Picture Homicide: A "Crucial Sense of Reality"
By Kenneth F. Irby, The Poynter Institute For Media Studies

It was just after midnight on the 30th of June, 1994, and Lawrence Jackson had finished his late shift at the Virginian-Pilot when his pager went off. "I had a feeling that this was it," recalled the young photojournalist.
He had been preparing for the call. He and his colleague, police reporter Mike Mather, had spent more than a year working on a project with the Virginia Beach Police Department. With murders on the rise, Mather had suggested that the newspaper try to help readers understand the magnitude of the problem by following the next murder investigation from beginning to end. They had reached the beginning: A quadruple homicide investigation was underway at the Witchduck Inn in Virginia Beach.
When he arrived at the scene, Jackson, nervous and wondering how much access he would get, spoke to emergency services workers waiting outside.
"They asked me if I had ever seen horror movies," Jackson said.
"I said, 'Sure.'"
"Did it bother you?" they asked.
"No way."
"Then you will be fine."
The scene inside was gruesome. A pool of blood blotted the floor where two victims, still clinging to life, had been loaded onto stretchers and taken away. Jackson walked around the bar, where the other two victims were in clear view. "I was numb," he said. "My adrenaline was pumping and I just did my job. All I could think was, 'shoot first.' I had been preparing for this for some time."
The first shots bothered him. "It was a difficult ethical choice to make," Jackson said. "Should I take these pictures?"
He returned to the office alone and produced more than a dozen prints.The first image troubled him so much that it was difficult to print it. Captured in those first few frames was a bloody corner of the room where the bar's owner lay on the floor and a patron sat slumped over the bar. Both had been shot in the head. It was a stark image; the kind that seldom makes it into the newspaper.
"In my heart I felt that the picture was important," Jackson said. "For me, it brought the reality of this terrible crime home. The story was incomplete without it."
The Pilot team had time to make a decision. To gain the open access that got Jackson beyond the yellow police tape and would help Mather write a more detailed story, the newspaper, in cooperation with police officials, had agreed to withhold any of the story's details and photos obtained by Mather and Jackson until the case had been fully prosecuted. That would take more than a year. Another reporter, acting independently from the team, would report the story's daily developments.
There were other conditions laid down before Jackson and Mather got the Witchduck call:

• No juvenile cases.
• A suspect had to have been identified by police.
• The homicide unit would pick the case and contact Mather.