Howard Swindle, Reporter

Photo courtesy of Dallas Morning News

Howard Swindle liked a good mystery. He liked chasing bad guys. In his 30-plus years as a journalist, he reported stories that exposed corruption and murder and put criminals behind bars; he directed three Pulitzer Prize-winning stories for The Dallas Morning News and, in his spare time, wrote works of both fiction and nonfiction. "My view was that he was the best investigative reporter in Texas in the Seventies and Eighties," said DMN president and editor Robert Mong. "He was a first-class journalist … artistic talent and a real Texas character."

Swindle was born in Houston in 1945, but grew up on a farm outside the rural community of Indian Gap. He attended the University of North Texas and served in Vietnam as a Navy signal intelligence communications specialist. He began his journalism career at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, where he solved his first murder, retired A-J Managing Editor Burle Pettit told the Morning News last year. A local woman told the paper that her barber stepfather had killed her mother with a pair of barber shears and had stolen a television to make the murder look like a burglary gone wrong. Swindle solved the crime by matching the serial number of the stolen set with the television in the stepfather's house. "I didn't ask how he managed to do that," Pettit told the daily. "I don't think I wanted to know." Police subsequently arrested the stepfather.

"Howard was a young reporter, but he had the attitude of an old-time police beat journalist," said Will Jarrett, the former editor of the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, where Swindle worked in the mid-Seventies before leaving for the Morning News in 1979. "He loved chasing mysteries and loved chasing stories to find out who the bad guys really were."

Swindle was diagnosed with cancer in 1998 but continued working at the Morning News until shortly before his death in June 2004. "He stayed until the end and was working on important stories through the end of 2003," Mong said. It seems there were no mysteries that eluded Swindle's dogged reporting except for one, the murder of Father Patrick Ryan. "We'd spend hours talking about [the Reyos case]," Swindle's colleague Tim Wyatt says. "It never left his mind."