I’m here to help.

We can all come up with excuses to avoid riding a bike to work or school. I know, because I made those same excuses, too. But in January, I finally bought a snazzy Cannondale Contro and became a bike commuter.

It’s been quite the journey. I ride a few days a week, and so far I’ve gradually saved about $350 in gas and maintenance expenses for my car. On the days I rode my bike, I avoided burning fossil fuels while burning an estimated 55,800 calories over the course of 1,000 miles.

Along the way, I dragged myself out of the insulated bubble of the automobile and explored parts of the city I’ve never bothered to really see before.

I’m not saying cycling is for everyone or that we all should abandon our vehicles. I live less than 5 miles away from downtown (although my usual biking route is longer). I can avoid busy roads most of the way. There’s a shower at the office I can use in the summer. When I need to drive somewhere during work hours, I use Lyft.

If you’re in a similar situation, here are some answers to questions you might be asking about the pros and cons of commuting by bicycle and whether it’s worth it:

How strenuous is bicycle commuting?

That depends on you and your route. I live in the Woodlawn Lake area and typically ride 6 to 7 miles to and from work on a route with modest hills.

I was already an avid jogger and hiker, but cycling wore me out after the first few commutes. I was sore and tired.

I got used to it. You will, too.

According to my Sports Tracker smart phone app, I’ve ridden more than 1,000 miles since January 2017 and burned nearly 56,000 calories. The vast majority of those trips were to and from work. I didn’t always feel like doing it. But most of the time it was fun and challenging and it slowly became part of my routine.

Is cycling dangerous?

San Antonio has a bad reputation for bicycling, much of it deserved. There are, indeed, motorists who don’t like sharing the road with cyclists and some streets are an obstacle course of bumps, debris and potholes.

One of the best ways to stay safe on a bicycle is to make sure drivers can see you. Buy front and rear LED lights that are bright and blinky. I bought mine on Amazon and they work fine. Shop around and find something that works for you. So far I’ve rarely had a problem with a motorist pulling in front of me or failing to yield. I’m not saying it’s never happened. But it’s rare.

Related: Interactive map of road-rage incidents in San Antonio

When I was deciding whether to make the jump into bike commuting, I spent a lot of time looking at Google Maps figuring out how I was going to get to and from work and avoid busy roads. Why ride on Broadway, where some drivers act like they’re Mad Max extras, when there’s a peaceful, parallel bike path that runs past Brackenridge Golf Course, dips under U.S. 281, then takes you to the pleasant Museum Reach of the River Walk?

Find those quieter routes and side streets. Google offers a bike-route feature in its maps app that can help.

Don’t motorists have to share the road with cyclists?

Yes, but not every driver likes it. I had someone tailgate me on Fredericksburg Road one time when we were the only two people on the road. It was weird. Sometimes cars and trucks speed by a little too close for comfort.

But motorists don’t cause every problem. Cyclists also have to obey the rules of the road. And not just that — they need to be smart. Spend some time learning how to be an observant, safe cyclist. Check out this guide that helped me. The title says it all: “How to not get hit by cars.”

Among the lessons: Don’t ride against traffic — it’s actually riskier than riding with the flow of traffic. Look out for parked cars — someone might open a door in front of you. Don’t ride on sidewalks — it’s a bad idea, plus it’s illegal in San Antonio.

You don’t always have to move as far to the right as possible to let traffic go by. The Texas Department of Transportation publishes a guide that notes cyclists can use the full lane if the street is too narrow to safely accommodate cars and bicycles at the same time.

Remember, you’re riding a type of vehicle. You have to be comfortable cruising among other vehicles.

To avoid feeling vulnerable riding with the flow of traffic, you can buy a mirror that attaches to your left handlebar or your helmet that lets you check your blindspot and see what’s coming up behind you.

I also bought a waterproof GoPro I attach to my helmet in case I have any close calls (or see something cool on my ride). Let’s say somebody clips me and takes off. I figure it will probably happen so fast I won’t be able to get a license plate number. The GoPro gives me a chance to take some video of that number, or at least get a good description of the car.

You can buy an air horn that attaches to your bike. It works as advertised — it’s loud and lets drivers know you’re there. I’ve only had to use this once, when I was riding at the roundabout on Fulton and Blanco and a car failed to yield to me.

