To Bayard Brunt, 38, star rewriteman on the Philadelphia Bulletin, the tip from the Miami News on the death of a young woman looked like nothing more than a routine news story—at first. All he knew was that a Miami policeman, Earl Oestreicher, had been given emergency leave to go to Philadelphia because of the sudden death there of his wife. Brunt remembered Oestreicher: only two months before, he had eloped with Philadelphia Heiress Doris Jean Silver, 22, daughter of a vice president of Food Fair Stores, Inc. (fifth largest U.S. food chain) and niece of the chain's founder.
But Brunt is too good a newsman to let even a routine tip go by without checking it exhaustively. His hard digging into stories has turned up a handful of beats and earned him the nickname "Bulldog" in the city room. By last week, as a result of Bulldog Brunt's smart reporting and shrewd detective work, the death of Doris Oestreicher was big news on Page One of many a big-city paper, and three people, including Doris Oestreicher's mother, were under arrest for suspected abortion.
Brunt started out with a phone check to the Silver home. Yes, Doris had died, but at the "home of a friend." That was all he could learn. On a hunch, he phoned the city morgue, found that a "Shirley Silver" had been brought in the night before. Her home address was 1500 Melrose Avenue in suburban Melrose Park, the same as that of Heiress Doris Silver Oestreicher.
She had been brought from an apartment in a slum area. Wondered Brunt: What was an heiress doing there?
The Sudden Pain. But the city's Medical Examiner Melville Aston was not so curious as Brunt: he had already agreed to release the body, without an autopsy, thus ending his interest in the case. His lack of interest was due to the fact that the Silvers' family physician had assured him that the girl had suffered from an allergy, and he would get a letter from the allergist setting this forth. To the allergist who had been treating her, the family physician explained that Doris had been "suddenly taken with an acute pain in the chest and within minutes had died."
On this report, the allergist agreed to give the coroner a letter establishing the fact that she had been under a doctor's care before death.
When Brunt learned this, he called the allergist and bluntly asked: Did he realize that he would, in fact, be giving a death certificate for the girl? The allergist was shocked, said he intended to do no such thing. Then Examiner Aston hastily changed his mind about releasing the body. As he scheduled an investigation into the death, the Bulletin broke the story on Page One.
But when Reporter Brunt tried to dig further into the case, he ran into a political stone wall. No official of the police or medical examiner's office would talk. Angrily, Brunt hustled to the office of Mayor Joseph Clark, charged that covering up the scandal "would cost the Democrats the election." Then Brunt went after District Attorney Samuel Dash, convinced him also that the cover-up would be a hot political issue. Two days later, Dash finally made it official: Doris Oestreicher died from an "illegal operation."