Among the thousands of people gathered at St. Alfred’s Catholic Church in St. Catharines three years ago to mourn the loss of Kristen French, who had been murdered, was news reporter Anne Marie Owens.
She was there to mourn and to cover the funeral for the local newspaper, the St. Catharines Standard. Owens has been covering the disappearance of French and the trial of Karla Homolka.
“Covering the funeral was just emotionally wrenching,” said Owens. “Because while you were taking it all in, there was a part of you that was remembering it for a story. There was another part of you grieving at a funeral.”
As a reporter assigned to cover the disappearance of a young girl for the local paper, it can be difficult to separate the emotions from the story. It’s something that isn’t taught in journalism school. It can be even more difficult when the disappearance happens in a tightly-knit community like the St. Catharines, where interest in the story runs high. There is also the national and international spotlight that shines brightly on this city.
Simple things such as taking out a notebook at a funeral become a moral debate. Owens didn’t take out her notebook because she felt bad doing it. She relied mostly on the tape recorder she had stuffed in her pocket to record the pain. “I don’t know if I were a reporter from Toronto, whether I would feel bad to take out my notebook,” she said.
“A lot of times when you are at a meeting or in court, you are the person just there observing, and you’re emotionless. Whereas a lot of times, in this case, you’re feeling it as well as recording it. Karla’s trial was like that too,” Owens said.
The death of Kristen French, the arrest of Paul Bernardo and the trial of Karla Homolka drew international attention to this small community of 130,000. Owens explains that there is a difference between living and writing for the local paper and being a reporter from somewhere else like Toronto. “You are aware, and you can feel the impact like other people in St.Catharines do, whereas, in Toronto, it can be just a big story.”
“If I were to feel ‘Oh! It’s just a big story’ I think there would be people in the community that would quickly set me straight because to them, it’s not a story. It’s something that everyone here went through.”
There is also the conflict between being a member of the community and being a journalist working for the community newspaper. As a concerned citizen, Owens went to Holy Cross Secondary school and signed up to help in the search for French when she disappeared on that Good Friday weekend. She was off of work during the two-week ordeal when French was missing. “I signed up for the search because I was a person who lived here, not a reporter. But you can’t really separate the two,” she said.
She recalls one time when the entire city was looking for a creamed coloured Camaro that an elderly couple saw at the time of the abduction. In the early stages of the investigation, it was the only thing the police had to go on. Everyone who owned a similar car brought it in to be checked by the police. They found one in the Welland Canal. “There is a part of you that thinks, ‘if it’s the car, then this is something, it’s a big scoop, its a story.’ But there is another part of you that is thinking, ‘oh my god, I hope they’ve got something or someone,'” Owens remembers.
During the trial of Karla Homolka, Judge Francis Kovaks imposed a publication ban on the details of the case. Anne Marie Owens was one of those reporters allowed to sit and listen to the details of the trial. Rumours and the “did you hear …” stories spread throughout St. Catharines like a plague. When hearing these stories, Owens wants to tell people, “no, that’s not true,” but she can’t.
Owens has been a reporter for six years at the Standard. That is how long she has lived in St. Catharines. She started with a paper covering education and social services then her editor gave her this.
“In the beginning, before anyone was arrested, I was dealing with the community’s emotions,” said Owens. “A lot of times, it meant you were in very emotional situations, and then there were rumours and sifting through things.”
Because of the presence of other media, she has learned to deal with competition for information which is unusual in a one-newspaper town. Also, her opinions on the media have changed with this case. “Traditionally, I tend to think of reporters and coverage as getting better when papers got bigger. I don’t necessarily believe that anymore,” Owens remarked.
One of the biggest problems in covering this story was fatigue. As there are times when she was working around the clock when Bernardo was arrested, for example. Then it would recede into the background and then go all out. It’s unusual for a court reporter to be covering the same trial for 2 years. “You have to learn how to manage something that has gone on for so long,” commented Owens.
She will continue to cover the case as the trial moves to Toronto in May.