For a less obtrusive warning, don’t forget a bike bell. You’ll need this for pedestrians, especially if you ride on the River Walk or one of the many creek trails in San Antonio.

What’s the best bicycle to buy?

For me, buying the bike was more daunting than actually riding the thing. There are so many choices out there.

You’re faced with three types: Sturdy mountain bikes, fast road bikes or hybrids of the two. From there you can dive into countless brands and variations.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time researching bikes and reading reviews. I finally lucked out at REI, where I found a slightly used Cannondale Contro for sale. REI employees are amazingly helpful and they also offer a free tune up you can use later if you buy a bike there.

You’ll want to find something with fenders and a bike rack or buy those extras later. Even if it’s not raining, sometimes you have to ride through puddles and you don’t want mud staining your work clothes. The bike rack helps you carry the standard gear of a bike commuter — a change of clothes, patches and spare tires, a pump, a bike lock and a multitool.

The best advice I can give is don’t get too hung up on finding the perfect bike. Find a decent one and start riding.

Can you wear work clothes or do you get all sweaty?

Depending on the weather and the distance of your commute, you can totally wear work clothes. There’s a lot of breathable, stretchy, moisture-wicking clothing out there, even for office attire. Check out Ministry of Supply if you have money to burn. Their stuff is expensive but their office slacks feel like yoga pants.

In mild weather I work up a bit of a sweat but I cool off at the office. Either I don’t stink or my colleagues are really nice. In the oppressively hot San Antonio summer, I wore exercise clothes to work and brought a change of clothes for the office, which has a shower, which I most definitely used. The ride home in San Antonio is brutal in summer. When you’re moving, the wind helps cool you off, but bring a water bottle and use it.

For chilly weather, check out this helpful guide that offers some tips about bundling up. When you ride a bike there’s going to be a windchill factor. But you’re also going to get warmer as you ride.

What gear should you buy for bicycle commuting?

Cycling makes you spend a little time thinking about the logistics of what you need to get from Point A to Point B. A bike drags you out of your comfort zone.

Did you prepare for the chance of rain today? Do you have your patch kit and other tools? Do you know how to change a flat if you need to?

In the summer, you’ll probably have to shower at your workplace after your morning ride, which means you’ll have to pack your clothes and gear into a backpack, messenger bag or saddlebags. I attached a trunk bag to my biake rack, and put the rest of my stuff in a Timbuk2 messenger bag. Messenger bags are bit more uncomfortable than backpacks, but they do allow more air flow to cool off your back. If you use a messenger bag, buy a cross strap to prevent it from sliding around.

You’ll have to come up with a system to keep track of all your stuff. Use a checklist to make sure you bring everything … you don’t want to show up sweaty at the office and realize you forgot fresh socks.

In the summer, I leave all my toiletries in a duffel bag under my desk so I don’t have to carry them back and forth. It’s just extra weight and space you don’t need to worry about.

Is cycling worth the hassle?

What I learned in 1,000 miles of bicycle commuting is you really get to experience and explore the city in ways that just aren’t the same in a car.

I’ve driven down Mulberry Avenue a million times but never bothered to take a detour on Avenue A, a narrow side street that winds along the shady San Antonio River.

Well, things changed on my bike. One day I was riding by that bumpy little street and decided to find out where it goes.

It turns out, the street ends at a cool pedestrian crossing that spans the river. It was a tranquil setting — and I had no idea it existed until I bought a bike.

All kinds of things good things happen when the wind is in your face.

How much money do you save riding a bike?

When I drive my car to work, it’s 8.8 miles round trip. IRS guidelines say driving a car costs 54 cents a mile in fuel, insurance and maintenance costs. So I’m saving about $4.75 a day every time I ride my bike.

That might not sound like much but it adds up over time. I’ve ridden to and from work 75 times so far, which means I’ve saved about $350.

Keep in mind, I had to buy my $680 bike and the gear to go with it, so it will take several more months of commuting to break even. I also got extravagant with a $300 GoPro, although I use that for other things besides biking. It’s easy to get sucked into buying tons of gear and apparel that can quickly get expensive if you’re not careful.

But compare that to how much it costs to own a car. Even if you go a little crazy on a bike-gadget shopping spree, riding a bicycle even a few times a week saves money that will gradually add up over the years.

Plus, you don’t have to worry about those long Mary Poppins lines at the gas stations.

