Like other hard-driving journalists, Reg Murphy was always looking for the big story, the news event that would define his career. But he never expected to be that story.
Murphy was the editorial page editor of The Atlanta Constitution on Feb. 20, 1974, when he was kidnapped and held for two days by a Lilburn man seeking a $700,000 ransom.
The kidnapper, William A.H. Williams, had contacted Murphy and told him that he needed help donating 300,000 gallons of heating oil. Murphy checked out the deal, found it feasible and accepted an offer on a Wednesday night to have Williams give him a ride to an ostensible meeting about the matter. But soon after the two men were in the car, Williams pulled out a gun and asked Murphy if he had ever heard of the American Revolutionary Army. Murphy said he hadn’t.
At that point Williams said, “Mr. Murphy, you have just been kidnapped.” He then cocked the gun, stopped the car, and locked Murphy in the trunk.
Murphy survived the ordeal and continued a long and successful career in journalism, including stints as editor of the San Francisco Examiner, publisher of the Baltimore Sun and serving as both executive vice president and later CEO of the National Geographic Society. Murphy, 90, died Saturday.
Shortly after he was kidnapped, Murphy was allowed a phone call to the newspaper editor, Jim Minter, who was in the middle of an editorial meeting.
“I’ve been kidnapped,” Murphy said.
“Well, then you’re in a helluva shape, Reg. No one’s going to pay anything for you,” Minter cracked wise and hung up.
Minter drew a round of laughter from others in his office, saying Murphy must be out drinking.
Not longer after, Minter, with a growing feeling something was wrong, called Murphy’s wife, and things turned serious. She told him he left the house with a stranger
Minutes later, a man called WAGA-TV proclaiming Murphy had been kidnapped.
Credit: Stephen Morton for The Atlanta J
Credit: Stephen Morton for The Atlanta J
In the car with Murphy, the kidnapper went on a rant about lying, leftist newspapers and Jewish control. Law enforcement was called in, and the long, strange negotiations over Murphy’s release began.
Two days later, Minter responded to Williams’ ransom demands by taking two suitcases full of $700,000 to a drop-off point at the north, then unfinished end, of Ga. 400 and drop them at the last road sign. At 9 that night, Murphy, blindfolded as he had been throughout the ordeal, was released in a motel parking lot. Murphy’s 49 hours of terror were over. The FBI arrested Williams within hours.
Murphy’s kidnapping made national headlines and, for the next few months, that was all anyone wanted Murphy to talk about.
“That’s one reason I left Atlanta in 1975 to become editor and publisher of Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner,” Murphy said in a 2006 interview. “I wanted to be remembered for what I did for newspapers, not as the guy who was kidnapped.”
John Reginald “Reg” Murphy was born Jan. 7, 1934, in Hoschton in Gwinnett County to wholesale grocer John Lee and teacher Mae Ward Murphy. Murphy grew up in Gainesville, attended Mercer University and joined the sports department of the Macon Telegraph while he was still in college.
In 1955, he opened the Macon Telegraph’s Atlanta bureau and, in 1959, he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship, a prestigious study program at Harvard for members of the news media.
Murphy joined The Atlanta Constitution in 1961 as political editor, where he began his scraps with the Georgia Legislature and later with then-Gov. Jimmy Carter. In 1965, he left the paper to briefly work with a consulting firm before taking a job as managing editor of Atlanta magazine from 1965 to 1968.
He returned to The Atlanta Constitution in 1968 to as the editorial page editor, a position he held until moving to the San Francisco Examiner. Murphy said his decision to leave Atlanta for San Francisco in 1975 was motivated in part by the chance to serve as editor and publisher.
“In the middle of the ’70s, everyone looked at San Francisco as if it were either the Garden of Eden or Hell, or both,” Murphy said in a 2006 interview. “It was a changing culture, and a lot of ideas in this country originated in that part of the world. It was fun to be in that culture at that time.”
Eventually, Murphy said, he realized that most of the news was being made on the East Coast. So when the Baltimore Sun offered him part ownership of the paper and a chance to get closer to his Southern roots, he took the job.
“The West Coast is where people talk in one-liners,” Murphy said. “In the South, people tell stories. One of the things I wanted to do in Baltimore was to tell the stories that deal with people’s lives. This was a new approach, but it paid off in 1985.”
That year, The Sun won two Pulitzers, one of them for feature writing about what life was like for a young blind boy. The other was for explanatory journalism.
After the Times Mirror company bought The Sun in 1986, Murphy stayed on, was promoted to chairman in 1990, then resigned in 1991 to become vice president of the United States Golf Association, which runs the U.S. Open tournament.
He was named president of the USGA in 1994, and in 1996 he moved to the National Geographic Society as president and chief executive.
In 1997, he retired to Sea Island, where he played golf, managed his investments and wrote books.
Murphy’s biography of the former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell, “Uncommon Sense: The Achievement of Griffin Bell,” was published in 2001. Earlier, he and Hal Gulliver coauthored “The Southern Strategy” (1971), an analysis of Richard Nixon’s campaign to win Democratic votes in the South.
As an editor, Murphy was inspiring, said Art Harris, a star reporter at The Constitution, who later followed Murphy to San Francisco. “That was his magic. He inspired people by building them up. He was a gentleman, and a gentle persuader. I never heard him raise his voice. Not everyone liked his decisions, but he didn’t let that dissuade him from making them.”
Mercer University named its Center for Collaborative Journalism after Murphy in 2023. Earlier this year, it established a journalism scholarship named after him.
The AJC is seeking information on arrangements for Murphy’s service.
