News Beat in Dallas

To the angry Dallas newsmen outside the two-story brick house at 6116 Gaston Avenue, Edmund Barker, news director of radio-TV station KRLD, the local CBS outlet, seemed a traitor to the reportorial trade. Standing beside Barker on the front porch was gaunt, tearful Frances Spears, wife of fugitive Naturopath Robert Vernon Spears (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). When the other reporters tried to question Mrs. Spears, Barker shooed them away, ushered her back into the house, explaining: "Her kids have to have a bath." Growled one newsman contemptuously: "Are you going to give it to them?"

But by last week's end, Barker's colleagues had been forced to swallow their scorn. Chubby Eddie Barker, 32, had got himself the news beat of many a long month: in an exclusive taped interview with Barker, Frances Spears confessed that she had secretly visited her husband in a Dallas hotel nearly two months after he had presumably perished, along with 41 others, in a National Airlines DC-7B that crashed last Nov. 16 in the Gulf of Mexico. How Barker got his story was almost as interesting as the story itself.

Confidence Man. When the FBI first began hinting last fortnight that ex-Convict Spears might still be alive and in hiding after duping a friend into boarding the National Airlines plane, Radio Newsman Barker called Mrs. Spears, got her to agree to an interview. In that first innocuous interview, Frances Spears insisted that if her husband were alive he "would be here with me and the babies." But if Barker did not at that time get much of a story, he got something else: Mrs. Spears's confidence. She named him her "press adviser," let him stay in the house and kept other newsmen outside.

When the news broke that the FBI had found Spears in Phoenix, Barker was right on hand with Mrs. Spears. "It was luck, really," recalls Eddie Barker. "I was sitting there talking with Frances when my office called me. They read me the flash about Spears. Frances was standing there with the baby in her arms, and I told her. She suddenly blurted out, 'I told him it wouldn't work.' At that moment, I knew I had the story. But Frances turned on me and said, 'Eddie, don't you dare tell anyone about this. Don't you dare.' "

On the Air. Lonely and desperate, Frances Spears asked Barker to stay with her. He agreed -- but only on the condition that "after she talked to the authorities, she'd have to give me the beat." To the newsmen outside, Barker seemed to have fallen down on his job. He had, he said, taken no notes of his talks with Mrs. Spears, and furthermore, his tape recorder was empty. Weary and frustrated, the other reporters concluded that Eddie Barker had got himself so emotionally involved with the story that he had forgotten to get the news.

Next day, after FBI agents had questioned Frances Spears, Reporter Barker tipped his office that he would have an important tape for his 10 p.m. broadcast, sat with Mrs. Spears as she told of her four-day meeting with her husband when the rest of the world supposed that he was dead. That evening, in a saloon near the Spears house, other reporters were told that next morning Frances Spears would, at last, hold a press conference. Minutes later, Barker went on the air. Asked he: "Frances, have you seen Bob Spears since this plane crash?" Said she: "Yes, I have." Said Barker: "Tell me about it." What she told added up to a noteworthy exclusive for Eddie Barker.

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