Every bicycle commute is a small victory. You got off your ass and did something to stay healthy. You did something to keep a car off the road and help the environment. And you did something to break out of your vehicular rut and challenge yourself.

Those small victories add up.

Did I overlook any good tips? Leave a comment or let me know and I’ll update this post.

Update No. 1: Abigail Rodriguez, San Antonio’s former bike coordinator who is now with VIA Metropolitan Transit, emailed me some useful tips I didn’t know.

The Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization offers a free, hourlong “Street Skills” class for anyone 14 years old and older who wants to brush up on their cycling skills. If you sign up in advance, you get a free helmet and set of bike lights. Nice.

VIA buses have bike racks. Abigail said she knows some cyclists who can’t shower at the office in the summer, so they’ll take the bus in the mornings, change at the end of the day and ride home from work.

“You only get half the workout, but the summer days can be brutal, even in the morning,” Abigail told me.

Update No. 2: The MPO publishes a bicycle map that shows “traffic stress” on local roads, giving you an idea of how comfortable cyclists might be riding on any given route.

Here’s an interactive version of the traffic stress map I downloaded from the MPO’s website. Click on a colored trail or road to view more information about it:

Check back here for new updates.

A note about affiliate links: Sometimes I blog about stuff that helps journalists. I pay for all the products I review on my blog. To help defray those costs, I use Google ads and Amazon’s affiliate advertising program, which provides a way for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.com. There’s no extra cost to you, and I’ll never link to stuff I don’t like or try to make you buy something that sucks. These reviews are my honest opinions. Thanks for reading.

The post Is bike commuting the answer to the crazy gasoline crisis of 2017? appeared first on John Tedesco.

If you read weather updates on Facebook from the San Antonio Express-News, then you’re keenly aware that it’s summer and the forecaster is not happy about it.

“There is no weather,” a typical forecast reads. “There is only this. Always this. Unchanging. Eternal. Forever. This.”

Then there was this gem:

“It’s mostly sunny and almost 100 degrees again, a forecast that’s not even fit for a country music song. Well, certainly not a good country music song that goes platinum and wins a bunch of awards as a crossover sensation that does particularly well with the 18-24 demographic while simultaneously sparking a resurgence in line dancing that leads to lots of bad paperback romance novels with taglines like, ‘She danced to remember. He danced to forget. They found one another — and love — on The Line.’

“The forecast would at least need some summer showers to pull that off. You can’t just openly profess your secret love outdoors when it’s 100 degrees. It’s simply not done.”

Don’t forget the update that called for readers to create their own forecasts, with a suggestion of “partly snuggly and 40 percent of kitten.”

The comedic genius behind these quirky Facebook posts is Chris Lykins, a recent hire by the Express-News team that oversees the newspaper’s premium site for subscribers.

Over the past few months, Chris has miraculously transformed boring weather forecasts into creative, amusing rituals that a growing number of readers look forward to.

I sat down with Chris to talk about his unique job, his inspiration, and his goals as the newspaper’s funny weather guy. Here are the highlights, lightly edited:

Question: First of all, where did you get the idea to write these clever weather updates?

Answer: I started when I first got on Facebook when I was at Seguin at the Gazette and was just trying to inject some levity. Because so much of what we do is really kind of depressing at times. You’re dealing with sad stories and tragic stories. And I was just trying to spice things up a little bit and make it clear that newspapers offer more than bad news. And it started to take off from there.

It ended up driving a lot of new Facebook fans. What was silence sort of got replaced by conversations. And not just on the weather posts but on the other stories that we posted.

People were getting more engaged?

Yeah, we sort of built this community to the point where I didn’t even have to really do a lot of moderation on some of the story posts because people took it upon themselves that this was their home on Facebook and they were going to treat it that way. So it was a pleasant sort of surprise.

You didn’t expect that.

I really didn’t know. I’ve always had an offbeat, quirky sense of humor. And there were a couple people at first who really didn’t like it. They expected the newspaper to be stoic. The thing I used to explain to people is, the newspaper has always been more than that. It’s always had comics. And puzzles. And opinions pages. It’s more than just headlines that you typically see. So we wanted to bring a little of that to Facebook and it paid off.

What time frame was this when you were at the Gazette?

Oh, gracious.

Because then you went to New Braunfels, right?

