The New York Post

The New York Post is a pivotal employer in the narrator’s career and a lasting reference point for the reporting habits he brings to his investigation. His four years at the paper follow his entry into the occult press and precede the decline of small print publications, leaving him with both investigative experience and a professional past against which his later, less secure work is measured.

Place in the Narrator’s Career

After Ampersand closed, its editor, Friedman, helped the narrator obtain a job as a reporter for the New York Post. He remained there for four years. He then joined a new publication devised by European investors, but online newspapers soon undercut what remained of the printed small-daily market. When that publication and other titles began to disappear, he lost his job, started a blog and a news site that earned very little, and tried to make a living from freelance work. His nostalgia for the earlier newspaper years—and his sense, while still in his early thirties, of already being a dinosaur—makes the Post part of a larger account of journalism’s instability.

Reporting Experience and Professional Network

The Post period belongs to a career that began in the unusual territory of the occult press. During his approximately two years at Ampersand, the narrator reported on séances and haunted houses, encountered eccentric sources, and received letters from readers and priests. That experience preceded his four years at the Post, where he worked as a reporter. The evidence does not detail particular Post assignments, but it establishes the job as a substantial stage in his professional life rather than a brief stop.

A connection from his reporting work later helped him pursue the Wieder investigation. During an inquiry for the Post, he had met Harry Miller, a Brooklyn private detective who specialized in missing-person cases. Years later, when Laura Baines was at the top of his list of people to find, the narrator searched his old address books for useful contacts and called Miller. The encounter shows how his newspaper career left him with a practical network he could reactivate beyond the newsroom.

The Post and the Wieder Case’s Public Record

The narrator approaches the 1987 murder partly through the press record, reconstructing the period after Joseph Wieder’s death from published reports. Those accounts did not mention Laura Baines, even once, while Richard Flynn’s name appeared repeatedly. They emphasized Wieder’s prominence as an expert witness for New Jersey and New York police forces, but made no mention of his clandestine psychological experiments. The disparity between what the public record foregrounded and what Flynn’s manuscript described becomes one of the narrator’s investigative problems. The evidence establishes the narrator’s employment at the Post, but does not identify the newspaper as the publisher of each article he consults.

Press coverage also traced Flynn’s changing status. He was repeatedly interviewed but never officially declared a suspect or charged. His attorney, George Hawkins, accused the police of harassment and suggested they were making Flynn a scapegoat for their own incompetence. After Martin Luther Kennet became the official prime suspect, Flynn receded to a passing mention in reports. Kennet was convicted of the Easton couple’s murders, but prosecutors ultimately did not accuse him of Wieder’s killing; the case remained unsolved. The sequence illustrates how a suspect can dominate public attention without resolving the underlying crime.

Narrative Significance

The New York Post connects the narrator’s earlier working life to the methods he brings to a case built from incomplete and conflicting accounts. His reporting background explains his reliance on press stories, old contacts, and the comparison of public statements with private records. At the same time, the newspaper record proves limited: it leaves Laura unmentioned, omits the experiments, and follows the changing prominence of suspects without supplying a conclusive answer. The Post therefore signifies both the narrator’s investigative training and the gaps that make reporting alone insufficient to settle the truth.