"Guardians"

The Dallas Morning News
04/27/2020

When Billy Chemirmir was indicted for the deaths of a dozen elderly women in North Texas, we knew we had an important story. But it wasn’t until reporter Charles Scudder met Shannon Gleason Dion, daughter of one of the alleged victims, that we realized readers deserved to be told this heartbreaking story in a thoroughly reported and well-written narrative series.

Dion told Scudder about her mother’s missing necklace — the key that helped her nearly solve the mystery of what was going on at a posh Dallas senior living center. She told him about the records request she’d filed, and the pattern of deaths and thefts she’d uncovered at the facility. Finally, she told him that this wasn’t her family’s first brush with an evil intruder on the doorstep. An attack on her sister decades earlier was eerily similar.

Scudder, along with project photographer Lynda M. Gonzalez, worked carefully over the months that followed to develop trust with Dion, in time persuading her to put her story on the record for the public’s benefit. He dug through court records, confronted management at the facility and interviewed other victims’ families. He went to church with Dion, and spent time with her at her parents’ gravesites. The final story, Guardians, goes beyond the investigation of the crime, and is a deeply personal story of loss that speaks to everyone who has cared for an elderly loved one or faced the emotional challenge of placing them into a senior living home.

The writing uses a variety of techniques to attract, inform and retain the reader. At the very outset, the story invites the reader into the point of most drama — the murder scene itself. Part One ends on a carefully selected suspension point: a police detective’s careful spelling and revealing of the killer’s name.

In places, the writing employs second person or first-person plural to personalize particularly impactful or unifying themes: the struggles that come with putting an elderly parent into a senior living home, or the horror of learning through a police call of a loved one’s death. Exposition on the slayings is kept to a minimum and is aided through inclusion of an extensive case timeline. Throughout, the writing exhibits compassion without losing objectivity.

As for the story’s impact, Dion told readers at a special “behind the story” event sponsored by The News that publication of Guardians proved “extraordinarily therapeutic.” For so long, she said, she’d been trying to get others to see the apparent security flaws she saw — the same ones that police say Chemirmir exploited. Our reporting helped do just that.

The project also has shined a light on work that Dion and the children of other alleged victims are doing with Dallas police and state legislators to bring stiffer regulations to the senior independent living industry.

For the quality of the writing on an important, deeply reported story, for the project team’s commitment to informing  — in a sensitive way — the public on such an important topic, and for early signs indicating the story’s positive impact on the community, we ask that you please consider Guardians for the Texas Headliners Showcase Award for Enterprise and Innovation.

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Submitted by Chelsea Watkins.