Life behind the camera
He might be the most famous local person you don’t know.
His work is seen by thousands of TVwatchers every day.
Lodi resident Will
Heryford is the man behind the camera for KCRA Channel 3.
The photojournalist is assigned to the station’s Stockton bureau, but he covers news and events from South Sacramento to Modesto, and most places in between.
He may have one of the best jobs in America, and he knows it. Every day brings something new and possibly exciting. He’s able to go where most others can’t — across police lines, into the middle of the action, places that are off-limits to most people. “I love my job,” says Heryford.
He starts each work day in an editorial meeting with the station’s news director, who’s in Sacramento. He joins other journalists on the call where everyone “pitches” their story ideas to the director, who ultimately decides what will be covered and what will air that evening.
Once assignments are made, it’s up to each news crew to develop the story, line up interviews, provide visual images, write the script, do voice-overs, and transmit the package electronically back to the station by deadline.
A lucky break
Heryford, 64, was born in Stockton and graduated from Bret Harte High School as a proud Bullfrog. He went on to earn a degree in journalism from Sacramento State. He’s married to Tina, a substitute teacher for Lodi Unified. The couple have two boys: Peter, 22, who graduated this year from the University of Nevada, Reno, and who currently works as an investigator with the Washoe County Health Department. Their other son Andrew, 20, attends Cal State East Bay.
Heryford began his career with KCRA in 1979, starting off as a video editor making $5 an hour. At the time, he played on the same softball team as the station’s news director, which he says gave him an opportunity to get a foot in the door.
When KCRA expanded their Stockton bureau in 1980, Heryford got hired to work there with reporters Rich Ibarra and Kent Pierce. A Stockton native, Heryford knew the territory well.
He usually works with a reporter who does the on-camera interviews and helps with the scriptwriting, but not always. Sometimes Heryford works solo as a “oneman band,” he says. At those times he does everything from writing the script, shooting video, lining up and conducting interviews
while behind the camera, editing the final package and sending it off to Sacramento.
Heryford has seen a lot through the lens of his camera, being on the front lines of many of the biggest local stories that have occurred over the past 42 years.
Fabric of life stories
But most of Heryford’s work just tells the story of everyday life.
One of his more recent pieces was a report on the nationwide coin shortage and how it has affected local businesses and consumers. His story took him to Podesto’s Market & Deli in Stockton’s Lincoln Center for an interview with the store manager.
But, his first call for the assignment was to a local bank to see if he could line up an on-camera interview. They referred him to their marketing department. No one ever called him back, so he scrambled to secure the interview with Podesto’s. Sometimes getting all the pieces together can be a challenge, he says. “The worst thing in the world is waiting for a phone call,” he laments.
Often a story is simply assigned to him. Other times he receives a tip and it turns into a national story.
He recently heard about a wallet being found in the wall of the old Sunset Theater. Renovations to the building revealed a girl’s wallet that had been stuck, hidden, in the wall’s interior for the past 50 years.
Heryford was there with his camera and microphone when theater owner Terry Clark handed over the found wallet to its rightful owner. That story aired on Channel 3 and also went national, appearing on NBC’s “Today Show.” His video report in available on YouTube.
When thinking up potential story ideas, Heryford says, “I do stuff I feel comfortable doing.”
One day he saw his two boys catching crawdads with friends behind his backyard, which backs up to the WID canal. It became a cute human-interest story that aired that evening.
“That’s how you get stories — just driving around town,” he says.
Heryford recently reported on blind 10-year old Miles Limaas, who competed in the National Braille Challenge in Southern California. The youngster also sings and plays the piano. He’s also battling a rare cancer called retinoblastoma. It was one of those fabric of life stories that Heryford likes to do.
Hard news stories
He’s has done thousands of stories during his time with KCRA, too many to remember. However, there are some events he vividly remembers.
One such story hit close to home. Literally.
He had just moved to Lodi in 1994, into a house on Cologne Court, off Vine Street. On July 3 of that year one of the biggest stories of his career would unfold just a few doors down from his new home.
Drifter Steven Reese Cochran talked his way into Heryford’s neighbor’s house, where Katie Romanek and her sister and a friend were staying while the parents were out of town. Cochran tied up the girls then kidnapped Katie, escaping in her sister’s car.
The pair would spend the night hiding in tall grass as an army of rescuers were scouring the countryside just outside the small hamlet of Bellota, 25 miles east of Lodi. Katie was found the next day and her abductor arrested. The story made international headlines.
