The One Club announces COLORFUL finalists bizcommunity.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bizcommunity.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This article was published online on April 15, 2021.
The Motel El Encanto in Hermosillo, Mexico, served a lavish breakfast that John and Andra Patterson liked to eat on the tiled deck near their suite. The couple would discuss the day ahead over fresh pineapple and
pan dulces while their 4-year-old daughter, Julia, watched the gray cat that skulked about the motel’s Spanish arches.
On the morning of March 22, 1974, the Pattersons’ breakfast chatter centered on their search for a permanent home. They were nearing their two-month anniversary of living in Hermosillo, where John was a junior diplomat at the American consulate, and the motel was feeling cramped.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Investigative reporting can require months, or even years, of work before it’s published; that’s ProPublica’s specialty. Our reporters go into the world, sometimes following a hunch or a tip; spend ages burrowing down a rabbit hole; and emerge having frequently uncovered deeply unsettling abuses of power. It’s why our work often falls outside the day-to-day news cycle.
But there was nothing regular about what happened in March. In just a few weeks, everything about the world changed. Our conference rooms went quiet as Manhattan’s offices emptied, and the general din of our collaborative newsroom transformed into a complicated web of group chats, direct messages, email listservs and more.
Thank you for your interest in republishing this story. You are are free to republish it so long as you do the following:
You have to credit us. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, ProPublica.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by ProPublica.” You must link the word “ProPublica” to the original URL of the story.
If you’re republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our PixelPing tag.