Reg Murphy, a widely admired editor and publisher of newspapers in Atlanta, San Francisco and Baltimore whose kidnapping by a lone, right-wing gunman in 1974 riveted the nation, died on Nov. 9 at his home in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Diana Murphy.
Mr. Murphy was the editorial page editor of The Atlanta Constitution on Feb. 19, 1974, when a man later identified as William A.H. Williams, a drywall subcontractor, called Mr. Murphy’s office to ask his advice about how best to donate 300,000 gallons of heating oil to a worthy cause.
He called again the next day at dusk and arranged to meet Mr. Murphy at his home; the two of them would then drive to Mr. Williams’s lawyer’s office to sign some papers.
“I really had no choice but to go with him,” Mr. Murphy wrote in a lengthy account in The New York Times shortly after the incident, “for newspapermen have to lead open lives and be available to anonymous or strange people.”
So strange was Mr. Williams that he immediately displayed a .38-caliber gun in his left hand and announced, “Mr. Murphy, you’ve been kidnapped.” He identified himself as a colonel in the American Revolutionary Army and ranted against the “lying, leftist, liberal news media” and “Jews in the government.”
“He was a bigot and disagreed vehemently with the anti-Vietnam stance of our ‘damn liberal’ newspaper and all it had done to promote the civil rights movement,” Mr. Murphy, who in fact was generally regarded as a political moderate, wrote in 2011.
Mr. Williams forced Mr. Murphy to cover his eyes with adhesive, hogtied him and placed him in the trunk of his green Ford Torino. He allowed him to make one telephone call. Mr. Murphy called the paper’s managing editor, Jim Minter, who at first assumed it was a joke.
Mr. Minter realized it was not when Mr. Murphy’s wife confirmed that he had driven off with a stranger — just two weeks after Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress, had been kidnapped in California by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Mr. Murphy was held in a motel room, wedged tightly between a wall and a bed, and ordered to record an audiotape demanding $700,000 in ransom. The money was delivered in marked bills in two suitcases dropped off on a rural road.
“Does that smell like filthy lucre to you?” Mr. Murphy said Mr. Williams had asked.
“No, colonel,” Mr. Murphy said. “That smells like freedom to me.”
After 49 hours of captivity, Mr. Murphy was released in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn. Mr. Williams, whom Mr. Murphy identified from photos of suspects, was arrested six hours later.
He was convicted on federal extortion charges and sentenced to 40 years in prison, of which he served nine. His wife received a three-year suspended sentence for failing to report his crimes. The ransom was recovered.
In 2019, Mr. Williams, stricken with Stage 4 melanoma, called the newspaper to apologize. He said he had been high on amphetamines when the kidnapping took place.
“Reg Murphy’s legacy in Atlanta remained long after he left the city,” Andrew Morse, president and publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said in an email. “He will always be remembered for his kidnapping, but it was his tireless pursuit of the story and his commitment to the craft that made him a legendary editor of The Atlanta Constitution.”
In 1975, Mr. Murphy left Atlanta to become editor and publisher of The San Francisco Examiner, owned by Randolph Hearst, whose daughter was on trial at the time for participating in a bank robbery linked to the radical group that had abducted her. After she was convicted, Mr. Hearst appeared in The Examiner’s office and dropped the key to a new Porsche on his desk in appreciation of the newspaper’s coverage.
“It takes integrity of a different kind for a father to come in and say, ‘You did a good job covering the trial of my daughter,’” Mr. Murphy said in an interview published this year in The Mercerian, the magazine of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., his alma mater.
In 1981, Mr. Murphy became publisher of The Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, which won Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure for feature writing and explanatory journalism.
John Reginald Murphy was born on Jan. 7, 1934, in Hoschton, Ga., in Gwinnett County. He grew up in nearby Gainesville, where his father, John Lee Murphy, owned a convenience store; his mother, Mae (Ward) Murphy, was a teacher.
Reg, as he was called, enrolled at Mercer University intending to become a doctor. But he developed an affinity for journalism when he began writing for The Macon Telegraph to help pay his tuition. In 1952, he dropped out to become a full-time reporter — 20 credits short of a degree, his wife said.
He was named a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard in 1959 and joined The Constitution as political editor two years later. He left in 1965 to become managing editor of Atlanta magazine, but after three years he returned to the newspaper as editorial page editor.
His marriage to Virginia Rawls ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Diana (Mather) Murphy, who ran the business operations for The Sun, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Karen Cornwell and Susan Murphy; a sister, Barbara McConnell; and two grandsons.
Mr. Murphy was the author of two books: “The Southern Strategy” (1971), about Richard M. Nixon’s campaign to capture the South, and “Uncommon Sense: The Achievement of Griffin Bell” (2001), a biography of President Jimmy Carter’s first attorney general, a fellow Georgian.
After his newspaper career ended, Mr. Murphy was the president of the United States Golf Association from 1994 to 1995 (preceding his wife in that position by 20 years) and was president of the National Geographic Society and editor of its magazine from 1996 to 1997.
He was a trustee of Mercer University, which named its Center for Collaborative Journalism in his honor, and a board member of the advertising company Omnicom, which announced this year that it would award journalism scholarships in his name.
“Journalism is, in my mind, sacred,” Mr. Murphy told The Mercerian. “It is a sacred trust to tell the truth and to try to give people enough freedom to be able to find the truth and then to pursue it.”
While he was being held captive, he later said, he feared that his heart murmur might become life-threatening and calmed himself by replaying previous golf games in his mind — and bettering his seven handicap.
“At courses I knew well, I would imagine every detail down to the weather, the bounces, the people I was paired with, and the shots they’d hit,” Mr. Murphy recalled in a 2011 essay he wrote for Golf Digest. “I made a lot of birdies.”
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