Yes, that was one of the things that I was asked to do when I came over to New Braunfels. And I probably did it for two years maybe in New Braunfels. And probably five or six before that in Seguin. But it got progressively more elaborate as I went on.

Probably the best known stuff was the three posts that I did in New Braunfels that ended up being a weather romance. It just happened one night. I was sitting at home and I was thinking, I gotta come up with a different way to do this because I’m running out of this one-liner material. And I said, what would it be like if I wrote it from the perspective of a Harlequin romance novel? And so I did that one time and it blew up huge and pulled in these crazy numbers. And so I did it a second time about a month later. And then that one actually got picked up by Chron.com and ended up on mySA here.

Is that how you got on our radar screen?

I’m not real sure but I”m sure that probably factored in a little bit. So that was a story that got picked up and that’s sort of when I was like, oh, it got noticed.

This is reminding me of a Reddit threat where a guy wrote fictional updates on what would happen if modern troops went back in time and fought the Roman empire and it went viral. Is this a weird, unexpected, creative thing that’s going on that people respond to?

Yeah, particularly with the romance stuff. What worked out so well was this was after the peak with E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Grey, and these erotic meteorological ramblings really did well. And I think it’s because people are sort of hungry for something a little different.

What’s great is a lot of people who are in San Antonio who have started picking up on this, they’re kind of taking ownership of this. Being in smaller community newspapers before I came here, I always thought of San Antonio as this sort of giant, metro establishment. But people in San Antonio consider the Express-News their hometown paper. It really struck me that it’s all the same, no matter the size of the city. People want to take ownership in the things that cover them.

So that’s really been kind of fun to watch that community and to watch people tag their friends and say, ‘Hey, have you read this?’ and watch those numbers climb on a daily basis. It’s been a lot of fun.

Coming up with something funny to say about the weather sounds incredibly daunting. You’re kind of like the astrologer for the Onion. Somehow, there’s always something different about the same thing. Where do you get your ideas?

Just absolutely random things that sort of pop into my head. Sometimes I’ll hear a song and I’ll think of a way I can segue into that or it’s just random crazy neurons. And summer is brutal. It is very difficult to come up with different things when it’s 103 degrees, partly cloudy, for days and days and days on end.

Well, it seems like that works because we’re all stuck in summer.

Yeah.

And so we’re all sharing in the joke of this suffering, right?

Right.

Does that create a receptive audience for these weather jokes?

I think it does because it’s the thing that impacts all of us.

Yeah. There’s no escaping it.

You’re not going to get away. What’s really kind of interesting is during the winter, you’ll see those winter Texans, they get in on that. Because it’s all part of that thing. They leave and come here to escape it. I’ve poked fun at them before when it’s 50 degrees outside and everybody who’s from here is wandering around in jackets and you see people out in shorts and tank tops and it’s like, ah, they’re from Minnesota. The weather is like death and taxes. It’s one of those constant things.

How do you measure the response from readers? Shares and likes?

Yeah, we look at that. I look at reach, too, to see how far it goes. A lot of times I will go back and I will look at the people who have public shares, I’ll read what they’re writing and what kind of comments they get on that. The best one was somebody saying, ‘If they keep doing this, I might have to resubscribe.’ And I’ve had several of those over the years. And I’ve had people message me, or call, and say, ‘I’ve resubscribed to the paper because of this.’ And it’s like, that’s great. That’s the high bar you want. If you can get some of those, now you’re rollin’.

The theory behind it at first was, OK, we need to bring in people and make people aware that we exist. And then be able to put other things in front of them. Because not everybody is going to have a story about (city) council or what they’re going to do at the Alamo show up in their news feed.

Related: Fake Steve Jobs misses the real point

But if you have something that people go to every day because they want to see what I’ve written, then they get all of that other stuff. It’s sort of my way of kind of gaming the system because Facebook has changed the algorithm that determines what they see in their feed. But if they go to our page directly because they don’t want to miss something, now you have them.

Then other stories pop up in the feed below that.

Yep. Right.

We should mention here your day job is social media ninja, right?

Yes. I basically decide what comes off of the premium site and goes on to social media. How to spin it, when to play it. Sometimes that involves bits and pieces of the story that I think will attract attention. And sometimes it’s shepherding conversations to make sure we don’t go too far afield.

What are some of your favorite comments from readers related to weather updates?

