Word: shotgunned
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...picked up his eleven-year-old son Ted Jr. and set out by car for the scene. Before he left, he slipped a loaded .38-caliber revolver into his pocket; on the way, he stopped in the little town of Grover, Mo. and made a purchase: a 12-gauge shotgun and two magnum shells...
With methodical thoroughness Jim Robinson, 35, examined the record. On June 9, 1954, Detroit police had answered a call to the residence of Walter A. Pecho and found Pecho's wife Eleanor dead of a shotgun wound in the chest. Pecho, an Oldsmobile plant worker, insisted that his wife had killed herself, showed police a suicide note. Police, prosecutor and jury did not believe him. He was convicted of second-degree murder; on Nov. 16 of the same year, still swearing his innocence, Pecho entered the state prison at Jackson to serve 15 to 20 years...
...Robinson dug more deeply, his suspicions grew. Pecho's conviction was based on the flimsiest of evidence, centering around the testimony of Dr. Charles E. Black, a state-retained Lansing pathologist, who testified that Mrs. Pecho could not possibly have held the weapon, a 20-gauge shotgun, against her chest and been able to reach the trigger. Reporter Robinson also discovered that some evidence strongly implying Pecho's innocence had not even been introduced at the trial...
Example: the only fingerprint found on the shotgun was that of Pecho's wife...
...impressive contingent of crack newsmen-among them Damon Runyon, Courtney Ryley Cooper, Burns Mantle and Gene Fowler-the paper read like a circus flyer. For an editorial page, Tammen and Bonfils substituted invective, raked up so much scandal-a good deal of it true-that they kept a loaded shotgun in their office to discourage reader complaints. As the Post grew in power and prosperity, its proprietors branched into other fields; the Post became the first and last U.S. daily ever to own a circus (Sells-Floto), run a burlesque house and sell coal...