Behind the Badge
In a bit of reporting tenacity that is hard to envision, much less execute, former journalist turned true-crime author Larry Welborn chased a story from early in his career into a 40-plus year pursuit for justice for a murder victim, her family, and the unpunished perpetrator.
In “Murder by Suicide: A Reporter Unravels a True Case of Rape, Betrayal and Lies,” now available on Amazon and other book retailers, Welborn details the enduring quest undertaken while he was also the “Dean of Courtroom Journalists” in Southern California.
Welborn was a reporter with the Orange County Register for 44 years and covered, by his estimation, anywhere from 500 to 1,000 jury trials during his award-winning career. Larry Welborn spent 44 years as a staff writer at The Orange County Register, much of that time on the courthouse beat, where he covered more than 500 trials and chronicled the 60 most notorious criminal cases in Orange County history. As a college student, he covered the Tate-LaBianca murder trial of the Manson Family for the Der Spiegel German newsmagazine.
But the one case that stuck with him longer than any others, was the 1974 murder of Linda Cummings, sloppily staged to look like a suicide. It is a story that tells of a staggering miscarriage of justice, a truth plain to see had anyone cared to look, and a system aligned against the victim. Only 46 years later, when the cause on Cummings’ death certificate was officially changed to “homicide,” was the final — and admittedly incomplete — justice delivered.
On the Behind the Badge podcast, Welborn takes us through the twists and turns that led to his debut book.
