Linda Deutsch, AP trial writer who had front row to courtroom history, dies at 80

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Linda Deutsch, a special correspondent for The Associated Press who for nearly 50 years wrote glittering first drafts of history from many of the nation’s most significant criminal and civil trials — Charles Manson, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, among others — died Sunday. She was 80.

Deutsch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2022 and underwent successful treatment, but the cancer returned this summer. She died at her Los Angeles home, surrounded by family and friends, said nurse Narek Petrosian of Olympia Hospice Care.

AP chief United Nations correspondent Edith Lederer was among those with Deutsch at the end. They were friends for more than 50 years and trailblazing female reporters when they joined AP in the late 1960s.

“She was an incomparable friend to hundreds of people who will miss her wit, wisdom, charm and constant inquisitiveness,” Lederer said.

One of America’s best-known trial reporters when she retired in 2015, Deutsch’s courts career began with the 1969 trial and conviction of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. She went on to cover a who’s who of criminal defendants — Manson, Simpson, Jackson, Patty Hearst, Phil Spector, the Menendez Brothers, “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and the police officers charged in the beating of motorist Rodney King.

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She was in a Los Angeles courtroom in 1995 for the conclusion of “The Trial of the Century” that saw Simpson, an NFL Hall of Famer, acquitted of killing his ex-wife and her friend. Thirteen years later, Deutsch was in a Las Vegas courtroom when Simpson was convicted of kidnapping and robbery and sentenced to prison.

“When a big trial loomed, AP’s assignment editors didn’t have to ask who should get the assignment. No, the instant question was, ‘Is Linda available?’” recalled Louis D. Boccardi, who served as AP’s executive editor for a decade and as president and CEO for 18 years. “She mastered the art of celebrity trial coverage and, in the process, became something of a media celebrity herself.”

For decades, Deutsch covered every appeal and parole hearing of each convicted Manson Family member. Other historic moments included witnessing the 1976 conviction of Hearst, the newspaper heiress found guilty on bank robbery and other charges; the 2005 acquittal of Jackson on child molestation charges; and the 2009 murder conviction of Spector, the famed music producer.

“Linda was a fearless reporter who loved being on a big story — and she indeed covered some of the biggest,” said Julie Pace, AP’s executive editor and senior vice president. “She was a true trailblazer whose command of her beat and tireless work ethic made her an inspiration to so many journalists at the AP and across our industry.”

Her work, always written with verve, was not limited to celebrity — other trials involved fraud, conspiracy, environmental disasters and immigration — and eventually earned her the title of special correspondent, the most prestigious byline for an AP reporter.

Defense attorney Thomas Mesereau, who represented Jackson, called Deutsch “the epitome of ethics and professionalism in journalism.”

“I can’t think of anybody who rises to her level,” he said of Deutsch when she retired.

Deutsch was just 25 when she covered the conviction of Sirhan. She then turned to the bizarre case of Charles Manson, a career criminal who had reinvented himself as a hippie guru, proselytizing and furnishing psychedelic drugs to a group of disaffected youth.

The Manson Family, as they came to be known, terrorized Los Angeles on successive summer nights in 1969, breaking into homes in two wealthy neighborhoods and killing seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate. Most victims were stabbed multiple times, and their blood was used to scrawl “pig” and other words on the walls of the homes.

When Manson and three of his young female followers went on trial for murder in 1970, they turned the monthslong legal proceeding into a “surreal spectacle,” as Deutsch would write when Manson died in 2017.

“People were having LSD flashbacks in the courtroom and at one point Charlie is leaping across the counsel table at the judge with a pencil in his hand and the girls are jumping up and down singing,” Deutsch recalled during a 2014 interview.

With only one significant trial under Deutsch’s belt, the AP initially sent a more experienced reporter from New York to lead its Manson trial coverage. After a month of witnessing such antics, he returned home in disgust, leaving Deutsch in charge.

“I thought, ‘Oh, this is really something,’” Deutsch remembered with a laugh. “I didn’t know trials could be like this.”

Nonetheless, she was hooked, forming tight bonds with the journalists who showed up every day for nine months.

But an even bigger trial, born in the modern television era, would eclipse Manson more than two decades later. When Simpson, one of America’s most beloved celebrities and sports figures, was charged with fatally stabbing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in a fit of rage, news outlets from all over the world sent reporters to cover the case.

The judge made Deutsch, by then a familiar face around the courthouse, the only reporter to cover jury selection. She became ubiquitous on television, telling a worldwide audience what was going on in the courtroom.

After Simpson was acquitted 11 months later, he called to thank her for what he considered fair and objective coverage. The conversation led to what would be the first of a number of exclusive interviews he gave her over the years.

Not all her trials involved celebrities. Deutsch spent five months in Alaska covering the trial of Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker that caused one of the worst U.S. environmental disasters when it spilled 11 million gallons (41 million liters) of crude oil in 1989.

She was also at the 1973 espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked to The New York Times the top secret Pentagon Papers that revealed unsavory details about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Times published a series of articles about the contents that helped turn the public against the Vietnam War.

Deutsch covered the trial of Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” serial murderer, listening to testimony so gruesome it brought tears to the eyes of reporters. But it was the 1992 trial of four Los Angeles police officers who were videotaped beating King that shook Deutsch the most. Their acquittals triggered rioting in Los Angeles that killed 55 people and caused $1 billion in property damage.

“That almost destroyed my belief in the justice system,” she said in 2014. “I feel a jury usually gets it right, but in that case, no. It was the wrong conclusion. It was the wrong verdict and it nearly destroyed my city.”

Like so many others, Deutsch fell in love with Los Angeles after moving there from somewhere else. Born and raised in New Jersey, she traced her interest in journalism to age 12, when she founded an international Elvis Presley fan club newsletter in her hometown of Perth Amboy. The lifelong Presley fan traveled to the musician’s Graceland home in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2002 to cover the 25th anniversary of his death.

By her sophomore year at New Jersey’s Monmouth College — now Monmouth University — she had landed a part-time job at her hometown newspaper, where she persuaded her editor to allow her to travel to Washington, D.C., in 1963 to cover the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech.

Arriving in Southern California after graduation, she worked briefly for the San Bernardino Sun before joining the AP in 1967. Deutsch initially aspired to be an entertainment reporter and, for years, would take time off from the court beat to help cover the Academy Awards.

In 1975, after the fall of Saigon ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam, she was sent to the Pacific island of Guam to interview evacuees and help get locally hired AP staffers safely to the United States.

But it was always the drama of the courtroom that called her home.

“It’s as old as Shakespeare and as old as Socrates,” she said in a 2007 interview. “It’s an extremely powerful theater that tells us about ourselves and about the people on trial. And I think it’s ever fascinating.”

Funeral arrangements were pending.

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John Rogers, the principal writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021.