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If it speeds, it leads: since local news aired the first live police pursuit in 1992, car chases have become a nightly staple--and an international industry. (The News).

Article Excerpt
IT WAS A CONSPICUOUS TARGET, the red Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to 75 miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About 400 feet in the air above Interstate 5 followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot's wife, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper's camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at 2 p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the breaking news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day--Friday; January 3, 1992--a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh's 1979 Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn't help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker tried unsuccessfully to give Stroh's Toyota a jump, removed the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his body out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the ride? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the damage, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel 5 until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, "No station in this market has a news product that they can really be proud of.... Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage." One of Wald's first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the chase footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to move on it. He called the station's general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after 2 p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to shake the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the 5 Stroh merged onto the 170 and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the chase. At 2:27 KNBC Channel 4 had gone live from their helicopter; at 2:35 KABC Channel 7 from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, demanding the chase. They got it.

At 2:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. "We're going to see a drama unfold here," said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until...

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