Uuum … I’ve had some people say I’m gonna marry that guy. Which is problematic because I’m already married. There was the one today, ‘I need to be BFFs with this person.’

I saw that.

I get that quite a bit. Sometimes people are like, are you — and then they’ll tag somebody — the one who writes these? And those are always really funny for me too because I think most of us have that person in our circle of friends who’s always got something funny to say, who’s always there. I’m that for a slightly larger and growing crowd.

There was one earlier this month where you said, ‘It’s Friday, all bets are off, the weather is whatever you want it to be.’ You had some good comments. I like this one guy, he was like, ‘Scattered Cracker Jacks throughout the day with 100 percent of bourbon in the evening.’

I love that sort of interaction because it’s what we really need. People need to feel invested and part of something.

Is that a problem newspapers face where readers don’t feel like that?

Yeah, I think that’s something that, as other media has come in and you’ve ended up with these really close communication and collaborative tools with people, I don’t know that newspapers were as quick to adopt them as some other folks have been. And particularly new media.

And there’s a notion with some people that newspapers are more solemn and not as approachable. And so opening that door and saying look, we’re people just like you, is important.

Yeah, I think some people view newspapers as stodgy and oldertimerish. But in our features section, for example, we’ve had writers who lead rock bands. They’re lead singers of rock bands. Hector Saldana. These guys are as hip as they come. But do people know that?

I don’t necessarily think that they do. I think that it’s one of those things where newspapers have tried as an institution to make delineations about, you know, these people may have political opinions, but they’re not reflected here. And we’ve had to do that. But everybody who has done this work, we all have cool, interesting parts of our lives and cool, interesting stories to share. I don’t think we really have a way to reveal that to the readers.

Would these weather updates work in a different medium? Could they work in the print side of things, or is it more suitable in a quirky online format?

I don’t know how well it would work in print because the audience is fundamentally different. Like the weather romance stuff. I would never in a million years put it inside the New Braunfels paper.

The thing I mainly try to focus on is making sure everybody is in on the joke. Not coming across as terribly patronizing.

I guess you get instant feedback, too, online.

Yes. In milliseconds.

Did you know that Jack Handey from SNL’s Deep Thoughts used to work here?

I did not.

He did.

Really?

Yeah. He’s a real guy. Used to work here. Apparently his position was eliminated because he wrote an unflattering story about auto dealers. Do you think newspapers offer an adequate outlet for clever, funny people?

Well, I know they have talked about what they want me to do, maybe a column on the premium site. So they clearly want me to do more than what I’m doing.

How have our likes grown?

We’re coming up on 26,000. And when I interviewed for the job, I think we were at 19,000. I’ve been here since the end of March, so we’ve grown quite a bit. But more importantly, we don’t have a lot of what I call dead stories. Stories that have no likes, no comments, no shares. We don’t have a lot of those anymore. Because there’s more of a community built up now that is participating.

Related: How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search

It’s been a lot of fun. And it is really flattering to see something that you wrote in the morning and you see how far it goes, how many people share it, and what people are saying about it.

All these people who say they want to be my best friend, how can you not feel great about that at the end of the day?

The post Meet Chris Lykins, the funny weather guy at the Express-News appeared first on John Tedesco.

No one knew what happened to her. And it’s likely no one ever would if it hadn’t been for a series of investigative articles written by San Antonio Express-News reporter John MacCormack, who realized it was a murder case before the police.

Director Tommy O’Haver said the reporter in the movie is a fictional composite of MacCormack named Jack Ferguson, played by Adam Scott.

“We had to compress so much of that story, and obviously the real investigation was far more complicated,” O’Haver told Express-News entertainment columnist Jeanne Jakle. “So we had to create a composite character for John. A lot of the stuff the reporter does in the movie, he didn’t actually do during the investigation. We also had to fit everything into an hour and a half.”

Without seeing the movie, I think it’s safe to say the truth about the reporting is going to be more interesting than fiction. Here’s a video and transcript of my Q&A interview with MacCormack as he looked back on the O’Hair story.

Who was Madalyn Murray O’Hair?

MacCormack: Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a formerly famous atheist who had achieved prominence in the early 60s when she filed a lawsuit alleging that school prayer and school bible reading was unconstitutional. It was one of three suits filed in a short time frame in the early ’60s. Hers was the third. They all three made the same legal claims. And the Supreme Court decided in favor of each one of them. However, O’Hair came out of all this identified as being the one who had filed the most important suit and she took advantage of it and basically became a professional atheist. And she appeared on talk shows, she established various atheist organizations, eventually settling in Austin. And she was quite prominent in the ’60s and ’70s. 

