Jour, PolSci’21), the overall quality of the pool was an impressive reminder of what local journalism is doing to hold law enforcement accountable.

In the Star Tribune piece, “there were so many layers the journalists could have stopped at … but they just kept uncovering more and more layers from there,” said Lysik, a data visualization journalist at Axios. “It went on to show (that) police can see cases on a monochromatic level, when there is really so much more to it.”  

The right tone for a traumatic story

She also noted that the boldness of the reporting was presented sensitively, in a tone other contest entries struggled to match.

“The components in place allow the reader to choose what they see, and what they cannot, without sacrificing the message and information within the story,” Lysik said. “In covering sensitive stories, this is crucial in order to not re-traumatize your audience.”

Alex Edwards (Jour’21), a reporter with The Denver Gazette, noted the tenacity of the journalists, editors, visual teams and other associated with each of the entries.

“As a young journalist, it was very encouraging to know that work like this is still being done,” said Edwards, another judge on the panel. “Pieces like those in the Nakkula series demonstrate that journalism is still the noble profession of respected titans like Murrow, Cronkite, Couric and countless others.”

The special mention went to Robert Anglen and Elena Santa Cruz of The Arizona Republic, for their reporting on the so-called “Gilbert Goons” and police inaction in making communities safe for teenagers.

“When the cries of victims and their parents fell on law enforcement's deaf ears, these reporters listened,” Metzger said. “They reignited hope that the victims will finally get justice. The impact has yet to fully unfold, as arrests continue to be made, but it’s clear most would not have happened without the work of these reporters.”

The competition annually attracts contest entries from national media organizations like The New York Times and ProPublica, which has won the last three Nakkula awards. Plunkett said it was “gratifying” to recognize a local publication like the Star Tribune, which took runner-up honors in last year’s competition.

“I’m so proud to see local newsrooms stepping up as they are, and like the Star Tribune has done this year,” Plunkett said.

Edwards echoed that sentiment. Judging the competition, he said, “showed me that any newsroom can make a huge impact within their community—and that almost any thread is worth tugging on. You never truly know what you’ll uncover.”

About the Nakkula Award

The Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting honors the late Al Nakkula, a 46-year veteran of the Rocky Mountain News, whose tenacity made him a legendary police reporter. This year, nearly 30 national media outlets submitted entries to a panel of four judges: Edwards, Lysik, Metzger and Plunkett.

Each year, Nakkula contest judges look for stories that meet the highest journalistic standards, help readers understand complex issues and solutions, show a commitment to community, and bring about societal change. The competition is sponsored by the journalism department at CMCI and the Denver Press Club, and has been awarded annually since 1991. More on the Nakkula Award.

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By Malinda Miller (EnglJour’92; MJour’98)
Illustration courtesy of ProPublica

While reporting on a suspicious death in Louisiana, Brett Murphy came across a method used to determine guilt or innocence he hadn’t previously encountered, 911 call analysis.

Murphy, a reporter for ProPublica, filed more than 80 open records requests to get his hands on thousands of emails, police reports and other records in his quest to find out whether people’s word choice, cadence and even grammar on a 911 call were really being used to help put them in prison.

He documented more than 100 cases across 26 states where law enforcement agencies had used 911 call analysis to investigate, arrest or convict defendants, despite a consensus among experts that it’s junk science.

His reporting resulted in “,” a two-part series and this year’s winner of the 2023 Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting.

The Al Nakkula Award honors the late Al Nakkula, a 46-year veteran of the Rocky Mountain News, whose tenacity made him a legendary police reporter. This year, almost 40 national media outlets submitted entries to a panel of four judges, including Chris Osher, senior investigative reporter/editor of The Gazette; Jennifer Brown, co-founder and reporter at The Colorado Sun; Joey Bunch, retired politics writer and editor at The Gazette; and Tina Griego, editor, reporter and coach at the Colorado News Collaborative. 

“I would say part of what stood out for us was that Brett’s work exposed something that was so unique. None of us knew that 911 call analysis was regularly being used by police and prosecutors,” Osher said. “To think that a person could be targeted at times for just calling 911 for help was revelatory. To think that prosecutors and police were relying on key phrasings to determine who they believed was guilty or innocent also defied common sense as well as ongoing research that found doing so was unreliable and prone to error."

Each year, Nakkula contest judges look for stories that meet the highest journalistic standards, help readers understand complex issues and solutions, show a commitment to community and bring about societal change.

"All this work, along with others submitted, blew each of us away," Osher said. "It was heartening to see the quality of work out there.”