Heryford covered it, but he respected his neighbor’s privacy after Katie was found. He did live shots outside her house and from Highway 26, where she was found. “I don’t think anyone expected a good outcome. It was a miracle,” he remembers.
Heryford also keenly recalls covering the “Yosemite murders,” a heinous crime that took the lives of Carole Sund, her teenage daughter Juli Sund, and their teenage traveling companion, Silvina Pelosso, and Yosemite Institute naturalist Joie Armstrong. Cary Stayner sits on death row for those crimes.
As part of the coverage, Heryford remembers standing on the tarmac at Spanos jet center in Stockton as the body of Silvina Pelosso was loaded onto one of Spanos’ private jets to be taken home to Argentina. He remembers recording Mr. and Mrs. Spanos waving goodbye to Pelosso, with tears streaming down their faces. “It was a chilling moment,” Heryford recalls, “especially since I had ridden on one of (the Spanos) jets recently to a San Diego Chargers game with KCRA sports anchor Creighton Sanders.”
There was another blockbuster news story that Heryford remembers well. It made international headlines. It was the shocking 1985 murderous rampage of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. The pair would be found to have kidnapped and killed at least 11 women, and perhaps as many as 25. The murders were committed in a remote cabin in Calaveras County, next to which was a “bunker” where victims were tortured, killed, dismembered, and their remains incinerated.
The area was crawling with news people, but Heryford and a reporter managed to get a scoop. “It was surreal. Kent Pierce and I were the first news crew allowed on the property,” remembers Heryford. “We rode in (the) sheriff ’s car and had to duck down because (the sheriff) didn’t want all the other media seeing us. It was the first opportunity to see (the) cinder block torture chamber and a lot of power tools (they) used to cut up body parts. The feeling of getting on the property where such heinous things were carried out was chilling,” he says.
Most memorable stories
But every story isn’t as shocking.
“My favorite kind of story is something that people will react to and say, ‘Hey, I saw this on Channel 3 last night,’ ” he says. Comments like that are especially rewarding when he created the entire package himself, working without a reporter.
A story he did a few years ago about “a new Gold Rush” in Tuolumne County is the second most-viewed KCRA story on YouTube, Heryford says proudly, which has garnered over 1.7 million views.
One of the most memorable stories Heryford covered was when Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth visited the U.S. in 1983. One of her stops was in Sacramento, where she addressed the California Legislature. KCRA was the television station selected to provide a pool camera, and Heryford was chosen to be the cameraman. The only cameraman. Heryford’s TV camera was the only one allowed in the senate chambers and it provided a live video feed to all the television stations.
Heryford normally wears whatever he wants to work, usually shorts and T-shirt or sweatshirt. But on this occasion, he had to dress the part. “It was the first time I ever wore a suit to work,” he said. A few minutes before the queen arrived and the chambers were filled with dignitaries, the senate’s sergeant-at-arms came by and said to Will, “Your fly is down!”
His zipper wasn’t just down, it was broken. After some emergency repairs, his trousers were presentable once again and the show went on. No one was the wiser.
Heryford has covered thousands of stories, but some get to him. “I remember how emotional Lodi PD Officer Rick Cromwell’s service was,” he says. “Then at the cemetery they played ‘In the Arms of the Angels.’ Everybody teared up,” he remembers sadly.
Some of Heryford’s experiences are amusing, like the time he and a reporter flew to Mexico to do a piece on “flying doctors.” He remembers, “We left Stockton metro airport and the doctors on the plane were very hospitable; they gave us orange juice and muffins and all the coffee we could drink.” But the plane had no bathroom. Hours later, as they disembarked from the airplane, Heryford remembers he and the reporter yelling to customs officers, ‘’Emergencia medico! Emergencia medico!’’ as they ran to the lavatory.
Then there are stories that changed his life.
Heryford got a call one morning of an accident on Victor Road just east of 99. A car was hit and two people died. Years later he met an 8th grader named Gabriel, who had his own little online newscast. Heryford eventually did a story about the youngster. “I befriended and tried to mentor him,” says Heryford.
He found out that the kid’s father had been killed in an auto accident — the one he had covered on Victor Road. “After that, I tried to help as much as I could, and I am proud that he is starting school this fall at Arizona State University in the Walter Cronkite School of Broadcast Journalism,” beams Heryford. Turns out the kid’s father was a passenger in the car, and he was teaching a fill-in driver to deliver papers so he could take his family to Disneyland. “I’ll do anything to help Gabriel,” says Heryford.