In 1995, O’Hair, her son and her granddaughter disappeared. How did you get involved in the story?

MacCormack: The assignment was a casual mention by my then-boss, Fred Bonavita, the state editor, that it had been a year since Madalyn Murray O’Hair had disappeared and why didn’t I check into things and see how the case was going? I, frankly, wasn’t even aware that she had disappeared because there was no commotion made, no police complaints filed, nothing when she disappeared. The organization just kept it very, very mum. So I didn’t know she was gone and I knew very little about her at that time. 

How many stories did you write?

MacCormack: Well, there were about 80 to 100 stories over three years and about five of them really mattered. The first one was just laying out that she was gone. And I met a few critical sources who would help me later. But it didn’t go very far. And no one had any idea whether she had fled to the South Seas with atheist money or whether she had been captured by the Christists or the CIA or the Vatican as various theories were floating around.

In November of 1996, I looked at the 990 (tax) forms filed by several of her atheist organizations. And they revealed that some $600,000 had disappeared at about the same time as the O’Hairs had disappeared. So when you add a lot of money into the plot of disappeared persons it gets more interesting.

What were the major breakthroughs?

MacCormack: The next big development was that I was approached by a private investigator named Tim Young who proposed that we collaborate because his specialty was finding people who didn’t want to be found. And he frankly thought it would be rather easy to find them. …

The most critical breakthrough for us came in June of 1998 when I got an anonymous call from someone who basically told me that the O’Hairs had been killed and that another party named Danny Fry had disappeared with them. By this time we were pretty much working the theory that they were dead because Tim Young hadn’t been able to find no sign of life anywhere on the globe. So with the introduction of Danny Fry — who was kind of an alcoholic low-life con man from Florida — into the plot, and the fact that he had disappeared, this really made things more interesting.

Related: How a journalist solved the murder case of the ‘most hated woman in America’

It was in this phone call that we were told to pay attention to a guy named David Waters, who was an ex-con who had worked for the O’Hairs a few years earlier, had stolen about $50,000 from them, and O’Hair had pressed the case against Waters, and he had been convicted. And she had also devoted an entire issue of the American Atheist newsletter to David Waters and his horrific, shameful past. Because he had done some very, very bad things in his past. Including being convicted of murder.

So now we had a murderer, we had four disappeared people, we had $600,000 gone somewhere. So it was beginning to get much more serious for Tim Young and I.

In August of 1998, Tim Young and I had a split. He felt it was his duty as a private investigator to go to the police with the information we had. Because we had a pretty coherent theory now. And I had no confidence in the police. I’m speaking of the Austin police, who had pretty much ignored the case. They treated it as a voluntary disappearance by a person, which isn’t a crime. So Tim and I had a — not acrimonious — but it was an unfriendly split. I decided I was going to keep reporting. He went to the Austin police. They ignored him. And from then on I worked alone. 

How did you find out Danny Fry had been killed?

MacCormack: In October of ’98, I happened across a small story that was generated by AP in Dallas, based on a (Dallas) Morning News story about the third anniversary of the discovery of a nude, headless, handless body beside the Trinity River. It had been found in October of ’95. And I just, somehow, fortunately thought to myself, ‘That’s the same weekend that Danny Fry disappeared, and you know, why not?’

To make a long story short, I tried to exclude Danny Fry from being that person. … Nothing could exclude him. So I called the sheriff’s office in Dallas County and I said, ‘Look, I might know who your missing guy is.’ And they’d invested hundreds of hours and hundreds of missing person’s reports trying to find out who this was. So they were kind of cautious about talking to me but they wanted to do it. So I flew up there. We all sat in a little room. And I walked them through the O’Hair disappearance. And to them it was like science fiction. But eventually they came to see that there was a possibility that this headless, handless guy might be my Danny Fry who had disappeared in Texas after coming from Florida. So that was a big, big development. They didn’t laugh me off or anything, they took me seriously.

Danny Fry’s relatives weren’t the type who were comfortable with police. So I got three of his relatives to contribute blood samples, and the lab tested it all, and voila, in January of ’99, it turns out that the headless, handless body was Danny Fry. And that pretty much closed the door on the O’Hairs being alive anywhere.

