It was after midnight when Las Vegas Review-Journal executive editor Glenn Cook hit send on a short email to the staff. “I’m beyond devastated to be sending you this message,” he wrote. Veteran investigative reporter Jeff German had been found dead outside his home hours earlier, on the morning of Sept. 3, Cook told his employees, adding: “It appears he was stabbed to death.” It was a terrible way to break the news to them. Cook would have preferred to tell them all personally — “I just remember wanting to throw up,” he recalled later — but the Review-Journal was minutes away from publishing its first news story about their colleague’s killing. And his email would serve as a tacit marching order for their workweek ahead: Even while they were mourning a friend’s death, these journalists would need to investigate it. Over four breakneck days of relentless reporting, the staff of the Review-Journal would essentially crack the case — delving into German’s old reporting and doing their own on-the-ground detective work to identify a surprising suspect, who is now behind bars, facing murder charges. “If this had happened to one of us,” David Ferrara, an editor and writer, told The Washington Post, “Jeff would have worked his tail off on every aspect of it. That was part of the reaction: Let’s do the best we can, because he would have done that for us.”
