Taking the stand in the public’s interest

Robert Hoefman has been convicted of first-degree murder and extortion in a court case that has intrigued readers but leaves more questions than answers.

The gavel finally fell Friday after sentencing was suspended a day earlier to bring in paramedics for the accused who apparently blacked out, and for sheriffs to remove members of the gallery.

The Medicine Hat News itself played a roll in the bizarre case that surprised at many of its numerous twists and turns.

Its journalists were witnesses, and the paper of record here for 135 years was mentioned in its own coverage — a rarity after a letter arrived at the News one grey fall day in 2017.

It was read. Vague details of a blackmail plot. Snipers. A money drop gone wrong with two little girls playing nearby.

It was quickly copied and handed over to police, and then after some discussions of ethical conduct and how to handle the story, we sat on it.

And sit we did for three and a half years until Crown prosecutors asked us to read it aloud in court this month.

This may fly contrary to the widely held opinion that vulturous media only cares to grab eyeballs with bad news, gruesome and sordid tales, and sell copies hot off the stack.

Perhaps that was the intention of the letter’s author all along: to create a public panic, diverting police resources and grease the wheels to a payoff in this perverse and obscene game.

But, instead of “if it bleeds it leads,” Hatters should know and be assured its local newspaper is a professional organization with standards and a dedication to act in the public interest.

And, when it is in that public interest, we can keep a secret until it is ready to be told.

We would have been well within our rights to publish the bizarre details, explosive details.

But, would selling a few extra copies for a couple days four years ago be worth the risk of a public panic, let alone tainting a jury pool in a future trial? It certainly may have stymied a police investigation, or, more importantly, given a professed killer what he wanted.

Would commenters on Facebook or a rising number of web-based independent journalists thought the same and acted accordingly? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

The actions of the News and its reporters exemplify pure professionalism, plain and simple, and for much longer than most can keep something under their hat.

At least four News staffers knew the tantalizing details, which could have earned them wider acclaim with a “mustread” story.

This includes the identity of the extortion target, who can never be named under court order, and who seems to have done nothing more than be well known in a lucrative profession.

In the end there’s no good reason, it seems, for any of it to happen.

The story was finally and officially told this month in a four-week trial, made more difficult by restrictions of the COVID pandemic and the increasing pressure to mount a quality product daily, hourly, up-to-the-moment, every day in an era of tight budgets and diminished reputation of traditional media.

But we did it, and we’re proud to have done something not so much exceptional, but what was rightly expected of us in the public’s interest.

A look ahead

It’s a short work week heading toward the Easter Sunday. In case you were wondering, city yard waste collection typically begins the third week of April.

100 years ago

Sparing no literary licence, a New York author compared Medicine Hat to Aeolus of Aeolia — the meteorological centre of the ancient world in The Odyssey — in a widely circulated article, the News reported in late March 1921.

“It is father of the winds of a vaster continent than Homer dreamed of,” he wrote, continuing that chinook winds emanating from the Hat lick up winter snows like a wolf from Montana to Fond du Lac and on to Fundy and Nantucket.

The New Yorker argued that too important was this cauldron of weather that southeast Alberta should be declared a neutral zone by the forming League of Nations.

Robert Gardiner would be the United Farmers candidate in the coming Medicine Hat federal byelection following a local convention of the fledgling political party

“The fight is going to be one of the stiffest in Canada,” said Gardner, a bachelor who farmed at Excell, Alta., near Oyen.

Canada’s coal reserves were enough to supply the entire world for 2,000 years, a report from Ottawa boasted.