So I wrote another story basically laying out the picture of them being taken to San Antonio, Danny Fry’s with the O’Hairs, he’s making calls from the same places that they’re known to be. And he’s dead. So, ergo, they’re likely dead. And this really inspired the FBI to get involved. So they threw a lot of manpower at it. And within a couple of months, they’d arrested David Waters, and they’d arrested a second ex-con named Gary Karr, who was a real cold-blooded snake. So the FBI got involved hardcore and then the story proceeded from there.

At this point, the only thing that was really missing, the critical component, was proof of their deaths. It’s hard to prosecute someone for murder when you don’t have a body. So that hung over the case for a long time. No one knew where the bodies were. 

How did authorities find out where the bodies were?

MacCormack: David Waters decided, basically, it was over. He was in state custody on a state offense. And he made a deal with the feds that if they put him in federal prison, which apparently is a lot nicer place than state prison, that he would cooperate. And that was the deal they cut. So Waters gave a very long statement describing everything, and eventually also walked them out there and said, ‘There’s the spot.’ And they dug and they found the bodies. … They kind of knew they found Madalyn Murray O’Hair when the turned up a titanium, artificial hip. And the DNA tests proved that these were the bodies of the three O’Hairs plus Danny Fry’s head and hands all buried in the same hole. And that kind of brought things to an end. 

What’s it like as a reporter solving a murder mystery?

 MacCormack: Well, as a newspaper reporter, most stories are short-lived and you never really figure everything out. And it ends up, you know, you’re just further into the murk. With this story, it went on for three years. I wrote 80 to 100 stories. And it kept getting better and better and better the longer we pushed and searched. Not every day. There were long periods of no progress. But at the end of the day we managed to take a complete mystery, everything was confused, and we pulled it all the way into the sunlight where you had a clear idea, a clear story of what happened. And it solved a very complex murder case, which doesn’t happen every day. So it was very satisfying.

But I don’t confuse it with more important reporting about social issues. This was just a whodunit that was just a hell of a lot of fun to report, a lot of work and at the end of the day, very satisfying.

The post Meet the real reporter in the new Netflix movie ‘The Most Hated Woman in America’ appeared first on John Tedesco.

It sounds too good to be true, but did you know there are two John Tedescos roaming around in the world? It’s true!

If you recently Googled “John Tedesco” and wound up at my blog, you’re probably looking for this Colbert Report episode that made fun of the other John Tedesco, who is a school board member in Wake County, North Carolina.

Related: Contact the real John Tedesco

This is all very confusing and for now I’m going to think of me and the other John Tedesco as the Good Spock/Bad Spock in that one Star Trek episode about an alternate universe. I’m assuming the other John Tedesco is Bad Spock because they both have goatees and a Vulcan death grip.

I will provide a full update when Colbert will inevitably make fun of me at some point in the future.

(Photo credit: Dave Friedel on Flickr)

The post I’m famous! Colbert Report mocks John Tedesco! Wait, what? appeared first on John Tedesco.

Hat tip to Dean Lockwood: “Texas classic. LBJ ordering — explicitly — from Haggar in 1964. Listen for the belch , ‘nuts’ and ‘bung hole.'”

The post Daily Diversion: LBJ orders pants appeared first on John Tedesco.

“Trash Day,” a hilarious video by Sam Lerma at KSAT, was featured on Vimeo this week. It’s the story of a woman’s obsession with her garbage man, based on an actual Craigslist ad, which says: “You are the hottest garbage man I have ever seen.”

Related: A review of the Sigma 17-70mm lens for videographers

It only gets better from there …

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There’s a lesson for journalists somewhere in this video …

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When you work a weekend shift at a newspaper, you never know what kind of story you’re going to cover.

Some are kind of lame, but I liked this annual cattle drive on Houston Street in downtown San Antonio.

Related: A review of the Sigma 17-70mm lens for videographers

I covered this event a few years ago and Abe Levy wrote the most recent story about the cattle drive, which kicks off the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo. I took this video of it last year when Jen and I were downtown on my day off.

Good times.

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Introducing Baby Pete Tedesco: 7 pounds, 1 ounce of total cuteness.

The post Daily Diversion: My new baby! appeared first on John Tedesco.