This year’s runner up is the StarTribune’s five-part series “,” which examined how Minnesota's juvenile justice system is failing young people, families and victims of violence. The contest judges were especially impressed by how reporters Liz Sawyer and Chris Serres obtained juvenile records in order to provide detailed accounts of how youth crime affected young offenders and victims. 

The series is the “perfect balance of smart data reporting and rich storytelling, the kind that's accomplished only by earning the trust of sources who've been through the worst of the system,” Brown said. “The timing of the project is on point, given the concern nationally over the rise in youth violence, the efforts in multiple states toward restorative justice, and questions about whether restorative justice actually works.” 

For more than 30 years, the Al Nakkula Award, co-sponsored by The Denver Press Club and the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, has recognized the best journalism on crime and justice from around the country. 

The first place award will be presented to Murphy during The Denver Press Club’s April 14.

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Photos by Loren Holmes for the Anchorage Daily News

What happens when communities lack law enforcement?

For many of us, this may seem like a theoretical question. But through reporting based on hundreds of public records requests and interviews, Anchorage Daily News Special Projects Editor Kyle Hopkins found that one in three Alaskan communities have no law enforcement of any kind.

CU News Corps Director and lead judge Chuck Plunkett calls the investigation “a vast and breathtaking series of reports that revealed in vivid detail how Alaska’s indigenous populations are systematically denied basic public safety services.”

In a letter to this year’s judges, Daily News Editor David Hulen and ProPublica Editor-in-Chief Stephen Engelberg wrote that Hopkins went to extraordinary lengths to capture the stark realities of everyday life in these communities. 

“Reporter Kyle Hopkins traveled to villages where it is up to the residents to tackle active shooters and restrain them with duct tape, where generations of children were sexually abused by Jesuit priests, and where abusive husbands hide from visiting troopers with impunity,” they wrote.

In addition to communities who have no law enforcement, many others are served by unarmed village officials who receive no benefits, low pay and hardly any training, such as a 49-year-old grandmother who is the sole police officer for an Arctic Circle village of 421 citizens. 

Meanwhile, well-trained and well-paid members of the Alaska State Troopers, an agency created to patrol hard-to-reach areas, instead protect mostly white suburbs surrounding road-system cities like Wasilla. According to Hopkins’ reporting, this is because residents in these highly populated regions––home to both current Gov. Mike Dunleavy and former Gov. Sarah Palin––refuse to pay taxes for local law enforcement while rural areas pay the price.

The series “was the first comprehensive investigation to lay bare Alaska’s failing, two-tiered criminal justice system,” Hulen and Engelberg noted. “Within weeks of publishing our first story, U.S. Attorney General William Barr declared a federal emergency, releasing millions of dollars in law enforcement funding for rural Alaska. Subsequent stories led to a state regulatory crackdown and calls for reform from the state’s U.S. senators.”

Another standout in this year’s competition is the series by Baltimore Sun Reporter Justin Fenton. 

The series exposed a culture of corruption within the Baltimore Police Department’s elite Gun Trace Task Force that allowed officers to steal money and drugs from those they were to police, in order to operate a crime ring of their own. 

In addition, the judges give special mention to a collaboration with Marquette University’s Public Service Journalism O’Brien Fellowship and theMilwaukee Journal Sentinel that produced the series, Through both a podcast and written series, Journal Sentinel Criminal Justice Reporter Gina Barton investigated the cold case of Father Alfred Kunz, who was murdered in a rural Wisconsin town in 1998. 

“Like the ProPublica assistance, such partnerships, similar to the one that produced last year’s Nakkula winner, help illustrate how outside groups with a desire to help local journalists play an increasingly important role in doing important work for local communities during these challenging times for local newsrooms,” Plunkett says. 

In addition to Plunkett, this year’s judges included Colorado Springs Gazette Senior Investigative Reporter Christopher N. Osher, Colorado Public Radio Reporter Hayley Sanchez, Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Megan Schrader and Colorado Sun Reporter Kevin Simpson.

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The award, sponsored by the Journalism department at the College of Media, Communication and Information and the Denver Press Club, honors the late Al Nakkula, a 46-year veteran of the Rocky Mountain News whose tenacity made him a legendary police reporter. Nakkula passed away in 1990.

The award is for work produced by a reporter or reporting team in print and/or online platforms in the United States in 2018. Entries are due by Jan. 18, 2019 and should take the form of a story or series about one topic and/or event. Sorry, this award is not for broadcast work. 

The first-place prize is $2,000. The winner will be invited to speak to classes and to accept the award at the  on March 1, 2019. The second-place finisher will receive a certificate of merit.

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