"Unnamed Dead"

STORYTELLING CATEGORY

Houston Chronicle
01/11/2022

Upon arrival at the Houston Chronicle eight years ago, St. John Barned-Smith dealt deftly with news that forced itself upon him. A true reporter, he threw himself into breaking stories about recurring catastrophes -- storms and shootings. Amid the clamor of breaking news, though, he remained diligently attuned to other narratives in Houston, a sprawling city full of dark, swampy tales befitting its landscape.

In early 2022, Barned-Smith chased an intriguing lead tied to a decades-old murder first reported in 1981 when a German shepherd emerged from a neighborhood off Wallisville Road clenching a human arm in its mouth. Soon after, police found the bodies of a young man and woman. He was beaten to death; she was strangled. For four decades the murder victims remained unidentified.

Unlike the immediacy of breaking news, this decades-old story required a different sort of reporting. Barned-Smith’s digging yielded a rare story involving murder that was grisly, obviously, but with a complicated and hopeful undercurrent. The child of the murdered parents – both unidentified and long forgotten – was not found with her parents.

Barned-Smith’s reporting could have ended with an unresolved story resolved: He wrote about the genealogical evidence that helped close the story of husband and wife Harold Dean Clouse and Tina Gail Linn, who were murdered and their bodies dumped east of Houston in 1980. He delved into Clouse’s life, telling the story of a young man who left his native Florida with his wife and daughter for Houston, chasing work. That narrative alone was an astounding piece of cold case storytelling.

The identification of Clouse and Linn drew national coverage, and the story caught the attention of more than 100,000 readers on the Houston Chronicle’s site. It proved to be just the beginning of the story Barned-Smith would tell. The couple’s families found some closure with the identification of Clouse and Linn. And the identification of the two murder victims drew attention to the operations of morgues and pauper graves, where the unidentified dead rest restlessly. One major question had been answered, but another question emerged. The family wondered: What happened to baby Holly?

Barned-Smith chose to dig deeper and learn more. In doing so, he told a revelatory story of life following death. His work started in Houston and reached across to Florida. It spanned a formidable stretch of Interstate 10 and much of 40 years. It led to Oklahoma, where investigators from the Texas Attorney General’s office – pushed by Barned-Smith’s original story -- located Holly Marie, informed her about what had happened to her biological parents and connected her to members of her family.

Barned-Smith’s work at the Chronicle to that point was urgent and topical. He’d written scores of quick-hit investigations and accountability pieces about involved illegal dumping and the flow of money through non-profits. He covered the aftermath of multiple school shootings and the killing of five police officers in Dallas. Amid the stories about immediate trauma, he skillfully tracked the narrative about Clouse and Linn and their child and further investigated why so many John and Jane Does remain unidentified in Texas. He led a team that included data reporter Allie Kanik and University of Texas journalism student Cecilia Garzella. The trio filed more than 800 records requests with Texas’ Justices of the Peace, bringing to light the ways the state fails to follow through with missing persons and nameless dead cases. Cold cases to investigators remain slow, simmering trauma for victims’ families.

Later in the year, Barned-Smith looked to the past once more. This time, the subject was more personal. He wrote about the disappearance of his great-aunt, Frances St. John Smith, who vanished three decades ago. He applied his trade to a family narrative, interviewing family members, researching hundreds of newspaper articles, digging through archives at Smith College and correspondence between his great-grandfather and police, investigators and others who tracked the disappearance. The story, as yet, doesn’t have the resolution of his Baby Holly story. But it underscores the value of such reporting, which serves those underrepresented in tragic stories. His work addresses the trauma that lingers with survivors in these stories. His tales represent the ghosts, certainly, but also those haunted by them. We are proud to submit this work for your consideration. The Houston Chronicle has a daily circulation of 50k.

Sincerely,
Chris Fusco

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Submitted by Elizabeth Pudwill.